by Brandt Legg
Her surprised expression told him she did not accept his treasonous acts, even though she knew about them. Shanoah recovered quickly, and knew not to ask where, but her scientist’s curiosity persisted. “Is it fully operational?”
He understood the question really meant could he actually succeed in placing one or more Eysens into the future, and did he have the ability to track and monitor the changes brought from such communications and manipulations with the recipients?
“Yes,” he’d whispered while looking into her eyes. “It is total.”
“How do you keep such a place secret?”
“It is well concealed.”
“If The Circle discovers—”
“They won’t,” he said, not letting her finish. “And if need be, I could live there for a long period of time, like an Imaze.”
He saw the understanding register in her eyes. There could only be one such place that could conceal such a magnificent lab. The vastness of where it was hidden meant even if one knew, it would be extremely difficult to locate.
“Food and water would not be a problem. Even power and every other resource, I’m sure you’ve thought of them already,” she said.
He had known where she was going. The two of them were always in synch, even in their disagreements.
“Globotite,” he said.
She nodded. “How will you have enough, if you need multiple Eysens?”
“That is the final detail,” he said.
“A difficult one to solve,” she said, for a moment as if talking to a colleague, but she knew he would solve it because that’s what Trynn did. He solved problems.
Standing alone in a cluster of twistle trees, he savored the memory, thought for a moment about the way she had looked at him then. It warmed his heart, and inspired him to go on.
Then he heard the guardians.
“He’s gone this way!” one of them shouted. They were expert trackers, some of them having been brought up with the Etherens.
They’ll be here in less than a minute, he thought, desperately trying to find a way out.
The buzzing sound of a FlyWatcher turned Trynn’s anxiety to fear. The 360° self-propelled camera could fly into places that the guardians could not, and speed was perhaps its most dangerous feature.
Trynn, a master of technology, had only one hope of escape, a trick he’d learned in childhood. If it worked, he had a chance to make it to High-peak.
If it failed . . . banishment, and the end of it all.
Suddenly, guardians were everywhere.
Forty-Three
Rip finally spotted two of his security team near the end of the wall, but couldn’t see the others, which wasn’t unusual since they were trained to blend in and not announce their presence. He left Cira and Gale alone for a moment and casually walked to the closest one and informed her of his concerns. The woman quickly scanned the area and spoke into her wrist.
“Where?” she asked. “I don’t see him.”
Rip turned to look for the man they had seen. “He’s gone.”
She got a more detailed description from Rip and broadcasted it to the others, then told him, “As a precaution, we should leave immediately.”
Rip overruled her. “We have to find what we came here for. Just be extra alert.” After talking with Gale, although reluctant, she agreed they should keep searching.
As the day wore on, both Rip and Gale continued to search the stones while looking over their shoulders less and less. They did not see the mysterious man again, and Rip decided he was just being paranoid. Still, Cira kept close tabs on where Booker’s people were, especially as the crowd thickened with midday tourists.
Rip walked over to where Gale was looking. “How about a break for lunch?” he suggested, knowing she had packed sandwiches.
Cira, who had been working on a separate section of the wall about twenty feet away, motioned to them to come over. “Look at this diagonal crack,” she said. “I think it could actually be a seam.”
Rip studied the stone block carefully. It appeared to be a natural crack running from the upper corner to the other side, ending a couple of inches above the lower corner. “We’ve been looking for horizontal or vertical lines, but I hadn’t considered that it could be a diagonal one,” he said, looking at Cira and smiling. “You may have found something here.”
“Of course,” Gale said. “If someone wants to hide something, they wouldn’t make it so obvious. Crafting it to look like a crack would also guarantee it would be placed in a more secluded, less visible section of the wall.”
“But it’s locked in pretty good,” Cira said, rubbing her fingers along the seams between the tight-fitting blocks above, and then doing the same below.
“It will be difficult to remove,” Gale said. “And we can’t even be sure it’s the one.”
“I’m almost sure,” Rip said. “Look at the coloring. It’s off so slightly that an untrained eye would miss it, and even my trained eye wouldn’t have noticed it unless I was specifically searching for it.”
“Yes, I see it,” Gale said.
“I think there’s a high probability that this is it,” he said, barely able to contain the excitement in his voice, desperate that he might be that close to another Eysen and wondering if Crying Man would be waiting inside with a new message.
Will it be the same replay of what we’ve heard before, or will the ancient figure recognize me and speak to us as old friends?
He studied the wall and specific block even further. Cira and Gale stood in front of him to block the view of anyone who might be curious as to what he was doing.
But if the foundation or another one of our competitors is here, Rip thought, we would already be dead . . . unless they’re just waiting for us to make the discovery.
In spite of his reservations, Rip couldn’t stop, not when he was this close. He kneeled with a magnifying glass and carefully scanned the stone as fast as possible. He gasped, then took a meticulous series of photographs.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know if there’s an Eysen in there,” he admitted, “but there’s something special about that block. It’s marked with a tiny Chi and Rho.”
“What is that?” Cira asked.
“ΧΡ. It means ‘of Christ’ in Greek. It’s taken from the first two letters of ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, ‘Christos.’”
“That’s a very good sign,” Gale said.
Rip nodded. “Some call it the Monogram of Christ.”
“Who would have made it?” Cira asked.
“Persecuted Christians, very early in the catacombs, when Christianity was still illegal.”
Rip snapped a few more photos from a distance to help orientate Booker’s team, who would return later to retrieve the stone. Then they found one of the Blaxers and indicated they were ready to go.
“Can we eat at the plaza?” Cira asked. “It’s not a far walk.”
They decided the plaza was close enough to wait and have their lunch there. Soon they were eating a small picnic like the carefree tourists they were pretending to be.
The sudden burst of machine-gun fire at first sounded like fireworks, but as several of their security detail fell, Rip and Gale flashed back to the many tragic situations they’d faced since finding the first Eysen.
Diving behind a small fountain, Rip tried to figure out where the attack was coming from while shielding Gale and Cira. “They’re all dead!” he hissed.
“Who?” Gale asked.
“The Blaxers! Come on!”
As a swarm of gunmen began closing in on the now defenseless family, Rip, Gale, and Cira dashed toward the back of the plaza.
“Who are they?” Gale yelled breathlessly as more came from the other direction.
“This way!” Rip said, pointing into an alley.
Just as they reached the end, a van screeched to a halt. The side door slid open, and Rip recognized the driver as the mystery man from ea
rlier at the wall.
“Rip,” the driver yelled, “I’m here to help! Get in quickly!”
His first instinct was to run, but the gunmen were closing in from all sides.
The man, sensing his panic, yelled again, “Crying Man sent me!”
Forty-Four
The girl from the health-lounge decided going through the city, with hundreds of guardians on high alert, was too dangerous, and instead slipped out of town and headed for her former home—a remote Etheren settlement in the mountainous region north of Solas.
Taking a goeze most of the way meant her travel time would be short. No one owned the miraculous vehicles—they were free to use by anyone—but they were also traceable, and she didn’t know how far they might look once Jofyser was caught or killed.
She left the goeze at a common, a kind of fork in the road, or layover for long distance travelers. From there, she could have gone in one of eight different directions. Five of them led to widely dispersed Etheren settlements.
If they are looking, they won’t know where I went, she thought as she checked the sky for flyers or visuals. It feels odd taking the globotite in the opposite direction, back to its origin, but other people will know better than I what to do with it, and at least it’s safe.
Markol looked into the floating Eysen screens in his lab. “We can’t have another Nostradamus,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” a student said. “What exactly caused the Nostradamus incident?”
Markol recalled the days that followed the first insertion of an Eysen into the far future. At the time, he was working as an assistant to Trynn. “It was not what we expected,” Markol replied, shaking his head.
“How so?”
“A lot of things went wrong,” Markol responded. “But ultimately it was because Trynn made a mistake in his choice of giving it to Nostradamus. There were huge ripple effects.”
“I wondered,” the student said. “I’d heard rumors about a crisis in the lab. What happened?”
“I’m not sure how he chose Nostradamus for the insertion, but he had a team researching it. They spent months making the decision. Before the Eysen, Nostradamus was a simple shop owner. His wife and two children had recently died in the plague.”
“Plague?”
“You’ve studied the far future?”
“Not enough.”
Markol nodded. “A bacterium-caused illness that killed millions. More than one-third of the population died.”
“Wow.”
Markol nodded. “It was a turning point for our recipient. He began working with doctors of the day to help treat victims. He wrote about treatments and other ideas and published them as almanacs. This was just after the advent of printing presses. Books became inexpensive, with widespread availability for the first time in their culture. I suppose that is partially why he was chosen. He had a platform, was wealthy, and had important supporters. People would listen to him.”
“Was he intelligent?”
“Yes, a very bright man, but nothing extraordinary. I never did get the full reason why he became the one for the first Eysen insertion, but afterwards . . . after his discovery of the Eysen, everything changed for him.”
“And us,” the student added.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” Markol studied the moving images. “What happened with Nostradamus sent ripple effects in both directions. And maybe it even helped cause the plague.”
“But the plague was before he got the Eysen.”
“Yes, but the repercussions of an insertion can actually undo, change, and cause events of any time—before and/or after.”
“Hard to fathom he could have damaged even his own past.”
“As I said, we’re still trying to figure out what happened.”
“The Circle has thousands of scientists directing the future as part of the predictive league.”
“Yes.” Markol’s knee bobbed up and down slightly, a nervous habit.
“And the Missing-Time?”
“We still haven’t been able to get inside that.”
The student nodded. “But did Nostradamus cause that time to shut off?”
“Possibly. The plague killed thousands of direct Cosegan descendants. We needed them to be there, in those times, in those places, in order to help save things.”
“But it’s been three years since the Nostradamus incident happened.”
“It is so complex. He revealed too much. Trynn allowed him to go too deep.”
The student frowned. “Can’t Trynn figure it out?”
“He would like to try—I think he is trying—but The Circle has said no more. Trynn lost everything when Nostradamus went wrong,” Markol said, recalling those difficult days when Trynn’s triumph turned to despair. “The Circle confined him to mostly world projects, nothing about the Terminus Doom or the far future.”
“But you think he still . . . ”
“He can’t resist. The thing is, there was a huge section of Nostradamus’s predictions that were lost, and there were private prophecies. Many are unaccounted for, damage still waiting to be done, and Trynn knows it.”
Forty-Five
Trynn called the brite-lite birds with the cry he’d learned as a child, living with the Etherens—a long, haunting sound followed by a series of short hoots. The first brite-lites arrived in seconds, the glowing-winged creatures ranging in size from that of a hummingbird all the way up to bigger than hawks, with colored feathers varying among each bird in an endless array of neon shades. Thousands appeared quickly, their glowing lights an incredible spectacle, made more so since the birds were utterly silent. Swarms like this were rare, and also quite hazardous. Contact with their feathers instantly burned skin, and staring at too many at once could lead to temporary blindness.
In the fluttering chaos, Trynn ran. Some guardians hunkered down, others retreated. He stole a glance back just as two FlyWatchers switched into protection-mode and self-grounded.
Having spent part of his childhood with the Etherens, Trynn had a better chance to escape in the wilderness than most of his colleagues would have, and yet he knew the odds were against him. He’d seen guardians in the woods before, seemingly on their way to somewhere else, or on routine patrols. Everything had changed since the discovery of the Terminus Doom.
For tens of thousands of years, no real crime occurred among the Cosegans. With each passing day since the public announcement of the pending Doom, the transformation had been stunning. Petty theft, arguments escalating to fights, territorial disputes, and other forms of cheating and stealing, all occurred regularly now. And there had been talk of uprisings against The Circle, even fear of attacks from the Havloses.
The Circle had tightened their grip, expanding the guardians’ numbers and authority. The Arc had teams watching him and other rogue scientists who might be attempting things forbidden by The Circle. Although not a scientist herself, the Arc was intelligent enough to hold their society together in the face of the looming end times. She knew nearly as much about the future as he did, having access to the greatest crystal-minds the Cosegans had developed. Trynn wished he could work with her, but she had let fear control her decisions.
The forest along the coast was thick. Zero development or interference from man allowed the misty air to feed vegetation on an enormous scale; wide trees reaching more than five hundred feet into the sky, massive fern plants the size of houses, and a thousand varieties of verdant undergrowth offered many places to hide.
Trynn ran among the thick stalks, finding natural trails and regular paths beaten down by the plentiful wildlife in the area. Species of animals who would not survive the Missing-Time years between Cosegan and Rip’s time roamed and lived in a remarkable balance.
Many of these animals could have easily eaten a human, yet the Cosegans had an aura of loving peace to which even the wildest responded. There still remained a linked commonality that held them together and allowed some form of communication with their own kind and o
thers, and it was that connection with the animals that saved him, at least for the moment, as a herd of perhaps a hundred deer came thundering through.
Nearly twice the size of their modern descendants, it was easy for Trynn to hitch a ride. The deer’s long, thick fur provided an easy handle as he pulled himself up onto one. The pounding of hoofs hitting the ground, amplified by their numbers, made it impossible for him to hear where the guardians were, but he was confident they could not see him.
At least if they aren’t on their Airsliders, he thought, thinking of the jet-propelled scooters equipped with laser munitions, which the guardians favored in the forest instead of their jet packs. They might go high enough to see me, but it’s more likely they’ll avoid the herd.
He held on tightly until he could no longer maintain his strength and position. By then, ten minutes had elapsed since he’d seen a guardian.
The trick is to let go and slide off without being trampled by the deer behind me. He took one last look around. I wish I could wait until this stampede stopped, but I’ve already gone too far.
Trynn slid down the side of the deer’s back leg, and was instantly propelled into another one. He bounced off and came down in a roll, landing right in the middle of a shallow stream as dozens of the huge deer leapt over him, following their herd.
Athletically toned, the scientist’s rough exterior attuned to instinct swiftly, and he moved into the thick foliage along the creek. Moments later, as the herd moved farther into the distance, silence crept back into the forest. He crouched, straining to hear any sound of the guardians. Their Airsliders gave off only a slight soft hum.
The forest seemed still.
If the guardians weren’t moving in the same direction as the herd took me, I could easily be quite far away from them now.
But I could also be way past High-peak.
Forty-Six