by S. S. Segran
Mariah cursed and lifted the midsection. There! Get it out!
Tegan tried to urge the moribund creature to move. Come on, come on! Don’t fight me now!
Her will overpowered it and she sent it toward the surface, leaving behind the object they’d found for the time being. As soon as Tank drew in the first pull of air through its blowhole, the friends released their hold on each other and returned to themselves, wilting in relief.
“That was close,” Aari said, resting his hands on his knees. He looked at Victor and the Sentry’s expression gave him pause. “What?”
Victor frowned. “You didn’t feel it?”
“Uh.”
“Your pendants. They pulled toward each other when the four of you joined in the novasphere.”
The friends looked down at their necklaces. “I thought I felt something earlier,” Aari muttered. “When it was just Kody, Tegan, and me.”
“I did, too,” Kody said.
Mariah traced the string holding her pendant. “Do you guys remember back in Israel when we were visiting Asa, our pendants sort of . . . moved toward each other? Just a little?”
“We were supposed to ask the Elders about that,” Tegan said. “But with everything that’s happened, we completely forgot.”
“That’s definitely something you ought to . . .” Victor’s words petered off. He pushed himself off the captain’s seat, staring out toward the beach. The rainfall had escalated into a sluicing downpour, obscuring sights afar, yet something had put him on high alert. The Sentry’s fingers reached for the ignition before he changed his mind.
“Get in the water,” Victor said. “Now.”
The usual low rumble of his voice was shadowed by something Aari had never heard before—terror. The others must have picked it up as well; no one questioned him. They lowered themselves over the left side of the boat into the now-frigid bay and kept close to the hull, heads and shoulders bobbing over the brine.
Aari tracked Victor’s gaze skyward, squinting against the precipitation. There, soaring on monstrous, batlike wings was a legion of specters that shot his heartbeat into his ears.
Camazotz.
There were dozens of them, silhouetted against the murky sky and flying in loose formation, limber tails flicking as they dropped altitude to approach the vessel. Elongated jaws parted, releasing a string of rattling clicks before clamping shut.
A collective, primal sense of survival impelled the group to dive beneath the boat. It was too dark to see much of anything and they had no way of knowing what was happening above. Aari could only hear the motion of the waves as they huddled together.
Pointed thuds reverberated off the bowrider through the water. At first he thought it might have been hail, but the strikes seemed localized to the vessel. They waited until the beating stopped and, unable to hold their breaths any longer, resurfaced.
The Camazotz had regrouped and taken off toward Gibraltar, swifter than should have been possible. Kody packed Tegan between him and the boat’s hull. “They’re heading toward the marina, fast,” he said. “I hope no one’s out of their cabins in this weather.”
They stayed in the water, on tenterhooks as they scanned around for more winged abominations. None came, but the first faint screams carried over the water. Danielle and Joseph’s faces flashed in Aari’s mind. Oh, God, no.
Victor tilted his chin so one ear was raised. “There were a lot of people in the marina when we left. That won’t make it better, but it doesn’t sound like all of them were attacked.”
“Just the unlucky few who got caught out,” Aari whispered.
“And we can’t do anything,” Kody growled. “Again.”
Victor helped Mariah up into the boat and pulled himself in after her. “We can find Jag and stop Reyor. That will save future lives.” He looked back toward the marina, then drew a hand over his face and turned away.
The others hauled themselves on board once more. They were all soaked and shivering, trying to put aside thoughts of everything but their mission. Tegan was only half aware of what she was doing; Aari suspected she had reconnected with the dolphin.
The space under the hardtop was as they’d left it, but the rest of the vessel had been carpeted with black spikes ten inches long. Not wanting to touch them with his bare hands, Aari rolled one under his shoe. “So this is what that sound was.”
He didn’t need to look at the others—the shift in the air was enough to tell him that they, too, were imagining what these projectiles would have done to anyone caught in the open at the marina.
Kody took a closer look at another spike that had pierced the cover of the outboard motor. “But why did they aim for the boat? We weren’t even in it.”
“Maybe they could sense us somehow,” Victor said. “We can gather the barbs up and take a look at them later.”
Happy squeaks came from the side of the boat. They all peeked over where a familiar gray head had risen from the water. Tegan leaned over to stroke the side of Tank’s face. “Hi, baby. Sorry for getting you into that mess. Thank you for hanging in there while we got you out . . . and for helping us get this.”
She opened her hand and the dolphin dropped a rounded object into it. Victor eyed it. “Is that what I think it is?”
“We’re about to find out.” She gave the dolphin a kiss goodbye on the snout, waiting until it had safely exited the bay, before holding up the item for everyone to see.
“Looks like ivory and gold,” Victor commented.
“I think it can be opened, too.” With some effort, Tegan managed to pop the lid. Settled at the center of the hollow was a white quartz the thickness of her finger and half its length. It wobbled, then began arcing from side to side; left, right, left right, like a pendulum.
No one knew what to make of it. Kody took the object and held it up. “I’m assuming this is what we’re looking for, since it has a crystal that seems to be pointing . . . um, well, it’s swinging in two different directions.”
“I guess it is built like a compass,” Mariah said, “but it hasn’t got any directional markings. How is it supposed to work, then?”
The group tinkered around with it, growing increasingly frustrated as the pointer crystal continued to move in unsettled directions no matter which way they held it.
“I don’t get it,” Kody said. “We’ve gotta be missing something.”
Tegan looked out over the water for a long moment. “Aari.”
“Yeah?” he replied.
“When you used your retrocognition to find the seeds back in Africa, you experienced Lucius dying, didn’t you?”
He regarded her uneasily. “Yes.”
“Oten’s aunt, Kanta. She died here. And she was the one who made the compass. We have an important geolocation and, I’d think, a valuable object she made. These are the two things needed for you to access a person’s memories.”
“You’re asking me to experience someone’s death again.”
“I know.”
“And this time it’s not Lucius being held in his son’s arms and passing away from old age—it’s a woman drowning in a storm. A violent end.”
Tegan’s features curled in sympathy when she turned to him. “I know, Aari. But seeing her with the compass might help us understand how it works. It’s all we’ve got left to find Jag.”
Aari rubbed his arm, then claimed one of the seats for himself. Once he had the compass pressed between his hands, there was a sudden flash behind his eyes, both bright and dark. As it faded, his view morphed and he found himself aboard an ancient sailing vessel, riding out a brutal squall. A tanned boy with floppy dark hair was precariously making his way over from the other end of the vessel as waves surged over its sides. Aari’s mouth opened of its own accord and, when he shouted, a woman’s voice came out. “Oten! I told you to stay inside!”
The vision cut out, throwing Aari back into the present. That’s not supposed to happen, he thought, mystified. The memory only just started.
Tegan sat on the seat opposite his. “Elder Nageau said retrocognition only works if the object was created on deeply emotional and spiritual levels, or the person who owned it was extremely attached to it. And they had to be dead for you to access their memories. Either Kanta wasn’t as invested in it as we hoped, or . . . she isn’t dead.”
“She’s a hundred percent dead,” Aari assured her. “I was able to get into one of her memories, but then got kicked out.” He brought the compass to eye level. “I’m not sure how to explain it. It felt more like this thing can’t be used as a focus item. I have no idea why.”
Kody pressed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. “This can’t be happening.”
“We should reach out to the Elders and let them know.” Mariah tucked her arms against her chest, shoulders slumping. “Maybe they’ll have an idea.”
“Not sure what good that would do,” Aari said. “Nageau was specific when he explained how to use retrocognition. He never said there’d be times it wouldn’t work even when the proper conditions were met.”
“Sure, but he also never said you could follow a person through their death and beyond, but you found that out by yourself with Lucius.”
Victor knocked a fist against the boat’s foldable windshield, commanding their attention. “I just connected with Elder Nageau. He’s unsure what to make of our situation. As far as he knows, an artifact meeting the requirements should work. The Elders will do what they can to learn more, but to be frank, he didn’t sound optimistic that they’ll turn up anything.”
Tegan’s arm shot up, index finger erect. Her face was twisted in shock. No one moved until she lowered her hand a couple of minute later.
“This,” she said, hoarse, “is a wild ride. Jag just reached out to me.”
There was a breath of silence before the friends clamored around her, questions pouring out like a dam broken. She gestured for them to settle back. “Before you ask, yes, he sounded fine. He didn’t say much, just that he’s been freed and has a lot to tell us, but we need to meet face-to-face for that. According to him, we have a real shot at ending this whole nightmare.”
“As in, Reyor wants to call it quits?” Victor asked. “I don’t believe it.”
“Not Reyor,” she told him. “Jag said that there’s someone more powerful who can put a stop to all this, but this person needs our help. He’s the one who actually started this whole ‘cleansing’ decades ago and apparently wants to make things right now, but he needs proof that we’re the real deal. Something about needing to see if all of us really did make an evolutionary leap. Jag said he wants to meet us, and he’s been tasked to find us and take us with him. He’ll be in the country by tomorrow.”
By the raised eyebrows around him, Aari knew he wasn’t the only one who thought it sounded strange.
“This reeks of a trap,” Kody said. “Maybe Jag’s been repurposed and this is Reyor’s way of getting us to drop our guard.”
“On one hand, I absolutely agree,” Tegan said. “On the other, it doesn’t seem like Reyor’s style. All throughout this year, we’ve been hunted in the open. Yeah, you could say there might be a switch in tactics, but Reyor’s got to know how weird it would look from our end that Jag’s been released out of nowhere, especially after all the effort that was put into capturing us.”
Aari shut the compass’s lid. “Let’s say for a minute that Jag’s telling the truth. What’s this about the guy who’s the originator of everything that’s happened?”
“That would be a pretty bizarre story for Reyor to use to convince us that we won’t be abducted,” Kody acknowledged. “There are at least five better ones I could come up with.” He nudged Victor. “What do you think?”
The Sentry tapped his fingers against his thigh holster. “I don’t like it, but that’s not a surprise by now. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t go.”
“If there’s even a chance that Jag’s telling the truth,” Mariah said, “then maybe we should take it. It’s not as if we’d be going in blind. Tegan can stake out the meeting place with her abilities to see if it might be a trap. If it’s unsafe, we just won’t go in.”
“That’s probably the best idea,” Aari said. “Let’s not pretend that we’re going to refuse to go. We will, but we’ll handle it smartly.”
“Can you reach out to Jag again?” Victor asked.
“He said he’ll contact me later with details about where and when we’ll meet,” Tegan answered. “He’s just getting off the drugs they used to keep his abilities suppressed so his telepathy’s still spotty, but he wanted to reach out because he missed us and wanted to connect as soon as he could.”
In that moment, Aari watched the masks peel away, revealing a tired, heavyhearted group who just wanted their missing friend back and now saw that possibility close at hand. Cautious hope loosened the tension that had been trapped on their faces for weeks. They pulled each other close.
“We’re doing this, then?” Kody asked.
“Yeah,” Aari said, “I think we are.”
Spain’s third-largest city was up in smoke, and though the breezes scattered the dark haze, the reek of fireworks stunk the air.
“What did they do here, celebrate New Year’s a few days early?” Kody gagged as the group climbed down from the truck to stretch their legs and give Tegan space to carry out a reconnaissance of Valencia’s airport.
Victor took stock of the empty lane, sizing up the low-rise apartments on either side. With exterior claddings of brick and cement, many boasted an assortment of storefronts at street level. It was too narrow to even consider maneuvering around the cars that congested the city’s arterial roads, so he’d had to drive on the wider lanes meant for cyclists and pedestrians.
“That’s probably right,” he said absently. “Not the part about celebrating. Valencians are kind of pyromaniacs.”
Aari bobbed his head enthusiastically. “They have a huge festival every year that includes burning models of monuments they create, shooting out fireworks and all that good stuff. They also set off fireworks for basically any other celebration they can.”
Kody used his foot to turn over a Scourger’s carcass where it lay in the middle of a scorched patch of ground fifteen feet across. “A city filled with explosives managed to kill just one of these things? This is the only dead Scourger we’ve seen since we got here.”
Mariah, standing by Victor’s side, shuddered. “If that’s true, then they really are almost impossible to kill.”
Aari crouched by the beast, head jutting forward as he studied the body. “Graphene’s strong, it takes a lot to make it burn. Looks like this one was torn from having a ton of things explode at it. The scorch marks around it are huge.”
Kody scrunched up his nose. “Man, the smell of this place is killing me.”
“If you can turn your senses up, you can turn them down,” Victor said. “Unless you’ve already forgotten your training session back in San Francisco.”
Kody made a face, then took a minute to concentrate. It wasn’t long before he visibly relaxed, his nose unwrinkling. Victor quietly approved—so the boy had been practicing after all—then returned his thoughts to the city around him.
No living Scourger was in sight. The horrid creatures from the sky were also nowhere to be seen, nor had they been evident during the entire three-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip from Gibraltar. Reyor may have created hordes of these things, he thought, but at least they can’t canvass the whole planet at once.
The group had passed several people along the way who were out clearing the streets of debris and bodies. Though their faces were dirty and grim, they seemed almost at ease.
Almost.
Valencia was a sizeable port city and had most likely been among those ravaged first. It had also been a few days since the EMP attack and subsequent invasion of the beasts, so Vict
or supposed the creatures had moved on to the suburbs and rural regions, or northward to inland cities like Madrid.
Some semblance of life was returning, even if it was an eerily silent affair with a shocked populace struggling to make sense of what had happened and navigating a new world without technology. There would be no way to know how many people were left standing now that their primary means of communication no longer worked.
Phoenix destroyed global crop production, infected the world with two strains of a deadly disease, then hit us with EMPs before unleashing the Scourgers and the Camazotz. All within the same year. Victor’s hand slid down to the grip of the holstered Glock at his thigh, itching to put a bullet into Reyor. But that would only lead to even greater catastrophe, and it wasn’t so long ago that he’d nearly made that mistake.
Tegan stuck her head out of the truck’s backseat window. “It’s like all the animals have cleared out of here. I could only find a few small birds.”
Victor strode over to her. “Sitrep?”
“From the air, everything looks fine over the airport. I don’t see mercenaries or guards or anyone hanging around or setting up a perimeter. And Jag was telling the truth, there’s a private jet waiting there.”
“Any place where people could be hiding?”
“Is this really necessary?” Mariah asked tentatively. “This is Jag. And he did mention that he was let go because there might be a way to stop all this.”
“We all want to believe that, but we have to make sure,” Aari said.
Tegan folded her arms on the windowsill, resting her chin on them. “Considering Reyor has always been direct with trying to capture or maybe even neutralize us, tricking us seems out of character. If we’re that much of a threat, Phoenix could have come after us when we told Jag our location. They literally have killing machines that we barely managed to escape, so they could’ve sent those after us, too. I flew around and there’s literally not a single Scourger for miles. Usually you can find a few in a city this big, like during our drive to Gibraltar, but it’s as if they’ve all disappeared.”