Lander

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  “Where she couldn’t do it again.”

  Jameson stared at him. “Shit, you’re right.”

  “Look, we have the advantage now.” Alix flashed him a grim smile and squeezed his arm.

  For some reason, the gesture made Jameson feel warm all over. It was nice having this man in his confidence. “What’s that?”

  “We know she’s here. They can’t be sure that we are.”

  Jameson nodded. “The element of surprise. Though this whole disappearing skythane thing must have them worried.”

  “Let’s see if that key has at least one more bit of charge in it. Take us back to that island of yours. Then we can figure out how to get her back.”

  Jameson glanced back at the tower. There was a damsel in distress there, and it was his fault. “I’ll be back,” he said softly. He put away the holo and opened the waygate. It seemed slower than before, but it did open fully.

  They stepped through, and he let it wink shut behind them.

  XANDER COULDN’T sleep.

  His mind kept circling around the strange logic puzzle he’d set for himself. Was he in love with Jameson because of the pith, or in spite of it? When the effect wore off, would he still feel the same? Would it wear off? If it didn’t… what would he do then?

  Not only that. Alix was back too. The man whose loss he had mourned over the better part of a year, before he’d closed that door tightly behind him.

  Alix was just a friend now. Right?

  Xander understood why Jameson had taken Alix with him. In Jameson’s place, he probably would have done the same. With Xander questioning their bond, who knew what might have happened between them in the stress of the campaign?

  There were so many things he wanted to ask Alix, though. Questions about their past. About the mission he’d been sent on to Gaelan. About Dani and Danner Black. Instead he was out there practically alone, trying to sleep in a place that held happy memories of his time with Jameson, memories that only served to torture him now.

  It had to be after midnight. He was frustrated with the tossing and turning, so he quietly peeled himself out of his sleep sack and spread his wings. He was tired—exhausted, really, but his demons wouldn’t let him sleep.

  Alia stirred and opened her eyes, looking up at him questioningly.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, and she nodded and closed her eyes again.

  He pulled on his pants and shirt and padded out of the room barefoot, into the courtyard outside. There in one corner, Xander had held Jameson for the first time, his wings wrapped protectively over him. A sense of protectiveness gripped him again.

  He shook his head and stalked off into the gardens.

  The white pathways were cool under his feet, and a light breeze blew past him, bringing up goose bumps on his skin. This place must have really been something once. Its ghosts clung to him as he made his way to the statue of Erro.

  Its golden beauty was silvered by the moonlight. Erro looked down on him beneficently, his warm smile promising… something. Peace? Safety? Love?

  Xander wasn’t a religious man, and he had no grounding in the faith of his own people. Certainly, that face offered the hope of something, but what it was remained a mystery to him.

  There was another statue in the gardens, on the far side of the House of the Stars. Gael, the moon god, the god of his own people, the Gaelani.

  Xander circled around the castle to the far side of the gardens, marveling once again at the wild beauty of this place. Once this whole thing was over—assuming he lived to see the end—he and Jameson would remake this place, bring it back to its former beauty, together.

  Jameson.

  Xander cursed himself for thinking about Jameson again. It was far too soon to be making any plans, especially those that might include him.

  He looked up at the silver statue. Its surface gleamed and seemed to move like mercury in the moonlight, like the amalite key. He smiled. He’d always been more partial to silver than gold. Gold was gaudy, flashy, showy. Silver was elegant, pure.

  Gael was extended as if taking off into flight, his wings swept back, a silver sphere in his hand. Like Erro, the statue was flawless, polished as if it were brand-new. That was strange enough.

  He reached up to touch that sphere, and a torrent of electricity ran through his arm. It was like this with Jameson too… he thought before he was somewhere else.

  Lyda looked around the grounds where the House of the Stars was beginning to rise.

  The construction was coming along apace. The Gaelani had almost entirely abandoned Oberon now after the company had chased them across half a continent. They had taken refuge in the House of the Sky, where the landers had trouble finding or following them. No one knew why. It was as if the world itself had decided to protect them.

  They had eventually crossed over to Titania, the home of their bright cousins, the Erriani.

  The unexpected influx had made a mess of things for a while, scrambling half a dozen treaties that laid out the ownership of Oberon and Titania between the two tribes, but now a greater outside force threatened both. Old enmities had been set aside, and this place was being built by Erriani and Gaelani together to symbolize their newfound peace and common cause.

  Men and women worked to build the wall that would contain the waygate that appeared there on a regular basis. It had to be built to exacting specifications so the waygate itself would appear on its surface.

  She turned back to her own task, crafting the molds for the statues of the gods. She took inspiration from the drawings of Rohin the Explorer, one of the first skythane to venture through the waygate to Titania hundreds of years before. The first one to encounter the gods.

  They showed themselves rarely enough these days, though the nimfeach, their angels, were still relatively commonplace. It was one of the nimfeach that had warned Lyda’s people, the Gaelani, to flee Oberon before the OberCorp onslaught.

  She smoothed the clay form, working to make one side of the perfect sphere that Gael would hold in his hand.

  Next to her, Zain worked on Gael’s companion statue—Erro, the sun god.

  “He’s gonna be a beaut.” She admired his work. She could see the face of the statue in inverse now, and he looked every inch the loving god. Maybe too loving. “He looks like Zim, no?”

  Zain blushed. “Maybe. Think anyone else will notice?”

  “Probably not. He’s a great model, anyhow. Very sunny.” She fancied Zain, but she wasn’t his type.

  Lyda sighed and went back to work on Gael.

  Xander shook his head, suddenly back in the garden alone, his feet on the cool marble of the paths. The stars were arrayed above him.

  Was he meant to learn something from the vision? He’d known the skythane believed in their gods, and Lyda had inferred that the nimfeach were a part of them too. He’d never seen one, but Quince swore she had.

  What if they were real?

  He was caught up in a grand play that he didn’t have the pages for. There were forces at work there beyond the simple machinations of mankind, and parts of this world ancient and deep.

  His was just a small piece of the puzzle.

  He sighed. Nothing he could do about it tonight. Maybe he’d be able to get some sleep now, if he tried.

  He looked around at the grounds. He’d just seen them when they were new, and the spirit of cooperation that had existed between Gaelani and Erriani. Somehow that gave him hope that they could be made so again, that things once broken could still be repaired.

  Xander returned to the House of the Stars and lay down in his sleep sack. In no time, he was fast asleep.

  Chapter Sixteen: Cracks

  A TALL, dark-haired man with black wings—wings!—and a sharp pointed black-and-gray beard dragged Jessa out of the transport. His long hair was pulled up in a bun.

  She’d read about the winged men of Oberon, but still, seeing one in person was another thing altogether.

  Then she looked up to see a won
derland.

  It was a broken, smoking wonderland, to be sure. There were smoldering fires in several places, and the towers that were still standing were scarred with black pulse laser trails. But those towers… they were something to marvel at, even in her current captive state.

  They were tall and graceful, like fluted stalks of bamboo, reaching for the sky. Each segment was a slightly different shade of white, darkening near a crease that banded the whole tower. Near the top, each tapered to a narrow band, and then expanded out again in a shape that was most like a flickering candle flame.

  In the distance, a waterfall thundered over a cliff face, a white cloud of spray flying into the air from its base.

  “Come on, girl.” The man snarled at her. “I’ve got other things I need to be doing besides babysitting a lander.”

  She ignored him, standing her ground to look at the city before her. By the half-circle rim wall behind it, she guessed it had been built inside an impact crater. On the other side, it faced the open sea.

  The man grunted and grabbed her tied arms to drag her bodily forward.

  A sliver of fear clouded her vision. Angrily, she pushed it back. She would not cower before this asshole. They’d have to do a whole lot worse to her than this to make her afraid.

  She hated being used as bait for Jamie. How did these people even know who he was? He’d been a low-level psych stationed on a backwater world before this mission, but clearly things had changed. She just wished she could figure out how.

  If only there were some way to warn him.

  She was hauled inside the tallest tower and dragged up five flights of stairs to an empty white room. The cord tying her wrists was cut, and then the door was locked behind her and she was left on her own.

  A wide-open window was the only other feature, besides the door.

  She went to the window and looked out at the plaza below.

  There was a flash in a grove of trees on the small hill in the middle of the plaza—a little park in the middle of the city.

  She waited a few minutes, but it wasn’t repeated.

  Sighing, she sank down with her back against the wall, contemplating her fate. There had to be a way out of here. She would find it and show those OberCorp jerks how stupid they were for assuming she was just another dumb blonde.

  Then she would find a way to warn Jamie.

  ON THEIR third day out of Gaelan, Quince and Robyn finally reached the northern edge of the Riamhwood. The trees grew out onto the northern plains in small stands for a couple kilometers, valiantly trying to extend the reach of the vast forest, but sooner or later, these vanished too, giving way to clumps of purple-gray bushes that Robyn called norcrest.

  It was colder as well, as they left the central climes and flew toward the frozen north pole.

  Quince saw the scars first. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at when they appeared on the horizon. The ground there was covered in purple grasses, flowing like water under the winds blowing down from the mountains to the east. In places, the patchwork of grasslands and clumps of norcrest were interrupted by brown, jagged lines. These stretched roughly north to south and were the most prominent feature of the plains.

  Robyn had no knowledge of them, so they flew down for a closer look.

  The scars were ruptures where the ground had split apart, in some places thrust up on one side more than ten meters, and in others divided into a canyon-like gash across the land.

  Quince frowned. “The shift?”

  Robyn shook her head. “I have no idea. Maybe? Or the quake the other day.”

  One more weird thing to add to the pile of assorted oddities.

  “Like everything else, they seem to point north.” Maybe this whole trip was a bad idea. Quince was decidedly uneasy about what they would find up there.

  “Have you considered what we’ll do if we find him?”

  “Morgan?”

  Robyn nodded. “You say he needs you. But if he’s a nimfeach… do you think his priorities are the same as ours?”

  “I don’t know.” Robyn had a good point. She shouldn’t put blind faith in Morgan, but something told her to trust her gut. Or maybe it was just her need to make up for how wrong she’d been about him the first time. She shivered to think how close she had come to ruining everything. “I trust him. For better or worse.”

  “Okay.” Robyn took her hand. “I trust you. If you say this is what we need to do, I’ll support you.”

  Quince squeezed Robyn’s hand. “It’s nice, having you to myself. Away from it all. Even if we are on a mad quest through the northern wilds.”

  “Likewise.” Robyn kissed her, and Quince let her fear and exhaustion and anxiety drain away for just a minute. For that brief interval, she was just Quince, and Robyn was just Robyn, and the world was right.

  It ended all too soon.

  Quince glanced worriedly at the scar. “Let’s go. I want to cover a lot more ground by nightfall.”

  They made good time. Quince’s wing was healing, though it was still sore where she’d taken the grazing pulse shot. Around midafternoon the wind shifted, blowing out of the south, and pushed them along toward their destination.

  When the sun reached the horizon, they were within striking distance of the great ice sheet that covered the north pole. It was much colder up here. Thank the gods she’d brought supplies.

  The land below was starting to climb, rising from the cracked plains toward the higher ground around the pole. It was cut into deep ravines now by runoff streams from the glaciers ahead.

  Quince found them a sheltered spot next to a bluff, carved out of a hillside by one of the runoff streams. The shore of the stream was littered with rounded stones carried down from the glacial moraine. The gullies themselves ran from north to south, probably flowing into the Orn and eventually down to the Argent Sea near Errian.

  She wondered if Jameson and Xander had arrived there yet.

  THEY HADN’T seen or heard a hoversport in two days, so Quince decided they were safe enough having a fire.

  Robyn gathered some driftwood, and Quince lit a cheery blaze up near the side of the bluff. They sat down with their backs against the hard-packed ground, staring out over the flames at the starry sky. Robyn had snagged a plains gopher, and its body was roasting on a spit that they turned every few minutes over the fire. The smell made Quince’s mouth water.

  She took a sip of ice-cold stream water from her canteen. It was pure and sweet.

  She handed the canteen to Robyn, who took a long drink. “I don’t want to go back.”

  Quince regarded her. Robyn looked at peace, more relaxed than she’d been since they’d left the Mountain. “I get that.” She set the canteen down and rummaged through her pack, pulling out a tri-dee holo crystal.

  “What’s that?”

  Quince passed her hand over it, and an image appeared above its surface. “That’s Xander when he was five.” She’d all but forgotten she had it. It was the one thing she had carried with her always, tucked in a pocket inside her shirt. She’d brought it to show Robyn when they’d arrived at Gaelan, but Robyn hadn’t been there.

  Robyn took it and stared at it in wonder. “He’s… he’s beautiful.”

  “Like his mother.”

  Robyn turned the image around to look at it from all sides.

  “There are more.” She showed Robyn how to change the image by waving her hand across it. There was one of Xander at seven, and another at seventeen when Alix had found him. Then some of them together in the Outland of Oberon.

  Robyn sighed, handing the crystal back to Quince. “I missed so much.”

  “I did too. I sent Jameson offworld.” He had been like a son to her, and she’d missed most of his childhood and growing up.

  “When this is all over, I want to find a place to be with you. To slow down. I’m tired of all the pain and responsibility.”

  Quince nodded. “I think we’ve earned it.” She plucked the gopher off the spit. It was cooked thr
ough. She pulled out a knife and carved the meat, and they enjoyed it together.

  They talked into the night, about their separate lives in Gaelan and Oberon City, about the boys—men now—and about what might yet come to be.

  Quince forgot about Morgan for a few hours, forgot about OberCorp and the shift and all the other things that had been weighing on her for weeks. For years.

  The rest of the world would just have to take care of itself for a night.

  SOMEONE WAS shaking him awake.

  Jameson groaned. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and his mouth was dry. He blinked, looking up at his tormentor.

  Alix’s face was framed by the sun. “You okay?”

  Jameson struggled up onto his elbows. He was lying under something that vaguely resembled a palm tree, but the fronds were round, with veins a deep purple mottled with splotches of gold.

  “I think so. What time is it?”

  Alix closed his eyes for a minute. “3:17 p.m.”

  On a twenty-two-hour clock, that was late afternoon. “Wait, you have a PA?”

  Alix nodded. “It’s running in autonomous mode, stealthed.”

  Jameson missed Angie, his own Personal Assistant. He’d been forced to short-circuit her when this whole misadventure had begun. He was annoyed to learn there might have been another option.

  He sat up and looked around. He was surrounded by people, filling the shade under the tree and spilling out onto a white sand beach in front of a turquoise-blue lagoon. Volcanic walls rose black in the distance. What the hell?

  Alix stood back, and they came up, one at a time, to touch him. Some placed a hand on his shoulder, others his knee. Just a gentle touch, and then each one turned away to be replaced by another.

  One elderly woman, her wings and hair gray with age, kissed his forehead. “Bless you, Lyrin.”

  By the time the line was done, he had counted over two hundred people.