AEGIS EVOLUTION

by S. S. Segran

  “I’m guessing you all keep in contact with the Elders, then,” Aari said. “At least, if you have telepathy.”

  “Actually, no. Or, well, we never really did up until the past year or so.”

  “How come?”

  “We’re Sentries. Our main duty, before the five of you came along, was to live among regular folks in our communities and help keep the light of goodness alive and to protect it, and the people, when required. There was never a need to contact the Elders until you entered the playing field and Reyor began moving the chess pieces.”

  Something still nagged at Tegan. “Marshall, you said that Reyor would be visiting a Sanctuary somewhere in Kazakhstan real soon. That was a week ago, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t we have heard something from Victor by now?”

  “Not necessarily,” the Sentry said gently. “Relax, kiddo. I know him well enough. And if anything’s wrong, all he has to do is reach out to me. He’s got telepathy, too.”

  “You’ve worked with him, then?” Kody asked as he took a peek over the rubble wall. Tegan followed suit and saw Jag approaching from afar, but Marshall’s clipped tone returned her attention to the Sentry.

  “I can count on one hand how many times we’ve worked together.”

  Tegan lightly bonked her head against his shoulder. “There’s a bit of friction between you two, huh?”

  Marshall smiled sheepishly. “I do a bang-up job of hiding that, don’t I?”

  “You sure do.”

  “Colback was good. Easy to talk to, easy to be with even though he’s solitary by nature. Then a few years ago…” He hesitated. “Mmh—you know, it’s not really my place to tell.”

  What would make someone go from easygoing to hard around the edges, maybe even hard on the inside? Tegan wondered to herself, tapping her jaw. An issue of the heart, right? So…

  “He lost someone?” she asked quietly.

  Marshall hesitated again, then nodded. “More than one. I can’t even begin to fathom the pain. And then, on top of that… Never mind. He’s been through rougher patches than most Sentries I know. And I feel bad for him, I really do, but he fell into a really dark place and pushed a lot of people out. Working with him got harder, at least for me. He gets along well enough with Dev and Gareth and a handful of other Sentries. It’s the strangest thing, but for some reason I feel as though he loathes me.”

  The friends listened to him attentively. Kody gently nudged the Sentry with his knee as if to comfort him. “Well, we definitely don’t loathe you, and I for one am glad we’ve got you here, Mr. Poster-boy Sentry.”

  Marshall threw his head back, laughing, and smacked the back of it against the rubble wall. He winced, rubbing the sore spot. “Ouch…”

  The group let out a short laugh just as Jag joined them behind the wall. “What’d I miss?”

  “Marshall hurting himself,” Kody said brightly.

  “Brilliant.”

  “Everything good?” Marshall asked.

  Jag passed Marshall the keys. “Yeah. Our ride’s in the parking lot of a hostel just down the road from the visitors’ center.”

  “That was quick. Who needs the cable car when we’ve got a speed demon?”

  “I made sure no one was on the Snake Path. Don’t wanna spook the tourists or the locals, do we?”

  The six of them waited, conversing softly as the fortress grew quieter. Tegan checked her phone just as it turned four p.m. Last cable car would have just left, and it should get dark out here in about fifty minutes.

  Sure enough, the sun began to sing its goodbye for the day in a glow of golden ichor that trailed through the Judean desert, its echoes heard for another hour until twilight appeared. The heavens started to wink with emerging stars, and the waxing moon painted the fortress in its pale sheen.

  Tegan felt warm on the inside as she watched the cosmos run its course. There was something just so utterly magical about the world when day gave way to night. It made her feel alive.

  Marshall stood up, grumbling. “I’m getting stiff with my old age.”

  “You’re thirty-three!” Mariah admonished. “My mom would whack you with her ironing board if she ever heard you complain. I can hear her now: ‘Thirty-three! Thirty-three? And he has the gall to say that’s old? If that’s the case, then I’m ancient!’”

  The Sentry pulled Tegan and Kody to their feet. “Your mom’s such a sweet lady. She’d never assault me with an ironing board.”

  “Don’t test her.”

  “You can see where ’Riah gets her spunk from,” Aari said cheerfully.

  “Don’t you test me either, Aari.”

  “That was a compliment!”

  Tegan scanned the area, ensuring there were no stragglers or security details, before taking the lead. They headed past an open water cistern and stopped between two small buildings adjacent to the eastern wall. “Here’s a good place to drop the gear.”

  Marshall removed a pouch from his backpack and pulled out an ultralight tactical ladder. As he drew out two climbing ropes from his bag, he said, “Before we do this, I need to ask: Are you guys okay going down? Free-climbing isn’t exactly safe and I’ll gladly do it on my own—”

  “You’re not getting rid of us that easy,” Jag told him firmly.

  Marshall’s mouth quirked. “Alright then. So if there are eight caves like Tegan said, then four of us can go down and take two each, and be done with this in no time. Who’s keen on joining?”

  “I am,” Jag said.

  Tegan stood beside him. “I’m coming, too.”

  Kody raised his hand. “I’ll go, but I gotta say that ladder looks pretty sketchy to me.”

  “It’s designed for combat situations,” Marshall reassured him. He threaded the climbing ropes through the two metal-lined eyelets of the ladder and fastened them around a sturdy boulder at the edge of the mesa. “Look—reinforced steps and Kevlar sides. It’s military-grade, Kody.”

  “Mmkay…”

  “Mariah and I’ll stay topside,” Aari said, “keep an eye out for guards or whatever else shows up.”

  Tegan grabbed three small walkie-talkies from her backpack and tested them, then put the volume on the second-lowest setting. Since she, Jag and Marshall were the only ones capable of communicating through telepathy, the others would need radios to keep in touch.

  She passed one to Mariah and another to Kody, then gave the last to Marshall before she went to scrutinize his handiwork with the ladder. “Are we gonna lower the ladder over each opening to drop one person at a time?”

  “Nah,” Marshall said, clipping the radio to his belt. “I figure it’ll be faster if we just climb down from the middle then scale sideways.” He tugged on the ropes, tossed the keys for the SUV to Aari for safekeeping and started to descend, quickly leveling with the row of caves. Finding hand and footholds on the mountainside, he made his way to the westernmost openings. Kody went down after him and moved to the two caves on the east, albeit more cautiously.

  Tegan cautiously lowered herself down to take the caves between Kody and the ladder, leaving Jag to check the remaining ones on the other side. She’d never had a problem with heights, but it was a tad unnerving to see the desert floor a thousand feet below her shoes.

  “Good luck, guys!” Mariah whispered. “Be safe!”

  24

  Aari and Mariah watched as Jag disappeared below their line of sight. “And then there were none,” Aari murmured. He grabbed their bags and stuffed them into a small, unidentified stone building near the tip of the plateau.

  As he returned, Mariah took a few steps back from the edge and craned her neck to look up at the sky. “This is such a treat,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many stars in my life. Even away from city lights back home, it was never anything close to this.”

  “There’s hardly any light pollution for miles, and the air is real dry here. Picture-perfect for viewing.”

  Mariah was still for a while as she stargazed. “You know, if these were normal times, we
’d be in our senior year. In a few months we would’ve graduated and gone our separate ways. Kody to the Air Force like his dad, Jag and Tegan probably sticking around until they found what they wanted, and you to some Ivy League university if they accepted you. Hah, who am I kidding? They definitely would’ve accepted you.”

  Aari grinned. “No, no Ivy League school for me. I wanted to go to MIT.”

  “And what did you plan to study there?”

  “Computer science and artificial intelligence.”

  “AI? Seriously? Haven’t you learned anything? Do the words Terminator and Cylon ring any bells?”

  Aari unconsciously started to dig into the dirt with the heel of his shoe. “Pfft. And what exactly did you want to do? The last I remember, you were pulling your hair out over what academic route to take.”

  Mariah twirled around to examine the vast fortress behind them. “I really wanted to go into scriptwriting for TV, and maybe eventually movies.”

  “Seriously? That would have been awesome.” His heel struck something. He bent down to pick up an inch-and-a-half-long rock that resembled arrowhead. “And your mom’s cool with that?”

  “She had lots of questions, as always, but she did get on board. And even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered because, hey, look where we are now.”

  Aari faced the fortress with her, bouncing the rock in his palm. “Where we are,” he repeated, almost inaudibly.

  It came out of nowhere. A quick flash behind his eyes, somehow both bright and dark. Bodies upon bodies lying in red rivers that tainted the ground and pooled at his feet. Women, children, men. Glassy-eyed, unbreathing.

  He dropped the rock, blinking fast, and the image disappeared. Mariah was holding his arms to steady him. “Hey, hey! You okay, Brainiac?”

  “Y-yeah.” He turned his back to the fortress. “Can you… can you feel them?”

  She let go of him. “Feel who?”

  “Them. The ones who died here. The ones who took their own lives.”

  “What, are you into the supernatural now?” she joked. When he didn’t react to her attempt at humor, she seemed mystified. “Yeah, I can feel this—this deep kind of sadness and the historic weight of the place, but I don’t think I feel them. Are you sure you’re alright?”

  The radio clipped to Mariah’s back pocket crackled softly, and Marshall’s voice came through. “Hey, eyes in the sky, everything kosher up there?”

  Mariah pulled out the walkie-talkie. “Everything’s swell. How’s it going with you?”

  “We’ve almost cleared our first caves. Nothing to report yet. Will keep you informed.”

  “Copy that.”

  She clipped the device back to her pocket and returned to their conversation as if they hadn’t been interrupted. “What happened, Aari? You’re pale.”

  “I was here. Not here-here, more like farther back in the fortress. Bodies—the suicide that happened. I saw it. Am I crazy? Because I swear I saw them but my mind is telling me that’s impossible.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “It felt like I was there. Mariah, it felt real. I don’t know what it was, but I… I just…”

  Her eyes scoured his face, as if assessing his mental state. Aari moved closer to her, voice soft. “So you really didn’t feel them?”

  “Not the way you just described. But maybe…” She pursed her lips. “We were told by the Elders that we would uncover more of our powers.”

  He snorted. “Sure, but seeing into the past? Come on. That’s a stretch, even for us.”

  “We’ll talk to Marshall about it, alright? We’ll talk to him and find out what happened to you. But was it just that one thing you saw, right? Nothing else?”

  “Yeah. But this is ridiculous.”

  “I think just about anything is possible now, don’t you?” She fiddled with the pendant around her neck.

  Aari grasped his own pendant, then looked at her miserably. Mariah lightly rubbed the side of his head. “Right, I forgot. You need hard facts for everything.”

  “Preferably.”

  “That’s funny, considering your favorite movie of all time is Contact.”

  It was a thinly-veiled attempt to lighten the mood, but she was trying hard to shake him out of his funk; Aari felt he ought to indulge her. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he tried to put the episode behind him. “Hey, it’s not like Contact was a B-grade horror flick. Okay, yeah, there’s a reference to an alien civilization, but at its heart it’s about the conflict between science and faith.”

  “Huh… And here I thought it was about you going googly-eyed over the idea of Marvin the Martian hiding somewhere in outer space.”

  “If you’d just watch the movie like I keep telling you guys to, then you’d know better.”

  “Bah, fine, I will. One day. Sorry for interrupting. You were saying?”

  “I like Contact because of the story’s underlying conflict. And now with all that we’ve gone through since last year, I’m learning more and more every day that the physical and the metaphysical are just different branches of the same tree. Whether it’s science or spirituality, we’re just viewing reality from different angles. But I’m not saying that it isn’t hard to wrap my mind around all this, of course.” He stopped, then grinned. “And besides, Matthew McConaughey and Jodie Foster in that movie? Total OTP.”

  “Now you’re speaking my language!”

  “If you ever tell anyone I said those words—”

  “Oh, bite me. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Atsor!” a voice thundered.

  Aari felt his blood run cold. Slowly, he and Mariah turned around to face a powerful beam of light. They raised their hands to shield their eyes, both moving instinctively to block the boulder behind them.

  If he sees the ropes, we’re in trouble, Aari thought.

  The guard holding lowered the flashlight; Aari could only see a silhouette as his eyes tried to adjust to the sudden shift in brightness. “Atah medaber ivrit?” the man asked.

  Ivrit… that means Hebrew. He’s asking if I speak Hebrew. Aari shuffled through the few words he knew in the language. “Loh, loh ivrit. Anglit. English, we speak English.”

  The guard became disgruntled upon hearing that and asked in stilted English, “What you doing here?”

  Aari swallowed. “Uh…”

  Mariah suddenly rounded on him. “I told you!” she screeched. “I told you we shouldn’t have come up here!”

  He nearly tripped over himself in his surprise. “What—”

  “No! Don’t even try! I told you, there’s no need for something overly romantic! A simple day trip to the Dead Sea’s a good enough date! But do you ever listen to me?”

  It took a moment for Aari to catch on and when he did, it took everything he had to keep a straight face. “I was trying to do something nice for you!” he yelled back. He noticed that she’d slipped her hand to her back pocket, just out of the guard’s view. “But you always have to go and make a big fuss about it, don’t you?”

  “A fuss? Look at where your harebrained idea just landed us. Thanks so much! What a fan-freakin’-tastic night! I’d rank this as the worst date of all time!”

  “Hey, hey!” the guard boomed. “Calm down!”

  Mariah stormed past the guard, taking his attention with her. Aari quickly faced the boulder and deflected the light, rendering it and the ropes invisible. He backed up so he and Mariah stood together, forcing the guard to turn toward them, away from the big rock. Aari could see from the corner of his eye that the white-haired man sported a gray shirt and black pants, with a holster on his hip. Definitely a park guard, he concluded. Old guy, but he sure doesn’t move like one.

  “My mother warned me about you,” Mariah hissed.

  Aari stifled an eye-roll. Of course, pick the most clichéd of clichés.

  “What you doing here?” the guard dem
anded again. “Hours closed!”

  “This… this complete idiot thought that staying here after the place closes would be romantic,” Mariah snapped. “I told him no, we really shouldn’t, but he kept insisting. I am so, so sorry!”

  “Show ID.” The guard, though gruff, was obviously thrown off by the teenagers’ quarreling.

  Aari, needing to keep the boulder in his line of sight to hide it, reached into his pocket and pulled out his passport, as did Mariah. The guard took the documents, then stopped. Aari could feel the man’s eyes on him. Probably wondering why I keep looking past him, he thought.

  The guard whirled around. “What you looking?”

  Yep.

  “What you—” The man halted. He peered straight in the direction of the boulder. In his peripheral view, Aari could see the guard’s mounting perplexity as if something was missing, which was true enough.

  “Nothing, sir,” Aari said. “I just don’t want to look at her, because she’s so bloody ungrateful when all I did was try to be more romantic like she wants me to!”

  “Don’t you dare!” Mariah screamed. “I am so done with you!”

  “Yeah? Well I’m done with you!”

  “Quiet!” the guard bellowed. “My God!”

  Aari felt his heart racing as he watched the man go through their passports, alternating his flashlight beam between the document and their faces. Then he slipped the passports into his shirt pocket and motioned for the teenagers to walk ahead of him, back to the north side of the mesa.

  “Are we in trouble?” Mariah asked. “Please, it was an honest mistake! I’ll never date another moron!”

  “I send you down. Other guard will get you. Walk, please.”

  Aari fell in step with Mariah, feeling very conscious of the guard behind them. Oh no, oh no, no, no. What are we gonna do? Where are they gonna take us?

  “What’s that?” the guard asked harshly. “Madam, back pocket. Is that radio?”

  Every ounce of color drained from Aari’s face.

  “Is that radio?” the guard repeated.