by Valerie Parv
For the first time, Shana saw her security chief falter. The safe house farther up the mountain was no longer safe, and they wouldn’t reach Black Tree in time. The square outside was designed as both ornament to the building and buffer zone, keeping crazies from approaching too closely. Neither was much use in this situation. Nor could Garrett pull a rabbit out of a hat by landing their attacker in a communications black spot – from Captain Zael’s vantage point, there was no such thing. Her means of weather manipulation was beyond human technology to stop.
As if reading her thoughts, Garrett came between her and June. “We know Zael is set to blow Mount Ekin. Nowhere within fifty kilometers will be safe.”
Shana saw her chief turn pale. Being unable to protect her boss was her worst nightmare. But Garrett was right, if the mountain went up, refuges would be few. For the first time since the Kelek arrived, Shana knew real fear. Her hands and feet were so icy she could barely feel them.
“We can go to the cellar of my apartment building,” Garrett rapped out. “It’s practically bomb proof.”
It would need to be, Shana thought.
June considered the suggestion then nodded. “We don’t have many alternatives.”
“Is there room for all of us?” Shana asked, her gaze taking in the staff milling around them. Characteristically, her mother was moving through the group, offering comfort and an encouraging smile.
Garrett nodded tightly.
The ground began to shake in earnest and Shana was horrified to see a fiery cloud of red hot ash and cinders bloom over the peak that had overshadowed the city throughout her life. She was having trouble seeing Ekin as the sheltering mountain sacred to her ancestors – it was now a weapon of inconceivable power in the hands of an alien hell-bent on revenge. She imagined the rivers of deadly hot lava pushing over forests and buildings – people too, if they were in the path of destruction.
Shutting down the useless fear, she focused on keeping her mother in sight as they followed Garrett toward his high rise. This time, the penthouse wouldn’t be much good to them. If there was any refuge, it would be in the bunker that was the building’s vast cellar and parking area.
Some of Shana’s staff resisted June’s urging and insisted on staying out in the open. Shana’s heart bled for them but she forced her feet to move. She couldn’t make them go, and getting herself killed wouldn’t help anyone.
Getting to Garrett’s building was a feat in itself. With every few meters they traveled, the ground became increasingly unsteady. Shana felt the power of the volcano grumbling through the soles of her shoes. She saw Amelia gripping Elaine’s arm, helping the confused woman to stay upright and moving. When Elaine stumbled at a particularly rough tremor, Garrett took her other arm.
“Are you okay?”
She managed a nod. “Nice city you have here.”
He forced his own smile. “You’re not seeing the place at its best.”
“Do I live here?” she asked.
He frowned. She’d asked that soon after they arrived in the city. “You have a house on the slopes of Mount Ekin,” he told her again.
Her gaze went to the plume of smoke and ash blanketing the city. “Not my smartest real estate purchase.”
“You still can’t remember anything?” he asked, pulling her close against him to shelter her from the debris showering them.
On Elaine’s other side, Amelia was brushing red-hot ash off her clothes. Dark patches showed where she hadn’t been fast enough to stop them smoldering. “We can’t stay out in the open much longer.”
*
They had reached Garrett’s building and he ushered the group inside as fast as he could. “Down the fire stairs on the left,” he said. He was far from an expert in volcanic eruptions, but he’d researched the so-called Glowing Avalanche for a scene in one of his books. Never had he imagined being in the middle of one.
A sudden thought came to him, and he left the governor and her staff to file into the underground area while he dashed up the stairs to his penthouse. His lungs were nearly bursting when he reached his floor, but he dared not risk using the elevator.
Some time later he was on his way down again, a yowling ball of ginger fur gripped under his arm.
“You went to get a cat?” Amelia said with disbelief.
“Not mine, Adam’s. Lurid, meet Amelia and vice versa.”
The TV presenter shook her head, obviously convinced he’d lost his mind. But from across the room, Shana gave him a look of gratitude. If – when – they found Adam, they’d better be able to account for his pet, second only to Shana in Adam’s affections.
Garrett released the cat and it shot under a concrete beam and stayed there, shaking. He knew how she felt. The building had been designed to withstand earthquakes but he suspected nothing could hold out against Zael’s attack on the volcano. This would be Vesuvius, Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens all rolled into one.
He was right – they’d barely closed the fire doors when a deafening roar made speech impossible.
A row of double-glazed windows faced the city and the volcano. Shana went to one and looked out, her expression speaking volumes. Even from where Garrett stood, he could see buildings erupting in flames or crumbling as the river of lava pushed them over like toys.
The performance was as loud and destructive as a nuclear explosion. The flying rock and debris known as pyroclastics rained deadly fire down on the city. Heaven help anyone caught outside.
*
Oh, but Storm was well named, Akia thought as she worked her boards like a celestial conductor, directing unimaginable fury at the city below.
She’d ordered a geostationary orbit to keep them over her target. The initial energy bolt she’d aimed at the volcano had shattered the crust, spearing all the way to the molten core. Now the magma from the core was on the move, the noise, heat and toxic gases savagely counterpointing the pyroclastic cascade.
Before much longer, her son’s killers and all they held dear would be swept into the boiling seas.
*
They were wrong, Shana thought. The writers who said the world would end not with a bang, but a whimper, they were wrong.
This was the biggest bang since the dawn of creation. Her ears rang with the endless assault, and even underground, they were all coated with the white ash that seeped through the building’s pores. Again and again they batted at cinders threatening to set their clothes on fire. The air was acrid, forcing them to breathe through torn strips of clothing. Talking was pointless, reassurance even less useful as death stalked them from the sky. At the windows, which had miraculously held so far, Shana felt numb as she watched her city burn.
Garrett was huddled with Elaine and Amelia on either side of him, his arms around both. The others had found solace in small groups. Only Shana stood alone at the window, a sentinel whose mission, to keep her people safe, had failed.
Adam, where are you? she asked silently. Was he out in the maelstrom, thinking about her? Buoyed by the thought, she searched her mind. There had to be some way to turn this disaster around. She’d spent her life wrestling victory from defeat. Giving in wasn’t an option now.
The cave where she’d normally consult the spirits of her ancestors had most likely been washed away in the river of fire. The Apu Ana spoke to her in the cave but they didn’t live there, she consoled herself. Dragging in a breath through sodden cloth, she sent her thoughts to her grandmother’s spirit in a prayer more fervent than any she had ever uttered.
Show me what I should do.
Before she had the thought fully hatched, she saw the sky turn red. The basement floor rocked with the force of a nuclear explosion. Cracks spidered across the floor, opening up and swallowing anyone standing where they opened. Their cries were soundless, their eyes more surprised than terrified. Then they were gone.
Not even with a whimper, Shana thought. Then, unbelievably, she felt the whole building lurch, lifting her off her feet and slamming her against a wal
l. The molten river of lava and debris battered the windows until they blasted inwards and let the fury pour in.
A glowing avalanche indeed.
Chapter 28
“The governor is expecting you,” Jules told them when they reached Government House. They weren’t shown into Shana’s office but into a large reception room where tea and coffee had been set out.
The second Garrett entered the room, he was assailed by a powerful sense of wrongness. He looked around but nothing seemed different. Nevertheless, his jarring sense of displacement persisted.
Evidently Jules didn’t share Garrett’s unease. “Ms. Akers will join you as soon as she can. In the meantime, please help yourself to refreshments. There are bathrooms across the hall where you can freshen up. Use anything you need.”
Garrett bit back an automatic comment about welcoming the chance to clean up. He did feel grimy from the time at Black Tree, he acknowledged. A change of clothes and a shave would be a good start. The urge to actually say so felt like a battle raging inside him.
He clamped his jaws shut on the words, aware of Jules regarding him curiously. Something was wrong. Then Garrett had it. They’d played out this exact scene once before.
He nodded to the aide, who took himself off, leaving Garrett alone, his thoughts in turmoil. His last memory was of windows crashing in and a river of lava engulfing the basement where they’d all taken shelter.
Around him the reception room felt solid enough, but he could also feel the white heat of the glowing avalanche searing the skin from his bones as he breathed his last. Which was real? He shuddered, hating to think the nearness of death was forcing his mind to seek refuge in an earlier reality.
Amelia approached him, evidently having taken Jules’s advice. The TV presenter’s hair was damp and her skin glowed. She thrived on the chaos and Garrett wished he could say the same for himself.
Like one of the old vinyl records he used to collect, he felt his thoughts dropping into a well-worn groove. On the drive back he’d noticed the city was slowly returning to normal. He wondered if he’d ever feel normal again and found himself looking at Amelia to steady his jangled nerves.
Not the thoughts he wanted to have, but he couldn’t stop them. Holding two thoughts at the same time was impossible and he felt this reality threatening to take over.
Moving stiffly, he joined Amelia at the table and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Feeling better?”
“Better than you look.” She’d said the exact same thing last go-round. Next she would tell him that she …
“… called my studio.”
“Jules is letting you set up in the governor’s media room so you can do a live update from here,” Garrett supplied her next line.
Her startled gaze met his. “How did you know what I was going to say?”
He added cream to his coffee and balanced a couple of bite-sized éclairs on the saucer, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d eaten. Or should he count the last time this scene had played out?
“Lucky guess,” he said. “What will you put into the update?”
“Nothing about your beacons or the Kelek yet,” she said. “I don’t have to toe the governor’s line, but I’m not stupid either. I won’t say anything to make the situation worse.”
Garrett swallowed a bite of éclair and used a knuckle to wipe away a spot of cream from the corner of his mouth, aware, as he did so, of echoing an earlier action. His body felt divorced from his mind. He seemed unable to stop himself acting out the part he’d played in the original of this scene.
He fought the sensation. “Amelia, don’t you see anything wrong with this?” He gestured around them.
“You mean like déjà vu? No, unless …” Her eyes briefly lost their focus.
“You do feel it,” he urged. “I don’t know how or why, but we’ve already lived through this scene.”
“We’re tired. It’s affecting our perception.”
He set the cup and saucer aside and clasped her shoulders. “Try to remember. The volcano erupted. We had to evacuate to the basement of my high rise.”
She shook off his hands. “Timo Rooke has a doctor on call. If you’re not well—”
“I’m not even sure I’m still alive. That any of us are,” he snapped, giving way to the tension coiling through him. “Zael blew up the volcano. The lava poured in on us.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Neither does any of this.” His wide-flung arm encompassed the reception room.
“Have you seen your friend Guy?” she asked. “He seems to have disappeared again.”
Her attempt to distract him made Garrett’s anger rise, his thoughts sliding into the old grooves in spite of himself. Guy hadn’t explained how he’d come to be at Black Tree. Not by car, because he’d accepted the offer of a ride back in Amelia’s car.
Garrett carefully extended his hearing to try to locate the physicist. Nothing. Either Guy had his own equivalent of the dampening field or Garrett’s hearing wasn’t as reliable as usual.
He refused to accept that. When he’d lost his beacon hearing the first time he’d battled the Kelek, he’d started to resign himself to hearing like any normal human. The sense had returned quickly but he hadn’t forgotten the terror of being walled off inside his own skull. He didn’t have that feeling now.
So where the hell was Guy Voland?
No, wait. Where the hell were he and Amelia? What was going on?
Timo was also missing. Amelia had drifted off to talk to Jules, presumably about her broadcast. How could Garrett make her listen to what were basically only his own misgivings?
He switched his hearing to Timo, finding him with Shana in her office and talking about Elaine. Garrett had no qualms about listening in.
“I trust Garrett on this,” the governor was saying. “His hearing is different from ours.”
“Tell me about it.” Garrett heard the other man prowling around Shana’s office. “We Hawai’ians have our own kinds of mysticism, so I have no problem dealing with his. What I can’t deal with is Elaine, injured and alone up there at the mercy of that Zael creature.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate Elaine, either,” Shana said. “I’ve seen her under pressure when the first Kelek ship came. She’s stronger than you know.”
“But not unbreakable.”
The tremor in the diplomat’s voice shook Garrett, although he shouldn’t be surprised. Powerful though Timo might be, he was entirely human and he cared a great deal for Elaine.
“No, she’s not,” Shana agreed. “We will get her back.”
“So Luken says. I accept your word that he’s on our side, but he isn’t very forthcoming about how he intends to rescue her.”
Garrett pulled his hearing back to the reception room, aware of being studied intently. The feeling hadn’t been in the original scene. He looked up to find Guy lounging against a wall, his gaze fixed on Garrett.
“Where did you come from? And where are we now?” he demanded, deliberately invading the other man’s space.
“Why assume we’re anywhere other than where we appear to be?”
Garrett was getting mighty tired of questions. Time for some answers. He pressed closer. “We’ve played out this scene once before.” How many times? He ignored the unnerving thought. “The only variable this time is you. Who are you? Why are you here now?”
“I think you already know.”
“If I’m right, we’re inside the flux. Is Adam here, too?”
Guy gestured toward the serving table, where Adam was talking with Garrett’s niece, Cate Rossi. Garrett couldn’t possibly have missed seeing them before. Where had they appeared from?
He knew the flux as an energy field connecting Earth’s space with wherever the Prana homeworld was located. In his first encounter, he’d sensed a living presence inside the field. The same sentient being had saved them by moving their shuttle out of harm’s way before the first Kelek ship exploded.
“You know that, too.”
Okay, he’d play along. “You’re an avatar – a representation of the being that lives inside the flux?”
Guy stayed silent. Bull’s eye, Garrett thought. No wonder Guy and Adam were genetic twins. Adam must have been the template used by the flux to create Guy.
The uncanny similarity struck him again when Adam joined them. “Are you all right?” Garrett asked. “You’ve been missing for days.”
“I’m fine,” his friend said. “In this reality, time isn’t necessarily linear,”
Garrett repressed a shudder. “How long have we been here?” They both knew he didn’t mean in the reception room. He felt the floor drop away from under his feet, and turned to confront Guy. “Has everything I remember happened inside the flux? The tsunami, the fire tornado, even the flight to rescue Elaine?”
“Some of it, all of it, or none of it – I can’t tell you.”
“Because you won’t or because you don’t know?” Garrett fought for composure. “Why is the flux here?”
Guy looked relieved, as if finally being asked something he could answer. “About thirty years ago, the Prana homeworld became uninhabitable because of an environmental disaster. The flux felt their distress.”
“Making it a logical next step to transfer their racial essence into the flux,” Garrett supplied.
Guy nodded. “The Prana knew they would solve their planet’s problems some day and could return there, provided the flux preserved everything they were.”
Resisting the urge to pace, Garrett balled his hands into fists then deliberately relaxed them. “You sent the beacons out in search of a way to heal your planet. Why didn’t our parents know their true mission?”
“They weren’t supposed to know. They were supposed to become part of wherever you were sent, to blend in, so you’d have time to learn what the Prana needed.”
Garrett looked around them. “You didn’t choose much of a role model. Earth is in danger of going the same way as Prana. Maybe you’d have done better to let the beacons know what we were looking for, giving us a better chance of finding it.”