Santi brought them down about a hundred meters from the scene of the attack, onto the balloon landing pad next to the tarmac with the covered ships. He tied the balloon down to its post, and they all climbed out.
Andy ran ahead of the rest of them into the compound. “Dad? Mom? Sean!” The buildings were in shambles.
“Andy? Is that you?”
“Sean?” Andy looked around for the source of the voice.
“Over here!” Sean popped out of the storage building at the back of the compound, the structure that had sustained the least damage.
She ran to him and threw her arms around the boy. “You’re alive, sprout!”
“Again with the sprout?”
“Live with it. Where are the others?”
Keera appeared at the door to her house with an armful of plates. “Andy!” She stopped. “It is really you, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Marissa cut me free of Davian’s hold on me.” In two long steps she had her arms around her mother. “Where are Dad and Jayson?” She looked around, confused.
“They’re gone.” Sean took the dishes from his mother and carried them off into the storage building.
Marissa and the others arrived, and the girl threw her arms around her grandmother.
“Gone?” Andy’s heart dropped.
“No, not like that.” Her mother frowned. “They went down the river. They’re going after the world mind.”
“How long ago?”
“This morning.”
Andy tested her connection to the world mind. It was blocked, but it felt different than before. “Jayson made a dead zone, didn’t he?”
Keera nodded. “To keep Davian out. But he did some damage… before.”
Sean returned and greeted all the newcomers.
“What happened here?” Eddy asked the boy.
“Jayson and I came home from Darlith, and we found them asleep. Or something.”
“It was like we were in a fog.” Keera looked distant. “Jayson and Sean managed to break Davian’s hold on us too. Then the ground started to shake.”
Sean nodded. “They decided someone had to go after Davian. But they wouldn’t let me go.”
She hugged him again fiercely. “They were right.”
Soon she was surrounded by her mother and niece too, and for a moment she felt safe and warm.
When they let go of one another at last, Andy looked up at the storm in the distance, frowning. “So what do we do now?”
Chapter Seven: Regroup
“SO HOW do we get to the top?” Jayson stood at the base of the North Pole, looking up the rough black rock face. It was a long way up. This close, it seemed like it really did go on forever.
Aaron was looking back and forth along the length of the wall. “There’s an old escape shaft somewhere. It was built when the Far Hold was first constructed.”
Jayson looked back the way they’d come. It was dark underneath the storm clouds that boiled above their heads. Jayson shivered, thinking of the chaos the storm would unleash.
They’d rowed across the lake that would one day be a sea and had pulled the kayak up onto the broken black shale. A short hike across the intervening space had brought them there. “A shaft?”
“Yes. It’s fitted with a manual cargo elevator that has no links to the world mind. Colin was a bit… paranoid on that point.”
“Apparently with good reason.” The Dressler, and then his own misadventure with Transfer Station, had proven that.
Aaron sighed. “Apparently.”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“It’s hard to get my bearings in this darkness. But if memory serves, it was a bit to the east of the Rhyl.” He rubbed his temple. “Times like this, I really miss my loop. But maybe I can dip….” Aaron touched the wall. “Old trick,” he explained to Jayson’s confused look. “This was the first way I learned to interact with the world mind.”
“How? The world mind’s blocking access to vee space.”
“I can… feel its autonomic processes. Things even Davian wouldn’t be aware of. They guide me where I need to go.” He pointed east. “It’s that way.”
Jayson grinned. “You’ll need to teach me that trick someday.”
“Deal.” They set off along the wall.
EDDY PULLED off the tarp and poked his head inside the old Moonjumper. The cramped space smelled stale after having been closed up for so long.
An almost overwhelming wave of nostalgia flowed through him—not for the frantic flight up from Earth, but for everything else it represented. His mother. His military buddies. His home. The skies of Earth.
He closed his eyes and steadied himself against the frame of the little craft. Those things were dead and gone. Most times he no longer thought about them, at least not more than five or ten times a day.
Now that his loop had been cut out, he’d taken another step away from that time—and from who he used to be.
He sighed and climbed inside.
Matt poked his head in behind him. “I’ve never seen one of these before.”
Eddy patted the console. “Shame we have to use it. I don’t suppose it’s coming back in one piece.”
Matt shot him an alarmed look. “That’s not reassuring.”
He grinned ruefully. “Sorry. I hope all of us will come out of this alive. I certainly want to. But this is bigger than any of us. If this is the hill I die on, so be it.” He fired up the control panel. “Everything looks good. We’re low on fuel.”
“Can we use luthiel?”
Eddy shook his head. “Won’t work. It’s not pure enough.”
“I thought this thing ran on some special kind of drive?” Matt raised an eyebrow.
“It does. But it works off antigravity, and you have to boost it into the air first with liquid fuel. And in this case, we’ll be using the x-drive to haul the escape pod.”
“What about the shuttle?”
“Good thinking. There may still be a little of the purified luthiel Ana and Keera created in there. We had to fly it out here, after all. ’Scuse me.” He climbed out of the Moonjumper.
The shuttle was covered by a much larger tarp. It loomed over the other small craft—the Moonjumper and the escape pod—that occupied the small tarmac.
Eddy lifted the tarp and ducked underneath. He opened the hatch and went inside to find one of the spare fuel containers, a screwdriver, and a hammer.
He hauled them out and looked for the external tanks.
Matt was right behind him. “We’ll probably need some pipe to siphon off the fuel—”
“No need.” He chose a spot, high enough up on the tank, and used the hammer to drive the screwdriver through.
It took five blows, but on the last one, a fountain of ship fuel spouted out. Eddy captured the stream of fuel in the can. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Under the seat in the Moonjumper you’ll find an old pack of gum. Grab it for me?”
“Gum?” Matt looked confused.
“Just go look.” The spare fuel container was about halfway full.
Matt came back a moment later holding his old pack of Snap gum. “Unwrap a stick for me?”
Matt did as Eddy asked. “What is it?”
“Chewy flavor. Mostly sugar.”
The fuel can was almost full. “Okay, pop the gum into your mouth and chew, but don’t swallow.”
Matt started chewing the gum. “Wow… geez, that’s sweet. What’s that flavor?”
Eddy scratched his head with his free hand. “I think it starts with watermelon, moves into cherry, then finishes with banana.”
Matt laughed. “I don’t know what any of those things are.”
“Let’s see… cherry is like red berry. The others? It’s hard to explain.” Eddy checked the container. Just about there. “Okay, spit it out.” He held out his hand.
Matt spit the wad of gum into his waiting palm.
Eddy took it and wedged it into the hole he’d made i
n the tank, sealing it shut. “There, all fixed.” That brought back a few memories too.
Matt eyed it warily. “Is that spaceworthy?”
Eddy shrugged. “Hope so. I plugged a hole in the Moonjumper that way twenty-two years ago. But give me the rest of the pack. Just in case.”
ANDY PACED the edge of what she was calling the dead zone.
It was a circle about two hundred meters wide, centered on the destroyed outpost. She urgently needed to know how Jayson had done what he had done. It could be useful when the time came to fight Davian.
She stared off at the North Pole. How was he going to get into the Far Hold? Would he and her father find a way to beat them there? Frowning, she turned her attention back to his handiwork.
The dead zone was a sphere inside which she couldn’t reach the world mind, and apparently it couldn’t reach her either. Jayson had done something similar in Agartha, cutting off that little chunk of the world.
She’d never learned how.
“Can you feel the difference?” She stepped over the line they’d drawn in the dirt.
On the one side, she could feel that the world mind was there. Her abilities were blocked from it, but she could tell it existed.
She stepped back across. It was as if her senses were wrapped in cotton.
Marissa and Sean tried it too. “Yeah, I can feel it,” her former pupil said. “It’s like when the blackout hit.”
Andy nodded. “It’s like Agartha, too, but you weren’t old enough to know what you were missing. How did he do it?”
“I can show you.” Sean was staring at the line thoughtfully.
“How?” Andy hadn’t spent much time with her brother, as far apart as they were, except for the few times he’d come to visit, like the last week, and three years before when he’d come to live with them at the schoolhouse for three months. But they’d formed a deep bond then. They’d also seen each other regularly in vee space ever since.
“He showed me how to do it. He called it null space.”
This is good. “So how did he do it?”
Sean took both of their hands and pulled them out of the null space zone.
Sean knelt. “You know how when you dip, you can feel what’s beneath you?” He put a hand to the ground. “And you can dip into vee space?”
“Yes.”
Marissa nodded.
“Okay, and you know how it feels when you reach into someone? Through vee space, or the network, or one on one?”
“Yes.” Where was this going?
“Null space is like the opposite of those. You must find the place inside you where the reaching and dipping comes from. Here, feel mine.” He took their hands and placed them on his chest. “Close your eyes and look for the spark.”
“Your spark?” Marissa frowned.
“The place inside where I’m connected to the world. It’s not really in my chest. This just makes it easier.”
Andy reached inside him, and there it was. The source of his abilities. It was simultaneously hard as crystal and soft as mud. It shone a golden light, and threads extended out from it into the world.
“Feel it?”
“Yeah. I’ve never visualized it like that before.” Marissa’s eyes were wide.
“Me neither.” Andy was surprised that there were still things for her to learn about her ability.
“Okay, now reach inside and find your own.” Sean looked inordinately proud of himself.
Andy grinned to herself. How often, after all, did he get to teach the adults something? She reached inside. There it was. It didn’t glow as strongly in her as it did in Sean.
She wondered about that. Would this ability be watered down in time, as the Liminal kids merged with the general population?
Or was it dominant? All the Liminal kids had it.
“I found it.”
Marissa nodded. “Me too.”
“Okay, now take it and push it out of you.” He demonstrated. The little spark exited his chest, and a translucent sphere appeared around him. As he pushed the spark farther away, it rode the surface of the sphere, which got bigger and bigger.
“How large can it go?”
Sean shrugged. “I think it depends on the strength of the Liminal. Uncle Jayson can push his really far.”
That made sense. “He’s strong.”
Sean grinned. “He is. Go ahead—give it a try.”
She took her spark and pushed. Her spark left her chest, but when it was about a meter away, the pain started. “Ooooh.”
“I know. It hits you when you near your limit.”
Andy stared at him. “My limit’s a meter, but Jayson pushed his out a hundred?”
“He had a lot more practice.”
Marissa’s expanded to encompass all three of them before she faltered.
“You’re strong too, girl.” Andy made an appreciative whistle. “Just like Jayson.”
Marissa sighed. “I’m worried about him and Uncle Aaron.”
Andy turned to find her brother trying not to cry.
“I’m sorry. I should be stronger.” Sean’s face was drawn and his eyes wet.
“Nonsense. Come here.” She pulled him close. “You too, Marissa.” Andy enfolded both of them in her arms. “I don’t want to hear any of this nonsense about being strong. Far better to be human. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” they both said in unison.
“We’re all going to be okay.”
SANTI STARED at Andy and the Liminal kids. What was it like to have been born in a generation that had never lived on Earth? To be the first true spacefaring humans?
What was it like to be so connected to the world around them? Although at times like this, he wanted to disconnect—from the events that were moving to engulf them and from his own painful memory of the day before.
He shook his head to try to dispel the look in the man’s eyes as he died.
“Brave new world, huh?” Keera caught his gaze.
Santi sighed. “Yeah, it sure is. Do you ever wonder—”
“How things will be different for them?”
Santi sighed. “I do. So many things you and I had in common, they’re just gone.” He turned back toward the house. They were trying to secure everything that had survived the attack, taking it inside the storage building. “Philly cheesesteak sandwiches.”
“Philadelphia.” Keera grinned.
“Tri dee. Oreos. Destra Vanity.”
Keera laughed. “Oh my God, that woman could sing. Augmented voice or not.”
“She always swore it wasn’t.” Santi managed a slight smile. “The grid. You could find anything on the grid.”
“Oh… chocolate. Dark fricking chocolate.”
“Yes!” Santi laughed. “So do you think the Liminal kids will fit in?”
“They already have.” Keera nodded in the direction of the shuttle pad. “Matt over there… it doesn’t matter to him what Marissa can do. The new generation doesn’t see them as weird or different. It’s just us stuck-in-the-mud adults.”
“Maybe so.” Santi let down his latest load inside the darkness of the storage building—a box of clothing from Jayson’s home. “Still, Davian couldn’t have gotten into the world mind without help from those abilities.”
“True. But men have always taken advantage of those around them and of technology. Name me one piece of tech that someone didn’t put to an evil use.” Keera put down her armful of pots and pans.
“Um… sonograms?”
Keera laughed. “Easy. Some people used them to abort fetuses that were differently-abled.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” He concentrated on the work, tying off the knot just right.
“Are you scared? For Eddy, for what he’s about to do?”
“How could I not be?” Santi looked at her. “But I’m proud of him, too. He never walks away from a fight.”
Keera nodded. “From what I can see, you don’t either.”
They crossed the courtyard and wen
t back into Jayson’s cottage. “Eddy has always taken the lead.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. If you hadn’t done what you did, we’d probably all be under Davian’s sway right now. Because of you, we have a shot.”
Santi sighed. He hadn’t confessed his crime to Keera yet. “I killed a man.”
She stared at him. “In cold blood?”
“When we were fleeing Micavery. He came at me, his eyes dead. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to fend him off with a stick and he got impaled on it.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Santi, listen to me. You’re a good man. I’ve watched you and Eddy, and I don’t see how he could have chosen any better.” She looked him in the eye. “We’re at war. You did what you had to, and because of that, we may all come through this thing alive, and free.”
“I guess—”
“No, no guessing. You saved my little girl.” She pulled Santi in for a hug. “For that, I’ll be forever grateful.”
Santi’s eyes welled up, and he hugged Keera back. “I miss my mom. But you’ve been so good to me. If I could have chosen a replacement, I couldn’t have done any better than you.”
Keera laughed. “Hey, I’m only fifteen years older than you.”
Santi smiled through his tears. “Nevertheless.”
“So Eddy will take Shandra and Andy and Marissa in the Moonjumper and the escape capsule to fight Davian, and you’ll take Sean, Matt, and me to Micavery to pick up the pieces if they win?”
“That’s the plan.”
Keera squeezed his arm. “Then they’d better win.”
Chapter Eight: Goodbyes
IT WAS late afternoon when Jayson and Aaron finally found the entrance to the emergency escape shaft. The storm still raged overhead, but it hadn’t yet moved or let loose its fury.
Jayson had used his walking stick to navigate the landscape of dust and broken rock.
The entrance was covered in rock debris. If Aaron’s dipping hadn’t led them to it, they would have passed it by.
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