“Don’t you know?” The girl’s face flushed with bright fear as she looked Kendra over—her face, her clothes, her pack with the olive branch sticking out. “Oh my God!”
She turned and ran stumbling to the gatehouse, kicking snow up from her boot heels. Kendra flung off her pack and darted along after her, overtaking her in four long paces. As she tackled the girl into the hard-packed snow, she kept her grip lighter than she normally would. Kendra held a hand over her mouth as she sat on the girl’s sparrow-wide chest.
“I’m not here to hurt you, kid. Shhh. Don’t yell.”
The girl’s eyes were wide and panicked. Kendra could feel her breath coming heavy and moist against her palm. She slipped her hand away and patted the girl’s thin shoulder.
“My name’s Kendra. What’s yours?”
“Kendra?” The girl’s eyes showed recognition. “The one who—my mom—”
“Your name, kid. Just tell me your name.”
“Irene. Irene Lee.”
“Irene. Gordon and Sofie’s eldest, right?”
She nodded, just once.
“I know your grandfather—Andrew Weiss. And your great-uncle Jake. I’ve just come from them, in fact. What’re you doing out here? You’re not on guard duty?”
“No, I, um—”
“A boy, right?” Kendra grinned.
“If I say yes, will that get you off my chest?”
Kendra shifted her weight but only slightly. “How’d you get out here?”
“Through the tunnel.”
“The tunnel’s closed.”
“It’s not. I just came through it ten or fifteen minutes ago.”
Kendra stood up. “Show me.” She gripped Irene by her upper arm and made her wince, then eased up a bit as she led her back toward the place where she had dropped her pack.
“So,” Irene asked, head down but tossing her chin in the pack’s direction, “is that an olive branch?”
“Yeah,” Kendra said, hefting the pack on her shoulders.
“Do you really come in peace?”
“Why do you say that?”
“That’s what olive branches mean, right?”
“How do you know that?”
A sharp intake of breath slid through Irene’s small white teeth. “You’re hurting me.”
Kendra eased up. “Just tell me.”
“I dunno. I was looking stuff up in the Archives about my name, Irene. She was a Greek goddess. Olive branches had something to do with her.”
A nearby sound brought Kendra’s gaze up to the gatehouse above her, its guards invisible. “Show me how you got out here.”
“If you come in peace, why sneak in?”
“I’m not in the mood for anyone to kill me before I get inside to say what I came to say. Get me?”
“Yeah, okay. Sure.”
The girl kept her head down, her eyes averted. She looked small and frail and wanting to look smaller. Kendra thought if Irene could pull her head inside her own body, she would. She smiled to herself as she followed in the girl’s tracks.
“You must have a good memory. I read all about the Greek gods when I was your age, but I sure don’t remember anything about olive branches.”
“How come you got one in your pack, then?”
Kendra smirked and watched her frozen breath rise and scatter. “Long story.”
They didn’t speak for a while. Kendra kept her guard up but found nothing to disturb the sound of their steady crunching of snow.
“I kinda want to be a botanist,” Irene said. “I’m really into plants, growing stuff.”
“Good job. Better than any one I’ve ever had.”
“What’ve you been?”
“A soldier. An idiot. And now a messenger. Not sure if I’ve ever been good at any except the middle one.” Kendra stopped the girl by the elbow again. “You know John Giordano, right? Has he come to the city in the last few days?”
“Dunno. A lot of people have been showing up lately.” She pointed at the wall in front of her. “It’s here.”
This was definitely not her escape hatch. She knew her spot and had just seen it cemented up. This was another, at least half a klick from where hers had been.
“Show me how it opens, kid.”
Irene reached her gloved hand up to head level and with an expert touch pushed three stones into hidden housings in rapid succession. A moment later the stonework slid back in silence to reveal a passage about six feet high by three feet wide. Another hidden passage, but full-sized and not at all like the crawl space she had shimmied herself through so many times.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “What were these guys playing at?”
As Kendra peered into the passageway, the girl leaned against the edge to get her attention. “You’re really not going to hurt anybody, are you?”
Kendra turned to her. “Irene, I could’ve killed you before you ever saw me. That’s what I’ve been trained to do. But I’m not here to hurt anyone. I’m here to try and talk sense to your father.”
“Good luck with that.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.” She took a resigned step into the passage. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 25
Kendra was impressed. Irene was smart and stealthy and proved the old adage Novices told one another while in training: to get from one place to another without being noticed, follow a teenager. They’re the only ones sneaky enough to have already mapped out all the routes, the variations in sentry duties, where guards would be at given points in their rounds, everything. Irene moved through the streets and checkpoints with smooth deliberation but without speed or fear, each step predetermined. Kendra wondered what Irene’s boyfriend would think once he realized he’d been stood up.
“So where are you taking me, kid?” Kendra asked when they paused at one dark corner a few blocks from the point at which they had pierced the city wall.
“Stop calling me that. You’re, like, only a few years older than I am.”
“A few more than you might imagine. Same question.”
A heaving sigh was followed by a rolling of her eyes. “To the Archives.”
“The Archives. Why there?”
“He’s always there these days.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Trust me.”
The route to the Archives—Kendra could do it in her sleep. From any direction, she knew how to get to that fortified bunker that housed the greatest of human treasures—knowledge—safe from the world. Thousands of spines, millions of words. All her life she had tried to absorb each bit of light from the long-lost polestar of Earth-of-old. Could she ever have imagined how contradictory and divisive all those words would someday be? Even their dates now mocked their ignorance.
At the stone steps that led to the bunker below, Irene lifted the first oaken cellar door with strength that seemed impossible coming from such reedlike arms. Kendra lifted its partner from the frame and felt the rushing scent of musty old paper filling her nostrils. She glanced over at the girl.
“No guards, Irene?” Kendra peered inside at the flickering gaslights below. “Not even a lonesome sentry?”
“He doesn’t really need them anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“My m—” Irene shook her head. “Forget it. Lights are on. He’s there. Nobody else would be.”
Kendra looked again at the stone steps, then back to the girl. “No need for you to stay.”
“You said you wouldn’t hurt him.”
“And I won’t. I promised you. All I want is for him to help me bring our people back together.”
Irene snorted. “Good luck with that.”
“Again, kid, meaning?”
“Again, ‘kid’?”
“And you? You gonna be okay?”
She nodded at the branch in Kendra’s pack. “I will be if you really do come in peace.”
The stone steps still held their perfume of earth and old p
aper and sweat. The gaslight seemed brighter than it had the last time she had been here. She could hear indistinct muttering—more than Lee here?—as she approached the stacks. Rounding the first corner she couldn’t help but trace the book spines with her fingertips. She found him standing amid a pile of books, some about waist high. To his left and right two tall desks had been pulled near each other. A high-backed stool stood between them. She knew the style of this seat well—a swivel. It was one of Lee’s first inventions as a teenager. Lee himself was hunched over one desk, his back to her, his face obscured by long locks of his black hair.
“Well, of course it doesn’t make any sense,” he was muttering. “Why should it make any more sense than anything else? Others can talk all they want—got to have a basis in fact—”
“Gordon?” Kendra called, resisting her urge to pull out the knife.
He flinched and turned. He squinted his eyes to focus them better and recognized her only slowly. How long had he been sitting down here absorbed in his close reading?
“Kendra? Kendra McQueen?”
His face seemed more lined than when she had last seen him, just before the start of winter. His hair was matted, and a scraggly beard that came in thickest at his upper lip and chin covered his face. She knew he was only in his early thirties, but he looked older.
“Come to wreck my other leg, have you?” He hopped off the stool with the aid of a lacquered wooden cane. She hadn’t noticed it as she came in, obscured as it was by a pile of books. “Go ahead, take it. I can finish what I need to do as a complete cripple.”
Kendra had forgotten how she had smacked his knee with a carbine while escaping. She drew the olive branch from the backpack.
“I come in peace, Gordon.”
He cocked his head. “Is that why you’re brandishing a tree branch at me?”
“It’s not a tree branch,” she began, then shook her head. “I mean, it is a tree branch. An olive branch. It’s an ancient symbol of peace. You know, from the Greeks.”
“The Greeks—” His gaze suddenly pulled back and seemed lost in the distance. “They had their gods and myths too. No more use to them than the One True has been for us, eh?”
The casual blasphemy raised her hackles. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Which part, my dear? The mythical nature of a bunch of capricious gods lording over the ancient world, or the absolute obsolescence of ours?”
“Gordon, please. The Remnants and everyone who followed them into exile—they’re all dying out there in the wilderness. They’re sick; they’re starving, desperate. I’ve come home to ask—”
“Desperate? You call a little less than three squares desperate? You know how many weeks I’ve been down here trying to make sense of things on far less food than that? There’s always a reason, a good and logical and, I might add, scientifically provable reason for every piece of superstitious malarkey meant to oppress and paralyze thinking men.”
“Gordon, listen to me. They’re desperate and dying, and there’s a lot of people coming here—”
“Coming?” He laughed with his arms folded against his chest. “Let them come. It’s not like they’re the first to show up unannounced to cause trouble. First the Tylers—though I am sort of glad they did come—and now these others—”
“Others?” Kendra stepped closer to him. “What others? Do you mean John?”
Lee gave her a quizzical look. “Giordano? Is he here too?”
“Don’t you know?”
He sighed and began to putter among his open books. “Nobody tells me anything these days. But with him I’d expect her to at least—”
Kendra swept around the desk and slammed the book he had been thumbing through shut. “What’re you saying? That the big boss man doesn’t know that John’s here?”
Annoyance fled from his face, replaced by mocking laughter. “You really have missed a great deal, haven’t you?” He seemed to savor her flashing anger. “Testing that pacifist stance of yours, now aren’t I?”
“Keep testing. See how far you wanna take this.”
“But that’s what I do best, Kendra. Test, analyze, come to conclusions. Here’s my working theory on you right now. I think you’d like to beat me to a bloody pulp or cut pieces off me with that knife you keep fingering. But you won’t, because you believe you’re on some sort of ‘divine’ mission.”
Kendra said nothing.
“Perhaps Petra sent you? To get her son back? Am I right?”
“And what do you believe in, other than the great Gordon Lee? Aren’t you on a mission to save us all from our unenlightened selves? How’s that working out for you?”
He held up a hand to emphasize a thought that died stillborn in his throat. The same hand then beat an unsure path to his mouth. The smug confidence went out of his dark eyes and took a little light with it. For a moment he almost looked humble.
“I admit, much of my research doesn’t have a provable formula as yet.” He shuffled through some of his notes. Kendra glanced over his shoulder at the ink-blotted pages filled with deletions and revisions written above and around previous lines. “But what the others have said simply doesn’t make any sense.”
“What others?”
“The people from the wilderness,” he muttered. “Some of them said they knew you—or heard of you, anyway.”
“Was one of them a woman named Prisha Lewis?”
“Dunno. There’s a number of them here now mucking up the works. Anyway, the point is that they claim—get this—that we’re actually on Earth and that they have evidence strongly suggesting that it wasn’t destroyed a generation or two ago, but a thousand or more years ago.”
Her society and upbringing had trained her to hate no man, but she found it hard not to hate Gordon Lee. And yet even with that hate eating at her, she told him the truth as gently as she could.
“We are on Earth, Gordon. And it was destroyed long ago. I’ve seen the evidence. In the wilderness there are ancient roads in an advanced state of decay, a bronze statue of—”
“Now how can that be, my dear? Our ancestors were brought here right at the end.”
“And you claim the world ended around 1962, not in 2491. Is that any stranger?”
“But that—that’s just Remnant misinformation, not a gap in the historical record of a millennium or so. And it’s not as radical an error as being on Earth this whole—” He mused on the idea for a few moments. His eyes pleaded with her even if his voice had regained its smugness. “But how? Where were the survivors all that time? Thousands of years—where?—and then here, on Earth, for a half century?”
“None of that matters now, don’t you see? That was all another life. We’ve got a new life here and now, but we won’t have it unless you help me bring the exiles home. Otherwise there’s going to be a war and people are going to die, killed at the hands of their own families. Can’t you see that?”
“Pointless bloodshed,” he mumbled through the fingers curled around his lips. “I’ve always been against it. Told Sofie that myself right after they killed the Tylers—”
“Forget the past. Won’t you—please—help me now?”
“Forget?” Lee looked at her with worn-out eyes. “How can we forget anything? The past—it’s all around us. If these others from the wilderness are right, we live on top of it. How can we go forward if we don’t know where we’ve been and why we’re here?”
“By helping each other. I came to make peace. That’s what I can offer.”
He snorted. “I can offer nothing.”
“Gordon, where’s John? Please tell me where I can find him.”
“The others from outside the city,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Did you know they’re the ones who had the books of Eastern culture that have been missing since the days after the Arrival? At least that’s one longtime mystery solved.”
Kendra gripped his arm to keep him focused. He met the gesture with wide-eyed alarm and confusion, as an animal
caged. When he finally spoke, he looked only at the hand on his arm.
“There’s life all around us, Kendra. It’s out there growing over so much death.”
“I know, Gordon.”
“And it doesn’t make any sense. Why is it here? What does it all mean?”
She slid her hand down his wrist to grip his hand in hers. “Stay with me, Gordon. Where’s John?”
A throat cleared behind them as casually as a bird might flap its wings. Kendra turned to find the only person who had ever gotten a drop on her: Sofie Weiss Lee. In one hand she held a carbine. In the other was a whistle used by drill instructors, which she blew once to bring a half dozen guards down into the Archives. Kendra, once relieved of her olive branch and pack and knife, was led upstairs with her wrists bound by strong cords. Irene stood at the top of the steps shivering in the snow and looked at Kendra with wide and unsure eyes.
They had built a prison. A prison in New Philadelphia. In the now-depopulated west wing of the barracks, where Kendra had spent her third year in the Defense Forces, a prison now stood subdivided by bars and complete with narrow bunks and chamber pots. The air—which had previously smelled of rubbing alcohol and soap—was now tinged with damp and dirt and a hint of defecation.
She was alone in her cell, though its bunk beds suggested it was meant for two. About eight feet by eight feet, if she had to guess. The floor in here had been swept. And fresh linens were folded on a feather-stuffed pillow on the top bunk.
She scratched her ragged nails through her scalp to clear her head.
Knowledge is power, right? What has been learned here? Lee’s a broken man, not in charge. Sofie definitely is—and no longer pregnant. What happened? Don’t think about that. Other people are here in the city from the wilderness—Jack and Prisha’s people? Were some of them in the cells I walked past? Young men and women, my age, a bit older, all asleep at this hour of the early morning. Who were they? If they came from the wilderness, why had they come? Curiosity? They must’ve heard about the city all their lives from their parents and grandparents. Why show up now? John. Where is he? Lee didn’t seem to know anything about him. Did he never make it to the city? Don’t think about that.
The Beachhead Page 28