The Rogue World

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “We’ll sleep here tonight,” Badri said.

  Eleanor looked at Finn, who seemed equally unsettled. “This place?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Badri said. “The forecast calls for snow tonight. I’d rather be indoors than in a tent.”

  Eleanor didn’t know how to argue with that. She didn’t like the idea of sleeping in a tent during a snowstorm, either. But she also didn’t like the unease she felt here. At the edge of town, she saw what looked like the ruins of an ancient fortress, with square towers and thick walls the color of sand.

  “What was this place called?” she asked.

  “Tangbe,” Badri said. “The Tangbotens were once a proud people with their own language. They were salt traders many centuries ago, and then they became farmers. But the G.E.T. drove them out when they discovered the World Tree.”

  “And no one stopped them?” Finn asked.

  “It’s not the first time a group of people has been forcibly relocated from their land. You have much experience with that in the United States, I believe.”

  Finn went quiet at that. They all did. With the backing of the UN, Watkins could probably get just about anything he wanted.

  One of the other Grendel team members, a man named James, pointed at a nearby building that was wide, whitewashed, and newer in appearance than some of the others. “That one looks large enough, and it’s still in good shape.”

  Badri nodded. “Yes, good.”

  The team moved toward the building, and when they found the narrow front door locked, they used a crowbar to force it open.

  Once inside, Eleanor discovered the interior was entirely empty, no furniture or fixtures of any kind, with bare white walls and a bare cement floor. Someone had boarded up the windows from the inside, but James had been right. The space in here would be plenty big enough for all of them to sleep that night, and this was only the main room. A few members of Badri’s team went deeper into the building, exploring the rest of it, but returned a few minutes later to report that they hadn’t found anything—no supplies, and certainly no people.

  After that they all settled in and made their beds with the pads and blankets they had brought with them. Then they had a meal of a kind of flatbread and salty cheese, with more of the chewy honey bars for dessert. It tasted wonderful, and Eleanor went to sit by Badri as she ate.

  “Thank you for this,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” the woman said.

  “No, really. I don’t know what we would have done without your help.”

  “I don’t know what we would do without your gift,” Badri said.

  Eleanor snorted. “It doesn’t exactly feel like a gift.”

  “It is a burden?”

  Eleanor tipped her head a little to the side. “I guess, yeah, it’s a weight. A responsibility. I feel like I’m the only one who can do something.”

  “I wonder what the difference is between a responsibility to help and the privilege of helping.”

  “I don’t know,” Eleanor said. She wasn’t sure it mattered, really. This was just who she was.

  Badri nodded. “I can say that I would feel it a privilege to have your responsibility. But it isn’t mine. It’s yours. It is my privilege—and responsibility—to help you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Eleanor said.

  “Soon we will reach the Yggdrasil Facility, and we will hopefully find out more about this privilege and burden that you carry.”

  Eleanor made herself smile, but a feeling of nervous dread weakened it from the inside. This was truly their last hope. If this plan failed, she had no idea what they would or could do next.

  Soon they all bedded down for the night, but Eleanor lay awake, looking up at the wooden slats of the ceiling. She found eyes and faces in the whorls of wood grain, and it reminded her of lying in bed with her mom, finding shapes in the texture of the ceiling over her bedroom back home. She wondered where her mom was, in that moment. Still back in Egypt? Or had Watkins sent her somewhere else, another research station, or some kind of compound for those who were part of the Preservation Protocol? Or was she on her way here? Eleanor’s breath caught in her throat. Watkins almost certainly was headed to the same place they were, and it hurt to think of her mother with him, helping him.

  Before long, everyone around her seemed to have fallen asleep, and sometime after that, a howling wind picked up outside. It was the snowstorm Badri had mentioned. Eleanor lay awake listening to it, feeling warm and protected.

  But then she heard a different noise, and she sat up, holding still, listening.

  Something moved outside. Something heavy. Something big. It thudded against the walls of the building, and it dragged what sounded like thick fingers across the boards that covered the windows.

  The sounds of it eventually roused some of the others. Finn shot up, wide-eyed.

  “What the hell is that?” Luke whispered.

  Badri whispered, “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  WHATEVER IT WAS, IT SEEMED TO BE CIRCLING THE building, and the walls shuddered with its periodic thuds. Some of Badri’s team produced pistols, which helped Eleanor feel a bit more secure, knowing they weren’t defenseless against whatever was out there. But she hoped there wouldn’t be a need for them to use their guns.

  They kept quiet, speaking in whispers, and eventually the sounds faded away, and once again Eleanor heard only the storm.

  “I think it’s gone,” Badri said.

  “What could it be?” Betty asked.

  “There are animals in the mountains,” Badri said. “Goats. Perhaps even bears or snow leopards.”

  A bear seemed the most likely of those, considering how big it sounded.

  “We have a long day tomorrow,” Badri said. “We should try to get some more rest, but I think we need to establish watches.”

  “I’ll stay awake,” Uncle Jack said. He got up and lumbered over to the door, where he sat down with his back against the wall. “You all get some sleep.”

  “Wake me in two hours,” Luke said. “I’ll take the next watch.”

  Uncle Jack nodded.

  Eleanor didn’t know if she’d be able to get to sleep after that, but knowing Uncle Jack was awake helped. She lay back down and closed her eyes, imagining the storm outside, the hazy bulk of a bear emerging from the darkness, pacing around the building, sniffing and huffing and shouldering the walls before disappearing into the snow and the night.

  When Eleanor awoke early the next morning, they all ate a quick breakfast and emerged from the building into the abandoned village. The snowstorm had moved on, but had left six inches of new snow, powdery as dust, on the ground. They scouted around, but saw no tracks or footprints from the night before, the wind having erased them. It would have been easy for Eleanor to imagine their visitor had been a dream, were it not for the fact that everyone had heard it.

  “Stay sharp,” Badri said. “Bears and snow leopards are shy, but they are less so if they’re hungry.”

  They set off and soon left the ghost village of Tangbe behind. The landscape of valley and ravine through which they traveled remained as dramatic as the day before. The Himalayas towered over them, jagged sentinels observing the world at a scale of time and distance no human could grasp.

  Later that morning, their party passed through another abandoned village, but this time they didn’t stop. A few miles past the village, they marched under some high cliffs honeycombed with dozens of caves. The entrances were of different sizes, some small enough that Eleanor needed to crouch to enter them, some large enough that she and Finn could enter shoulder to shoulder. They appeared to be man-made.

  “What are those?” Betty asked, pointing upward.

  “They are called the Sky Caves,” Badri said. “They are found throughout this valley.”

  “They are an archaeological mystery,” Dr. Von Albrecht said. “No one knows exactly who built them. Or why. But they number in the tens of thousands.”<
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  To reach most of the caves would require a perilous climb, if it were possible to reach them at all. Eleanor studied them as they passed by overhead, and the sensation of being watched again crept over her. As if the caves were the mountains’ black eyes.

  The caves continued to watch them periodically as they proceeded along the valley, which narrowed and twisted in upon them. They passed through two more ghost towns, until eventually the road they followed veered to the left, across a bridge to the other side of the river, where it climbed up into slopes and foothills. But Badri led them onward, off the road, directly into a narrow ravine. The imposing rock walls to either side rose hundreds of feet above them, almost vertically, and their party now walked through near-permanent shade and icy wind along a severe and tortuous path.

  “This is Kali Gandaki Gorge,” Badri said. “According to some, the deepest gorge in the world. We are nearing the heart of the ancient Kingdom of Mustang.”

  They followed this gorge for a few miles. The previous night’s snow made the march more difficult than it had been the day before. Eleanor’s thighs burned, but she kept her complaints to herself, eventually falling in beside Finn.

  She was about to ask him how he was doing, but that question had become a bit ridiculous. “Do you miss your dad and Julian?” she finally asked.

  He nodded. “I guess so.”

  “What do you mean you guess so?”

  “It’s not like I wish I was with them.” He looked up at the cliffs. “I wish they had made a different choice. I guess that’s what it is.”

  “I get that.”

  “I mean, they’re with the bad guys. Does that . . . does that mean they kind of are the bad guys?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Eleanor said. “Just because the G.E.T. is wrong and we’re trying to stop Watkins, doesn’t mean they’re bad guys. In their way, they’re trying to save the world, just like we are.”

  Finn shook his head. “If you say so. Your mom is with them, too, you know.”

  Eleanor looked down and placed her next step carefully. “I know that.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  She did miss her mom. But she didn’t miss the way her mom tried to stop her from being who she was. “I’m like you. I wish she was here. But only if she was on our side.”

  “At least you have your uncle.”

  Eleanor looked up ahead of them at Uncle Jack’s broad shoulders. “Yeah.”

  “He seems like a good guy.”

  “He’s the best guy. I didn’t have a dad growing up, but I had him. Whenever my mom went away on her research trips, which was all the time, he stayed with me. You should taste his cooking.”

  “Maybe one day I will,” he said.

  Soon, they left the gorge behind, and the valley reopened, though not as wide as it had been. When they climbed up onto a ridge, and Eleanor could see some distance in all directions, the surrounding mountains and valleys formed an enormous and seemingly endless maze. It was hard to grasp the scale of this place, the weight of the mountains and distances between their high peaks. Eleanor felt very small in the same way she did when staring up into the night sky. Without Badri, she wasn’t even sure she could find her way back to the airstrip where they’d landed the day before.

  “What’s that over there?” Finn pointed at a distant, broken slope of snow. The face of the mountain appeared to have been gouged with an ice cream scoop.

  “Avalanche,” Badri said.

  “Avalanche?” Finn looked around. “Are we safe?”

  “At the moment,” Badri said, with a bit of a grin.

  They kept moving, and as evening fell, the older woman suggested they stop and make camp.

  “The Yggdrasil Facility is still a few miles away,” she said. “We don’t know what kind of security measures they’ve put in place, so I would rather not approach it in the dark. We’ll camp here and go in at first light.”

  “What about that thing from last night?” Betty asked.

  “The animals up here are shy,” Badri said. “Curious, but shy. Whatever it was, I think it will keep its distance.”

  So they broke out four tents and everyone helped set them up. Eleanor knelt in the snow, feeling her knees turn cold and a little wet as she fit tension rods together and threaded them through canvas. It wasn’t quite dark by the time they’d finished raising their encampment, but the sun had gone down, and the white snow around them had deepened to blue.

  The tents each held three people, and after a quick meal they divided themselves up. Eleanor took a tent with Uncle Jack and Betty. Luke, Finn, and Dr. Von Albrecht ended up in another, with the rest of the team filling the other two.

  “Let’s keep the lights out,” Badri called to everyone. “We don’t want to be seen. We need to set up watches, too.”

  After that was all decided, Eleanor lay in the darkness between Uncle Jack and Betty, staring at the low, domed ceiling growing dimmer and dimmer, until the tent became a dark cave. In the quiet of the night, she felt the subtle pull of the earth’s telluric currents flowing beneath her, but more than that, she could sense the hum of the Concentrator. She hadn’t felt one from so far away before, but she thought perhaps that was because this one was larger than the rest. She could almost hear the artificial intelligence within it, a very distant howling of rage.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Betty whispered. “I know we keep saying that we’ll deal with this later, but what if the rogue world doesn’t move on? What if it stays in our solar system, even if we shut down all the Concentrators?”

  Neither Eleanor nor Uncle Jack answered her. Eleanor wondered if Betty was having doubts about their plan.

  “Then I guess we have to find a way to survive the Freeze,” Eleanor finally said.

  “Right.” Betty was silent a moment. “Which is exactly what Watkins is doing, isn’t he?”

  Eleanor frowned in the darkness. What was Betty trying to say?

  “Do you think Watkins is right?” Uncle Jack asked her.

  “No,” Betty said. “I don’t accept any solution where we just write off most of the people on this planet. But I am starting to think beyond this goal we’ve had. I’m asking what if—and I don’t think it’s a question we should keep putting off.”

  But it was still a question for which Eleanor didn’t have the answer. “If that happens,” she whispered, “then we’ve lost. And Watkins wins. But that won’t mean we were wrong to try, and I still have hope.”

  “So do I,” Uncle Jack said.

  “I’ll try,” Betty said. “Maybe I’ve worked in the Arctic for too many years. I’ve seen too much to trust in hope alone.”

  Their tent went quiet after that, but the conversation echoed into the night, keeping Eleanor half awake. She wasn’t sure how long she lay there, drifting, but sometime later she jolted. Her eyes snapped open, and her breathing stopped. Something was out there.

  Whatever that thing was, it was back.

  She couldn’t hear it, she couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there. Whoever had the watch in that moment might not even be aware of it. For a moment, Eleanor thought about Finn’s mention of pissed-off aliens, but she dismissed that. She felt certain she would know if it was an alien. But it was something, and it was holding still, watching them all in their tents.

  Eleanor wanted to wake Uncle Jack, but she was afraid to make any kind of sound. She didn’t want to draw any attention to their tent. Whatever it was, it was leaving them alone, and eventually, Eleanor heard heavy footsteps moving away from them, and its presence faded from her mind, leaving a wake of tingles along her neck and shoulders.

  After that, it was near dawn before she fell asleep.

  The next morning, as everyone stretched out of their tents into the sunlight and snow, Eleanor wondered if anyone else had felt the presence of their night visitor. She waited to see if any of them would bring it up as they ate breakfast, and when they didn’t, she decided to keep it to herself. She figured everyone thought
she was weird enough, alien enough, without adding to it. Perhaps she had simply imagined it.

  Badri led the way ahead, up and over hills, down and out of ravines, along valley floors. The few miles she had said were left between them and the Yggdrasil Facility proved arduous, and Eleanor’s lack of sleep the night before slowed her down.

  “How does the G.E.T. get all the way out here?” she asked, her mouth dry from panting, her legs sore.

  “They take the road,” Dr. Von Albrecht said.

  “Wait.” Finn stopped walking. “You’re telling me there’s a road?”

  “Yes,” Badri said. “You are free to use it if you would like to get caught. The rest of us will come in behind the facility, avoiding G.E.T. surveillance.”

  Finn closed his mouth and resumed his trudge along with the others. A few miles later, around midday, they approached the crest of a rise and Badri stretched out her arm, motioning for everyone to duck down. Eleanor crept forward with the rest of them, slowly, until she could peek over the top of the hill at their target.

  The complex below them sprawled at the base of a mountain with the industrial appearance of a power plant or a refinery. Miles of tangled pipes, cables, and wires connected a network of towers and transformers, while tall chimneys vented white, billowing steam. A massive structure sat in the middle of it all, with satellite dishes arrayed across its roof. Eleanor sensed the Concentrator nearby, tugging at the telluric currents.

  “The Yggdrasil Facility,” Badri whispered.

  Luke whistled. “This is sure a different situation from the others.”

  “They have expanded since I was last here.” Dr. Von Albrecht squinted. “Much is different.”

  “How are we going to get in there?” Finn asked.

  Badri pointed at a smaller building at the edge of the complex near them. “If the schematics we have are still accurate, that outbuilding will have a computer terminal. That’s as far in as we need to go.”

  “I assume the Concentrator is inside that big building in the middle?” Betty said.

  Before Eleanor could answer, Uncle Jack said, “No.”

  She turned to look at him.