They were two of Atwar’s people. It made sense to keep using pilots trained to fly these specific planes.
I felt the nerves of the crowd waiting for us outside. Their nerves worsened when we still hadn’t appeared. I could feel them waiting just past the bottom of the rolling staircase behind the plane’s cockpit, and I felt a twinge of guilt at my own confused feelings.
It was really just nerves. I wasn’t reluctant so much as tense.
Strangely, I was more nervous than I had been when climbing aboard that boat after Beijing. Of course, Revik made that whole thing easier, but it still should have been a bigger shock to my system, at least from a logical perspective.
Half of these people, I’d just seen, having left them in Turkey only a few weeks earlier.
Still, it would be the first time all of us had been reunited in months. To say my feelings were mixed would be a laughable understatement.
On one hand, my light was completely charged up and elated.
I could not fucking wait to see Lily.
Every drop of my blood hummed to see her, to hear her voice, to hear her laugh. My hands wanted to stroke her hair, my arms wanted to wrap her in a hug, I wanted to cover her in kisses and hear about her time with Tarsi in the mountains. More than anything, my light wanted to envelop every part of hers, to pull her inside of me.
While wanting to see Lily wiped out just about every other priority, she wasn’t even the only person I was looking forward to seeing.
I wanted to see Tarsi.
My Aunt Carol would be here. So would Uncle James, cousin Kara, cousin Marcus, and cousins Gregor, Miranda and Tom. I hadn’t really spent much time with any of them since we were all in New York––really, since the wedding, despite my attempts to visit them here and there on the ship before Dubai. My friends from art school, Desmond and Krista, should be here, too, along with Sasquatch and Frankie from San Francisco. I knew they’d been staying with Jaden and the rest of the ex-San Francisco crew on the aircraft carrier, too.
I was looking forward to spending real time with Jon and Wreg.
I’d seen them relatively recently compared to Lily, Aunt Carol and some of the others, but I hadn’t had much time with either of them in months.
I missed their light, and their counsel… and just them.
I knew Revik was looking forward to seeing Maygar.
He’d seen him on the ship relatively recently, as well, but he’d gotten little real time with him since he’d returned from China.
I was looking forward to seeing Maygar too, funnily enough, although I was even more excited to see Maygar’s girlfriend, Angeline, who was one of my oldest friends.
It was strange to think the two of them had been together more than a year.
I was looking forward to seeing Loki and Chinja. I was looking forward to seeing Gina, Frankie, Dante, Anale, Hondo, Jax, Declan and Vik.
On the other hand, we didn’t come bearing the best of news.
Chandre would be here, which I hadn’t wrapped my head around yet.
Balidor also confirmed––with me, at least, privately, at least––that Dalejem was here in New Mexico, as well.
Seeing Torek would be strange after everything Revik showed me.
Kat came here with us. We’d stopped in Langley to grab the rest of our team, so we had Kat, Jorag and Raddi in reclined seats somewhere in the middle of the plane, all three of them having miraculously pulled through after Chandre nearly killed them.
Kat’s survival surprised everyone the most. She’d been so close to death when Declan and his team left, they’d assumed she would die. In fact, due to a confused transmission from one of the seer physicians in Langley, Declan thought she was dead.
She was still weak as hell and slept the entire flight from Virginia to New Mexico, but she was alive and even relatively mobile. Balidor had been apologetic about bringing her on our plane, but honestly, it didn’t really faze me. We couldn’t exactly leave her in Langley, given everything we knew was about to happen, and we might be the last trip out here.
Anyway, I was genuinely relieved they were all alive––even Kat.
Our entire dysfunctional family was here, like it or not.
“You ready for this?” Revik murmured, leaning down by my ear.
Looking up at him, I snorted a little. “Are you?”
His eyes tightened perceptibly. He didn’t exactly reassure me with his answer, which was a noncommittal shrug with one hand.
I already knew who he was the most wound up about seeing.
Well, in the bad column, anyway.
“Hey,” I said, tugging on his hand. “Really. Are you ready for this? I can send ahead. Have them keep some of the people down there away from both of us.”
He quirked an eyebrow in my direction.
He knew exactly who I meant.
“No,” he said after a pause. “No, we don’t have time to fuck around with this shit. We need to settle it, and move on. Or send him away… which doesn’t strike me as a realistic option. He’s one of the best organics techs we have. We need him.”
I frowned. “We don’t have to do anything at all today, you know.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
I continued to stare at him, skeptical.
“I’m fine,” he repeated. “I’m not homicidally not-ready for it. So maybe I should say, he’ll be fine. I won’t do anything to him, Allie. I won’t.”
Again, not entirely reassuring, but I grunted in spite of myself.
“The light helped,” he said, a little more reassuringly. “So did the sleep.”
I nodded, still studying his light. “Okay.”
“Don’t hover, wife.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re hovering right now,” he observed, guiding me forward with a light hand at the small of my back. “Hovering is taking place this very second.”
I glanced up and over my shoulder at him. “I’ll stop hovering when you actually prove you’re not homicidally not-ready… husband.”
Giving me another look, he snorted a laugh.
By then, we were at the doorway.
Turning into the sun, I looked out over the desert landscape for the first time. Faced with the blood-red desert floor, the striated colors of the nearest cliff, the feel of the wind on my face, a faint smell of campfire smoke and some kind of flower mixed with dust and a thick, cactus-y kind of smell––my heart paused briefly in my chest.
I’d always loved deserts.
It was something my mother and I shared. My mother loved deserts, too.
Jon and Dad were more beach and mountain types.
They thought we were weird for wanting to go somewhere with no water and too much heat where most things either don’t grow or die. My mom would win a few of those battles though, and she and my dad would drive us to Arizona, Utah and New Mexico to camp and buy Native American jewelry, rugs and Kachina dolls, along with polished rocks, keychains and T-shirts with images of rock formations on them.
The next trip would generally be somewhere green and dripping with water, or one of the beaches that littered the coast to the north and south of San Francisco.
Revik wound an arm around my waist, bringing up a thick pull of pain.
I closed my eyes against it, gritting my teeth slightly, and he kissed the back of my neck.
“Come on,” he murmured. “Time to pow-wow, squaw. War is coming.”
I knew he was right.
I knew it.
But I would have preferred a few more minutes of looking at the desert and remembering my human mother and father, anyway.
“ALL RIGHT,” I said. “We’d better begin.”
I stood on a slightly elevated slab of rock by one of those striated cliffs I’d looked at from the plane. Below me, and in a rough, sprawling half-moon around me, sat and stood a large crowd of people. It was big enough that Balidor convinced me to use an amplifier for my voice now that I intended to address all of them.
We were in what you’d probably call a box canyon, but a wide one, around ten or twelve miles from where we’d left the plane. Because of the steep cliff walls, we stood in the shade provided by the rock and trees, just outside the camp they’d carved out of the valley floor.
A creek wound around the inside of the opposite cliff wall, leaving a small oasis of pine and desert willows, scrub brush, even some desert breeds of grass with tiny blue flowers. The water itself was only a few feet deep, but as clear as blue ice, and I could see polished stones in the bottom of the creek bed––blue and purple and black and dark gray, in addition to the layer of red sand. I saw fish here and there, if small ones, blending in with the shadows and rocks as they clustered in schools along the creek bed.
Water-polished stones covered the ground where we sat and stood as well, although they’d cleared spots away for tents and pads for people to sleep and sit.
Most of the canyon was filled with those tents now.
A handful of wood cabins also stood at elevated parts of the canyon; I was told a few ranchers had lived here prior to the outbreak of C2-77.
Now it looked like a makeshift city, a weird mish-mash of Old West and modern tech with the portable satellite dishes of our tech team and organic tents and shelters.
To my right and nearer to the creek stood a row of fire pits, each delineated by a circle of blackened stones, sheltered by the cliff from the sun and likely from the wind.
It was beautiful here, and a lot cooler than the flat valley where we’d first landed.
“Used to be a river,” one of the locals told me, when they first showed me around the camp. He pointed around at the whole area. “This is all that’s left.” He looked at me with dark, far-seeing eyes. “Used to be stupid to camp here. When the rains came, you get washed away. Now it doesn’t rain. Not here. The water comes from the snow. From north.”
He pointed up towards a distant peak, just visible past the lowest part of the box canyon. The high peak didn’t have a spec of white on it.
I knew maybe it wasn’t the right time of year, but it was disconcerting.
“Also down below,” he added, without explanation.
He pointed down at the rust-colored sand and rocks, presumably at some kind of aquifer that had probably been there for millions of years.
I wondered how much longer that would last, too.
Looking around at the flat expanse covered in those smooth, water-tumbled stones, I could briefly see the river he described. I could feel how it carved its course through the rock, likely creating the canyon where I now stood––either as a river or before that, as a glacier.
Sliding into his light, almost without realizing I was doing it, I saw it through his eyes even more clearly. The whole valley transformed in that darkness, turning a lush green. The dark river flowed past, deep and strong, white lines of foam showing its power under the wind that wound between the cliffs. Its waters moved fast, turning to white-water in parts––so fast that people, children, dogs could easily get swept up in it, lost in it, drown in it.
It teemed with fish. Birds nested around it, above it, even with the people there.
I saw mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, jackrabbits, snakes.
The village on the box canyon floor vanished.
To my left and slightly higher up on the cliffs, a different village stood in the upper shadow of these cliffs. On a higher plateau, crops grew. Kids played down by the water, skipping stones and shrieking while their mothers washed clothes and hung out fish to dry in the sun.
Clicking out, I frowned, fighting a pain in my heart.
I looked at the trickle of creek that remained, and that pain worsened.
Still, even the small amount that was left was beautiful.
And anyway, that was why Revik and I were here.
None of this might matter at all, relatively soon.
Shoving the thought from my mind, I looked around at the span of faces that surrounded us. I still hadn’t talked to most of the ones I knew. I’d barely seen most of the people I knew in this crowd, even just to look at, much less to give them a warm hug or grab their hands.
Lily clung to my waist even now, and I stroked her dark hair down her back as I stood in front of them, thinking about what needed to be said, how to say it. Behind me, Revik leaned his weight on one of the big rocks at the base of the cliff.
He’d told me I should tell them this part.
He said the first part needed to come from me.
“We don’t have good news,” I said.
I watched and waited as stragglers finished settling down, finding seats in the shade, either on the rocks or directly below me on the dusty ground.
“I’m not sure where to begin,” I added. “So I’m just going to tell you what we know. Starting with a vision my mother, Kali, had of what is coming. I’ll tell you what I saw, first. Then I’ll tell you what we believe it means.”
Taking another breath, I proceeded to tell them.
That part, I hadn’t really planned out.
I just started at the beginning, adding things and reversing myself to explain things I missed as I went along, expanding on areas I remembered as I went.
I tried to tell them enough that it would be real to them.
I told them about Kali’s vision from beginning to end. I told them about the Mythers and how they were herding humans and seers towards the hotspots on Loki’s map. I told them about the hotspots themselves, how we now believed they were the locations of Barrier and physical-world doors, doors that formed a kind of climax to the Displacement itself.
I told them how most of those hotspots coincided roughly with the location of one of Shadow’s quarantine cities.
The few hotspots that didn’t correlate with a Shadow city were generally located in a city or area protected by another group, like Denver having NORAD nearby, Rome having the Mythers, or the Lao Hu controlling Beijing.
In any case, we were relatively certain Menlim and his people made sure they controlled every hotspot they found on that map.
I also told them we believed Menlim built telekinetic organic machines to operate and guard every door they controlled.
I didn’t stop talking long enough to try and gauge their reactions to any of it. I didn’t give them a lot of room for questions, or requests for clarification.
I didn’t let myself think about the fact that I was describing the end of the world.
I hadn’t really let myself think about that part yet.
As I spoke, I did try to gauge the reactions I read on particular faces. I saw Aunt Carol and Uncle James holding hands, looking pale. I saw my cousins sitting together on the ground near them, looking more exhausted and confused than even afraid.
I looked at Dante and Vik where they sat in the middle of the thickest group of seers, watching them react to the news of the telekinetic organic machines.
I looked at Kali and Uye, who sat on a flat-topped boulder just below the rock shelf where I stood. My parents also held hands as they watched and listened to me speak, their expressions grim, but containing less surprise than most of the faces there.
I glanced at Tarsi, who sat on a second flat-topped rock on their other side, next to Balidor and Cass. Tarsi didn’t look particularly surprised, either. The expression on her face was maybe more warlike than any I’d ever seen on her, though.
I also saw President Brooks in the crowd, her hair down and probably the most natural I’d ever seen it. She wore a dusty white T-shirt and blue jeans and sat among the local humans, not far from Torek, who was already dating one of the local seers, a female named Luriaal.
I didn’t look to my left, where I felt Dalejem watching me, or at Chandre, who sat next to him, watching me almost as intently as he did.
I might have found it strange the two of them would be sitting together, but according to Declan and Torek, Jem had more or less appointed himself Chandre’s guardian since the local humans decided to release
her. From what Balidor said, Jem had given himself the task of making sure she didn’t try anything.
He’d also given himself the task of taking her down if she so much as moved a muscle out of line, particularly with the Four now in camp.
It was strange to see that Chandre wasn’t restrained––although I did note the sight-restraint collar she wore around her neck. She was also clearly wounded, and walked with a cane that now rested beside her on the red dirt.
Really, it was strange that she was alive, that Declan hadn’t killed her.
Apparently the local humans still had governing authority here, including in matters of punishment and incarceration. It made sense, and I was more than happy to cede that authority to them, given everything we owed them. Even so, I found it slightly nerve-wracking when it came to the security of our own people, particularly in relation to things the tribal elders might not see as clearly, being human.
Torek and his new girlfriend, Luriaal, seemed to think it was okay.
Luriaal told me the tribal elders had their own kind of vision, a vision we could trust.
They’d also apparently done something to Chandre that caused them to view her as “safe.” I hadn’t yet gotten the full story on that, but Torek seemed to think they’d cut or removed some kind of cord she’d had to the Dreng, something she’d gotten as a kid.
The tribal elders spoke of it more in terms of “demons” and “bad spirits,” but Torek told me with confidence they meant the Dreng, specifically Menlim.
He wanted me to go look at her later, and I agreed I would. Since I’d been the one to ID her as a possible mole, it made sense they’d want me to check her light.
I didn’t dwell on any of that now.
As long as she didn’t shoot me, or Revik––or anyone else, for that matter––I was good with the tribal leaders’ decision.
I hadn’t so much as said hello to Jem yet, much less to Chandre.
I was positive Revik hadn’t either.
I’d noticed him keeping as physically far away from Dalejem as he possibly could. I’d also seen him looking at Jem here and there, almost like he couldn’t help himself.
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