She could hear the outer door to the wing opening at the far end of the hall. She remembered that door led to some supply closets and a weapons locker. In the semidarkness no one stirred as the light footsteps drew closer. She held her breath and waited for someone to appear before the dimmed gaslight sconce outside her cell.
It was Grace Davison.
At least it was someone who looked like Grace Davison. This was a woman in her sixties, with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, caramel skin, and dancing dark eyes that were clear of cataracts. This was Grace Davison, not as Kendra had known her recently, but as her mind’s eye had always known her. Seeing her alive—and younger—Kendra felt no fear, but only the same feeling of love she had always had for her.
But it couldn’t be her. It just couldn’t.
“Hello Kendra.” The voice was even, warm, known. A pair of loving hands gripped Kendra’s own between the bars. Real hands. Alive.
“Grace.” She swallowed after calling this woman by her old friend’s name. “How are you here?”
The familiar smile emerged. “Because you need me. I’m always here when you need me. I promised you that the night you came home from the mountains, remember?”
“Petra—she told me you were dead.”
An unfathomable smile creased her face. “Is that what your heart believes?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But this can’t be. It just can’t.”
“What has been written is coming to pass.”
Kendra stiffened. “Oh no. I don’t want to hear it. Don’t speak to me about Scripture and prophecy. I don’t know what to think or what to do. I came here because I was told to come, that’s all.”
“Do you still trust me?”
“I trust Grace Davison. She never did any wrong by me.”
“You’re on a mission of peace. Don’t stray from it, child. No matter what happens.”
“What will happen?”
Grace’s shoulders shrugged in their familiar way. “I don’t know. Those decisions have not yet been made.”
Kendra shook her head in anger. “More decisions and vague suggestions. Come on. How many countless generations of human beings have been told that they have the ability to choose the right path and, having done so, still suffered? Haven’t all the lives cut short or the lives dragged out in endless suffering set things right between us yet? If God’s really there, why can’t he just for once come right out and tell us what he wants?”
The woman outside the prison cell pursed her lips in the way Grace had done. This simple expression—more than anything else she had said or done so far—convinced Kendra that this was, for all intents and purposes, Grace Davison alive again.
“You want me to tell you that your standing here is proof enough, that I should just see and believe and obey. And I do, Grace, and I will. But will you just please tell me what the truth is?”
Grace looked into her eyes. “No one knows the whole truth. We all know a piece and that only partly. Don’t you see that? Here’s what I do know. A loving family is what the human race is supposed to be. And only through love, like its twin, heartache, comes understanding.”
“No, Grace. We’re all too different. Too hateful and greedy and sinful and plain old fucked up. That’s the problem with mankind’s fall. As much as we’d all like to be what God or whatever intended us to be, part of us wants to be this way because like this we’re human. There’s no decision that we can make that can change our nature.”
“Then we’re lost,” she answered. “The lowest state of man is when he feels he has no choice in life. At that time he is most like the animal he was never intended to be and least like the image in which he was created. Yet from these struggles here and now, a new kind of human may come of age, fully formed from the animal shell in which his species had been encased.”
Kendra listened to this not without sympathy and almost entirely because this was Grace Davison doing the talking. But it was all too much, and she was too tired to go on. Had she been free, she would have run away. Had she had the courage of a saint or a hero, she would’ve leapt at the opportunity being given. But she was just Kendra, no more or less. She would do what was needed no matter what and in spite of everything.
“I’m in agony. Don’t make me do this.”
“I can’t make you do anything.” Grace removed a key from inside her rough woolen coat and held it up. “Now what will you do?”
Kendra reached between the bars and took the key, pausing only a moment to squeeze the old woman’s warm fingers again in her own before unlocking the cell door.
CHAPTER 26
A deep, mournful horn blew out long in the distance in repeating two-tone beats. Kendra knew the sound: the general alarm calling everyone in the city to their emergency posts, to arms, to battle stations. And she knew from its particular repeating pattern that it was not a drill. New Philadelphia was under attack. It was the attack they had long been preparing for, and it was happening with the city at only half strength.
After remembering the master key Grace had slipped into her hand, she began fitting it into the locks of the half dozen occupied cells in this wing. She rattled bars and yelled at the occupants to get up, get moving, that the city was being attacked. Her actions were met by around a dozen pairs of sleep-heavy eyes that stared at her with marvelous wonder. She recognized no one but imagined she had looked at Grace in a similar way moments before.
“All of you, get up and go back home,” she said. “Whoever is about to attack isn’t going to sort us out by citizens and visitors.”
“Who are you?” a ruddy, red-haired young man asked with some bewilderment. “How did you get out of your cell?”
“My friend Grace here—” Kendra turned to discover that Grace was no longer there. Not even a farewell. “Never mind,” she said to the man. “All that matters is that you and your people get the hell out of here.”
“Why?” The young man asked the question as if the very idea was crazy. For the first time, she noticed they were all wearing very rudimentary garments, cloaks and cassocks of rough cloths, the kind worn by the poor or the clergy on Earth-of-old. It seemed a bizarre joke.
“Why? Why? What’s the matter with all of you? Because someone carrying a bumper crop of crazy will kill you if you don’t leave here. Either whoever’s outside the gates or the batshit-nuts woman who’s taken over the city.”
“Why would anyone harm us?” another baffled young man protested. “We’ve come in peace.”
“And we will leave in peace, even if we die here,” a confident young woman said, stepping forward. “Of that you can rest assured.”
Her dark and attractive face was familiar. Something about the jaw and the long nose Kendra recognized, even though she knew they had never met.
“You’re Kendra McQueen, aren’t you? I’m Nishtha Lewis, Prisha’s older sister. You’re just as she’s sketched you.”
“Prisha’s sister? Is she okay? Her baby?”
“She’s fine. And the baby’s doing well, going to be born sometime in the early spring.”
Kendra took a step toward this young woman. She was maybe thirty but carried herself with the kind of confidence Grace had. “If you know me, then you know I can’t let you stay here. We couldn’t save your father and—”
“No one blames you. Not even Prisha. Not anymore. But our generation is tired of the wilderness, of . . . dislocation. We come in peace to be with our brothers and sisters here in the city. And we fear no man—or any creature. Your coming was foretold. No one told you this then, but when my father found you, he knew that our long isolation was ending.”
“What the hell’re you—”
The horns blew again and again. Panicked voices could now be heard outside. They each looked out toward the barred windows, as if they could somehow see the threat outside the city walls from where they stood. When Kendra turned back to the outsiders surrounding her, she was surprised to find their faces beatific, at ease.
“I have to leave you.”
Nishtha nodded and smiled. “I know. You’re meant to stop this.”
“How do you—”
“Go. We’ll see each other again, Kendra McQueen, in this life or the next.”
Kendra paused for only a moment to watch them serenely wait for their futures before she took off in a full run. By design, the barracks were far from the city walls and were well protected in that way. Being a low building, however, it was not an ideal place to see what was happening along the city walls. It did offer one good vantage point: its main watchtower in the center of the quad. From there she could see for blocks, maybe even up to the market area.
Every part of the barracks was deserted—everywhere she ran, every hall, every room. Even the armory had been left unguarded, its heavy oaken doors unbolted and ajar. As she stopped in front of them, the doors seemed to breathe her in. She had come in peace. Would it be wrong to defend herself in order to secure that peace?
She went in and found little left in stock, just a few boxes of ammunition, six or so sidearms. She slipped a .38 Super Automatic from its rack after finding a box of matching bullets. It all felt wrong, even as she loaded the magazine and snapped it in place. It was a sin. A pox upon her. But she left with the weapon anyway.
All around her in the distance she could hear yelling, scrambling of feet, rushing, barked orders, counterorders, cries of small children—all moving away from her. She took the nearest exit to the quad and found the expanse dusty and deserted. She raced to the high tower and climbed the ladder rung by rung with the pistol in her waistband until she reached the booth four stories above the ground. From this height the center of New Philadelphia spilled open before her. Everywhere people were running—some to the gatehouses but most to points deeper into the city, places believed to be better protected from outside attack. As best as Kendra could tell, the city’s few remaining defenders were headed toward the northwest section of the wall. The city center was quieting. The blood had left the heart and was flowing toward the extremities. But what to do with all that life? The defenders were disorganized and chaotic. She could see a few commanders attempting to take these unseemly mobs and make soldiers of them again. But it didn’t matter. Even if every single one of them was brought under control, they just didn’t have the numbers. If the attackers wanted to breach the walls in another section, they could do so without resistance. Whatever forces the city had were getting too concentrated. New Philadelphia—a half century of a new human civilization—would be destroyed from within.
Then the impossible—or something close to it—happened. She saw him. Just outside the front gates of the barracks. It was him. She was sure of it even though she had seen only a glimpse of the back of a dirty-blond head. John was bolting away from the barracks toward a retreating column of soldiers. Had he been held prisoner here the whole time? He was grabbing them by their elbows and arms as if to urge them to stand fast.
Kendra jumped out of the guard booth and sped down the ladder by keeping her feet on the outside of the vertical posts and letting gravity do the rest. She darted across the empty quad and was moments away from the main gate—her John, outside, right now, right there—when she was stopped by a frightened and completely alone Irene Lee. She had been hiding in a shadow-blanketed corner behind a stone support pillar.
“Irene?”
The girl winced when she saw her. “I’m sorry. I’m so absolutely sorry—”
Kendra seized her by the shoulders and held her tight. “Forget it. Why are you here alone?”
Loneliness was the only thing that made a human being wail like Irene did, the feeling of supreme abandonment that seems to only ever find relief with death. “My mom left me. She just—”
“Look, I can’t stay. I can’t hold your hand. Now go. Hide someplace until it’s safe.”
The girl looked at her with still eyes. “But please, won’t you just—”
“Go, dammit!”
Irene fled in an awkward clopping run, spurred on by equal parts terror and embarrassment. Kendra hoped to see the girl again on the other side of this to let her know . . . something. Something that still wouldn’t make this moment right.
Kendra yanked open the gate and looked into a swirling mass of human chaos. Instinct told her that John had been to the right of the gate. A dozen yards distant was a group of Novices and other soldiers looking like they were trying to organize themselves.
“Who’s the unit commander here?” Kendra barked as she marched forward with practiced, recognizable authority.
“I am, ma’am,” a half-finished voice snapped back. It belonged to a boy, maybe sixteen, still straddling the fence between youth and manhood. His pockmarked brown face was clearing and already growing dense with black stubble.
“Did a captain just come and talk to you?”
“He did, ma’am. Told us to stand down, that the threat wasn’t real.” He shook his head in involuntary disbelief. “He ordered us to protect civilians at all costs.”
“So why aren’t you at it?”
“Well, ma’am, we’re waiting for another officer to confirm it.”
“I’m an officer, mister, and I’m confirming the captain’s orders. Stand down and help the civilians. And spread the word.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now where’d the captain go to?”
“In that direction,” the boy said, pointing down a westerly street. “He was in a hurry, but I think you can catch him if you double-time it.”
Kendra took off but struggled to make her way through the crowds that were pushing her in the opposite direction. Clawing her way forward by inches, grappling for each step, she snatched at pillars or doorframes to hold her ground whenever she felt the overwhelming press of humanity drawing her back. In those seconds of rest, she looked back to see the Novices and their pockmarked commander doing their best to control the incoming hordes and direct them to safety.
But John was gone. She was sure he was headed to the part of the wall where the hostile forces were massing, so she moved with deliberate steps against the tide. Realizing her futility, she forced a locked door open with her shoulder and ran past frightened children and some huddled men and women crouched within to the roof. Deserted. With luck she could race along the row house roofs for blocks until she was closer to the wall.
She paused at an intersection to get her bearings. Judging from the crowds three stories below her, she was still due west of the main action. But to keep going in a straight line, she would have to go back downstairs, force her way through the crowds in the intersection, and then make her way along the next block of roofs. No good. She looked at the gatehouse nearest her, which was about six blocks perpendicular to her position. She hooked a left and raced along the rooftops until she reached the next corner. From there she climbed down the stairs and found herself on a mostly deserted block running near the wall.
She pulled out the pistol with reluctance. She had little interest in killing anyone but less in getting shot by a twitchy Novice or some advance scout of whoever was outside the walls. This part of the city reminded her of a party after the guests had gone. Papers, dishes, and bits of food and clothing littered the ground. A wooden toy cart was tipped on its side, its right wheel spinning in the breeze. The streets were empty apart from a few dogs likely just entering their new lives as strays. The wall was a block away, the gatehouse another two blocks south.
When she scaled to the top of the gatehouse, she found it empty. Whether the guards had fled in a panic or left the gate to defend the part of the city that was under attack, she didn’t know. The path along the wall’s battlements to the next gatehouse—maybe even to the one after that—looked clear. She could see flashes, brighter than anything generated by gaslight, popping in the distance. It wasn’t something that looked stoppable.
Each gatehouse stood about a mile from its mates, not counting the width of the gatehouses themselves. Always a fast runne
r, Kendra knew she could cover the distance easier than most, but it was exhausting nonetheless. The flashes kept popping off; a roar, low in tone, increased as she drew near. She kept waiting for the heat on her face as she drew closer to the flashes, but the air stayed damp and cold. Light without heat.
At the second gatehouse she stopped to rest and drink some water from one of its stores. It was warm in the gatehouse and almost silent, despite its proximity to the action. If not for the flashes she saw out the window, it might have been any night she had been up there on guard duty. She watched the lights beam and fade over the rim of the clay cup she kept refilling from the water keg. Then—inconceivably—she again saw John in the distance. He was nearer the lights than she was and moving toward the edge of the crowd of defenders. She would lose sight of him the moment she went through the gatehouse door, but she started running toward him anyway.
The cold, bracing after those few minutes of warmth inside, didn’t sting her for long. She felt neither cold nor fatigue as she ran. When she finally reached the massing surge of defenders, she felt the air pop with the sudden force of explosions but felt no heat and heard no sound apart from the panicky cries of those around her. She made her way to the parapet’s edge with her elbows and shoulders. From there she saw the enemy forces threatening the city for the first time.
Portals. There were portals everywhere. They had been amassed at the edge of the foothills surrounding the city’s northwest quadrant. They appeared to vary in size and shape—some allowing no more than a single fighter to come through at a time, others able to accommodate many more—but even at this distance it was clear that each was surrounded by a distinctive orange band. And out of these portals poured hundreds of ragged but armed men and women to join thousands of others in the fields around the city. They were the hungry and angry outcasts she and John had lived among these winter months, all those who had come to believe themselves foolish for having followed the Remnants into exile. Her heart sank. The Weiss brothers had failed to stop the attack. But how had the exiles found so many portals? How did they discover how to work them?
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