by Stacey Berg
Khyn nodded miserably. “His heart will break, but that’s the whole point. We have to stop this. We have the seed, now we need to—” She broke off with a guilty glance towards the inner doors.
And all at once Echo understood exactly what Khyn wanted to do. The explanation had been in front of her the entire time. Netje looked much like Khyn, though the med said the child was not hers; and Echo had noted the resemblance among the others. And there were so few of them—not just children, but any Preservers. Generations ago the city had gone through the same bottleneck. Without sufficient variability in the breeding pairs, few offspring survived. The Church had managed to guide the cityens through it, and out the other side. It had been close; only the wisdom of the forebears had kept humanity from falling over the cliff. Echo had been taught all this, the better to help her serve. Yet she had still managed to misunderstand, because it was not what she expected to find.
It was happening all over again here.
And now Echo knew what the Preservers meant to hide from her. “The seed for your line is stored in the Vault.”
Khyn glanced around the room. Netje slept in her corner; the workers who were trapped here for the night shifted and mumbled on their blankets as they too fell into sleep. The vektere had divided themselves into shifts, a pair back at the outer door while all the others rested. No one seemed particularly interested in Khyn and Echo. Khyn lowered her voice anyway. “The team doesn’t want you to know this, but I need your help. I have to make them see reason, before it’s too late.” She leaned so close that Echo could feel her breath as she spoke. “All the seed is stored in the Vault. Us, the capri, the trees—all of it. That’s what the Preserve is for. And the time has come for us to use it.”
One of the vektere at the door glanced over, attention drawn to their voices; Echo could not risk questioning Khyn further while he watched. Instead she let her eyes drift closed as if exhaustion overcame her. After a few hours, she awoke as planned. Everyone still slept except the two vektere on duty, and even they were dozing. She stifled a flash of disapproval; they were not hunters. She rose and padded across the room with well-trained silence. The inner door gave with only a tiny click; the vektere didn’t turn. She slipped through and closed it softly.
Door after identical door lined the long hallway. They were not simple panels, but heavy hatches rimmed with some kind of rubbery material, and closed with long levers marked “Lock” and a quarter turn away, “Open” in large raised lettering. Beside each door a dial was mounted on the wall, a half circle of numbers with an arrow swung nearly all the way to the left, and each door bore a small window, fogged with interior cold. She squinted through one and saw racks upon racks of small boxes, marked with numbers and letters that looked like some kind of coordinate scheme.
Inside those boxes would be the seeds of everything that had existed before the Fall. The Church thought these treasures lost forever. What the priests could make of them . . . She thought of the laboratory in the bowels of the Church, and the pink blob of eggs beneath the magnifier lens, all that was left of a girl named Ela.
A girl Echo had murdered.
Perhaps even now the nuns bore a batch of Ela’s successors. If they grew, and if Echo lived long enough to see them, she would recognize herself in all the hard young faces.
Her hand was on the lever when she noticed the red lamp above the door. Some kind of alarm, probably, and she did not want to be discovered just yet. Reluctantly she turned away.
The hall dead-ended at another door, this one closed not with a hatch but with a smaller version of the panel set into the mountainside. Now she could see the design clearly, though it made no sense: a pair of twisted ladders, joined at the ends to make a circle that split into precise halves when she approached.
She stepped through and came up short, the breath stopped in her throat.
For a long moment her mind refused to process what she saw. This room was larger than the others, and comfortably warm. The soft lighting came from tubes shielded to diffuse the glare. That only emphasized the bright patterns playing across the panels set at regular intervals in an open circle edging the room, panels like those the priests sat by in the Church sanctuary. People monitored these panels too, but Echo barely noticed them, all her attention focused on what lay at the center of the room. In the sanctuary, wires ran from the panels to the altar and the Saint’s copper crown, then snaked high up the spire, spiraling the Saint’s thoughts into the web that controlled power, light, the forcewall that protected the city. Here, wires connected the panels too, but not to an altar. Six couches faced each other in a circle like the petals of a flower, and in each lay a body, the cables passing from them to a column that blossomed with colored lights at the center of the circle.
Six couches. Six bodies.
Six Saints.
Even as she struggled to believe what she saw, Echo knew she had found a treasure far greater than any seed. The survival of the entire city hung on the one woman in a generation made to ascend as Saint. Without her, systems faltered: aircars crashed for lack of a beacon to guide them; the forcewall fell. Cityens died. And the Saint line had been failing; each life flickering briefer than the one before, until it seemed that the city itself would lose the battle against the dark.
Until Lia, the Saint who had been not made, but born. Echo closed her eyes against the image of the body shrouded on the altar, the crown spinning her essence away in the fine tendrils that sustained everything but her own life.
Six Saints, to preserve this one small outpost.
Echo opened her eyes again to find the men and women at the panels staring back at her, as amazed as she was. Someone, quicker than the rest, slammed a button and a whooping started in the hall.
And then Echo felt her knees give way as one of the Saints sat up, removing his glittering crown.
Chapter 5
Vektere poured into the room, grabbing her arms and wrestling her to her knees, but she didn’t even try to resist. “The Vault,” Stigir murmured, lifting the crown from his head like a cityen taking off a hat. His gaze, oddly distant, passed over Echo without recognition, as if he were seeing something else entirely. “There’s been an alarm. Is everything—” He broke off with a wince, hand to his head.
One of the people monitoring the panels—Echo couldn’t think of them as priests, not in this room so far removed from the Church—spun on her stool. “Careful, Stigir, that wasn’t an orderly extraction!”
Khyn pushed into the room past the vektere holding Echo. “Run the sequence again, Smilla, manual extraction. Quickly Stigir, before you hurt yourself.”
Stigir nodded vaguely and let her settle the crown on his head again. The moment it was in place his eyes went blank, his features slack, his mind suddenly absent as if it had never inhabited the flesh. Smilla returned to her station, fingers dancing over small buttons inlaid on the surface beneath her screen, the panel lights reflected in miniature in her dark eyes. “Ready,” she told her companions. “Start the procedure again at step seven.” They worked in silent concentration for a moment until the woman was satisfied with what she saw. Then she hit a last key, and the complex pattern on her screen contracted to a single pulsing dot.
Stigir opened his eyes slowly. Khyn removed the crown and helped him sit, a hand supporting him until he returned from wherever he’d gone. “Ah, that’s better. Thanks.” He swung his feet to the floor, leaving the crown beside him on the couch as if it were nothing.
“You’re not a Saint,” Echo said stupidly. Her mind kept seeing the sanctuary, its dim lights and ancient wired panels and the dark altar where the woman married to the City must live out whatever strange existence she led, sacrificed to save them all. Echo could not grasp this: a whole group of Saints lying in comfortable chairs, a man joining and leaving that irreversible union like a cityen going in and out of his habitation. It was not possible. It had never been possible in the history of the Church.
Stigir murmured, “We still don’t k
now what you mean by that. There are quite a few things about you we don’t understand.” Then he snapped fully awake. “What is she doing here?”
The lights dimmed fractionally. The woman at the panel adjusted a dial, bringing them back to full strength, and said, “Would you mind taking this conversation outside? You’re distracting the stewards.”
“Come,” Stigir said, pushing himself to wobbly feet. Khyn held his arm until he caught his balance. The ones pinning Echo’s arms dragged her up and didn’t let go.
She let them lead her out while her thoughts rushed ahead. The Church had always taught—had always believed—that only a specially bred mind could take on the burden of Sainthood. Even Lia, born a cityen, carried the denas that made it possible for her to wear the Saint’s crown. Despite her fresh strength, the burden would wear her away, too, one day. But if there were a way to spread that burden, to ensure that if one Saint failed others could take up the load . . . The Patri had to know.
And if a Saint could remove her crown . . .
Echo’s concentration focused to a single point. She had to bring this information to the Patri. Nothing else mattered now.
The front room buzzed with activity. Echo smelled rain and wet dirt; a new group of vektere, Birn and the young woman Taavi among them, rushed in through the open door. Birn ran to Stigir as Khyn helped him to a chair. “Yilva had just sent us to check on the Vault when we heard the alarm. What happened? Are you all right?”
“Give him a minute,” Khyn said. “He just came out of the link.” She knelt by Stigir, laying fingertips on his wrist. “These short cycles aren’t good for you. Your nervous system needs time to make the adjustment in both directions, before it gets so tangled up it can’t make them at all.”
Stigir rubbed his temple with his free hand. The crown had left marks, red indentations encircling his forehead. “It just takes a few minutes to get used to being me again. I wanted to update the stewards on everything that’s happened since we found—what were you doing in the Vault?”
Echo jerked her attention back from the room at the end of the hall. From what she had seen there. Every instinct screamed to return to the city now. To do that, she had to gain the Preservers’ trust. Or failing that . . . “I had to relieve myself,” she said.
Birn jabbed an angry finger at her. “She’s seen what’s inside.”
“I saw nothing but boxes kept in cold,” Echo said, flicking a warning glance at Khyn.
“Then why did you break in here? I told you to stay in the dispensary.”
“So what if she did see? She isn’t our enemy, Birn.” Khyn gestured at the child collapsed on a pile of blankets in the corner. Even the alarm hadn’t awakened her from her exhausted sleep. “She risked her life to save Netje. The little fool ran into the storm trying to catch a capri that got loose. If Echo hadn’t gone after her, I don’t know what would have—” Her voice caught. She looked at Echo, brow creasing as she thought of something for the first time. “How did you know?”
At that, the vektere murmured among themselves. Soon it would occur to them to wonder how she’d gotten through the forceshield, too. Now more than ever it was important not to frighten them. She must persuade them that the Church would be an ally, not a threat.
“The wind carried her voice.”
Birn’s face darkened with suspicion. “No one else heard anything. How did you—”
“This all can wait,” Khyn said. “There’s something more important. Stigir, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. While you were in the link, Marget . . . the baby came.”
A hushed silence fell in the anteroom.
“That can’t be,” Stigir said, forehead furrowing. “It isn’t her time, she’s carrying until the equinox at least.”
“Marget is all right, but the baby . . . There was nothing I could do.” Khyn clasped his limp hand in both of hers. “I’m so sorry.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending. Then his face changed, the way a man’s did when he realized the wound he had sustained was mortal. He made no sound, but he dropped his face into his hands, shoulders shaking.
Khyn began to weep too. “We can’t let this keep happening. We know how to fix it. We just need to make up our minds. Please, Stigir.”
Birn laid a helpless hand on Stigir’s shoulder. “How can you trouble him with this now?” Khyn began to protest, and he added, “You’re not the only one who cares. Leave him alone.”
Stigir raised his tear-streaked face. His voice was heavy, but he was composing himself already, a steadiness that reminded Echo of the Patri, for all Stigir claimed no such title. “It’s all right, Birn. She has a right to ask.” His shoulders rose and fell. “Tomorrow. The team will decide tomorrow.”
It was Khyn’s victory, but Echo’s heart pounded. She knew that tomorrow might bring her one chance to persuade the Preservers to bring their tech to the city.
Chapter 6
“Will the team listen?” Echo asked. No one had slept any more last night; they had returned down the mountain at first light. Khyn was pacing the dispensary with the restless energy of exhaustion.
“Stigir’s always fair. Too fair, sometimes. If he thinks he might want something for his own benefit, he’ll go against it just in case.”
“Perhaps it would help if I speak of the city’s children.” Echo ignored a twist of guilt. She was not ready to reveal her plan, but she needed Khyn to get her in position to implement it.
Khyn scowled out the window. “It’s Birn I’m worried about. Even if he didn’t have any other reason, he’d be against opening the Vault just because I’m for it.”
Echo had enough experience with cityens to guess why. “You and he were formerly paired?”
Khyn gave a startled laugh. “Me and Birn? Preservers, no. Stigir and I . . . Birn was always jealous. It was a long time ago, but he never forgave me, even though it was already over between them. Not that it mattered in the long run. Stigir’s true love is the Preserve. That’s more important to him than any of us.”
The words burrowed into the hollow place behind Echo’s breastbone. “But he does not have to choose. He is able to come and go from the link at will.”
“Of course. The stewards take turns in the link, otherwise they get too worn out. It’s a big burden.” She gave Echo a puzzled look. “Isn’t that what your Saints do?”
Echo thought of the wizened body of the old Saint, dying. The crown settling over Lia’s head, and the moment of astonishment in her eyes, before they closed forever. “Something like it.” A tiny spark of a thing she did not want to name for fear of extinguishing it tried to catch in her heart. “What is the longest a steward can stay in the link before the damage is permanent?”
Khyn shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to find out. A few weeks is hard enough on them. Even somebody really talented, like Stigir.”
“Is that how the stewards are chosen? By talent?”
“How else? It’s like the vektere, or Netje with the capri. I tried the link once, but I didn’t like it. Turns out I’m much better at taking care of the stewards than joining the link myself.”
Surprise jolted through Echo. Before she could stop herself, she asked, “What was it like?”
“There’s a sort of shock when the interface connects.” Khyn grimaced. “The room goes away, and then it’s like a long, long fall— What’s wrong?”
The shutters were open. A few raindrops still streaked the window. Echo focused on one’s slow slide down until she was sure her expression was under control. “I did not realize one could simply . . . try on the link, that’s all.”
“It mostly takes concentration,” Khyn said. “You would probably be good at it.”
Echo saw in her mind the altar at the center of the sanctuary, and the crown that would destroy any who donned it except the true Saint. “I doubt it,” she said.
Soon after, Taavi came to the dispensary. “Are you ready, Khyn? The rest of the team is gathering.”
“It’s
about time. Come on, Echo.”
Taavi shifted from one foot to the other. “Stigir didn’t say about Echo.”
“I say.” And when Taavi still hesitated, Khyn added, “If it’s Birn you’re worried about, remember, I have equal right when it comes to the team.”
The young vektere gave an uncomfortable nod.
As they walked, Taavi kept looking sidelong at Echo, her expression not hostile but somehow troubled. She seemed about to speak once or twice but changed her mind, until finally, arriving at some decision, she slowed, glancing up the mountain. “All the vektere have heard how you saved Netje.”
“I am glad I was able.”
Taavi stared down at the muddy toes of her boots. In a low voice she said, “I was the one stationed closest to the capri enclosure, and I heard nothing. It would have been my fault.”
From another hunter that would have been a fair assessment. But this girl had none of a hunter’s advantages. Yet her failure would weigh on her until she questioned every decision, every instinct.
Echo knew that burden all too well. She said, “It is also a fault to allow one error to assume undue significance. The next time you will know to position yourself better.”
After a moment, Taavi’s face cleared. She said nothing, but when she resumed her pace, her step seem lighter.
“That was kind,” Khyn murmured, looking after the vektere.
Echo couldn’t tell if the note in her voice was surprise.
Word must have traveled ahead that Echo was coming with Khyn. A small phalanx of vektere surrounded them at the door of the team building. For the first time, some of them were armed with more than batons: hands hovered close to slim black boxes on their belts, stunners or something worse. Echo had revealed too much in rescuing Netje when they could not; or perhaps it was only because she had been inside the Vault. Khyn frowned, but said nothing.
The vektere nearest gestured towards the door. Echo paused. It might be a trap. Likely she could wrest the guard’s weapon from him, and if she used him as a shield, she could probably break through their formation. Then it would only be matter of outracing them in the long dash to the aircar yard.