by Brandt Legg
I attempted to break up the clouds with Gogen but they were too large and pliable. Knowing it wasn’t a natural storm, I tried every power within my knowledge to stop it from growing but nothing worked.
It was as if the menacing clouds had devoured the sun whole, like an enormous black, blue and white dragon gobbling up a small child. Thunder rumbled, building to near constant booms. Lightning webbed across the now darkened sky. My final attempt at protection was a weather dome; it collapsed instantly into a puddle. The super-typhoon had been created by someone extremely powerful. Winds shook the house until it whined and creaked. The clouds ripped open like blisters. In a terrifying deluge, the air vanished, overrun by a waterfall dumping with the force of ten Niagaras, flooding the tiny island.
We retreated into the pantry.
“This has to be the worst storm ever,” Amber said, raising her voice above howling winds and crashing rain.
“Can this house hold?” Linh shouted. “There goes the power.”
Total darkness.
“Everyone use Gogen to keep the house together. I’ll concentrate on the roof, Linh, north and west walls. Amber, east and south.”
Ever since Dustin signed off, I’d been trying to reach Yangchen on the astral. Now I made futile attempts with the other mystics. Even Dustin was unreachable. But he knew what was happening. Surely, he’d get word to the Movement.
A horrible ripping sound. All my efforts went back to Gogen and the roof.
Kyle’s voice came through, “Things are not always as they appear.”
“Kyle?” I asked silently.
“Remember, you can’t trust the universe just when it’s convenient.”
“Kyle, what do I do?”
Shattering glass. Linh screamed.
“Kyle?” I begged him to return.
Splintering wood and crashing metal.
I held the roof with all the energy of Gogen until a section slipped.
Crunch. Bang. A wall collapsed somewhere.
“We’ve got to hold it!” I yelled. Earlier we’d discussed what would happen if the house were destroyed. But at the time, the sky was still blue with only a warm tropical breeze. The island didn’t have much contour, mostly flat beach, trees and some small rises. Our backup plan centered around a tight cluster of palms amid a ringed rock outcropping, which might have been the highest point on the island.
Shattering glass. Crashing boards.
“How much longer can the house withstand this?” Amber shouted, as the thunder grew even louder.
“Keep on Gogen!”
Another section of roof went. Boom. Crackle. Thump. Thump. Bam!
“Remember the rock-trees.” I yelled. We had tied ropes there.
Shattering glass. Riiiiiip. Crunch.
“Can we even get there?” Linh screamed.
Most of the remaining roof went. It sounded like a freight train plowing through the house. Water flooded in, four or five feet deep, and floating debris knocked me into a beam and tangled my legs. With the collapse of the pantry, and everything else, my night vision nearly blinded me during lightning strikes every few seconds. I lost sight of the girls. The water, freed from the structure’s last confines, receded and ran across the land. I found the girls again; we forced ourselves toward the rock-trees with Gogen against two hundred mile per hour winds.
The typhoon swirled. Amber kept getting thrown about. She still couldn’t Skyclimb, which Linh and I were using to supplement Gogen. It seemed obvious Amber was the one least likely to survive the storm, but saving them both had been my obsession for so long, I might die trying to save her.
It was as if the ocean turned upside down over the island. “We’re going the wrong way!” Linh yelled, grabbing my arm.
Visibility didn’t exist, the only light coming from the terrifying lightning. Rain poured in thick sheets that made breathing difficult. I didn’t know if Linh was right, nor did I ask how she knew. I just grabbed Amber and swam through the air. The main force of the wind was now at our backs, making progress a bit easier, but side gales continued to knock us to the ground.
Not far from the rock-trees, the torrent increased. A small trail became a raging river. Getting airborne with Skyclimbing was impossible in those conditions.
“We’ll never get across that,” Amber shouted.
“Where else can we go?” Linh yelled.
I looked around and could only see faint outlines of nearby trees as the wind and rain washed out everything.
“Maybe over there.” I pointed toward the bulk of the island’s trees.
The “river” pulled Amber and me in. It sucked us downstream and pushed me under the surface, twisting in vines, leaves and mud. I fought back up and miraculously surfaced next to Amber. Linh was running along the bank.
“Get back!” I yelled too late.
The ever-widening river grabbed her legs. She disappeared for a few scary moments before emerging several feet in front of us. Battling the raging current, we worked over to each other, frantic, as we cascaded toward the ocean.
“Never let me go!” Linh screamed as our hands locked. Amber was on my other arm.
We struggled to keep our heads from sinking, in the turmoil of mud and debris, tumbling down the violent river, somehow managing to keep hold of each other. Then the world ended. I saw it too late. The river poured over a cliff. I reached something and gripped with bleeding desperate fingers, just at the edge. Linh slipped and grabbed my ankle. Amber hooked into the bend of my elbow. My hand locked on an exposed root. The rushing water tried to pull us down. Rocks, broken parts of the house and crashing ocean waves waited twenty feet below. Here it is, I thought; Dustin was right, one of us is about to die, maybe all three of us.
“Nate, help! I’m slipping!” Linh screamed.
I tried holding her with Gogen but it weakened my grip on the root. Amber slipped too. I now had her in my other hand. My only choice was to let go of Amber and grab Linh or let Linh go over.
“Kyle!” I yelled, realizing I could only save one of them.
No response.
“Hold on, Linh.”
She kept slipping. The suction from the waterfall pulled hard on her legs. Linh’s hands were now gripping just my feet.
“Amber, can you reach the root?”
“I’m trying!”
The force of the river was pulling her, too. I had to decide. If I did nothing; Linh would go over any second. If I saved Linh, I’d have to let Amber go over.
“Nate,” Linh cried.
Time suspended. The years and the universe had grown impatient with my inability to choose between Amber and Linh and now there was no time left. I could save only one – even if I loved them both, I could only have one. It had to be Linh.
The decision gave me the strength to do what otherwise would have been impossible. But as I started to release Amber, I remembered Kyle’s earlier message. “Things are not always what they appear. You can’t trust the universe just when it’s convenient.”
Instead, I pulled my leg back hard, which broke Linh’s grip and she went tumbling backwards over the falls, screaming.
53
Without Linh’s weight, I managed to pull us up to the tree. Now on the other side of the river, we clung to each other, pushed with Gogen and battled through unrelenting winds and water until we found the rock-trees. We strained to get the ropes secured around our bodies. It was freezing, my body was drained, and Linh was gone.
“Nate,” Amber shouted, pulling herself as close as the ropes would allow, rubbing my arms trying to warm me. “You’re in shock. You’ve got to hold on.”
The storm raged in loud fury. My voice hoarse, I yelled above it, “I let Linh die.” My breath came in gasps. “I. Let. Her. Die!”
“Don’t think about that now. We have to get warm.”
“How can I not . . .” My teeth chattered uncontrollably. “ . . . think about . . . that? I lost her . . . again.”
Several trees had been sna
pped or uprooted. We’d chosen ours carefully before the storm. Closely surrounded by rock outcroppings and other trees, we were shielded from the brunt of the wind on all sides.
Amber stopped rubbing. My shaking increased. She pushed a Lusan into my lap, then rubbed another around my upper back and neck. I passed out.
I woke with three Lusans in my lap, my body still. “I’m sorry,” I said to Amber, while thinking of Linh, then dropped out again. The next time my eyes opened, there was silence. Glorious silence.
“Is it over?” I asked.
“I don’t know, it just stopped a minute ago,” Amber said. “It could be the eye of the storm.”
Darkness still shrouded the island, but without lightning, my night vision allowed a view of the incredible damage. Aside from the rock-trees and another stand nearby, the landscape had been transformed into a ravaged wasteland. We decided to stay tied to the trees; there was nowhere else to go.
“Thanks for . . . the Lusans,” I said.
“You saved me.”
“Linh asked me to not let go.”
“You did your best.”
“Did I? How do you know? I kicked her over the edge. I killed her.”
“Did you feel her change?”
The thought had not occurred to me. How could it have? There’d only been a few conscious minutes since we made it to the rock-trees. Feeling through the energy, I discovered her change had not been made. “She’s alive!”
“Where?”
I searched for her on the astral, but found nothing. Still, I knew she was alive. “We’ve got to go find her.” I wriggled out of the knots and ropes. My legs were rubbery and gave out when I stood.
“Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Who cares? She’s out there and needs help. You stay here.”
“No, I’m coming.”
“I’m going to Skyclimb.”
“I’ll follow on the ground.”
Returning to my feet, slowly this time, I hugged her. “First sign of rain or wind, get yourself back here.”
“You too.”
I leapt up to the tops of the few surviving trees, and then took long leaps across piles of uprooted trunks and debris. The waterfall was still draining excess water from the island. I scanned the ocean below.
Suddenly conscious of the sky, I realized the storm had returned to its hellish origins and left the Milky Way and billions of other stars in its wake. “Linh, Linh,” I shouted in a raspy voice that didn’t sound like my own. I walked along the cliff until it eased into a beach, all the time calling her name, all the time begging the universe to lead me to her, calling on my guides to tell me how to find her. Amber caught up to me just as the sun peeked over the horizon and turned the ocean gold and orange.
“I followed your voice,” she said.
“It’s not working very well,” I said hoarsely.
“We’ll find her.”
“We have to,” I gasped. “If she dies, it’ll be because of me and I can’t bear that.”
“It was an impossible situation.”
“Nothing is impossible,” I whispered.
“It’s true, everything is possible, but there are moments that are impossible.”
Halfway around the island we found her, partially covered in sand and trash, rolled on her side, just out of the surf. “She’s breathing,” I said, scooping her up in my arms.
We got her to a clearing. Amber made Lusans while I did hands-on healing. It didn’t take long before she opened her eyes.
“You’re safe. The storm is over,” I said.
“Are you okay? Amber asked.
“Good,” she said softly, seemingly answering us both.
Linh had Skyclimbed as she went over the falls and had been able to run along the churning waters until she found a thick chunk of Styrofoam insulation amidst the debris to hold onto. The surge pushed her out to sea but soon the tide pulled her back. As the storm waned, she was able to kick her way to the beach. She collapsed with the waves on the sand not long before we arrived. Linh wasn’t talking much. I learned the story only by reading her.
“Shouldn’t we think about food and fresh drinking water?” Amber asked.
Before I could respond, the quiet of the post-storm morning was shattered by the sound of approaching planes.
54
Three seaplanes circled the island twice, one of which I recognized as one we’d flown in the day before. I left Amber with Linh and went to meet the planes a quarter mile up the beach at the same small inlet.
Booker was off the plane by the time I got there. He hugged me. “Looking at this disaster, it’s hard to believe anyone survived,” Booker said. “We’ve brought food, water, first aid and blankets.”
“How’d you know?” I asked.
“Yangchen watched it on the astral.”
“Did Omnia do this?”
“No. Let’s talk about the storm later.”
One of the pilots wrapped me in a blanket. A couple got off the plane with Booker. The woman’s eyes were a shade of blue that existed only in myth. She wore her curly blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. I thought she was a movie star, but I’d never seen her before. The man, however, was as familiar to me as was Spencer. I instantly recognized him as one of the nine entrusted and also as a man from Clastier’s time who worked to suppress my papers; his name on the list was Ripley Gaines. I sank to the ground, dizzy.
Amber and Linh reached us.
“Are you okay?” Amber asked. “We didn’t want to wait.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Before I could tell her about Clastier’s enemy being one of the nine, Travis Curry, the author of the Mayan books, emerged from the plane. I looked at Linh as she waved at him. Travis was an incarnation of Kyle’s soul but I wasn’t sure he had forward-memory. Even so, Travis was another of the nine. Why had Booker assembled one third of the nine entrusted at one of the most remote spots on earth?
“You know these men, don’t you?” Booker asked.
“Why are they here?”
“We need to get the Jadeo back,” Curry answered before Booker could.
“My dad and Lee are dead, Spencer’s lost in time, Dustin’s at Outin. That leaves Kevin Morrison and Helen Hartman. And if you aren’t the traitor,” I said to Ripley Gaines, “then we know for sure it’s one of them.”
“Why would I be the traitor?” Ripley asked.
Booker, Travis and the woman all turned to me.
“Because you spent a lifetime trying to destroy my work as Clastier,” I said bitterly.
“Please, Nate,” the woman began. “We’ve not been properly introduced. I’m Gale. This is Dr. Ripley Gaines, and I assure you, any wrong that may have occurred prior to this lifetime has been made up for this time around.”
I was ready to blast her on the lessons of karma, ask if she knew how much harm her boyfriend had done to me during Clastier’s time, ask if she’d read the papers or understood that they might have been released a century or more ago if it hadn’t been for Ripley, but she stared at me with those eyes. Her eyes told me that she knew all those things and more. They were the eyes of an unmade mystic, teaching at a glance, asking for patience and friendship.
“I’m Nathan Ryder.”
Gale smiled. She knew that, too. Everyone knew who I was. They either wanted me dead or protected. I’d learned to see people that way, and I could quickly deduce friend from foe. “There is much to discuss,” she said. I somehow knew Gale was good.
Linh walked over to Travis Curry and they shared a long embrace. I would later learn that he didn’t have forward-memory but had met enough mystics and heard enough messages from Kyle that his awareness brought him close to it.
“I’d invite you up to the house,” I said to Gale, motioning to a swath of natural and manmade debris, “but it’s a bit of a mess.” I looked back at Booker. “I want to know where this storm came from.”
“Let’s have that discussion back on the mainland. We brought the extra
plane to get you all out of here.”
“Where are we going?” Amber asked, wearily. “Nowhere is safe.”
“There are places,” Booker said.
“You brought us here,” Linh said, evenly. “That very plane dropped us on this rock in the middle of nowhere hours before an epic storm. I’m not going anywhere until you answer Nate’s question.”
“Nate, you know I’ve always been straight with you,” Booker said.
“I believe that’s the case,” I said.
“I’m avoiding this conversation because you won’t like the answer. I know how you are, and you’re going to jump to conclusions and condemn our decisions before you think it through, before you remember that everything we do is to protect you.”
I was embarrassed to hear his assessment in front of these “strangers,” especially Gale; for some reason, I wanted her to have a high opinion of me.
“I’ll hear you out Booker, I owe you that.”
“For some time it has been critical that the surviving members of the nine entrusted meet. As you stated earlier, it is not currently possible to gather everyone. Circumstances also created an urgent need for Ripley and Gale to hide and it seemed very likely that this would be the only time that Ripley could attend.”
“We’ve been brought through a Time-seam,” Gale added.
“Quite fortunately, just prior to our departure to join you here, which we believed was the safest location for this gathering, the Movement got word of a new satellite, and our tracking showed they were going to discover you last night. TVCs and Timefolds were considered but apparently they are perception-dependent, meaning they offer no concealment from orbit. The storm was the only option.”
“Wait, you’re saying the Movement had something to do with starting that typhoon?” I asked incredulously.
“Yangchen created the storm.”
“We almost died!” I looked at Linh. Her steely gaze never left Booker.
“No one could reach you,” Booker said.