I also set a few incendiary charges just below the turrets; explosions might take out the tower, but simple fire wouldn’t, the structure was made of nonflammable materials. Of course, that meant the incendiaries would burn themselves out pretty quickly too. Everything’s a trade-off.
All of that took most of the second day on the tower. By the time the second dusk fell, we were as prepared as we were going to be.
I drew Esa to the side that evening. She’d been watching me set up for the assault with bright, interested eyes—too excited to be really afraid, but too afraid to get really excited. “Are we all set up?” she asked me.
I nodded. “As good as we’re going to be. Listen, Esa, when this starts, I want you to stay in the bunker.”
She scowled at me. “Fuck that nonsense,” she replied. “There are only three of us; you’re going to need me. Plus, I can move shit with my mind, remember?”
“Yeah, but that takes a toll on you; I’ve seen it.”
“So will getting shot.” She had a point.
“Stay in the bunker,” I repeated. “You won’t be able to do anything with telekinesis that the Preacher and I can’t do with bullets. You’ll be our first line of defense if they get to the door at the top of the stairs.” If that happened, there’d be a lot of other shit going on as well, but at least she’d feel useful in the interim. “If they get that close—here.” I reached to the small of my back and produced my pistol, holding it by the barrel so I could offer her the grip.
It was a heavy thing, heavy and old, a basic revolver chambered for .45 caliber rounds. It would probably put her on her ass the first time she tried to fire it, but it was better than nothing—I kept it around because it worked on every world, regardless of the level of pulse radiation. Plus, it had been a gift.
I extended the gun toward her. She scowled at me again, and refused to take it. “I can move shit with my mind,” she said again. “Why would I need a gun?”
“Because telekinesis takes concentration; a handgun just takes a reaction, and your gifts still draw attention. Just . . . take it. Hopefully, you won’t need it.”
She licked her lips, and nodded, reaching gingerly for the gun, feeling the heavy weight of the thing. I didn’t know if she’d killed anyone before—she’d put that Pax soldier through a wall down in the tunnels under the city, but that didn’t necessarily mean she’d killed him, or at least that she had been trying to.
“It kicks like a bastard,” I warned her.
“Got it.”
“Don’t ever point it at me. Or the Preacher.”
“Got it.”
“To fire, pull the hammer back, then—”
“I know how a goddamned gun works.”
“All right. And Esa?”
“Yeah?” She was still staring down at the pistol in her hands.
“Don’t lose it. It has a great deal of sentimental value to me.”
“A gun has sentimental value? That’s . . . kind of fucked up.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. So.” She was still holding the weight of the heavy revolver in her hands, but she wasn’t looking at the gun anymore, and she wasn’t looking out over the concrete walls of the bunker, either—she was looking at me, instead.
“Yeah?” I asked her, knowing what was coming next.
“Why me?” she asked. A question teenagers had been asking me for a very, very long time.
I gave them the answer they always thought they wanted to hear, until they heard it and realized they really, really didn’t. “You’re special,” I said.
She smiled crookedly, tilting the gun in her hands. “I can move shit with my mind. I get that makes me fairly uncommon, yeah. But I mean . . .” She stopped playing with the weapon as the words trailed off, let the gun’s weight drop back into her palms.
“You’re asking why,” I said, taking a seat opposite her, leaning against the concrete wall; this might take a bit. “Not the other bit, not the how: it’s the why that you want.”
She nodded. “The how doesn’t interest me—I just can, that’s all. It just happens, usually when I get pissed. I always figured the why was just . . .” She stopped for a moment, looking for the words. “I mean, why is your skin a lighter shade of brown than mine? Why is your hair straight and mine’s springy?” She shrugged. “I dunno, but it’s still true, right? Genetics, or something like.”
“Not quite.”
“Genetics don’t control skin color?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass. I mean genetics aren’t what give you your gifts.”
“And you know what does?” A note of something there, in her voice, something she was keeping locked up tight. Hope, maybe. Or fear. The two can sound surprisingly similar.
“In a way,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound like a yes.”
“Maybe, but it’s also not a no. The people I work for—scientists who have spent the last century studying kids like you—they think your abilities are actually a kind of . . . by-product.”
“A by-product of what?”
“Of the pulse.”
She stared at me for a moment, like she was trying to gauge whether I was joking or not. Finally, she laughed. “Sure. Everything’s always the pulse’s fault, isn’t it? Rains won’t come? Blame the pulse; must have had an effect on the atmosphere. Cattle gets sick? Must be the pulse, changed something in the soil. Grow a goiter on your big toe? Well then that’s got to be—”
I held up a hand to stop her, and I sighed. I got the point. You’d think, after doing this so many times, I’d be better at it, but the truth was, it was different for each subject. Some had come from worlds with almost golden-age technology; some, like Esa, had come from worlds like this one, where spaceflight was a nearly forgotten memory. Others came from worlds even worse, places that had descended into near-feudal nightmares.
None of them wanted to believe me when I said that their gifts—however much chaos they might have caused in the kids’ lives—came from the worst thing that had ever happened in the galaxy, as far as they were concerned.
“Let me start again,” I said. “Here’s what you think you know about the pulse: a hundred years ago, technology worked the same the whole galaxy over. If a ship could take off from one world, it could land on another, and if something worked on one planet, it would work on the next, unless you broke it in between. Yes?”
“Correct,” she nodded, blinking raptly at me in what I’m pretty sure was a deeply insincere approximation of attention.
I kept going anyway. “Then the pulse came, and it knocked your world—and a lot of other worlds like yours, most of the worlds in the galaxy, really—back a few thousand years, back to a time before spaceflight, before electricity, even.”
“Yeah, I’m not entirely clear on what ‘electricity’ is,” she admitted, forgetting to be a smart-ass for a second. “Something about lightning, and then you can cook food without fire?”
“Close enough.” I shrugged. “And that’s the thing about how I just described the pulse to you, the same way most of the rest of the galaxy thinks about it: close, but not quite the truth.”
“And you know the truth.”
“I do. You ready?”
“No.” She grinned. “Okay, yes.”
I didn’t laugh at her little joke. I think that shook her, a bit. Good. I wanted it to. She needed to really hear what I said next. Pax on our trail or no, it was going to define the rest of her life, whether she wanted it to or not.
“The pulse wasn’t a one-off thing,” I told her. “Everyone thinks it happened, it’s done, and we’re living with its aftereffects. Some of them even believe that, in time, the radiation that suppresses so much tech will fade, and we’ll be able to rebuild to what we were.”
“Assuming we’d want to,” the Preacher added. She was leaning against the concrete bunker doorway, listening in.
“Assuming we’d want to,” I nodded up at her. “The galaxy before the pulse was .
. . not very nice.”
“Not nice?” Esa cocked an eyebrow at me. “As I understand it, everyone was always trying to kill each other.”
“A pretty fair summation, yeah.”
“What do you mean, the pulse isn’t ‘done’?” the Preacher asked me. She’d latched on to the more important part of this discussion.
“Just what I said. It wasn’t a one-off thing, like everyone thinks. It came, and it knocked out most of the tech in the galaxy, and so everyone assumed that was it, it was over.”
“You’re saying it’s not.”
“I’m saying it’s still happening. It spread through the galaxy, yes, and yes, it passed beyond the edge of known space—but it’s still out there. Building in power, building in intensity.”
“Yeah, but it’s still going out, right?” Esa said. “So who the fuck cares—it’s still moving away from us.”
“No, it’s not,” I shook my head. “It’s stopped its outward advance. And sooner or later, it’s coming back. We don’t know how much time we have—could be years, could be decades, could be centuries, for all we know—but we do know that it’s happening. It’s not done yet.”
“Do you know what it will do when it hits?” Esa asked me, her voice gone careful. She was finally starting to get it, now; the consequences that such a return might entail. “Will it turn some of the less-affected worlds into something . . . more like mine?”
I shook my head. “We don’t know.”
“Will it push worlds like this one even further backwards, make it so that wheels don’t roll, make fire not be fire anymore, or something?”
“We don’t know.”
“So it could do that. Or it could do worse.”
I nodded. “It could do worse, yeah.”
She made a face. “Great.”
“Not ideal, no.”
“And this all has what to do with me, again?”
“It has everything to do with you.”
“Because the pulse gave me my . . . abilities.”
I nodded. “You’re part of what’s called the ‘next generation.’ ”
“The next generation after what?”
“After the pulse.”
“But I’m not the next generation after the pulse. I’m, like . . . four generations after the pulse.”
“It’s a general term, it’s not . . . not important.”
“Because Reetha don’t live as long as humans; some of them are on, like, the eighth generation after the pulse. Would a Reetha kid who was . . . different, like me . . . would they still be called ‘next generation’?”
“Still not important. There have been kids like you being born since immediately after the pulse, that’s where the . . . it’s just a name. What matters is that the lingering radiation from the pulse changed you, somehow. Gave you gifts. Made you . . . different.”
She was finally trying to think it through. “You’re saying that before me—before the start of this ‘next generation,’ before the pulse—there weren’t kids like me.”
“Have you ever heard of any? In any of the golden-age or sect-era stories you’ve been told, was there ever any mention of telekinesis, telepathy, the ability to alter mass or density or gravity at will?”
“Those are options?”
I snapped my fingers. “Focus,” I told her. “Yes, Esa, I’m saying that kids like you didn’t exist before the pulse.”
“You think it was the radiation that did it.” The Preacher frowned at me.
“Yes.” I nodded. “I do—we do, the Justified. I can’t walk you through it all that well, I’m not a—I don’t do science—but I’m saying, yes. Kids weren’t born with your kind of abilities, Esa, not before the pulse. Then the pulse happened, and all of a sudden they were, and their births corresponded with a rise in ambient pulse radiation. That’s correlation and causation, all wrapped up in one. We’ve done countless studies on pulse-radiation exposure, studies on kids like you, and yes, there is a genetic component, but mainly it’s the pulse itself that did it, that made it possible. And not just human kids, either. All species were affected, all except . . .” I trailed off; the Preacher knew what I meant, and she knew I knew, but I didn’t want to say it.
“There are no Barious children to have been so gifted,” she said flatly. “Not anymore.”
I nodded. “Anyway, Justified—”
“And that’s the sect you work for,” Esa clarified.
“Yes.”
“But weren’t sects the bad guys during the time before the pulse?” she asked. “Weren’t they the ones trying to kill each other?”
“It’s . . . kind of a catch-all term, like ‘government’ or ‘organization.’ There can be good governments and bad ones. Sects were—are—the same. The Pax are a sect, and yeah—they’re the bad guys. But there are hundreds of thousands of sects, Esa, and some are good, and some are bad, and most just . . . just are. The Justified is the name of the sect I belong to.”
“And what does that name mean? Justified? Justified in what?”
I sighed. “It’s an old name; it doesn’t mean anything anymore. The point is, we started studying the kids with the gifts, those who came after the pulse, and in doing so—in studying them, in how their gifts reacted to pulse radiation, in where they were born, on which worlds—that’s when we learned that there was a . . . a kind of connection. Not just between the next generation—”
“Still a stupid name,” Esa groused, but she was listening intently anyway.
“Not just between the next generation and the pulse,” I continued, “but also between the next generation and the pulse’s return, the force that . . . moves the pulse through the universe. They’re linked, somehow. That’s how it all connects.”
“Linked how?”
“Be specific,” the Preacher added firmly.
“I can’t,” I told her, trying not to get annoyed myself. “Look at me, Preacher—do I look like I’m wearing a lab coat? I know what the scientists tell me, and what they tell me is that the kids and the pulse and the pulse coming back are connected. Do you think I’m lying?”
She shook her head mutely.
“Do you think I’m wrong?”
“No,” she said quietly. She hadn’t been surprised when I’d mentioned the pulse coming back; just surprised that I’d known about it. I filed that away as well.
“All right then.” I turned back to Esa. “Once we figured out the pulse was coming back, we figured we’d need a . . . defense, against it. A bulwark, a shield. For when it returned.”
“A shield?” the Preacher asked. “A shield for the whole galaxy? Or just for who you deem worthy?”
“We’ll protect as many as we can,” I replied evenly. “That may not be everyone.”
Esa had figured out which part of the information I was feeding her was the most important; she’d set aside the gun, and was staring intently at me instead. “And you think that . . . kids like me . . . can help you protect people. Can help . . . stop it. Can be that shield.”
“A kind of barricade, right. Think of the pulse as a, a kind of wave. Right now, it’s going out, pulling back into the ocean—”
“I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
“But you know what it is, right?”
“Duh.”
“So right now, the pulse is receding, and it’s leaving kids like you in its wake, exposed in the sand. In another year, or a decade, or a century, that wave will return, taller than ever. The Justified are trying to train the next generation to be a seawall against that wave. And the more kids we have, and the more powerful they are, the stronger that wall becomes. The more walls we can build. The more systems we can protect. The pulse made you the way you are, Esa. It gave you your gifts. We’re just trying to make sure that they’re used defending the galaxy against the return of the greatest threat it’s ever known.”
Esa looked down, for a moment. “You’re saying the pulse gave me my gifts,” she said quietly, staring at her hands
. When she said those words before, she’d been mocking, joking. Now there was something different in her voice. She’d finally understood. “You’re saying it made me what I am.”
I got that was a hard thing to hear. “You’re not alone in all this,” I told her. “What the pulse did to you, it’s done to others; there are other kids at Sanctum right now, training, preparing for—”
She held up a hand. “You don’t need to give me the hard sell,” she said. “If it’s you or the Pax—yeah, I’ll take the guys trying to build a wall against the return of the pulse over the guys with the guns dropping out of the sky and shooting everything in sight. I mean . . . yeah.”
I smiled briefly at that; at least she was pragmatic. “Wise choice,” I said.
She held up the revolver. “But you still think I need this,” she said.
I stood, and stretched. “Understanding your gift’s origin won’t change the fact that the Pax are still coming for us. Yeah. You might need that.”
I left her examining the revolver—and the Preacher staring after me—and I walked out to the edge of the observation platform, looking out over the fields. So now she knew. I hadn’t come to save her.
I’d come to ask her to save everyone else.
Schaz called in again, breaking into my reverie. “No doubt about it now,” she told me. “They’re definitely heading your way.”
Right. The Pax. All that talk about the pulse and its return, and I’d almost forgotten the significantly more imminent threat.
“Making good time?” I asked, squinting at the horizon as though I could see the Pax soldiers approaching. I couldn’t—they were still miles out. I looked anyway.
“I’d say they were in a hurry, ma’am,” Schaz replied.
“Understood. Is your window still open?”
“They haven’t changed anything up here, no. I can try and come earlier if you’d like, but I’d call it fifty-fifty odds they’d shoot me down before I even made the atmosphere.”
The Stars Now Unclaimed Page 7