Truitt missed the ending. After the mummy did away with Mr. Brill’s Shade, the floating monitors showed naught but snow.
That was bad. They didn’t go dark or switch to an alternate view. Instead, the dance of dots across the screens indicated that something wasn’t just turned off—it was broken.
He was able to piece together what came after from reports sent by Ravagers as they closed in on the target before being destroyed. Those reports told the tale of Paul Reid’s obliteration of an entire battalion—of the boy’s backlash frying whole sectors of Mr. Brill’s infrastructure.
There was no denying the truth of the thing. It was a disaster.
Mr. Brill convulsed and opened his eyes as if recovering from a nightmare—or now waking to one. He tried to form a question, but his voice failed. He leaned over, head between knees, and gulped air.
Waiting for the questions about what had just happened, Truitt formulated the answers that would keep him from joining June Medill in eternal suffering.
Paul woke up in the dark of his room. For a moment, he thought he’d never left it.
He went into the bathroom and drank some water, then went to the window and pulled the curtains aside, peering out into the night.
In the parking lot, Rain sat on a curb a few yards from the kneeling Po. The monk hadn’t moved from the spot where Ken had been killed.
Killed—no matter how much it hurt to say it, to admit that the gentle mummy warrior had sacrificed himself for them. Whatever the question of whether Ravagers or anyone else in The Commons could truly die, the mummy was no longer with them.
“Goodbye, friend,” he’d said before taking Paul’s burden on himself—a weight that had crushed him.
Ken was gone.
Paul went outside and crossed the moonlit parking lot. His storm had taken out all the pole lamps. He sat on the curb beside Rain.
She didn’t look at him, instead watching Po grieve. Her eyes reflected the monk’s anguish. She’d been crying.
“Look what I did,” she said.
“You?”
“It was coming for me when Ken…”
“Oh, no. Come on. No way.”
She began to cry again—quiet tears.
He rested his fingers on her arm. “Who was it after? Who should have stopped it? Me. I didn’t finish it. I thought I did, but I didn’t. And then I wasn’t quick enough to realize what Ken was doing. We lost him because he was protecting me. Because everyone has to protect me.”
Moving his hand along her neck, he stopped at the holster strapped across her shoulders. He’d seen it, but it hadn’t registered. Her pack sat beside her. “Hey. Were you—are you leaving?”
She didn’t answer.
“Rain?”
“It’ll be better for you.”
“No—no, no.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I won’t.” He pulled her close.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
He chose his words with care. “You asked what I wanted, and I told you I wanted you with me. I still do.”
She remained silent, wiping her eyes.
“Let’s go inside.” He stood and offered her his hand. After a moment, she let herself be pulled to her feet.
Both of them watched the monk. Po wouldn’t allow them to do anything for him.
“I know,” Paul said. “Believe me. I know.”
Dawn pushed its way through the crack between the curtains. Paul turned over to find that Rain was no longer with him, though the shape of her in the sheets proved she had been. He went to the window, looked out, and dressed in a hurry.
Out in the parking lot, Porter stood, pack at his side. Nearby, Rain crouched next to Po, who still hadn’t budged. She spoke softly to him as Paul approached in the morning’s first light.
“We’re very close now,” Porter told Paul. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
The Envoy watched Rain coax Po to his feet. “How do you feel?”
“Washed out,” Paul said. “But I’m here.”
“Do you understand what you did?”
“Not with my head. With my heart, maybe.”
“That’s all the understanding needed.”
Po looked to the crushed frame of the phone booth, lying in its own pebbled glass where Ken had made his decision and left them behind.
“How about you?” Paul said.
The gray man sighed. “I grow old … I grow old.”
Rain bent to brush glass and gravel from Po’s robe and asked him something only the monk could hear. He nodded. He was coming with them.
“You’re ready for Journey’s End,” Porter said. “Do you know that as well?”
“I think so.”
“Humility is a luxury. Yes, you do. No, you don’t.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Paul, but that distinction is important. I don’t know how many jumps I have left in me. Thanks to Ken, it should be what we need.” He looked around at their remaining troupe, measuring each in turn. “Are we ready?”
Paul nodded.
“Yes,” said Rain.
Po straightened up, gave the site of Ken’s departure one last glance, and joined them. His pride of bearing was his answer.
Porter held his staff out and beckoned each of them to put a hand on it. They did—Rain’s atop Po’s, Paul’s on hers. The Envoy closed his eyes.
He gave the stick a turn.
Part Three: IMUURS
33
El Aeropuerto Fantasmagorico
They descended into a small airport dotted with patches of gray snow that defied the summer temperatures outside. In a place where sea creatures showed you dead friends and dead media carried you through mirrors, Annie was still surprised to see such hardy remnants of winter.
It was even more puzzling when she realized her error. As Weston took the chopper down, the snow became ashen worms—and the worms became weasels as they approached the tarmac.
When they were 100 feet above a spot near the control tower, a man-sized weasel emerged from the building. He waved his arms to clear away his smaller cousins so that the Black Hawk could touch down. The animals obeyed.
Weston babied the helicopter to the asphalt, and the weasels retreated to avoid the rotors’ wash. While the Ravager powered the engines down and the blades slowed, the animals all turned to face the giant weasel, drawing themselves upright in a foot-high wall of fur around the chopper.
The large weasel wasn’t a weasel. He was a man in a homemade coat of sewn-together pelts. On his forearm sat a hooded falcon, attached to him with jesses.
The blades stopped. All was silent but for the jingle of the falcon’s bells as the man approached. Annie opened the door on her side and climbed out, flexing her knee.
“Howdy,” the man said from beneath his fuzzy hood. “I’m Wrangler John. They told me you were on the way. Thank you for not crushing my ferrets.”
Then he pulled a .44 Magnum from one of his pockets and took aim at Weston. “They didn’t say anything about a black-hat, though.”
“He’s with me. He won’t hurt you.”
“Doesn’t look like he’ll hurt anyone.” He lowered his hand-cannon and made it vanish into his pelts.
She turned to look at the pilot. The young man’s head rested against his seat, face turned toward her, his visible eye blue glass. He really was gone this time.
Weston.
Annie removed his broken head gear, smoothed his hair, and closed his eyes. Sitting him up straight, she put his helmet in his lap and folded his hands over it. Then she told him goodbye.
The animals remained respectfully silent and upright, as if in salute.
“That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” Wrangler John said as she shut the Black Hawk door. “He brought you here to help—not as a prisoner or anything.”
“He’s the weird one? You’re the weasel whisperer.” It came out harsher than she’d intended, her voice hoarse with a grief she hadn’t a
nticipated.
“Ferrets,” he said. “Please.”
The airport had never been used for its original purpose, Wrangler John explained. It was an exact replica of a real-world Spanish boondoggle built in a place no one wanted to fly to.
The ferrets parted for Annie and Wrangler John as they headed for the control tower, scores of them standing upright on either side of the path they cleared like miniature royal guardsmen. Nearby, a field was carpeted with fat rabbits munching away on emerald grass.
Wrangler John lived alone, having been hired to control the bunny and bird populations and make it safer for air traffic. Only there was no air traffic, and the ferrets and the falcon refused to kill any rabbits or birds.
Which was how he liked it. It was important for Annie to understand that he was no life-taker. His coat was made only of the pelts of animals that died of natural causes.
The ferrets kept pace with them as they walked. When they reached the tower, Wrangler John held the door for her.
A sign marked the facility as “El Aeropuerto Fantasmagorico.” The letters were bordered in tufts of fur. It appeared to be a hand-crafted labor of love—an artisan-made prototype that would be mass-produced with far less care and sold at the airport gift shop. When Annie asked about that, Wrangler John brightened. He’d made the sign himself, and a shop was in the works. The target opening date had yet to be determined.
Inside, he broke the news with an apologetic tone that they’d have to use the steps to get up top rather than the elevator right in front of them. “We can’t spare the battery juice,” he said. “We need it to get you tapped in. That’s a big pull.”
Annie’s pride powered her up the stairs, ache and all. She didn’t get there fast, but she got there. That was pretty much the theme of her post-warrior years.
Upstairs in the main control room, an array of radar units and computers were draped in plastic tarps. Most were not even plugged in.
In the center of the space, one radar screen stood uncovered. Dark and unpowered, it was a hulk of cold, dead metal. The equipment was ancient, unlike the recently built airport that served as its home. Vintage Cold War screens, green and curved like bottle bottoms, were housed in steel thick as cast-iron skillets.
Wrangler John settled the falcon on a mews in the corner.
“Tapped into what?” Annie said.
“The field. Your friends plus a whole bunch of strangers—unknown to you and me both, which is key. They’ll connect you where you need to be connected.”
“What kind of strangers?”
“All kinds. Everybody. You can’t really name just one.”
She eyed the units as he tethered the bird and removed its hood. “How old is this radar?”
“Sonar. You need to listen, not watch.”
The sonar unit was dark. “No power?”
He laughed. Taking her by the shoulders, he turned her to the windows behind them.
Out on the asphalt was a football-field-sized spread of hamster wheels the size of car tires, all of them empty. “Watch this.”
He crossed the room to a battered metal desk that looked as if it had been scavenged from another era and carted in, which it most likely had. A man who wouldn’t let ferret pelts go to waste would see the value in used furniture.
Wrangler John thumbed a switch on a bulky microphone with a base like a clothes iron and a head the size of a pepper mill—the kind Annie hadn’t seen since helping with announcements at sleep-away camp. Feedback squealed across the grass and tarmac from speakers on the outside walls and light poles.
He waited for it to fade, clapped his hands into the mike in a staccato pattern, and flipped the switch back off. “Watch,” he told her.
The lawn emptied of rabbits. They headed for the wheels, filling them in a quick and orderly fashion—thousands of them stretching to the horizon and beyond.
After a few minutes, Wrangler John turned the mike on and clapped into it again. Annie’s old Morse Code training interpreted the single-word command: go.
The rabbits went, setting their wheels into motion. “Give them a sec to hop to it,” he said, taking a great deal of pride in his pun. He didn’t have company very often.
“You can barely hear them.”
He beamed. “It’s a constant oiling process. By the time I finish lubing, it’s time to start over because the first ones need it again. I keep trying to come up with a more efficient way, but efficiency loses to elegance.”
With a low buzz, the ceiling’s racks of fluorescent lights flared. Then came a symphony of beeping as the computers awoke in red and green constellations made hazy by their plastic shrouds.
The screen in front of her came to life. A pinpoint of white in the center of its screen grew brighter and spread outward.
“We have solar, too,” he said. “But it’s not nearly as reliable as the bunnies. Which reminds me.”
He pulled a tarp from a unit that looked even older than the others—a rolling leviathan with gun-gray sides. The metal of its cabinet appeared to have been hammered into shape by smiths, not stamped out in a factory.
He palmed a rocker switch to turn the unit on. Nothing happened.
A pop preceded a hiss that sounded more organic than electric.
The air filled with the bouquet of burnt fur. He reached into the unit’s back and extricated a smoking ferret, which fled the room as soon as he set it down.
With much muttering, he got the unit up and running. The smell of scorched beast cleared from the air as the machine’s hum grew. “You’ll like this. You’ll like this a lot.”
Annie was fairly certain he was speaking to her and not the machine.
She waited a few moments, but her patience was running out. “John?”
“Wrangler John, please.” He continued puttering as if the exchange completed the conversation.
“Wrangler John?”
He stopped working, surprised that she wanted more.
“What are we tapping into?”
He blinked several times, like she’d spoken a language he’d only just learned, and he needed time to translate. Then he wiped the dust from his hands onto his coat, saying something in a low voice about how hot it was.
“I’m looking for my son,” she said. “What are we doing?”
“Your son?” He wiped again. She suspected there wasn’t any dust left; he just needed something to do. “You’re telling me it’s a kid? The name sounded so grown-up when they sent it. I mean, go figure—Zach.”
34
The Farmer and the Monsters
The splashing woke Zach. He lay on his side on the bed-sized rock he was trapped on, his ear sore against a patch of moss covering the hard stone.
It was morning. The sun beat down.
In the air above, large white birds with long bills wheeled about in wide circles. Every now and then, one would bomb down into the lake and bob back up, water draining out of the sides of its face. Sometimes the birds flapped back up into the air, disappointed. Other times, they happily swallowed whatever the water left behind.
They were catching fish. The birds had woken him up over breakfast.
Pelicans. The p-word in the book Zach’s mother used when she wanted him to learn letters, even after he’d already learned them and had moved on to whole words. He couldn’t read every word, but if he understood what one meant, heard someone say it, and was able to make a connection, he didn’t forget it.
Pelican. P was for pelican.
Zach stood for a better look.
The pelicans dove into the water, sometimes coming up with fish, sometimes not. When they did, they took to the rocks to enjoy their meal. Sometimes they tried to take the fish from one another, but for the most part, the supply was such that they could catch what they wanted without having to steal.
The wind moved the water in little waves. However, not all of the waves were blown, and not all of them were small.
Some were made by something underneath the water
—they were too fat and slow to have been made by the birds. Zach was safe on his rock, but what was large enough to make such waves?
The rocks around Zach’s rock were not far. He could jump to one if he tried really hard. The pelicans stayed off of the ones nearest him. They didn’t know that he wouldn’t try to catch them like they caught the fish.
He tried to imagine himself trapping one in his mouth. That wouldn’t work—and he wasn’t hungry.
Many of the surrounding rocks sat in a circle, while others broke the pattern. If Zach stared long enough, he got dizzy from trying to figure out how it worked.
That was how he found the Farmer Says.
He turned around and around, studying the rocks until he stumbled and kicked the moss he’d tried to use as a pillow. There was something solid underneath it—something that shifted when he nudged it with his heel. It wasn’t part of the stone.
Zach peeled back the sheet of moss as if he were uncovering a treasure and revealed a toy he knew. It was the one with the little man in the middle who, when his string was pulled, spun around, pointed to things, and announced what they were.
On the one in his class, the little man was a fireman who pointed to firehouse things—an engine, a ladder, a hose. On the one he saw in the store, a circus man pointed to a lion, a tiger, an elephant, and other circus animals.
This one was a farmer. He had a duck, and a pig, and a cow to point to.
He also had animals Zach had never seen on any farm. One looked like an octopus in a shell. There was also a peacock, a weird squid thing, and a scary lizard-fish that had a head like a snake and a long mouth full of teeth, like a crocodile. Its body appeared to be part polliwog, part shark.
Zach had a hard time sounding out what the word said until he pulled the string. The little farmer went around and stopped on the lizard-fish. “Mosasaur,” he said.
Mind the mosasaur. That’s what the tape recorder lady had said. Zach needed no warning. If he saw one, he’d mind it.
He pulled the string again. This time, the little farmer stopped on an open door with an e-word underneath it. “Egress,” the farmer said.
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