But Kiva didn’t see that she had any other choice.
She had to call the Sisters together and tell them the truth about what was happening. That was the first step.
In the Sisters’ camp, Kiva went to Rehal’s hut. Pausing for a moment just outside the door, she heard her friend’s voice, pitched at a volume that was unusual for the quiet girl.
“… can’t betray her! I won’t! We must stay loyal to—”
“Loyal to who?” Kiva asked, walking inside.
Rehal’s head snapped up. Thruss was inside the tent with her.
“Vagra,” Rehal said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you there. I thought you were still with …” She paused, swallowed, and started again. “I thought you were still gone.”
“I’m back now,” Kiva said, looking from Rehal’s face to Thruss’s, which was flushed deep gray. “And it seems that something has been happening while I was away.”
“The village is quiet,” Thruss said. “Quieter than normal. You can see for yourself. People are afraid to leave their homes. When you brought the Forsaken and the Strangers here, it … it disturbed them. There have been rumblings.”
“About me?” Kiva asked, then went on without waiting for Thruss or Rehal to answer. “Kyne’s rebellion isn’t over, then.”
“Forgive us, Vagra,” Rehal said. “We’re sorry to be the ones to tell you, it’s just that you’ve been so busy with the Strangers, and the Forsaken, and that boy, that—”
“Enough,” Kiva said. “I’m not busy with the Strangers now, am I? With the Forsaken? The boy—do you see him here?” Kiva made a show of looking around the hut.
“Go,” she said. “Both of you. Gather the Sisters. Tell them that I wish to speak with them. Tell them we meet at nightfall.”
67
matthew
Matthew gripped his hands tight around Dunne’s waist. His legs were clamped on the sides of the speeder so hard that his muscles began to ache. They hurtled across the plain at over one hundred miles an hour, moving gently up and down with the swell of the hills passing beneath them, the tips of the grass below whipping by mere inches from Matthew’s toes.
They traveled for an hour without seeing anything but prairie, and Matthew began to wonder if that was all Gle’ah was—a dull but haunting sameness in every direction. Then, after an hour more, something else rose up in the distance, a single black point thrusting up into the air from the sea of grass. At first, Matthew thought it was just a tree. But as they grew closer, it rose still higher into the sky, and he realized it was no tree—it was too thin, too straight, too tall.
It was a spire.
Soon, other spires began to rise up around it, poking through the horizon one by one like needles through the underside of a balloon. Matthew drew in his breath as the whole city came into view.
It was a city unlike any Matthew had ever seen. Jutting into the air out of the flat landscape, it looked like a medieval metropolis. Limited in its growth by the outer wall that encircled it, the city looked to have grown upward rather than outward, the buildings culminating in circular turrets that loomed ever higher as Matthew and Dunne drew closer. The sun was setting behind the city in a blaze of brilliant red, illuminating a tangled web of flying buttresses and narrow walkways linking the soaring towers and spires thousands of feet above the ground.
Matthew and Dunne slowed as they drew near to the wall. Dunne circled the city until they came to an opening: a thick wooden gate that had been smashed to splinters.
“Does anyone live here?” Matthew asked.
She shook her head. “If they do, I haven’t seen them. The city’s abandoned. It’s crumbling. It looks as though it’s been standing here for hundreds of years. Maybe even thousands.”
The speeder came to a halt outside the gate and Dunne swung her leg over the side. Matthew followed her through the opening in the wall.
They stepped onto a cobblestone street shaded by the looming buildings around them. Their footsteps tapped on the stones and echoed off the walls. Matthew paused and craned his neck as Dunne walked forward. He placed his hand on the outer wall of one of the buildings. Each one looked to be made of the same material, a light-colored stone that shone gold even in the fading sunlight.
“Come on,” Dunne said. “Let’s go before it gets dark.”
Dunne moved so quickly through the streets that Matthew had a hard time keeping up with her. He followed her at a half run, but several times she slipped around the next corner so far ahead of him that he feared she’d be gone when he rounded the corner himself. The city was intricate, a dizzying tangle of streets and alleyways and open squares where stone fountains stood dry and crumbling to dust.
Soon, after they’d walked for about twenty minutes, Matthew noticed a change in the buildings and cobblestones. They were covered in a delicate white down that clung to every surface like mold. It began to bind to the bottom of Matthew’s shoes. He crouched and reached his hand to the ground. He pulled together a small clump and worked it back and forth between his fingers.
“Maiora,” Matthew said.
Dunne nodded. “Let’s keep going. It’s just up ahead.”
She turned and walked around another corner before Matthew could ask where she was taking him, what was up ahead. He pushed himself out of his crouch and jogged after her. Around the corner, his steps ground to a halt.
Dunne stood before a square opening that had been cut into the street, right up against the edge of a building. There were steps leading down into the ground, under the building. On either side of the hole were flat, rusted pieces of metal—doors, by the look of them, though they were just pieces of scrap now, torn from their hinges.
“It’s a bunker,” Dunne said.
At the mouth of the bunker, the maiora was especially thick, clustered on the ground more than an inch deep. Dunne stepped over it and set her foot on the first stair, then descended inside. Matthew followed.
They came into a narrow corridor where there was so much maiora clinging to the walls that they had to hunch their shoulders to keep it from catching on their clothes. After a dozen paces the corridor opened into a small room with a metal door hanging off its hinges. This room was also clustered with maiora, but underneath the white substance Matthew could see a long, thin object sitting on the floor. He crouched and brushed the maiora away. It came off easily, and before long Matthew’s palm was resting on smooth, rounded metal. The object was a thin, cold cylinder that came to a point at one end. At the other end were the circular openings of three thrusters. A small console panel with a blank screen and a half dozen small buttons was on the side.
“What is it?” Matthew asked.
“What does it look like?”
“A weapon,” Matthew said. “A missile.”
Dunne nodded. “Look at the other side.”
Matthew looked and saw that the smooth metal of the missile had ruptured at a seam. The maiora was especially thick at the place where it had ruptured.
“It’s broken. Is this where the maiora is coming from?” Matthew said.
“It seems so. Look. There are more.”
Dunne nodded toward the wall, where under the layers of maiora, Matthew could see the shapes of more missiles stacked nearly to the ceiling.
They kept walking. At the end of the corridor stood a reinforced door.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” Dunne said. She pressed a button next to the door and it came open with a hiss.
They went through the door into a long room that looked like a laboratory. In the middle of the room, a rectangular metal table was covered with beakers, flasks, burners, scales, and complex instruments that Matthew didn’t recognize or know the purpose of, instruments constructed in odd, angular shapes and covered with smooth, insect-like exoskeletons. To the left of the table was a bank of displays and controls. On the far side of the room were the remains of a small living quarters: another table, a small chair, a few cupboards, and the frame of a cot,
the fabric in the middle gone to tatters. The room wasn’t covered in maiora, but everything was coated in a thick layer of dust.
Matthew wandered among the instruments in the laboratory while Dunne moved straight for the bank of displays. She pressed a series of buttons, and a recording came on one of the screens. The recording showed a man with the same gray skin as Kiva and her people. He was old, his face sunken and haggard. He sat in a chair and spoke into the camera. Over his shoulder were the same table and laboratory instruments Matthew now stood among.
“What is this?” Matthew asked.
Dunne turned. “What I wanted to show you.”
Matthew listened to the recording for a few more seconds. “But I can’t understand anything.”
“You need to try. This may hold the key to everything.”
Matthew shook his head. “Look, I can only understand Kiva. No one else.”
“I know that. But something’s happened to you since you’ve been here. Maybe whatever—or whoever—chose you to be the one to communicate with Kiva also wants you to understand this. Maybe the Ancestors have some purpose for you here.”
Matthew sighed as the man on the screen went on speaking in his alien language. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t control the Ancestors.”
“All I’m asking is for you to try.”
Matthew came around the table and replaced Dunne in front of the display. He stared at it, looking directly into the man’s eyes on the screen, and willed the alien words he spoke to turn into sense. The foreign sounds were a jumble in his head. But then, amidst the sounds, Matthew heard a couple words he recognized.
“… death … Gle’ah … confession …”
Matthew stepped back and tried to breathe slowly, fearing somehow that if he pushed, if he tried too hard, understanding would slip away. Gradually, the words in the recording clicked into meaning in Matthew’s ears.
“… Ilia’s conquest seemed as though it would never end …”
“I understand it,” Matthew said softly, then louder, turning to Dunne: “I understand it!”
“… happened centuries ago, before I was born. By the time I was a boy …”
“Can you start it over?” Matthew asked.
Dunne pressed a few more buttons. The screen went blank, then lit up again as the recording started at the beginning.
Once again, the man’s face appeared on the screen. He looked into the camera for a few silent seconds, then spoke.
“First entry, dated the seventh day of the fourth month of the season P.I. 3748. My name is Soran Thantos. I am a scientist of the city-state of Ilia, recording from my laboratory under the city. I have enough food and water for two months. After it is gone, I will die. Outside…”
Soran Thantos paused and looked off to the side. He put his tongue between his lips, and seemed to hold back tears.
“Outside is only death.”
68
soran thantos
… I am recording because … well, I don’t really know why I’m recording. Soon, all life on the planet Gle’ah will be gone, and there will be no one left to hear my voice. No one to hear my confession.
Perhaps that’s it—I’m confessing. It’s as good a reason as any, I suppose.
If you’re listening to this, then life has found a way to thrive on this planet again, so please regard what I’m about to tell you as a cautionary tale.
Ilia is—was, I suppose—the most powerful city-state on Gle’ah. I learned of Ilia’s glorious history when I was just a boy, forced in school to memorize the names of my city’s heroes and the dates of their military victories. Over the centuries, Ilia’s generals extended the city’s empire over more than half the surface of the planet, conquering smaller cities and villages and forcing them to pay tribute in exchange for protection.
Ilia’s conquest seemed as though it would never end—until our armies reached the foot of the mountains on the other side of Gle’ah. There, we encountered the Bakarai, mountain-dwellers who rebuffed Ilia’s conquest by luring Ilian legions into the foothills and then ambushing them from higher ground.
All this happened centuries ago, before I was born. By the time I was a boy, the stories of Ilian glory were already lies, foolish propaganda that no one believed anymore. Everyone knew the truth—we were losing the war. Our armies had retreated into the plains, and the Bakarai armies—amassed in secret in underground cities dug out of the heart of the mountains—had begun to advance and take land that once belonged to us. With every step backward, our armies shrank; and with every step forward, the Bakarai numbers grew, as the farmers and villagers and city-dwellers who’d once paid Ilia tribute took up arms against us.
By the time I was a grown man and a respected scientist in the city, the Bakarai armies had grown so large that our defeat was certain. Our generals estimated that it would only be a few seasons more before the Bakarai circled our city and launched an assault against our walls. One day, Chancellor Ekto came to me and asked if I might quit my research into new medicines and cures for illness to work instead on a weapon that would rebuff our enemies.
I agreed. But now, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret my decision. It would have been better for Ilia to be crushed to rubble, better for my nieces and nephews to be murdered before my very eyes. To let that happen—that would have been the difficult choice. The courageous choice. But I took the coward’s path.
As soon as I designed the weapon, I knew my mistake. I knew that what I had created would mean the end of all life on Gle’ah.
The weapon was a pulse beam—a wave of radiation that would rush outward from Ilia’s outer wall and wash over the entire surface of the planet, gaining power with each life it took, each cell it destroyed, until every person, animal, and plant on Gle’ah was dead. Only the Ilians inside the city walls would survive.
But survive for what, with the rest of the planet dead?
I begged Ekto not to use the weapon, but on the night when the Bakarai finally came to our walls, shouting as they brandished their glowing light spears and fire swords in the air, the Ilians panicked and begged their Chancellor to do something. In a moment of weakness, he set off the pulse.
Now, our enemies are gone. But so are our crops. Ilia has descended into chaos as the citizens scramble for what few resources remain. They will starve soon—if the deadly radiation my weapon put into our air and water supply doesn’t kill them first.
Billions of lives lost, all because of me. I should kill myself. If I were a braver man, I would. But I fear what awaits me on the other side of death—what hell the gods have waiting for me.
Enough confession for one night.
Second entry, dated the eleventh day of the fourth month of the season P.I. 3748.
It’s morning. Last night I had a strange dream. I was walking outside, beyond the walls of Ilia in the wasted world I’ve created. Alongside me, hordes of people were staggering back and forth, stumbling toward death, their mouths crying out for water and their skin covered with sores. Only I seemed unaffected by the radiation in the air.
Then, in the distance, a cloud rose up from the dust of the ground and billowed toward us. Soon it surrounded us, and as the dust buffeted the people around me, I watched as the sores on their bodies healed and they suddenly became well again.
Just a dream. A silly dream. But now I keep thinking about putting something in the air—a cloud of something to offset the radiation and bring healing to those who are dying.
Maybe this could be my penance.
Maybe.
Third entry, dated the twenty-first day of the fourth month of the season P.I. 3748.
You’re probably wondering what P.I. means. Among my people, it stands for peace. The glorious era of Ilian peace.
It’s a cruel joke now, utterly meaningless—if it ever meant anything. Today I went above ground and saw just how meaningless it is. I wore a suit to protect myself from the radiation, and brought a gun to protect myself from th
e people who remain.
The city is chaos. The streets are full of dead bodies. The stench of death is overpowering. Those who still live will be dead very soon. They stagger back and forth, barely seeing the world around them. They’re blind to everything except their own pain, the agonizing effects of radiation sickness eating their bodies from the inside out.
While I was on the surface, I passed an old woman. She was sitting on the ground with her back to the outer wall of a tall building, weeping and asking me in a quiet voice for some water. I stopped and crouched to look into her eyes. There were hundreds of others just like her—but she reminded me of my own mother, and I wanted to help her. Her skin was covered in sores. I gave her some uncontaminated water from my canteen. Half of it dribbled down her chin, but she managed to swallow some. She begged me to help her and reached her hands toward me. I stood and backed away, left her pleading there on the ground.
Not everyone is so sick. Others are stronger. The radiation hasn’t affected them too badly yet. They use their strength to take from those who are still weak, roving around in gangs that loot and kill. I have to be careful not to be seen when I come back down to my underground laboratory. If they see that I am here, they will break in and kill me.
Next time I venture out, I must be more careful.
Fourth entry, dated the twenty-seventh day of the fourth month of the season P.I. 3748.
I’ve done it. My research from before the war, my life’s work—the search for the elixir of life, a cure for death and disease—is complete.
I went to the surface again today, with a small syringe of my creation. Careful not to be seen by the gangs, I went back to the old woman. She was still alive. Her pain must have been incredible.
I crouched in front of her and gave her a drink of water. She barely opened her eyes. Then I took her by the wrist, peeled back her sleeve, and injected my elixir into the crook of her arm. Before my eyes, in a matter of seconds, the sores on her skin healed and she opened her eyes.
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