Full, he passed the remains of the dead Prophets and walked out to where the Messiah sat motionless, the faint whistle of his breathing audible through the gaping hole of his nose. The man’s eyes were fixed on Guan Shi, as if the comatose and limp Prophet was on the verge of uttering some stunning pronouncement.
“Messiah?”
The man remained mute.
“Have any of the other teams reported in? My team, Will, Tuac, Sima, they’re confirmed dead. Mars and Hap, they just disappeared. Gone. Taken by the forest. I barely made it back.”
The Messiah might have been cast of stone for all the awareness he showed.
“Outside the door the invertebrates are eating Svetlana. They’ll bite you if you try to touch her. I could use something, a rake maybe. A rope with a loop. We need to drag her away from the door. I can’t bring her inside with all those things eating her.”
Nothing.
“Messiah?”
The man’s eyes—including the eerie blue one carved into his forehead—remained fixed on emptiness.
Vartan ground his teeth. Took a deep breath. “I’ll figure it out on my own.”
He turned, had taken a step when the Messiah, in a disjointed voice, said, “We are being tested, Second Will. The universe is winnowing away the chaff. Those who have been taken, they have been judged and found wanting. Immortality is not granted lightly.”
“Found wanting?” Vartan tried to keep the incredulous tones from his voice. “Svetlana fell to her death fighting to save the airtruck. Mars, Will, Sima, and the rest of my team? There was no testing, just luck of the draw as to which of us was taken.”
The Messiah raised his bone scepter. “Beware of your words, Second Will. The universe is listening.”
“Messiah, two of the Prophets are dead. The third is dying. Three of the First Chosen are dead. Petre and Tikal’s teams haven’t returned. It’s all falling apart.”
“You must have faith.” The words were said with simple conviction. “The universe has brought us this far. It will not let us down now.”
“Messiah, have you heard anything I’ve said?”
“Vartan, you must trust. Believe that. Take it to your breast and hold tight.”
“Messiah, we’re dying like—”
“We are the immortal. Now, you have your duties, Second Will. You and the rest, bring me the Supervisor. I’ve heard that she’s out there. Once we have the Supervisor, the rest of the people on Donovan, they’ll fall into line.”
Vartan placed a hand to his stomach, feeling the building ache. Damn it, he’d eaten too fast.
The Messiah was staring fixedly at Guan Shi.
Vartan stepped over, got a good look. Reached out and touched her half-slitted eyeball. No reaction.
“She’s dead, Messiah.”
Batuhan nodded slowly, sagaciously. “Then, so be it. The universe will provide. Just have faith.”
65
Talina tilted her head back to better sniff the night breeze. Where Demon lurked behind her stomach, she could feel the piece of shit’s tension. Rocket’s presence perched on her shoulder, chittering his unease. Bits of memory, flashes of forest, glimpses of long-ago hunts played out in her imagination.
And something else. Something old and terrifying. Something out there in the dark. A looming danger.
She couldn’t put her finger on it.
Quetzal memory.
“What is it?” she asked, concentrating on the thought. Wishing she had a direct link to the quetzal molecules instead of the hit or miss as transferRNA went through its rigmarole in search of the right information.
How the hell did that work, anyway? Too damn many pathways through the nervous system.
Dya had tried to explain it and . . .
Dya.
Dead.
That hurt. In a lot of ways.
Talina still owed the woman: On Clemenceau’s orders, she’d shot Dya’s first husband down in the street. Hardly seemed like she’d come close to making amends. Now Dya was dead. Smart, competent, resourceful Dya. And the loss wasn’t just Kylee’s, wasn’t just Su’s, and rest of her family’s, but all of humanity’s. Dya Simonov had known more about the botany, the genetics, the intricacies of TriNA. She’d been on the verge of a breakthrough with the native plants. Had barely begun to catalog her research.
Gone. Just like that.
Not to mention Mark Talbot. Steady as the stars in the sky. Talina ached for his amused smile, the wry sense of assurance the man possessed. Not to mention his skills when it came time to hunt rogue quetzals.
Where she sat off to the side, Muldare fought a whimper and cradled her arm. The thing was red, swollen. They’d hadn’t been able to pull all the gotcha spines out. How the woman bore the pain and still managed to keep it together was a wonder.
Talina shifted her rifle, stepped over to where Kylee sat; the girl had her back propped against Flute’s side. She looked up, eyes hot in Talina’s IR vision. She’d been crying.
“How you doing, kid?”
“Really, really mad, Tal.”
Behind her, Flute opened his left eye to study Talina. To say that quetzals didn’t deal with death the same as humans did was an understatement. Especially given that they tended to eat their progenitors.
Talina dropped to a crouch, rifle across her knees as she listened to the night sounds. “You and Flute found where this thing got your mom and dad. Was there any clue as to what this is? Some scent? A track? Anything?”
Kylee worked her jaw. Knotted a fist. “A couple of spots of blood, and the roots were already absorbing them. Flute and I looked up. Couldn’t see anything up in the branches. No thermal signature, no shape. Flute’s sense of smell is a lot better than mine; he didn’t catch of a hint of anything unusual. Maybe it had moved on.”
Talina winced at the resentment and guilt in the girl’s voice. Kylee’s words echoed in Tal’s memory: “Everyone I love dies!”
“We’re going to find this thing,” Talina promised. “The way Kalico and Briah described the tentacle, or whatever it was, the creature’s got to be big. Something limited to deep forest where it can anchor among the high branches. And then there’s the biomechanics of being able to lift a person that high that fast.”
Kylee’s lips were pursed, her face contorted. Now she said, “She shouldn’t have been out there in the first place. They drove her out there. You know it just as well as I do.”
At the venom in Kylee’s voice, Talina took a deep breath. “You and Flute going to go on a rampage? Slicing and dicing your way through the Unreconciled? Murder every last one of them?”
“They eat people.”
“So do quetzals. Flash killed and ate three people in the belief that he could synthesize their molecules. Learn who they were. The Unreconciled think that by eating people, they can purify them. Give them immortality. Where’s the difference?”
Kylee’s hot glare would have melted sialon. “I really hate you sometimes.”
“Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass when someone brings up all this rational, put-it-in-perspective stuff when all you want to do is go murder forty or fifty human beings. You gonna kill the kids, too?”
“Don’t be an asshole, Talina.”
“Right back at you, kid. Part of being a decent human being is thinking things through before you’re hip-deep in the blood you’ve spilled.” A pause. “And living with the guilt for the rest of your life.”
Kylee leaned her head forward, buried her face in her hands. “There’s so many things I needed to tell Mom. Tell Mark. Stuff I couldn’t get myself to say. Like, I’m sorry. Like I let her down so many times. And I was there . . . stood there . . . like a fucking rock when Leaper and Diamond killed Rebecca and Shantaya. And I didn’t care. I saw it! I just wanted everything and everyone to die.”
“Your moth
er knew that. So does Su.”
Talina dropped to a knee as her leg started to cramp. Carefully she scanned the surrounding trees, sorted the sounds of the night. That was the thing about having a quetzal in camp. None of the local wildlife was likely to sneak in for a snack.
“They also knew that you were different because you’d bonded with Rocket. That he’s part of you, part of us.” Talina tapped the side of her head. “Me, I’m a stop-gap. You’re the future. You, and probably Tip and others like you. Dya understood that. Yeah, she loved you, and it broke her heart that it had to be her beloved daughter who was chosen as the bridge to the future.”
“I hurt her.” Kylee sniffed, wiped her nose. “Really, really hurt her.”
Talina shifted her butt. “You know why she left you out there when she could have talked Kalico into sending armed marines to bring you back? It’s because she trusted you. The greatest gift you ever gave your mom was letting her and Mark come visit you out at Briggs’.”
“I’m tired of hurting, Talina.”
“It sucks toilet water, but if you’re going to really live, you’re going to hurt. At least, if you’re normal. Now, take Dan Wirth. He’s a psychopath. Everything is all about him. No remorse. No guilt. No grief. On days like today, psychopathy sounds pretty good.”
“I still want to kill cannibals.”
“I hear you.” Talina glared up at the high basalt escarpment where it blocked the eastern sky. “But here’s the question: They were locked in a living hell, and the only path to survival led to a different kind of hell. If you or I had been there with the choices they had, what would we have chosen?”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s simple really: Would you have let them cut your throat and cook you? Become food for your fellow passengers? Or would you have chosen to live and cut someone else’s throat, cooked, and eaten them? Choose.”
“There had to be something else they could have—”
“Do you eat, or are you eaten? Pick.”
Kylee glared at her. “It’s never that simple.”
“It was on Ashanti.”
The girl crossed her arms, turning sullen. “Doesn’t matter. When they drove Mom and Mark out into the forest, they weren’t on any damn ship. Whole different rules.”
Talina chuckled, her night-shifted gaze fixed on the heights above. “Yep. And before this is done, I’m going to settle with Messiah Batuhan.”
“What about the rest of them?” Kylee asked.
Talina waved away a pesky night-flying invertebrate. “Well, if what we’ve seen so far is any indication, Donovan’s slowly whittling the numbers down. And we gave them fair warning.”
“And this thing out in the forest?”
“It’ll have to wait its turn, but I promise you this: Its turn is coming.”
“Good,” Kylee whispered fiercely, “because I want to be there when we take it down.”
66
Had it not been for Talina’s quetzal-enhanced hearing, she wouldn’t have known how long Kylee sobbed her grief. The girl had taken Flute, removed herself from the impromptu camp, and retreated up to the foot of the slope. Only then, out of sight, had she allowed herself to let go over the deaths of her mother and father.
That had been hours ago.
Talina, dozing off and on, had kept watch. The night creatures moved in the trees; night chime—so different from the sounds of the day—had risen and fallen in harmonic cadence. Briah Muldare had moaned in her sleep. Kalico, to Talina’s amusement, snored. Taglioni slept with the sprawled and loose-limbed unconcern of the totally exhausted.
But nothing was as painful as Kylee’s heart-wrenching grief.
The stars had wheeled most of the way across the sky when Talina stood, willing circulation back into her legs. That internal sense told her that morning was only an hour away.
Stepping gingerly, she slipped up the trail. Glanced around the bole of an aquajade. On the unyielding stone, Flute lay curled around himself like an oversized donut. The quetzal’s vigilant right eye was fully fixed on Talina.
Took a moment for her to realize that deep in the curl, Kylee lay cradled. The girl’s knees were drawn up to her chest, her hair splayed across the quetzal’s foreleg. She might as well have been sleeping in one of those beanbag beds.
Flute’s right eye regarded Talina with an unusual intensity. Seemed like nothing was getting by the quetzal on this night.
“How’s she doing?” Talina asked softly.
Flute’s hide flashed a deep-bruised purple, patterned with black and infrared designs. Colors and patterns Talina had never seen.
Rocket’s Wayob—perched on Talina’s shoulder—whispered, “This is grief. Something quetzals do not feel.”
Seemed she learned something new every day. “So, how come Flute’s feeling it?”
Flute flashed the designs for “Kylee hurt. Deep hurt. Makes eye-water. Do not tell.”
“Yeah, I wondered how she kept it together as long as she did.”
Talina sighed, stared up at the stars. So the kid had buried her head in Flute’s side and bawled herself empty?
“How are you doing, Flute?”
Again he flashed the bruised purple, then black and infrared. She swore that if only quetzals had tear ducts, Flute, too, would have shed a tear.
Didn’t feel grief, huh? Flute did. Mark it up to humans changing quetzals as much as quetzals changed humans?
“Hurt with Kylee.” The patterns were perfectly clear in the night.
“Yeah, buddy,” Talina told the quetzal. “Me, too. Keep her safe.”
The beast’s hide shaded into orange, quetzal for “yes.”
How much pain could a kid take in life?
Kylee’s words: Everyone I ever love dies.
One of these days, the kid was going to explode. As it was, the only creature she could allow herself to be vulnerable with was a quetzal. How screwed was that?
Talina gave Flute a parting smile, then reshouldered her rifle. As she turned to go, a single whimper passed Kylee’s lips. Even in dreams, her heart was breaking.
67
The day dawned hot and humid. Salmon pink colored the thin layer of high cirrus. Dek Taglioni roused himself, surprised that he’d slept straight through on the bare stone. But by damn and hell, he hurt. Every muscle felt like it had been torn from its mooring on his bones. His hips, knees, and shoulders were sore from the hard rock.
And he was thirsty. Hungry. His coveralls emitted the ripe odors of sweat and stink.
If any solace could be found, it was that where she lay beside him, Kalico Aguila looked worse. Her thick midnight hair was a filthy tangle, her clothes smudged and stained. Something black—looked like grease—smeared her right cheek, the side of her perfect nose, and left a streak across her forehead.
Even as he watched, she blinked awake. Looked around with almost tortured eyes. The woman’s face was drawn tighter than old rope. Her left cheek was lined and wrinkled from where it had pressed into the fabric of her sleeve.
She sat up, smacking her lips, tongue sounding dry as she struggled to make enough saliva to swallow. Dek read the sudden distress as she placed a hand to her stomach.
“Here,” Dek told her, reaching into his web gear for the energy bar Chaco had given him. “This will help.”
She shot him an uncertain look, glanced at the bar, thick as it was with roasted grain, dried blueberries, and desiccated crest meat.
“How long since you’ve eaten?” Dek asked.
“Since we left PA,” she said, closing her eyes. “God, I swear, I can smell that bar you’re holding.”
She took it with a hesitant hand, shot him a wary look, and carefully bit down.
He couldn’t help but grin at the expression on her face. Worked his own mouth in an attempt to conjure saliva. Finally
managed a swallow.
“Where’s yours?” Kalico indicated the pocket in his web gear.
“In a bit,” he told her.
Quick as she was, her eyes flashed that laser-blue intensity. “You don’t have another, do you?”
“I ate yesterday,” he told her. “If what I hear is correct, you were lost in a cave. Already hungry.”
She handed what was left back. “Here. You’re going to need it.”
He declined to take it. Waved absently toward the rising bulk of the Tyson escarpment. “Once we get to the top, there’ll be food. I’m fine. Ate an energy bar last night before I went to sleep.”
That sharpness had faded into a thoughtful appraisal. “Liar,” she said softly.
To avoid any additional complications, Dek staggered to his feet. Wobbled. Wondered if every cell in his body was being tortured. Then tried not to make a face as he took in the small camp.
Talina and Muldare, rifles across their laps, were seated on basalt boulders, talking softly. Even as Dek watched, Muldare uttered a stifled gasp, made a face as she shifted her wounded arm. The thing looked horrible. Had swollen to fill her sleeve. The hand was puffy and red. How the woman managed was a miracle.
Kylee and the quetzal were gone. Around him the aquajade and dwarf chabacho trees were turning their branches and leaves toward the morning, all focused on the top of the high basalt cliff where Capella’s light would appear. The chime was involved in its just-slightly-off symphony.
As he walked carefully across the uneven stone, he could feel his calves, his thighs and glutes, not to mention his back and shoulders. How long had it been since he’d hurt like this? University? When he was playing sports?
“Dek?” Talina called. “Where you going?”
“Behind these trees,” he retorted over his shoulder. “And what I’m going to do is none of your business.”
Looking back, here came Talina, stopping only long enough to scoop up his rifle from where he’d left it lying on the basalt.
She handed him the gun, a look of wry amusement glowing behind her alien eyes. “First, never leave your rifle out of hand while you’re in the bush. Second, never step out of sight. Third, modesty has its place. But not here. Not now.”
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