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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  The cable van exploded.

  Machine-gun fire pierced the metal fire door of David’s lab, and, as Jess hit the floor, David scrambled for his computers, grabbed the wireless keyboard from the plywood table, then ducked beneath it. Gunfire might cause his death. Losing his data would guarantee it.

  Hunched over, working swiftly, he typed a sequence of commands to copy the results of his latest run to disk just as the lights in his unit flicked off. Power failure? He listened intently, then relaxed. The battery backup for his computers hadn’t chirped. No power failure. Good. Jess must’ve turned off the overhead fixtures.

  He stretched up to check one of his screens to be sure the commands were correct, then hit ENTER in the same instant the thud of a thunderous explosion outside coincided with a brilliant flash of red light through the high windows of his unit.

  Jess was gone. The metal door gaped open.

  Silence.

  David leapt to his feet, ran for his equipment table. He quickly sorted through a pile of padded envelopes to find the ones with the genome data disks he’d ordered from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  More rapid-fire gunshots.

  He dropped back to the floor as bullets ricocheted around him. Heard a can of Red Bull hiss as it was punctured, saw dark streams of spraying liquid.

  Flat on his stomach, envelopes in each hand, he saw Jess again. Bent over, struggling through the open door, firing her gun one-handed into the parking lot, the other hand dragging Dom inside. She hadn’t run off—she’d gone for her bodyguard.

  A burst of machine-gun fire peppered the concrete floor beside her, and she let go of Dom and flattened against the wall beside the open door.

  David shoved the envelopes in his waistband, started forward on his hands and knees.

  For a heart-stopping moment Jess swung her gun around to aim at him, but he kept moving toward her. “I’ll get him!” David reached out for Dom, pulled him in.

  Jess spun around in the same instant. A small magazine dropped out of her pistol’s grip, and she slapped another one in place.

  She fired into the parking lot. Six times, David counted. Then she slammed back against the wall as another round of machine-gun fire poured through the door.

  For just a moment, her eyes met his. A dozen questions whirled through David’s mind, unvoiced. Who the hell was trying to kill Jess? Was there any way out of this? How much ammunition did she have left?

  Her red hair in wild disarray, she again reloaded as he tried to see how badly her unconscious bodyguard was hurt. The lab was dark. No light for a visual check, so David used his fingers. He unzipped Dom’s Windbreaker, ran a quick hand over the man’s T-shirt, stopping when he encountered body armor. Checked both Dom’s shoulders. The left was wet and sticky. Felt the weak, rhythmic gush of blood.

  Beside him, Jess leaned out to shoot into the lot again. Steeling himself for the loud bang of her gun, David yanked off his own T-shirt, folding it to make a compress. First-aid courses had been mandatory at the army lab.

  He pushed the wad of cloth hard against Dom’s shoulder. Kept the pressure steady.

  Heard a groan. Good sign.

  Jess stopped firing.

  “How bad?”

  “Ask again in twenty minutes.”

  She took another quick look into the parking lot. No response. No gunfire. She resumed position, back against the wall, gun ready.

  Then from a distance came the wail of sirens. David cocked his head to listen. Four police cars and an ambulance from the east. Two more police cars from the south.

  Jess touched David’s arm, looked down at Dom, spoke quickly, clearly. “His full name is Dominic LaSalle. He works for Cross Executive Protection Services out of Zurich. He’s licensed to carry his weapons here. The Suburban is registered to Cross.”

  She was giving him a cover story for the police, but he’d already worked out one of his own. Not only would it be truthful, it would satisfy the cops and protect his arrangement with Ironwood.

  “He’s your friend,” she continued. “You were showing him your new lab. Someone tried to break in. To steal your computers. Dom drove them off before they could.”

  “I won’t lie to the police.”

  “Those clusters you found? You’re looking for an explanation for them, aren’t you? I know what it is.”

  David almost relaxed the pressure on Dom’s shoulder. Almost.

  “Who was here with you tonight?” she asked.

  Approaching voices, shouting, noisy. The flicker of angry red reflected flames in warehouse windows beyond the unit’s open front door.

  “Who was here tonight?” Jess repeated.

  David made the only decision he could.

  “Dom LaSalle. My friend the bodyguard. Lucky coincidence.”

  Jess holstered her gun in the small of her back and pulled out his phone. “You help me. I help you.” She laid it on the floor beside him, held his gaze. “Expect a call.”

  Then she darted out the back door and was gone.

  HAVI ATOLL 7,418 YEARS B.C.E.

  Half a world away from the outpost being built on the shore of Cornwall, what would one day be an atoll was still an island.

  Mordcai, Apprentice Master of the Star Paths, was grateful for the choice his elders had made in selecting this outpost’s site. Some outposts were in cold and rocky regions, far from the center of the world. Others were along inland riverbanks, and one, which he had visited himself, was set high in a range of mountains where the Navigators themselves had once traveled. This outpost, though, was in the midrange islands of the Ocean and endured no extremes of weather. Nor had its construction offered many difficulties, other than the transport of building materials from larger islands hundreds of stadii distant.

  Fortunately, the ahkwila who inhabited the local islands had welcomed the khai and become eager students of the knowledge. Ahkwila wayfinders were common now, and trade routes among all the islands and even the great lands were established and secure.

  Those routes were what Mordcai charted now, on the great world map in the Navigators’ Hall of Nan Moar. Beneath the precisely aligned silver starstones on the room’s domed ceiling, with brush and rule the apprentice master carefully plotted the paths between the local islands, and beyond them to the other outposts across the world. In time to come, even if everything the Navigators warned against was true, the outposts would remain. And, Mordcai thought with satisfaction, these routes that he now charted, combined with the starstones on the ceilings, and the gifts on the altar, would ensure that the knowledge would never be lost. Nor would the way home be forgotten, no matter how much the world might change.

  On this midsummer morning, Mordcai knelt on the polished stone floor of the hall among his paints and brushes, spools of twine, and precisely shaped bars and rules of iron. Despite the heat of the day outside, the room was cool, insulated by the outpost’s thick walls.

  He used a slender stone rod to scratch notations on a slate made easy to grasp by its woven wicker frame. In the warm amber light of a sputtering mollusk-shell oil lamp, he consulted a star path as recorded by Navigators’ glyphs pressed into a thin sheet of gold. Only then did he work the number markings on his slate to accurately convert the position of a star that could be seen in the hemispherical dome of the sky to the cylindrical projection of the wall map. It was a calculation he could do easily enough without making marks, but he had two young students with him today, and the notations were for their benefit, to demonstrate the knowledge.

  Adma, a true khai female, eight years old, softly chanted each step of the conversion as Mordcai scratched them onto the slate. Her head was shaved, following tradition, as was her mother’s, though Adma’s obsidian skin was not oiled. The fine white sand spun up by the winds on the island had led the young khai to abandon the practice. So, like many of the true children here, Adma was an unsettling blend of the old and the new.

  Adma’s fellow student this day was Lisafina, an ahkwila
female of twelve years. Despite being ahkwila, the girl was fortunate. One day, with Mordcai’s help, she would rise to become an adept wayfinder of the islands. Even now, she knew the night sky well enough for her years, and could name each local wayfinder star as it rose above the horizon, although the abstract notion of changing spheres to cylinders was something his lessons had been unable to instill in her.

  Mordcai wasn’t troubled by that, though. It was a known fact that different people, khai or ahkwila, had different talents. While Lisafina would be a wayfinder, Adma could very well become a master of the star paths. The world had need of both.

  His calculation complete, Mordcai rose from his kneeling position and crossed the floor to the far wall, to count off the hexagonal cells spanning the distance from the Nan Noa quarries to Nan Moar. As he did so, Lisafina held the oil lamp close as Adma used a bone awl to etch a knotpoint into the plaster of the wall, precisely where Mordcai indicated. This close to the cool plaster, its damp sour smell overwhelmed the almost sweet scent of the whale oil burning in the shell.

  The knotpoint he marked set the position on the open sea, beyond sight of any land, for a wayfinder to change heading from one particular star to the next. The second star was made easily identifiable as it rose above a horizon board, provided that board was held away from the eyes the particular distance set by the red knot in its wayfinder cord.

  To sail from the quarries to this outpost, a wayfinder required a single horizon board, three different cords with a series of precisely measured and colored knots, and knowledge of only eighteen stars. To sail between all the local islands, and to the nearest great land, required knowledge of fewer than two hundred stars.

  But to know the star paths between all twelve outposts and home—that is, to be able to sail anywhere around the world in any season—required knowledge of more than twenty-four hundred stars, plus the signs of the sea, of the clouds, and of the winds. Those who held that knowledge were star path masters, a rank to which Mordcai had dedicated himself five years ago, and a rank he might achieve in another five years of study. He’d be twenty then, and would spend his final few years traveling the world, looking for changes in the star paths, so that others might learn after him.

  Adma used bright red plaster to fill in the hole she had made in the wall map. Then Mordcai used slender fishbone needles to position a length of fine twine along the properly calculated arc between the previous knotpoint and this new one, in order to guide the route-marking he would etch and color.

  As he brought his flint scribing tool to the wall, the ground shook.

  Lisafina gasped, and a ribbon of flame trailed from the open lamp she carried and now spilled.

  Adma looked at her fellow student with disapproval. “It’s just the Earth growing.”

  Mordcai smiled. “Not quite, little one. The Earth’s size hasn’t changed in all the years it’s been measured.”

  “At the equinox!” Adma exclaimed.

  Mordcai nodded. It was common practice at an equinox to measure the size of shadows cast by perpendicular rods set at different known distances from the world’s central circle. At the same time, young students were often tasked to demonstrate simple geometry. By using the differences among those measurements, they were able to calculate the circumference of the world.

  Adma was proud to recite her knowledge. “But the land changes!”

  “The land changes,” Mordcai agreed. “So do the seas.”

  “But slowly!”

  “Usually.” Mordcai noted Lisafina’s skeptical expression and chose to elaborate on his qualification. “I’ve been on mountains far inland and high above any sea, where I’ve found shells and the skeletons of fish. Such a thing would only be possible if, in time past, the tops of those mountains were underwater. So parts of the Earth do grow, but not the Earth itself.”

  Lisafina flicked her eyes at him in disbelief. So Mordcai turned that disbelief into a lesson as well.

  “You’re right to doubt the word of any one person, Lisafina. But I’m not the only one to have seen the shells and skeletons. And the more people who see something, the more times a thing is seen, then the more likely it is to be true.”

  The young girl remained resistant to the unfamiliar, a trait of the ahkwila, Mordcai knew. “I haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “It’s not possible for anyone to see everything.” The apprentice master tapped the gold sheet, finely textured with the intricate glyphs of star paths. “That’s why it’s everyone’s duty to record what’s seen, so it can be shared with others and added to. That’s how we learn.”

  The ground shook again.

  Lisafina’s doubt changed to worry. “We should go outside.”

  Adma objected. “We haven’t finished marking the path.”

  “We can finish it later!”

  Mordcai shook his head. Adma was right. Once begun, a task had to be finished. However, before he could devise a lesson about duty to impart this concept to Lisafina, he heard running footsteps in the corridor leading to the hall.

  It was Qiamaro, a young ahkwila apprentice to the builders, his face glistening with sweat from working outdoors, breathless from running and from fear. “The wall has fallen! Master Balihann . . .”

  He could say no more. He didn’t have to.

  In the central courtyard, the sudden movement of the ground had brought down an unfinished wall and its scaffolding. Dust still hung in the air.

  It was true that Architect Master Balihann was dead. Mordecai could see a well-muscled leg and arm emerging from the tangle of wooden scaffolding that surrounded a fallen stone block, as a nest surrounds an egg. Thick blood pooled around what was visible of the body. As a group of khai watched, a group of ahkwila builders worked frantically to position a makeshift lever to move the stone block.

  Adma, at Mordcai’s side, was fascinated, and as her teacher, Mordcai made use of that.

  “See the wound on the body’s leg?” Mordcai pointed to where a splinter of stark white bone had punched out through the outer thigh. It seemed his good friend had been standing upright and died instantly when the block had crushed him, driving straight down onto his head.

  “Where the bone is?” Adma asked.

  “Correct. What does the nature of the blood there tell us?”

  Adma stared at the wound and the bone and the blood, her young face contorted in concentration.

  Mordcai gave her a hint. “Is the wound still bleeding?”

  “No . . .” Then she had it. “That means the heart’s stopped!”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So he’s dead, and there’s no hurry to remove the stone!”

  “Very good.”

  Adma smiled up at Mordcai; then both looked over to the scene of the accident as they heard Lisafina wail.

  The workers were removing two other bodies from the rubble, both ahkwila.

  “I think that one was her father,” Adma said.

  “It was.”

  “Should we finish the map?”

  “We should,” Mordcai agreed, but he stopped Adma from going to get Lisafina. “She won’t be finishing it with us. Not today.”

  Adma looked at him in puzzlement.

  “It’s not their way,” Mordcai said.

  That night, Mordcai and the other khai disposed of Balihann’s remains by fire, to prevent the spread of disease. Afterward, since the necessary business of elevating an apprentice to replace the master architect could not be finalized until the rubble of the fallen wall had been cleared, Mordcai went to the workers’ camp near the beach. The public health traditions the ahkwila followed were, as always, a mystery.

  By firelight, the elder women of the workers’ camp wept and sang as they cleansed the dead men. Mordcai saw younger women preparing long strips of cloth with which to wrap the bodies—cloth they wouldn’t use for clothing but would waste on the dressing of a valueless corpse. At the same time, the men of the camp struck rhythmic, ritual poses around a large
bonfire. Bellowing loudly, they were drinking large quantities of a liquid made from the root of the sava plant—not fermented, but potent all the same. Mordcai knew this behavior would last three days. There was no chance of the rubble being cleared until then.

  Young Qiamaro had joined the men around the fire, but when he saw Mordcai, he left the others. A few moments later he offered Mordcai one of two half-coconut-shells filled with the sava drink. The apprentice master accepted it politely. He had seen how the drink was prepared—by groups of ahkwila males chewing the roots, then spitting them into a communal bowl. He had no intention of consuming the resulting liquid unless it had been boiled to eliminate particles of disease. It had not. Boiling apparently also eliminated the drink’s potency.

  “It’s good you came,” Qiamaro said in the true language. He spoke as if his lips were numb, and laughed lightly when he failed to make the proper click. “I have something to ask you.”

  “Of course.”

  “I would like a set of wayfinder’s tools.” Qiamaro swayed on his feet, obviously relaxed, though his eyes remained sharp and clear in the firelight. “A horizon board . . . a set of knotted ropes . . .”

  “You want to change your apprenticeship?” It was likely Qiamaro was too old to ever study long enough to be a star path master. Still, becoming a pilot or a local wayfinder was a possibility for him.

  The young ahkwila surprised him.

  “Not for me. For Natano.”

  “Lisafina’s father. One of the dead.”

  Qiamaro nodded and took a gulp from his coconut shell.

  “Why?”

  “To guide him.”

  “The dead man.”

  Another nod. “In the next life.”

  Mordcai moved to correct the youth. “That’s not a known fact.”

  The youth rolled his head from side to side, as if his muscles had lost the necessary tension to hold his head erect. “Not for your kind, maybe. But for us, no doubt.”

  Mordcai regarded Qiamaro, curious. “Can you prove it?”