This Alien Earth: The Complete Series: A Dystopian Sci-fi Box Set
Author: Paul Antony Jones
Date: 2021-05-04 04:00:00+00:00

THIS ALIEN EARTH

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.

Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu.

Published by Aethon Books LLC.

All characters in this book are fictitious or fictitious versions of historical persons. All characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are property Aethon Books.

All rights reserved.

Contents

THE PATHS BETWEEN WORLDS

Part I

Quote

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part II

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part III

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

A MEMORY OF MANKIND

ALEXANDER - INFINTY OF WORLDS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part II

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part III

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Author’s Note

From Karen

Thank you for reading This Alien Earth

More In Sci-Fi

THE PATHS BETWEEN WORLDS

This book is dedicated to:

Meredith Emerson, whose bravery inspired the lead character of the series.

And to the memory of Dr. Gerald “Gerry” Henseler. As good a man as you could wish to meet.

Part One

the lonely almost-death of meredith gale

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

―Marcus Aurelius

One

I got the letter kicking me out of Berkeley the same day Oscar Kemple’s mom called to tell me she'd turned off his life support.

It’d be easy to blame everything that happened after that on those two coincidental events, but the truth is, I was already on a downward spiral; I just didn’t see how close I was to crashing face-first into the ground. I can guess what you’re thinking: Meredith, don’t be so hard on yourself. You weren’t to blame. And that’s mostly true, I suppose. After all, the asshole driving the Ford F150 is where my life really changed. But here’s the crazy thing, the one thing that surprises me the most—even knowing what I know now—if I could go back and change what happened, I don’t think I would.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with Oscar.

Oscar is, or rather was, my best friend. There had never been anything romantic between us, just a really strong connection that started the moment we bumped into each other in the junior high library. He pulled the book I wanted (the latest Harry Potter, if I remember right) and must have seen the look of disappointment on my face because, without a moment’s hesitation, he smiled and handed it to me. Turns out, we shared a lot in common. We liked all the same stuff; the same music, the same movies, the same books. And, to cap it all off, as we each grew into our teenage years, I liked guys and so did he—so it really was a friendship made in geekdom heaven. We made it through junior high school together, suffering all the associated ignominy of that period of our young lives; me the relentless target of bullying for being a ‘copper top,’ ‘little orphan Annie,’ or ‘freckle face,’ and finally, every school bully’s favorite go-to insult for redheads, a ‘soulless ginger.’

Oscar, for who he was attracted to.

On my fifteenth birthday, Oscar handed me a small package neatly wrapped in shiny silver wrapping paper with an orange-ribbon bow. Inside was a copy of Anne of Green Gables he’d picked up from a second-hand bookstore. That night, after the few friends I’d had over to celebrate left, I’d sat in my room and begun to read the book and the adventures of its eponymous red-headed heroine. I finished it in one sitting. The next day at school, I’d rushed up behind Oscar and delivered a quote from the book, “Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

Oscar had laughed, hugged me, and without even thinking about it, I'd kissed him. It wasn’t a romantic thing, not in the boyfriend-girlfriend sense, it was just an expression of my absolute love for my friend, my very best friend. It was… natural. He was my first kiss and I his, and when we pulled back from each other, we were both beaming like the proverbial Cheshire Cat and his doppelgänger.

“Well, that was unexpected, Carrots,” he said, calling me by the same nickname Anne’s eventual Green Gabel’s love-interest had given her. And from that day onward, I was officially ‘Carrots,’ and every time he called me by it, I smiled. That moment… It’s the best memory I have, and I hold on to it like it’s the most precious thing I possess of my old life. Because it is.

After high school, Oscar was quickly accepted to Caltech and graduated as a materials scientist with a job offer from Dow Corning that would have set him up for life. By the time I found myself sitting at my first UC Berkeley Law school class, I’d spent four of the previous six years as a mild-mannered receptionist by day, and five evenings a week at my local community college to earn an Associate Degree. Add to that another two years to earn my Bachelor of Science, and you can pretty much see why I’d stayed single for most of those six years, except for the occasional brief romantic fling. I hadn’t ever really wanted to be a lawyer, but I thought it would be a good foundation for a move into the political arena, which was where I felt my true calling in life really lay. Still, at that moment in time, my future looked brighter than I could ever have hoped for… right up until it didn’t.

Fast forward to Christmas 2015, and I was one year in at Berkeley Law. Oscar and I hadn’t seen each other in almost six months, so when he called to tell me he was going to be home visiting his parents at the same time I was on winter recess, I could barely contain my excitement. We had a lot to catch up on. So that’s how he came to be a passenger in my beat-up Toyota Camry driving home early from a Christmas party that'd turned out to be nowhere near as exciting as it’d promised to be. Oscar, never one to let a moment of happiness slip by uncelebrated, sat in the front-passenger seat blasting Beyoncé’s Single Ladies from the car stereo. We were both giving the Queen B a run for her money, serenading her at the top of our voices, Oscar moving and grooving to the rhythm as he drummed out the song’s beat on the dashboard with his hands. He’d had a drink or three, and he was happy and relaxed. I’d stuck to Diet Coke. Despite my sobriety, the drive home was turning out to be more fun than the party that evening; an evening that should have become nothing more than a vague memory for the both of us.

That was not to be.

The last memory I have before both our lives took a sharp right turn was stealing a glance at Oscar as he sang and bopped to the beat of the pounding music. So young. So happy. So full of potential and promise, his face smiling back at me as the Ford F150 ran the stop sign, its headlights flooding the car’s interior, creating a momentary halo around Oscar a second before the two-ton truck slammed into us at fifty-five miles-an-hour.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed, three days after the crash with a concussion, broken wrist, and a fractured femur that left me with a permanent hitch in my step. It was Oscar who got the grand prize; he spent the final year-and-a-half of his life in a hospital bed, hooked up to a bunch of machines, in what the doctors classified as ‘unresponsive wakefulness syndrome.’

The uninsured asshole in the F150 walked away without even a scratch. I’ve always thought it was a sign of just how screwed up our existence is when a single second of time can divert your life for better or for worse, depending on what side of a decision it falls. A moment’s delay here or there and your life is suddenly moving down a completely unexpected road. It was only much later that I would truly understand the implication of that simple observation, how a simple choice can quite literally save or end a universe.

Again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, two surgeries on my leg followed by four months of outpatient treatment and physiotherapy later, I was on my feet again. The Oxycontin my doctor prescribed after I’d been released from hospital took the edge off the residual pain enough for me to get back to my classes at Berkeley. Then my insurer decided they wouldn’t pay for the pain meds anymore and I was suddenly, and irrevocably, cut off. I wasn’t particularly worried. I had enough pills to last me the rest of the week, and when they were gone, I’d do as my doctor suggested and just switch over to Tylenol and leave that period behind me. Done. Over. Deep breath; time to get on with my life.

But a half-a-day after I’d swallowed my last pill, I started feeling the first uncomfortable effects of withdrawal. As the day went on, the discomfort graduated to a pain so intense even my bones hurt. Tylenol had no effect whatsoever, and by the time that first evening rolled around, I was at a bar, searching for anyone who could hook me up with something, anything, to take away the terrible sensation I had of rotting from the inside-out. It wasn’t hard to find him, and from that day on, my habit was fed mostly by cash transactions in the bathroom at the local Denny’s.

I won’t bore you with too much of the gory details, but as my habit got worse, I started missing classes. Just one or two at first, but within a matter of months, I was spending more time in my apartment getting high than I was at Berkeley. Then I stopped going to class altogether. I told myself I could always catch up; the faculty would understand. After all, I was traumatized. I needed the downtime. Everything would be just fine. Everything felt fine… until reality finally caught up with me.

Which brings me to earlier this afternoon.

With not a dime to my name and out of Oxy, I’d woken around mid-day with the red-hot grip of withdrawal already beginning to melt my insides. My mind refused to focus, constantly slipping from thought to thought as I tried to come up with a way, any way, to scrounge up some money, but my friends wouldn’t loan me another dime; I’d burned those that had stuck around one too many times, already. I’d sold or pawned everything I had of any value. Rent on my apartment was due in two days, but I’d already spent that. I had nothing left. I was twitchy, constantly pacing back and forth from bedroom to living room to bathroom to kitchen, my mind a fog of disjointed thoughts, paranoia, and fear. Finally, unable to deal with the constant feeling of uneasiness, I walked out to the street. A couple of fliers sat in my mailbox… and a letter from the university.

For the attention of Meredith Jane Gale, the envelope read in laser printed letters above my mailing address, Berkeley’s return address in the upper left. I was seized by a sudden sense of hope; there had been a clerical error, and inside this crisp white envelope I’d find a nice little check. Just sixty bucks or so would be enough for me to score some Oxy and get my head straight again for a day or two. That’d buy me enough time to sort myself out, get myself back on track. My heart began beating faster, saliva filling my mouth. A smile sprang to my face, and I felt a surge of anticipation. Tossing the fliers, I tore open the envelope, pulled out the neatly folded sheet of paper within and read it:

Dear Miss Gale,

Despite numerous attempts by our staff to contact you, we hereby notify you that your position within the Criminal Law curriculum has been revoked due to lack of attendance. While we understand that there have been mitigating circumstances… blah, blah, blah...

If you feel this decision has been reached in error, you may appeal by... blah, blah, blah...

Sincerely...

The air became suddenly heavy… abrasive against my skin as a growing pressure pushed against my chest. I let the letter slip from my fingers. It fluttered to the sidewalk, where a gust of wind caught it and carried it down the street. I stood motionless, watching as it tumbled away, taking with it the last vestige of my future and everything that I had worked so damn hard for since leaving high school.

Above the roof of my apartment building, angry rainclouds scudded across the sky toward me, dark and menacing, bringing with them a promise of chaos. I watched their approach with a growing sense of foreboding as, with each passing second, the pain in my chest became sharper as though the storm were attracted to the swelling desperation within me like some kindred force. Unable to look away, I might have remained transfixed for eternity if I hadn’t felt my phone vibrating against my thigh. Without taking my eyes from the sky, I slowly reached down with a hand that seemed to be encased in molasses and slipped the phone from my pocket.

“Yeah?” I mumbled.

“Meredith? Is that you?”

I recognized the voice instantly; Oscar’s mom, June.

After the accident, Oscar’s parents had transferred him to a hospital near their home in Studio City so they could be closer to him. They had never forgotten the friendship their son had with me, which I was thankful for, even though it was always they who called me. It had been a long time since their last update, and I was glad to hear her voice, mainly because they were good Christian people. Generous to a fault. Which was just what I needed right then because I hadn’t ever hit them up for any kind of a loan and I knew they were well-to-do. I took a deep breath, pushed the swelling panic within me down into the darkness and tried to make my voice sound as normal as possible. In the back of my mind, I was already concocting a sob story about how I’d been robbed and left penniless with no way to pay my rent or buy food. I felt that warm, nagging glow of anticipation return. I was beginning to feel better already.

“Hi, Mrs. Kemple, how are you?” I said, finally dragging my eyes from the ominous clouds. “How’s Oscar doing?”

There was a long pause before June spoke again and my paranoid mind thought that maybe, just maybe, she'd somehow figured out what I was up to. When she did speak, June’s words were like a sledgehammer against my heart, somehow able to batter their way past all the pain and the incessant needling of my addiction.

“Oscar passed this morning, honey,” she said, her voice hushed and slow. “I… I wasn’t sure if anyone had told you yet.”

“Wh… what?” I stuttered. My head swam, and a fog descended over my vision. My legs suddenly unable to hold me up, I crumpled to the sidewalk, my free hand resting on the side of the mailbox to stop me from tipping over completely.

“I’m sorry, Meredith. It was, well… it was just time. We couldn’t let him go on like… like that.”

At the sound of those last two words, the image of Oscar lying in his hospital bed the last time I had visited him flashed into my head: surrounded by machines, tubes coming from his mouth and his sides. The only sound in the private hospital room the constant beep, beep, beep of the monitors. And the smell, that antiseptic, unmistakable hospital scent that barely masks the scent of dying and despair.

June continued, “Richard and I… well, we decided it was for the best.” She paused for what seemed like forever waiting for me to say something, but I found no words to fill the expanding emptiness. The knowledge that they'd ended my best friend’s life, my only friend, without even giving me the chance to say goodbye drove an invisible spear through me, skewering me to the spot.

“Meredith, are you there?” June eventually whispered. I could hear the barely hidden river of her agony flowing behind the words.

I'd tried to blame myself after the accident, but June and Richard refused to allow me to, placing the blame squarely on the driver of the F150. But secretly, I knew I was still the one to blame; if I’d only taken a different route or stayed and talked to a couple of our friends for a few minutes more, everything would have been oh-so-different. None of this would have happened. Oscar would still be alive, and I would still have been me, not this strung out, drug-addled addict. That one extra minute would have made all the difference, and this version of the universe would have never existed. Everything would have been… right.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to whisper, my voice cracking.

“It’s not your fault, sweetheart. You know we don’t blame you. And it’s all for the best,” June’s voice whispered in my ear.

I felt tears slip down my cheek.

I’m not sure if I was crying because of the news of Oscar’s death or the letter kicking me out of law school or the pain of the withdrawal that was already turning my body and mind into mush. I guess, if I’m honest, I’m going to go with the withdrawal pain because that was symptomatic of what I had become back then; selfish, negligent, and, ironically, considering the source of my addiction, in almost constant pain from the residual effects of the accident. But this news about Oscar, well, it was a pretty close second. The combined weight of it all broke me. Somewhere inside, an invisible dam buckled, crumbled, fell. And the reservoir of self-loathing and despair it held back spewed its poison into me.

“Fa… fa… thanks for letting me know,” I sniffled and hung up the phone. I hadn’t offered a single word of comfort to June, and that’s something I’ll never forgive myself for, but at that moment, I felt utterly empty. And that emptiness was a relief, because even the withdrawal pain was gone, replaced by an emotional void, black and infinite. I felt as though I was just a sack of skin, inflated by the fumes of that toxic, black nothingness. Dead. And if this was what it felt like to be dead, then I welcomed it, because there was no pain, no guilt, no caring, nothing.

It was already late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees lining the street stretched across the road, reaching for me like skeletal-fingers. I pushed myself to my feet, stared at my apartment building, then staggered off in the opposite direction just as the first plump drops of rain began to splatter on the sidewalk.

I was soaked through within the first minute, but I didn’t care. Couldn’t care, not anymore. So, I kept walking, my eyes cast downward, permanently fixed to the continually unwinding concrete pavement just a few feet ahead of me.

One step. Two steps. Repeat.

I don’t know for how long I walked, have no real memory of the journey, but by the time I looked up again, the sun was setting, and my familiar neighborhood was gone. Ahead of me, I saw the lights of the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge stretching out into the San Francisco Bay, the city lights of the bay’s namesake glowing in the darkening sky beyond. What should have been a beautiful ethereal sight was nothing but pain-inducing to my bulging eyes. A walking path extended across the span of the bridge, and I followed it, the oncoming lights from cars heading to Oakland slicing through the gathering darkness just a few feet from where I staggered through the rain falling in ice-cold sheets.

The emptiness within me shifted like a living thing, as if the void sensed the approach of night, growing restless as the sun’s last rays vanished from the horizon.

Blackness within. Blackness without, I thought.

I continued walking the footpath, black and shiny with pooling rainwater. When I reached the center of the Oakland span, I stopped. In the distance, the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge sparkled and scintillated. Unlike its infamous sister, the Bay Bridge had no safety nets to catch a jumper who was willing to simply climb over the waist-high metal security fence and step off into the freezing waters of the San Francisco Bay.

Until this moment, I hadn’t fully understood why I was here, why my feet had led me to this place. Now it was all perfectly clear; there was nothing for me; no one who cared for me; no reason to stay. The final frayed ties to this life were all broken. This was the place. Here was where all the pain would end. I was about a mile or so out over the bay, almost at the mid-point of the Oakland span.

Far enough, I decided.

I stopped and grasped the freezing, rain-slick metal of the bridge. Movement drew my attention back to the path: a cyclist was approaching along it toward me, his head bowed to keep the rain out of his eyes, water spinning off his bike’s wheels.

Somewhere within the blackness that had once been me, a small spark of hope sputtered into life and began to gradually expand; a dim light weakly illuminating the void. This had to be a sign, it told me. A final attempt by a seemingly indifferent universe to grab my attention; to give me a chance.

“If he stops, it means he cares,” I muttered to myself. It means I matter.

The cyclist rode by without even glancing up at me.

The spark sputtered and vanished.

All I wanted now was an end to this torture.

I grasped the safety-barrier with both hands, ignored the jagged chill that ran up my arms, swung my legs over, and lowered myself down onto the thin lip of concrete extending out just a couple of inches, my back pressed against the railing. Below me was nothing but a black mirror; the only evidence there was anything other than oblivion down there, the refracted light of headlights on the shore-road bouncing off the waves of the bay. If my eyes could have pierced the darkness and driving rain into the glassy waters of the bay what would I see? Bright red hair pulled back into a bun, unruly tendrils falling around my face. Blue eyes peering back at me, surrounded by darkly shadowed skin, puffy and lined from lack of sleep. I’d lost about twenty pounds over the past couple of months, and it showed mostly in my face; I was almost twenty-eight, but I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for thinking I was closer to forty.

I teetered on the edge, the rain pounding all around me. A numbing wind gusted in from the east, cutting into my soaked and rapidly freezing skin. My teeth began to chatter. My fingers were quickly turning numb against the icy metal. I leaned back to take some of the strain from my arms, let go of the barrier, and pressed the palms of my hands against my thighs, eyes tightly closed.

“Now,” I whispered.

It was so simple. Just step off.

My body refused to obey me.

“Now,” I repeated, the first tears of frustration beginning to run hot over my freezing cheeks.

“Now!” I screamed, urging myself to do it. All I needed to do was take a step, a single step, and it would all be over. I began to lean forward...

...and stopped.

I reached blindly behind me for the safety of the guardrail as the emptiness within me vanished as though it never existed. What replaced it was an explosion of overwhelming panic, then terror at my utter stupidity, and a wild undeniable desire to live.

There were people who loved me.

I could get help.

All I had to do was reach out to someone, anyone. My heart thudded loudly in my chest, adrenaline pushing back the fear and the discomfort and pain. Everything could be fixed, but first I needed to get off this bridge, now!

Ever so carefully, I turned back toward the safety that lay just on the other side of the barrier. Shuffling my feet inch-by-inch while I swiveled my body to face the walking path, my fingers now totally numb and barely responding, the cold eating into my bones, slowing my muscles. I’d managed to get my left leg up onto the safety rail when a violent gust of wind flashed across the bridge, slamming into me head on. My right foot skated on the slick concrete lip like it was ice. I tried to keep my balance, overcorrected, felt my foot whip out from beneath me… and I slipped. My chin smashed into the railing knocking my head back. I felt teeth and bone crack as my jaws smashed together. Hot blood filled my mouth. Pain exploded through my body. My vision swam, my fingers released their grip on the railing. I began to slide off the side of the bridge, stopped from plummeting straight into the bay only by the fact that my body, from my right heel all the way up to my armpit, scraped agonizingly across the lip of concrete I’d been balanced on. As I dropped, my hands smacked against the railings… and the fingers of my right hand locked onto the metal. I would have screamed, but the blood in my mouth clogged my throat, choking me. I couldn’t even draw enough air to breathe let alone cry out for help.

I’m going to die. Oh my God, I’m going to die, my mind screamed. This can’t be happening. Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!

A fresh wave of panic exploded through my body, taking hold of me and refusing to let go. I whimpered like a baby as the fingers of my right hand began to cramp.

I gasped out loud at the sound of someone’s voice nearby.

“Candidate 13, do you wish to be saved? Answer yes or no.”

I couldn’t tell whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman; it was flat, emotionless. It sounded like it was coming from the walkway, about two-feet above where I dangled over the drop into the freezing bay water, suspended by one hand. And for a moment, I thought I was saved. I looked up, expecting to see feet or a hand reaching for me… but no one was there.

Then the disembodied voice spoke again, crackly and with a distinct electronic edge to it, like you hear in a movie when some kidnapper is trying to disguise his identity from the Feds. “Candidate 13. Meredith Jane Gale. In thirty seconds, you will be beyond my ability to save. Do you wish to be saved? Answer yes or no.”

I blinked several times in quick succession. “What?” I managed to slur through lips that felt like they were made of cotton. I felt warm blood spill over my chin with each word. “Help me. Please.”

“Meredith Jane Gale,” the voice continued. “Born August 7th, 1990 to Norman and Doreen Gale. Attended El Camino High School. Your best friend was Oscar Kemple. He expired today, contributing to your advanced state of depression. You lost your virginity to Richard Pollard at age sixteen and seven months in the rear seat of his Ford Explorer. The color of the walls of your childhood bedroom was purple, a color your mother objected to. This afternoon you received a letter stating you have been removed from your law course at Berkeley University.

Candidate 13, in eight seconds, you will lose your grip and fall. You will break numerous bones upon impact with the water, but you will not die from the fall. You will, however, drown six minutes and eighteen seconds after impact. The pain during that time will be intolerable. Once you are deceased, high winds and a stronger than normal swell will sweep your body far out to sea. It will never be recovered. I can save you. Answer, yes or no.”

Just how the voice knew all of this, I did not know. “Please, help me,” I whispered, blood clogging my lips. “You have to help—”

“Answer, yes or no,” the voice interrupted in that same cold, almost-electronic tone.

I started to answer, but before I could get the words past my shredded lips, my fingers gave way, and I slipped from the bridge, and I fell.

“Yes!” I screamed, my eyes tightly closed as I dropped toward the waiting abyss. Whether the words were in my mind or I actually managed to say them, I don’t know, but a millisecond later, there was a bright flare of orange light, and my world ceased to be.

Two

Darkness was replaced by daylight.

I had a fleeting moment to realize I was still falling, dropping through the air like a stone. My legs kicked wildly in a vain attempt to halt my fall, arms windmilling as though I might suddenly learn the secret to flight.

I started to scream, but the cry never came. I crashed into water, swallowing a mouthful of it instead. Seawater! Its briny taste unmistakable as it flooded down my throat and into my lungs, choking the breath from me. I spewed it back out just as my head broke the surface.

Gasping for breath, panicked and confused, I began treading water as my brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened. This wasn’t the San Francisco Bay. There was no sign of the bridge. No sound of a distant city and no way for me to explain how night had, in an instant, been replaced by this insipid daylight.

A gauzy mist hung just a few inches above the water, rising high enough that I could see no more than a few feet of the surface. Something splashed into the water close by. It took me a moment to realize it was a piece of the walkway from the bridge. It sank instantly. My cellphone bobbed on the surface a few feet away from me, and I made a vain attempt to reach it, but then it too disappeared into the murky water.

Born and raised in California, I’m a fairly decent swimmer—I should be after a childhood spent playing on the beaches up and down the West Coast. I knew I wasn’t going to drown, I could tread water like this for hours if needed. I willed my body to relax, fighting to regain control of it from the panic-induced rush of adrenaline still surging through my veins. Minutes passed, and I switched position to float gently on my back, staring upward into a sky filled with leaden clouds.

It was raining hard, the downpour pounding the water’s surface and my face as I tried to relax, blinking away fat, stinging raindrops. I began to regulate my breathing to match the gentle bobbing of my body—in through my nose… out through my mouth—gathering my wits, my stomach-acid-raw throat burning with each breath I exhaled.

I flipped myself upright and began treading water again. Gray, foamy water the same color as the slowly dissipating fog surrounded me. The surface was calm, like that of a lake, but the mouthful of water I’d swallowed was definitely seawater, which meant I was in an ocean. Fog blocked my view beyond just a couple of feet, and the rain blurred my vision. The sun was a barely perceptible ghost, haunting the invisible sky, hidden behind the mask of angry cloud.

The mist began to fade, gradually revealing more of my surroundings. The hazy outline of a distant coast appeared, maybe six or so miles away. Suspended above it, rising high into the troposphere was a tower-like structure.

It was huge. Just how huge, I couldn’t tell because its upper section was hidden by the cloud. But, like the stem of a wine-glass, the tower tapered downward, narrowing as it drew closer to the ground. It was too far away for me to be able to make out much detail besides its immensity, but the way the light reflected off its surface suggested the tower was constructed of flat planes, placed together at differing angles, like the facets of a diamond.

I stared open-mouthed at the unbelievable monolith for more time than I can remember while my brain tried to process it, all thought of my predicament temporarily gone from my head. But then reality came crashing back again as I realized I had been deposited so far from the shore of that distant coast there was little chance I would be able to swim to it. I simply wasn’t strong enough to make it that far. I rotated slowly, shivering as the chilly water finally made itself known.

“Yes!” I hissed. An island sat about fifty feet away, its beach covered in white shale and gray-and-black pebbles. Beyond the beach, a swath of tall grass swayed in the breeze. And then a line of trees that could be palm or maybe coconut reached skyward before the craggy outline of a mountain jutted high into the air, dominating the island, its pinnacle hidden within the thick gray clouds that owned the sky.

A shrill cry of panic drew my attention back to the ocean. There! I saw the face of a young Asian woman about thirty feet to my left, her long black hair streaming all around her head just before she vanished beneath the surface. She popped up a second or two later, spluttering and spitting water. She yelled something in a language I didn’t understand before sinking again.

This time she didn’t resurface.

I swam quickly to her, and dived down, searching blindly, the water so murky I could barely see any further than my hands. I pulled myself deeper into the darkness, feeling for the woman. Nothing. With a kick, I propelled myself to the surface, sucked in air, and dove again… but the woman was gone.

By the time I surfaced for a third time, the fog had almost completely dissipated except for a few wisps, allowing me to see that I was not alone. There were more people in the water, many more, some splashing frantically, others treading water like me. Still others swam for the island. There had to be at least a hundred or more, stretched out in an arc that roughly followed the contour of the beach, as though we had all been deposited into the ocean in a neat line. Objects floated around them; baskets, hats, bits of wood, other things that were nothing more than indistinct blobs to my irritated eyes. I spotted a couple of horses heading for the safety of the island, one with a rider still seated in the saddle, another, riderless and panicked, foam bubbling from its nostrils and mouth as it fought its way up onto the beach and stood there, panting. I caught movement near where the riderless horse stood nervously pawing at the ground. The horse spotted it too, squealed in terror and galloped away in the opposite direction.

I gasped in astonishment as a figure, nine feet tall, humanoid in shape but definitely not human, rose up from the beach, sand and stones falling from its body, and strode down the beach toward the shoreline.

It was a machine, I realized as it got closer to the water… a freaking robot!

Two small electric-blue eyes sat on either side of a narrow, concave bar that floated unattached to the bump that was its head. A V-shaped torso tapered down to hips protruding almost as far from its body as its broad shoulders. A black triangular latticework or grill sat in the middle of the machine’s protruding convex chest. Two arms, made up of multiple flat oblong-shaped segments, swung at the machine’s side, each segment hinged in some unseen way to the next. Its legs were human-like, long with muscular metal thighs and calves, the illusion of humanity only ruined when I saw the robot’s feet; they were claw-like and articulated with six-joints on each of the three elongated ‘toes.’ A single, fourth spur jutted backward from each heel, kicking up gouts of shale with each step as the robot moved closer. Its body was either painted gold or was actually made of gold.

The golden robot reached the shoreline but did not stop; striding into the water, never faltering for a moment as it continued toward me, a wake trailing behind as its massive body pushed through the water to where I bobbed helplessly. Only as it drew closer to me did I realize it was speaking, repeating the same words over and over again like a stuck record: “Welcome, children of Earth. Do not be afraid… Welcome, children of Earth. Do not be afraid...”

Less than five feet separated us by the time the robot drew parallel to where I floated, gaping in shock and amazement and fear at this impossible creature.

“Welcome children of Earth. Do not be afraid,” it repeated, its eye-bar shifting left and right before facing forward again as it pushed further and further out. It vanished beneath the surface with only a ripple and a few bubbles to mark that it had ever been there at all.

As if a hidden switch had been thrown, the people still floating all around me simultaneously began screaming, their words and pleas merging into one incomprehensible voice. Exertion, shock, and the cold water had begun taking their toll. My muscles were starting to stiffen. If I didn’t try to get to the beach now, the chances were good that I’d end up like the unfortunate woman I’d tried to save.

I struck out for the beach, trying to conserve my dwindling energy. Others did the same, and by the time I pulled myself up onto the stony shore, shivering with the cold, arm and leg muscles spasming, twelve people had made it there before me. Eight men, the rest women, all with the same wide-eyed look of confusion in their eyes. One woman looked as though she’d stepped out of an eighteenth-century period drama, her long dress clinging to her body. Her auburn hair had been tied back in a bow, but it had come half-undone and flopped over her face. Another, a man this time, was dressed in robes, or maybe it was a toga. Another wore an expensive looking suit, and another some kind of military uniform. Others looked to be dressed in similar attire to my sweat-shirt and jeans, but there was something about the style that seemed dated to me, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.

While I lay there catching my breath, shivering hard now from the cold, two of the men I’d seen pull themselves from the water—and who I assumed must know each other—grabbed the woman dressed in the eighteenth-century attire and dragged her screaming up the beach toward the forest. Another man scrambled after them, yelling in a language I didn’t know. They disappeared into the trees before I could even find the energy to push myself to my knees.

Behind me, the others still struggled to make it to the island. Allowing myself ten seconds to gather my wits and energy, I forced myself to my feet and waded out into the surf.

Grabbing anyone I could find, I helped as many as I could ashore, depositing them one-by-one on the beach where they collapsed, feeble as half-drowned kittens. Some looked at me with obvious terror in their eyes but were too weak to resist my help, and I wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer. Others seemed grateful; obvious words of thanks spilling from their water-wrinkled lips. I thought I caught what could have been a couple of words in French mixed with a recognizable word or three of Spanish or Italian. But for the most part, their speech was unintelligible to me.

Then someone did yell in English.

To my right, about a hundred feet away, I spotted a small head bobbing in the water, raised hands waving in an attempt to catch someone, anyone’s attention. It was a young boy, twenty feet offshore and he was being dragged further out to sea.

Riptide.

Instead of allowing the riptide to carry him along until it dissipated, the boy was fighting it; trying to swim directly to shore. That was a sure way to quickly exhaust yourself and drown. A surge of adrenaline pumped through me, and I stumbled down the beach, pebbles crunching beneath my sneakers until I was parallel to him. I considered dumping my clothes but thought better of it. I waded out as far as I could, hoping I could simply grab his hand and pull him to shore, but by the time I got close enough, the boy floated face down in the water, ten feet still separating us.

The riptide tugged greedily at my legs. Instead of resisting, I allowed it to take me, relaxing as it pulled me out until I was parallel to the boy. Once within arm’s reach, I grabbed his still body by the collar of his jacket and flipped him over while I trod water.

He was no older than ten I guessed. I pulled him close and leaned in until my ear was against his lips; he was unconscious but still breathing, thank God. I maneuvered myself behind him, rolled onto my back, slipped my hand beneath his chin to keep his head above water and allowed the riptide to carry us further out. Eventually, I felt the grip of the riptide slacken, and I began to backstroke the two of us toward land.

My feet touched the shoal of the beach, and I heaved myself and the boy up into the surf as far as my weakened body was able. I collapsed, unable to move another inch as waves lapped at my elbows, lifting me gently from the ground then depositing me back down again. I flopped back, gasping like a fish, staring up at the leaden sky, my vision darkening as exhaustion overcame me. Muscles cramping, I closed my eyes and tried, again, to regulate my breathing, but my mind was racing uncontrollably as it tried to process the impossibility of everything that'd happened.

I heard footsteps crunching across the beach toward me. I opened my eyes and tried to push myself upright, but for the second time that day, my muscles refused to obey, and I simply lay there, unable to do a thing. My eyes closed again.

The footsteps stopped near my head.

My eyes fluttered open, and I found myself looking into the face of the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“Are you an angel?” I croaked, pain gripping me, squeezing me like an iron fist.

The angel looked down at me quizzically, her head canted to one side, her eyes narrowed while she processed what I'd just said. Then she laughed, a bubbly melodic laugh, and said something in a language that my addled mind could almost understand; words that were almost, but not quite, English. Her voice was sweet, intoxicating, like wine.

“Okay,” I said, “sounds good.” Then I closed my eyes again and slipped away into blissful unconsciousness.

Part Two

Children of Earth

Three

When I came to my senses, it was to the stinging smell of woodsmoke in my nostrils, the thrum of rain against leaves overhead… and darkness; a darkness only held at bay by a campfire that crackled and flared brightly a few feet from where I lay. The air was thick with moisture and the dank smell of rotting vegetation. My mind was a blur of incoherent thoughts. The last thing I remembered was… Oscar? No, that wasn’t right. I was on a bridge… there was… a voice...?

It all came roaring back to me: the double-barreled blast of soul-destroying news; the pall of depression that had possessed me; the bridge; the voice; falling; and then the events on the beach. The memories returned one after the other, each one like a punch to my gut.

I had no idea where I was or how I'd gotten to this forest. I knew I hadn’t lit the fire, which meant someone else must have. With that in mind, I forced myself to remain absolutely still and allowed my mind to work backward over my recollection of the events, trying to decide whether what I thought I remembered was what had actually taken place, or whether it was all just some kind of an awful dream. It had to have happened, I decided. It was all just too real.

I allowed my eyes to move slowly to the left then right, trying as surreptitiously as I could to get a better look at my surroundings. Whoever had made the fire knew what they were doing. A ring of large stones had been arranged in a rough circle, the branches and twigs used as fuel formed into a pyramid, tee-pee-like. The flames created a halo of orange illumination for about four feet around the fire before the absolute darkness beyond stopped it.

The ground was littered with twigs and bushes and a layer of wet leaves in various states of decay, and the trunks of several large trees were just visible within the perimeter of light, the largest one just a few feet away. Whoever had built the fire had managed to find a spot beneath its heavy boughs, the sprawling limbs giving enough protection that the rain I heard smacking above was funneled off to the left and the right, leaving the area around the fire quite dry.

Directly across from where I lay, on the opposite side of the fire, I saw the woman I had thought was an angel. She sat on a short rotting tree trunk, leaning forward, elbows placed against the top of her knees, the palms of her hands supporting her chin, her fingers pressed against the light brown skin of her cheeks. I thought she was looking at me, but after a few seconds had passed, I realized she was staring deep into the flames of the fire, lost in her own thoughts.

To the right of the angel was the young boy I’d pulled from the water. He sat cross-legged on the ground, his back against the dead tree trunk, also gazing into the fire. He had something in his hands that glinted in the light of the fire. They clinked together with a glass-against-glass sound as he absentmindedly transferred them from one hand to the other.

Near my feet, stretched out on his back next to the kid lay the body of a man who was either unconscious, asleep… or dead. That question was answered a few seconds later when he exhaled a deep groan of pain and grasped at his right arm resting across his chest. The arm was wrapped in a crude sling. He struggled to sit up and failed, then tried again, moaning loudly. With his good arm, he reached for a wide piece of torn material on his forehead. His pale face illuminated by the flames, I saw he had a nasty-looking ragged gash about five-inches-long running from just above his left eye, over his temple, stopping just below his hairline. Flakey, dried blood had caked around the wound, and a scab had already formed.

The angel jumped to her feet and moved to the man’s side. She was tall, around six feet. She wore a white blouse and matching skintight pants that accentuated her athletic figure but looked impossibly clean given we were in a rain-soaked forest. A voluminous cloak of the same white material reached down to just below the top of a pair of knee-high black boots. The inner lining of her cloak scintillated like Mother-of-Pearl in the firelight. The hood of the cloak was pulled down, revealing the long thick black braids of her shoulder-length hair and the finely cut features of her face, her mocha skin contrasting perfectly with the pure white clothing. High cheekbones, full lips, an aquiline nose, and a slim jawline gave her face a proud yet gentle look. But it was her eyes that truly held me: large and expressive, they seemed to glow with a deep ice-blue in the light of the fire. Thin purple strokes of what could be makeup but might just as easily be tattoos below and above each of her eyes only served to emphasize their intensity. She moved with an assuredness and grace, like a ballerina floating across a stage. She was, as I might have mentioned, the most stunningly beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.

The angel dropped to her knees beside the restless man, clasped his shoulders in her hands and gently eased him back down to the leafy ground. She murmured something to him I couldn’t hear, then picked up the makeshift-bandage he'd removed from his forehead. She dipped the bandage into what looked like a large clamshell filled with water, twisted it to wring it out, and placed the bandage back over the man’s head-wound. Her patient groaned then slipped back into unconsciousness, his chest rising and falling rapidly for several seconds before returning to a more natural rhythm. The angel hovered over the man until she seemed sure he wouldn’t try to sit up again, then pushed herself to her feet… and noticed me watching her.

The angel smiled and said something in the same beautiful language she had spoken on the beach. I still had no idea what language it was; couldn’t even take a guess at her accent, but that was okay because the tone of her voice conveyed her concern for me.

I smiled weakly back at her and tried to sit up.

Major mistake, and one I instantly regretted as my brain felt like it was being bounced around the inside of my skull. My vision swam violently, and I felt myself sway, as my sight grew misty. Muscles cramped like I’d just finished a five-hour workout, every joint throbbed. A headache pounded above my right eye, probably from dehydration judging by my chapped lips and swollen tongue. My stomach felt twisted and overflowing with nothing but bile. Above all of that, prowling through the hinterlands of my nervous system was the ravenous beast of my opioid withdrawal. It clawed at my mind and insides. Every cell of my body felt like it was alternately on fire or frozen. Every nerve-ending vibrated agonizingly. My body itched as though it was crawling with ants. A greasy sweat peppered my skin, and my mouth was as dry and rough as a sheet of sandpaper.

I need a fix, right now, the beast screamed at me, demanding I give it what it desired.

I’m ashamed to say that, at that moment, if I had been given the choice of saving the people collected around the campfire or downing a single pill of Oxy, I would have swallowed the pill in a heartbeat, never giving a thought to the well-being of my three companions. Shit, I would have sold my own soul for half a Percocet.

Now, please, don’t make the mistake of thinking I enjoyed being an addict. No, that would be the furthest thing from the truth. After the accident, I never asked for the pills. Was never warned of just how addictive they were. Jesus, until the crash that sent my life careening down this detour I’d never even tried marijuana. Before all of this, I’d known exactly where my life was going, had it all mapped out; I would graduate from law school, pass the California Bar Exam, get picked up by some big law firm, and work my way up the ranks. After five years or so, maybe I’d dip my toes into the political waters. If nothing got bit off, I’d aim for the DA’s office. Maybe higher.

This junkie version of me was something I had not planned on or for. It had been inflicted on me.

I turned on my side and vomited nothing but bile toward the fire. A few seconds later, I threw up again, which made the throbbing behind my eyes even worse. When I was done, I rolled over onto my back, gasping from the ferocity of the pain.

The kid got to his feet, a grossed-out grimace on his young face, and I felt a moment of shame at him seeing me this way. Even through the haze of pain and self-loathing, I registered that the boy was dressed in what I thought was a school uniform: gray pants, a light blue shirt made of some rough looking material, and a black, threadbare blazer. He was a skinny little thing; narrow faced, unruly brown hair, a larger-than-average nose, and hazel eyes.

“Is she alright?” the kid said, with a very British accent. I could still hear the quiet click-clack of whatever it was he was holding as he moved them from hand-to-hand.

The angel was halfway to where I lay squirming on the ground, she looked back over her shoulder at the kid, flashed him a smile and said something that sounded reassuring. The kid sat back down as though he'd understood her, but continued to stare at me with wide eyes, worry lines creasing his pale forehead.

Then the angel was kneeling next to me. This close to her, I could see just how perfect her features were. Most everyone I’ve met has some kind of blemish or scar or out of place feature when you get close enough to them, but there wasn’t a single mark on her skin. She picked up something from the ground near the roots of the tree we sheltered beneath. It was another shell that she had placed close enough to the tree to collect rainwater running off the bark. She leaned in close, gently placed a hand behind my neck, and raised my head, bringing the makeshift-cup to my mouth.

The water was cold and tasted slightly woody as it spilled over my lips, dripping onto the front of my sweatshirt. I drank deeply, gulping the liquid down. My throat unclenched, and I pulled my lips away momentarily to whisper a ‘thank you’ to the angel. She smiled, nodded, and lifted the cup back to my mouth. When I was finished, the angel lowered my head just as gently back to the leaf-covered ground. I felt better, enough that I tried to sit up again, slowly this time. The angel took both of my hands in hers to help me, easing me to a sitting position.

I grimaced in pain as my guts suddenly twisted, cramping violently as the beast gnawed and gnawed and gnawed away at my insides. I flopped back down again, trying hard not to throw up. The angel’s forehead creased in concern and she reached out and took my hand in one of hers, squeezing it gently while whispering what could only be words of comfort.

I tried to relax, to focus on the angel’s touch rather than the waves of pain. Eventually, as the pain eased, my eyes drifted away from her, to the thick trunk of the tree we sheltered beneath. The light from the fire illuminated enough of the trunk I could make out the lowest branches, about eight feet or so above the ground. Miniature rivers and tributaries of rainwater ran down the bark. The pitter, patter, pitter of random drops hitting the canopy was soothing, and I felt my anxiety begin to subside a little.

My eyes swam in and out of focus before fixing on something… well, I wasn’t quite sure what it was I was looking at. Two pinprick green dots of light glowed on the tree trunk, midway between the lowest branch and the one just above it, burning like tiny jade fires. I blinked a couple of times, not sure if what I was seeing was real or if maybe it was light from the campfire reflecting off rainwater as it ran down the trunk. I continued to watch, trying to focus my eyes on the lights. The two jade dots looked strangely out of place against the sinister backdrop of trees and darkness, sitting just within the penumbra of illumination cast by the fire, and I was sure they had not been there moments earlier… but the way my head was pounding and my sight fading in and out, I couldn’t be certain they hadn’t been there all along.

My heart jumped as, without warning, the lights moved. Just a couple of inches first, then after a few seconds, with a rapid spurt of movement, traveling down to the leaf-choked twist of roots at the base of the tree. They leaped the final foot or so onto the forest floor, vanishing momentarily into the detritus of leaves, before popping up again and moving quickly toward the dead log the angel had been sitting on. The lights disappeared behind the log. Both the boy and the angel were focused on me, so neither noticed the two little lights.

I tried to say something, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth, all my saliva having dried up. I chided myself to focus, but my mind was just too foggy, as another wave of nausea knotted my stomach. I managed to tilt my body on its side, so I wouldn’t choke, and heaved up most of the water the angel had just fed me. Rolling over, I saw the jade eyes (that was what I was convinced these things were now, eyes) reappear on the top of the dead log. They began to move slowly toward where the boy stood watching me. The eyes came to an abrupt stop. And as they did, I got an immediate and unshakable feeling that behind those two jade sparks, someone or something was watching us intently, surveying our little camp. Then the eyes were off again at twice their previous speed, leaping from the end of the log down to the forest floor, heading directly for the boy’s feet.

I managed to raise my hand from the floor and weakly point a limp finger in the direction of the eyes. “Look… out…” I mumbled.

Both the boy and the angel followed the direction my finger pointed. The boy’s mouth began to open in a yell of surprise as he saw the lights just a few inches from the heel of his shoe. He took a step away, but before his foot could even leave the ground, the angel was beside him, traveling the six or seven feet so quickly she became a blur. She swept him up with one arm while simultaneously reaching for something on the ground with the other. I had a moment to see the thick branch in her hand as she raised it over her head and smashed it down onto the two glowing eyes.

There was a popping sound followed by a hiss, and then the two lights flickered, dimmed and vanished.

Immediately, I began to question what I had just witnessed, because this woman I had thought of as an angel had crossed the space to the boy, grabbed him and the makeshift club, and dispatched whatever the eyes belonged to in what seemed like only a second. No one should be able to move that fast.

It must be me, my inner voice whispered, I’m not well. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’d be seeing things weirdly. Still...

The angel swung the boy to her left side, carrying him on her hip as though he were a toddler, before lowering him to the ground. The boy’s mouth hung wide open, either from fear or from awe at the way the angel had just dealt with whatever those eyes belonged to. This last choice seemed most likely given the look of admiration on his face, his eyes following the angel as she moved closer to where she had dealt her killing blow to the jade-eyed thing.

The angel dropped to her knees, prodded with her club at something I couldn’t see in the carpet of leaves. She reached down and picked that same something up with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, raised it to eye level and examined it closely for a few seconds, twisting whatever it was back and forth before finally dropping it into the palm of her other hand. She stepped closer to the fire to get a better view of what looked, to my strained eyes, like a shapeless lump lying on her hand.

“Can I see?” the boy said, stepping in closer to her… and let out a little gasp of astonishment. “What is it?” he whispered.

The angel’s eyes left the crushed object in her hand to look at the boy. She flashed him her dazzling, reassuring smile but didn’t say anything, just shook her head in what was an obvious gesture to convey I have no idea. She continued her examination for a few more seconds before coming around the fire to where I lay, followed closely by the boy. The angel lowered herself to the ground near my head and sat cross-legged. Slowly, she extended her open hand to me until it was a few inches from my eyes. Then she tilted her head inquisitively as if to say to me, You got any idea what this is?

I blinked several times in succession to try and clear the thin layer of mist blurring my vision. It didn’t help, so I reached out and pulled her hand closer, bringing it into focus. Now it was my turn to gasp. Resting in her upturned hand was what looked like a large bug—a stag beetle is the name that came to mind. It was about seven inches long, completely black, with six articulated legs, two of which still moved weakly, pedaling through the air in slow circles. The legs were attached to a carapace that was split in two, two delicate-looking wings lay just beneath the chitin covering. Two large compound-eyes sat on either side of a broad flat head from which extended a dangerous looking set of pincers that resembled the horns of a deer. It looked like any other bug for the most part. Except for the inch-long crack along the belly of the carapace. Instead of spilled goo and insect-guts, I saw tiny gears and pulleys and levers, all working in perfect synchrony, moving the two still functioning legs.

It was a machine!

A nightmare of a thought suddenly elbowed its way through my pain to the front of my befuddled mind; what if we were machines? What if whoever the voice on the bridge had belonged to had taken my soul, my essence, whatever you want to call it that makes me me and placed it in a new body, a mechanical body? Like the suicidal robot I’d seen on the beach. What if all my guts and innards had been replaced by cogs and wheels and pulleys and God-knows-what-else. I felt hot tears begin to roll down my cheeks as panic swept over me. My sudden emotional turn seemed to surprise the angel. She pulled her hand, and the mechanical beast it held away from me, moving it out sight as though that was the cause of my tears.

I realized she must think the dead robo-bug had scared me. But there was still enough of my brain functioning that I had already figured my panic was nothing more than the far-fetched imaginings of a paranoid brain and a body suffering through withdrawal. The unconscious man lying just a few feet away pretty much disproved my theory that we were anything other than human. The gash across his skull bled what was obviously real blood. Which meant he was human. And if some evil genius had decided to place my mind in an android’s body then why leave me with all this pain? Why not just give us new, perfectly functional robot-bodies, instead? No, this was definitely the same body I had before the voice had saved me from my own stupid half-hearted attempt at suicide.

I started to try to explain my idea to the angel and the boy, but before I could muster the strength to get the words out, the night sky exploded.

Four

All heads swiveled simultaneously toward the forest’s canopy. Bursts of red, green, blue, yellow, and every color in between cascaded through gaps in the branches above us. Flashes of color streaked across the sky, saturating everything in a kaleidoscope of shimmering hues, illuminating the heavens like the Aurora Borealis on steroids. It was a beautiful but disturbing light-show that gave no hint or clue as to what could be causing it. I saw from the confused expression on the angel’s face that she was as surprised as I was. The boy, on the other hand, seemed absolutely ecstatic at the incredible aerial show. He stood, face turned skyward, wide-eyed, mouth fixed in an ‘o,’ staring at the shimmering ribbons of color.

The aurora sliced through the darkness around us, pushing it away, painting everything with a surreal blast of color.

I noticed something even more curious floating through the air all around us; tiny motes of what I assumed to be dust. Not much bigger than a pinhead, these tiny particles glowed and pulsed with a small but intense white light of their own as they swirled slowly through the air.

If you’ve ever shaken a snow globe and watched the imitation snow swirl, it looked just like that. If the aurora hadn’t revealed them, I doubt any of us would ever have known they were there.

I inhaled a deep breath of air… and tightly shut my mouth again as I sucked several of the glowing particles into my mouth. A moment of fear followed as I wondered whether they might be dangerous before I realized that we must have been inhaling them from the second we arrived here. Certainly from the time the angel and the boy had brought me into the forest. It was, I reasoned, probably just some kind of particulate matter from the layer of rotting leaves and vegetation that was reflecting the light from the aurora somehow. But whatever these tiny motes of lights were, they were everywhere. The entire forest, for as far as I could see, glowed with their otherworldly presence. Even the branches and trunks of the trees were outlined by this weird glowing pixie dust. It lay in a thin layer all over the ground, too; a sparkling carpet of tiny white lights.

The boy shifted his feet as he moved to get a better look at the aurora, kicking a puff of the pixie dust into the air. He didn’t seem to have noticed its presence yet, his attention focused entirely on the small gap of sky visible through the forest’s canopy.

The angel, on the other hand, definitely saw them. She followed a single glowing mote as it traveled across the space between us. She raised one eyebrow when she saw me watching her watching it as if to say, ‘Well, this is weird.’ I was in the process of shrugging back my amazement in answer to her when a violent boom shattered the silence of the forest, shaking the ground and sending leaves spinning from their branches. I jumped in surprise. The boy yelped in shock, and the angel took a step backward, shaking her head as though she’d been slapped. At the same time, the aurora grew momentarily more intense, and I felt the strangest sensation pass through my body. It was like a low-voltage electric shock, mildly discomforting but not painful. It lasted for only a few seconds, but every muscle in my body jerked in response. I suddenly felt very warm, as though I’d developed a low-grade fever. Raising my hands to eye-level; I saw they were flushed red. Sweat popped on my forehead, my arms, my legs, and my breathing became very rapid as I gulped in huge lungfuls of air.

And then it was over as abruptly as it had started, melting away as though whatever God ruled this place had thrown its off switch.

Darkness hemmed in our little camp once more, held back only by the light of the campfire. The pixie dust continued to glow for a little longer before it too faded away, disappearing as though it had never been there, even though I knew it still must be, floating invisibly through the air.

The three of us remained silent and motionless for several long heartbeats. I think we all half-expected the sky to ignite again, but it didn’t. And as the shock of what had just happened began to fade, I realized the pain that had permeated my body was also gone, vanished, as though it had never been there.

I sat up, slowly.

There was none of the vertigo I’d experienced just a few minutes before the aurora. In fact, apart from a stomach that felt as empty as I knew it was, I felt… fine. Better than fine. I was… invigorated. Not even a creaky muscle from lying on the damp ground for so long. Tentatively, I got to my feet and stretched. Gone were the muscle aches and cramps. Gone was the sense of alternately being on fire and encased in ice. Gone was the knife-wielding headache, the nausea, the sweating. I took a few steps. The limp I’d had since the car crash, that was gone too. It was… miraculous and terrifying at the same time.

“Wow!” I said, quietly. “Wow!”

At the sound of my voice, the angel turned and looked at me, smiled, then said in perfect English, “Well, you’re certainly looking better.”

I blinked three times in quick succession.

The little boy stared, too. “I can understand you,” he said, matter-of-factly to the angel.

The angel froze mid-step. She turned to the boy, turned back to me. “And, apparently, I can understand you, too,” she said, enunciating each word slowly as though she was double-checking each of them as they left her lips.

We stared wide-eyed at each other.

“This is very… peculiar,” the angel said. “Until this moment, I have been unable to understand anything you have said. I recognize that your language is an old one, but there appears—"

Before I could ask what exactly she meant by ‘old,’ we were interrupted by the injured man who had been lying unconscious next to the fire.

He sat up, slowly shaking his head from side to side, as if waking from a deep sleep. The blood-stained bandage fell from his head into his lap.

I gasped: the ugly gash across his forehead I’d seen just minutes earlier had vanished, replaced by a thin line of fresh, pink skin where the wound had been.

The man blinked several times, squinted at each of us in turn, and said in a thick Midwest American accent, “Where the hell am I? And who in God’s name are you people?”

Five

We stood rooted to the spot; four strangers stunned into silence, the only sound the constant hiss of rain, each of us expecting—hoping—for the other to say something, anything.

When no one did, I spoke up.

“My name is Meredith Gale,” I told the man, “and these others are… well, you know, we haven’t actually been introduced.” I looked at the angel, raised my eyebrows questioningly.

The woman stared back at me, an odd expression on her face. It wasn’t so much a look of surprise, more like she recognized something when I told them my name.

“What?” I asked after a few seconds of her staring at me.

It took a couple more seconds before the angel answered me. As if she was carefully weighing her reply, she said, “My name is Weston Chou. I am—or rather, I was—the Security and Research Officer for the exploratory vessel Shining Way.” While her words were obviously English, Chou’s accent was still exotic and unrecognizable to me.

‘Security and Research Officer’ seemed like a particularly contrary mix for a job title, especially for someone who I assumed worked on some kind of a privately funded ocean-going research vessel. Or maybe she was part of a foreign navy, which would explain the strange accent. I didn’t mention any of this; my mind already had enough to think about, and I was trying to remain as present as I could, considering the utter weirdness of what had just happened.

The angel, or rather the woman who now said her name was Weston Chou looked to the boy. “And you, little one, what is your name?”

“I’m Albert,” the kid stuttered, “Albert Edward Glanville.” Then after a short pause, he added, “Schoolboy.” Albert nervously shifted the small objects he held from hand to hand, and now I saw they were glass marbles. He noticed me looking at them and held them out for me to inspect. They were larger than the ones I vaguely remembered owning as a child and quite lovely.

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

“You can have one if you like,” Albert said, sheepishly, holding all six on the palm of his extended hand.

“No, it’s okay, you keep them safe.” I tried not to smile but couldn’t help myself. The kid was just too cute. Between his obvious wide-eyed admiration of Chou and his English accent, well, he was just adorable.

The man nodded each time we identified ourselves, and when we were done, he stood there as if assessing us. “Okay, well that’s good. Now what I want—”

“And your name?” Chou interjected.

The man looked taken aback. “It’s Phillip. Phillip Yeoman. Where the hell am I?”

Chou said, “When we found you on the beach, you were unconscious. You had a broken arm and a head laceration, possibly some internal injuries. Albert and I did what we could to stabilize you. Moments ago there was an… event. That event appears to have healed your injuries.”

Phillip chewed his bottom lip. “Beach? I don’t remember any beach. I don’t remember anything at all after—” He stopped talking as though he had been on the verge of giving away some personal secret.

“When we arrived,” I said, “I saw stuff falling out of the sky around all the other people in the water. I think parts of the bridge I was on arrived here with me. Maybe you were hit by something heavy that came through with you. It’d explain the broken arm and head wound.”

“There are others?” Phillip said.

“Yes,” said Chou. “I estimate there were at least two-hundred others in the water upon our arrival.”

“Well, where are they now?” Phillip demanded.

I said, “They all panicked and ran away into the forest. It was pandemonium for a while.”

Phillip turned slowly, looking out into the darkness as if he expected to see some visual clue to where he… where we… were. “There’s no shelter nearby? No town? A village maybe? Nothing to tell us where we are?” he said. I presumed he was talking to us because he didn’t bother to turn and speak to us directly.

Chou smiled. “There was no time to inspect the area.”

“Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea if we looked for some shelter? We could be close to a town and not even know it,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at us. “And I’d prefer not to spend the rest of my night out here.”

“Without some form of portable illumination,” Chou said, her voice low, “anyone foolish enough to venture further into the woods will quickly become lost. And it was obvious when I carried you here from the beach that there is no shelter other than the trees within the immediate vicinity.”

Phillip turned to face Chou. “You carried me?” he said, condescendingly. “Look, lady, I’m thankful for your help, but I hardly think you’re capable of carrying someone my size more than a few feet.”

I have to admit, I found the idea a little farfetched too, at that point. Phillip was easily one-hundred-and-eighty pounds, maybe more. Chou was tall and obviously fit but couldn’t have weighed more than one-twenty. No way was she going to be able to carry a full-grown man too far.

“She did,” the boy, Albert, said. “I saw her pick you and Meredith up and carry you both here.”

Phillip didn’t look convinced. He stared at Chou for a few long moments.

Chou held his stare. She threw more twigs into the fire. It crackled and bloomed, sending sparks floating high into the canopy, reminding me of the pixie dust I’d seen earlier.

“Did you see the tiny lights during the…” I searched for the right word to describe the light show that had swept over us only minutes earlier, “…aurora?”

“I saw them,” Albert said excitedly. “They looked like tiny stars floating through the air.”

“Huh?” said Phillip. “Aurora? What lights?”

“You were still unconscious when it happened,” I said, and quickly explained what had occurred while he lay senseless, adding, “and when it was done, that’s when you woke up. Your head wound had vanished, and it looks like your broken arm has healed too. And I… well, let’s just say that I feel a lot better than I did when I arrived here.”

Albert said, “And we can understand each other now, as well.”

Phillip looked at the boy. “So, you’re saying that before this… aurora happened, none of you could understand each other?”

“Well, Albert and I could understand each other, but we couldn’t understand Chou, and she couldn’t understand us,” I said.

Phillip eyeballed me with such incredulity I wanted to punch him. “It’s true,” I said.

“Well, I certainly don’t intend to wait around here all night,” Phillip said eventually, his gaze moving over the darkened canopy of the forest. “Can’t even see the damn stars from here.” He turned back to Chou. “Which way is the beach?”

Chou pointed to her left. “That way. But if you’re thinking of leaving, I would advise you wait until the morning. We have no idea where we are or what’s in these woods.”

Phillip shook his head. “Well, as I said, lady, I have absolutely no intention of—”

We froze as a sound, half-snarl half-growl, echoed through the forest from somewhere close by.

“Is… is it a wolf?” Albert said, suddenly at my side, his two hands clasped tightly around the fingers of my left hand. I instinctively drew him closer to me.

“Maybe a coyote?” Phillip said quietly, though I knew from the tone of his voice he didn’t believe his own words.

Living all my life in California, I’d heard coyotes on an almost nightly basis, and whatever creature that bone-chilling snarl belonged to was most definitely not a coyote.

“Probably just an owl or… something,” I said, not wanting to scare the boy any more than he already was.

“Shhh!” said Phillip, “listen.” He took a quick step back as something large moved through the undergrowth beyond the light of the fire. “Jesus!” Phillip hissed. He stumbled backward, narrowly escaping falling into the fire.

“Quiet, all of you,” Chou whispered, staring into the darkness beyond the range of the fire as though she could see whatever was moving there. She picked up the heavy branch she had used to club the mechanical bug with, gripping it firmly in both hands. Not daring to move, we remained where we stood for several minutes, listening helplessly as the thing prowled through the darkness around the perimeter of our camp.

From somewhere even deeper in the inky blackness, the unmistakable sound of a woman’s high-pitched scream reached us. It was followed by a man’s panicked yell, his words unintelligible.

Our visitor gave a few short snorts that were quickly followed by the sound of it padding away through the underbrush, presumably drawn by the screams.

“It’s gone,” Chou said with certainty after another minute had passed.

Despite the sureness of her words, I wasn’t convinced the thing wouldn’t come back and said so.

Chou said, “I will stand watch and keep the fire burning all night. I believe that will keep it at bay. You should rest.”

Phillip, his face pale in the orange glow of the fire, turned and said, “I think you have a point about waiting until morning.” He grinned sheepishly, and I couldn’t help but smile back, relieving some of the fear I still felt.

“You should all try and sleep,” Chou announced. “Tomorrow, we should leave as soon as the sun rises. Whatever that creature was might be less fearful of us in the daylight, and we should find more defensible shelter as quickly as possible.”

Despite the myriad questions still clamoring for answers in my brain, I knew Chou was right. How we had all arrived here on this island was confusing enough, but the events of the past hour made everything before them pale into insignificance on the Weird-Event-O-Meter in my head. There was no guarantee any of these strangers knew any more about what was going on than I did.

The rush of adrenaline that had saturated my body began to fade, replaced by a growing exhaustion. I sat down close to the fire and watched my three companions.

Phillip didn’t seem like he was likely to slit my throat in the middle of the night, and Chou had been the one who saved all of us. We would all undoubtedly be alone or dead if she hadn’t shown up on the beach when she did. And little Albert? Well, he was just a scared kid.

“Come on over here,” I said, beckoning Albert. He did as he was asked and sat down beside me. “I won’t let anything hurt you,” I promised him. He laid down next to me with his back to the fire, one hand cushioned between his head and the now dry leaves surrounding the fire. I did the same, facing him. Over the next few minutes, I watched his eyes gradually close and the slow, intermittent flare of his nostrils as he succumbed to sleep.

Phillip sat with his back against the tree trunk. He pulled his windbreaker tightly around him and closed his eyes. It wasn’t long before he too was asleep.

Chou leaned against the log and stared deep into the campfire’s flames.

That was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed and I drifted away too.

Six

I woke with a start.

Albert still slept beside me, curled up in a tight ball like a kitten. The campfire burned weakly. A dull gray light permeated everywhere. Phillip lay asleep on his side just a few feet away, his back toward us. Chou stood off to the left, her cloak pulled tightly around her shoulders, looking out into the woods.

We'd made it to morning.

The rain had, thankfully, stopped, but the cloud-choked sky, visible through the treetops, was as dull and gray as the insipid light, painful to my eyes.

“Good morning,” I said quietly, hoping not to rouse Albert or Phillip.

Chou turned and smiled at me. “Hello. How are you feeling?”

“Good,” I said, shooting a weak smile in her direction. I actually felt much better than I had in, well, forever. My mind was surprisingly clear, free of its usual clutter. My muscles felt strong, energized like I’d spent a week on a beach somewhere rather than a few hours of sleep on a damp mattress of rotting leaves in the middle of an unknown forest.

Phillip suddenly sat bolt upright like he’d been pricked with a pin, making me gasp and jump. He looked left then right, as though he had no idea where he was. When he saw me and Chou, he relaxed a little.

“Wasn’t sure last night wasn’t just a bad dream,” he said. He pushed an unruly tongue of hair out of his eyes, scratched his head, then added, “Unfortunately, it wasn’t.”

I knew exactly what he meant. This was all so… out there. I mean, that didn’t even really begin to describe the events of the last twenty-four hours. But maybe today we would get some answers.

Phillip stood, stretched, then began to walk away from the camp.

“Where are you going?” Chou asked.

“I need to take a leak. That okay by you?” he said, before disappearing behind a tree. A cloud of steam appeared a few seconds later, and he exhaled a contented sigh.

“I’m hungry.” I turned to see Albert getting to his feet, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“Makes two of us,” Phillip said, rejoining us, wiping his hands on his windbreaker.

“Here,” said Chou. She handed each of us several large pieces of something woody-looking and white. “Coconut,” I exclaimed, taking a bite. “Oh my God, it’s delicious.”

“There’s water over there.” Chou pointed at the two conch shells full of water resting on top of the dead log.

“Where’d you get this?” Phillip asked, sniffing at the coconut.

Chou nodded back in the direction she had said the beach was.

“You snuck off while we were still asleep?” Phillip said.

“And snuck back. I have enough supplies for us for the next twenty-four-hours if we limit ourselves. There will be little time to waste today. We must find permanent shelter soon. We will not be able to survive long in these woods if the weather turns.”

“You mean we need to find a settlement or a village,” Phillip continued.

“I do not believe that we will find anything of the sort on this island,” Chou said.

“What? Why?” Phillip said between chewing pieces of his coconut.

“A suspicion, at this point,” Chou said. “But one which I believe will be proved correct.”

“Well, are you going to share?” Phillip said.

“Not yet. When I am certain, I will.”

I said, “No matter which of you is right, we can’t live on coconut and rainwater forever.”

“You are correct,” Chou said, “we need to find a water source and food, too.”

“I don’t expect we’re going to find a 7-11 anytime soon,” Phillip said gruffly.

“What’s a 7-11?” Albert asked.

I looked down at the kid, surprised he’d never heard of the favorite store of pot-heads and road-trippers and weekend drunks of all ages. But then, he was British, so I guess that would explain why. “It’s a store… a shop.”

Albert nodded as though he understood, but I wasn’t really convinced he did.

“Maybe we should head to the mountain?” I suggested, turning my attention back to Chou and Phillip. “If we can get above the forest’s canopy, we might be able to see where we are, or maybe we’ll spot signs of civilization. We should at least get a better idea of the size of the island.”

“I vote we head back to the beach,” Phillip said, matter-of-factly. “There will probably be rescue boats or planes or something looking for us.”

“I don’t think so,” Chou said.

“Don’t think we’ll be rescued or that we should head back to the beach?” Phillip said.

“Both,” said Chou. “Meredith’s idea is the better one. We do not know where we are or…” she paused as if she had been about to say something then thought better of it. “We should head to the mountain.”

I kicked dirt over the fire, extinguishing it.

“Are you ready?” Chou said to Albert, smiling and reaching out a hand for him to take.

The kid nodded enthusiastically and took hold of her hand.

“As I’ll ever be,” I said.

“Now wait just a damn moment,” Phillip blustered.

Chou walked away. “You may do as you wish Phillip Yeoman, but we are going this way.”

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Phillip stand his ground for a good ten seconds or so. Then he grumbled something under his breath and jogged after us.

* * *

We’d only walked about ten yards from the camp before Phillip stopped abruptly and said, “Holy sh...” He glanced at Albert, finishing his sentence with, “...Shmoly! Would you look at that.” He pointed down at the ground in front of him.

A set of tracks, paw prints to be exact, ran in an arc through the wet earth of the forest floor back in the direction of our camp.

“Were those made by our visitor last night?” I said.

“Undoubtedly,” said Chou.

I knelt and placed my hand inside one of the prints. It was easily four times the size of my hand and three times as deep. Big and heavy. The print showed the outline of four distinct toes, each with a deep indentation at the top of them, presumably from a claw.

“It must be huge? Do you think it was a bear?” I asked.

Chou didn’t respond, her head was on a swivel, turning left and right as she scanned the forest looking for any sign of whatever the prints belonged to.

“It’ll be a big son-of-a-bitch if it was,” Phillip said, his decorum momentarily lost.

Albert pushed closer. “Bears have five toes,” he said, “this one only has four.”

“Really?” I said.

Albert nodded enthusiastically, then added, “But tigers have four toes and a dew claw, like a dog’s, so the tracks might be a from a tiger.”

“Oh, that’s just great. That’s just freaking great.” Phillip turned rapidly from left to right, his eyes jumping up and down the trees as if he expected to spot the beast watching us. “So, we’re being stalked by a big cat? Freaking wonderful.”

“The tracks are heading away from us,” Chou said. “I don’t think whatever predator these belong to is still in the vicinity, but we shouldn’t test my theory. We should continue onward and place as much distance between us as quickly as possible.”

“Agreed,” Phillip said, for once not looking to argue. He took Albert’s hand in his and started off again.

The forest floor was mostly flat, apart from the occasional mound pushed up by the deep roots of the trees. Still, it wasn’t exactly easy going, winding our way through the tree trunks and brush, but we made decent time. There was no sign of any of the other humans who had arrived offshore with us. If it hadn’t been for the screams last night, I might have begun to doubt I’d seen anyone at all. But the forest was alive with life; birds of every size and color, odd-looking rat-like creatures that burrowed deep into the leafy forest floor when they sensed our approach or scampered up the trunks of trees. I even saw what I thought might have been a monkey high up in the branches overhead but it moved so quickly through the upper-canopy of the forest I couldn’t be sure.

We’d not taken more than two-dozen steps away from the prints before a large bird with breathtaking plumage exploded from a nearby bush with a clap of frantic wings, sending all of us a foot into the air in surprise.

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Albert said after he watched the bird fly up into one of the nearby trees.

“What doesn’t?” I asked.

“The trees are all wrong,” the boy said. “And the animals, too.”

Chou stopped and knelt before the boy. “Explain,” she said, gently.

“Well, that’s a California Redwood,” Albert said, pointing to a huge tree towering over everything else. He pointed at another growing just ten feet away from it. “And that’s a Manna Ash.” Then he pointed at another tree I’d assumed was just a run-of-the-mill conifer. “That’s a Mountain Hemlock. And there were coconut trees on the beach.” Albert walked over to a large bush and gently pulled off one of the long tongue-shaped leaves from it and brought it over to us. “And I think this is a Glossopteris.”

Phillip sighed, “So? So, what?” He turned to Chou. “Is there a point to this zoology lecture?”

“Dendrology,” Albert shot back. “Zoology is the study of animals.”

Phillip rolled his eyes and said, “You’re making my teeth itch, kid. How the hell do you know all this stuff, anyway?”

Albert smiled broadly, showing all of his less-than-perfectly-straight teeth. “Books,” he said. “I like to read.”

“Go on,” Chou encouraged, a smile forming on her lips; not condescending, but one a teacher might use when a pupil has finally grasped a concept that had eluded them.

“Well, that bird we saw just now, I think it might have been a Monal, and I definitely saw a Leithia running up a tree.”

Chou didn’t take her eyes off the boy. “Tell us, why this is important,” she whispered.

“Most of these trees, and I don’t recognize all of them, they shouldn’t be growing together at all, especially not in this climate. They all come from very different ecologies around the world; cold, hot, humid. They shouldn’t thrive here, not together.”

“At the risk of sounding like I’m repeating myself,” said Phillip, “So, what?”

Albert’s cheeks grew red at the older man’s dismissive tone, but Phillip saw the daggers I was sending him, and some of the condescension evaporated. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just a guy who was under a shit-ton of stress and wasn’t handling it quite as well as the rest of us.

“Sorry,” Phillip said, throwing a pained smile at the boy, and ruffling his hair gently. “Tell us the rest.”

“And this,” Albert said, holding up the leaf he’d just pulled from the bush, “is a leaf from a Glossopteris.”

“Okay,” Phillip shrugged.

“It went extinct during the Great Permian Extinction. And the bird we saw, I think it was a Himalayan Monal which lives in Nepal and shouldn’t be here.”

“And what about that other thing? What did you call it, a Leika?” I asked.

“A Leithia. A giant dormouse; it’s extinct, too.”

Phillip took a step backward. “So, just let me see if I’ve got this straight? You’re telling me that we’re walking in a forest full of impossible trees, filled with bushes and animals that went extinct before man even walked the Earth? Oh, and did I forget to mention the thing that was apparently looking to add us to its meal plan last night?”

“Yes,” said Albert, smiling happily.

Phillip gave the boy a confused stare for about three seconds, then shook his head and turned back to Chou. “What if the kid’s wrong?” he said.

“He’s not,” Chou said.

“But what if he is?” Phillip insisted.

“He’s not,” Chou repeated.

“No sense. This makes absolutely no damn sense at all,” Phillip muttered and began walking again.

As the day wore on, the meager afternoon daylight grew even weaker, and it became apparent we would not even reach the foot of the mountain by the time darkness came around again. Although there was no way to accurately measure how far we'd walked or how far we still had left to travel, Albert was convinced we must be getting close.

“The ground’s been slowly rising for a while now. It’s getting steeper, so we must be close to the mountain.”

“We should make camp soon, then,” Chou said, “before it gets dark. We will strike out again in the morning.”

“No argument from me,” I said.

“Or me,” said Phillip, and with that, he leaned his back against the trunk of a nearby tree and allowed himself to slide slowly down it until he was in a sitting position. “Wish I had a damn cigarette,” he mumbled as he patted the pockets of his jacket. “Damn lighter’s vanished, too.”

Albert gave a little gasp and reached into his pants’ pocket. He pulled out a silver-colored Zippo lighter and held it out to Phillip. “It fell out of your pocket when Chou was carrying you to the forest.”

Phillip reached out and took the lighter from the boy’s hand. “Thanks, kid. Don’t suppose you have my cigarettes in there, too, by any chance?”

Albert shook his head.

Phillip sighed, then, with practiced ease, began to rapidly flip the lighter’s lid open then closed. “Weird thing is, I’ve smoked since I was fifteen, but today I don’t even really want one.”

“Those things would have killed you anyway,” I said, wondering if his tobacco addiction had been cured just like my pain-killer addiction had.

“Bit late for that, sweetheart,” Phillip replied. “Truth is, I think it might be a bit late for all of us.”

* * *

We gathered dry wood and stacked it at the foot of a tree whose wide branches and dense leaves we would spend the night beneath. It would provide cover if the cloud-packed sky made good on its threat of more rain.

Albert got on his knees and swept away leaves with his hand until he exposed the fertile soil beneath. He quickly gathered together a pile of small pieces of wood and dry leaves, then topped it off with a pyramid of larger twigs. Phillip handed him his Zippo, and the boy used it to ignite the kindling, then blew gently into the kindling, encouraging the flames until they bloomed and ignited the larger sticks.

“You are such a cool kid, Albert,” I said.

He looked up at me, confusion on his face. “Now we have the fire none of us will be cold,” he said.

I glanced across at Phillip who simply raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“No, I mean you’re cool… you know, never mind.”

Albert went to hand the lighter back to Phillip.

“You know what, Meredith’s right,” said Phillip, “you are a very cool kid. You keep it.”

The little boy beamed as though he had been handed a pound of gold, threw his arms around a surprised Phillip, hugged him then headed over to where he had set aside four long, straight branches. He brought the branches to the base of the tree, sat in the natural pocket made by its roots, and began to carefully examine them.

“You’ll poke your eye out with those things if you’re not careful,” Phillip said, then added, “Hey, where’d you get that from?” when he caught the glint of a small blade, about three inches long in Albert’s other hand.

“It’s mine,” said the boy, as if one of us might try to take it from him.

“Don’t worry,” I called to him, “it’s okay. Just be careful with it.”

I followed Albert out of the corner of my eye as he used the knife to strip away the bark from each of the branches, exposing the soft virgin wood beneath. He used the knife to whittle the end of each branch into a sharp point, then, one after the other, he placed the sharpened end into the embers around the edge of the fire.

I observed him in silence, fascinated by what the kid was doing.

“The fire hardens the tip of the spear,” Albert said, as he pulled the first branch out of the embers. “See?”

The tip of the branch had turned black. Smoke rose slowly from it into the evening air.

“We’ll take your word for it,” said Phillip, but I could tell he was impressed by Albert’s knowledge. “Where’d you learn to do that, anyway?” he added. “Wait, don’t tell me… books.”

Albert nodded enthusiastically. “I like to read. Here.” He handed the sharpened branch to Phillip. “It’s a spear. We can use it for hunting and spear-fishing.”

“That is one hell of a pig-sticker,” said Phillip, no longer trying to hide how impressed he was with the kid’s handiwork. He flicked the spear’s tip with the nail of his thumb and nodded as if it had passed some kind of inspection.

Albert handed Chou and me a spear each.

“Thank you,” said Chou. “We do not know what other predators live in these woods. This will offer us a modicum of protection. You have done well, Albert.”

Albert glowed at Chou’s praise. “I can make bows and arrows, too,” he offered, as if it was something he did every day, which, for all I knew, he did. “But that will take a bit longer, and I’ll need special materials.”

Night had closed in fast while we watched Albert work; shadows crawled almost imperceptibly between the tree trunks until, finally, all that remained visible of the world was contained once again in the protective orange ring of light extending out from the campfire.

“We will need to post guards tonight,” said Chou. “I will take the first watch. Phillip, will you take second?”

Phillip nodded, still inspecting the spear—which I think had relieved some of his feelings of vulnerability.

“And you, Meredith, would you take the third watch?” Chou asked.

“Of course,” I said. I’m a naturally early riser, so getting up a few hours earlier than normal wouldn’t affect my energy much. I mean, I’d barely gotten any rest last night and my energy and focus had been better today than they'd been in years.

We gathered closer to the fire and silently watched the flames for a while. Over the crackle of the burning wood, I heard things moving in the woods: strange animal calls echoing around us, the rustle of leaves and branches in the trees as things crept from limb to limb, the scratch of claws on tree bark.

“I didn’t notice how alive the forest was last night,” I said.

“Well, we were kind of preoccupied, but it’s a whole other world out here,” Phillip answered.

I caught Chou’s gaze move in Phillip’s direction, as if he’d said something deeply profound, but she said nothing, just continued eating the last of her coconut ration.

Phillip must have sensed the weight of her attention too because he said, “So, come on Chou. You’ve hinted all day that you’ve got some kind of a theory about all of this. You’ve obviously been chewing it over since we arrived. You going to share your insights about what the hell you think is going on here?”

Chou looked up slowly, her gaze moving from me to Albert to Phillip. She paused as if she was still considering whether to speak, words poised on her lips, then said, “Tell me, Phillip Yeoman, what language do you speak?”

We all looked at her a little oddly. It was perfectly obvious to the rest of us what language he was speaking.

“English,” Phillip said slowly, as though he’d been asked a trick question. “But then I assume you already know that as—”

“And what year were you born?” Chou said, with that same soft tone.

“My birthday? Look, I really don’t know what any of these questions have to do with—”

“Please, answer my question,” Chou insisted.

Phillip bristled. He outweighed Chou by a good fifty pounds, was in decent shape, and Albert’s gift of the spear seemed to have returned some of his earlier arrogance. But there was just something about Chou’s bearing that screamed that it would be the biggest mistake of his life to screw with her. Phillip must've sensed that too, because he answered her, albeit grudgingly. “October 30th, 1966.”

Albert reacted like he’d been slapped hard, his head whipping first to Phillip then back to Chou. And I understood why—or thought I did, at least. Phillip Yeoman looked to be no more than a couple of years older than me. I’m twenty-seven, and there was no way he could have been more than thirty-five, tops. And yet I was born on August 7th, 1990. Which meant Phillip was twenty-four years older than me. That put him around fifty-two.

“You’ve got to be joking,” I blurted out, unable to contain my surprise. “Whatever exercise program you’re on, you have to let me in on it.” I laughed briefly at my sad little joke.

Phillip just looked at me oddly. “What are you blathering about?” he said.

Before I could answer, Chou said “And that would make you how old… precisely?”

Phillip sighed as though he were answering an imbecile. “I’ll be thirty-three this coming October.” He must have seen the look of disbelief on my face because he added almost slyly, “Why?”

Chou ignored his question, turning her attention to me. “And you, Meredith; when were you born?”

I gulped, my mouth suddenly dry, then told her my birthdate.

Now it was Phillip’s turn to be taken aback. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “look at you! You look like you’re the same age as me. You should just be a child, younger than Albert even. It’d be impossible for you to—”

Chou cut him off again. “And you, Albert. When were you born?” her voice was now soft, comforting.

We all turned to look at the boy who suddenly seemed very vulnerable and confused under the weight of our combined gazes.

“I don’t… I… I,” Albert stuttered.

I walked the four steps to his side, sat and placed an arm around his shoulder. I squeezed him gently. “It’s okay, kiddo,” I said. “Take your time.”

Albert drew in a deep breath. “I… I’m twelve years old. I was born on January 5th, 1898.”

Phillip jumped to his feet and stared at Albert.

I did the math quickly in my head. That would make him around… one-hundred-nineteen years old. I’ve changed my mind, I thought, I need whatever diet the kid’s on.

Phillip finally found his voice. “That’s just… I mean… no way. Just no way. Is this a joke?” he hissed. He sat back down again and stared into the flames, not pressing for an answer.

“And what about you?” I asked Chou. “When were you born?”

Chou turned her ice-blue eyes in my direction. “I was born in March of 2253. When I entered stasis, I was almost one-hundred-and-twenty-two years old.”

Phillip’s head lifted momentarily from the flames to look at her then drifted slowly back again.

Albert started to quietly cry.

I blinked hard, several times. But you want to hear something weird? I absolutely, unequivocally believed her. Believed all three of them. Because, unless these people were professional actors, there was no way they could come up with such outrageous fabrications and deliver them so believably. No damn way! And when I took into consideration everything else that'd happened since that strange voice had asked if I wanted to be saved, well, there was no doubt in my mind that I had wandered so far off the normal path I’d taken up permanent residence in the Twilight Zone. And everything that had happened since the Bay Bridge had begun with that question: Do you wish to be saved?

A question of my own burst in my mind like a firework.

“Hey,” I said. “Right before we ended up… wherever this place is, did any of you hear a voice? Did it ask you a question?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to ask it before.

“How did you know that?” said Phillip.

Chou nodded slowly. “Yes, I did.”

Albert said, “A voice asked me if I wanted to live.”

I turned to Phillip, trying to frame the question I had in my head as succinctly as possible. “Can you tell me what led up to the voice talking to you?”

For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer, his gaze already focused deep into the fire again, but he pulled his eyes away and spoke.

“I was on a sabbatical. Truth is, I hadn’t been able to write a thing in over a year. So, I decided to leave Los Angeles and head to Argentina for a road-trip. Just something to try and grease the cogs again.” He tapped two fingers of his left hand against the side of his temple.

“You’re a writer?” I asked.

He nodded. “Author. I left my son in my ex-wife’s not-so-capable hands for six weeks, pocketed my passport and hopped on a plane to Bolivia. About a month later, I’d made it to Argentina, and I was heading through the Los Glaciares National Park, remotest damn place I’ve ever seen. Beautiful. Cold. Snow and ice everywhere. I think I hit a patch of black ice, lost control of the rental car, headed off the road and took a nosedive into an ice lake.” He paused for several moments as he recalled what happened next. “Everything seemed to… I don’t know… slow down, like when you put a video-recorder on slow-mo.” Phillip took a deep breath. “Then a voice came over the radio just as the car was about to hit the water. It spoke to me by name. Told me I was about to die. It started to tell me all these things about my life, personal things, things no one else could have possibly known about me, not even my family. It said my body would never be found. And then it asked me again if I wanted to live, yes or no? I said ‘yes.’” His voice trailed off.

“I’m… sorry,” I said, lost for words.

Phillip shrugged. “Don’t be. At some point, I’m going to wake up and find out this is all a bad dream. Right?” He gave me a half-hearted smile. “I just hope my boy’s okay.”

Turning to face Chou, I asked, “What about you, Chou? What’s your story?”

“I had been placed in deep suspension onboard the Shining Way. Several years into our mission, my husband alerted me that he had detected a catastrophic problem with the ship. He woke me to help assess the situation. There had been some kind of malfunction with the life support system, and it was only a matter of hours before the ship’s atmosphere would be exhausted, and I would die. We were still over a million light-years from our destination when the—”

“Wait a second. Wait just a damn second,” said Phillip, interrupting her. “Life support? A million light-years? You’re telling us you were on a spaceship?”

“Have I not made that fact obvious?” Chou asked. “Yes, the Shining Way is an interstellar research vessel. Our mission was to reach and study an area of dead space. We would spend an estimated eight years there before returning to Earth with the information we gathered. But I suspect that our mission may have been sabotaged. There were factions back on Earth who did not believe fully in the mission. A failure of our ship’s system was close to impossible. Outside interference is the only other possibility. Either way, there was nothing that could be done. I was doomed.”

“You were doomed?” I said. “But you said your husband was on the Shining Way with you, too. What about him?”

Chou’s head tilted slightly toward her shoulder, as though I was asking her the strangest of questions. “Ah, of course,” she said, “the bonding of human and non-corporeal intelligences is not yet possible, let alone legal, in your times.”

“Wait,” I said, “you’re telling me your husband was… an artificial intelligence?”

“A Non-Corporeal Intelligence,” she insisted. “For our mission, my husband was, for all intents and purposes, the Shining Way. His personality once merged into the ship’s system core would allow him to pilot and control the ship while I, upon reaching our destination, would carry out all of the required scientific experiments.”

Everything Chou had just said should be completely unbelievable. And yet, I believed her. And if she really was from three-hundred and fifty years into my future, it also explained why her language had been so utterly unrecognizable to me.

“A few seconds before the atmosphere became unsustainable, my husband asked if I wanted to live. Confused, I said of course I did. My next memory was plunging into the ocean off-shore of this island.”

Phillip seemed overwhelmed by everything he had just heard. I decided to shift the topic back to him.

“You said you were an author,” I said, touching Phillip on the forearm. “Write anything famous?”

Phillip nodded slowly. “I wrote Last Stand at the Maple Leaf Lodge.” He delivered the line as if that would explain everything I needed to know.

“Don’t know it,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Really? You’ve never heard of it?”

He seemed quite taken aback, bordering on hurt.

“It was on the New York Times bestseller list for like twenty months. Have you been living under a stone?”

I know writers have fragile egos, but his reaction seemed a little much. He continued, “They made a movie out of it that won three freaking Oscars. Jeff Daniels played Lazlo. He said it was his defining role. You never heard of it? Really?”

“When was the book published?” I asked.

“1994. The movie was released in ’96.”

I shrugged. “Sorry.” And even though it wasn’t true, I added, “But then I’m not much of a reader.” Still, it did seem weird that the book’s title didn’t ring any kind of a bell with me. And while I did like to read, I loved to watch movies, especially old movies from the eighties and nineties, so I was sure I would have remembered Last Stand at the Maple Leaf Lodge; especially if it had really won as many Oscars as he said it had.

Phillip turned his head toward me. “What about you? What’s your story?”

“Suicide,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I got some bad news, and I was dealing with some personal problems, so I decided to jump from the Bay Bridge into the San Francisco Bay.”

I welcomed the momentary silence that descended over us. It allowed me a few seconds for all the new information to sink in. Then I said, “So, what seems perfectly obvious to me is that we were moments away from dying when the voice contacted us. What we don’t know, is who the voice belongs to and why they chose us.”

No one appeared to have an answer to that question, so we retreated into silence. Chou placed a couple of branches into the fire. The wood, still damp from the rain, hissed and spat, but eventually caught and the flames rose higher. The warmth was welcome, comforting.

“I believe,” said Chou, eventually, her eyes still staring deep into the flames of the campfire, “that whoever has brought us here did so for a very specific purpose. An intelligence capable of plucking each of us from our own specific time, depositing us together at this same point in time, must have access to incredibly advanced technology. The energy required to move just one person must be incredible, but to move the several hundred I saw arrive on the beach with us would require access to massive stores of energy. And if the people on this island are not the only ones that have been brought here…” She allowed her words to fall away.

I got the impression Chou was talking more to herself than us, and though I had questions, I didn’t want to break her train of thought to ask if she’d also seen the distant continent the day we first arrived. Or the huge structure towering over it.

Chou continued. “Energy so immense it could only come from…” Her words faded again as her eyes drifted skyward, they lingered there before returning to the fire.

“But who on earth would be able to do something like that?” I said when I judged she was open to questions.

“Who said anything about the voice being from Earth?” said Phillip. “Maybe it was aliens.”

Chou looked at him. “In my time, we have established colonies in many of the nearest star systems, explored even further than that. But we have never encountered or seen any evidence to suggest there is any alien presence elsewhere in our sector of the galaxy. The likelihood of aliens being responsible for this, seems… improbable. Although it cannot be ruled out completely.”

“Well, if it’s not aliens, then who is it?” Phillip sounded put out that Chou had shot down his idea so quickly.

“I don’t know,” Chou admitted.

“So, then it could be aliens.”

Chou smiled slightly, “Yes, Phillip, I suppose it could be aliens.”

Her acceptance of the possibility was enough of a victory for Phillip. He quietened and went back to staring into the campfire.

“But why would they bring us here? And where on Earth is here exactly?” I said.

“How do you know we’re on Earth?” Albert said quietly as if the question might get him into trouble.

We all stared at him.

It hadn’t even crossed my mind that whatever intelligence had transported us through time might also have the ability to move us through space, too. And judging by the look on Phillip and Chou’s faces, neither had they.

“That is a very astute observation,” said Chou. She flashed him one of her smiles, and he instantly beamed with pride. “And one I should have thought of, considering how far away from Earth I was at the time of my… translocation. You are correct, Albert. Currently, we have no way of ascertaining exactly where we are. The storm and the forest canopy have obscured our view of the sky; hopefully, when we reach the mountain, I will have a clear view of the stars and be able to make a judgment as to our location.”

Chou got to her feet and stepped closer to the trunk of the tree we sheltered beneath. She ran her fingers over its crenelated bark.

“Having said that, this tree appears to be an oak. And as you have already pointed out, Albert, the forest is full of trees and animals that originated on Earth. That data alone suggests that we are still on earth.”

“But,” said Albert, apparently unwilling to let go of his position within the discussion, “couldn’t the…” He paused, searching for the right word. “…couldn’t the force that brought us here also have brought the trees and animals too?”

Phillip nodded, enthusiastically.

Chou remained unconvinced. “Again, the amount of energy required to bring just us here would be—”

“And yet, here we are,” I said, interrupting her.

Chou turned to me, the edges of her mouth betraying a slight smile. “Yes, Meredith, here we all are, indeed.”

“If our assumptions are correct,” Chou continued, “and we were brought here for a reason, I would expect there to be some form of sustenance easily accessible to us. But, I would also have anticipated a more… welcoming arrival. It does not make sense for us to be dropped here with no access to food or water or shelter.”

I leaned forward. “But if whoever’s controlling all of this really had our best interests at heart, why drop us so far offshore of the island? I saw at least one person drown.”

Chou pondered the question. “I do not know,” she said eventually. “As I have already stated, I would have expected a more accommodating reception on our arrival. However, I do agree that it does run contrary to the theory that there is a structured plan behind all of this.”

Albert spoke up again. This time his voice was quiet, frightened. “Maybe we aren’t really alive,” he said. “Maybe we are all dead, and this is hell.”

“Do you see any demons, kid?” said Phillip, sarcastically.

“Well… well, maybe this is purgatory, then. Hot tears began to fall down the kid’s cheeks.

I put my arm back around Albert’s shoulders and pulled him closer to me again. “It’s okay, kid.”

Chou continued. “I do not believe that this place is either ‘hell’ or ‘purgatory.’ While whatever or whoever is behind these events has what we would conclude to be god-like powers, that does not mean that they are a god. No, I am confident that the explanation for this lies somewhere other than ancient extinct religions.”

Albert seemed unsure of what to say to that, so I said, “Hey, listen. Why don’t you tell us about how you got here? Can you do that?”

The boy looked up at me, his eyes, glassy, distant. “There was a fire at my boarding school,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I… I was trapped in my room, and I couldn’t get out. And the fire got closer and closer, then—”

Before Albert could finish his sentence, Chou jumped to her feet. “Quiet!” she hissed.

“What’s happening?” Albert whispered.

I answered by pulling him closer to me. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly erect.

“Something’s not right,” said Chou, rising slowly to her feet.

She was correct; the forest had fallen suddenly and completely silent.

Phillip started to say something then his mouth sprung shut with an audible cracking of teeth as somewhere nearby, the same terrifying snarl we had heard the night before bellowed from out of the darkness.

“It’s close,” Phillip said, slowly turning on his heels.

“Look out!” I screamed, as a shadow suddenly exploded from the greater darkness and catapulted itself at Chou. I kicked my heels into the ground, pushing myself backward, dragging Albert with me by the collar of his shirt.

In what seemed like slow-motion and with the kind of high-definition detail only a mind drenched with adrenaline and fear could coolly observe, I watched a huge creature, all fangs and claws, leap over the fire.

I estimated Phillip was at least six feet tall, probably closer to six-two or six-three. This thing was three-feet longer than him, and that didn’t even take into account its tail. It resembled a tiger with the same orangish coloring as tigers I’d seen on a visit to the LA Zoo, but its fur was longer, more like a Husky’s, as though it had evolved to live in colder climates. Its fur was covered in black stripes and mottled with black and brown patches, similar to a leopard’s. Its paws were as big as Chou’s head, and the four toes on each foot ended in a claw that I had no doubt could rip us open like we were nothing more than a wet paper bag. And its head… its head was huge. Spittle flecked from between the gaping jaws, which looked more than capable of swallowing all four of our heads at once. Its eyes burned with a merciless intensity and the cold cunning intelligence of an apex predator. But it was the two huge incisors that curved downward from its upper jaw to below its lower jaw that really set it apart from any other big cat I’d ever seen.

If the tiger-thing had aimed for anyone else but Chou, it would have easily sunk those teeth and claws into its intended victim and carried them off into the night.

Chou, however, was something else entirely.

She leaped right, her cloak billowing around her as a monstrous paw swooped through the empty space she had momentarily occupied. The tiger-thing hit the ground, kicking up leaves. It turned to look back at us, yellow eyes flashing in the firelight, snarling as it repositioned itself to face us.

I felt Albert’s grip on me tighten. The boy was attached to my side as though he were a new limb, his arms wrapped around my waist. I looked down. He was pale as a ghost, his eyes fixed on the tiger-thing. He whispered something, over and over.

I leaned down to hear him.

“Smilodon’s are thought to have had excellent night vision and to be able to see up to six times better than humans. They could grow to weigh up to eight-hundred pounds or more,” he mumbled, the words coming out so fast I could barely process them. “Popularly known as a sabre-tooth tiger, the smilodon is not truly related to any modern big cat and evolved from a separate genus.” He was obviously reciting the words directly from memory, perhaps as some kind of nervous reaction.

“Shhh!” I whispered and placed my hand gently over the boy’s mouth.

Phillip seemed stunned, his limbs frozen in mid-motion, trapped by the hypnotic, monstrous eyes of the big cat. He too was mumbling something under his breath, and I strained to catch what it was: “Good kitty. Nice kitty,” he whispered over and over.

The monstrous cat seemed conflicted. It had four targets to choose from and seemed quite happy to take its time in deciding which of us it was going to make a meal of first.

Chou seized on its indecision and reached blindly for one of the spears Albert had made earlier, lying close to the fire, her eyes never leaving the creature. Her fingers found the spear’s shaft, and she dragged it to her. The weapon looked almost comically toy-like compared to the thousand-pounds of muscle, sinew, claws, and teeth she was facing down. But there was nothing childlike about the pose Chou struck, placing herself directly between us and the tiger… between us and the sabre-tooth freaking tiger. She crouched low, her feet set in a wide stance, the spear thrust out in front of her.

Chou took a step toward the tiger. Then another. And another.

The sabre-tooth squared its body to Chou and roared, its mouth so wide I saw past the rows of teeth into its black maw.

Chou appeared unfazed. She advanced another step then thrust the spear at the sabre-tooth’s head. It batted at it with one of its huge paws, but Chou was too quick for it. She dropped the tip of the spear then thrust upward just as the cat’s paw passed above it.

The sabre-tooth yelped in pain and surprise as the hardened tip of the spear penetrated the paw. Blood dripped from the puncture wound, but rather than dissuade it Chou’s attack only seemed to enrage it. Its attention now fully focused on Chou, the giant cat lunged forward, trying to snag the spear in its bear-trap jaws. Again, Chou’s reactions were faster, she pulled the spear back so the sabre-tooth’s jaws locked on empty space, then thrust forward with a deep lunge, aiming for the cat’s left eye. But the sabre-tooth anticipated the attack, it dodged its head to the right, avoiding being blinded but not fast enough to completely avoid injury. The hardened tip penetrated its left ear, pushing all the way through to the other side of it.

The saber-tooth bellowed, wrenching its head away which caused the spear to rip through its ear, slicing it open in the process, leaving a ragged bloody tear. Now the creature roared in real pain.

“I think you’re just pissing it off,” Phillip hissed. He was moving again and had grabbed his own spear which he now held out in front of him like Chou. He swallowed hard and moved quickly to Chou’s side.

The sabre-tooth took a step backward. Its eyes had lost some of their confidence. It batted at its head, then backed up another step. Perhaps it was the injured ear, or maybe it was the fact that there were now two of these pesky two-legged creatures willing to do it harm; either way, the promise of an easy meal had turned out to be a lie, and I saw the confidence leave its eyes.

“Yahhhhh!” Phillip suddenly screamed. He leaped forward, thrusting the point of his spear ahead of him in quick short jabs.

Chou jerked, almost as surprised as the sabre-tooth at Phillip’s strategy… but it worked. With a final snarl, the cat turned and leaped behind a tree, then sprinted away.

Phillip, panting hard, watched it disappear into the darkness.

Silence descended again over the camp.

* * *

The buzz and drone of the forest’s nightlife slowly returned.

Phillip slumped onto his butt, buried the tip of his spear into the ground, wrapped his hands around its shaft and leaned his forehead against his knuckles. “Jesus! Did we really survive that… that…”

“Smilodon,” said Albert, peeking from behind my midriff.

“Sabre-toothed tiger,” I said, then repeated it, more to convince myself than anyone else. If there had been any doubt in my mind up to then that we were somewhere very, very strange, the past four minutes had completely removed it. I looked down at my hands. They were covered in minor nicks, cuts, and grazes from pushing through bushes and climbing over trees, but they weren’t shaking. Which also surprised me, because inside I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a rocking chair store.

Chou took a knee in front of Phillip. “Are you hurt?”

He looked up and, surprisingly, smiled. “No, no. I’m fine. As stupid as it sounds, I actually feel more alive than I have in forever.”

Chou smiled back and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You were very brave,” she said.

Phillip released one hand from his spear and covered Chou’s with it. “I wouldn’t go that far, but thank you.” He glanced in my direction. “Are you and the boy okay?”

“I’m good,” I said and looked down at Albert. Slowly, ever so slowly, he was releasing me from his death grip. He took a step away from me, then one toward Chou and Phillip.

“You alright, kiddo?” Phillip asked.

Albert nodded. “That was frightening.”

“Yes, yes it was,” said Phillip.

“Will it come back?” Albert asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Chou. “I think it has learned its les—”

Before Chou could finish the forest lit up like a Christmas tree, as streams of multicolored light rained down through the canopy, soaking everything in color.

“It’s happening again,” said Albert, the sabre-tooth forgotten already as the aurora illuminated the forest.

“My God,” Phillip said, experiencing the aurora for the first time. He used the spear to push himself to his feet. “It’s so beautiful.” He glanced back at me and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.” Then he gave a little twitch as a billion tiny white lights sparked into life around us.

“The pixie dust,” I whispered, reaching for a cloud of the tiny motes of light floating in front of my face. I wasn’t afraid this time, only a little nervous. I forced myself to breathe in deeply and sucked in the cloud of light.

“Everything’s covered in it,” Phillip said. “The trees, the grass, everything. Why can’t we see them any other time?”

Before anyone could answer, all four of us gave a little shudder. A feeling of absolute well-being spread through my body, and, judging by the expression of pleasure on my companions’ faces, they were experiencing the same sublime sensation of deep relaxation too. As it washed through me, I felt the day’s aches and pains and stress drain from me.

“Woah!” Phillip giggled. He staggered a little. “That’s some good shit!”

And then, just as it had the night before, the lights in the sky faded to nothing, and the pixie dust dimmed into invisibility again.

“Wow!” said Phillip. “I feel… great. Absolutely invigorated.” He sounded stoned. “What the hell are those things?”

Chou said, “I believe that the lights Meredith refers to as pixie dust are a form of highly advanced nanotechnology. Are you familiar with nano-tech?”

“Yeah, it’s like little-robots that can be used to repair stuff, right?” I said.

“Yes, that approximates their use, I suppose.” Chou moved her hand through the air as if she could still see the particles I knew must still be floating invisibly all around us. “In my time, the healing of minor wounds can be accelerated over the course of a matter of days; broken bones, such as your arm, are healed and fully functional again in a week to nine days.” She turned her attention to Phillip. “Last night, while you were unconscious, we witnessed the healing of your broken arm and head wound in a matter of seconds.”

“Look,” I said, holding my hands out and turning them slowly so everyone could see where the scratches and grazes I’d accumulated over the course of our journey had vanished, completely healed, leaving only fresh, pink skin behind and a fading warmth. “It’s amazing. Like magic.” After a second, I added, “Last night, I think the aurora cured my addiction, too.”

“It is impressive,” Chou said, inspecting her own hands in the glow of the firelight.

“Do you think it’s going to happen every night?” Phillip asked.

“Perhaps,” Chou replied. “Two nights does not establish a pattern, but it could be the beginning of one.”

“Okay,” said Phillip. “I follow this nano-tech can heal us, kind of, but how does it explain how we can understand you, Chou? I mean, it’s not like language is something that can just be fixed like a cut, right?”

Chou paused briefly. “I believe that the nano-tech also rewired our brains to be able to understand each other’s language. We have been augmented so as to be able to communicate with one another, which indicates to me that we will be expected to cooperate. However, it does not make who is responsible any clearer to me.”

I said, “But I thought nano-tech was supposed to be like really tiny? What I saw looked like it was the size of a pin-head. Shouldn’t they be invisible to the human eye?”

“Yes, you are correct, but I think the lights represent bundles of nanites, grouped together for efficiency.”

“Bundles? But doesn’t that defeat the idea behind nano-sized technology?” Phillip asked. “I mean, these little mechanisms are microscopic for a reason, right?”

“Yes, under controlled conditions and certain applications small would be desirable, or if the nanites were to be, say, swallowed to aid in curing an illness you could keep them at their normal size. However, it would appear that this island is supersaturated with the nanites, and, like anything that exists in the wild, there is much to be gained from roaming as a pack; efficiency and survivability being the two most obvious. All it would take would be for you to swallow a single bundle and you would be ‘infected,’ so to speak. The nanites can then utilize your body to replicate.”

“Wild nanites?” Phillip said. “Roaming bands of do-gooder robots that heal us and change our brains. Sounds great on the surface, I guess, but our permission wasn’t asked for any of these changes, and until I know who’s behind all of this, I would never have said ‘yes’ to any of it.”

“Except you already did,” Chou said.

I nodded my agreement with her. “She’s right. The voice was very specific when it spoke to me. I got the impression it wouldn’t do a thing to help me until I answered ‘yes’ to its question. So, technically, you did give it permission.”

Phillip nodded slowly, “I guess I did, too, except none of us were told up front what we were getting ourselves in to.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said. “And think about the alternative.”

Chou continued, “I presume we have been breathing in bundles since we first arrived here. The energy storm that we have witnessed for the last two nights… the aurora as you named it… is probably a way to energize the bundles and provide the nanites with the power they need to carry out their tasks. Although, it does seem like a massively inefficient way to go about it.”

Throughout most of the conversation, Albert had remained silent, his eyes following whoever was talking.

The poor kid must be utterly confused, I thought. Here he was sitting in a forest in the middle of the night with three virtual strangers talking about technology that couldn’t have even been dreamed about in his day. It was confusing and scary enough for me, God knows what he must be going through.

“Albert,” I said, “are you okay?”

The kid nodded.

I patted the ground next to where I sat. “Why don’t you come over here and sit with me?”

Obediently, Albert joined me.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered to him, “I know it sounds confusing, but I’ll explain it all to you.”

Albert nodded again and yawned.

I put an arm around his shoulders. He leaned into me and closed his eyes. I felt his body relax. There was no way to tell what time it was, the night sky was still invisible, hidden beyond the darkness of the treetops.

“I think perhaps you and Phillip should follow Albert’s example and try and get some rest,” said Chou. “I’ll keep watch while you rest.”

I did not disagree.

Seven

The clouds that had held permanent sway over the sky since our arrival had vanished by morning, revealing patches of blue between the high, thick limbs of the forest’s canopy. Somewhere within those branches, birds sang a vibrant morning chorus greeting to the newly born day. A light mist moved across the ground, and I breathed in the heady smell of wet leaves and damp soil, bringing back memories of childhood camping trips.

Phillip crouched near the dying campfire, warming his hands against the morning chill, he smiled and nodded. “Good morning.”

“Where’s Albert?” I asked. The boy wasn’t anywhere to be seen around camp.

“He is urinating behind that tree,” Chou said, matter-of-factly, pointing at a large oak about twenty feet away.

Hearing his name, Albert’s head appeared around the tree trunk, a look of mortification on his face. I suppressed a laugh by pretending to cover a yawn, turning my head away as the red-faced kid walked back to the camp.

A short time later, we were on our way again, determined to reach the mountain as quickly as possible.

We walked in a loose group, chatting quietly back and forth. Over the next hour or so, terrain that had begun as a gentle incline grew gradually steeper and more taxing. I was about to suggest we stop for a short rest when Phillip said, “Hey! Listen. Hear that?”

“I think… it sounds like water,” I said. I could just make out the faint hiss and burble of running water. “It’s coming from that direction.” I pointed to our right.

We changed course and followed the sound until it increased to a roar.

Chou pushed ahead of us through a cluster of tall, thick bushes. “Careful!” she said suddenly, throwing out her arms to stop any of us from passing.

“Woah!” I whispered as I saw why she had stopped us so abruptly. We stood at the highest point of a horseshoe-shaped cataract, just inches from its edge. I leaned forward and peered over. A quarter of the way down, a steady torrent of water gushed out of a ragged crack in the rock, cascading the remaining sixty or so feet into a large natural pool of the clearest water I’d ever seen. The pool, in turn, fed a creek that zigzagged downhill in the direction of the beach.

I felt Albert’s hand suddenly clasp my arm while his other pointed to something near the pond. “Look,” he whispered.

“Ho-lee shit!” Phillip hissed.

I simply stared.

At the far edge of the pool, a group of five deer lapped at the water. I’ve followed the Pacific Coast Highway along the California coast, up through Oregon and Washington state a couple of times, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of deer along the way. But the creatures lapping at the water and ruminating on the abundant vegetation growing along the bank were unlike anything I’d seen on any of those road-trips. These were huge. They stood at least seven feet tall at their shoulders and must have easily weighed a thousand pounds each, if not more. The single buck among them, larger again than the females, sported a pair of antlers almost as long as his body from tip to tip. But rather than the branch-like antlers of normal sized deer, this creature’s formed a single structure that reminded me of a giant bony maple leaf.

“They are magnificent,” Chou whispered.

And quite intimidating, too, I thought, even though I knew they were unlikely to attack us unless we got too close. Those antlers looked like they could snap bones.

As if sensing our presence, one of the females looked up, her head tilting to one side as she locked eyes with me. For three breathless seconds, the doe held eye-contact with me, then, with a high-pitched warning bellow to the others, she darted off into the woods, the other deer right behind her.

“Well, at least we know there’s a good supply of fresh meat,” Phillip said. “Hell, one of those would feed us all for a month or more.”

“Indeed,” said Chou, “but what concerns me more is that if there are herbivores such as those, then they will undoubtedly attract predators such as the sabre-tooth. We should remain even more vigilant from now on.”

We cautiously followed the edge of the cataract down to the pool. The water was crystal clear, bubbling over rocks and stones rounded from years of shaping by the creek’s constant caress. I scooped up a palm-full of water and drank it down. It was ice cold and delicious. Small fish, about an inch or so long and far too tiny to make much of a meal, swam through the reeds and stones. There was no sign of any larger aquatic life.

“So now we also have access to a fresh water supply,” said Phillip, splashing water over his face. “This day is shaping up pretty nicely.”

“Yes, but the water is a valuable resource,” said Chou, “and there may be survivors who will be willing to do others harm to keep it for themselves.”

I scooped another palm-full of water into my mouth, shook the remaining drops from my hand then joined the others as we continued our journey again toward the mountain.

* * *

“We have to be getting close,” Phillip said, pointing to scattered rocks and larger gray boulders sprinkled between the trees.

“I can see the edge of the forest,” Albert said excitedly, not long after. Ahead of us, through the thinning lines of trees, I could just make out a cold gray scree of pea-gravel and some larger boulders.

We picked up our pace, panting a little as we jogged up the growing incline and crossed from the forest out into the open air.

“Wow!” I said, panting. I stood with my hands on my hips, the sun’s rays kissing the back of my neck as I stared up at the mountain. It was much, much bigger than I remembered from my brief glimpse of it that first day on the beach, the craggy and snow-capped peak starkly visible against the washed out blue-gray backdrop of the sky.

Phillip let out a long whistle. “It’s got to be nine, ten thousand feet,” he said, reverently. “Wish I’d brought my damn climbing gear.” He was panting lightly from the jog, too, a hand shading his eyes while they acclimated to the sudden change from dark forest to daylight.

This side of the mountain rose steeply upward from where we stood, the pea gravel quickly transitioning to larger rocks and stones then boulders and finally, slabs of granite and craggy outcrops.

“We are still well below the forest’s canopy,” said Chou. “We will need to climb higher if we are to be sure to spot any signs of civilization.”

“I think we should aim for that outcropping,” Phillip said, pointing at a large slab of flattish rock jutting out from the mountain, another hundred-and-fifty feet or so further up from where we stood. It created a ledge which looked like it would give us an unobstructed view over most of the island back in the direction we came from and a pretty good view over either side of it, too.

Phillip handed Chou his spear, then reached down and swept Albert up onto his shoulders. “Come on little man, the going’s a bit too rough to trust you won’t slip.”

With Phillip leading the way, Chou and I followed him from boulder to boulder until, sweating profusely, we reached the ledge.

“Up you go,” said Phillip, hoisting Albert off his shoulders and onto the ledge before pulling himself up alongside the boy. He turned back to face me and extended a hand.

“Grab ahold, and I’ll help you—”

Phillip’s words faded away to silence. His eyes grew huge shifting from me to over my shoulder, then skyward. “Holy shit!” he hissed. “Holy. Shit.”

I was in a precarious position, my left hand grasping onto a crevice in the lip of the rock ledge, the rocks, and loose gravel beneath my sneakers making it dangerous to turn too quickly without the risk of falling. As carefully as possible, I repositioned myself until I was looking back over the tops of the forest in the direction we had come from… and almost slipped from my perch.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “Someone tell me this is a joke.”

In the far distance, the gigantic multi-faceted edifice I’d briefly seen in my first few minutes on this island towered over the coastline, vanishing into the clouds collected around its upper portion. From this vantage point, I could see that the coastline did indeed run for hundreds of miles along what I assumed must be the eastern horizon, as I had suspected. The sun hung above it, making its slow climb toward its azimuth. Except, this quite obviously wasn’t our sun. This couldn’t be Earth’s sun. This star was larger, brighter, and rather than the golden-orange light I had taken for granted all my life, this star burned with a dark orange that bordered on red.

A glowing net of lights filled the sky, encircling the sun within a framework of concentric rings. There were hundreds of rings, each filled with thousands-upon-thousands of pinprick-sized orange lights. It looked like millions of fireflies had surrounded the star, only to be frozen in place, trapped in a permanent orbit around the glowing ball of gas. It was obviously not natural… and it was obviously not human-made. At least, not by any human from my time.

“My God!” Phillip said, then repeated himself several more times.

Chou said nothing, but her face reflected the shock we all felt.

I felt a tugging on my wrist and looked up to see Albert facing in the opposite direction to the caged sun. He pointed up toward the summit with a trembling hand.

“The moon,” Albert stammered, “what’s wrong with the moon?”

We turned to look in the direction Albert pointed. To the west, emerging from where it had been hidden behind the mountain’s snow-capped peak, the remains of what very well could have been the twin of our own moon described a slow arc across the blue sky. I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but I thought I could make out what looked like structures or maybe even buildings peppering the moon’s cratered surface, or, at least, what was left of its surface. This moon looked as though some giant space-faring monster had taken a bite out of it, then vomited up its undigested meal. I estimated about a third of the moon had broken away from the main satellite, and now trailed behind it in an extended tail of debris. Other, larger chunks orbited the dead planetoid, moving in never-ending circles around their mother as it continued its never-ending journey around this planet.

It all felt so dreamlike. And, as if that dream insisted on forcing me to accept this new, strange version of reality in one mind-boggling minute, my attention was drawn first to the northern horizon, then to the southern. Rising high above each, sunlight glinting off the quartz-like facets of their sides were exact duplicates of the monolith so clearly visible above the distant coastline to the east.

Struggling to exert some control over this information overload, my mind drew the logical conclusion that if I could see through the thousands of feet of mountain obstructing our view, there would be a fourth structure dominating the western horizon, too. Which made four monoliths, each standing guard like giants over this hemisphere.

“I… I don’t see any settlements,” Phillip murmured, his voice barely audible over a gust of cold wind rolling down from the summit.

“No,” I said, just as quietly, “no signs of civilization.”

Phillip breathed in deeply, held it for a New York minute, then exhaled a long sigh, as though he was finally resigned to the fact that this world was not his, not any human’s.

“So, what do we do now?” he said, looking to me and Chou.

Chou considered the question. “I believe this confirms that our chances of rescue have been reduced to zero. Our immediate objective should, therefore, be to focus on establishing a permanent, defensible shelter.”

Another gust of wind swept down the mountainside, blanketing us with freezing air.

“Let’s get down off this mountain before we either die of hypothermia or get blown off it; both of which are beginning to appeal to me,” said Phillip. He picked Albert up and lowered him down to my waiting arms.

“Stay close,” I ordered Albert. I took the boy’s hand in mine and followed behind Chou who was already gingerly making her way back down the mountain in the direction we had come from. As relieved as I had been to finally get out of the forest and see open blue skies, I was twice as relieved when we crossed back into the woods again; to have everything the skies had revealed hidden from me once more.

Phillip picked up his pace, striding past us as if he was trying to outrun what we had all just seen up on the mountain.

“Is Phillip alright?” Albert said.

“Absolutely. He’s just… confused,” I said, but for all I knew, Phillip intended to keep on walking until he couldn’t walk anymore and leave us all behind. “For God’s sake, Phillip, hold up,” I called after him. He didn’t stop, but he did slow enough for us to catch up to him.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop! Phillip! Just stop, would you?” I let go of Albert’s hand, reached out and grabbed Phillip tightly by the bicep, forcing him to either stop or drag me along with him.

Maybe it was the hint of desperation I heard creeping into my voice that finally made it through the panic I knew he must be feeling, I’ll never know, but Phillip stopped and turned. His face was a mask of shifting emotions and confusion.

I understood exactly how he felt, of course. I mean, it wasn’t his reality alone that had just been shattered, it was ours too.

He exhaled a long sigh. “I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

I saw the object fly out of the shadows behind Phillip. It traveled with a swooshing sound in an arc and pierced Phillip’s shoulder with a sickening thud before I could even shout a warning. Phillip grunted like he’d been punched, blinked twice and tried to turn his head to see what had hit him.

I gasped as I saw the shaft of an arrow buried almost down to the feathers of its fletching in Phillip’s right clavicle.

Phillip reached weakly for the arrow, but before his fingers could close around it, there was another thud. He staggered under the impact, coughed, sending a gobbet of blood spilling over his lips, and toppled forward. Phillip collapsed face down into the ground, a second arrow sunk deep into his back, just below his left shoulder blade.

He twitched, then lay motionless.

I started to reach for him… and froze.

Behind Phillip, deeper in the forest, two men stepped out of the shadows. Both were dressed in leather armor and chain mail. They looked like extras out of a movie about ancient Rome or medieval England. One held a bow, the other carried a small round shield, the edge of which was ringed with metal studs. In his other hand, he carried a large sword with a curved blade that grew thicker toward the end. He raised the sword high above his head, let out a bloodcurdling cry and dashed toward us.

Eight

“Run!” I screamed.

I grabbed Albert’s hand tightly in my own, and we took off like frightened rabbits, zigzagging between trees so our pursuers couldn’t get a clear shot. I didn’t know if Phillip was alive or dead, but what was obvious was that if the two men caught us, they would kill us, without hesitation. Why though? And who were they? I chanced a quick look over my shoulder and saw we hadn’t put any extra distance between us and them, despite the heavy leather and chainmail armor they were wearing. Albert’s legs were just too short for us to outrun them. Chou must have reached the same conclusion because without missing a step, she leaned down and plucked the boy from me and pulled him in close to her chest.

“Put your arms around my neck,” she ordered the boy. Albert did as he was told, clutching tightly to her. Now he was looking back over Chou’s shoulders at our attackers. Chou increased her pace, moving from a fast jog to a sprint, despite her now carrying a sixty-pound child.

I struggled to keep up, her long legs eating up the uneven ground in huge strides. I knew she was holding back, that she could have easily outrun our pursuers but wasn’t willing to leave my slower ass behind.

“Look out!” Albert yelled.

Chou ducked to her right. An arrow whistled past us and thudded into the trunk of a tree, missing Chou by just a couple of feet.

“Our only chance is to lose them in the trees,” I yelled, panting hard already.

“Yes,” Chou yelled back, leaping over some dense undergrowth, then zagging to her right.

“We need to—”

I should have kept my eyes fixed on the ground ahead of me rather than on Chou, that way I would have seen the knot of roots at the foot of the tree we were sprinting past. Instead, my foot snagged on one, twisted painfully, and I went sprawling to the ground with an Ooof!; the air knocked from my lungs.

Chou yelled at me: “Get up! Get up, Meredith!”

I tried to push myself to my feet, but my ankle wouldn’t support my weight.

Chou stood close by, both she and Albert glancing down at me then back in the direction of the fast-approaching men, the clink-clink-clink of their chainmail getting closer by the second.

Chou flinched as an arrow streaked past her. “Get up!” she yelled at me again.

I managed to push myself to my knees, then scramble to my feet, but the second I put weight on my injured ankle I screeched and collapsed to one knee. I pushed again and limped a few steps but quickly knew my ankle was at best twisted or sprained, possibly broken. Either way, my running was over for the foreseeable future… maybe forever.

I stole a look back; the two men were less than sixty feet from us, closing fast. They’d be on us in less than ten seconds.

Without missing a step, the archer slipped his bow over his shoulders, then pulled a long dagger from a belt around his waist. Both men were sweating profusely, but the look of cruel triumph on their faces told me everything I needed to know about their intentions.

“Go!” I hissed at Chou. “Take Albert and run. I’ll try and delay them long enough for you to get away.”

With Albert still clinging tightly to her, Chou wordlessly assessed her choices, then sprinted away… only to stop at a nearby oak and lower Albert to the ground behind its wide trunk. “You must be a brave boy and stay here,” I heard her tell him.

Albert nodded, his eyes wide with fear.

Chou spun around, ran back to where I lay, and placed herself between me and the attackers. She took a long, deep breath, exhaled slowly… and launched herself at our pursuers, moving faster than I had ever seen anyone run in my life.

The two men, suddenly faced with a six-foot-tall Amazonian warrior charging at them, stumbled to a confused stop. The swordsman took up a defensive stance, his sword held out in front of him, while the archer dropped back ten feet and began pulling his bow from around his shoulders again.

Chou surged across the last few feet, dodged right, leaped into the air, and used the trunk of a tree to propel herself at the swordsman. She held the spear Albert made for her above her head with both hands as she crashed knee first into the swordsman’s face, sending him sprawling to the ground in an explosion of dirt and dried leaves. Chou landed next to him, used her momentum to roll away, leaped back up and lunged at the swordsman’s back with her spear.

The man’s reactions were almost as fast as Chou’s, and he managed to bring the flat of his weapon around in time to deflect Chou’s attack. Jumping to his feet, he brought his sword up in a whirling attack aimed at Chou’s neck that was so fast the blade became a blur of liquid silver.

Chou ducked under it and rolled away.

The archer had unslung his bow, an arrow nocked and ready; the bowstring pulled back to his shoulder, ready to let fly the second his friend was free of the woman who ducked and dived so nimbly around him. The archer’s face was a picture of frustration as he moved the bow left and right, trying to draw a bead on Chou, but she was just too fast… and too close to his friend for him to be able to risk a shot.

Chou feinted at the swordsman’s face, waited for her opponent’s move to block her attack, then twisted the spear past his guard and drove the tip into the man’s unprotected leg, just above his right knee.

The swordsman screamed in pain, teetered, but remained standing. Reversing his swing, he slammed the rounded base of the sword’s pommel against Chou’s temple, sending her staggering away.

Chou picked herself up, wobbled as if she was concussed and moved back a couple of feet, lowering her spear. The sword-wielding man took two quick steps toward her, a smile of victory on his face as Chou took another small step backward, her eyes moving left and right. She wobbled and dropped to one knee.

I looked on in horror as, with both hands wrapped around the pommel of his weapon, the swordsman raised the sword above his head. He held it for a second, took another step forward and began to bring the blade down in a swooping arc that would remove Chou’s head from her shoulders.

Chou turned to face her attacker, and the look of defeat melted away. Her mouth set in a wicked grin, I instantly understood she had lured him into the overconfident move. The swordsman tried to sidestep, but it was too late, he was committed to his attack, the weight of the sword and its momentum carrying him forward.

In one lightning-fast movement, Chou leaped up and forward, placing herself almost nose to nose with the swordsman, and thrust the spear up in a short jab, driving the fire-hardened tip into the man’s unprotected chin and then up into his brain.

The sword flew from the man’s hand and landed in the leaves near the archer as the swordsman’s lifeless body continued forward, colliding with Chou and knocking her to the ground, covering her in a spray of arterial blood that gushed from his neck.

Chou pushed the dying man’s body away and jumped to her feet. Her face fixed in a grimace of determination, made all the scarier to me by the blood splattered across her clothing and smeared in long stripes over her cheeks. She placed a foot against the man’s leather-clad chest and pulled her spear from his body, took a step toward the archer… then screamed, knocked back as an arrow struck her above her left hip. Chou stumbled then collapsed to the forest floor.

The archer dropped his bow, pulled his knife from his belt and advanced on Chou.

Chou forced herself to a sitting position, grimacing as the shaft of the arrow thumped against her knee, sweat dripping from her forehead. She gripped the spear with both hands, holding it out in front of her like a lion-tamer keeping an unruly beast at bay.

“Leave her alone, you son of a bitch,” I screamed at the archer.

He glanced over his shoulder, sneered at me, and backed away from Chou. For a moment, I thought he was coming to slit my throat. Instead, he ran to where his friend’s weapon had fallen, searched amongst the fallen leaves, found what he was looking for and hefted the sword. Striding confidently to where an immobilized Chou sat, he knocked the spear from her weakened hands with the flat of the sword and kicked her hard in the solar-plexus, forcing her onto her back. He pinned her to the ground with one sandaled foot on her chest, switched his grip on the sword, so the tip of the blade faced down, and lifted the pommel to eye level, preparing to drive it point-first into her heart.

I flinched as two deafening explosions split the air a half-second apart behind me, their echoes moving through the woods like restless spirits. Two corresponding spurts of blood erupted from the archer’s torso. He grunted and spun sideways, the sword dropping from his hands point first into the ground where it swayed back and forth. The archer’s body crumpled next to it, twitched once… twice… and was still.

As the echoes of the two gunshots faded, I heard Albert’s desperate sobbing from behind the tree where Chou had left him. I scuttled crab-like on my butt, my throbbing ankle all but forgotten, repositioning myself to face where I thought the shots had originated.

Around fifty or so feet away, a man sat on a horse. The horse was a brown and white dappled male, young and strong looking. Beautiful to behold. As if it had psychically sensed my silent compliment, it whinnied fiercely and raked at the ground with a hoof, kicking up leaves. The rider looked like… well, he looked like a cowboy, complete with a black, wide-brimmed hat that hid his eyes in shadow. He sported a thick straw-colored mustache and long shoulder-length auburn hair, not as red as mine but just red enough to guarantee he would stand out. He wore a dark green frock coat that stopped just above his knees, beneath that a white frilled shirt. In his hands, he held a lever-action rifle, smoke rising from the muzzle. The rifle was pointed at me.

I held my breath, waiting for the stranger to shoot me, too. Instead, the cowboy slid the rifle into a leather sheath on his saddle. He kicked his heels gently into his mount’s flank. The horse trotted in my direction, stopping when it was ten feet away. The cowboy silently looked us over, then he pinched the front brim of his hat between thumb and forefinger and nodded.

"Morn’in," he said in a deep, gravelly voice, thick with a heavy mid-western accent. "Name's James Hickok, but you ladies can call me Wild Bill."

Nine

“Come on out from behind that tree, boy,” the man who said his name was Wild Bill Hickok yelled; not unkindly, but still with a tone that conveyed he expected to be obeyed.

I was still processing this latest insanity, but the fact that the stranger who had just saved our asses shared the same name as the legendary cowboy was not lost on me, but at that moment, it was the last item on a pretty long list of craziness.

“Come out, Albert,” I called, wincing at the pain in my ankle. “It’s safe. I don’t think this man’s going to hurt us.”

Albert hesitated for a few moments, his hands planted firmly against the trunk of the oak he was hidden behind as if it were his mother’s skirt, then he ran to where I sat, his eyes never leaving the cowboy.

“That’s better,” said Hickok. “Are there any more of you hiding around here?”

None of us said a word.

Hickok sighed. “Do any of you speak American?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I speak English,” said Albert, quietly.

“No,” said Chou, grimacing with pain.

Hickok gave Chou a look that said he thought she might be a little loco.

“Well, alright then.” He looked directly at me. “Would you mind kindly answering my first question: Are there any more of you that I should know about?”

“Just… just our friend, Phillip.” I nodded at the bodies of the two men who had attacked us. “I think they killed him. He’s back that way.” I pointed. “Please, you have to let us go check. He could still be alive.”

The cowboy pushed the rim of his hat up an inch then pulled it back down again, looking through the trees in the direction I’d just indicated, but said nothing. He pulled the rifle from its leather holster, then, to the accompanying creak of oiled leather, dismounted, dropping nimbly to the ground. Wild Bill walked to where Chou lay. She’d crawled to the same oak Albert had hidden behind and now sat with her back resting against its trunk. She tried to get to her feet, but the pain was too much for her and, wincing, slipped back down between the roots.

“Ma’am, there ain’t no reason for you to get up right now. I don’t mean you or your friends any trouble. I’ve had compadres who been stuck with arrows before, maybe I can help, if you let me.” He nodded in the direction of the two dead men. “Now, those bandits don’t look like no Sioux I never seen, but I’m guessing the idea’s the same.” He nodded at the spear Chou clutched to her chest. “Are you going to stick me with that thing if I try to take a look?”

Chou hesitated, then placed the spear on the ground next to her within easy reach.

Hickok knelt beside Chou and traced the shaft of the arrow with his fingers. There was a tearing sound as he ripped the fabric of Chou’s pants around the arrow’s shaft and leaned in to examine where it had penetrated her flesh.

Albert continued to stare openmouthed at Chou and Hickok. I tapped the kid on his thigh to get his attention. “Help me up,” I said. Albert crouched down, and I used him as support to pull myself upright, then as a crutch to lean on while I hopped closer to Chou and the cowboy. Albert gasped when he saw the blood spatter on Chou’s chest, sleeves, and hands.

“Most of it is his,” Chou said between gritted teeth, nodding at the body of the dead swordsman.

Only a small amount of blood trickled out of the wound where the arrow had penetrated her hip. I don’t have any medical training to speak of other than general first aid and CPR, but I was confident lack of bleeding was probably a good thing.

“Alright. Now, next, I’m going to have to roll you over just a little and check your back.” Hickok didn’t wait for Chou to answer. Instead, he placed one hand on her butt and moved her slowly onto her right side.

Chou hissed in pain, clenching her teeth so hard I thought they would crack.

“Almost done,” said Hickok. He moved the palm of his other hand to her lower back and began to slowly move it around as though he were petting a dog. “There she is,” he said a second later. He tapped at a slight bulge protruding from the material just above her left butt cheek. “Arrow head’s out your back. That’s a good thing, at least for when we get around to removing it. Can’t speak to what it’s done to your insides, but there’s folks back at the garrison that can take a shot at patching you up. I’d bet a month’s wages you’re gonna be just fine.”

“Back at what garrison?” said Chou. Her words came out from between her clenched teeth like gas escaping from a pipe.

Hickok leaned back on his haunches. “So, you do speak English?”

“No,” said Chou, “I do not.”

Hickok closed his eyes for a second. Shook his head slowly from side to side as if he was trying to clear it, then stood up and turned to face me. “You said you had a friend who might still be alive?”

I nodded. “He’s back that way,” I said, pointing again. “About a quarter mile, maybe. Near where the forest ends.”

Hickok looked in the direction I was pointing, then turned and walked over to his horse. He swung himself into the saddle. “I’ll go check on him.” Then with a “Ha!” and a kick of his heels, he rode off to look for Phillip.

I watched until Hickok and his horse disappeared in the trees, then turned to Chou. “How is it?” I asked urgently, not knowing what else to say.

“Painful,” said Chou, more calmly than I would have if it'd been me impaled by a two-foot-long arrow. “I believe the arrowhead may have clipped my hip bone.”

“Can you walk?”

“Probably as well as you can without Albert’s assistance,” Chou replied.

I frowned. “There’s no way we can outrun that guy. He has a horse,” I continued, then asked, “Do you think he really is the Wild Bill Hickok?”

“Yes,” said Albert, as though the question had been directed at him. “He looks like the pictures I’ve seen of him in history books of the wild west.”

Chou raised an eyebrow. “On any other day, I would vehemently argue the probability of that being possible. But, given the three of us…”

I stood up. “This is all just so… crazy. What do we do when he comes back?” I was torn; part of me wanted him to come back because he had that gun, the other part of me wanted to just vanish into the trees because, well, that gun. “I guess he did save our asses,” I said, finally.

“He has not shown any aggressive behavior toward us,” said Chou. “And none of us would be able to escape him and his animal.”

“It’s a horse,” I said. “If we can’t get away from him, unless he’s willing to just leave us be, I suppose we’ll have no other option but to go with him to this garrison. Whatever that is.”

“It’s like a fort. A kind of military outpost,” Albert piped up. “He said there were people that could help Chou. We should go.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t feeling particularly confident about either choice we faced.

“It’s not like we have any other option,” Chou said. “Unless this arrow is removed, and I receive medical treatment, I will, in all probability, expire. And you, Meredith, you are barely able to walk. Albert is too young to be able to help us. I see no other way. We will go with him when Wild Bill returns.”

As if the mention of his name had summoned him, the silhouette of the cowboy materialized from the trees, moving through the forest in our direction.

“Your friend is dead,” Wild Bill said when he pulled up alongside us, with only a hint of emotion in his voice. “Here.” He tossed something at Albert, who caught it deftly, despite me still leaning heavily on the boy’s shoulder. It was a bundle of clothes. Phillip’s clothes.

“What!” I hissed. “You stripped him?”

Wild Bill dismounted and began to rummage through one of his saddlebags. “Well, he ain’t gonna need ’em no more,” he called back over his shoulder.

“That’s… that’s…” What exactly was it? I finally came up with “Sacrilegious.” The word sounded dumb even as I spoke it, but it got my point across.

Wild Bill turned and looked at me. “Ma’am, if you have any idea where we are, how we got here, or when we can expect to find civilization again, especially given the peculiarities of this locale that I am sure you would have to be blind not to have noticed…” he jabbed skyward with his right index finger “…or when we’re likely to find an outfitter capable of replacing your clothes and sundries, then I’d suggest that you make a habit of picking up anything you think might be useful to our well-being and comfort. And seeing as you have no problem already dressing like a man, I figured you might want your friend’s clothes, too.” He didn’t say any of this with any kind of arrogance or malice; it was all delivered in a very matter-of-fact way, as if he were explaining it to a child. As Wild Bill talked, he strode over to where the body of the archer lay sprawled on the ground. He undid the belt holding the man’s knife and slung it over his shoulder, then began removing the dead man’s chain-mail and leather armor. “Now, I’ll take what I can from this hombre, and I’d suggest you and the boy do the same to that other fellow, over there.” He nodded at the body of the dead swordsman not ten feet from where Albert and I stood. “When we’re done, we’ll get your friend here situated, then I’ll take you to the garrison.” He continued pulling pieces of clothing from the dead man.

He was right, of course. We still had no idea where we were or even when we were, but after my first look at that sky, one thing had become very clear to all of us: this could not be Earth. And drawing from that obvious conclusion, dear Toto, we most definitely were not in Kansas anymore, so to speak. Which meant that unless I was right, and whatever intelligence had brought us here had plans for us and had made some kind of provision for our well-being, we were on our own. Or, at least, we were on our own along with a couple of hundred or so other humans who had been dropped on the island alongside us. Better to err on the side of caution and expect the worst.

“Okay,” I said. “Albert, stand still for a second, will you?”

Albert nodded.

I kept my right hand on his shoulder, then eased a small amount of weight onto my injured foot. There was pain in the ankle, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been, which gave me hope. I took a tentative step, winced, which made Albert (bless his heart) throw an arm around my waist to support me. I smiled and shook my head at him.

“I think I’m okay,” I said.

He backed away but stayed close enough that I could reach out to him if needed. I took another step toward the dead swordsman. This time, I was ready for the pain and kept as much weight on my good leg as I could. I took my hand from Albert’s shoulder and walked a couple more steps, Albert shadowing close by. I smiled to myself. My hero. There was still pain but I could walk. I stood by my earlier self-assessment that I wouldn’t be doing much running for a while still, but I’d lucked out and was in better shape than I thought.

“How you holdin’ up, over there?” Wild Bill called out to me.

I gave him a thumbs up and even threw in an “I’m fine, pardner,” using my best Clint Eastwood voice. In return, Wild Bill gave me a bemused look before turning his attention back to undressing the archer, which I can assure you looked as weird as it sounds. My attention turned back to the body of the dead swordsman. He looked a little younger than me. His deeply tanned olive skin was already beginning to pale. His eyelids were half closed, his mouth agape showing lightly stained teeth. He had a full beard the same color as his black wavy hair. His beard was twisted into four long braids. Each braid had three colored beads (red, green, and brown) threaded onto it. Even though his eyes were half-closed, I could see they were intensely green. A light blue eyeshadow had been applied to his eyelids and swept across to each temple. The makeup was actually quite scary, creating a mask effect across the upper portion of his head. He had been a good-looking man, I would have even said he was attractive if the little bastard hadn’t tried to kill us. I unbuckled his knife belt then began to undo his armor which was a lot harder than it sounds thanks to some really weird fastenings that took both me and Albert almost a minute to figure out how to release. By the time we were done, I was looking at the body of a young man in his early twenties who would not have looked out of place lounging in a park reading the latest Steven King novel. While his sinewy body was certainly more muscular than my own, he wasn’t that much bigger than me.

What a stupid waste, I thought.

A question still nagged at me: why would they want to kill us in the first place? It wasn’t a stretch to think that these two men had been offered the same choice Albert, Chou, Phillip, and I had been given. So why try to kill us all on sight? It made no sense to me. And if this man, who said he was Wild Bill Hickok, hadn’t shown up...

“Don’t forget his sword,” Wild Bill said, looking approvingly at the pile of armor and underclothes lying at my feet.

“It’s a scimitar,” Albert said. “I’ll get it.” He quickly located the sword from the undergrowth where it had landed and carried it back and handed it to me—a little reluctantly I noted—pommel first. Surprisingly, the sword was a lot lighter than I expected. I gave it a couple of half-hearted swings in front of me. The meager light that managed to make it through the treetops bounced off the curved interior edge of the blade, glinting as I swept it back and forth.

Yeah, I thought, I could get used to using this. In fact… I eyed the body of the dead man again; he really wasn’t that much bigger than me. I could probably fit into his armor. I resolved to give it a try once Wild Bill took us back to this garrison he had talked about and Chou was safe.

“Albert, could you hand me the sword’s thingy, please.” I pointed at the long envelope of leather fastened to the dead man’s belt.

“Scabbard,” Albert said, as he handed it and the belt to me. I fastened the belt around my hips and slipped the sword, somewhat awkwardly into the scabbard.

“Why don’t you take this?” I said to Albert, holding out the dead swordsman’s dagger to him.

The kid’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

I smiled, extended my hand a little more. “Sure. Go ahead.”

He took the knife, slipped it from its scabbard and moved it slowly in front of his eyes.

“Just be careful you don’t cut your fingers off with it. Or anyone else’s for that matter,” I said, only half-joking.

Albert nodded enthusiastically, undid the belt holding up his pants and threaded it through the two slits in the back of the scabbard. We gathered up the clothes and armor then limped over to where Chou sat. Her eyes were closed, and I didn’t like how pale her skin had turned. I could see her chest rising and falling steadily, so I decided to simply let her rest. Albert and I placed the armor we were carrying next to the archer’s armor and equipment Wild Bill had left near his horse.

Wild Bill was working nearby. He had cut down a bunch of long low-hanging branches which he was lashing together with twine from a roll lying in arms’ reach of where he knelt. He then used the branches to build a flat triangular trellis that measured about nine feet long.

I said, “Albert, go stay with Chou while I speak with Wild Bill.” He nodded and ran to Chou’s side, then began examining his new knife.

Wild Bill was engrossed in lashing more branches horizontally across the trellis.

“What is this?” I asked, looking at the mesh of branches he was working on.

Without looking up, he said, “This here’s a travois. We’ll put your friend on it, fasten it to Brute over there, then get her back to camp. Camp’s a good four hours east of here through these trees, probably longer seeing as we’ll be taking it slow. I’d say we should make it back by early afternoon, but the hell if I know how long a day is in this place.” He finished up fastening the last branch from his pile, clasped the apparatus with both hands and shook it violently, to make sure it wasn’t going to fall apart, I guess.

Happy with his work, Wild Bill got to his feet and announced, “There, we’re good to go. You take the other side.” He picked up the side of the travois nearest to him and waited for me to do the same with the other. Together we dragged it over to where his horse Brute waited.

Brute gave a low huff as we approached pawing at the dead leaves and branches beneath its hooves with a long muscular front leg.

“Careful now,” Wild Bill said, as we got closer, “that horse is nothing but fifteen-hundred pounds of hate. Don’t want to get on the wrong side of him. And let me tell you, most every side is the wrong side of this old son of a…” He cut his words short, replaced them with a shy smile.

While I held the travois upright for him, Wild Bill used more of the twine to fasten the left and right side of the travois to the stirrup leathers on either side of the saddle. When he was sure it was securely fastened, he unfurled a rolled-up horse blanket and laid it over the travois.

“Let’s go get your friend,” he said. We walked to where Chou still lay, either asleep or unconscious, I couldn’t tell.

Albert looked up as we approached and smiled.

Kneeling at Chou’s side, Wild Bill placed a hand against her forehead and said, “She’s running a nasty fever. Sooner we get her back to the garrison the better.” He gently shook Chou by the shoulder. “Hey! Wake up now, you hear?”

Chou’s eyes fluttered open.

“That’s better,” said Wild Bill. “Now listen, the boy’s going to go get my horse and bring him over here.” He nodded sharply at Albert. “Go on now,” he said. Albert took off to where the horse waited and began untying the reins from around the branch it’d been fastened to. “Then your friend and me are going to get you to your feet. Now I’m not gonna lie, it’s gonna hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but if you could try and stay conscious, that’d be a big help. Okay?”

Chou nodded and said, “Yes.”

“You know,” said Wild Bill, turning to look at me, “for someone who says she don’t understand English she sure does understand a lot of English.”

“Long story,” I said. I turned back to Chou, as Albert led the horse to us. “You ready?” I asked her.

Chou nodded.

I positioned myself on Chou’s left, Wild Bill her right, each of us taking an elbow. “Okay,” I said, “on three we lift.”

Wild Bill nodded.

“One… two… three…” Together we hefted Chou to her feet. Chou grimaced but didn’t utter a word of complaint.

Slowly, we helped Chou one painful step at a time over to the travois, my own ankle still spasming. We positioned her at the widest end which lay against the ground, then gradually lowered her down onto the blanket. She lay there with her eyes closed, panting hard, her brow covered in perspiration.

Wild Bill took a long length of rope from his saddle and cut off a piece about six feet long with the knife he kept in his boot, then used it to tie across Chou’s chest and under both arms, before securing it to the travois framework.

“Grab those fellas’ belongings, if you’d please,” Bill said to Albert and me, nodding to the two piles of armor. We did so, bringing the two sets of armor and assorted bits and pieces to him. He placed what he could in his saddlebags, securing the rest to the travois with more twine.

I leaned in and took Chou’s hand in mine. “You doing okay?” She opened her eyes, looked at me and shook her head. “Something… does not… feel… right,” she whispered. She coughed once then closed her eyes again.

Without another word, Wild Bill Hickok, a man I was sure had been murdered in a saloon over a hundred years before I was born, urged his horse in the direction of the garrison, and Albert and I followed behind.

* * *

We had been walking for what must have been at least three hours. My ankle still hurt every time I put weight on it, and my legs felt a little tired. Apart from that, I felt good, despite the fact that for the six months before I ended up on this island, the closest thing I’d gotten to exercise had been when I left the apartment to score more pills, or I got up to pee. I should be breathless, barely able to move, but instead, I was breathing evenly and I’d hardly even broken a sweat. I began to suspect that more changes had been made to us than just the ability to understand each other’s language. I remembered the sensation I’d felt the previous night when the aurora had streaked across the sky. When it was all over, I had felt completely refreshed; like how I’d imagine an athlete who ate right, never drank, and was in bed by ten every night for a full eight hours of sleep must feel. My body was invigorated… renewed. And if Chou was right, it was all down to the pixie dust; the nanites.

The forest had grown denser, trees and shrubs crowding in all around us to the point we found ourselves almost constantly having to adjust our course to avoid some new obstacle.

“Maybe we should head down to the beach and follow the coast; we’ll make better time,” I suggested.

“It’ll also leave us exposed,” Wild Bill said, without turning to look back at me. “We’ll make too plump a target for anyone who makes the mistake of thinking we’re an easy mark. Better we stay hidden in the trees for as long as we can.” He hesitated, then came to a complete stop. “Say, have either of you eaten anything today?”

Albert and I both shook our heads.

“I guess I must have left my manners back in Arizona,” Wild Bill said. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a small brown sack. From the sack, he took two long strips of something that looked like mummified hundred-year-old skin and handed one each to me and Albert.

“It’s beef jerky,” Wild Bill said, smiling when he saw us both staring blankly at what he had given us. He pulled another strip from the bag, took a bite out of it, then raised his eyebrows in mock pleasure and said, “Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm!”

I took a tentative nibble of my jerky. It was tough to the point that it took me several seconds of levering it back and forth between my tightly clenched teeth to actually tear off a piece, but it tasted not too bad. Albert started on his too, his eyes widening in obvious pleasure as he chewed. For the next twenty minutes, we did nothing but walk and gnaw our way through the jerky. By the time I was done, my jaw muscles ached from the exertion.

Chou lay motionless on the travois. She had grown paler, her hair now stuck to her forehead by a sheen of perspiration. Her chest rose and fell slowly and steadily, and occasionally, she would let out a little moan, but at least I knew she was still alive. I asked Albert to stay back with her while I walked quickly to where Wild Bill guided his horse between the trees.

He turned and looked at me as I drew alongside him.

“Thanks for the jerky,” I said, by way of an ice-breaker.

He pinched the tip of his hat and nodded at me. “You’re welcome.”

I dove straight in with my questions. “You mentioned a camp? A garrison, right? How many of you are there? Did you all arrive here together?”

He gave me a reproachful look. “That’s a whole lot of questions for one breath,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not, but then his face cracked into a smile and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, not really knowing what I was actually apologizing for. “I just… when I arrived, I saw probably two hundred people in the water heading for the beach. I just wondered how many you've found.”

Wild Bill nodded solemnly, his eyes searching the ground ahead as he continued to negotiate the best route through the trees. He gave his horse a friendly stroke along its neck. “When me and Brute hit the water, we managed to swim to shore easy like. Helped as many folks as we could, but most everyone we saw was skittish as a runover ’coon. We fell in with a couple of others and, well, we just kind of started to pick people up. Found a place near the river—”

“There’s a river?”

“Uh huh,” he said. “We started the fixings for a camp near it.”

“How long until we get to there?” I asked.

“Not too much further. Look!” He pointed through a gap in the trees ahead of us where the forest had begun thinning. Through the gap, probably a quarter mile or so away, I saw the river Wild Bill had spoken of. “We just need to follow it downstream until we find the garrison. I’d guess it ain’t too far now.”

As if Wild Bill pointing it out had suddenly made it real, the sound of the river reached us. By the time we stood on its stony bank, the trees had thinned sufficiently that we could walk in a mostly straight line.

“So, you’re the boss of the garrison?” I asked Wild Bill.

He laughed loudly. “Me? No, not me. I don’t have the disposition or preclusion to such a position. I’m too attracted to the more immoral of life’s ways: gambling and such.”

“Who is then?”

“Fellow by the name of Edward Hubbard. An Englishman; says he’s from the future. Said the last thing he remembered was being involved in some mighty war that killed so many people, they’d lost count how many exactly.”

The idea of some futuristic warrior holding sway over the island’s population was, on the one hand, kind of enticing. If Wild Bill had no qualms about following this William Hubbard, then he must have some redeeming qualities. On the other hand, if Hubbard was from the future, then who knew what kind of deadly advanced weapons he might have. That could be why Wild Bill seemed so nonchalant; there was simply no chance of fighting and winning, so it was better to be on the winning side.

“Did this Hubbard guy say which war he fought in?”

“Yes, miss,” Bill answered. “Said it was the European War. Someone else said, where they came from, it was known as the Great War.”

I exhaled a slow breath and tried to conceal the smile of relief that went with it. While I’m not exactly what you would call a history buff, I’d paid enough attention during high school history to know those were two names that would be replaced over time by the name World War I. I’d not considered that the whole of the twentieth century would be the future for Wild Bill. Same went for Albert, and anyone else from the nineteenth century, too. I’d bet my last dime that Chou was the most chronologically advanced human on this island right now, which would give our little group an advantage.

“Look, yonder,” said Wild Bill.

A half-mile in the distance was a clearing where several small groups of people sweated under the glare of the afternoon sun.

“They’ve been busy while I was gone,” said Wild Bill, a note of genuine pride in his voice. “Come on, let’s go introduce you to the boss man.”

Ten

Closer to the garrison, I counted eight small structures that formed a horseshoe-shaped arc around a large campfire. A woman was in the process of stoking the fire with wood from a stack of nearby branches. A gray-black pillar of smoke rose straight up into the air, undisturbed by any breeze.

A hundred or so steps closer and the structures resolved into lean-tos; simple shelters made of a single panel of woven branches about eight feet by ten feet, similar in design to the travois we carried Chou on. The panels were propped up at a forty-five-degree angle by two supporting branches at each corner. They wouldn’t win any design awards, but they would provide decent shelter from the elements.

To the right of the camp, near the edge of the forest, two men stood on either side of a tall oak tree. Both held axes in their hands which they methodically swung back and forth, alternating each swing in precise time as they chopped at the tree. Suddenly, the two men scurried away, and the tree slowly toppled over, kicking up dust and debris as it crashed to the ground. The stumps of at least twenty others marked the path of the men’s progress into the forest. The lumberjacks paused to wipe sweat from their foreheads, then moved on to the next tree. Near them a pile of felled oaks waited for a group of four men and women to finish the job of stripping off the remaining branches before cutting the trees into ten-feet long sharpened stakes. The completed stakes were, in turn, being carried by two men to the outer edge of the camp where they set them into pre-dug holes to create a stockade. The stockade was already forty-feet or so long and would, judging by the number of empty pre-dug holes, enclose the entirety of the camp, save for a six-foot gap at each cardinal compass-point, which I guessed would be used as entrances.

Three burly looking men stood guard at the south, east, and northern points of the camp. Each cradled a spear like the ones Albert had made for us.

Between the campfire and the stockade, a man and two women worked on putting the finishing touches to a large log cabin. Thick branches had been used to form the beam-like supports of the roof, and the two women stood atop them while a tall, thin man passed them bundles of long-grass which the women then used to thatch the roof.

The woman I’d seen tending the fire earlier was now walking back from the river. She struggled with a large brown vase-like container that was almost half her height, supporting it with both hands like it was a fat, struggling baby. Water sloshed over the container’s rim, soaking her front and leaving small puddles behind her, as she half-walked half-staggered back toward the campfire.

The guard at the northern approach spotted us, raised a hand to shade his eyes, then yelled something back in the direction of the camp, waving his arms above his head until he got the attention of the slim man working on the cabin.

The slim man looked toward us as he was handing another bundle to one of the women doing the thatching. She stopped, tapped her workmate on the arm and their heads turned in our direction too.

“That’s Edward, the boss man,” said Wild Bill. “The two girls are Sarah and Jacquetta.” There was something about the way the cowboy spoke the last woman’s name. He had a wistful smile on his lips that made it obvious he had a bit of a ‘thing’ for this Jacquetta. I looked back at the camp before Wild Bill could see that I had noticed. Hubbard said something to the women, then stepped away from the cabin, wiped his hands on his trousers and trotted toward the guard who had alerted him to our approach. Sarah and Jacquetta watched us for a few more seconds before turning back to their work.

We reached the guard about the same time Hubbard did.

“Welcome back, Wild Bill,” Edward said as we approached, an honest smile of happiness on his face. “I see you brought some friends.” Like Albert, Edward had an obvious English accent, but it was rougher than the boy’s. But the rich timbre of the Englishman’s voice made his words sound soft, rounded like pebbles smoothed by a river. And his quiet, even pitch made his delivery gentle and measured. I was struck by a distinct but impossible feeling that I knew Edward from somewhere. He had the most intense hazel eyes, short brown-bordering-on-black hair, and a complexion which suggested he hadn’t seen much sun in a very long time. He was dressed in a worn and patched brown/gray military uniform. The right elbow of his tunic had a large green patch inexpertly sewn to it.

“Welcome to the garrison,” Edward said looking directly into my eyes. He reached out a hand, saw that it was covered in dirt and grime, smiled apologetically and wiped it clean on his pants, then extended it again, his smile widening. “Honest dirt from an honest day’s work.”

I shook Edward’s hand and told him my name, still unable to shake the feeling of déjà vu. He seemed so familiar to me.

“And this young man is…?” Edward said.

“I’m Albert.”

“Your son?” Edward asked.

I shook my head. “No. We met on the beach.”

Edward smiled again, started to say something, then noticed Chou on the travois. His expression became serious. “You have a casualty?” he said, walking to the travois, the flat of his right hand running down the flank of Brute as he did so.

“We had a run in with some… unfriendlies,” said Wild Bill, joining Edward and me.

Chou was conscious, but her skin was even paler, and she looked to be in a great deal of pain.

“Hello,” Edward said quietly, kneeling just off to the right of Chou, his attention drawn to the arrow protruding from her hip. “We’re going to get you to the surgeon and have him take a look at you.”

Chou said nothing, she just stared at Edward through half-closed lids. There was definitely something seriously wrong with her, and I worried she might be bleeding internally… or something worse.

Edward turned to face Wild Bill. “Let’s get her to Bull.” He turned back to face me and Albert, “I expect you’d like to stay close to your friend?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Come with me,” Edward said. We followed him through the stockade entrance into the camp then he guided us toward the lean-tos I had seen on our approach.

The stockade wall was taller than I had thought; a good thirteen feet high. At our approach, men and women looked up from their work, smiling or nodding at us as we walked through what was effectively a construction site toward the horseshoe of lean-tos.

“Doc Bull!” Wild Bill yelled in the direction of the two lumberjacks working on felling another oak. “Doc! Hey, Doc Bull, you got yourself a patient,” he yelled, louder this time.

One of the two lumberjacks, a large man, his belly extending over his dirt-smeared trousers, stopped mid-swing and squinted in Wild Bill’s direction.

Wild Bill waved his arms above his head and yelled the man’s name again. “Doc Bull, we need you right now.”

Bull turned to his workmate, said something to him, then leaned his ax against a tree stump. He dusted off his hands and quickly walked to where we waited.

“Got a patient for you, Doc,” Wild Bill said, as the man I would later find out was named William Bull approached us. Bull was overweight, but there was also clearly muscle beneath the top layer of fat, and he carried himself with a confidence bordering on cockiness. He was a squat, fireplug of a man, and reminded me of a neighbor’s Bulldog. He had a thick, drooping mustache the same color as his curly blond hair. He didn’t say a word to anyone, just eyeballed me and Albert as he passed us on his way to where Chou lay, the smell of sweat and wood sap wafting behind him.

He knelt beside Chou, raised one of her eyelids and stared deeply for several seconds, before doing the same for her other eye. Bull took Chou’s left forearm in his hand and measured her pulse with a pocket watch he’d pulled from his waistcoat’s breast pocket. He tutted to himself, then gently moved the clothing from around the arrow’s shaft so he could get a better look at where the arrow had penetrated Chou’s hip.

“Wild Bill, take her over to the fire and get her off this sled… carefully.” Bull sounded American, Boston, or New York maybe. His voice had a cultured accent I wasn’t familiar with, and although the precise delivery of his words conveyed a deep intelligence, there was an aloofness that didn’t sit well with me. “Edward, if you would set some water to boil while I fetch my medical bag.”

While Albert and I followed Wild Bill, Edward jogged through the space between two of the lean-tos and spoke to the woman I had seen working on the fire and fetching water from the river. She immediately grabbed more fuel from the supply of branches and leaves and fed it to the fire.

Edward picked up a large iron pot from near the fire and filled it with water from the same vessel I’d seen the woman bringing from the river (a big brown amphora with a chunk missing from its lip). A tripod made of thick, straight branches lashed together by vines stood over the fire. Edward hung the pot from a long piece of metal shaped like a hook that had been attached to the tripod.

I helped Wild Bill unhitch the travois from Brute, and we dragged it as slowly as we could to the lean-to closest to the fire, then gradually eased Chou off it and under the lean-to.

Bull came back with a big black leather bag secured by a brass clasp similar to a woman’s purse. He laid the bag on the ground, undid the clasp, and pulled out a roll of tanned leather. Kneeling, he unrolled the piece of leather, next to Chou. Attached to the roll by pockets of more leather stitched to its interior were a variety of medical instruments. Some of them—like the scalpel, scissors, and stethoscope—I recognized, the rest, I had no idea about. He also took a small metal container from the bag that reminded me of an antique cigarette case. Inside the case were eight thin glass vials swathed in cotton wool. Each vial was about three inches long and contained a reddish-brown liquid. Bull took one of the vials, popped the tiny cork seal, lifted Chou’s head with his free hand and moved to tip the contents of the vial between her lips.

“Hey!” I said, grabbing his wrist. “What are you giving her?”

Bull looked completely taken aback.

Judging by the dark gray wool trousers, what had once been a white cotton shirt was now almost as gray as the waistcoat he wore over it, I’d already reached the conclusion that the last holiday Bull had celebrated had been sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. I guess being challenged by anybody would come as a bit of a surprise to him, more so if it was by a woman.

Bull gave me what could’ve been considered a hard-stare.

“I asked you what you intend to give to my friend?” I tightened my grip.

Bull flushed red, the jowls of his cheeks began to tremble like a volcano about to erupt.

I had no illusions about his ability to break free of my grip, but he’d look like a good old-fashioned buffoon to everyone if he did. And there was no way I was going to let him administer whatever was in that vial to Chou until I knew exactly what it was.

“Well?” I continued to stare at him and wait for his answer.

I heard a chuckle behind me, followed by Wild Bill’s unmistakable gravel-road-crunch of a voice. “You two better learn to play nice,” he said. “Doc, I figure Ms. Meredith here has a right to know what your intentions are with her friend. Now, in the spirit of us being a welcoming community and all, why don’t you just tell her, so we can get this over and done with. The sun isn’t much longer for this world, and I’d like to water Brute before dark.”

Wild Bill placed his hand lightly on my right shoulder. I held Bull’s wrist for another second, just to make my point, then released it.

Bull continued as if nothing had happened, but his face remained flushed. “In order for me to extract the arrow, I need to sedate your friend.” He held up the skinny glass vial. “This is laudanum. It is a soporific and analgesic.”

“Isn’t that opium?” I asked.

“Of sorts. It’s a tincture of approximately twelve-percent opium,” said Bull. He appeared grudgingly impressed, giving me a little nod of acknowledgment, some of his brashness falling away. “You’ve had some experience in medicine?”

“In passing,” I said. I was surprised at my reaction to the drugs. Not so long ago, I would have killed to get my hands on Bull’s doctor’s bag if I’d known they were in there. Now there wasn’t even a tinge of interest. Whatever changes the nano-clusters had made to me, it had been done proficiently and completely.

“May I continue?” Bull said, his eyebrows raised while he waited for my answer.

“Sure, go right ahead.”

Bull placed the open end of the vial against Chou’s lips and slowly poured the laudanum into her mouth. I watched, still expecting some kind of reaction from my own body, you know, like a starving dog watching someone devour a big juicy burger, but I felt nothing. Chou, however, was an entirely different matter; within a few seconds, her body visibly relaxed as the drug took effect. I watched the small muscles in her face loosen and begin to droop.

“We can proceed,” Bull said with a slight smile at the corner of his mouth. “Mr. Hickok: if you and the young… lady would be so good as to help me turn the patient on to her right side… gently now… that’s it.”

Despite being loaded up on laudanum, Chou still moaned as we slowly eased her onto her side.

Bull took the scalpel from the leather roll and slit through the fabric of Chou’s trousers, exposing the arrowhead where it had exited her back. The barbed head of the arrow was coated in what I first thought was congealing blood, but it looked too black and too thick.

“What in heaven’s name?” Bull said. He leaned in closer and touched the black viscous fluid with the tip of a finger, brought the finger to his face and sniffed. He wrinkled his nose, then touched his finger lightly to the tip of his tongue. Bull spat three times in quick succession into the grass, then turned to face me. “I believe your friend has been poisoned.”

“What?” I said. “You can’t be serious?”

“I assure you, I am,” Bull continued. He held the finger with the black goo on it in front of my eyes for a second then wiped it off on his trousers. “While I can’t be completely sure, the smell leads me to believe that this is, in all likelihood, a plant-based poison, possibly from the Genus Helleborus.” Then with barely hidden urgency, he said, “We need to remove the arrow immediately. Continued exposure will only worsen her symptoms.”

Bull turned to me and said, “If you would support her shoulder here, please.” He placed his hand on Chou’s left shoulder where he wanted me to put mine. When I did so, he grasped the shaft of the arrow about six inches above where it entered Chou’s body. “And Mr. Hickok, if you would do the honors and cut the arrow just below my fingers.”

“Be my pleasure, Doc.” Wild Bill reached down and pulled the large-bladed knife from the inside of his right boot. One side was a regular knife blade, the other a serrated edge. Gently, he began to saw away at the arrow’s wooden shaft just below where Bull held the arrow. It took about a minute of careful work on Wild Bill’s part, but finally, the arrow shaft snapped off. Bull tossed it to Edward, who examined it thoroughly before tossing it into the fire.

“Meredith, stay where you are and support her back. Mr. Hickok, when I give you the nod, if you would be so kind as to slowly remove the arrowhead from your side of Ms. Chou. And do not let it come into contact with your skin.” As Bull gave us his instructions, he rummaged in his bag and removed two squares of cotton gauze and a roll of three-inch wide bandages along with a small brown glass tub with a gold lid. The words zinc oxide cream were handwritten on the lid.

“Now, Mr. Hickok, please.”

Wild Bill took a pair of worn leather gloves from his belt and leaned over Chou. He wrapped the leather glove around the head of the arrow, grasped it with his right hand and began to slowly pull it out.

Chou moaned quietly but did not regain consciousness.

The end of the arrow shaft popped out of Chou’s back with a wet slurp that made me want to gag, but I managed to resist the urge. Blood began to trickle out of both entry and exit wound.

Bull leaned in close to Chou and inspected first the wound in her front, and then her back. “I don’t believe it has damaged anything vital to her survival, but only time will tell. Our priority, now, is to keep her comfortable and ameliorate the effects of the poison as best we can.” He beckoned to Edward, “The hot water, if you please.”

Edward ran to the fire, unhooked the pot of hot water and brought it back to us. Removing a large handkerchief from his pocket, Bull dipped it gingerly into the steaming water and used it to clean Chou’s wounds. He took the roll of bandages and handed it to Wild Bill, then set about smearing some of the contents of the Zinc Oxide tub onto each piece of cotton gauze, which he placed over the entry and exit wounds. “The Zinc Oxide will help prevent infection and promote healing,” he said to me specifically. He beckoned for the roll of bandages from Wild Bill. “Now, very carefully lift her an inch or two from the ground.” Wild Bill and I complied without a murmur from Chou, and Bull fed the bandage under her then around her abdomen twice, covering the two pieces of gauze. He cut the bandage and tied it off. “You may lay her down now,” he said finally, after he had inspected his work.

We lowered Chou down onto her back.

Bull placed his materials back into his bag and stood up. “She’s in God’s hands now,” he said.

“What?” I blurted out. “Is that it? Don’t you have antibiotics or something you can give her in that bag of yours?”

Bull looked at me quizzically, an eyebrow raised. “I’ve done as much for her as I can. I’m sorry,” he said slowly, then he walked back in the direction of the tree stump where he had left his ax.

Albert sat cross-legged with his back against the lean-to’s sloped wall, his elbows resting on his legs, his chin in his hands, silently looking out at the camp and the people working there. His face was drawn, his expression glum, his eyes shaded by worry.

“She’ll be okay,” I said, smiling at the boy. The truth was, I had no idea if Chou would survive or not. I felt absolutely useless. The poison was obviously working on her, and there was nothing any of us could do to stop it. The only hope we had was that she lived long enough to make it to tonight’s aurora. But, while I knew the aurora could mend bones and heal cuts, I had no idea whether it could negate the effects of poison.

I sat down next to Chou and did the only thing I could think of that might help; I began stroking her forehead. Chou’s skin felt hot, clammy beneath my hand. Occasionally, her eyelids would twitch then become still again as if she was deep in a dream. I don’t know how long I watched her like that, but eventually, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I turned and looked up into Edward’s face.

“We should probably let her rest,” he said quietly. “Why don’t you both come and get something to eat?”

Food! In the days since we’d arrived, we’d gotten by almost exclusively on coconut, except for Wild Bill’s jerky. Now, at the mere mention of an actual meal, I felt how empty my stomach really was.

“Yes, please,” said Albert, nodding enthusiastically. “I’m starved.”

“Well, young man, you’re in luck. Come with me.” Edward winked at Albert, smiled at me, then helped us both to our feet and led us over to the campfire. He sat us down on one of four large logs, each about ten feet long that had been placed in a square around the edge of the fire. He pulled a sharpened stick from where it had been poked into the ground, then proceeded to prod the ashes and cinders around the edge of the fire until he found what he was looking for. He flipped a misshapen brick of mud from the ashes onto the ground, then poured water on to it from a coconut-cup. The mud brick hissed and steamed. Edward continued to pour water until the steam subsided then gingerly tested the brick’s temperature with his fingers. Satisfied it wasn’t going to burn him he made his way back to where we waited, tossing the brick back and forth between his hands.

“Watch this,” Edward said to Albert.

Sitting cross-legged in front of us Edward dropped the mud brick to the grass and pulled what looked like a cross between a set of brass knuckles and a butcher’s knife from a sheath on his belt. He gave the brick of dried mud a couple of good thwacks with the knife’s hilt until it cracked along a seam then pried the two halves open like a clam.

A scent of pure deliciousness wafted into my nostrils. My stomach growled like a dog and my saliva glands immediately tried to drown me as the unmistakable smell of cooked fish filled my senses.

“Salmon,” said Edward. He nodded in the direction of the river. “The river and lake’s teaming with them. Other fish, too. Here.” He separated the two halves of the mud brick and used them as plates for us. “Just watch for bones.”

It took all of my self-discipline to first pull the tiny, fragile white bones from the salmon before eating it, but it would have been a real shame to come all this way only to choke to death on my first real meal. Edward helped Albert debone his portion, then, as if he was the head-chef of some fine French restaurant, sat back and watched us with a look of expectation on his face as we ate.

It was quite possibly the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. The smoky, oily salmon flesh melted in my mouth, filling my senses with pleasure. Albert grinned from ear to ear, juice and oil shining on his lips and chin.

“Good, eh?” Edward sat back on his haunches, smiling broadly, apparently pleased with our reaction. “Let me get you another,” he said, as we made short work of the first. He returned to the fire and repeated the process of pulling a brick from the embers, cooling it and cracking it open. He also brought us a canteen of water.

As I ate my second helping of salmon, I added another tick to my growing list of things pointing to someone or something having brought us here for a reason. I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure the probability that there could be salmon on a planet other than Earth without someone transporting it there was only a couple of digits shy of next-to-impossible. No, this was just another indication that whoever, or whatever, was pulling the strings behind the curtain of this world, had plans for us. They didn’t want us to starve, which meant, logically, at some point they were going to have to put in an appearance and make those plans known to us.

“I really need to check on Chou,” I said after finishing my meal. I felt a pang of shame at having left her for so long.

“Of course, of course,” said Edward. “Go, be with her. I’ll watch over this little rapscallion.” He ruffled Albert’s hair playfully.

I thanked Edward and moved to Chou’s side, wiping pieces of fish and oil from my mouth.

Chou lay on her back, chest rising and falling slowly, rhythmically. She was still in her drug-induced sleep. I placed the back of my hand against her forehead.

“Shit!” I hissed quietly. Chou’s temperature was definitely higher than earlier. I bit into my lower lip with concern.

A slim, elegant-looking woman approached from behind the lean-to. She was a little taller than me, her round face free of any wrinkles or blemishes, with the kind of cheeks I imagined aunties would have felt the need to pinch every time they visited. Her thick light brown hair was pinned back on either side of her head at the temple by two metal hair clips. I guessed she was somewhere in her early thirties. Her clothes looked like they were circa nineteen-forties or fifties: blue pants and matching jacket over a white blouse, which, although a little worn-looking was business-like and clean save for a few muddy splotches. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in an office or welcoming you to an la art gallery. I recognized her as the woman I had spotted tending the fire and fetching water from the river when we first arrived at the garrison.

“Hello,” the woman said, with a distinct New York accent. “I’m Evelyn McHale.”

“Meredith,” I replied, shaking her offered hand. “This is Chou, and the little boy is Albert.”

“I’m going to assume you all arrived here from different times?” She paused, then, with a smile, said, “Aren’t those just the strangest words you’ve ever heard?”

I nodded in agreement. “I’m from 2017. Albert’s from 1910 and Chou says she’s from 2374.”

I expected the dates to leave Evelyn speechless. Instead, she nodded and said, “You and Ms. Chou are by far the ‘oldest’ of us, if I may use that term. Before you arrived, that title belonged to Tabitha; she’s from 1977. My last stop before whenever we are now was 1953.”

I suddenly felt intolerably overwhelmed by the absurdity of our situation. How was any sane person supposed to deal with this? How? I gave a brief snuffle and threw my hand to my mouth to stifle it.

“Oh, honey! What’s wrong?” Evelyn said, she stepped in close to me and wrapped a comforting arm around my shoulder, her hand slipping down my arm to hold my hand. She squeezed it reassuringly. “Tell me what’s wrong. Are you okay?”

I nodded, gave a little snort and pulled myself together as best as I could. “Sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “It’s just… all of this.” I fluttered my hands around my head.

“Oh, my dear, it’s nothing you should be apologizing for,” Evelyn said, stepping back but not letting go of my hand. “I’ve felt like falling apart ever since I arrived. If it hadn’t been for Edward, well…” her voice trailed off, and her eyes seemed to briefly focus on a point far away. Then she was back again, smiling at me. “Tell me, how’s your friend doing?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, hearing my voice falter again. A small red dot of blood had appeared on the gauze Bull had placed over Chou’s wound. “Bull says he thinks she’s been poisoned and… and I think it’s getting worse.” It had only been three days since Chou, a total stranger, had dragged my ass off the beach, but in that short time, she had saved my life twice. This last time, putting her own life on the line to save Albert and me when she could have easily outrun our two pursuers and left us behind. The idea of losing the one person in this world I felt I could trust was terrifying.

Evelyn leaned over and placed the back of her own hand against Chou’s head. After a moment or two, she pulled it away, nodding in agreement with me. “Well, don’t you worry. Doc Bull’s a fine physician. Bit abrupt for my taste, but I’m not going to hold that against him. I’m sure your friend’ll be just fine.” She did a pretty good job of sounding convinced.

I seized the moment to change the subject. “You all have made a lot of progress in just three days.” I took a good long look over the camp.

“That’s all Edward’s doing. He’s been unstoppable since we arrived. We landed in the water together, and he helped me get to shore; then he went back in and rescued as many souls as he could. Everyone was just so confused and frightened, but not Edward. He took charge, organized us into scavenger groups and had us search the shoreline picking up anything useful that washed ashore and looking for anyone else who made it to the beach. Most people were just as terrified as we were and ran away, but some were grateful and decided to join us. When we found the river, Edward said we should consider making a camp along it as we wouldn’t last long without a source of fresh water. We followed it upstream and found this clearing. We spent the first night sheltering from the rain as best we could. Then the lights in the sky came, and everyone felt so much better. It heals you, you know?”

“Yes, we know,” I said. “I’m counting on it curing Chou… if she can just hold on.” I felt tears force their way to the corners of my eyes. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so useless in my entire life as I did then.

Evelyn grasped my hand and gave it another brief squeeze. “Now, don’t be silly. Of course, she’s going to make it. You have to have faith.”

I nodded, knuckled the tears away and said, “Please, go on.”

“Well, now, where was I? Oh, yes. The next morning, when we all saw how strange the sun was, it became obvious we were not on Earth anymore. Edward stopped us from panicking. He said he believed we’d been brought here for a good reason and he was sure that reason would be revealed to us at some point. Until then, we needed to survive and to do that, we needed shelter. He gave us all something to live for, a purpose.”

It seemed like Chou and I weren’t the only ones to believe that whatever intelligence was behind transporting us to this planet had an as-of-yet unrevealed plan for our future.

Evelyn continued, “Edward had us make the lean-tos, so we had somewhere dry to shelter. Then he got everyone involved in creating the garrison. Except for Wild Bill. He asked him to go scout out the island and report back what he found.”

“Luckily for us,” I said.

Evelyn gave my hand another squeeze. She pointed at the almost complete cabin that Edward and the two women had been working on. “Benito showed us how to make the cabin, which was difficult, seeing as he doesn’t speak any English. Thank goodness for Peter, he speaks more languages than you can shake a stick at. We’re going to have a fine village here soon. Somewhere safe for all of us.”

“You said Benito doesn’t speak English?”

“Just a dialect of Spanish, as far as we can tell.”

“Not even after the aurora… you know, the lights that come at night.”

“Aurora. I like that name,” said Evelyn. “But to answer your question, no, we still have to rely on Peter to translate. Why?”

I gave a moment’s thought to making up some story as a cover but thought better of it. The world I came from thrived on deceit and mistrust. We had a chance to change that and now seemed like as good a time for me to get on board. I took a deep breath and said, “Because Chou doesn’t speak English. And up until the first night’s aurora, we couldn’t understand each other at all. Now, when she talks, I hear her words as English and when anyone else speaks Chou hears it in her language.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Evelyn said. She turned to where Edward sat chatting with Albert by the campfire. “Edward, you need to come hear what Meredith has to say,” she called out.

Edward got to his feet and brought Albert with him, his right hand resting on the boy’s shoulder as they continued whatever conversation they were so engrossed in.

“Meredith just told me something amazing,” Evelyn said. “Go ahead dear, tell him.”

I dutifully repeated my story for a second time.

“It’s all true,” said Albert, when I was finished.

“Chou said she thought it was the nanites… the pixie dust... that’s what we call those little specks of light the aurora illuminates. She says they are actually really tiny but powerful machines that have reprogrammed us in some way, so we can understand each other.”

“Pixie dust… I like that name, too,” said Evelyn, cheerfully.

“Chou is convinced these little machines are responsible for healing us. I know it probably sounds impossibly farfetched to you, but in the time I come from, they’re beginning to work on that same technology. And Chou said that in her time they’re commonplace, just not as advanced as the ones on this planet. Which I guess makes sense if she’s really from several hundred years into my future.”

Edward’s brow furrowed. “I’ll admit, it’s hard to get my mind around. If I hadn’t seen what they can do with my own eyes, I would be skeptical.” He paused momentarily, then said, “Tell me, Meredith, why do you think only your group was given this ability to translate?”

“Until now, we didn’t even know we were the only ones affected. We just assumed that because we changed, everyone on the island must have too. Why were we singled out? I honestly have no idea.”

“How do you know it changed all of you?” Evelyn said. “Couldn’t it have just affected one of you? And who’s to say it only works when it’s translating between English and whatever language it is Chou speaks. Do you think it works with other languages, too.”

“Wow!” I said. “That hadn’t even crossed my mind.” I thought the idea over for a second. “There’s only one way to test that theory. Maybe we should go talk to Benito and see what happens?”

“That’s a good idea, but we’ll have to save it for later, I think,” said Edward, “I don’t want to pull him from his work right now.”

“Well, one thing is for certain,” said Evelyn. “Whether it’s all of you or just one of you that has this ability, if it works on other languages too, it’s going to make you very, very valuable.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, my dear, just think what it means if you are able to translate any language? There are hundreds of people on this island, and I’ll bet you dollars to buttons most of them don’t speak English.”

It was a keen observation on Evelyn’s part. In this strange new world, it would be what you could contribute on a personal level, your skills, knowledge, abilities, and willingness to learn which would be the yardstick by which your worth was measured. There could be hundreds of different cultures from throughout time represented on this island alone, some of those languages would inevitably be so old they would be a complete mystery. I could only imagine how valuable someone who could communicate with all those cultures might be… and how coveted they might be by those who pursued power. And if there were more humans on that distant continent to the east, there could be thousands of different cultures, millions even.

“That’s concerning,” I said.

Edward stood, subconsciously brushed dirt from his pants, and looked over to where the two women were still working on the cabin. “I really should get back to work. That roof isn’t going to finish itself. Perhaps later we can put your theory to the test,” he said. “In the meanwhile, make yourselves comfortable. I’ll introduce you to everyone when we’re done for the day.”

“We’d like to stay as close to Chou as possible,” I said, placing my arm around Albert’s shoulders.

“Of course,” Edward said. “Evelyn, would you do the honors?”

“Don’t you worry, I’ll look after them,” Evelyn offered with a smile.

Edward said goodbye and walked off toward the cabin.

“Well, young man,” Evelyn said, sitting down, “why don’t you come over here with me and tell me all about yourself.” She patted the ground next to her. Albert joined her. I turned my attention to Chou while Evelyn kept Albert occupied with stories of her own childhood adventures growing up in Washington D.C. and Tuckahoe, New York—which he seemed fascinated by. They chatted enthusiastically, laughing as they bantered back and forth.

Thankful for a few minutes to myself, I checked Chou’s temperature again; she seemed unchanged, but I noticed a line of drool running from the corner of her mouth. It had a slight red tint to it.

My thoughts drifted back over everything that had happened since morning. I hadn’t even had time to really think about Phillip. Poor, poor, Phillip. Although I had known him for only a few days, his violent murder had rocked me to my very core. Despite his outer gruffness, he’d been a good man, and his affection for Albert had been apparent. It was a painful loss.

I felt a swell of panic rising within me as I realized how close we’d all come to dying. If Wild Bill had not been near enough to hear the fight, or if he had arrived a few minutes later, then the chances were good Albert, Chou, and I would be lying dead alongside Phillip. As it was, Chou had risked her life to save us and had paid a painful price; might even pay the ultimate price. The idea of losing Chou, too… well, that was too painful to even allow myself to consider.

“He reminds me of my boy,” Evelyn said.

“What?” I said, suddenly pulled back to the present. “I’m sorry, I was thinking back over… never mind.”

A look of concern passed across Evelyn’s face, like a cloud moving in front of the sun. “Albert, he reminds me of my own son, Malcolm. He’s about the same age. A good boy. A very good boy.” Evelyn’s mask of abundantly cheerful energy slipped momentarily, a lopsided smile hinting at a deeper pain lying just beneath the surface like a toxic pond. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that some of these people might have families they'd left behind. That everyone on this island had their own story to tell, their own pain and worries and fears that were easily equal to my own, if not even more so. This was no time for me to wallow in self-pity and fear.

“I’m so sorry,” I managed to say.

“Oh, that’s alright.” Evelyn reached out and patted my knee affectionately. “It’s not like my ending up here was anyone’s fault but my own. Others arrived here because of a bad flip of the coin, but I’m the only one responsible for my fate. No one to really blame but me.”

I was about to ask what she meant by that but thought better of it. I sensed there was a lot of pain hidden behind the beautiful façade that was Evelyn McHale.

“How many kids… I mean children, do you have?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation back to something more cheerful.

“Just Malcolm,” Evelyn said, her smile returning as she recalled her boy.

“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you,” said Albert, throwing his arms around Evelyn’s neck and hugging her tightly.

Evelyn laughed, a cute, girlish giggle, obviously genuinely moved by the boy’s show of affection. “That is a wonderful thing to say, Albert. You are a very chivalrous young man.”

“He’s also a very brave kid,” I said.

Albert blushed.

Evelyn cocked her head in exaggerated curiosity. “Oh really? It sounds like there might be a story of knightly gallantry behind that sentence.” She spoke her words with no hint of adult condescension. She pulled Albert to her and held him tight, rocking back and forth as she stroked his hair. Finally, she set him down again. “I swear to you, my fine young knight, that just as you have promised to protect me, I will never let anyone harm you. Do you hear me?”

Albert nodded, tears appearing at the corner of his own eyes.

“Well, I guess now is as good a time to share my own story,” I said. “If you’d like to hear it?”

A dip of Evelyn’s head indicated that she would, and I spilled everything that had led up to my arrival on this world, leaving out none of the gory detail.

“You don’t look as though you’re shocked or surprised,” I said when I was done. There was perhaps even a hint of understanding in Evelyn’s eyes.

“Time might separate us, but society’s problems rarely seem to change,” she said. “We’re more alike than you would imagine. I knew several people who were frequent users of illicit drugs, and more than a few who were addicted to Horse. We’re all just human, after all.”

“Horse? What’s horse?” I said, a little confused, and thinking she might be referring to a gambling addiction.

“Heroin,” Evelyn whispered as though the long arm of the law might have an interplanetary reach. She flushed red and gave that same innocent giggle she had earlier. “Racehorse trainers used to dose their horses with heroin to give them a little extra pep, if you know what I mean. So… Horse.” She smiled, and I laughed along with her.

“Oh, my! Wherever did the time go?” said Evelyn. She stood up. “I’m supposed to be preparing the evening meal,” she went on. “Do you feel up to lending a helping hand?”

“Sure,” I said. Sitting around fretting wasn’t going to help Chou, so the idea of having something to distract me was enticing.

Evelyn turned to Albert and said, “I need to show Meredith something down at the river, would you be a gentleman and watch over your friend Chou for a little while?”

Albert, ever eager to be of assistance, nodded.

“And if you need him, Edward’s right over there at the cabin.” Evelyn reached out and touched Albert’s cheek tenderly. “You’re a good boy.”

Albert blushed a deep crimson, walked over to where Chou lay and sat next to her, clasping one of her hands in his own.

“Come on,” Evelyn said, setting off toward the river. “I need to check the traps.”

“Traps?” I asked as I followed her.

“You’ll see,” Evelyn said.

* * *

At its widest, the river stretched two-hundred feet from one side to the other. It moved languidly, like liquid diamond; slow enough that lily-pads grew in clumps below its banks, along with tall bulrushes and wispy reeds, and lined with poplars, oaks, and willows that dipped their weeping branches into the water like fingers trailed behind a boat.

I followed Evelyn along a rough path she must have been responsible for beating, pushing through curtains of bamboo, past trees and bushes heavy with red and black and orange berries until we reached a natural bay, formed at the elbow of the river where it curved to the left, altering its route through softer soil.

“Here we are,” said Evelyn. She placed a hand on my shoulder for balance, kicked off her shoes, rolled her pants legs above her knees, and waded out into the water of the bay, moving toward three tall bamboo canes rising up from the water about twenty feet from the earthy riverbank I stood on. The water was shallow enough that, by the time Evelyn made it to the first bamboo cane, the water was still only just above her knees. She reached down, and after a moment or two of feeling around, pulled out a cone-shaped object about four feet long, made from bamboo lashed together to form a cage.

“Fish trap,” Evelyn called over to me, grinning from ear to ear while holding the trap above her head so I could see the four large Salmon thrashing within.

She waded back to where I waited for her on the shore, before returning to the other markers to bring back two more traps full of fish.

“Jorge showed us how to make these,” Evelyn said, anticipating my question, as I helped her haul the last fish trap out of the water. A wide mouth at one end of the wickerwork trap gradually narrowed to a much narrower hole. It allowed fish to swim in and become trapped in the back section of the cage. The salmon thrashed dementedly as the water spilled from the basket. With a sharp tug, Evelyn dislodged the inner part of the trap from the main basket, laid it at her feet then reached in and pulled out a fish. Dropping to her knees, she placed the salmon on the grass, held it in place and reached for a thick piece of wood from where she had evidently stored it between the roots of a tree. “And we use this,” she said, brandishing the piece of wood like a club, “to kill them.” She smacked the salmon on the head with the club. The fish, understandably, stopped moving.

Shocked, I gave out a little gasp at the sudden act of brutality.

Evelyn seemed not to notice. She started to hum a catchy upbeat tune to herself as she worked, singing a chorus about ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ and ‘working for the Yankee dollar’ while she proceeded to kill the remaining fish one after the other.

“Now we have to prep them,” she said. She pulled a knife from inside the waistband of her pants and set about expertly gutting the fish, tossing the innards out into the river.

“You, uh, look like you’ve done this before,” I said, trying not to allow the revulsion I felt show in my words.

Evelyn glanced up from her butchering, regarding me with raised eyebrows. “Nothing I haven’t done on a regular basis for dinner for my family.”

“I buy my fish frozen from the supermarket,” I said.

“Supermarket?”

“Really, really big stores that sell, well, everything.”

“Oh, like a Safeways? I’ve heard about them out in California. Sounds… easy,” Evelyn said as she finished gutting the last fish. There was no judgment in her voice.

“It is… or I suppose, it was.”

Evelyn picked up the fish and walked back down to the river’s edge. I followed. “This next part’s a bit, well, messy,” she said.

I wondered what could be messier than pulling the entrails out of a fish.

“Here hold these.” She dumped the gutted salmon into my outstretched hands where they slipped around like they were still alive. As I fought not to drop them, Evelyn began pulling large handfuls of mud from the river bank until she formed a large mound on the grass between us. “Let’s try that big one first,” she said, plucking one of the fish from my hands. She immediately began to cover the salmon in the mud, plastering it on until it was an inch deep all over and resembled one of the bricks I had seen Edward pull from the fire earlier. She did the same for two more, then said, “Now you give it a try.” She took the remaining fish from me, and I proceeded to try to duplicate the procedure.

“Ahhh,” I said as the fish slipped through my hands and onto the grass with a splat. “It’s a lot harder than you make it look.” Getting the right consistency of the mud so it would stick to the fish scales and not my hands was easier said than done.

“Just add a little water to the mix,” Evelyn said, guiding me.

I did as she instructed, molding the more pliant mud around the fish.

“There. Perfect,” she announced when I finally had a finished product that somewhat resembled hers.

Perhaps it was my earlier candidness that made Evelyn feel at ease, or maybe it was just that she needed to say what she had to say aloud to someone, I don’t know, but as I worked on the next fish, Evelyn took a deep breath, looked me straight in the eye and said “I prefer women to men. That’s how I ended up here.” She sounded almost apologetic. Her eyes dropped to the ground, and she flushed red. “There I said it.” Her eyes rose back to my face, obviously expecting to see judgment in them.

“You mean you prefer women in the romantic sense, right?” I said, cautiously.

Evelyn bit her bottom lip and nodded.

I smiled warmly, and said, “Well good for you.” I raised my right hand and waited for her to return my high-five. An awkward three seconds followed of her staring, confused, at my muddy hand before I finally dropped it and gave her a light tap on the knee instead. “But that doesn’t really explain how you ended up here.” Now I put both hands up in the classic gesture of surrender. “And I completely understand if it’s just too personal and you don’t want to talk about it.”

“You mean how did my preference for women lead to me standing on the bank of a river teaching a woman from the future how to gut fish?” Evelyn said, with only a hint of irony. “No, it’s okay, I need to get this off my chest because it’s all a bit of a jumble in my head right now.”

She placed the fish she had been working on down next to the others we had already prepped, and continued, “I met the love of my life in 1943. We were at war, and I’d joined the Women’s Army Corp to do my bit for the effort, as we all did back then. I was stationed in Jefferson City, Missouri, of all places. Her name was Caroline, and she is… was… perfect.”

A sad smile haunted Evelyn’s lips, and a tear began to roll down her right cheek, but she exorcized them both with one muddy hand, leaving a streak of dirt behind.

“Those two years were the best time of my life, but when the war came to an end, I knew there was no way we could carry our love affair into the real world. I was tormented by confusion and self-loathing, and, may God forgive me, I left Caroline without even saying goodbye. I moved to New York, got a job and met a man, married him, had my sweet baby Malcolm by him. Everything seemed… bearable, and for a while, I convinced myself I’d put all of that other foolishness behind me. Then a year after Malcolm was born, I received a letter from Caroline: she had tracked me down and wanted to talk. I met with her, of course. How could I not? But it was with the intention of telling her that there was no chance for us, none at all. I had a husband, a child, a life. But, oh, when I saw her sitting at that cafe table, I knew that none of that mattered. I loved her; that was what mattered. For the next eight months, we would meet at her apartment every chance we could, planning how we would spend the rest of our lives. And maybe it would have all worked out if my husband hadn’t cottoned to what was going on. How he found out, I can only guess, but when I got home one night, my bags were packed and waiting for me on the porch, and no amount of pleading or crying was going to change his mind. I don’t know how it is where you’re from, but women don’t fare so well in divorces in my time. I lost my child, my home, my job. And, my God, the shame that was heaped upon me.”

“I can’t even begin to imagine,” I said quietly.

Evelyn smiled sadly, and continued, “Caroline begged me to come away with her; we would move somewhere quiet and live as spinsters, the only acceptable way for society to cast a blind eye to two women living together. But I was inconsolable; I knew everything was my fault and nothing Caroline could say or do was going to make a difference. So I threw myself into the Potomac. It was just as the river pulled me under that I heard a voice offer to save me, to take me someplace where having to worry about who I loved would play no part in my life.” Evelyn paused for a second and looked around us. “This wasn’t quite what I thought they had in mind for me.” She laughed with a heavy dose of melancholy laced through it.

At some point during Evelyn’s story, I had taken both of her hands in mine. I squeezed them now and smiled a matching sad smile. We picked up the fish-bricks and began to retrace our steps slowly back along the river bank in the direction of the garrison.

“You can imagine my surprise when I found myself swimming in what I thought was another river that first minute after we arrived,” Evelyn said. “I suppose it would have been the ultimate cosmic joke to have drowned in the process of being saved.”

I nodded and said, “Well, here we both are then: two suicides given a second chance. If God or the universe or whatever is willing to forgive us for that, then I don’t think either are going to be too interested in judging us for who we choose to love.”

When we reached the campfire, we began carefully burying the fish-bricks under the glowing cinders.

“Where I come from…” I paused, realizing I would have to change the tense of my memories from this point on. “In the when I come from, most people don’t have a problem with two women being in love. In fact, they live together openly and can even get married if they want to.”

“Married? Really?” Evelyn seemed incredulous.

“Really. People can change, Evelyn. Civilization is like a river, it changes people whether they want to or not. It just takes time, that’s all.”

Evelyn took a moment to consider my words, her head tilted to the right, the ghost of a smile returning to her face. “Well, if you’re right,” she said quietly, “maybe there’s hope for us after all.”

Eleven

For one heart-stopping moment, I thought Chou was dead. Then her chest rose and fell, and I exhaled a silent sigh of relief along with her. The afternoon was making way for evening agonizingly slowly. With several hours left until the aurora, I could only hope that Chou was able to hold on until then. I knew this woman from the future was astoundingly strong, but I didn’t know if that would be enough to save her from the poison coursing through her body.

Albert had fallen asleep next to Chou, his hand still entwined with hers. I woke him, whispering for him to follow me over to the fire where Evelyn watched over the evening meal.

Long shadows were edging their way across the garrison, and I wondered what time the rest of the camp would quit for the day. As if they'd heard my thoughts, I saw Edward and the rest of his people begin to make their way over to the campfire.

Edward, sweat-stained and dirty, smiled as he approached us. “I see you’ve had a productive afternoon,” he said, eying the fish-bricks baking in the fire’s embers.

“Food feeds friendship,” Evelyn said, beaming.

“You guys have been pretty busy too,” I said. In the time since we had arrived, Edward and his two helpers had all but completed thatching the cabin’s roof.

Edward looked back over his shoulder at the cabin. “Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll have it finished. It’ll be nice to have a proper roof over our heads again, and somewhere secure to store our food and supplies.” We spoke for a minute longer, then Edward said, “Well, I could talk your ear off all night, but I think there are a few others here who would like to meet you. Are you ready?”

“You bet,” I replied.

Edward got to his feet and called out loudly, “If you’d all gather around, please.” He beckoned everyone over to us, and once the last person had arrived, he continued. “I’d like to introduce you to our latest arrivals: Meredith and Albert.” I smiled and gave a little wave, Albert leaned into me, suddenly shy. Edward continued, “Their friend Weston was injured earlier today, but she’s under Dr. Bull’s care now. We’re sure she’ll make a speedy recovery.”

I was glad Edward was confident of Chou’s recovery because I certainly wasn’t.

A murmur of greetings and nods came from the gathered group. Albert and I smiled back. I did a quick headcount. Not including Chou, Albert, and me, there were thirteen other residents of the garrison, or as Edward liked to call them Garrisonites. The people looking back at me were mostly Caucasian, but there were two heavily muscled men and a strikingly pretty young woman who I guessed were either from South America or perhaps somewhere in the Mediterranean. The two men both wore heavy-looking shirts and thickly-woven pants, stained with sweat and dirt, the sleeves of their shirts rolled up past their elbows, exposing thick, strong forearms. It was obvious these men were used to manual labor, their strength gained from daily hard work, rather than from hours spent at a gym. The young woman, her long black hair pulled up into a tight bun on the top of her head, wore a beautiful dress; a white bodice with intricate embroidery of flowers and beading, the skirt red with black embroidered flowers and beads. She regarded me through half-closed eyes as she stepped closer to the fire, smiling a little nervously.

The rest wore what looked to me to be a mixture of twentieth-century clothing: three of the women wore skirts and blouses and a mixture of jackets or sweaters tied around their waist. The men wore pants and shirts you could’ve picked up in just about any store in my time. Two also had jackets folded over their arms. Everyone was dirty and smeared with sweat; their skin covered with splashes of dirt and mud. They all had scrapes and cuts and grazes of some kind on their arms and faces. And they all looked tired. And collected together, their body odor was… well, let’s just say it was pungent.

A woman appeared from inside the cabin and walked over to me, wiping her hands on a dirty cloth. She thrust out a hand and said in a clipped English accent, “Hello, I’m Jacquetta Hawkes. Very pleased to meet you.” She was dressed in light-brown riding jodhpurs tucked into calf-high black boots and a cotton blouse, the sleeves rolled up to show off her tanned arms. The blouse had been white at some point, but it was now stained tea-leaf brown with dirt.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said back, and we shook hands.

And finally, there was Peter Freuchen. He looked like he was eight-feet tall and weighed about the same as a fully-grown grizzly bear. He had a head of thick, black, disheveled hair. A matching fuzzy beard hid most of the lower half of his face. A pair of bright, intelligent eyes peered from beneath eyebrows that were so bushy they looked more like fur. He regarded first me, then Albert with equal interest. He strode toward us, and I half expected the ground to shake beneath his feet. Stopping in front of me, his face cracked into a smile.

“Hay-lo,” he said in a voice that was surprisingly gentle but heavily accented by what I would later find out was his Danish origins. “My name is Peter, but everyone just calls me Freuchen. I’m very glad to make your acquaintance.” He offered his hand, and I automatically took it, my own hand swallowed up in his meaty paw. He wore a thick leather belt with a machete hanging from it. In his other hand Freuchen carried a large wooden-handled ax, and when he caught Albert’s eyes straying to it, he chuckled loudly and said, “Don’t vurry, little vun I only use this for chopping the trees. You are safe.” He gave the ax a playful swing above his head.

Edward stood between Freuchen and Jacquetta. He clapped Freuchen loudly on the back and squeezed Jacquetta’s shoulder affectionately. “I see you’ve made your introductions already. Peter and Jacquetta are our resident translators; and thank God for them, too.”

“I speak most European languages,” Freuchen said, matter-of-factly and with no sense of boastfulness. “I have traveled the vurld many times over, so it has come in quite useful.” He smiled modestly.

Jacquetta said, “And I am fluent in Spanish, French, and German. I can also hold a decent convo in Latin and Ancient Greek. Oh, and I have a passing familiarity with several Arabic dialects.” Unlike Freuchen, there was a distinct sense of pride in Jacquetta’s voice.

“Jorge, Benito, and Evita don’t speak much English,” Edward said, looking across at the two men and the woman I had seen first walk back into camp. “Without Freuchen and Jacquetta’s help, we would have had a devil of a time understanding each other.” Again, I was reminded that whatever alterations had been made to me, or Albert, or Chou the previous night that allowed us to communicate so fluently, had not happened to anyone in this group of strangers.

“How is your friend?” Freuchen asked, looking over my shoulder to where Chou lay beneath the shelter.

“She’s holding her own,” I said.

“Edvard has told me that both you and your friend—”

“Chou,” I said, “her name is Weston Chou. Just call her Chou; she seems to like it.”

Freuchen nodded. “Sure. Sure. Edvard told me that both you and Chou are from the future. I very much look forvard to talking vith you both, at some point.”

He was like a little child; eager to learn as much as he could. The idea that I was, to all of these people other than Chou, some version of a futuristic time traveler had never crossed my mind. All the questions I wanted to ask Chou about what the future was like must be burning just as strongly in these people too.

“Come with me,” Edward said, taking me by the elbow. “Let’s go introduce you to everyone else. You too, Albert.” We walked back toward the fire where the rest of the group had settled, sitting on the logs placed around the fire to act as benches, drinking water from the pots we had seen filled earlier while chatting amongst themselves. Everyone looked exhausted, but apart from their clothing, they all looked so, well… unremarkably normal. Certainly not what I would've expected of a group I suspected had been hand-selected for some higher purpose by the Voice.

“Alright, everyone, please gather around,” Edward said again. Heads turned in our direction, and people moved in closer. “We’re going to be seeing a lot of new faces joining us over the coming weeks, I’m sure, and the first of those are here with us this evening. This is Meredith, and the little chap next to her is Albert.”

Freuchen began to repeat Edward’s words but stopped a half-sentence in, a puzzled expression on his face; an expression echoed on the faces of the three non-English speakers Jorge, Benito, and Evita as they looked first at Edward then Freuchen, then to the rest of the group.

“Is something wrong?” Edward asked Freuchen.

Freuchen seemed confused. “I… you understand vat I’m saying to you?” he said to Edward.

“Yes, of course. Why?” Edward replied, and I felt a sense of déjà vu wash over me.

“He’s not speaking English,” Albert said, beating me to the answer.

Edward looked puzzled, glanced at me, then across to Freuchen, raising his eyebrows questioningly.

“The boy is correct,” said Freuchen. “I am speaking Spanish. At least, I think I am.”

“This is what you were talking about earlier, isn’t it?” Edward said to me. “You said you thought the aurora made some kind of a change to you so that you could understand Chou and she you.”

“Yes, but I guess this means it was either me or Albert that the changes were made to. Peter, can you say something in another language?”

“And now I am speaking in French,” Freuchen said in perfect English.

Jorge, Benito, and Evita regarded us intently, everyone else seemed mildly confused as to what was going on. I smiled at Evita and stepped forward, extending my hand. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Meredith, can you understand me?”

Both Jorge and Benito looked at each other as though I was setting them up somehow, but Evita smiled warmly and said, “Yes, your Spanish is perfect.”

I glanced back over my shoulder at Edward and Freuchen. “I hardly speak any Spanish.”

Jacquetta’s face broke into an amused smile. “This is very strange, very interesting, but mostly very strange. The question would appear to be which of you is the one responsible for this… psychic translation.”

“Let’s find out,” I said and walked away from the group. When I was about fifty feet away, I waved my hand and waited as Freuchen, Edward, Jacquetta, and Evita talked amongst themselves. I was out of earshot, so saw only their mouths working silently and then the shrugs and raised hands that seemed to indicate they could no longer understand each other.

Freuchen waved me back, and I jogged over to them.

“Well?” I said.

Jacquetta answered, “As soon as you moved away, only Freuchen and I were able to understand anything that was said.”

“I can understand you now,” said Jorge, nodding sternly.

“Now, I too can understand you,” Benito added.

Evita smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “As can I.”

“Vell,” said Freuchen, “it seems ve have an answer to who our new interpreter is.”

“Let me try something else,” I said. “Keep talking until you can’t understand each other anymore,” I said.

Edward nodded and began to recite aloud to Evita a poem that seemed familiar to me.

I began to back away from the group, taking one step at a time and pausing. Around thirty feet, as Edward’s voice became muffled and indistinct, I saw Evita’s head tilt sideways in puzzlement, her smile turning into a look of confusion and mild amusement. Edward turned toward me and yelled for me to come back.

“It looks like I have to be close to you for whatever this effect is to work,” I said. “As soon as I can’t hear you, the translation ability stops. It’s like I’m some kind of human Wi-Fi router.” I realized by the puzzled looks directed at me that no one but me knew what a wireless router was. “A radio transmitter. It’s like I’m a radio transmitter, but with a very short range.” That explanation seemed to do it for the majority of the people to grasp the concept.

“This is incredible,” Freuchen said, but I barely heard him. My mind was occupied with wondering why I had been singled out to receive this… ability.

“So many questions,” I said.

“Excuse me?” said Edward.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking aloud. Look, we’re obviously not going to get any answers as to why I have this ability any time soon, so we might as well make use of it.” I turned and smiled apologetically at Freuchen. “Sorry to put you out of a job, big guy.”

When Freuchen laughed, it sounded like thunder echoing down a valley. “That is fine vith me. I have other things I could be doing.”

Edward nodded slowly. “Let’s get on with the introductions then, shall we?”

As I’d noted earlier, the Garrisonites were just every day, normal people. Jorge was an Argentinian fisherman who had drowned during a storm at sea in the winter of 1908. Oliver Schwartz, a tall, gaunt-looking man in a gray business suit, was an architect. The Voice had plucked him from his time when the private airplane he had been piloting alone to Bermuda had crashed into the ocean just before Christmas of 1965.

Benito Bella was a lumberjack who'd been in the process of bleeding to death after an accident with his saw in the Venezuelan rainforests in late 1898. Tabitha Keenan, a strikingly beautiful Irish botanist, said she died of malaria while on a solo expedition to the Amazon in 1958. Sarah Harmon, a veterinarian, had chosen to end her own life for reasons she was not willing to talk about. And Jacquetta was an archaeologist.

“I had a bit of an accident while exploring a tomb in Egypt in 1941,” Jacquetta said, by way of a cryptic explanation as to how she had ended up here with us.

Caleb Doggett, a haggard, stone-faced man of very few words told me he had been close to burning to death after his Texas homestead had caught fire sometime around 1902.

And last but not least was Evita Samaniego; the quiet-spoken woman from Mexico in the beautiful red and white dress which, it turned out, she'd made herself. She was a seamstress from San Pedro. Evita thought she'd probably died from tuberculosis, as her husband and three young children had already succumbed to the disease weeks earlier, leaving her alone. The last few weeks of her life were still so foggy within her mind, she couldn’t be sure. All she remembered for certain was the Voice offering to save her.

Everyone remembered the Voice.

There were no geniuses among them. No great leaders (at least that I knew of at the time) and, apart from Wild Bill, no one I recognized as standing out in history. But when you considered them as a group, they all had very specific skills or knowledge; knowledge that would be really useful for sustaining a civilization… or maybe for starting a new one.

As darkness settled over the garrison, and the shattered moon rose deathly-white to haunt the sky, we pulled the salmon Evelyn and I had prepared out of the fire’s ashes. We ate as a group gathered around the fire and talked for the next couple of hours about our own times, safe within the campfire’s lambent glow, burning furiously now as it was fed more branches. When everyone had eaten their fill, Edward dispatched Wild Bill and Benito Bello to stand watch on the perimeter of the camp.

The fire pushed back the darkness far enough that I could see all the way to the edge of the camp in one direction and almost to the bank of the river in the other. Overhead, the sky was cloudless and already buckshot with stars, the likes of which I had never seen before. Thousands upon thousands of them peppered the black canvas, mingling almost imperceptibly with the mysterious network of lights between us and the sun. I could not recognize one constellation amongst them. The moon, its tail of debris dragging behind it, crawled across the night sky. I strained my eyes to try to see the structures I thought I'd spotted on its surface earlier, but all I could make out now were shadows and craters. I would need a decent pair of binoculars or a telescope to be certain there was anything really there or whether it had been a trick of the light.

I noticed Bull kneeling next to Chou and excused myself from the group. The doctor held Chou’s hand in his own, the back of his other hand placed against her perspiration covered forehead.

“I fear your friend has taken a turn for the worse,” Bull said, looking up as I approached. Chou was soaked with perspiration. Her skin pallid, almost the color of chalk. Her eyes moved constantly and rapidly beneath her eyelids, and she groaned deeply as though she were caught in a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.

A wave of panic spread through me. “Isn’t there something you can do for her?” I begged, clutching Chou’s hand.

Bull shook his head slowly. “I am sorry,” he said, by way of a final prognosis, then, head hung, walked slowly away.

I felt a deep sense of frustration at my inability to help the woman who had undoubtedly saved my own life the previous night, and then again today, potentially at the cost of her own. I mopped the sheen of sweat covering her forehead with a water-soaked rag. Beneath Chou’s lids, her eyes would occasionally jerk left and right. And twice I could have sworn I heard her mutter what I thought was the word ‘husband,’ but I couldn’t be sure, her voice was so fragile, barely even qualifying as a whisper.

I continued to gently stroke Chou’s hair until she quietened again.

Shadows leaped across the camp in a synchronized dance with the flames of the campfire, pushing back the darkness then allowing it in again as the flames rose and fell. I watched my new compatriots talk and eat together, my translation ability passively allowing them to finally converse freely. I felt a faint sense of pride that I was, at least, able to do this for these people, but again I wondered why me? What was so special about me? But my mind was too exhausted with worry for my dying friend to hold onto the question for longer than a few seconds.

I stretched out next to Chou. If she was going to die, I was going to be right here at her side when it happened. It was the very least I could do for her. I cast my eyes skyward; the aurora couldn’t be too far away now. She just needed to hold on a little longer.

Chou breathed raggedly, then slowly dropped again. Once, twice more. A wheezing, high-pitched whistle escaped from between her lips, then Weston Chou, pilot of the starship the Shining Way, the woman who I owed my life to, took one final breath and then breathed no more.

Twelve

“Chou!” I cried out, shifting position from my side to my knees. “Chou! Wake up,” This time I yelled the words, but still, there was no response.

Her mouth hung open, exposing perfect teeth tinged with blood, her eyes stared sightlessly at the roof of the lean-to through half-closed lids. I glanced over at the Garrisonites, but no one noticed me, the crackle of the fire and their energetic conversation covering my words, the shadows hiding my frantic movements.

“No. No… no.” I leaned in close to Chou’s mouth, listening for any sign she was breathing. There was nothing. I placed two fingers against her neck, checked for a pulse, but felt none.

“You can’t die. I won’t let you,” I hissed into her ear. I’d taken a first-aid course, years ago, and I wracked my brain for the memory. I’d checked her pulse, checked her breathing. I had to get her heart going again.

Leaning in, I tilted Chou’s head back, pinched her nose shut, and placed my lips over hers which were already blue around the edges. Was it three or five puffs? I couldn’t remember. I settled on four and quickly breathed them into her and was rewarded with a corresponding inflation of her chest, but the second I stopped, she did too.

“It’s okay,” I said to myself, “you can do this.” I placed one hand on top of the other, interlaced my fingers and laid them over the center of her chest. The instructor had told me the easiest way to remember the correct rate of chest compressions was to follow the beat of the Bee Gee’s song Staying Alive, so I started singing it to myself now as I pushed up and down on her chest.

One-two-three-four.

One-two-three-four.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I cried when I felt one of Chou’s ribs crack beneath my hands while trying not to lose count of how many compressions I’d completed. When I reached thirty, I stopped and gave her two more quick breaths then went back to the chest compressions.

“Meredith?”

I looked up and saw Edward and the rest of the Garrisonites standing around me, their faces marked with concern.

Albert clung to Evelyn, his eyes as large as saucers. “Is… is Chou going to be alright?” he barely managed to mumble through the tears rushing down his cheeks.

“Yes,” I said, “I just… have to keep… this going… until the—”

A thunderous boom cracked apart the silence of the night, and everyone turned to look skyward.

Albert, Chou, and I had been deep in the forest every night prior to this one, so clouds and the forest’s canopy had blocked most of the sky and the aurora from us. We’d caught glimpses of it, of course, but tonight, here in this clearing, I had an almost completely unobstructed view. I looked up in time to see a column of blue-green light shoot into the sky far off to the east; the same direction as the first monolith that dominated the horizon in the daylight hours, I noted. More light columns exploded skyward from the west, south, and north.

There was a collective gasp of amazement from almost everyone as, in a split-second, the light columns split into branches that traveled across the firmament high above our heads, tendrils of color shooting off from larger bolts to create smaller light trails (smaller at least in comparison to the main bolts. These lesser off-shoots must still have been tens of miles in length). In graceful arcs, the aurora crisscrossed the sky from all four cardinal directions, converging on a central point, as though seeking each other out. They had to have originated from the monoliths; it couldn’t be coincidental. Right? I mean, what were the chances?

All around us, tiny spots of brilliance flickered into life, just as they had in the forest, suspended in the air and covering every object and building; energized it seemed by the aurora’s raw, naked energy.

“Pixie dust,” I heard Evelyn say.

The nano-particles that had, until now, floated, invisible in the air around us glowed and pulsed, shifting on the night’s warm eddies and currents. Within a matter of seconds, everything was aglow with their strange ethereal luminescence. The trees around the perimeter of the camp were turned into lamps, their trunks and branches ignited with the tiny motes. The lean-tos glowed like Christmas decorations. My hands were covered in hundreds of tiny glowing dots, shimmering with an intensity that was quite beautiful, unthreatening.

Chou too was covered in the tiny specks of light, but unlike those on my hands, hers were moving in what appeared to be a very deliberate fashion. A gentle stream of particles drifted across her chest, then over my hands as I continued to administer chest compressions, as they moved toward the wound in her hip. More lambent streams flowed into her mouth and nostrils.

The Garrisonites had all turned to stare at the sky, gripped by the awe-inspiring show playing out above us. Sarah and Evita stood together just outside the next lean-to. They moved their hands through the air, shifting the glowing pixie dust like they were water droplets, a look of almost mystical awe on their faces. With each passing second, the aurora grew brighter but other than the initial crash to announce its arrival, the event was silent. As the light grew in intensity, I felt an electric tingle move across my skin. It was like the feeling of pins and needles you get after a limb goes to sleep, but this was a pleasant sensation, almost soothing. I hadn’t realized how badly my neck and back ached from the continued exertion of trying to resuscitate Chou until I felt the dull throb of pain fade away as a wave of relaxation washed over me.

Beneath my hands, I felt a growing warmth; it came from Chou’s skin! The warmth quickly grew to heat, intense enough I had to pull my hand away. I looked down again at Chou and gasped in amazement. She was almost completely cocooned in the nanites, radiating so intensely it hurt my eyes; the heat was emanating from them as they worked whatever magic it was they did.

“Please,” I begged, “please work.”

I felt the full power of the aurora wash over me. I stumbled to my feet, unable to look at Chou, the light was so bright now. The sensation flooding my system was almost but not quite as good as my first opiad-induced high. Every muscle in my body relaxed, and after a few moments, I felt… rejuvenated. I took a couple of steps away from the lean-to my attention pulled skyward by the maelstrom of light coursing across it.

Edward stood next to Albert and Evelyn, their backs to me, faces turned heavenward. “It’s so beautiful,” Edward said, turning to look at me. The light played across his face and, again, I was struck by the notion that I knew him from somewhere, but from where continued to elude me.

“The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.

Albert turned at the sound of my voice. His eyes locked on mine, then shifted focus to a point behind me. A huge smile spread across the boy’s face.

“Hello, Chou,” Albert said, beaming now.

I spun around.

Chou was sitting up, blinking hard as the light of the fire played across her face. Pixie dust still moved over her skin and clothing, but with less urgency. She shook her head, blinked a couple of times, then gave a little shuffle of her shoulders as if trying to get rid of a knot in her muscles.

She rose unsteadily to her feet and looked around at the people staring back open-mouthed at her, a slightly confused expression on her face. Spotting Albert and me, Chou smiled and said, “Hello, Meredith. Hello, Albert. I’m very hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”

* * *

“How’s it taste?” I asked Chou as she picked apart the last of the salmon. She washed the last mouthful down with a gulp of water before answering.

“Delicious!” she replied, smiling back at me.

Cold Salmon is hardly something I would ever describe as delicious, but hey, under the circumstances, I got it. “I cooked it myself,” I said, which got a raised eyebrow from Chou. “I’ll explain later. Now, will you please tell me how you’re feeling?”

Chou pondered the question for a second while she licked her oily fingers clean, then said, “Very good. I feel… very good.” She pulled up the hem of her blouse and pushed down the waistband of her pants to expose her left hip. The arrow wound had completely healed leaving only an area of fresh pink skin much like I had seen on Phillip’s head wound.

“Miraculous!” said Bull, leaning in closer to get a better look. “Absolutely miraculous!”

Edward stood to my left. Crowded behind him were the faces of the rest of the camp, all fascinated by Chou’s miraculous recovery. “What kind of technology can bring the dead back to life?” Edward asked.

I paused as I tried to think of a way to articulate the complexity of how the nano-clusters worked (not that I had anything but a rudimentary idea myself), but Chou beat me to it.

“From what Meredith has told me, I was not truly dead; at least not for long enough.”

“You were ‘only mostly dead,’” I said, smiling to myself at the Princess Bride reference.

But Chou actually nodded. “You are correct, in a way, Meredith. Your resuscitation efforts managed to keep my heart pumping blood and oxygen to my brain long enough for the pixie dust to rid my body of the poison arrow’s toxin and repair the damage it had caused. So, to answer your question, Edward: Advanced technology. Very, very advanced medicine.”

Bull said, “Does this mean that we are immortal? If we die, will the...” He screwed his face up in obvious disgust at having to say “…Pixie dust… bring us back to life?”

Chou shook her head. “There are too many variables. But I believe it will depend on the extent of the wounds or illness that caused the fatality. And, most importantly, how long before the aurora’s arrival the deceased perished. I think I was both lucky to have expired close to the aurora and to have such a determined friend.” Chou looked up at me and smiled, and I grinned back at her.

“I still can’t believe it,” Evelyn said. “I had scratches on my hands, just small ones, but they’re gone. It’s like magic.”

“Same here,” said Oliver, the guy who had crashed his plane. “Had a three-inch long cut on my arm. It’s vanished. See!” He extended his right arm and showed me the line of pink skin where the laceration had been.

“And I feel so refreshed,” I said. “Like I got a really great night’s rest.”

People nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s like I’ve spent a week at the seaside,” Edward said.

“Yes,” rumbled Freuchen, “that is exactly vot I feel like; as though I have had a relaxing holiday.”

Chou continued, “It seems that whatever brought us to this island—”

“Avalon,” Albert chimed in. “We should call the island Avalon.”

“Ver King Arthur sleeps eternally,” Freuchen said. “Yes, I like that idea very much.”

“A ship with shields before the sun, six maidens round the mast. A red-gold crown on everyone, a green gown on the last,” Edward recited quietly.

“That’s William Morris,” I said, impressed. I had to think for a second before I remembered the poem’s title. Then it came to me, “Near Avalon,” I said, pleased I’d remembered.

“Indeed,” said Edward, who seemed even more impressed that I knew it.

“Yes, Avalon,” said Chou, smiling and dipping her head to the boy. “Whoever is responsible for bringing us all here to Avalon desires that we stay alive and healthy.”

“You think there’s an intelligence behind this with a plan, too. Don’t you?” I said.

Chou nodded. “All evidence that I have observed would point to that being the most likely conclusion, I believe.”

I felt a warm glow of vindication in my chest. I hadn’t had time to tell Chou that I seemed to be the one behind our ability to communicate in each other’s language, but I did so now.

“Interesting,” Chou whispered when I was done. “That would seem to increase the probability that we were brought here with a very specific purpose in mind.”

Edward stood up. “Could it be,” he said, “that we are here to populate this planet? It makes perfect sense to me. Why else would you relocate so many doomed people to this island, heal them, give them abundant food and water sources, if not to have them start humanity over? We were all going to die, right? But we didn’t. We all accepted the offer the Voice made. Now we’ve been given a second chance on this world… to create a brave new world.” He looked down at Albert and smiled, “A chance for the metaphorical Arthur to rise from this island and reclaim that which he was sworn to protect and hold dominion over. Begin all over again. Afresh.”

While I appreciated the romantic notion of Edward’s theory, if anything, it sounded too altruistic.

Chou got up and walked to the fire. Everyone else followed along with her as though she were the Pied Piper. “I do not believe this to be a new world, Edward,” she said.

“Why?” said, Jacquetta, the archaeologist. “Surely, to make that kind of a statement, you must have some evidence to back up your assertion?”

Chou dipped her head in acknowledgment. “You will have all noticed the net-like structure that surrounds this world’s star, yes?”

“It’s hardly missable,” said Bull, glancing up at the dots of light that peppered the night sky.

“I believe those lights are part of a structure known as a Dyson Swarm.”

“What on God’s good green earth is a ‘Dyson Swarm?’” asked Edward, stepping closer.

Chou thought for a second. “Think of it as a way of harnessing vast amounts of energy collected from the sun. Millions of mirrors are placed in rings orbiting a star, collecting unimaginable amounts of energy; all the energy needed to power a highly advanced civilization’s technology.”

“Like a windmill?” said Jorge.

“Or a waterwheel,” Freuchen added.

“Similar in principle, yes,” Chou said, “but on an unimaginable scale. Imagine the power a billion windmills would provide. The Dyson swarm transfers the energy it collects back to earth, where I believe it is collected by the giant towers on the horizon. Some of that energy will be consumed by the aurora on a nightly basis, to power the nano-bots that resuscitated me.”

“But, surely, the energy the Dyson Swarm is collecting can’t all be going to power the aurora?” I said.

“You are correct,” Chou replied. “It would, of course, have taken an unimaginable amount of energy to bring all of us here to this planet. Even so, I estimate there is still a surplus of available energy, collecting in some kind of storage device, perhaps. Unless…”

“Unless, what?” said Edward.

“Unless that energy is being used to power other technology we are not yet aware of.”

“Like what?” Tabitha asked.

“The applications would be unlimited, capable of powering vast computers, starships, and off-world ecologies.” Chou rattled off.

Edward leaned forward, obviously fascinated. “But how does that disprove my theory that we have all been brought here for a second chance?”

“You have observed how bright the sun is?” Chou said.

“It does seem far brighter than our own,” Edward agreed.

“And bigger,” Albert said. “It’s definitely bigger.”

Chou smiled at the boy. “Yes, well done Albert. Both of those things are indications that this star is old; past what you could call middle-age, if you wish to use a human analogy. I believe that the star is only a few tens of millions of years away from becoming a Red Giant, which will mean the complete annihilation of all life on this planet. That observation is backed up by the fact that whatever race lived on this planet must have been extremely advanced to have built the Dyson Swarm; at least level II on the Kardashev Scale. That takes a long time to achieve.”

“Hey! I know that one,” I said. “The Kardashev Scale is a measurement of the amount of energy a civilization needs to power itself, right?”

“Correct, Meredith. The scale starts at Type I and progresses up to III and, theoretically, beyond. Where Type I is a civilization that can store energy that reaches it from its star. A Type II civilization would be capable of building technology that harnesses all its parent star’s energy, and Type III is able to harvest energy on a galactic scale. And as the scale is logarithmic, as a civilization progresses further along the scale, so its energy consumption grows exponentially. An industrial culture such as the one Edward is from at the turn of the twentieth century would not even reach the threshold of a Type I classification. Meredith’s time would be on the low end of Type I, and my own time would be getting close to Type II. To be able to construct and utilize the Dyson Swarm would place this planet’s dominant civilization firmly in the Level II bracket.”

“So, the question is: where is the civilization that made the Dyson Swarm?” Evelyn said quietly.

“Precisely!” Chou said. “Since our arrival, there has been no attempt by the Voice to contact us. There also appear to be gaps in the swarm’s net, which suggests that no one is concerned with repairing it. So, where is everyone? The only conclusion I can draw is that whatever civilization once lived on this planet has either gone extinct or has migrated elsewhere. Which again suggests that this planet is far older than we suspect.”

“Fascinating,” Edward said. “Quite fascinating.”

“In conclusion,” Chou continued, “I see no reason for the Voice to have brought us here if the planet will be rendered uninhabitable in the near future. No, there must be another reason.”

A silence descended over us that lasted until Edward said, “Well, if what you say is true, Chou, it brings us back full circle to the first question we all have: why did the Voice bring us here to begin with? Why save us?”

“That is a question I’d very much like an answer to,” Bull said, more to himself than any of us.

Chou continued, “Anything we postulate is, at best, conjecture, at worst, uninformed. There is only one way for us to be sure, and that is to speak directly with the entity we call the Voice.”

“You think the Voice will try to contact us at some point?” said Tabitha.

“Perhaps,” said Chou.

“You don’t appear to be convinced?” Edward said.

“While the intelligence behind our transportation here is undeniably advanced, I am confused by the way we were… deposited in such a dangerous manner the day we arrived. It strikes me as being very clumsy. Out of character with the finesse and attention to detail of everything else I have observed on this world. To bring all of us here, arriving together from our various times must have been an immense undertaking that would not only have taken an incredible amount of energy, the source of which we can now say we know, but also incredible coordination and planning. Huge computational power far beyond what was available even in my time.”

“So?” Bull interjected. It was obvious he was only barely following the thread of Chou’s explanation, but he seemed to get the gist of it at least.

Chou answered him. “Assuming our belief that there is some kind of a plan for us is correct, why would the Voice drop us so unceremoniously into the ocean? Why risk losing so many of us after going to such painstaking detail to find us and transport us here? Why not simply deposit everyone onto the beach, together? Why leave us to fend for ourselves? The idea that a plan which required such precision to bring us here could then place us in a position where our survival is left to chance, seems implausible to me.”

“Maybe the Voice wasn’t able to do any of that? Maybe their calculations were off?” I said.

“Maybe they did it that way so we wouldn’t be hurt. You know, a soft landing into the ocean,” Oliver said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I fell maybe three or four feet, and we were dropped pretty far offshore. Worst case scenario, if we’d arrived on the beach or in the shallows, would have been a few people with broken bones or bruised egos. I saw at least one woman drown and I helped rescue several more who would have died, which means not everyone knew how to swim.”

“And anyone who was hurt on arrival would have been healed the first night after the aurora,” said Edward.

“Exactly,” I said. “As I told you before, I saw one woman drown for certain. There must have been others. Albert would have been one of them if I hadn’t been able to reach him in time.”

Tabitha, Oliver, and Evelyn all said that they had seen people drown or swept out to sea. Edward and Bull said they had seen bodies on the beach and floating in the water.

“Perhaps that wasn’t supposed to be a part of the plan. Maybe something went wrong?” said Evelyn.

“Or perhaps the plan was sabotaged?” I said.

“Sabotaged?” said Wild Bill.

I quickly recounted our run-in with the swordsman that began with Phillip’s murder. “Those two men didn’t seem particularly friendly and would have murdered the rest of us as well if it hadn’t been for you, Wild Bill. So, maybe someone’s working against whatever plan the Voice has for us. I mean, dropping us offshore seems like a pretty good way to screw up the plan early on.”

“It vould help account for the two assassins,” said Freuchen.

“What you’re saying,” said Wild Bill, “is that someone ain’t too thrilled about us being here. Someone who ain’t the Voice. Someone… else?”

“A saboteur? Meredith may well be right,” Chou said. “I believe that an undertaking such as we are a part of must have been planned meticulously and would have been executed just as precisely. For something to go so obviously wrong must mean one of two things: One… the Voice failed to adequately account for all variables of the space/time transference or two… as Meredith has suggested, an extraneous force was exerted on the process in an attempt to kill as many of us as possible upon our arrival. Given the available information, I believe that the second option is the most likely, considering the preparation, complexity and flawless execution of the plan up until that point.”

Silence descended over the group. The idea that there might be someone… or some thing else working against us sent literal shivers down my back. And judging by the look of concern on everyone else’s face, I wasn’t alone in how exposed I suddenly felt. “Great, just what we need,” I whispered. This was all weird enough without the idea that someone wanted us all dead.

Edward broke the gloomy silence with an injection of optimism. “We need to remember that this is all just theory at this point. We don’t know for certain that any of it is true, well, most of it, anyway. So, we need to keep our chins up. The one thing we all know is we were chosen for a reason.” He smiled a broad, attractive smile. “I’ll be the first to admit that I have no bloody idea what that reason might be, but we have to look after each other until we do.”

There were returned smiles and even a little nervous laughter.

“Vat do ve do in the meantime?” said Freuchen. “Ve can’t just sit around and act as though none of this is happening? Vat do ve do between now and ven the Voice decides to grace us vith his—”

“Or her,” interjected Tabitha.

“Yes, or her presence,” Freuchen agreed,

“We continue along the same path we are already on,” Edward answered, rising to his feet. “Our priority is to ensure the garrison and all who live within her walls are safe. We continue to build the cabins and the stockade, expand the garrison if we must. We have a fine location here. If this is to be our home, then we need to be able to protect it.”

“And then?” said Sarah.

“Then we canvas the island. Find out what resources there are. There must be more people; we all saw them on the beach. We need to find as many good men and women as we can and bring them into our fold. There’s strength in numbers.”

Chou nodded. “That seems like a reasonable plan of action.”

“And after that? What if the Voice decides to stay quiet? What are we supposed to do then?” This from Wild Bill.

“If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain,” said Bull.

“We can cross that bridge if and when we ever get to it,” Edward said. “In the meantime, we should all get some rest. We can talk more about this in the coming days.”

A wave of goodnights echoed over the camp as everyone moved to their quarters. Albert said he wanted to sleep near the fire, something I could understand; its warmth and light instilled the only real sense of security any of us could feel at this point. “Of course,” I said. “Chou and I are right over here.” I pointed back at the lean-to we would be spending the night beneath, Chou already sat cross-legged under its roof.

I gave Albert a kiss on the top of his head and whispered, “Sleep well,” then joined my newly resurrected friend.

Thirteen

The early-morning sun provided little warmth, despite the sky remaining clear overnight. I exhaled pale billowy clouds as I got to my feet and stretched. Around me, the camp was gradually coming to life, gravitating one by one to the campfire. The night had been cool, but not terribly uncomfortable, and we all seemed extraordinarily refreshed despite the stress of the previous day. I thought about the sudden rush of energy I’d experienced during the aurora. I’d felt so energized, so invigorated; like I’d taken a two-week vacation. That initial surge and feeling of well-being had gradually faded, but still, this morning I felt far better than I should have after a night spent on the ground with nothing but a bed of leaves as a mattress. I should have aches in my muscles and pain in my joints, but I felt… great, especially so after Chou’s miraculous recovery.

I walked to the fire, drawn by its warm currents. Chou was up and had already captured everyone’s attention. Albert sat nearby. As I drew closer, I caught the tail-end of a question Chou was posing Edward.

“—the axes, saws, hammers and nails I see you and your people using; where did they come from?” she asked.

Edward took a handful of berries of assorted color from a bowl, his lips stained the same colors as the berries. He swallowed and said, “We found some of them washed up on the beach next to a broken wooden crate. And others came with our people, like Peter and his ax.”

“I saw things falling from the sky while I was in the water,” I said as I got closer, remembering those first few minutes after arrival. “Apart from people, I mean. There were parts of the bridge I was on when I…” I let my words fade away, not willing to share the manner in which I’d left Earth behind so openly. “Anyway, it was as though whatever process the Voice used to bring us here, couldn’t bring just us here. It brought things that were around us, too.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn, “I saw that, too.”

Others nodded in agreement.

“Do you think the crate washed ashore or do you think it was placed there?” said Chou.

Edward shook his head. “Hard to tell for sure,” he said. “It was just sitting there. We snagged everything from it.”

“Might have come from a wreck or maybe it was the contents of an airplane or something,” I said.

Bull said, “Perhaps it would be wise for us to organize search parties to explore the coast, perchance there are more such crates or loot waiting for us to find. Better we locate them before anyone else does.”

Edward nodded. “That’s a fine idea, Doctor. We’ll organize a couple of groups soon as we’re done here.” Edward held his words for a moment or two, then said, “And you bring up something that’s been weighing on my mind: there have to be other people somewhere out there. I, for one, saw at least a hundred or more in the water upon my arrival and only a few of those faces are sitting here with us. We need to remember we're not alone on this island. And while all of you are amiable enough, let’s not forget the two men who accosted Meredith’s group and killed their companion as proof that not everyone is going to be as welcoming. It’s only going to be a matter of time before someone wanders into camp or we encounter another group. And while I’m not saying we should treat anyone we meet as an enemy, we need to be cautious. We’ll keep the lookouts posted around the perimeter, and I’ll expect all of you to take your turn in watching over us. If we are going to meet others, best it’s on our terms rather than theirs.” As Edward spoke his gaze moved over each of us. “Now, I need volunteers to form scavenger parties to go search for anything they can find on the beach. Two groups of three should do the trick.”

Chou looked at me, eyebrows raised. I nodded at her unspoken question.

“Meredith and I volunteer,” Chou said.

Edward nodded and smiled. “Who else?”

“I’ll go vith them,” said Freuchen. He got to his feet and, stretched, the joints of his huge frame audibly popping.

Benito, Caleb, and Tabitha volunteered for the second group.

Edward nodded, looking pleased. “Well, that’s sorted then. One group will go clockwise around the island, the other counter. I’d like for you all to lend a hand around the garrison today. That’ll give us time to prepare supplies for you, and you’ll be able to get an early start tomorrow. Okay?”

We all nodded.

“Anyone else got anything they’d like to add?’ Edward said. “No? Alright then, let’s get some grub in our bellies and get to work.”

* * *

“Do you mind if I join you?” Edward asked Chou and me as we finished our breakfast of wild berries together. He sat on the log with us, legs outstretched, hands folded in his lap. “If you feel up to getting your hands dirty today, we could use your help around the camp.”

“Of course,” I said, “what do you need us to do?”

“I’d say you could help Evelyn, but it looks to me like Albert has already usurped your job.”

I laughed. Albert had really taken to Evelyn and she to him. She had asked if he would like to help her around camp and the boy had eagerly agreed.

“So, let’s see what else do we have? We need someone to make sure the laborers all have fresh water. And Bull and Freuchen could use a knot bumper, or, if that’s not to your liking, you could maybe scavenge branches to make sure the fire has enough fuel for the night.”

I was about to ask what the hell a ‘knot bumper’ was but Chou spoke right over me. “That man, the one setting the stakes for the stockade, what is his name?” She pointed in the direction of the slowly growing perimeter wall of wooden stakes.

“Jorge? Why?”

“I would like to help him,” Chou said.

Edward suppressed a smile. “I’m sure he’d be happy to have your company, but that’s very physical labor, and I don’t think—”

Chou stood up, reached down, and grasped the end of the log we had been sitting on with both hands and proceeded to lift it off the ground as if she were merely lifting a sofa.

Edward and I both jumped to our feet as, in three swift movements, she repositioned the ten-foot-long tree trunk into an upright position. I felt my jaw drop; the log must have weighed close to six-hundred pounds if it was an ounce and she manhandled it like it was nothing.

“I believe I am more than capable of helping Jorge,” Chou said.

“I… uhhh… I believe you have made your point, Ms. Chou,” Edward said, nodding approvingly at her demonstration of brute strength, his broad smile showing how deeply impressed he was.

“I concur,” Chou said, lowering the log down into its original position beside the fire.

“So,” said Edward, “on second thought, why don’t the two of you help Jorge set the posts for the stockade.”

“I’m down with that,” I said, suppressing laughter that threatened to bubble up from deep in my chest.

“As am I,” said Chou, straight-faced.

“Thank you, ladies,” Edward said.

As he turned to walk away, Chou said, “Edward, wait. I have a question for you.”

“Ask away.”

“Have any of the group shared what they were doing immediately before their encounter with the Voice with you?”

“Some,” Edward admitted. “Why?”

“Would you tell me their stories, please,” her words were more a demand than inquiry.

Edward gave a little chuckle at Chou’s directness. “Well, seeing as you asked so nicely.” He lowered himself down onto the log. “Let’s see. Benito told us he was a lumberjack working alone in the mountains of Venezuela. The saw he used to section a tree he’d felled hit a knot and he sliced his arm open.” Edward made a cutting motion across his left arm. “He said he was losing a lot of blood and was many miles from his camp and any help. The Voice came to him as he was losing consciousness and asked him if he wanted to live.”

“Who else?” Chou said.

“Jorge said he was washed overboard from a fishing boat in a nighttime storm and he was heading to the bottom of the ocean when he heard the Voice. Evelyn drowned too, though that was at her own hand; not something I believe she would want shared, so, if you would be so kind as to keep it to yourselves. Caleb said he would have surely died in the fire that took his home. And Wild Bill said he got sick after being bit by a Rattlesnake while crossing Arizona.” Edward chuckled, “He was a little bit more colorful in his description, of course. And that’s as much as anyone has shared with me, and I’m not the type to put my nose into other people’s affairs if privacy is what they desire. You might want to speak directly with the others about how they got their ticket to Avalon.”

“And you, Edward? What circumstances led the Voice to ask you?” Chou said, her voice still low.

Edward’s eyes lost focus for a few seconds before he spoke again. “My regiment had been ordered to bolster our forces defending Ypres—that is, or was, a little village in Belgium. By the time we arrived in mid-April of 1915, there really wasn’t enough left of the place to fit in a matchbox. I’d been ordered out on a reconnaissance mission to verify the location of a Hun artillery battery. Instead, the Huns, or rather their artillery bombardment found me first. I was caught in a barrage and hit by shrapnel—” Edward’s hand unconsciously drifted to the right side of his chest “—and blown off my feet into a shell hole. It’d been raining heavily, and I was up to my neck in mud and muck and my own blood. I tried to pull myself out but the walls of the crater were too soft, and I couldn’t get a grip. Then another shell landed nearby, and the crater wall collapsed, burying me under what I imagine must have been ten feet of mud. I was close to suffocating when I heard the Voice tell me it could save me.” He gave a slow nod to indicate that he'd finished.

“I am… sorry,” said Chou.

Edward waved off her reply. “What was one more life in that meat grinder? I saw more death in my months over there than I ever thought imaginable. But I tell you now, this experience…” he shifted his gaze left then right, his eyes doing the pointing as they moved first to the caged sun, then the forest, then to the others working on their tasks, “…it’s changed my view on all of that trouble. Now I have proof that there’s something greater than all the world’s petty struggles and arguments. And I have to wonder whether those lives that were so senselessly cut short aren’t maybe here on this planet, somewhere. It gives me hope.” He gave an emphatic nod, as if to reinforce the sentiment. “Now, I’ve told you what you wanted to hear, why don’t you tell me why you’re so eager to learn our stories?”

Chou took a swig of water. “Tell me, do you notice a common theme in their stories?” she said.

Edward looked momentarily confused. “Apart from the obvious one of everyone being moments away from meeting their maker when the Voice spoke to them?”

Chou nodded slowly.

I have to admit that I didn’t see any connection other than the one Edward had mentioned.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Edward said, his face suddenly lighting up, “I do see another connection; we all died alone, away from anyone who could have helped us.”

Chou smiled, then added, “Yes, but more importantly, we all would have died in ways that would have meant there was a very high probability our remains would never have been discovered or recovered or identified. You, Edward, stated that you were buried alive. Wild Bill died alone in the desert. Jorge was lost at sea. Evelyn drowned. Benito died in the forest miles from civilization.” Chou paused then looked at me, and I felt myself flinch as she said, “And Meredith threw herself into the bay at night.”

“And you? How do you fit into all this? What’s your story, Miss Chou?” Edward said.

“I was lost in space,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Edward slowly allowed his face to turn toward the blue sky. He pointed his left index finger heavenward. “Up there?”

Chou smiled. Nodded again.

“Well, that would certainly put the kibosh on anyone ever finding your body, I suppose.”

Chou seemed to appreciate the humor in what Edward said because her smile grew wider. “Of course, I cannot back my theory up with proof other than that which you have supplied me, and it is not outside of statistical possibility that the similarity shared by the few people whose stories we know of are just a statistical fluke. The only way to be certain is to gather more stories. And that means I need to speak to more people.”

“Well,” Edward said, “I’ll leave that up to the individuals concerned. All I ask is that you respect their desire as to whether they want to share their story with you. Some of these people still seem to be coming to terms with how they arrived in this new reality of ours.”

As Edward turned to walk away, his face was caught briefly in shadowed profile, and some dusty collection of neurons finally connected in my brain. I let out a short, sharp puff of surprise, “Oh, my God!”

Edward stopped, turned back to look at me, his brow furrowed. “Are you alright, Meredith?”

I felt a tingling of electricity run up my back and down my arms as goosebumps popped across every inch of my skin. I knew I had recognized Edward from somewhere, but it was only as he had turned away, his face caught in profile that I remembered where exactly that had been. My throat went dry, grew tight, and I had to swallow hard to get it to let the next words out. “Is your full name Edward James Hubbard?”

Edward blinked. His head jerked slightly, like he was avoiding an invisible bee, then tilted inquisitively to one side. He said, “Yes, it is. How did you—”

“And before you became a soldier were you a teacher in Manchester, England?” I said, interrupting him. “You were an English teacher, weren’t you?” I stood up and took a step toward him.

Edward was shocked. “How could you possibly know that?” His expression changed quickly from surprise to one of suspicion.

I swallowed hard again to try and keep my voice from freezing up, unable to speak, finally, I blurted out “If beauty sets brother against brother and causes empires to fall, is not too high a price placed upon its exquisite head—if jealousy, pain, and death are the currency for loveliness?”

Edward closed the distance between us in two quick strides that bordered on leaps. He seized my arm just above the elbow, hard enough that I felt the blood begin to slow. He hissed, “Tell me how in God’s name could you know that poem? I’ve never had any of my work published. Never shown a poem to a living soul. Who are you? Answer me!” He yelled the last two sentences loud enough that the rest of the camp would surely have heard him if they had not already moved off to their assignments.

In the periphery of my vision, I saw Chou step closer, her eyes hard and focused squarely on Edward. “It’s okay,” I said, turning my head long enough to give her a tight smile before turning back to look at Edward.

“Answer me,” Edward hissed. “Are you responsible for all of this? Are you the one who brought me here?”

I shook my head. “No… no, I’m not.”

“Then tell me how you could possibly know any of that information about me?” His voice softened a little. He released his grip on my arm. “Please.”

I closed my eyes, allowed myself to relax a little as I reached back into my memory. “When I was in high school, I read a lot of poetry: Tennyson, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats. But my favorite poem by far was written by an Englishman named Edward James Hubbard. It was so good, I memorized it in its entirety. It was called The Maiden; one of your earliest works, I believe. It was one of a hundred of your poems released in an anthology of your work long after your death.”

Edward’s face turned beetroot red. “I am so sorry,” he said, “It… I’m still getting used to the fact that we are all from different times. While I am incredibly humbled by the fact my work was read by anyone after my death, it makes perfect sense that you would have read it in what would have been my future. I am so very sorry if I frightened you—”

Now it was my turn to take Edward firmly by his arm. “No, you don’t understand. In my time, you were seen as one of the greatest poets of your generation to write about the horrors of World War I. In my time, after the end of the war you became chair of the English department at Oxford University and you were eventually named Poet Laureate. Edward, in the time I’m from, you survived the First World War. You did not die until 1963.”

* * *

“What?” Edward blurted. “I don’t understand. Are you saying someone stole my identity after the war? My God, that’s an outrageous thing for them to do.”

I shook my head. “No, no. It wasn’t someone impersonating you, it was you. There were photographs of you in the book, and there was one where you were smiling and turning away from the camera like you just did. That’s what triggered my memory of you. And there were other photographs I’ve seen of you where you were in your uniform; the same uniform you’re wearing now, I’m sure of it. There was a biography at the beginning of your book that said you married a woman named Rebecca, she was your childhood sweetheart. You had kids… children… and… and…”

I felt Chou’s hand gently touch my exposed forearm and I realized from the horrified look on Edward’s face that I had utterly overwhelmed the poor man, confused him beyond belief with the deluge of information I was forcing on him. I mean, who wouldn’t be confused by some stranger from the future who knows so many intimate details of your life? A life that, in their time had not been cut short by war and one which, from your point of view, still lay ahead.

A couple of awkward moments passed in complete silence while Edward regained his composure. “Rebecca was the woman I intended to marry after I got home from the war,” he said quietly, his voice heavy with emotion. “We were betrothed a week before I shipped out.” His eyes suddenly became very wide. “My God,” he hissed, “does this mean I wouldn’t have died in that godforsaken shell hole? If I’d said no to the Voice, I would have been saved and made it back to my beloved Rebecca? Oh no, that cannot be. That is simply too much.” Tears appeared at the corners of his eyes and slipped down his cheek.

Absolutely horrified that I’d caused him this amount of distress, I began to second guess myself. Perhaps I was mistaken. Maybe I had confused him with someone else? After all, the photographs I’d seen had been old and grainy. But that wouldn’t account for how I knew so much about what had happened to him after the war, or that I knew his poetry so well.

“I do not believe that to be the case, Edward,” Chou said. “Given the description of your final moments, you most certainly would have died if you had not responded positively to the Voice. As would I. As would Meredith. As I am quite sure, would everyone who exists on this island and, possibly, across this planet. If you had died in Meredith’s timeline, she should have no recollection of your poems at all as you would never have written them. You should have simply been one of the forty-million killed or missing by the time that war was over. Remembered by no one other than—”

“Forty… million dead?” Edward whispered, his voice cracking. “What folly. What utter folly.” Edward seemed unsteady on his feet, and I thought he was going to faint, but instead, he allowed himself to sink to the log. He sat there in stunned silence as Chou continued to talk.

“As I have no reason to doubt Meredith’s recollection of your history after the war, there are only a few other possibilities: an opportune impersonator who happens to look so like you, he was capable of fooling even those closest to you for the rest of his life, including the woman who knew you best is a possibility, but unlikely enough that we can ignore it.”

Edward gave a mirthless laugh. “Well, that’s good to know, I suppose.”

“It is also theoretically possible, given the advanced technology employed to bring us here, that the Voice could have duplicated the original versions of us, cloned each of us, then copied our memories and implanted them in the cloned version to make it… make us think we were still the original. But that seems… inefficient to me and still does not account for how, in Meredith’s time, you survived the war.”

I said, “And if that’s what happened, then why would the Voice feel the need to ask our permission to save us? It could’ve just made a copy of us, and we’d never even know about it. And why would the Voice even need to wait until we were looking death in the face to ask if we wanted to live? It could have just posed the question at any point in our lives, after all.”

“Precisely,” said Chou. “No, I don’t believe either of those possibilities are the correct explanation for what has happened to us.”

“Well,” said Edward, “if neither of those ideas makes sense to you, what other possibilities does that leave us with?”

Chou stood silently, then, “There is a third possibility.”

“And that would be?” Edward said.

“Are you familiar with the concept of a multiverse?” Chou asked.

Edward looked puzzled, shook his head.

I’d seen enough sci-fi movies to know what Chou was hinting at. “It’s the theory that there’s more than just one version of the universe out there. That for every choice we make, a new copy of the universe is created where we make the opposite choice, right?”

“That is a very simple explanation, but yes, the theory suggests that there exist infinite versions of the universe outside of our own, all independent of each other. The laws governing those universes may be very similar to ours… or not. There are areas in the cosmos, light years across, known as cold spots which are believed to be the result of these alternate universes interacting with our own. I was part of a mission to investigate one when something went wrong, and I was brought here.”

“But that’s all just theory, right?” I said. “I mean, none of it has ever actually been proven. Not where I’m from, at least.”

“In your time, yes, it was still an unproven concept. However, in my time, that theory was greatly strengthened with a discovery by Professor Adrianna Drake of what became known as Vagrant Particles; extraordinarily rare sub-atomic particles which simply should not exist in the standard model of our universe. Professor Drake proved that vagrant particles could only originate from the numerous cold spots she had discovered scattered throughout the cosmos, which seemed to suggest that the cold spots were somehow connected to other alternate universes. At least, that’s what we thought, but those cold spots were so distant, it was only during my lifetime that technology capable of allowing us to reach them was developed. That was the mission assigned to me… and my husband. We were to investigate one of those cold spots and study the anomaly over an extended period of time.”

“So, these ‘cold spots’ are what, exactly?” I said.

“We believe they were created when our universe somehow brushed against an alternate universe. The resulting devastation ruptured both universes’ spacetime continuums. You can think of the cold spots as scars that have never quite healed, and every so often they open again, allowing particles from each universe to bleed through into the other.”

“My God,” said Edward, for the umpteenth time.

I took a few moments to digest what Chou had said. Although the concept was mind-numbingly confusing, the idea that there could be an infinite number of other Merediths scattered throughout these parallel universes was a surprisingly comforting thought. It meant there might be a version of me out there that hadn’t gone through the shit I’d had to suffer through. Maybe one of these other mes had done something meaningful with their life.

“It would explain why Edward was alive in my time and died in his,” I said. “And it would explain something that’s been nagging at me about Wild Bill, too. I’m sure I saw a TV show where he was shot in a bar while he played cards, rather than dying in the desert.”

“I believe my theory is the most likely explanation, given the data we currently have available to us,” Chou said.

Edward had managed to compose himself. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head sharply. “I would suggest we keep this theory to ourselves for now. The others have enough to worry about without adding this complication. Are we in agreement?”

“Yes,” said Chou, “I think that is a good idea, for now at least.”

I nodded. It was hard enough for me to get my mind around, and I, at least, had been born in a time when technology was everywhere. I couldn’t begin to imagine how baffling it must be for someone whose experience of advanced technology amounted to nothing more than a vacuum-tube-based radio set.

“Very well, now, if you’ll excuse me,” Edward said, obviously rattled by the conversation. He gave a curt nod and walked off in the direction of the cabin he had been helping to build.

* * *

We joined Jorge at the stockade. Before he could object to us, Chou shouldered one of the logs from a large stack that sat nearby awaiting his attention. Jorge watched expressionlessly as she carried it to a hole he'd just finished digging and dropped it in. He nodded once and went back to digging the next hole.

And that was how, for the next eight or so hours, we dug holes, sweated, manhandled the stakes brought to us by Bull and Freuchen into the holes (both men obviously astonished when they saw Chou’s handling of the logs), and sweated some more. There was no cement to secure the stockade stakes in the ground, so we mixed mud I’d fetched from the banks of the river with gravel and pebbles. Jorge assured us it was an age-old method and would work just as well as cement, and it seemed to hold the spikes in place just fine.

By the time Edward yelled that it was ‘time to knock off’ I was exhausted, but as I stood back and looked at the stockade’s fresh line of new poles that extended twenty-four stakes further than when we had started that morning, I felt an immense sense of pride like I’d never felt before. I came from an age where accomplishment seemed to be measured by the latest app or the newest smartphone or how many likes you got on your Facebook posts. All helpful, life-improving (for the most part, at least) additions, but all intangibles, and with associated prestige that would vanish the second the next big thing was released. But this, this was something solid that would stand for years, protecting those within its walls. It was something I had helped to build. And for the first time in, well, forever, I felt a burgeoning sense of self-worth. I had value. And it felt good. Really good.

Smiling with the glow of this new-found self-worth, Chou and I walked silently back to camp.

The smell of cooking meat greeted us, wafting on a cool evening breeze, mixing with the pungent wood-smoke of the fire.

While Chou seemed absolutely fine, my muscles ached and throbbed like I was ninety years old. If I had gone to bed that night knowing that I’d have to do that kind of work all over again when I got up the next day, I think I would have cried myself to sleep. But knowing that when the aurora showed up tonight, all of these aches and pains would vanish, eased my mind.

Chou and I were the last to arrive. The dirt-streaked faces that turned to greet us with smiles and nods each showed the exhaustion they felt. Everyone was in good spirits, laughing and chatting amongst themselves as they waited in line for the food Evelyn and Albert had prepared.

“Busy day, ladies?” Evelyn said as we stepped up to her makeshift workbench, a log that had been split down the middle to give a flat surface. Albert beamed when he handed me my food.

“It was, indeed, tiring,” said Chou.

I just smiled, took my food and followed Chou over to the fire.

“Good work on the stockade,” Edward announced as we passed him sitting with Freuchen and Oliver.

“It was mostly Chou and Jorge,” I said as I sat down on the log near them, too tired to continue the conversation.

Wild Bill sauntered over from where he'd been tending to Brute, carrying something in both arms. “I believe these belong to you,” he said, placing the set of armor I'd stripped from the dead swordsman into my outstretched hands.

Had that really just been a day earlier? It seemed like an eternity ago. “Thank you,” I said as I took the armor from him, trying not to notice the dried blood that still clung to the chainmail.

For the rest of the evening, we chatted quietly amongst ourselves, planning for our excursion the following morning. Albert would (grudgingly) remain behind in Evelyn’s care, while Chou, Freuchen, and I set off on what we agreed would be, at most, a three-day trek to map the outline of the island and report back on anything we found.

More tired than I think I’d ever felt in my life, I eventually made my excuses and retired to our shelter to wait for the aurora’s inevitable arrival.

Fourteen

Our two groups set out from the garrison not long after the sun rose over the horizon. Morning dew saturated the grass, and an ethereal mist rose from the river, drifting across our path as we walked downstream for a mile or so until we came to a spot Freuchen said we could cross.

Large boulders, the results of a rockfall or a flood that had swept them downstream, formed a natural path across the river.

We said our goodbyes to Benito, Caleb, and Tabitha, and watched them briefly as they continued downstream while we used the natural causeway to reach the river’s opposite bank. The boulders were slippery with lichen and water, but all three of us made it across without taking an early morning dip. We followed the river’s course toward the ocean for about five miles until the forest thinned out and we reached the estuary. The sea looked almost as gray as the pebble-strewn beach. The only sound came from the hiss of the waves lapping at the shore. As the three of us stood looking out at the ocean, Freuchen pulled a small pad of paper and a pencil from the pocket of his coat and began to draw with it.

“What are you doing?” Chou asked.

“I intend to make a map of our journey, so ve have a better idea of the size of this island,” Freuchen said. “It vill be very basic, but vill be better than nothing. I vill mark any major landmarks or points of interest that ve see or find so that ve can explore them later.” He finished his doodling and replaced the pad and pen back into the same pocket.

The tide-rounded rocks and shale that made up the beach were exhausting to walk on and required constant attention to where you planted your feet or risk spraining an ankle. We spread out in a line with approximately twenty feet separating us and began to walk: Freuchen closest to the trees, Chou near the water’s edge, and me in the middle. The beach stretched ahead of us in a slightly undulating line for several miles with no sign of ending, as we picked our way over it, scanning for anything that might be of use.

We found the first body about thirty minutes later. It was a man in his late thirties. He lay face down against the rocks, one arm tucked under him, the other stretched above his head like he was hailing a cab. He was completely naked and beginning to bloat.

“Oh no,” I said turning away, my stomach reeling.

“Looks like someone got to him already,” said Freuchen, “unless he arrived here naked, of course.”

I stayed back. The smell from the dead man made me want to vomit.

We found a second body ten minutes later, washed up at the shoreline. It was another man, but this poor unfortunate was still fully-clothed. The waves lifted and deposited him again and again, pushing him further up the shore, shifting his body in a macabre slow-motion dance. He was dressed in a modern-looking sweater, khaki pants, and brown shoes, one of which was missing. He too was beginning to bloat.

“Jesus!” I hissed when I made the mistake of getting a little too close. Some of the island’s smaller aquatic life had begun to pick at the corpse’s pale water-wrinkled flesh. Small crabs scuttled about his hands and head. This time, I couldn’t contain my reaction. I vomited the remains of my breakfast onto the shale.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly, spitting away the remnants of vomit and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

Freuchen chortled. “Don’t vurry, I had the same reaction ven I saw my first body up close.” He moved closer to the dead man, prodded him with the tip of his boot.

“I don’t think it vould be a good idea to take his clothes,” said Freuchen, squatting to examine the body more closely. “Vithout any vay to sanitize the poor fellow’s things, ve could be opening ourselves to any number of diseases.”

“That might not be a problem,” said Chou, seemingly unperturbed by the sight or smell of the body.

We both looked at her for a second not comprehending, then Freuchen said, “Oh, you mean the aurora?”

“I believe that the nanobots inside us will also prevent us from contracting any disease. It would seem like a logical addition for the Voice to ensure we remain healthy,” Chou said.

“But all we know for certain is it cures physical injuries and poison,” I said. “We can’t be sure it works against viruses or bacteria.”

“Time will prove me correct or not,” Chou added.

“Still, I don’t think it vould be a good idea to test that theory, just yet,” Freuchen insisted.

“I agree,” I said, “but shouldn’t we at least bury him?”

Freuchen shook his head. “Better safe than sorry, yes? Besides, the sea vill take care of him, given enough time.” He took out his pad of paper and with a few short strokes of his pencil added details to his map. We left the body where it was and continued onward.

A quarter-mile later and Freuchen stopped. “Here! Look at this,” he said, excitedly. Bending down, he picked up something jammed in between several rounded stones. “Do you know vat this is?” Freuchen said, offering the object out to me and Chou.

“It’s a cellphone,” I said, examining the old-style flip-phone Freuchen held in his hand. When I saw the blank look on his face, I added, “A kind of communication device; like a radio,” which seemed to do the trick. I took the phone from Freuchen and opened it up. The screen was blank. I pressed and held the power button for a few seconds to see if it would turn on. It didn’t. “It’s dead,” I said. “Not that it would matter; it isn’t like the reception’s going to be any good out here anyway.” I giggled at my own joke and handed the phone back to Freuchen. “It’s just junk.”

Freuchen examined the phone, flipping it open then closing it again a couple of times, which seemed to amuse him. Then he dropped it into his pants’ pocket and walked quickly to catch up with us.

I found a leather wallet with what I think were probably Australian dollars in it. The oldest date on the notes was 2004. There was no ID inside. A little further on, I found a wooden hairbrush which I pocketed. Chou found a single red-accented white sneaker, a woman’s, and then a discarded blouse which we rolled up and placed in Freuchen’s backpack.

“Perhaps we should look and see if the owner of the sneaker and blouse are nearby,” Chou said.

“Good idea,” I agreed, and we paused our beach-combing for another hour while we moved into the forest a quarter-mile or so in all directions, searching for any signs of life, but found nothing.

It was sometime in the early afternoon that we finally saw the beach begin to curve to our left. When we reached that point, we found that we had indeed found the furthest Southern point of the island. The shale had been growing less and less as we had progressed further south, and within a half-mile of reaching that point, had been replaced altogether by dark, almost black glass-like sand, which made walking much easier.

Freuchen made notes on his map, and began walking again, “Ve should probably continue on for another couple of hours before ve make camp for the night, I vould suggest that ve—” He stopped, dead in his tracks, staring up into the forest.

“Peter? What’s wrong… oh!” Following the direction of Freuchen’s gaze, I saw what had caught his attention. About a mile or so away, a tower jutted out of the forest’s canopy. Actually, it was the ruin of a tower; its gull-white walls rose in a gradual spiral like a twist of licorice, but there were ragged gaps here and there on the exterior. The tower projected upward at an odd angle. It reminded me of pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It must have had some kind of addition at its top, but that was long gone, leaving behind only a broken web of what I took for support beams and pieces of ragged material that could have been the remains of a floor or another wall, it was impossible to tell from here.

“Vat do you think?” Freuchen said, over his shoulder to us. “Should ve make a detour?”

“Hell, yeah,” I said, with honest enthusiasm. “This is the first sign of any civilization on the island. We can’t just ignore it.”

“I would not be too hopeful,” said Chou, “It is obviously in an advanced state of disrepair. And we should also be aware that other survivors may well have made their way there already… it is hardly inconspicuous.”

Freuchen tossed his ax from one hand to the other three times, as if relishing the idea of a fight. “If ve pick up our pace, ve should reach it before evening,” he said. “Ready, ladies?”

“Better mark this one down on your little map,” I said, as Chou and I stepped past him and walked into the forest.

“I vill take that as a yes,” Freuchen chortled and set off after us.

* * *

I had badly underestimated the distance from the beach to the tower. Rather than the mile I’d first guessed, it turned out to be closer to three; all uphill, too. My calves were burning by the time we found the first debris from the tower strewn across the forest floor. We spotted several pieces of what looked like highly-polished aluminum or steel poking up from the layer of dead leaves covering the forest floor. Kneeling, Freuchen wiped the leaves from a large piece of it that was easily as tall and just as wide as the man himself, and at least five inches thick. There was no sign of rust or scratches or any kind of weathering or degradation.

“I think it’s some kind of metal,” Freuchen said. He placed his legs in a wide stance and lowered his butt to the ground, sliding both hands beneath the huge sheet of metal, bracing himself as he started to lift the piece of the shattered tower.

Freuchen’s eyes widened as he easily lifted the large sheet off the ground.

“Wow!” I said as he waved the sheet in front of him like it was made of cardboard.

“It is impossibly light,” Freuchen said, tossing the sheet from one hand to the other. “And look at these edges.”

He offered the piece of the tower to me, and I braced myself to have to drop it but, as Freuchen had said, it was incredibly light, given its size, weighing no more than a half-pound, if even that. The edges were fringed, uneven, like a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook with no visible sharp edges or burrs, not at all like how normal metal twists and deforms when it’s put under stress. It didn’t look like any kind of building material I had ever seen.

Chou picked up a second piece of the tower, this one about the size of a shoebox and began to examine it. “We have similar metamaterials in my time,” she said, “but this is definitely more advanced. Although it looks like solid metal, it is in fact constructed of very precise nanotrusses which account for its incredible lightness. The nanotrusses are then layered with an outer covering of material such as aluminum or ceramic, then coated in a weather-repellent or self-cleaning finish.” Chou turned to Freuchen. “Try and bend it or break it,” she told him, with a nod of encouragement.

Freuchen shrugged, smirked as if he had been given an easy task and tried to do what Chou had asked, placing his hands on both of the short sides and squeezing. The piece flexed outward slightly but that was all. Next, he tried to break it over his knee, but it refused to bend more than an inch. Freuchen continued to apply his considerable strength in an attempt to warp the metal, his face growing more and more red from the exertion until, finally, he gave up and tossed it to the ground. It instantly sprang back to its original shape.

“Another characteristic of nanotrusses are their incredible strength,” Chou said, with a little chuckle that brought a smile to my face too.

“Ve should continue on to the tower,” Freuchen said, obviously a little put out.

We followed the growing debris field up the hill until, at long last, we emerged into an area that had probably been a clearing at some point in the distant past judging by the younger trees that populated the large circular area. Although bushes and grass had pushed up at its edges, an uninterrupted pathway of what looked like wet silver ran down the hill and disappeared into the forest twenty feet to our right. The path was connected to the base of the tower, a bulbous fifty-foot-circumference section made of the same strange metal material. The tower gradually tapered in on both sides, vase-like at its mid-point, which I guessed was about one-hundred-fifty to one-hundred-seventy feet above us before expanding outward again until it was just as wide at the top as it was at ground level.

The overall effect reminded me of an hourglass. Spaced at regular gaps around the circumference of the tower, large, flat, tulip-shaped protrusions jutted out horizontally. They were made from the same material as the rest of the tower, and I wondered if they were observation decks or if they maybe served some other purpose.

The top section of the tower was, as I had thought when we first spotted the building from the beach, nothing but a latticework of crisscrossing beams and remnants of what, I surmised, had once been floors and walls and ceilings. There had obviously been something up there at some point, but the remnants of it now lay all around us. Despite the evident destruction up top, as my eyes moved up the outside of the tower, I saw that it remained pristine, unblemished in any way. No lichen grew on it. No vines or ivy wound up its sides. No weathering of any kind at all.

“If it wasn’t for the mess up top,” I said, “you’d think this thing had just been built today.”

“Look,” said Freuchen, pointing toward the rear of the base of the tower. “There’s the reason it’s leaning at such an odd angle.”

At some point in the past, a slab of the mountain had broken away behind the tower, sending an avalanche of boulders ranging from suv-sized boulders to smaller rocks the size of my head smashing into the tower. A rocky debris field lay all around it, covered in lichen and other plants, which seemed to indicate the rockfall had happened a few seasons ago at least. A large amount of that rockslide, millions of tons, had flowed past the tower, leaving a huge drift of rock piled up around the base of the structure.

“If that had happened to a building in my time,” Freuchen said, “there vould have been nothing left but matchsticks and dust. He knelt and pulled a piece of the tower from between two rocks. “But this incredible material the tower is made of must be vy it has only tilted instead of toppled.”

I pressed the flat of my hand against the side of the tower. “It’s very warm,” I said, “especially given how little sunshine it must get.”

Chou and Freuchen did the same.

“You’re right,” Freuchen said. “Very strange.”

“It is possible that there is some kind of thermoelectric system built into the structure still gathering energy,” Chou mused. “Perhaps the outer layer is a kind of solar collector, or there may be a subterranean heating system that is still operational.”

We scouted the circumference of the tower’s base for as far as we could, climbing over and around the rubble. There was no obvious entrance in the tower’s wall, but it could just as easily be hidden behind the sixty-percent or so obscured by the rockfall.

“At least there’s no sign that anyone else got here before us,” Chou said.

“Yes,” said Freuchen, “if there is anything inside it, then it should be ours… if ve can find a vay in.”

I took a few steps back from the tower, just to get a better look at the higher section when a flash of something metallic in the rocks and boulders of the debris field caught my eye.

“Hey!” I called back to Chou and Freuchen. “Come take a look at this.”

My two companions picked their way over to where I stood.

“What do you think that is?” I asked, pointing toward a thick tangle of vines twisted between a tightly clustered group of trees off to our left. “See, right there in the rock pile between those two trees.” I pointed as best as I could. “Can you see it?” Through a few gaps in the twisted, snake-like vines and the rocks that had accumulated around them, the rays of the afternoon sun reflected off of something gold and glittering.

“Vat is that?” said Freuchen. He scrambled over the boulders and picked his way toward the trees, Chou and me right behind him. We began tugging at the vines but quickly figured out it was useless; they were too tightly wound together and incredibly strong.

“Stand aside,” Freuchen said. He leaned his ax against the trunk of the nearest tree, pulled the machete from his belt, placed a boot on the rough surface of a large boulder for balance, and set to work, slashing at the vines with short, powerful, precise cuts. He sheathed the machete and began pulling some of the smaller boulders from the pile and tossing them away. A couple of minutes later, he stepped back, perspiration and bits of vine peppering his hands and face.

I gasped in amazement. “I think it’s another robot,” I said breathlessly. I couldn’t be absolutely sure because most of it was still hidden beneath the vines and rocks, but Freuchen’s work had revealed enough of the golden body that I was confident what lay beneath the rocks was the remains of another robot.

“You mean like the vun you said you saw on the beach, the day ve arrived?” Freuchen said, nodding toward the space he had cleared while grimacing as he wiped the sweat from his face with the back of an arm. “Two mechanical men!”

I leaned in to get a better look. Through the gap Freuchen had cleared I saw a black lattice-work of metal and the smooth curve of a gold surface I was pretty sure I recognized as the robot’s chest. I smiled at Freuchen and nodded. “Yes, I think so. But how on earth did it get stuck here?”

“The rockslide must have caught it unavare and trapped it,” Freuchen said. He stood back and eyed the debris piled up around the robot. “Ve could clear the vines avay in a matter of an hour or so… probably. It vould give us a better chance to examine it.” He let his words hang in the air, more question than statement.

“You think it might give us a clue as to who made it?” I asked, turning to face Chou.

“I hardly think it would have a manufacturer’s stamp on it, but who knows,” she replied. “It might yield some clues.”

Freuchen looked dubious, despite having made the suggestion to clear the vines in the first place. “The question is, do you think it is a good idea to uncover it? It could be dangerous.”

“The one I saw on the beach was…” I searched for the right words to sum up the feeling I’d gotten in my gut as the robot had walked by me into the ocean. I settled on, “…confused. It was like it didn’t understand why it was doing what it was doing. I know that sounds weird, but that’s the impression I got. I don’t think it had any intention of hurting us. Truth is it could have grabbed me and drowned me if it had wanted to. It’s no threat… probably.”

Chou shook her head. “It’s been buried under all that rock for a very long time. If it was going to get up and do anything, I think it would have done so by now. But it leads me to another question. Look at these trees.” She pointed at one of two trees that stood about twelve feet tall, young by comparison to the others that towered skyward around them. “Do you see how they are growing out of the space between the boulders?”

I nodded, not seeing the point Chou was trying to make.

But Freuchen apparently did. “They are growing from the rock pile that buried the mechanical man,” he said, “vich means that they must have started growing after the rocks were deposited here. A tree grows at a rate of about one to two feet a year, given the right soil conditions. That vould mean these trees have been here for a minimum of twenty years and perhaps longer. Vich also means the mechanical man has been buried here for at least that long, too.”

“Exactly,” said Chou. “But that raises another question. If this is a robot and it was trapped here decades ago, why did the one Meredith encountered on the beach choose the moment we arrived to walk into the sea?”

“You think it was just waiting there, on the beach? For all that time between whenever this happened…” I swept my hands over the rockfall “and when we arrived? That just doesn’t make sense.”

“Yet another question on a very long list of senseless events, I fear,” Freuchen said. “But perhaps if ve vur to free our metal friend here, he could give us some answers. Are ve agreed?”

Chou nodded.

“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “What have we got to lose.”

“Vunderful,” Freuchen said, his concern over the robot apparently alleviated. “Let’s get to vurk, then.”

For the next hour and a half, Freuchen hacked away at the vines while Chou and I pulled the severed creepers from the body of the robot. Bit by bit, the huge golden form of the robot was revealed. By the time we pulled the last vine away, there was less than an hour of daylight left, and we were all exhausted and soaked with sweat.

The three of us took a step back and stared at what had been revealed. The robot was trapped in a sitting position on the ground, its segmented arms clasped tightly to its sides. Its left leg extended straight out in front of it, the right leg trapped beneath a heap of rock. Several large boulders had piled up behind the robot, pushing its upper torso forward at its waist, like it was bowing. The robot I’d seen on the beach had a concave bar that floated just in front of the mound between its shoulders I assumed was its head. Two piercing blue lights had glowed on the bar and had moved to look at me as I floated in the water. I had assumed they were its eyes. The bar on this robot was firmly attached to the mound of its head, and there were no lights. No indication of ‘life’ at all.

“It must have been here for a long time for the vines to have grown so thickly over it,” Chou said.

Freuchen nodded. “Yes, but look, there is very little sign of veathering or any kind of corrosion on its body. Not even any scratches from the boulders. Is it made from the same material as the tower?”

Chou ran her hand over the golden chest. “I believe this is actual gold,” she whispered. “Gold is the most non-reactive of all metals which would account for the lack of corrosion, but to be this strong it can’t be pure; it must be some kind of alloy.” She rapped the knuckles of her hand against the robot’s chest. “It’s as hard as steel.” Chou maneuvered around the robot, climbing over tree roots and boulders, inspecting the machine as minutely as she could, given the forest’s advancing shadows as afternoon edged toward evening. “I do not see any kind of port or activation switch; no interfaces of any kind,” she said after completing her inspection.

Freuchen looked skyward, to the patches of darkening sky visible through the trees. “I have no idea vat you’re talking about but ve should ready a camp for the night. I vill prepare a fire.”

Chou reluctantly joined us, her fascination with the machine obvious.

We gathered extra wood and piled it next to the campfire Freuchen had built near the robot, ate some of the smoked salmon and jerky we’d brought with us, then sat around talking quietly to each other as evening edged toward night. The forest was alive with the sound of birds and other creatures I couldn’t identify, almost as if the animals that lived within the trees knew we were there and were warning each other about the strange interlopers on their territory. But gradually, as night descended through the trees, even that noise died away, leaving only the crackle and snapping of our fire.

“I vill take the first watch,” Freuchen volunteered, positioning himself atop a large nearby boulder. Chou and I bedded down near the fire to try and get some rest before the aurora inevitably woke us again. I was exhausted, and I felt myself slipping easily into sleep the second I closed my eyes.

* * *

I awoke just as the first streaks of the aurora filtered through the forest’s canopy. Freuchen and Chou were already up and about, sitting around the campfire talking in low voices.

The sky crackled and glowed as bolts of energy shot across the black sky. The nano-particles did their nightly dance, and I felt the cool rush of energy coursing through my body and the welcome feeling of regeneration as the aches and pains of the previous day’s trek and toil were erased from my body. When the show was over, I stretched and took over guard duty from Freuchen.

“I don’t think I vill ever get used to that,” Freuchen said, referring to the aurora. “But it is very velcome.” Without another word, he lay down in the spot where I had slept, closed his eyes and started snoring almost immediately—a strangely high-pitched sound for a man of his size.

“Wake me in a couple of hours,” Chou said, and she lay down too.

I walked over to a tree close to where the robot sat, the machine’s golden body reflecting the orange light of the fire, bouncing it around the forest. I sat down between the tree roots, my back resting against the trunk, and looked at the robot. The campfire illuminated the front of the mechanical man, casting a long shadow behind it that shifted with the flames, creating the illusion that the robot was swaying back and forth. A pile of dead leaves, pine needles, gravel, and pinecones had collected in its lap. Grass sprouted from between its long metal toes. My eyes had just begun to wander to the forest when something caught my eye. Something about the robot had changed, I was sure of it. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly.

I got to my feet and edged nearer to it. I looked closer… and gave a little gasp of surprise. The robot’s eye-bar that earlier I was sure had been firmly fixed to its head now floated an inch or so in front of it, just like the one I’d seen on the robot on the beach. I moved to the robot’s left shoulder to get a better angle. Sure enough, I was right, the eye-bar was floating in front of the mound between its shoulders.

“What is going on?” I said quietly.

As if my words had triggered some mechanism within its golden body, two tiny blue points of light materialized at the center of the eye-bar and quickly grew in size. I was suddenly looking directly into two electric-blue orbs.

I stumbled backward, an involuntary cry of surprise caught in my throat. My heel clipped a rock, and I fell hard on my ass with an oomph! The blue orbs followed my movement.

It was alive! The robot was alive.

I started to push myself to my feet but froze as the robot’s right arm flashed toward me, grabbing my wrist in a strong but not painful grip. Surprisingly, its long metal fingers felt as warm as a human’s hand against my skin.

“Candidate 13, I have a message for you,” the robot said in that same calm, humanesque voice I'd heard from its twin during my arrival on the beach. The tone was non-threatening, soft, welcoming; the kind of voice you might expect from a counselor or a psychiatrist. The timbre, resonance, and rhythm of its words articulated in such a way I couldn’t tell whether the voice was male or female. It was quite beautiful to hear. The robot tried to lean in closer to me but was unable to free itself from the rubble that had trapped it. Its eye-bar moved left and right then up and down as if it was assessing its situation. I looked back over my shoulder to where Chou and Freuchen were still asleep, thought about yelling for their help, but something told me I wasn’t in any danger. Not yet, anyway. When I turned back, the robot’s electric-blue eyes were focused on me again.

“Candidate 13, humanity is in peril. The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder; the effects on the outcome have moved beyond predictability. Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must travel to the Collector immediately and locate Candidate 1. They must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind.”

I sat there in the dead leaves and rock and twigs, staring at the robot. “I… I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I finally managed to splutter. “What plan? What external entity? What do you mean? Who are you?”

“Candidate 13; humanity is in peril. The plan has been compromised by an external entity—”

It took another recitation of the same short speech for me to realize that I was listening to a recorded message. It was in the process of delivering the message for a third time when it suddenly stopped mid-sentence and released its grip on my arm.

From behind me, I heard Chou and Freuchen scrambling to their feet, registering the shock in their voices as they saw that the robot was awake.

“Vat? Vat is that?” Freuchen hissed. He was standing next to me now, his open hand extended toward me, but his eyes fixed on the robot.

“Did you do something?” Chou said, as I took Freuchen’s outstretched hand and allowed him to pull me to my feet.

“I was just looking at it and—”

A sudden high-frequency whirring sound, like the noise a generator makes when it’s starting up, filled the air. At the same time, the robot’s eyes glowed momentarily brighter and then turned to look directly at the three of us. The whirring sound grew louder and higher in pitch, then either stopped or the frequency passed outside of our hearing range. The robot spoke again: “Welcome children of Earth. Do not be afraid,” it said in that same calm voice. “I know you are confused and have many questions. I am here to help you assimilate into your new surrou—” The robot’s words tapered off. The eye-bar moved left then right, then back to where the three of us stood watching it, our eyes and mouths wide in astonishment.

“Please excuse me. An error has been detected. This does not appear to be my assigned reception point. Please stand by.”

“It can talk?” Freuchen said, very quietly, turning to look at Chou and me. “No one told me it vould be able to talk.” Despite Freuchen’s huge size, right then, he sounded like a scared little boy.

“When it first woke up, it said something about a plan, a collapsing field. That I had to find someone or something called ‘Candidate 1.’ I…”

“It has to be the aurora,” said Chou. “It seems that the same energy which powers the nanites also powers the robot. The question is why didn’t it activate when we first arrived? If it’s been here long enough for the vegetation we had to cut from it to have grown as profusely as it had, then why didn’t it just free itself and leave?”

I answered her. “There was something wrong with the one I saw on the beach. It walked right out to sea and barely even registered that I was there. If this one was far enough inland that it couldn’t make it to the water, maybe something else was done to it…”

With a sound like ancient, unoiled hinges, the robot suddenly tried to get to its feet, spilling the leafy debris that had collected in its lap.

Freuchen yelped and jumped back, pulled the machete from its scabbard and raised it above his head. I gulped and took an involuntary step toward Chou who did nothing more than cock her head to the left and continued to stare inquisitively at the golden automaton.

Unable to free its right leg from the pile of boulders that pinned it, the robot collapsed back into its sitting position with a heavy thud that sent a puff of dead leaves and dirt spiraling into the darkness. “System diagnostics indicate significant degradation of multiple modules. Memory system corruption detected. Main power is at zero percent. Battery backup at two percent. Attempting to establish Neuro-net link…” There was a three-second pause, then, “Neuro-net link connection failed. Free roam status activated. Power level now at one-point-nine percent.”

Again, the robot’s electronic eyes moved to me, Freuchen, and Chou.

“Welcome children of Earth. Do not be afraid.”

For a second, I thought it was about to go through the same spiel we had already heard. I was wrong.

“Hello. I am Standard Instruction and Learning Servitor 762. You may call me Silas. This message is being broadcast simultaneously in Multi-Speech. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I appear to be suffering from an undiagnosed malfunction. I will shortly return to conservation mode, but please do not be concerned; I have activated my assistance beacon, and another silas unit will be with you promptly. In the meantime, I will remain active as long as—”

“The other silas units are all deactivated,” Chou said quickly, stepping in closer to the robot… to Silas. “There will be no help from anyone. We need you to stay online for as long as you can and help us to comprehend what is happening. Do you understand me.”

Silas’ blue eyes moved over each of us in turn. “Candidate 13, Meredith Gale; Candidate 20078, Weston Chou; and Candidate 207891, Peter Freuchen. Please elaborate.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d been referred to as a candidate; the Voice had used the same terminology when I was on the bridge. I looked at Chou, hoping she’d caught the reference. She glanced in my direction nodded as though confirming my assumption, then continued, “Silas, can you tell me how long you have before your power is exhausted?”

“I have approximately seven minutes and thirty-one seconds. Please elaborate on your last statement.”

We humans exchanged glances.

“We need to know if he is the Voice,” I whispered to Chou. Freuchen nodded his agreement.

Chou turned back to Silas. “Silas, are you responsible for bringing us to this planet?”

“I did not bring you here,” Silas said.

“Then who did?” I shot back.

“The Architect.”

Three sets of human eyes locked with each other then turned back to the robot.

“Who is the Architect?” I said, pronouncing the words slowly.

Silas hesitated for a couple of seconds. “I… I am sorry, I cannot remember that information. My memory modules appear to have been seriously compromised.” Silas tried to raise its right arm but only managed to move it a few inches from its side before it fell back again. The robot’s eyes travelled over the boulders trapping its right leg. “Do you know what has happened to me?” Silas asked.

The robot’s confusion was almost heartbreaking. I’d interacted with computers that gave the appearance of being able to talk like a human, but this, this was on a whole new level. This machine seemed, well, truly alive. There was real emotion behind Silas’ words, and I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for its situation. It appeared to be just as puzzled about what was going on as we were.

“I’m sorry, we don’t know what happened to you. We don’t even know what has happened to us,” I said. “But when we found you here you were… turned off and buried under rocks and vines. Lots of them.”

Chou added, “It was obvious that you have been here for a very long time.”

The robot’s eye-bar moved slowly left and right as if it was only now becoming aware of its surroundings. “This is not my assigned reception location. Have you interacted with any other Silas units?” His blue eyes dimmed momentarily, then brightened.

“I saw one of…” My mind stuttered over the correct personal pronoun, and I cringed as I settled on “one of your kind… on the beach the day we all arrived here. It walked out into the ocean and… and it did not stop.”

Chou spoke up. “Silas, can you do a full self-diagnostic and tell me what’s wrong with you?”

“Yes, I shall begin at once.” Silas sat motionless for about ten seconds, then: “I have limited power available to me, and my diagnostic report indicates that my memory has been severely corrupted. I am suffering from what you would classify as severe brain trauma. I have attempted unsuccessfully to contact other Silas units via the Neuro-Net. My diagnostic system informs me that my interface is functional which means that the Neuro-Net must be down. I have also detected unauthorized code additions within my main programming. It would seem there was an attempt to override my ambulation module. I have purged that code.” The robot paused for a second or two. “Please tell me everything that you can about your arrival.”

We quickly recounted everything that had happened to us since we’d been dropped into the ocean.

“If it had not been for the ruined tower, ve vould never have found you,” Freuchen said.

“Ruined tower?” Silas asked.

“Yes,” Chou said, “The tower behind you. It looks to have been abandoned a long time ago. It’s badly damaged, but it must have been impressive.”

“The habitat? That is troubling,” Silas replied. His eyes dimmed again then brightened. “Given what you have told me and my current location, I can only assume that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the Architect’s plans for your arrival. My internal power source was designed to last for approximately three centuries. As I am currently running on auxiliary battery power and I can detect no problems with my internal power system other than it has been exhausted, I have reached the conclusion that I have been at this location for a minimum of three hundred years. I have tried to reach out to my sibling units, but the Neuro-Net has vanished. That, in and of itself, is of great concern, but when I include all of the information you have given to me, I find it… disconcerting.”

“You think this Architect’s plan you spoke of was somehow sabotaged?” Chou said.

“Perhaps,” Silas murmured. “There is also the slight possibility of a confluence of natural phenomenon having caused these events, but I have calculated the possibility of that occurring as being low enough to discard as highly improbable. When all the events you have described are considered together, and my own predicament is also added to the equation, along with the corrupted code I detected, I can only assume that, yes, an outside force has purposely disrupted the Architect’s plan. The question is who would do such a thing? If only I could remember…”

Chou interrupted, “Silas, can you tell us what you were supposed to do for us when we arrived.”

“Yes, of course. Once the great transference is complete, it is my role to assist candidates in any way I can. I understand that the transference will have left you confused and that you have many questions. I will be happy to answer all of those questions but first… but first… but first…”

Silas repeated those last two words for another minute, jumping back and forth like a skipping record. Then, abruptly he stopped.

“Extensive memory corruption detected. Two minutes and fifteen seconds until shutdown. I hope that has answered your question. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Ummm, okay,” I said.

Chou met my gaze and raised her eyebrows momentarily. “Silas, is there any way we can help you recover your corrupted memory?” she asked.

The robot processed the question in silence, then said, “Yes. There are several options. If you can contact a repair facility that would be of great help.”

“Okay,” I said, “now we’re getting somewhere. Where can we find a repair facility?”

There was another pause. “I… I am unable to access that information.”

“Vunderful,” Freuchen mumbled.

“Okay, okay,” I continued. “You said there were several options. What else can we do?”

“If you can locate an inactive Silas unit I would be able to transplant modules and replace my own damaged components and memory.”

“How the hell are ve supposed to do that?” Freuchen wondered aloud.

Chou said, “Silas, if we freed your leg from the rocks do you think you would be able to walk?”

“Yes. My diagnostic system indicates that there is minimal damage to my legs.”

“And if we freed you, would you be willing to come back with us to the garrison?” Chou continued.

“Of course. My primary purpose is to assist you in any way that I can.”

Chou turned to face Freuchen and me. “I think the best thing we can do is get him back to camp where we can examine him without all of this…” Her hands fluttered to the forest.

“That makes sense,” said Freuchen, “but how?”

“He’s going to run out of power soon, but I think that tomorrow night, when the aurora returns, his backup battery should recharge sufficiently that he’ll be able to make it some of the way back to the camp. What do you think?”

I nodded. “Can’t say I’ve had much experience with robots, but it sounds like it makes sense to me.”

“Only one vay to find out,” said Freuchen.

Chou turned back to the robot. “Silas, your power is going to be exhausted soon. While you’re in shutdown mode, we’re going to free your trapped leg. That way, when the aurora recharges your emergency battery tomorrow, we’ll talk more. Do you understand?”

The robot’s eyes had been slowly losing some of their brilliance while we discussed the situation. Now they were only a little brighter than the sparks that had first alerted me to him being awake.

“Yes,” Silas said, his voice an electronic slur.

“You can shut down, now,” Chou said, laying a comforting hand against the robot’s metal chest.

“Thank you…” And with those final words, the robot’s eyes dimmed, then were extinguished, and there was only the three of us once again.

* * *

“Tell me again about the robot you saw walk into the sea on the first day,” said Chou. We had settled around the campfire, huddled close to its flames, more for the sense of security than warmth, I thought.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “It looked identical to this one and walked from the beach into the sea. But it just kept repeating ‘Welcome children of Earth’ over and over. It felt almost like it had no control over its actions. Like it was being forced into committing suicide.” I didn’t tell them about the sense of panic I thought I sensed from the robot as it disappeared beneath the surface of the ocean.

Freuchen gave a subtle nod to where Silas sat beneath the pile of rocks. “Do you think this one could be the same mechanical man?” Freuchen asked.

“I don’t think so, no. No, in fact, I’m sure it’s not; Silas has been trapped beneath that rockslide for a long time. It wouldn’t make sense that they could be the same.”

I felt a sudden thrill of excitement at this latest development. A golden robot! And all we had to do was free it. Maybe it could give us answers to the questions we had. A thought struck me: in all the excitement of our discovery of Silas, we hadn’t actually given any consideration to whether it was even a good idea to free the robot. I said so now.

“But what if it’s not really friendly?” I said. “What if we free it and it tries to kill us?”

Freuchen gave a deep growl, like he was considering the possibility of my words, but said nothing. Instead, he looked to Chou.

“There is always that risk,” Chou said. “But if his intent was to harm us, why greet us so warmly when he first encountered us? And why would the one you saw walk into the sea not try to harm you?”

“You’re right,” I said and quoted Silas’ opening line: “‘Welcome children of Earth, do not be afraid,’ isn’t exactly a threat. And that’s what the other robot kept repeating when it walked past me. I think it was supposed to help keep us calm. To show it’s not a threat.”

“Still, we should have a plan,” Chou said. “In case we are wrong. Although I will admit, I don’t believe we will have much chance of either overpowering or doing damage to it. Perhaps it would be best if we agree that if Silas proves aggressive, we should simply run away.”

“Yeah, because running from a killer-robot always works out,” I said. I felt it safe to assume Chou had never seen any of the Terminator movies. “So, if it comes down to it,” I continued, “it’s going to be a race between me and you, Peter, because I’ve seen how fast Chou can move.”

Chou was right, though; we had no weapons capable of harming Silas. Running away really was our only recourse at this point.

“I don’t believe it will come to that,” Chou said, all business again. “Now, earlier you said Silas gave you a message…”

“Mmm hmm,” I said. “Right after it first woke up.”

I’ve always had a pretty good memory but, now, as I recalled the moment, I found I was able to remember Silas’ words exactly: “Candidate 13, humanity is in peril,” I recited. “The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder; the effects on the outcome have moved beyond predictability. Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must travel to the collector immediately and locate Candidate 1. They must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind.”

A long silence followed.

“There was nothing more than that?” Chou asked.

“No,” I said, “that was everything. When you and Freuchen woke up, the robot stopped talking and went through his… I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a start-up process? Like booting up a computer.” I paused, unsure whether I should say what I felt but decided I should. “It felt like the message was recorded. It just didn’t feel spontaneous to me.”

“We will ask Silas what he knows of it tomorrow,” Chou said. “But if what you say is correct it seems obvious that the message was meant for you, Meredith. That suggests whoever left it knew you would be the one to find Silas and gave him the message specifically for you. It must be the Architect Silas spoke of. Do you know who Candidate 1 might be?”

I shrugged. “Not a clue. You?”

Chou shook her head. “No, but whoever it is, they must be key to all of this. If we assume that the originator of this message is the Architect, then we can also assume that the ‘plan’ is the reason we were brought here and what was supposed to have taken place after our arrival.”

“And I think we’ve already met a couple of the ‘agents of chaos,’” I said.

“The two men who murdered your friend and almost killed Chou?” Freuchen asked.

“Exactly,” I said. “But what about the last line? What do you think ‘the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind’ could mean?”

Chou considered the question. “I do not know,” she said finally.

“I guess that’s one we’ll need to ask this Candidate 1 when we find them. But why would the Architect leave such a short, cryptic message? Why not just give the exact details of who and where Candidate 1 is and how to find them?”

Freuchen said, “Perhaps the Architect could not risk that information falling into the hands of one of these agents of chaos? Vun thing appears clear: this message is a varning. And if ve’re correct, and the two men who killed Phillip ver agents of this unknown entity, then it means your location is known, and more vill surely follow.”

“Well, thanks for that, Peter,” I said. “That makes me feel so much better.”

Freuchen continued, “Ve should make Edvard avare of the situation as quickly as possible. It vould not be right for him not to know.”

Freuchen didn’t have to say it, but the implication was clear: our friends’ lives are in danger because of your presence, Meredith.

I nodded my agreement. “We’ll do it as soon as we get back to the garrison. The last thing I would ever want is to put their lives at risk.”

* * *

Freuchen snored quietly next to the fire, one arm raised, his wrist limp as he dreamed of wrestling polar bears or whatever occupied his slumbering mind. Chou could have been asleep or awake, there was no way for me to tell. She rested on her side facing the fire, perfectly still.

I lay awake, my mind leaping from thought to thought like a needle skipping across a record: Who is the Architect? Where was Candidate 1? Who was Candidate 1? What was the void? How was I supposed to get off this island? And last but not least, Why choose me? Why out of everyone on this island had I been singled out?

Round and around my thoughts spun, feeding a growing sense of restless anxiety that kept me firmly in the waking world. If our assumptions about the message were correct, then I had to find a way off this island as quickly as possible. But where was I supposed to go? The only other land was the distant coastline visible from the beach. But I had no way to reach it or any idea if that was even where I was supposed to start looking for this Candidate 1.

And the idea of walking away from my new friends and the security I’d found with them to set out on my own was deeply frightening, terrifying even. Less than a week ago, I had been a strung-out junkie intent on ending her life. And now, by some ludicrous cosmic rolling of dice, I was at the heart of a mystery that was so utterly crazy I had to stop myself from laughing at the absurdity of it.

And yet…

Beneath the feelings of helplessness and fear, a part of me I had not known existed had awakened, a growing desire to turn my face toward the unknown, to square my shoulders to the darkness and say ‘Bring it’ to whatever lurked within the shadows.

I have never thought of myself as brave, but I knew that was going to have to change. I was going to have to find that courage within me, and I was going to have to find it fast.

Fifteen

Early the next morning, good to Chou’s word, we began clearing away the rocks and debris that trapped Silas. The back-spill of boulders and gravel behind the robot proved the most difficult to deal with… and the most dangerous. Each time we removed one of the larger boulders, an avalanche of smaller ones slipped down from the scree above. More than once we had to jump away to avoid being crushed by a rogue rock we inadvertently dislodged and brought tumbling in our direction. And, of course, when we'd set off from the garrison the previous morning, we hadn’t exactly anticipated having to dig a robot out of the side of a mountain, so we had no shovels or other tools with us, which meant we had to rely on our bare hands. My nails were soon little more than a shredded mess, my hands cross-marked with cuts and grazes. Then, as the hours of lifting passed, we added blisters that split and bled to our growing list of wounds. But by noon, we had managed to clear away three-quarters of the rock that had trapped Silas. Two hours later, only a few smaller rocks in the fifty to sixty-pound range remained along with one large boulder that even Chou and Freuchen’s combined strength couldn’t budge.

“We need something for leverage,” Chou said, after the three of us, panting and dripping with sweat, had tried for the umpteenth time to roll the boulder away.

“I can fix that,” Freuchen said. He walked over to a young Fir tree, a quarter the size of the others; spat into both palms of his dirt-and blood-streaked hands and took a mighty swing at the tree’s trunk with his ax. Five similar swings later and the tree toppled to the ground. Freuchen quickly stripped all the smaller branches from a length of the trunk then separated that denuded section from the rest of the felled tree, creating a respectably straight eight-foot-long pole. He hefted the cleaned pole in both hands and carried it back to us. “Leverage,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

I got on my knees and used my hands to dig out a hole beneath the boulder large enough for the tip of the pole to fit snugly into, then, together, the three of us took hold of it.

“On the count of three,” Freuchen said. “Ready… and three!”

Grunting and snarling, we levered the boulder off Silas and cheered in unison as it rolled away, gaining speed as it bowled down the incline before crashing violently into a tree and coming to a halt in a shower of leaves. We yelled whoops of satisfaction, and I raised my hand to high-five Chou and Freuchen. They both looked at me quizzically. Freuchen raised his hand mimicking my own, and I slapped it hard. We made our way back to the fire, ate some of our provisions and chatted about our lives before our arrival on this weird other-world. The shadows grew longer, as we waited impatiently for darkness and that night’s coming aurora.

I volunteered for first watch, but despite the fatigue of the day, none of us slept, the idea of actually getting some answers too exhilarating, I think.

When the aurora finally lit up the night sky, I watched the cuts and grazes I’d collected while we’d worked at freeing Silas heal over, and the tension in my muscles vanished.

“Are we ready?” I said, turning to face my companions when darkness returned.

As one, the three of us got to our feet and walked over to where Silas, free of his rock prison, now sat slumped on the ground and waited for him to wake up. For a minute or so, nothing happened.

“Do you think it is broken?” Freuchen whispered. As if he had uttered magic words, Silas’ eye-bar floated free of its fixture. A second later, the two sparks of blue light that would become his eyes appeared.

“Hello Silas,” Chou said, as the blue dots expanded.

“Welcome children of Earth. Do not be afraid. I know that you are confused and have many questions. I am here to help you assimilate into your new surroundings…” Silas stopped. “I am sorry, there appears to be a problem. System diagnostics indicate significant degradation of multiple modules. Memory system corruption detected, main power is at zero percent. Battery backup at seven percent—”

I interrupted, “Silas, it’s okay, we’ve been through this with you last night, remember?”

The robot’s eye-bar moved in my direction. “I am Standard Instructional—”

“Silas, stop,” said Chou. “Do you remember us?”

“You are candidate 20078, Weston Chou. Your friends are Candidate 13, Meredith Gale and Candidate 207891, Peter Freuchen.”

“Yes, but do you remember meeting us last night?” Chou continued, her voice hesitant.

“I am sorry, but that would be impossible. Today is transference day, and we could not have met…” Silas’ words tapered off again and his eye-bar began to move left and right, up and down as he cast his electronic gaze over the trees and rubble strewn ground. “This is not my assigned reception location. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I appear to be suffering from an undiagnosed malfunction. I will shortly return to conservation mode but please...”

As Silas continued to run through the same lines he’d spoken to us the previous night, Chou turned to face me, a look of abject dejection on her face. “I think its memory problems might be a bit more complicated than we first thought.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” I sighed. “That’s just freaking great.”

“Silas, stop,” Chou demanded, as the robot continued the same speech it had given the night before. When he did as she asked, Chou added, “We know this is confusing for you, but your memory has been damaged. We spoke last night, so we know you only have a short amount of time before your systems begin to shut down again; what we need to know from you is how can we help you so that you can help us?”

“Yes,” Freuchen said. “It is time for us to sit crooked and talk straight.”

“If you could locate a repair—”

I took a step toward the robot. “There is no repair station. There is no neural net. None of the other SILAS units have survived on this island that we are aware of. Nothing has gone according to the Architect’s plan. There is only you, Silas. We don’t have time to explain everything to you. What we do need to know is if there is any other way to keep you powered up before your backup battery is depleted?”

As if he was waiting for someone to admit that what I had just said was a joke, Silas’ eye-bar dipped on the left side, giving the impression of an eyebrow raised in disbelief.

“I have a photoelectric charging system built into my outer skin,” Silas said after no one contradicted me. His eye-bar moved to look up at the forest canopy. “It will prove sufficient to keep my main systems active. There is insufficient sunlight here. Please direct me to the nearest open area.”

“The beach,” Freuchen said. “Ve should get him to the beach.”

“I don’t think he’ll make it that far,” Chou said. “Not at night. His backup batteries are only going to last him twenty minutes at most. Then we’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s aurora, and we’ll be a day later back to the garrison than we said we would be.”

“Maybe we should just get him into the clearing near the tower,” I said. “At least there’s open sky. Maybe it will be enough to keep him charged long enough to get to the beach.”

Chou nodded. “Yes, it’s worth a try.” She turned back to Silas. “Silas, will you follow us please?”

“Of course,” said Silas. The robot slowly extended both of his legs until they were directly out in front of him, his joints grating and creaking like stressed metal. At the same time, he flexed both of his arms, like someone at a gym warming up before hitting the weight machines. He did this several times, each time the grating sound grew less and less until, finally, he pushed himself to his feet.

We walked back to the tower, an unobstructed view of the star-speckled sky above us, the robot, looming over us.

“This will do,” I said. “Silas, wait here, please.”

The robot obeyed.

“What should we ask him?” I said, thinking back to the previous night and all of the questions that had gone left unsaid.

Chou shook her head. “I don’t think we should ask him anything tonight. We need him to conserve as much energy as possible to get him to the beach tomorrow morning. If we ask questions, it will use up his energy reserves.”

“You’re right,” I said, even though the questions I had were ready to spill from me.

Silas said, “Weston is correct. If I enter standby mode soon, I will conserve ninety-eight percent of my available power.”

“It’s the best course of action,” Chou said.

Both Freuchen and I agreed.

“Silas, shut down until we reactivate you.”

“Shutting down. Good night.” And with that, the robot’s eyes dimmed and went out.

Sixteen

We spent the rest of the night camped at the base of the tower. At some point, I’d fallen asleep and awakened to the sound of birds chirruping in the tangled wreckage at the top of the tower. The sun was still too low in the sky to illuminate much of the clearing, instead, sending shadow emissaries creeping ahead of itself, gradually shrinking harbingers of early morning’s approach.

The robot was in the exact same position we had left him.

“Silas, wake up.” No sooner had I said the words than the two blue spots of electronic light sparked into life on the robot’s eye-bar. I half-expected to have to go through the same welcome speech, but his battery-backup appeared to have held.

“Good morning,” the robot said, rising to his full height.

Silas looked around. “Oh, the habitat!” he said, surprised when he saw the ruined tower behind him.

“You mentioned the tower… the habitat, as you call it, when we spoke with you the first night we found you. What was it?” Chou asked.

“A residence for this island’s candidates. A home for all of you. I built it in preparation for your arrival.”

“You built it?” Freuchen said, obviously impressed.

“Yes, with the help of another SILAS unit.”

“Do you think there is anything of use to us in there?” Freuchen said, nodding at the tower.

“I do not believe so. The habitat was just that: a place for you to rest, shelter. It was to be furnished and stocked at a later date.”

“Silas, do you know why we were brought here?” I asked.

“Here?” the robot said.

“To this planet.”

“I apologize, but the information is lost to me.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Silas, the night we found you, when you first woke up, you relayed a message to me. Was the message from the Architect?”

Silas’ eye-bar swiveled in my direction. “I’m sorry, Meredith, but I have no recollection of relaying any message to you.”

I quickly repeated the message back to him: “Candidate 13, humanity is in peril. The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder; the effects on the outcome have moved beyond predictability. Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must travel to the collector immediately and locate Candidate 1. They must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind.”

Chou asked, “Who is the ‘external entity’? And what did you mean by the ‘void’? Can you tell me?”

Silas’ eye-bar tilted quizzically. “I have no information or memory of ever relaying that information to you, Meredith. Perhaps this is a product of my memory failure?”

“Okay,” I said, “can you at least tell me who Candidate 1 is? Or who the Collector is? Where I can find them? And what does this collector… collect, exactly?” Visions of bad horror movie villains sprang unbidden into my mind.

“I… there appears to be a block on that information.”

“You mean you’ve forgotten who it is? When we met, you knew who I was, who Chou and Freuchen were? Why would you forget who they are?”

“No, I have not forgotten the information, that part of my memory appears to be fully intact. Access to information relating to the first five candidates appears to have been placed behind a barrier that I am unable to breach.”

“You mean, it’s password protected?” I said.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. I know the information is there, I just do not have the authorization to access it.”

I tried not to let my growing frustration show, and while Silas may have been correct about having forgotten the message he had related to me, it just didn’t feel right. I mean, how could whoever had sent the message know it was going to be me who would be the one to find Silas? And why would the first words out of his mouth have been a message for me, only to then deny having any memory of it? It just didn’t make sense. But at least now I knew that the robot had some answers. How I was supposed to access that information was a whole other question.

“Can you tell us who the Architect is and what it wants from us?” I asked.

“That memory is fragmented. I do not remember who the Architect is, but I do know that he wants you to survive.”

“Survive? Survive what?” Chou said.

“I do not know.”

“Then vy did the Architect choose us?” Freuchen said. “Vy vould the Architect choose me? Or Meredith? Or any of us?”

“Your wasted potential,” Silas said, as if those three words were self-explanatory.

“Wasted potential?” I repeated back to him. “That makes no sense at all.”

“Please, explain what you mean,” Freuchen urged.

The robot repositioned himself, his eye-bar slowly moving to each of our faces in an equivalency of eye-contact. “Each of your lives was cut short; whether by your own hand, as the result of an accident, or by some other event. With your death, everything you would have ever achieved was lost. It is that wasted potential which drew the Architect to you. You were chosen because of your probability for achievement, or for your specific knowledge, or the skills which you possess that would prove useful in ensuring the continued success of humanity.”

“I knew it,” I said, throwing a smile at Chou. “There is a plan, and we’re all a part of it.”

Chou leaned in. “But how could the Architect know what our potential was? That suggests it possess some way to observe or predict what we could have achieved.”

“I’m sorry, I have no data available on that.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, with a sudden understanding of where Chou was going with her line of questioning. “There’s really only one way the Architect could know what our potential was.”

With a subtle nod, Chou encouraged me to continue.

“It had to have had something to compare our lives against. A version of us whose potential wasn’t wasted.”

“Yes,” said Chou, a smile parting her lips.

In my excitement, I grabbed both of Chou’s hands in mine. “You were right about Edward. You’ve been right all along. Parallel universes. That explains it. Not only are we not from the same time, we’re not even from the same universe, are we?”

Chou nodded, her smile widening. “I believe that is correct.”

Freuchen looked completely perplexed. “Vat on Earth are you talking about? How can ve not be from the same universe? Vat other universe is there?” He sat down hard and began to caress his temple with one meaty hand.

I crouched down beside him. “I know it’s confusing, but I’ll try to explain,” I said, placing a hand on his knee and squeezing gently. “When Wild Bill first brought us to the garrison, I was sure I knew Edward from somewhere. It was only later that I realized I did know him, or rather, I knew of him.”

Freuchen’s brow furrowed but he did not interrupt me as I explained it all.

“Are you saying that our Edward is an imposter?” Freuchen asked when I was through. “I do not believe you.”

“No, no. I’m not saying that at all. Our Edward is Edward. But the Edward I read about in my time, the one who survived the war and went on to become an esteemed poet, is also Edward. There’s a theory that suggests there’s not just a single universe, but an infinite variety of them. That, for every choice you make, another version of you makes a different choice and creates a new off-shoot of that universe. And while both versions of you share a common past, at the point they diverge, they branch off into their own, unique version of the universe.”

It would be easy to look at Freuchen and think that because of his size he was not a smart man, but that would have been a grave underestimation of him. Behind that humongous beard and the bear-like frame was a sharp mind. “You mean that the Edward Hubbard you say you knew from his poetry books is our Edward, but also not him?”

“In a way, yes,” Chou said, taking over the explanation. “The Edward from Meredith’s universe shared our Edward’s life exactly, right up until Meredith’s Edward made a choice that saved his life, sending him down a different path and creating a new version of the universe. An alternative version.

“Perhaps in Meredith’s timeline, her Edward delayed leaving the trench to reconnoiter the enemy’s position a minute later. Perhaps he was on some other battlefield that day, or the task was given to another unlucky soldier. Whatever the reason, Meredith’s Edward made different choices and lived. He is Edward and also not Edward. Do you understand?”

Neither Chou nor Freuchen noticed the quiet gasp of realization that slipped from between my lips. I understood now exactly where my life had diverged; the asshole in the Ford F150. That night, if Oscar and I had left the party just a minute earlier or later than we had, we would never have been t-boned by the truck. And if that accident had never happened, then Oscar would still be alive, and I would not have set off down my own dark path that led to me sitting here with this bizarre group of reluctant interdimensional time-travelers.

Freuchen said, “It is enough to make your head spin. I have always understood that the mechanics of our universe ver complex, it vould seem that I grossly underestimated just how complex.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said, leaning against Freuchen, “it also means that in some of these alternate universes, we’re alive and happy, and living normal lives. We probably have families. And in one of those lives, we achieved something so astounding that the Architect came looking for us.”

Freuchen smiled a sad, enigmatic smile. The idea was, I am sure, as appealing to all of us as it was to me, that there were other versions of us out there who were happy, successful, living their lives in blissful ignorance of the crazy reality of our multiple existences. It was… comforting.

Freuchen broke the silence. “Vile this answers one of our questions,” he said slowly, his voice a low rumble, “it also creates others: vy vould the Architect choose to contact us ven ve ver staring our mortality in the face? Vy not simply ask the question ven ve ver safe in our beds? Or choose a version of us that vas never in peril to begin vith?”

Chou sat cross-legged in front of us. “I believe I understand why.” She gathered her thoughts then continued. “Although we all originate from very different times, we do all share one commonality: after we died, our bodies would never have been found. I would have drifted for eternity through space. Meredith’s body would have been carried by the tide out to sea. Edward would have remained buried beneath the battlefield. And you, Peter, you said you would have frozen to death, lost in a blizzard. Our stories all end the same way.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why the Architect would wait until we were about to die. Why hold out until then?” I said.

“If the Architect had taken us at any point before it was sure our lives were over, it could have changed the course of the timeline. It had to be certain its actions would leave the timeline unaltered. The only way the Architect could be certain of that would be if it contacted us at the exact moment our lives would have ended if it had not intervened.”

“It does make a fantastical kind of sense,” Freuchen said, nodding in agreement.

I wondered just how long it must have taken for the Architect to find a version of me that met whatever criteria it had judged us by. How many timelines must it have searched through? How many lives had it observed? And what kind of an intelligence could be capable of such god-like feats? It was at once awe-inspiring and absolutely terrifying.

“Yes, yes. I see it now,” Freuchen said, his enthusiasm gathering steam. “And by the same logic, your theory also explains vy the Architect did not harvest us from a universe vare ve ver not destined for an early demise.” Freuchen was following Chou’s logic better than I was, apparently.

“How so?” I asked, uneasy with his choice of words; the idea of having been harvested was… creepy.

“Consider the shockwaves that vould have reverberated through your friends’ and relatives’ lives if…” He made an explosion with his fingers. “Poof! Suddenly you are no more… vanished… gone vithout a trace from a vurld vare you vould have lived a full and productive life. It vould irreversibly alter the chronology of that universe into one that vas never meant to be.”

Chou nodded in agreement.

Freuchen kept going, on a roll now. “Imagine for a moment all the people you vould have met, talked to, befriended, loved, all the ripples of influence that your presence vould have made over the course of your natural life. None of those things vould ever happen if the Architect meddled in a timeline vare our lives ver not destined to end prematurely.”

“But if there are infinite timelines, why would altering one of them have even mattered?” I said, my mind trying to grasp all of the implications.

Chou answered. “It would only matter to an ethical intelligence.”

There was a long pause as we allowed that information to sink in.

“You mean the Architect chose us because it cares about us?” I said, slowly.

“Not necessarily about us as individuals,” Chou explained. “But it suggests that the Architect is concerned about humans as a species and will carefully consider the effect its actions would have on us and humanity in general.”

Chou took a step closer to Silas. She reached into her pants’ pocket and pulled something from it, held it in her closed fist. When she unfurled her fingers, she held the remains of the mechanical bug she had killed that first night. “Can you tell me what this is?”

Silas swiveled his upper torso to face her and leaned down to inspect the bug. Gently, the robot lifted the remains from Chou’s hand and held it close to his eye-bar (whether this was an affectation to mimic a human response or whether he really needed a closer look, I have no idea).

“Fascinating!” Silas whispered. “I do not recognize this unit. It appears to be a beautifully crafted mechanism designed specifically for surreptitious observation.”

“You’re saying that thing was designed specifically to spy on us?” I said.

“Yes, I believe so.”

Silas placed the broken bug back into Chou’s hand. “How did you acquire it?”

“During the first night we arrived,” Chou said. “It attempted to infiltrate our camp. Why would you say it is designed to spy on us?”

“There would be no need to have it mimic an insect unless it was designed to blend in and avoid detection. As you can see from my own appearance, the Architect does not seek to disguise his creations.”

“If it’s not a tool of the Architect then who is it spying for?” Chou continued.

“I can only surmise that whoever is responsible for interfering in the Architect’s plan must also be responsible for that exquisite mechanism.”

“Are you saying someone is vurking against your master? Against the Architect?” Freuchen interjected.

A lightbulb suddenly lit up in my head as I made a connection that had been right in front of us. “The message Silas gave me, it warned about an ‘external entity.’ Maybe that’s who made the bug.”

“Then our suspicions ver correct,” Freuchen said. He snapped his fingers loudly. “The message also mentioned ‘agents of chaos.’ That could explain the two men who murdered your friend and I believe may vell have done the same to you and your companions if Vild Bill had not found you.”

“Murder?” Silas gasped, as though he had been startled. “That is impossible. The Architect anticipated that there would be confusion after the great transference, but efforts were made to ensure that your natural human proclivity to strike out during times of stress was abated for several days.”

Freuchen stroked his huge beard as he answered. “Vell it looks like vatever ‘efforts’ you’re talking about came to nothing, because if our friend Vild Bill had not found Meredith, Chou, and Albert, they vould surely have been killed too. Vat do you have to say to that?

“It does not make sense.”

“It does if you include this mysterious entity from the message in the mix,” Chou said. “But why would they target us?”

“Maybe it’s because I was the one who was going to receive the message from the Architect?” I said. “But that would mean that this other entity knew about it ahead of time. None of this makes any sense to me, either.”

“This other… adversarial entity,” Freuchen said, “it seems apparent that it does not share the Architect’s good vill toward us.”

Chou nodded. “Just the opposite. It appears to have its own agenda. And how we factor into that agenda, if at all, I do not know. But it is obvious to me that it does not share the same ethical values as the Architect.”

I said, “So the Architect has our best interest at heart, but we don’t know what it wants from us. And this other entity—what did you call it, the Adversary?”

“The Adversary seems an appropriate name for it, yes,” said Chou.

“The intentions of this Adversary are completely unknown to us,” I continued, “but it does appear its agents are willing to kill on its behalf, assuming our theory is correct.”

Freuchen leaned forward, stroking his beard. “It seems that venever ve unravel vun mystery it is immediately replaced by another that is just as perplexing.”

“Silas, what do you say about all of this?” I asked the robot.

“I wish that I could confirm or deny your theory. I know that there was a plan. I was created to help educate you as to its purpose, and assist you in achieving its goals, but that is as much as I can remember. I am sorry. Please, believe me when I say that this is almost as frustrating for me as it is for you.” Silas seemed honestly broken up about it.

“That’s okay,” I said, “it’s not like it’s your fault. But is there anything else, anything at all that you can tell us about what the Architect wants from us?”

“I am sorry, but no.”

Chou said, “Silas, if you don’t know who the Architect is, can you at least tell us where he is located?”

That question hadn’t even crossed my mind. I hadn’t given a thought that the robot might hold the key to the whereabouts of the Architect.

“Regrettably, I do not have that information.”

Well, so much for that idea, I thought. There was a brief period of silence.

“I have a question,” Freuchen said. His voice had grown quiet. “Can the Architect send us back?”

“Back? To where?” Silas asked.

“Back to our planet. Our home. Can this Architect, if ve find him, can he send us back to vare ve came from?”

“I am sorry, but, no, I do not believe that would be possible.”

“But you said the Architect brought us through time to here… varever here is,” Freuchen continued. “If he brought us here, vy can’t he just reverse the process?”

“The exact process of how your translocation was achieved is unavailable to me. But I know that the procedure by which the Architect brought all of you here was not truly time-travel, it was something… else. What that mechanism was, exactly, is lost to me. I am sorry, but there is no going back.”

“Vell,” Freuchen said, a note of exasperation entering his voice as if he already knew he would not receive an adequate answer in this ongoing exercise in exasperation. “Can you at least tell us vare ve are exactly? What name should ve call this planet of yours?”

Silas’s eye-bar tilted in a display of surprise. “I apologize. Had I not made it obvious? This is planet Earth.”

* * *

You could, quite literally, have heard a pin drop for what seemed like minutes.

Freuchen finally broke the silence. “But that cannot be. The sun? The moon? How can this be Earth?” His voice was tremulous, only just above the volume of a whisper.

I suddenly realized that of all the questions we had asked so far, we had missed the most obvious one. I asked it now: “Silas,” my own voice barely under control, “When are we? What year is this?”

Silas’s eye-bar swiveled in my direction. “As I cannot account for the exact period of time during which I was deactivated, I cannot calculate with any degree of accuracy what—”

Freuchen leaped to his feet and strode toward Silas until he was eye to eye-bar with the robot. “For the love of all that is good, vould you just give us a straight answer you metal monstrosity!” he hissed.

“The year is approximately 420,353,745; plus or minus several hundred years, allowing for my period of inactivity.”

“What?” I sat down. Hard. When I lifted my eyes again, my two friends looked to be in just as much shock as me.

“How can that be?” Freuchen said. “How?” His eyes drifted to Chou and me as if we might hold the answer.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, my eyes dropped to stare at the tufts of grass between my feet. I suddenly felt very, very tired. “Holy. Shit.” I managed to lift my head and look at Silas. “Half a billion years?” I whispered, my voice trailing off into an unrecognizable squeak that would have sent any nearby dogs into a howling frenzy. “We’ve been brought half a… bill… billion years into the future?”

“Approximately,” Silas said brightly, obviously happy he could finally give us an actual answer to a question, blissfully unaware that he had just delivered a hammer-blow to all three of us. It felt as if a cord I didn’t know I was connected to had been stressed beyond its breaking point and suddenly snapped. And now I was… adrift. I felt incredibly vulnerable, which was strange when you consider everything else that had happened to me since my arrival here. Could I even call it an arrival when I had, apparently, never even left Earth? But this new information from Silas only served to ram home how distant my old life was, and, even though this was still my planet, how very, very alien this Earth was.

“But if this is Earth, vare are all the other humans? The countries and civilizations? All our great vurks and vunders?” Freuchen’s voice trailed off.

“I have no data available on that, Peter.”

Chou, who seemed the least affected by the latest news, said, “Silas, why do you refer to us as Candidates?”

“That is your official designation, assigned by the Architect.”

“Yes, but candidates for what?” I said.

“I have no—” Silas began, but I cut him off.

“Available data on that,” I snapped, finishing his sentence. “Yes, we get it. Well, can you at least tell us how many candidates there are?” I said, expecting the same answer.

Silas processed the question then said, “There were one billion nine-hundred-million five-hundred-thousand-and-eighty-nine candidates who agreed to be relocated here from their home timelines.”

My mind reeled again, trying to take in the enormity of the number. It was staggering. I had grown used to the idea that this little island was all there was. That we were it.

Obviously, there couldn’t be that many people on the island, which meant they had to be elsewhere. The distant coastline I’d seen from the beach was the only logical place. It had to be part of a larger landmass or continent; large enough to accommodate almost two-billion temporal-gypsies, all so very far from home. Two billion people thrown together with no direction, no answers, and no understanding of who or what had brought them here.

It sounded to me like a recipe for disaster.

The first few days on this island had been insane, but now I counted myself lucky to have arrived here rather than the mainland. I could not begin to imagine the chaos that must have been magnified a million times across the mainland. How could anyone possibly be expected to build from that? How would we make it?

And yet… the kindness I had witnessed in my time here; the drive to begin over, to build something worthwhile from the ashes of destruction seemed… unstoppable. I’d come to realize that the will to succeed, to create something bigger than ourselves was a basic drive woven deep within the very fabric of our humanity.

We had all been given a second chance. A chance to try again. To make something… better.

And so what if the Architect was awol? Who cared if there was no roadmap to follow? And as for the Adversary; well, it wouldn’t be the first time humanity had come face-to-face with a tyrant intent on subjugating all of us to his will. Throughout the history of our race, we had confronted those same trials and beaten them, time after time.

There were two billion humans on this planet. Two billion hand-selected souls who shared the same drive and determination that had brought our species to dominance over every other living thing on this planet. This was our chance to build that brave new world that had haunted our species’ dreams for millennia. To rescue humanity from whatever fate had swept it from our rightful home.

The Architect had chosen me. Had told me that I was the one it trusted. And if our theories were true, then the Architect knew more about me than I did. So, who was I to question its choice?

Still, the fact remained, somewhere out there, amongst those two billion strangers, was the key to all the mysteries: Candidate 1.

“Ve vill need to be on our vay if ve vish to be back at the garrison before sunset,” Freuchen said, breaking me free of my thoughts.

“If you are sure there’s nothing worth salvaging from the habitat then there’s no reason we should remain here any longer,” Chou said. “Silas, do you think you have sufficient energy to make it approximately three miles through the forest to the beach or should we wait?”

“If we leave soon, I will make it.”

“The sooner ve are on our vay the better. All this standing around is making my feet itch,” Freuchen said. He kicked dirt over the smoldering campfire, then said to the robot. “Follow us.”

Seventeen

The second dead man had vanished from the beach. All that remained to show he’d ever existed was a lone shoe and a shallow indentation in the shale starting where his body had lain and ending at the edge of the forest.

“Did something drag his body away?” I said, not wanting to hear I was right. My mind flashed back to the saber-toothed tiger that had stalked us over those first two nights.

Freuchen bent over, picked up the shoe then dropped it quickly when he saw the foot still in it. “Something big, for sure,” he muttered.

“And hungry,” Chou added, scanning the forest. “Best we keep moving.”

“No argument from me,” I said. Despite having the giant robot as a deterrent, I couldn’t shake the thought that whatever had dragged off the decomposing body of the man was following us, camouflaged within the trees.

“Many animal genera were brought here by the Architect,” Silas said. “A wide variety of species from Earth’s timeline were needed to ensure an adequate food supply and maintain the biological fecundity of the planet. These include carrion eaters.”

“Oh-kay,” I said, “Well, thanks for that reassuring tidbit, Silas.”

“You are welcome, Meredith.”

The first body we’d passed was, however, still there. We smelled it long before we saw it, thanks to a breeze that set the forest rustling and the stench of decay wafting in our direction. After two more days in the sun, the dead man was evidently too far into the decomposition process to draw larger carnivores and had, instead, attracted birds, crabs, and a mass of insects that now treated the rapidly decaying cadaver as either food, a new home, or both. I gave the body as wide a berth as possible, covering my nose and mouth with a hand while trying hard not to repeat the embarrassment of losing my breakfast again.

Silas, on the other hand, appeared to be completely immune. He walked over to the body and knelt next to it. “The number of candidate deaths is disturbing,” the robot said. “Losses were expected during the Great Transference, but those were anticipated to have been due to shock induced by the translocation of candidates from their timeline to this one.” He leaned in closer, his eye-bar scanning the corpse. “Losses of this nature should never have occurred; it was all but impossible. Provisions were made by the Architect to reduce fatalities to as close to zero as possible.”

“What kind of provisions?” Chou said, also seemingly unperturbed by the stench of the dead man.

“Some minor adjustments were made to your bodies to ensure the release of elevated levels of key chemicals such as serotonin, and oxytocin upon your arrival.”

“Wouldn’t that bring on a sense of well-being, happiness?” I said, being somewhat of an aficionado on highs until a couple of days ago.

“Yes, Meredith, along with feelings of closeness for your fellow candidates,” Silas replied. “This would help mitigate the shock of your arrival long enough for my fellow SILAS units and I to educate you on why you had been chosen and to help assimilate you into your new home.”

“Figures,” I said. “Well, we certainly didn’t feel anything like what you described during this Great Transference. In fact, it was the complete opposite. Almost everyone panicked. But we definitely feel something like it every night during the Aurora.”

“Curious,” Silas said. “I wish I had access to more information on the subject.”

“Is there anything else you can remember? Anything at all?” Chou said.

“No, that is as much as I am able to recall. I am sorry.”

* * *

Noon had come and gone by the time we reached the estuary. I was pleasantly surprised at the feeling of ‘coming home’ that blossomed in my chest at the idea of reaching the garrison and once again seeing the people who I now called my friends. And it had been oddly quiet without Albert. The kid had grown on me.

“Ve should take a break,” Freuchen suggested, stopping to lean against a tree and empty several pebbles from his shoes.

“Oh, God, yes please,” I said. We’d been exposed to the full force of the sun for the last couple of hours, so fifteen minutes dangling my sweaty feet in the river sounded delicious.

“Very well,” said Chou, “but remain close by.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll stay within screaming distance,” I said, only half-joking.

Freuchen excused himself and headed for the privacy of a row of trees to do what he had to do. I walked to a cluster of boulders just a little further upstream, perfectly positioned in the shade of six coconut palms. I splashed cold water over my face and washed some of the sweat from it. I stripped off my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans and dipped my feet into the water, and leaned back. Through half-closed eyes, I watched Chou climb atop a large boulder that reminded me of a giant turtle’s shell, where she watched over us like some mother duck guarding her ducklings.

In the distance, semi-obscured by haze and clouds, the monolith guarded the horizon. My eyes drifted from it to Silas.

I watched him climb nimbly down to the riverbank, then wade out into the fast-flowing water, his eye-bar moving back and forth, searching the water for something. Eventually, he reached down, lifted an object from the river, scrutinized it, then placed it in a metal pouch on his hip. A few more minutes passed, then he stooped down again and pulled a second object from the water, held it in his hand and examined it closely. Apparently satisfied with whatever it was, he put the second object in his pouch and waded back to shore. He sat down on the river bank and took one of the objects he'd collected from his pouch and held it in front of him. It looked like a flat piece of rock or wood, I couldn’t tell. The robot raised his other hand, pointed an index finger at the object, and I saw a bright beam of light emanate from it. It was a laser, I was sure. Silas’ hand moved in a blur for several seconds back and forth across the object. Then the light went out and Silas, seemingly satisfied, placed the object back in the metal pouch on his waist. He got to his feet, looked around and began to walk to where I lay watching him.

When the robot reached me, he stood for several moments, his eye-bar moving back and forth across the scenery. “It is so very beautiful here,” he said.

“It’s almost paradise,” I said. “All it needs is a Tiki bar, and I’d die happy.”

Silas’ eye-bar tilted oddly as if he were assessing whether I was joking or not, then he said, “May I ask a favor of you, Meredith?”

“Of course.” I propped myself up on both elbows and gave him my full attention.

Silas reached into his pouch and pulled out a flat, gray piece of rock about eight-inches wide by four.

“It is slate,” Silas said. “I would like to give this to you now, to ensure that you know what to do tomorrow.” He offered the rock to me.

“Okay?” I said, taking it from him, puzzled as to why he would want me to have it. I flipped it over and saw rows of finely inscribed markings neatly etched onto its smooth surface. The markings reminded me of a upc barcode like you’d see on something you bought from a store, except this was much longer, easily several thousand tightly packed lines long. The code took up about half of the available surface of the one side of the piece of slate.

“What is it?” I asked, wondering at how perfectly the lines had been etched into the slate’s surface.

“In anticipation of the memory loss I will undoubtedly experience when my battery is exhausted, I have inscribed all pertinent information of the events leading up to today onto the slate in machine-readable code. It includes your names and everything you have told me, and that I should trust what you tell me without question. It will save us all time, I believe. I will update the slate on a daily basis until I am able to find a more permanent solution to my memory loss.”

“Wow!” I said, honestly impressed. “What do I need to do with it?”

“When you reactivate me tomorrow, simply hold it in front of my eye-bar. I will automatically recognize it and assimilate the information.”

I nodded at the robot. “Will do.”

“Thank you, Meredith.” Silas dipped his shoulders in acknowledgment.

I leaned back against the rocks. The clouds that had earlier obscured the monolith had moved on, so now most of the huge mega-structure was visible. It was hard to look at it without feeling uneasy; it was just so massive. But it was also beautiful. The reflected sunlight shone like a distant beacon.

A sudden realization hit me like a slap across my face. I jumped to my feet.

“Are you okay, Meredith?” Silas said.

“I’m fine,” I replied, then, “Come on. We need to talk to Chou and Freuchen.” I jogged to where Chou stood on her rock, casually chatting with Freuchen.

“The collector,” I said, not waiting for them to stop talking. “What if it’s not a person?”

Both of my friends looked at me quizzically.

“From Silas’ message: You must travel to the collector immediately and locate Candidate 1.” I pointed over their shoulders to the monolith.

“Oh!” said Freuchen. “Vell, I suppose that vould make sense, vouldn’t it?”

Chou took a few moments before she replied. “It is the most prominent landmark. But why not one of the three others?”

I took a moment to consider her question. “It’s the only one of the four that we can be certain is located on land.”

Chou nodded slowly.

“It vould be the logical place to start looking, at least,” Freuchen said, with a dip of his chin. “If you could get off the island, at least.”

I felt my mood drop a little. He was right. I would have to find some way to get to the mainland. But if the Architect was as smart as it appeared to be, and if it wanted me to locate this Candidate 1 so badly, then there had to be some way for me to escape the island. I just had to find it.

Chou stared at the monolith for a while, then said, “Time to move on.”

Together we set out on the final trek back to the garrison.

* * *

We retraced our original path up the river, crossed from one bank to the other, then continued following the river through the woods toward home, chatting happily amongst ourselves.

The acrid smell of woodsmoke wafted downwind to us; stronger than I remembered from the garrison’s campfire, but still a welcome reminder that we were almost home. But as we drew closer to the garrison, I noticed more smoke, a lot of it, reaching between the trees like ghostly fingers. I felt a moment of unease, then we stepped out of the forest and into the garrison’s clearing, and for a brief moment, I felt a distinct sense of relief.

“Stop,” Chou said suddenly, throwing up an arm to bar our way. “Look.”

The feeling of relief evaporated as I caught sight of what had brought Chou to such an abrupt stop. Edward’s cabin was nothing but a smoking ruin, and most of the lean-tos had been reduced to little more than splinters. There was no sign of anyone working in the camp or the forest. The garrison was deathly quiet. Deserted.

“No, this cannot be,” Freuchen hissed and ran toward the camp.

“Stop,” Chou hissed. “Whoever did this might still be in the camp.”

Freuchen ignored her.

Chou exhaled a long sigh then motioned we should follow too. By the time the three of us caught up with Freuchen, he was circling Edward’s cabin.

“I do not see any bodies,” Freuchen said, turning to look around the remains of the camp.

Edward’s cabin was a smoking ruin; a skeleton of blackened logs and ash-gray burned planks. But here and there, a few pieces of the outer walls remained untouched by the fire. There was something odd about one of them.

“I think these are bullet holes,” I said, running my fingers over several missing chunks that had been gouged out of the wood.

Freuchen examined them too, then walked away from the cabin, his eyes scouring the ground. After a minute, he bent over and picked something up from the scorched grass. He bent over four more times in quick succession. “You are correct, Meredith,” he said, holding out his hand to show us five brass bullet casings.

“Oh no,” I heard myself say. “Why would anyone do this?”

No one answered me, but Freuchen said, “There are a lot of tracks leading tovard the north gate. I think whoever is responsible for this has kidnapped all of our friends and spirited them away.”

“Why though?” I said. “What could they possibly want with them?”

Chou shook her head. “There are many possibilities. None of which are good. We will need to locate our friends quickly if we have any hope of freeing them.”

“How long do you think it’s been since whoever did this left the garrison?” Chou asked Freuchen.

“It’s difficult to be sure, but I vould say no more than a few hours judging by how the cabin is still smoldering.”

Chou nodded. She looked skyward. “We still have several hours of daylight left. I would suggest we gather whatever supplies we can find and follow their trail immediately.”

“I agree,” Freuchen said.

Five minutes later, we began to follow the trail of footprints through the north gate of the stockade. We had refilled our water bottles and found a few scraps of food, including several salmon bricks left behind in the ashes of the campfire.

“Vell, at least they vill be easy to track,” Freuchen said, nodding at the ground and a muddy furrow that marked the route where our friends had been marched away, presumably in single file. “They should be slower than us, too. So as long as ve keep our pace up, ve should catch up vith them quickly.”

“Let’s move,” Chou said, she began walking briskly in the direction the tracks lead.

“Look, there,” said Silas. He pointed at several sets of footprints laid down parallel to the deeper tracks of our people. “There appear to be four others walking alongside the main group; two at the front and two more at the rear.”

“Guards,” said Freuchen. “So ve know ve are not outnumbered.”

The tracks continued north initially then curved west, back into the woods, in the direction Wild Bill had found us. We were about to cross from the clearing into the woods when Silas came to a halt. He raised himself to full height, and his torso moved slowly left then right. His eye-bar moving rapidly as though it were scanning the forest.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There is a single human. Approximately fifty-seven feet in that direction.” He sliced the air with a gold arm at an angle away from the tracks we were following. “They appear to be in some distress.”

“It could be one of the kidnappers,” Freuchen said, his jaw set. I could tell he was spoiling for a fight.

“If that is so, we might be able to learn something from them,” said Chou. “We should approach carefully. If it is one of the people who attacked the garrison, they may still be armed.” She turned to the robot. “Silas, I want you to lead the way. Be as quiet as you can.” She looked back at me and Freuchen. “We will remain behind you.”

We followed Silas as he picked his way carefully through the forest. “We are nearing the location,” He whispered. “Should I go ahead and ensure that there is no threat?”

All three of us humans found cover behind the wide trunk of a Redwood.

“Yes,” Chou whispered, crouching next to me and Freuchen.

“Be careful,” I added, kneeling beside her.

The robot dipped his eye-bar in acknowledgment and began to creep forward, while we all held our breath in anticipation.

Seconds passed with only the background noise of the forest to cover our deep breathing, then Silas said “Candidate 812139, it is a pleasure to meet you. You are injured. May I be of assistance to you?”

There was a momentary pause then an unmistakable voice said, “You come one step closer, and I’ll blow that excuse for a head right off your shoulders.”

* * *

“Wild Bill!” I yelled, unable to hold back my relief. As one the three of us clambered from cover and rushed toward our friend’s voice.

Silas’ huge frame stood between two trees, blocking my view. He stepped aside as we approached, and I slipped past him, the grin on my face melting away as I got a good view of the scene. On the ground ahead of me lay Wild Bill’s horse. Brute was obviously dead; several bullet wounds along his flank a testament to what had ended the beast’s life. Wild Bill lay next to his horse, pinned from the waist down beneath him,

“Well, you all are a sight for sore eyes,” the cowboy whispered, through gritted teeth. “I thought I was a dead man, for sure.” As he spoke, he ran his hand over Brute’s mane, but his eyes did not leave Silas. “And the God’s honest truth is I ain’t convinced I ain’t dead.” He nodded at Silas “Is this… tinman with you?”

“Silas?” I said. “He’s one of the good guys. We’ll tell you all about him later.”

Freuchen stepped in and knelt at Brute’s head. “First thing ve need to do is get you out from under there. Silas?”

“Yes, Peter. How may I be of assistance?”

“Vill you help us lift Brute off Vild Bill?”

“Of course.” Silas moved closer, his multi-jointed legs bending in a way that allowed him to slide his arms under Brute’s body. Then, in one swift yet touchingly gentle movement that did not go unnoticed by the cowboy, he lifted Brute off of Wild Bill and set the horse’s body down nearby. Silas’ eye-bar shifted in Wild Bill’s direction. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

Wild Bill gave a curt nod of acknowledgment, exhaled a long breath that I assumed must have been relief then grimaced as he tried to move his legs.

“How badly are you injured?” Chou asked, kneeling next to the cowboy.

“Hard… to… tell,” Wild Bill said, through clenched teeth. “Damn legs are asleep or broken or both.” He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t respond.

“Just take a minute,” I said, laying a hand against the cowboy’s shoulder.

“Argh,” Wild Bill continued. “Feels like I’m being stabbed by a million damn knives.”

Chou knelt beside him and slowly moved her hands down his left leg, then his right. “I don’t think your legs are broken.”

“We came from the garrison. Can you tell us what happened?” I said.

Wild Bill winced. “Four men showed up around noon today. Came out of nowhere, hollering and pointing rifles at us. They was all dressed the same, some kind of uniform. They rounded everyone up before we could do a damn thing to stop them. They lined us up like they were going to shoot us right there. Instead, they walked up and down the line checking everyone real close. Like they was looking for someone. They kept asking questions, but no one could understand them.” Wild Bill grimaced and spat. “Damn it all to hell that hurts,” he said, wracked by another spasm of pain. But I noticed his legs were moving, which I took for a good sign. “Anyways,” Wild Bill continued, “Edward said they was speaking German, what with his experience fighting them in that war he was in. Said he didn’t recognize their uniforms, and their guns were like nothing he’d seen before.”

“German?” I said.

“Can you describe vat they ver varing?” Freuchen said, his voice suddenly suspicious.

“Like I said, they was all dressed identical, but they had these two lightning bolts on their tunics, right about here.” He reached up and fingered the lapel of his shirt.

Freuchen started to say, “They sound like—"

I finished his sentence for him, “Nazis.”

“That’s what Evelyn called them. Nazis. Said they were murdering cowards. That they’d been responsible for some worldwide war that killed, and I ain’t sure I believe this, millions of people.”

“She wasn’t lying,” I said.

“How the hell did they find the garrison?” Freuchen pondered.

“Benito led them here. They had him all trussed up like a pig ready for slaughter. Looked like they’d beaten him black and blue; poor son of a bitch could barely walk.”

“Then they must have also captured Caleb and Tabitha, ven they left to explore the other side of the island,” Freuchen said.

Wild Bill nodded in agreement. “Anyways, like I said, seemed to me they was looking for someone. Well, whoever it was, they didn’t find them. That’s when they made it clear they was going to march us right out of the garrison to wherever the hell they came from. Edward grabbed me, said I should make a run for it, take Brute and find you three and tell you what happened. Said you were our only hope. I wasn’t right happy about leaving them all, but it seemed like the best thing, under the circumstances.”

Wild Bill flexed his left leg slowly, moving it back and forth a few times. He did the same with his right leg, then continued. “Edward made a play for one of the guards, and in the ensuing commotion, I slipped past them, grabbed Brute and rode hell-for-leather toward the woods. One of them Nazis spotted us and started firing that gun of his—ain’t seen nothing like it; must have fired fifty rounds faster than I could spit. I’ll never forget him, an ugly bastard, had a scar down his face.” With his index finger, Wild Bill made a slicing motion from his right temple across his nose to the left side of his lip. “Anyways, he hit old Brute here, but we kept on going till he couldn’t go no more. And we been here ever since. I reckon them Nazis must have thought they missed, and we’d got away, so they didn’t bother to track us.”

“What about Albert?” I said.

“He was alright, last I saw him. Holding on to Evelyn like she was his mamma.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “And Edward? Did they hurt him?” I braced for the worst, expecting nothing but bad news.

“They beat him good, but he was alive.”

I squeezed Wild Bill’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

“I reckon I can probably walk, if you’ll help me up,” Wild Bill said to Freuchen.

Freuchen offered both his hands and pulled the cowboy to his feet, then wrapped an arm around Wild Bill’s waist while the two men took a few tentative steps.

“Would you fetch me my saddle?” Wild Bill asked Chou.

Chou uncinched the saddle, lifted it free of Brute’s body, and brought it to Wild Bill.

“I think I’m good now,” Wild Bill said, stepping away from Freuchen. “Legs feel like I spent a week in a Deadwood cathouse, but I’m pretty sure I’ll survive.” He took his saddlebags and rifle from the saddle, slung them over his shoulder, then walked to his horse. “I hate to leave you here like this, old friend, but I swear I’ll make that bastard pay for what he done.” He turned back to us and said, “I reckon they got a good two-hour start. Best we be on our way if we’re going to find our friends. And while we’re at it, why don’t you fill me in on who this here tinman is.”

* * *

We picked up the trail again, following it into the forest while we recounted to Wild Bill the story behind how we had found Silas. Perhaps it was the time Wild Bill was from, or maybe it was a symptom of this new, incredible reality we found ourselves living in, whichever, Wild Bill accepted our explanation with a simple nod and a note that he was “Glad the tinman is on our side.”

But it quickly became obvious that while Wild Bill’s injuries were, thankfully, minimal, we weren’t going to be able to keep up the pace we had before finding him.

“If ve’re going to have a chance to catch up vith our people before nightfall, ve have to move faster,” Freuchen said.

“Leave me,” Wild Bill insisted. “I’ll make my own way.”

“No,” said Chou. “We will need all of the help we can get if these Nazis are as well armed as you say they are.” She pointed at the two pistols Wild Bill had on his hip, and the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Without your weapons, we will have little chance of engaging them successfully.”

“So, what do we do?” I said.

“I will go on ahead and attempt to locate them,” Chou said. “Once I have found our friends, I will return. Then we can plan how best to rescue them.”

“I’ll come too,” I said.

Chou shook her head. “I will be faster alone.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d seen how fast she could move. “Well, just be careful.”

Chou smiled. “If I have not returned by nightfall, make camp. I will find you. If I have not returned by morning, you should consider me captured or dead.” She turned, sprinted away, flitting between the trees like a Valkyrie searching for the souls of the righteous dead.

* * *

“When he showed up, I thought Silas was a man in a suit, like them knights of yore I heard about, all dressed from head to foot in armor. Now you’re telling me the tinman’s a machine?” said Wild Bill “How’s that even possible?”

I did my best to explain. “I don’t really know how he works exactly, even in my time we didn’t have anything like Silas, but we had computers… machines that could imitate people so well, you thought you were talking to a real person. You should think of Silas as an artificial person. A very, very smart person.”

“Thank you for the compliment, Meredith.”

Wild Bill just shook his head. “All I know for sure is that if the tinman here hadn’t found me, I’d be as dead as Brute right now. So, artificial person or not, I owe you a debt.”

As we walked, I told Wild Bill everything we had learned from Silas about the Architect, including his message to me and how the robot had been unable to recall it once he had lost power.

“When you found me,” Wild Bill said to Silas, “you called me a candidate? Candidate for what?”

“I’m sorry,” said Silas, “but that part of my memory is corrupted.”

“Well, that ain’t much use,” Wild Bill said.

“We think the Architect and the voice that asked us if we wanted to be saved are probably one and the same,” I said.

“Makes sense, I guess,” said Wild Bill. “About as much sense as any of this can, at least. But if this Architect fellow brought all of us here for a reason, why would he bring these Nazis, too? Or the two men who killed your friend Phillip? I mean, you folks all seem like reasonable and good-natured people. Why drop you in amongst men of such low moral turpitude?”

“Chou thinks something else, some exterior force, brought them here,” I said.

“The same force that caused us all to land in the vater rather than on land,” Freuchen chimed in. “The same force responsible for the destruction of the building ve saw at the other end of the island.”

I nodded in agreement. “It seems obvious from what we have all experienced and from the few gaps Silas has been able to fill for us that there was a grand plan of some sorts… and that this isn’t it.”

“Someone or something has thrown the proverbial spanner in the vurks,” said Freuchen.

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. “We think this other —which we call the Adversary—has caused the Architect’s plan to go off course. But even if that is true, it doesn’t help us. It just means there’s an even deeper mystery to why we’re here.”

We fell into an almost hour-long silence.

That silence was broken when Silas suddenly announced, “Someone is approaching.”

Before we could even think about hiding, Chou appeared from the trees ahead of us, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She jogged to us, wiping away a light sheen of perspiration from her forehead with her sleeve. Wild Bill handed her his canteen of water, which she accepted gratefully.

“I have located the Nazis,” Chou said, after drinking deeply from the canteen. “They have a camp approximately three miles ahead of us in a natural clearing close to the base of the mountain.”

“Our people?” Freuchen said.

“They appear safe. They are being kept with others.”

“Others?” I said, surprised. “What others?”

“I counted approximately fifty more captives as well as our own people. They are being held in two separate groups. There are nine Nazis in total.”

“Nine? Damn,” Freuchen said.

“Yes, and they all appear to be heavily armed.”

Late afternoon shadows had begun their slow crawl through the forest. I estimated we still had maybe two hours before evening caught up with us.

“Think we can make it before dusk?” I said.

“Yes, if Wild Bill is able to keep up.”

“You try and stop me,” Wild Bill said.

* * *

We picked up the pace, walking quickly and silently. I occasionally glanced over at Wild Bill; his face was set in a mask of determination, but his pain was obvious. Back in the normal world, the damage that had been done to his legs would have meant days or even weeks of bedrest and recuperation, maybe even hospital. But here, whatever injuries he sustained would vanish when tonight’s aurora arrived. Still, his pain was obvious, and I marveled at his determination and drive. But when Chou finally held up a hand for us all to stop, I saw the relief on the cowboy’s face. He sank to the ground, soaked in sweat, gasping in pain.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, but he waved me off.

“I’ll be just fine once I’ve caught my breath.”

We had stopped near to where the edge of the forest gave way to the mountain; close enough that I could see the gray scree of the mountain rising up to my right through the trees.

“Their encampment is just beyond where the tree line ends,” Chou whispered, her hand following the curve of the forest’s edge ahead and to the right of us. She turned and pointed up the side of the mountain. “Up there is an outcropping of rock that will give us a view of the camp, but first, I need to explain my plan.”

We gathered around her. Chou turned to face Silas. “Silas, we will need your help if we are to free our friends and the captives held with them. So, it is imperative that we carry out this plan before your backup batteries die. Are you willing to help us?”

Silas’ eye-bar tilted upward. “Of course, but you should know that I am ethically unable to participate in any violence. Nor am I able to directly or by omission of action allow harm or do harm to any human; candidate or otherwise.” I thought I detected a note of suspicion in the robot’s tone of voice.

Chou nodded. “I understand, but our friends and the prisoners being held captive by the Nazis are all candidates who could be murdered at any moment. And the Nazis are, as far as we can ascertain, not actual candidates selected by the Architect.”

“Yes, that is correct,” said Silas, “but as I have stated, I am not permitted to hurt or cause to be hurt any human being. That, I am afraid, includes Nazis.”

“But your ethical programming does not preclude you from entering the camp on our behalf to negotiate the handover of the hostages, does it?” Chou said, a grim smile crossing her face.

“That is an excellent idea, Weston,” said Silas. “It would be my pleasure to negotiate a peaceful resolution to this situation and secure the release of the candidates.”

Chou spent the next few minutes explaining to Silas how she wanted him to enter the camp. “I will leave the exact details of the negotiation to you, Silas. Now, if we can—”

Chou’s words were abruptly cut short by the unmistakable boom of a single gunshot echoing through the forest.

“Someone’s shooting at us!” I hissed.

“No,” said Wild Bill, “that shot was close by, but not close enough that it was aimed at us.”

Chou turned to the robot, “Silas stay here and alert us if you see anyone. Everyone else, come with me.”

Chou raced away in the direction of the outcropping she said she had scouted earlier, with the rest of us scrambling behind her.

We scrambled up the side of the mountain, clutching at boulders and vegetation, anything that would give us traction or a handhold.

“There,” Chou said, leading us toward a slanted sheet of rock that at some point in the last thousand years had cleaved away from the rest of the mountain. Over time the rock had tilted further and further away from the mountain until it rested at an angle that created a V-shaped fissure wide enough for all of us to slip into. One after the other, we stepped in and pulled ourselves up until our heads were above the rough edge, our bodies hidden from view to anyone who might happen to glance in our direction.

Below our hiding spot, less than a quarter-mile away, the forest gave way to a large grassy clearing. Smoke rose from several campfires. Two large groups of men and women sat or lay on the ground in the clearing, separated from each other by a hundred feet. Each group was guarded by three tall men wearing the distinctive uniforms of World War II Germans. The soldiers carried machine guns or rifles cradled in their arms as they walked slowly, almost nonchalantly it seemed to me, back and forth around the groups.

“They’ve split the prisoners into two groups to ensure they can’t all rush the guards at once,” said Chou, “but look at the guards, they’re too relaxed. These are soldiers who are used to being in charge of prisoners they know won’t resist. They’re not expecting a fight.”

“Do you see our people?” Freuchen asked.

“There,” I said, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t carry. “In the second group. Toward the rear, I think I see Edward. And that might be Oliver and Sarah with him, it’s hard to be sure from here.” My heart gave a little jump when I spotted Albert lying with his head in the lap of a woman who surely had to be Evelyn. “Yes, I think I see everyone… except for Benito.” The man Wild Bill said had led the Germans back to the garrison was nowhere to be seen.

“He could be in the other group,” Wild Bill said.

From the edge of the forest, hidden from our view until they stepped into the clearing, came two more soldiers. One of them was tall and wore a crisp looking uniform with a peaked cap, his trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots. He was obviously an officer. The second was another soldier, and he dragged the lifeless body of a man behind him.

“Oh my God!” I hissed. “They shot that man. They just shot him.” I felt a surge of horror and revulsion rush through my body.

“That’s the scar-faced son of a bitch who murdered Brute,” said Wild Bill, pointing at the soldier dragging the dead man behind him. “I’d recognize him anywhere.”

The scar-faced soldier dragged the man’s body over to what I had taken to be just a pile of rocks near the first group of detainees and unceremoniously dropped the body next to it. I squinted to try and get a better look at who the dead man was and sucked in a deep breath as I suddenly realized that what I had thought was a pile of rocks was something else entirely.

“Those are more bodies. They’ve been executing prisoners,” I whispered.

There were at least five dead bodies in the pile, limbs twisted and stiff; men and women. While our horror at the realization that these bastards were murdering prisoners in cold blood sunk in, the Nazi officer strutted along the edge of the group holding our people. As he walked, he slapped a pair of black leather gloves against the palm of his left hand. He stopped abruptly and pointed at one of the prisoners cowering on the ground before him. The scar-faced soldier waded into the group and grabbed the woman the officer had pointed at and pulled her roughly to her feet. I saw Edward struggle to get to his feet, but one of the other guards stepped up behind him and cracked him on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle. Edward collapsed to the ground again and stayed there.

The scar-faced soldier pulled the struggling woman out of the group to where the officer waited, presenting her to his superior as if she were up for auction.

“Dear God!” Freuchen hissed. “Is that…?”

“We have to move, now,” Chou snapped and instantly began scrambling down from our hideout, closely followed by the men.

I remained where I was for just long enough to see Evelyn’s struggling form as she was dragged kicking and screaming into the trees.

Eighteen

Throwing any reserves of caution to the wind, I sprinted down the side of the mountain after Chou. She had already reached Silas. Panting for breath, I ran to her side in time to hear Chou tell the robot, “You have to go now, Silas. Quickly.”

“Of course,” Silas said. He turned, and with quick loping steps, covered the hundred or so feet to the edge of the forest. We ran after him. Chou angled to the left, darting between the trees. She stopped several trees back from the edge of the clearing in a position that placed us between the two groups of prisoners.

Chou turned to Wild Bill, “I need you to provide covering fire for me,” she said.

Wild Bill nodded, grabbed his rifle and levered a round into the chamber, then bent low at the waist, ran to a line of trees capping a nearby hillock.

“Cover for what?” I hissed.

Chou ignored my question. “Stay here,” she ordered. She turned to Freuchen, said, “Come with me,” then the two took off through the woods, winding through the trees in the direction our people were being held. Suddenly alone and completely out of the loop of what was happening, I turned back to face the clearing just in time to see Silas step out of the forest and into full view of the Nazis.

The response to his sudden appearance was, initially at least, shocked silence.

Silas walked closer, raised a hand in greeting and I recited the first few words of his now familiar salutation, “Welcome children of Earth—” The rest were drowned out by panicked yells, screams of fear and surprise, and gasps of amazement from the Nazis and prisoners alike. The three stormtroopers guarding the group nearest to Silas dove for cover, the three others guarding the second group reacted similarly a second later.

And then everything went to hell.

Five of the prisoners from the group closest to Silas jumped to their feet and dashed for the woods.

One of the stormtroopers, a grizzled-looking soldier with a week’s worth of blonde stubble on his jaw, pointed his weapon at the back of one of them and pulled the trigger. Bullets tore through the man, sending gouts of blood into the air. He crumpled to the leaf-strewn ground as though his soul had been ripped from him.

Silas froze as the violence unfolded around him.

The Nazi continued firing, cutting down another two people in as many seconds. Several of the prisoners who still sat obediently on the ground flopped over sideways or screamed in pain as stray bullets from the soldier’s automatic weapon slammed into them.

His synthetic voice ragged with horror, Silas yelled, “No! What are you doing? Please, stop… stop…”

I stifled a gasp of horror as a woman dressed in a peasant’s woven blouse and skirt staggered backward, three red spots suddenly appearing on her chest, raked by a burst of gunfire. She collapsed motionless to the ground. Another man spun and dropped, blood streaming from a leg wound. He began to pull himself hand-over-hand toward the nearest tree for cover.

Quickly, I scanned the rest of the camp. The Nazi officer and the soldier with the scar were crouched behind a tree, less than fifty feet from where I hid. Kneeling next to the officer, his pistol pressed against her temple, was Evelyn, her pale face speckled with dirt and streaks of blood. I felt a surge of anger well up inside me when I saw the skin around Evelyn’s left eye swollen shut, hidden beneath folds of bruised skin. The bastards had beaten her!

All three were oblivious to me, their attention focused on the violence unfolding in the clearing, their mouths simultaneously falling open in disbelief when they saw Silas.

Thankfully, the other stormtroopers seemed too shocked to decide who to shoot: the fleeing prisoners, those who still cowered on the ground, or the huge mechanical man who had suddenly walked into their camp.

Silas did something I never expected; he rushed the Nazi shooting the prisoners. The soldier’s face paled as he saw the huge golden robot bearing down on him. He swung his machine-gun in Silas’ direction… and fired a sustained burst at the robot until his magazine was empty.

Small dents appeared on Silas’ chest, and I heard the ping of bullets ricocheting away. Silas reached the man and slowed to an almost instant stop.

“No,” the robot said, his voice pleading. “You must stop this carnage.”

The stormtrooper stumbled backward ten feet, fumbling another magazine into his weapon. He raised his gun and fired another burst of automatic fire into Silas, adding more dents. Then the air was suddenly filled with thunder as more Nazis opened fire on the robot.

“No!” Silas bellowed. “This is not a part of the plan.”

He bounded across the space separating him from the Nazi, reached down and yanked the machine gun away from the soldier’s hands and tossed it away. The weapon skidded to a stop about ten feet from me.

“This is not a part of the plan,” Silas repeated, enunciating every word as if speaking to a child.

The stormtrooper stood as stiff as a petrified tree. Silas loomed menacingly over him. And even though he had no face to express it, I swear I could feel the disappointment and anger raging through the mechanical man’s circuits.

“You were all chosen for a reason,” Silas yelled, standing erect, looking at the clumps of humans scattered in disarray around the clearing. “You are the only hope humanity has to—”

The rest of the stormtroopers opened up on Silas again.

Bullets zinged through the air as they bounced off the robot’s body. I ducked down as one thudded into the trunk of the tree I had hidden behind, sending shards of bark into my arm.

When I looked up again, I spotted Chou. She’d circled to the rear of the clearing until she was behind the guards. Now she raced out of the forest toward the furthest stormtrooper guarding Edward and the rest of our people, all of whom had thrown themselves to the ground when the shooting started, their faces pressed into the grass.

With five paces left between her and the guard, Chou leaped into the air, her right hand held above her head, and I saw the glint of the dagger she'd taken from the swordsman she'd killed. She brought the knife down with the force of all her weight behind it, driving the ten inches of blade into the Nazis’ neck up to the hilt. The man crumpled instantly to the ground, trailing an arc of blood as he dropped.

Chou grabbed the dead man’s machine gun and tossed it to Freuchen who was running from the trees toward her. He caught it deftly and ran to the group of captives. He knelt, but didn’t fire, so as not to draw the other guard’s attention, I presumed.

While Freuchen watched over our people, Chou was already rushing toward the next stormtrooper who she quickly dispatched with similar economy as the first. She was bearing down on her third target when I heard four fast single shots ring out one after the other. Two more Nazis dropped, shot by Wild Bill, one of them was the stormtrooper Silas had just disarmed. The man spun away as if he had been punched in the face, splattering blood across Silas as he fell lifeless to the ground.

Movement in my peripheral vision pulled my attention back to the officer and Scarface; they were on the move… in my direction. Scarface grabbed Evelyn by her forearm and dragged her toward the tree I was hidden behind, running in quick bursts from tree to tree, cover to cover.

A short distance from where I lay, the ground formed a natural concavity, and the two men pushed Evelyn toward it. They dragged Evelyn down into it with them and lay still, completely invisible to anyone who hadn’t seen them on the move.

“Stop!” Silas pleaded, his eye-bar shifting quickly left and right across the unfolding carnage.

I think I was probably the only one who heard him because the world was chaos now; tendrils of smoke from the automatic weapons drifting through the air like lost spirits, people screaming in fear and panic, the smell of cordite mixing with the stench of terror. The wounded cried out in pain, and the dead added their own coppery smells. Machine gun fire crackled through the air and in between came the random snap of Wild Bill’s rifle, as he targeted the remaining Nazis.

Chou’s next target must have sensed her approach because just before she leaped at him, the stormtrooper turned and dove away, bringing his machine gun up. He fired a short burst at her, but Chou dodged at the last moment, rolling to her right. There was no cover for her to hide behind, so the second she hit the ground, she was up again with that amazing almost inhuman agility she possessed, just as another short burst of gunfire smacked into the ground she had momentarily occupied. The soldier’s magazine now empty, he ripped it out and dropped it to the ground and fumbled for a fresh magazine from his belt.

Chou, seeing her chance, lunged at him, her knife curving upward. But the stormtrooper was fast too; he dropped his weapon and pulled a wicked looking dagger from his jackboot, slashing the air in front of Chou, missing her by what must have been a hair’s breadth. Chou brought her right foot up and kicked the man in the solar plexus, sending him staggering backward, then she leaped inside his guard and dropped to avoid a meaty fist aimed at her jaw. As Chou hit the ground, she swept her left leg around in an arc across the dirt and knocked the stormtrooper’s feet from under him. He slammed into the ground, his head smacking so hard I winced, and before he could have realized what was happening, Chou was on him. She brought the blade up fast and hard into the soft flesh of his chin.

I looked away, not willing to watch this man’s ugly death. When I looked again, the soldier lay spread-eagled on his back, blood pooling around his shoulders, his head tilted in my direction, sightless eyes staring at me accusingly.

The Nazi officer watched Chou from the safety of his hiding place. My breath caught in my throat as Scarface began to raise his machine gun at Chou, but the officer pushed the barrel of the gun down. He shook his head. It was obvious to me he saw the writing was already on the wall for his men and was hoping to go unnoticed long enough that they could slip away into the woods unnoticed.

Silas was moving again, bounding across the field before throwing himself between one of the remaining Nazis and a group of cowering people just in time to take a burst of automatic fire that would have cut them all down.

Chou started to run at the soldier while Silas stepped in closer to him, completely blocking the view of his intended victims with his metal bulk, focusing the soldier’s attention completely on him.

“Stop, please,” Silas begged. “You must stop this madness.”

I wasn’t sure if Silas was talking to the Nazi or the rapidly approaching Chou. Either way, it didn’t slow Chou. She stepped up behind the stormtrooper, grabbed him under his chin with her left hand, pulled him backward until he was off balance, then drove the blade of her knife into his back with three quick, vicious jabs. I felt myself about to vomit, fought it back long enough for me to bury my face as close to the ground as I could to ensure Evelyn’s captors would not hear me.

The fertile scent of the forest, wood, and brier, pungent wet moss and lichen, filled my nostrils. I allowed myself a few moments to simply ignore everything happening beyond this tiny little bubble of false safety I found myself in. My heart thudded against my ribs like a crazed rabbit caught in a trap. Even allowing for how I got to this world in the first place, I can honestly say I’d never been so frightened in my whole life. I took three deep, slow breaths, held the last one for a few long moments then exhaled.

That Chou was capable of such unerring, precise acts of brutality wasn’t what made me throw up. It was the cold precision with which she set about carrying out her murderous task. That and the knowledge that at some point in the future of humanity, from my perspective at least, someone had gone to the trouble of hard-wiring how to eviscerate another human into her genetics so successfully that her body seemed at its most perfect when it was occupied with the act of taking a life. Even in the far-distant version of the future Chou came from, there was still a need for murder. And my friend was very, very good at it. That all of the destruction and bloodshed she was capable of seemed so incongruously out of place with the beautiful vessel that carried out these acts of death, made it all so much more obscene.

The sound of shooting had stopped, I realized, almost as abruptly as it had started, replaced now by the pained cries of the wounded and dying, and the pathetic whimpering of men and women who had survived the attack unscathed. I raised my head slowly and looked into the clearing.

Silas moved to each of the many bodies that lay strewn across the clearing. He stopped at a wounded man who had been among the first to be shot. The man was terrified, digging his hands into the dirt as he tried to push himself away from the robot. I couldn’t hear what he said to the wounded man, but it didn’t seem to do any good, the man continued to back away. Silas followed him.

Edward helped Albert to his feet as Freuchen rushed to them. Edward embraced Freuchen then began urging everyone else in his group to stand up. I saw Bull, Jorge, Oliver, Sarah, and Tabitha. They all seemed unharmed. Caleb, Evita, and Jacquetta were in the other group but were making their way over to join the rest of our friends. Caleb was being helped along by the two women, who supported him as he limped toward Edward. Caleb’s left pant leg was stained with blood, and someone had wrapped what looked like a scarf around his thigh to slow the bleeding. Chou hugged Albert tightly, then began to encourage everyone to follow her in my direction… right toward where the two remaining Nazis hid, the officer’s pistol still held to Evelyn’s head.

From my vantage point, I saw the Nazi officer tap his subordinate’s shoulder, then nod in the direction of Chou who was backing up toward them, urgently beckoning to any of the captives not from the garrison to follow her and our group to the cover of the trees, oblivious to the trap she was walking herself and them into.

If I yelled a warning, the Nazis would open fire immediately, and it was almost a guarantee that they would hit Chou and some of the other captives. They would, I was sure, also immediately shoot Evelyn. There was only one way to stop this.

Carefully, I crawled from my hiding place on my belly, pulling myself hand-over-hand toward the machine gun that had landed a few feet from me earlier; I could see its black outline still propped against the roots of the tree where it had fallen. I glanced in the direction of the two Nazis; their attention was entirely on Chou and the civilians, waiting for them to reach a spot where they would be nothing more than target practice for the experienced soldiers.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached out my arm and managed to touch the grip of the machine gun. Crawling forward another two inches, I was able to wrap my fingers around it and pull it to me. I had never fired a gun in my life, not even a pistol, so my entire knowledge of how to shoot came from cop shows and watching Bruce Willis in Die Hard on TV at Christmas. With the gun in both hands, I began to crawl commando-style through the leaves toward the two Nazis, hoping their attention remained focused on Chou and the approaching survivors long enough for me to get close.

Less than ten feet separated me from them when Evelyn saw me and gasped loudly.

Scarface turned in my direction, his eyes growing wide. I jumped to my feet, leveled the barrel of the machine-gun at the officer and screamed, “Don’t move. I swear I’ll shoot.”

“My God!” the officer said in perfect English, spinning to face me, shock registering on his face. “It’s you! Where did you come from?”

For a moment I was confused, then realized that my talent had apparently kicked in now that I was close enough to them. The officer seemed frozen, taken aback even, a look of surprise and, was that recognition on his face? He turned to look at his superior.

“Grab her!” the officer screamed.

I pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Scarface raised his weapon and pulled the trigger just as Evelyn landed a right hook that connected with his cheek. The machine gun barked, and I recoiled as a swarm of angry bees zipped past my head. Evelyn roared and lunged at Scarface, locking her arms around his upper torso, throwing him off balance and sending the both of them to the ground. The Nazi officer swore, drew his pistol, and pointed it at the two writhing bodies.

Now, I might not know how to shoot a gun, but I am resourceful. I held what felt like ten pounds of metal in my hands, scrambled the few remaining feet to the officer’s side, and, with a banshee scream, swung the machine gun by its barrel like a baseball bat. The metal stock of the machine gun connected with the officer’s temple, sending his cap spinning away. He dropped to the ground like a stone, unconscious or dead, I couldn’t tell which. Neither did I care at that point, either.

I turned back to help Evelyn. Scarface had her pinned to the ground, her arms trapped beneath his knees. He’d grabbed the officer’s fallen pistol and now had it aimed at me.

I realized I was about to die and closed my eyes.

I heard, “Hey, asshole, anyone ever tell you your face looks like a dime’s worth of dog meat?” I opened my eyes in time to see Wild Bill step out from behind the tree he’d used to hide his approach.

The Nazi swept the pistol toward the cowboy, but he was too slow.

Four gunshots rang out in quick succession, and four corresponding holes appeared in the soldier’s belly. The gun fell from his hand, and he collapsed backward off of Evelyn, his hands grasping at his stomach, his face a mask of agony.

Smoke rose from the barrels of both of Wild Bill’s pistols as he walked up to the mortally wounded soldier. For a moment, Wild Bill stared down at the dying German. “Those four were for my horse, Brute,” he said as he raised his right hand and pointed the pistol at the Nazi’s head. “This one’s for me, you son of a whore.”

I managed to turn my head away a fraction of a second before Wild Bill pulled the trigger and shot the man between the eyes. But there was no escaping the sickening crunch of the bullet entering his skull or the coppery smell of blood that filled my nostrils.

I stumbled toward where Evelyn lay on the ground, semi-conscious. The swelling over her left eye looked even worse now, the skin around the socket so badly bruised and swollen it was sealed completely shut, her right eye was half-closed too. Scarface must have managed to get in a punch or two while I was dealing with the officer, because Evelyn’s lip was shredded and bleeding, and she had an inch-and-a-half-long laceration on her cheek. Splotches of blood and mud had tangled her hair into clumps in several spots. She was whispering what could have been a prayer through her bloody lips.

Panting from the exertion and the gallon of adrenaline rushing through my veins, I bent down and picked up the machine gun and tossed it to Wild Bill, then took the officer’s pistol and stuffed that into the waistband of my pants. I couldn’t tell if the officer was still breathing, but there was a three-inch gash on his forehead where I whacked him with the machine gun, and it was bleeding quite badly.

“Meredith, are you hurt?” Chou asked, running to my side. Behind her stood Edward and a horrified Albert. Behind them were the shocked faces of the rest of the Garrisonites and twenty or more men, women, and children I did not recognize.

I nodded and gave Chou a weak smile. “I’m okay, but I think Evelyn could use some attention.”

A sudden collective gasp of fear escaped from the stunned group as Silas strode across the clearing toward us.

“Excuse me. Hello. Excuse me,” he said, easing himself between people.

“It’s okay,” I said, “don’t be afraid. This is Silas; he’s on our side.” I turned to Edward. “I’ll explain it all later.”

Silas stooped down next to the officer and began examining him.

My hands began to shake as the realization of what had just happened hit me—of just how close I had again come to dying. I flopped down hard onto the ground, and dug my fingers into the peaty soil, gulping in air.

“Did I… did I kill him?” I said, watching Silas examine the officer.

“No, thankfully you did not, but this man has a serious concussion,” the robot said after a few seconds examining the unconscious man. Silas’ voice, if you can believe it, sounded as shaky as mine, as though he were barely able to hold back his own feelings.

It’s funny really, isn’t it? Human arrogance. We think that emotions, feelings—both positive and negative—are an explicitly human trait. I doubt most of us have ever even considered the possibility of a machine being capable of love, fear… hate. But here was Silas, the product of some unbelievably advanced intelligence, expressing more compassion for the man who lay unconscious before him than any human I had ever met. It was nakedly beautiful, however misplaced it might appear to be to me.

Silas moved to Evelyn’s side. “This candidate is severely dehydrated and has deep tissue damage, but her wounds are not life-threatening.”

“Is it safe to move both of them?” Chou asked.

“Yes,” Silas answered.

Edward handed Albert over to Tabitha, then walked to my side and placed a gentle hand against my back. “Are you alright?” he whispered, kneeling beside me.

“Yes, I think so.”

Edward smiled and stood back up, surveying the carnage.

“What do you want to do with this fellow?” Wild Bill asked, kicking the officer’s leg with the toe of his boot.

Edward turned his face to the sky and stared into the darkness as though he were expecting some sign. “It’s getting late,” he said. “We need to secure the camp and help the injured make it to the aurora. Let’s find something to tie him up with. We’ll decide what we’re going to do with him later.”

Nineteen

With the smoke of battle dissipating, Edward, Chou, Freuchen, and Wild Bill moved through the clearing like ghosts, checking the bodies of the dead soldiers, collecting their weapons as they went. Silas carried the half-unconscious Evelyn to the campfire where Albert was given the task of watching over her. Bull and Silas did what they could to stabilize the wounded.

I was the one who found Benito.

He lay with the twisted bodies of the five other men and women the Nazis had executed before we arrived.

“Oh, God!” I whispered, my hand thrust over my mouth. All had been shot once in the back of the head. There was less blood than I had expected, but if anyone ever tries to tell you the dead look peaceful, they are liars; every face was frozen in a rictus of pain, the horror of their final moments captured in their sightless, dead eyes.

It was… a nightmare.

I sensed someone walk up beside me and turned to see Wild Bill. He stood over Benito’s corpse, sweat or tears running down his cheeks, I couldn’t tell which, his face an expressionless mask.

“Are you okay, Bill?” I asked softly, afraid that if I spoke too loudly, I might force the stoic exterior of this cowboy to crack and he would come pouring out in a flood of grief and anger.

Wild Bill continued to silently stare at the body. “The one in the fancy uniform did this?” Wild Bill’s words were even quieter than mine, his usual drawl gone.

“Yes, but Bill—”

Wild Bill pivoted on the heels of his boots, simultaneously drawing both pearl-handled pistols from the sash around his hips. He strode toward the unconscious body of the Nazi officer, his murderous intent written large across his face.

“Wild Bill, no!” I yelled and ran after him. “Bill, please. Stop.”

Freuchen looked up, read Wild Bill’s intention, shot to his feet and placed himself between Wild Bill and the Nazi.

“Now, Bill vill you please think about this,” Freuchen said, a hand held up like he was a cop ordering a car to stop.

The cowboy ignored him too.

“Stop!” I yelled again, loud enough that it caught Edward’s attention. He spotted Wild Bill trying to force himself past Freuchen and immediately understood that he was a man set on vengeance. Edward sprinted over and placed both hands on Wild Bill’s shoulders, stopping him in his tracks.

“Bill, no. You’re a better man than this,” Edward hissed.

Wild Bill’s rage bubbled to the surface, and for a second, I thought he was going to do harm to Edward.

“Did you see what that bastard did to Benito?” Wild Bill said, pointing at the officer with one of his pistols. “Did you see?”

“I see,” Edward said, glancing back at Benito’s body. “I see. But we’re better than him, Bill. You’re better than him. Put the guns away, please. Put them away. There’s been enough murder for one day.”

Wild Bill looked torn, then he glanced down at his hands and the two revolvers they held, and I saw his eyebrows rise with surprise; I don’t think he even knew he had drawn them. Slowly, ever so slowly, he slipped the pistols back into his sash.

“That man might hold answers to why we’re here,” Edward said. “We have to find out why he wanted us all kept alive long enough to question us. He has to live. You understand me?”

“And when you’ve gotten everything from him that you need?” Bill said.

“Then we put him on trial and decide what we do with him after that.”

Wild Bill’s rage bubbled up again, momentarily reaching the cowboy’s eyes, then it faded away, and I saw the man who had rescued me, Chou, and Albert that first morning return.

Wild Bill nodded as though he were agreeing with some unspoken question. “I’m going to bury Benito,” he said, then he turned and walked away without another word.

* * *

“Make sure you tie it good and tight,” I told Edward. He was in the process of securing the officer’s hands and feet together with two leather belts we had taken from the dead soldiers. We had wanted to tie him to a tree, but Silas had insisted that he would not allow that.

“The man is badly injured,” Silas said, “it is my duty to look after him.”

“This man is a monster,” I replied. “He shot those people in cold blood, would have killed everyone else, too, if we hadn’t stopped him. Why would anyone do that?”

Freuchen stepped forward, “He’s lucky ve don’t just let the others have their vay vith him.” When the Nazi officer’s former prisoners had realized their captor was still very much alive, several of them had tried to reach him, even if he was effectively comatose. I think they would have torn him apart with their bare hands if Freuchen hadn’t fired a warning shot over their heads, scaring them into silence and then placed his substantial bulk between them and the helpless Nazi.

“I understand your feelings toward him,” Edward said, cinching the belt tighter around the officer’s wrists. “When his men brought us here after they raided us, Evelyn told me about the atrocities men like him carried out in the next war. If they’re true, well…” He shook his head in disbelief as his words trailed off. He pulled the belt tight around the officer’s ankles and tied the loose end into a knot. “Peter, will you please watch over our… guest?”

Freuchen nodded, “It vill be my pleasure.”

Bull and a couple of others had volunteered for the gruesome job of gathering the bodies of the soldiers and disposing of them, but not before they had been stripped of all usable clothing and equipment. Each had carried a dagger and either a machine gun or a rifle, along with ammunition. That considerable arsenal was now being guarded by Wild Bill, partly to ensure no one made a grab for them but also to give him something to do other than brood about the Nazi officer.

Each dead soldier also had a backpack, a first-aid bag with bandages, gauze, and ampules of morphine, along with a metal canteen of water, and various utensils and tools, all of which were a welcome addition to our supplies.

“We can’t just leave them lying there,” I said when I saw that Bull had dumped the almost naked bodies of the dead soldiers unceremoniously in a pile in the woods.

“I’m inclined to leave them for the carrion eaters,” Bull replied. He was streaked with dirt and sweat and other people’s blood. In Bull’s defense, it had been a stressful couple of hours. He and Silas had tried valiantly to save as many of the wounded as they could, and the pressure of working on so many patients, dealing with wounds unlike anything he’d dealt with before, had taken its toll on Bull. The human doctor and the robot had settled on a simple improvised triage system. Those with minor wounds were handed off to Evita and Tabitha to watch over. Those who’d suffered more serious injuries but would likely survive at least long enough for the aurora to restore them to full health were treated, dosed with morphine where needed, then told to wait quietly. Those poor unfortunates with mortal wounds were made comfortable and watched over until they expired. There had been too many of the latter and not enough of the former, so, tempers were, understandably, short and spirits low.

Edward shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, the tone of his voice allowing no room for argument. “We bury them, like the decent human beings we are. We are not like them. Remember that.”

Bull was not happy. “These men were murderers, nothing more. I say we burn the bodies and be done with it.”

Edward shook his head again, “If we burn them there’s always a chance we’ll start a fire we can’t extinguish that could spread across the island. The last thing we need right now is to set the woods aflame. And no matter what you or I might think of them, these men were soldiers and they deserve a decent burial.”

Bull grudgingly agreed then walked away to carry out his task, grumbling and cursing to himself.

“What is his problem? He seems permanently disgruntled,” I said as I watched Bull round up Jorge and Jacquetta to help him.

“He’s a man who is used to being at the top of the intellectual food-chain, who now finds himself out of his depth and out of his time.” Edward gave me a sad smile, “Which is one thing he and I have in common.”

I looked at Edward for a moment. “Yes, but the difference between you and him is you’ve accepted this is where you are and where we’ll all be for the foreseeable future. Bull seems like a man who is, pardon the pun, stuck permanently in the past.”

Edward laughed gently; it was a pleasant sound. “He’s a good man at heart, Meredith. I don’t think he could be in his chosen profession and not want to do good, despite his protestations to the contrary. And I think that that’s why he’s here.”

I thought about that for a moment. “I think that might be why all of us are here,” I said.

* * *

Edward, Chou, Silas, and I volunteered for the ghastly job of burying the unfortunates the Nazis had murdered.

We found a spot of clear ground at the furthest end of the clearing, scraped away the layer of decaying leaves, and began to dig a mass grave using small foldable shovels we took from the Nazis’ backpacks. The soil was soft after all the rain, but even with Silas’ mechanical strength, it still took us well over an hour to dig a hole deep enough and wide enough for all fifteen bodies.

As we dug, Edward listened to us explain everything we’d learned since we found and freed Silas, commenting only to acknowledge that he understood what we were telling him. I think it’s a measure of how much he trusted us that not once did he ever question the validity of what we were telling him as we relayed what we knew about the Architect and its plan, Silas, the message I had been given, and, of course, the fact that there was some unknown entity working against us we had named the Adversary. When we were finished, he nodded grimly and said, “I’ll make sure everyone else knows once we’re done here.”

“I will inter the deceased,” Silas said when the mass-grave was finally complete. The robot had remained silent throughout most of the excavation, and I got the distinct feeling that something was not right with him. He seemed… off-kilter.

It could just be that his energy was running low, but I decided to stay behind and talk with him, just to be sure. I told Edward and Chou I would join them in a few minutes then, when they were out of earshot, turned to Silas. “How’s your energy holding up?” I asked as cheerfully as I could considering the job at hand.

“I have sufficient power to carry out this final task, Meredith. The continued exposure to sunlight has helped me immensely.”

I nodded, paused for a second but couldn’t find the right words to describe the disquieting feeling I was getting from him. Maybe I was just projecting my own emotional turmoil onto Silas, but I didn’t think so; I mean how do you quantify a feeling of empathy with a machine… a machine that has no face or human body-language to convey those feelings?

I nodded again and said, “Okay, well, thank you for doing this.”

I started to follow the others back to the camp, when Silas said, “May I ask another favor of you, Meredith?”

“Of course. Shoot,” I said, and felt my cheeks grow warm at my poor choice of words.

Silas did not seem to notice. He held a piece of slate about the same size as the one I had in my pocket, and I remembered that I had seen him fish two of them from the river earlier that day.

“I have updated this new slate with the events of today. Please replace the first with this one.” He held the slate out in front of him, so I could see it. Its gray surface contained substantially more code than the first.

“What does it say?” I asked quietly.

Silas remained silent for a few long seconds. When he spoke, it seemed to me he chose his words extra carefully.

“My emotional and empathic systems were created from human genomic data, that much I know, but the emotional pain I have experienced during today’s brutality was unexpected. My programming has an understanding of humanity’s ability to inflict horrors on each other, but it was an understanding—until today. I have been overwhelmed by the cruelty I witnessed earlier… and by the deceit and manipulation. I would never have imagined it possible for candidates to behave in such a manner. It is imperative that I do not allow such carnage to occur again, at all costs. So I have recalibrated and attenuated all of my systems to take today’s events into consideration, but once my battery is expended, those settings will reset, and I shall forget. I must make myself aware. But that requires that I trust you to carry out this task for me.”

I stepped in closer, my instinct to place a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but he had no shoulders to speak of, and there was no way to tell whether he would understand the gesture.

“What happened here isn’t indicative of humanity overall. Those men were from a time where that kind of barbarity was accepted. It doesn’t reflect the majority of humanity.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew I wasn’t convinced that I believed them.

“And yet, Chou, who is from a substantially more advanced and distant future than your own, seemed very effective at slaughtering those men.” Silas edged closer to me, placed his hand on my arm and gently turned me around to face the camp. “Look, there,” he said, pointing to where Edward and Bull were enthusiastically examining the machine guns they had gathered from the dead soldiers. “Do you see? Even now, they are excited by those weapons. No, I must remember this event. I must learn from it. I must protect you and the others from yourselves.” He handed me the new slate. “Will you do this for me, Meredith?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Silas. He reached out and touched me on the arm. I was sure I could hear relief in his synthetic voice.

I watched the robot walk back to help tend to the wounded, leaving me to wonder which of us was truly the more human.

* * *

We had relocated the uninjured and the walking-wounded to the opposite end of the clearing, away from the gruesome work of tending to the dead and dying. Jorge, Oliver, and Sarah had volunteered to watch over them, trying their best to keep the group of sixty-plus people calm, but the language barrier was making it difficult to keep it that way.

“They’re behaving themselves for now,” Oliver said, “but we shouldn’t expect them to stay that way.”

“You’re right,” said Edward. “Food has a wonderful way of helping people feel better. Seeing as the Nazis were kind enough to leave us their rations, why don’t we see about getting them distributed to our new friends? Once they’ve got some grub in their bellies, I’m sure they’ll feel better.” The German soldiers had been well supplied, and that included several large boxes of military rations that contained canned meats, crackers, and even chocolate. There was more than enough to feed everyone for several days, longer if we rationed it. Edward called Sarah over and had her begin distributing the food to the frightened survivors.

“These people are all still so scared and confused,” I said. “Edward, I think you really need to talk to them. Calm their nerves and make them understand that they’re safe. Right now, they have no idea what’s going on or whether they’re any better off than they were under the Nazis. And I bet as soon as darkness falls, some of them are going to either make a break for it into the woods or do something stupid that’s going to get them or some of our people hurt.”

Edward considered my suggestion, then said, “You’re right… again. Come on, better sooner rather than later, eh!”

The former captives were a geographically and temporally diverse group, with ethnicities ranging from, judging by their clothes, ancient Roman, through Dark Age Greek to twentieth-century African and European. They ranged in age from five or six to late-thirties and early forties. But despite their ethnic and chronological diversity, they all shared the same fearful look.

“Hello,” said Edward, raising a hand in greeting as we approached the group. The look of shock on the faces staring back at us was unanimous and almost instantaneous. Before Edward could utter another word, a man in his mid-thirties wearing a green toga with a leather belt around his waist and a brown cape thrown over one shoulder jumped to his feet and ran to him. He grabbed hold of Edward’s hands.

“You speak Latin?” the man said. “Thank the gods. I have not heard another of my people since I arrived in this place. Tell me, my wife, Maretta, and my son, Plennius, I lost sight of them after the eruption, have you seen them?”

A few faces turned in the man’s direction.

“Latin?” a slimly built woman dressed in a peasant’s skirt and tunic said. “Both he and you are quite obviously speaking Russian.”

“No, no,” a deeply tanned man, wearing a dirt-streaked gray suit and clutching a Trilby hat to his chest said “You are all speaking French. Why did you not say so earlier? I…”

“Ah, shit,” I said, low enough no one would hear me. I stepped in front of Edward. “Quiet down,” I yelled, waving my hands above my head. “All of you, be quiet.” A couple of questions were thrown my way, which I ignored, and waited for everyone to shut up. “Good, that’s better.” I took a deep breath and continued. “Hello everyone. My name is Meredith Gale. As you all have probably figured out for yourselves by now, we are all in a very, very strange place. I’m sure you, like me and all of my friends, were brought here when you were facing certain death. I’m also sure you all heard the Voice and answered ‘yes’ when it asked you if you wanted to be saved.”

I paused to let the information sink in.

There were gasps and more questions, which I continued to ignore. I waited for everyone to quiet down again.

“For a reason I don’t understand, the Voice that brought us here also granted me a…” I searched for a word that would translate well for everyone, no matter what time they came from. “A boon. And that boon allows me to translate languages for anyone who is standing near me. Which is why you can all understand me, and we can understand each other.”

More questions were hurled at me, and a couple of men jumped to their feet but sat back down again when Edward and Oliver stepped forward.

“Quiet… quiet,” I yelled over their collective voices. “Right now, you all need to calm down and listen to what Edward here has to say to you. So, everyone, please sit back down and shut the hell up.”

I turned and smiled at Edward. “They’re all yours, boss.”

Edward dipped his head in a show of playful deference, then said, “Let me start by saying that you are all safe and it is neither mine nor any of my people’s intention to hurt you. The men who held you captive were evil beyond words, but we are not like them.” He paused for a second, and I saw the rows of faces looking back at us relax just a little, enough that I could tell Edward’s words were having an impact. “We have a camp less than a day’s walk from here. There’s fresh water, enough game and fish to easily feed all of us for years to come. Any of you who wish to join us are welcome. If you choose not to, then you will be free to leave and find your own way whenever you want. For tonight though, I ask that you stay here with us for your own safety and take advantage of our hospitality and protection. In the morning, if you choose to leave, we will give you what supplies we can spare, and you may go on your way. For those of you who wish to join us, you’ll get a roof over your head and become a part of our community.”

I saw a few smiles cross faces that had up until then been tight with fear.

“Now, eat your food. Settle in for the night and know that you are safe. Edward smiled back and leaned in close to me. “I should check on Evelyn,” he said and walked off.

“Right,” I said, eyeing the remaining supplies, “who else is hungry?”

* * *

I spotted Edward, Freuchen, and Bull standing in a small group, and also, to my surprise and delight, Evelyn who was sitting up and talking with the men.

“Well, you look better,” I said rushing to her side, forcing a smile to my lips. It was a lie, she still looked like shit. The left side of her face was horribly bruised, which made it look like spoiled meat. She tried to smile through her shredded lips, but instead, winced, and spat a gobbet of blood onto the ground next to her, giving me a glimpse of several gaps in her upper teeth and at least two more broken teeth in her lower set.

“You’re a terrible fibber,” Evelyn slurred.

I bent over and took her hand in mine. “Not long now until the aurora. Then you’ll be good as new,” I reassured her.

Everyone else was suspiciously silent, and I thought I detected an air of discomfort.

“What?” I said.

The men refused to meet my eyes, which did nothing to relieve my growing sense of paranoia.

“You might want to sit down,” said Edward.

“Ohhhkay, now you’re starting to freak me out.” I sat beside Evelyn, cross-legged.

“Well, go ahead, tell her,” Bull urged Evelyn.

Evelyn took a swig from a canteen of water, winced in pain, then began to talk. “Just before you showed up, that Nazi son-of-a-bitch dragged me into the forest. The officer asked me all sorts of questions in German that I didn’t understand. I didn’t say a word, just stared at the bastard… which is when they did this to me.” Her hand fluttered up to her ruined face. “They were about to shoot me like the rest, so I may have yelled something unpleasant about his relationship with his mother at him.” Evelyn shrugged, gave a lop-sided smile that was more of a grimace and continued. “This smug smile comes over the head honcho’s face, and he put his pistol away, then he leans in close to me and tells me in perfect English that he was very happy to make my acquaintance, like he was some kind of Lord or something. He said he was looking for someone. Someone very important. Then he started to describe a woman to me. A very specific woman that he had been told to find.”

“Told to find by who?” I said, feeling my heart begin to sink.

Evelyn shook her head and grimaced in pain. “He didn’t give a name, but he was real specific about describing the woman he was looking for, like he was describing a painting or something.”

“Okay?” I said, hoping that this wasn’t going where it looked like it was heading.

She glanced at Edward.

Edward gave an ever so perceptible nod.

Sucking in a big gulp of air Evelyn said, “It sounded like you, Meredith. Exactly like you, even down to the clothes you are wearing. The woman the Nazis were looking for is you!”

“Now let’s not jump to conclusions just yet,” Bull said. “Just because the description sounds like Meredith, doesn’t mean that it is her he was looking for.”

I nodded slowly, not really listening to him. My mind was elsewhere, running back over part of the message Silas had given me: Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must leave this place immediately.

“Bull’s right,” I lied. “Has to be a mistake. Why would a Nazi from sixty years before I was even born be interested in finding me?”

“It doesn’t make sense at all,” Edward added. “But then, nothing has really made any sense since we arrived here, has it?”

“Vell, there is only vun vay to be sure,” said Freuchen, his beard bobbing with each nod of his head. “The officer is still unconscious, but ven the aurora comes, ve vill have a chance to ask him directly.”

Twenty

Chou insisted we keep the new arrivals corralled together for the night and under armed guard. “Not just for their protection, but for ours too,” she insisted to Edward. “We do not know these people or what their motivations may be. It would be safer for us all.”

Edward was not particularly happy about the idea. “We’re supposed to be open, welcoming. What kind of message are we sending if we force these people to stay here while someone with a gun stands watch over them? We are not the Nazis.”

“And what kind of a message will you be able to deliver if one of them decides to slit your throat while you sleep?” Chou said, matter-of-factly.

In the end, the group of former prisoners made the decision for us. Exhausted both physically and emotionally from their time under the Nazis’ jackboots, they huddled together in a group, their innate natural fear of the gathering darkness and the unknown things that lurked within it, winning over any distrust they felt toward us.

Still, Chou’s concerns had pricked Edward’s attention, and he grudgingly assigned Wild Bill and Caleb to surreptitious guard duty over our guests.

I grabbed some food and joined Chou where she sat alone near one of the campfires, silently watching the group of newcomers. She glanced up when she heard me approach.

“What a day,” I said, lowering myself down next to her, the warmth of the fire taking the chill off what was turning out to be a cooler than normal evening. “Fight a few Nazis. Rescue a bunch of innocent people from certain death. Just another day for the lost boys and girls here in Neverland.”

Chou smiled back at me. “I am as bemused by it as you, Meredith.”

We sat quietly, watching the flames dance as the logs crackled and spat.

“I have a kind of question for you,” I said, eventually.

“A kind of question?”

“Well, I guess it’s more like I need some advice from you.”

“Very well.”

I thought for a moment how best to pose my question, then said, “I have a dilemma. After the battle today, Silas confided in me how shocked he was by today’s violence. And how hurt he was by what he called our betrayal of his trust.”

Chou nodded. “Whoever designed him did an exemplary job integrating emotions. He does seem very empathetic. I am sorry I had to deceive him to achieve my plan.”

“Yes, but it’s all just programming, right? His emotions? I mean, he doesn’t really feel sadness, happiness, anger. He can’t really be hurt… like on an emotional level… right?”

Chou paused for what seemed like a minute but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. “In your era,” she began, “artificial lifeforms are limited to simple automatons and computational devices that mimic human responses and emotions. But in my time, lifeforms such as Silas, albeit not as exquisitely designed or as advanced mechanically, are a part of our everyday lives. They are as ubiquitous as automobiles or pets of your time. The biological systems required for the level of emotional connection I have seen exhibited by Silas are above and beyond any of my time, but only by a few generations in my estimation. It would be very easy to look at Silas as merely a machine as he is so different to you and me. At least, externally. But in here and here,” with her right hand she tapped her forehead, then her heart, “he is exactly like you. Exactly like me. So yes, I do believe that Silas is more than capable of feeling emotional pain and distress, perhaps more so than you or me even.”

I gave a long slow sigh. “Well, that complicates things.”

“How so?”

I recounted the rest of my conversation with the robot, just before he shut down, showed Chou the new slate he had entrusted to me. “My dilemma,” I added, “is that if I give him this new slate, he will be permanently changed, and it will be our fault. I’m thinking it might be better if I just conveniently lose it.”

Chou considered my idea then said, “Do you really think that a machine as intelligent as Silas would not have thought you might do that, possibly even hoped you would?”

“What? Why on Earth would he do that?”

“Perhaps because he is ethically unable to not allow that information to change him. He may have no choice but to assimilate the experience, despite wishing he did not have to.”

“So, giving the slate to me, forcing me to make the decision for him could just be a way for him to circumnavigate his programming?”

Chou nodded. “Perhaps. He knows that you will do the right thing. It’s an act of ethical mercy on your part. After all, he will never know that he was complicit in the deaths of those who were killed today… even if most of them were genocidal maniacs. It would be an act of mercy that he cannot ethically ask for. After all, his remit is to help all candidates, and if by learning about our propensity for violence helps him to understand us it would be merciful to deny him that knowledge; an act of mercy that he ethically cannot request.”

“But if I don’t give it to him, I’ll betray his trust.”

“Yes, you would. It is a dilemma, isn’t it?”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I would do what I thought was right,” she said, predictably evasive.

“Lot of use you are,” I grumbled.

Chou fired that enigmatic smile in my direction and said, “I am glad to have helped.” I wasn’t sure if she was being serious or not.

* * *

Eight of the twelve most seriously injured made it to the aurora. And as the first streaks of light crackled across the sky, igniting the pixie dust into a snowstorm of tiny glowing dots, Chou, Edward, Bull, Jacquetta, and I got a front-row seat to experience the nightly phenomenon’s incredible healing power.

“Wow!” I whispered in sheer awe. I was watching a young black man, dressed in bloodstained jeans and a blue t-shirt as he lay on the ground, unconscious thanks to a liberal dosing of morphine we’d found in the dead Nazis’ medical packs. He had taken a gunshot wound to his upper left arm that had splintered the bones and torn away a disturbingly large amount of the flesh and the muscle but miraculously missed any major arteries. It had been hit or miss as to whether he would live long enough for the aurora to work its magic, but he was strong and managed to hang on. I had seen the incredible benefits the aurora-powered nano-bots we called pixie dust were capable of—I’d been on the receiving end of it, after all—but those wounds had either been internal or comparatively minor, at least in comparison to this man’s injuries. Now, beneath a shimmer of heat produced by the pixie dust as it worked away at the young man’s wounds, I watched as bone and sinew and muscles then skin regenerated and knitted back together over the course of just a few minutes, leaving just mocha-colored hairless flesh. The same thing was playing out with the other seven patients; bones knitted, wounds healed, fevers subsided. Life bloomed. It was… miraculous.

“It relegates me to little more than a nurse whose sole job is to keep people alive until the aurora each night,” Bull said, less a complaint and more a statement of fact.

“A hell of a problem to have, Doctor,” said Edward. “But one I’m glad we have, considering the alternative.”

As the aurora’s light faded, one after the other, the injured sat and looked around. It reminded me of one of those old horror movies where the vampires or zombies come back to life at nightfall. But these weren’t the undead, they were the almost-dead, saved by a technology so advanced I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the intelligence behind it. How did that quote by Arthur C. Clarke go? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I whispered the words reverently.

“Magic indeed,” Bull said.

“I wonder, if we had possessed this technology in my time whether we would have continued to fight?” Edward opined. “Or whether we would have ever started those damnable wars in the first place. It seems to me that only infinite enlightenment could have created such a technology as this.”

“It doesn’t matter what time or where,” I said, “humanity has a habit of turning everything good into a weapon. I’d bet this technology would not have stayed benign for very long once humanity got its dirty little hands on it.”

“That’s rather pessimistic,” Edward said. He sounded honestly surprised at my dark tone.

I threw a sad smile in Edward’s direction. “I’ve seen way too many people screwed over for a buck to have much faith in the chance of technology ever truly enlightening our species.”

“But someone has faith in us as a species,” Jacquetta added. “Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”

I couldn’t really argue with her on that. I stepped toward the revivified and said as reassuringly as I could, “It’s alright, you’re safe. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You were injured, but the aurora has healed you. You’re among friends now.”

We spent the next fifteen minutes calmly explaining who we were, what had happened to them, and that they were now safe and had nothing to fear from us. By the time I saw Freuchen striding out of the shadows toward us, the formerly injured were up on their feet and being handed food and water.

“The Nazi, he is avake,” Freuchen growled, before adding with a chuckle, “And he is not very happy vith his predicament.”

“It’s okay,” said Jacquetta, “I’ll handle things here. You go deal with him.”

* * *

“Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to stay back a little so he can’t see you,” Chou whispered as we drew closer to where the restrained Nazi officer was being watched over by Wild Bill. “If you are who he is looking for, it will allow us some time to interrogate him before he knows you are here.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly. I wanted this particular mystery put to bed as quickly as possible. The idea that this man and his band of killers had murdered all those people in an effort to find out whether they knew me seemed preposterous. But the message Silas had relayed to me had predicted this might happen; there were people, bad people, who would be looking for me. And there had been that moment of apparent recognition when the officer had first seen me. It was terrifying, if I was honest, because there was no reason whatsoever I could think of why I should be of interest to them. I was just a student who’d taken a wrong turn and become a junkie. The Voice had offered me a second chance here on this alternate future Earth, and I’d taken it. But I hadn’t asked for this. It had been forced on me. So, if we could learn more about the reason behind it from this man, then I was all for it. Still, as I watched my friends approach the restrained officer from the shadows, I felt a flutter of anxiety wing its way into my stomach.

“Are you comfortable?” Chou said stepping into the officer’s field of view, her face soft, relaxed.

The officer shook his head.

“Would you like us to loosen your bindings?” Chou asked next. “Perhaps that would make you more comfortable.”

The officer did not utter a word; he only nodded.

Chou crouched down in front of him, her hands hovering above the belt that secured his hands. “Perhaps you would do something for me, first? Tell me, what is your name?”

“My name is Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, Commander of the 4th SS Panzer-Grenadier Regiment, and I demand you release me immediately.”

A few years older than me, if I were to guess, Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger was an undeniably handsome man. His aristocratic features had looked a little bruised after I’d clobbered him with the machine gun earlier, but that had disappeared along with his concussion, thanks to the aurora, and now his classic German features were restored. There were still blood splatters on his cheek, and his military-cut black hair had mud or dirt clumped in it, but his pale skin, piercing green eyes and dashing good looks still couldn’t make up for the whole homicidal Nazi vibe. In fact, the more I watched his arrogant, smug answers to the questions Chou asked him, the more he reminded me of one of the rich frat boys I’d had the misfortune to run into at parties during my time at Berkeley. He was a grade-A asshole.

“Why were you interrogating and executing your captives?” Chou asked nonchalantly.

“Your German is impeccable,” the officer replied, avoiding the question.

Chou ignored him and said, “Please answer my question.”

He repeated his first answer again, “My name is Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, Commander of the 4th SS Panzer-Grenadier Regiment, and I demand you release me immediately.”

Chou persisted, her voice losing some of its softness, “We have already established that, now answer my question: Why were you interrogating and executing your captives?”

“My name is Oberst—”

Chou’s hand flashed out and slapped Weidinger so hard across his face his head turned directly toward where I hid in the shadows less than ten feet behind him. I stifled a gasp of surprise, thinking he might see me, but Weidinger’s eyes were glazed, his face slack with shock. He blinked a few times, then turned slowly to face Chou.

“You will pay for that, you insolent whore!” Weidinger spat. “I will—”

I flinched when I heard the crack of the second slap connect with Weidinger’s face. Blood began to drip onto his tunic’s lapels from a newly sliced lip.

Chou’s head tilted first to her left shoulder then, ever so slowly, to her right as though she were trying to see the whole of this man who sat seething with anger and embarrassment before her. “I had taken you for a smarter man than this Obersturmbannführer Otto Weidinger. A man of your… profession should realize the situation he now finds himself in.” She stood, allowed herself to look around as though she were taking in the surrounding forest for the first time. “You are, I am sure, aware of the restorative power of the aurora. I thought that someone like you would have realized its potential.”

I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about, and neither did Weidinger, apparently, as he looked up at her, he said, “What are you babbling about, you fool?”

Chou knelt again, this time she was eye-to-eye with Weidinger. “I can keep you alive for days, months, years if I wish. And I can make every single hour of each day excruciating.” She took his chin in her right hand. The man tried to shake free, but she was too strong for him. “Perhaps tonight I will take an eye. Tomorrow, a couple of fingers, or perhaps a leg. Who knows? But what I do know, what we both know, is that every night your wounds will heal and then I will begin again. Over and over and over again. That will be your fate. Unless… you give me what I want. Do you understand me?”

“Threaten me as much as you like. I will answer none of your—”

Chou slapped him again.

I’d had enough of this. I stepped out of the shadows and made my way casually into the light of the fire. The Nazi glanced up at me as I passed by his shoulder and stopped next to Chou. He started to look away then his head snapped back to me.

“You! It is you, isn’t it?” Weidinger hissed, a look of utter astonishment shattering his arrogant demeanor. He struggled against his bindings, but the leather belts Edward had used to secure his wrists and ankles did their jobs. He thrashed impotently for a number of seconds then stopped, then he raised his head, jutting his chin out imperiously. “You are younger than I expected but that red hair… it is unmistakable. It is you.”

“My God!” Bull hissed. “Evelyn was right. It is Meredith he wants.”

I felt almost everyone’s eyes turn to me at the same time I felt my stomach plummet to the ground. “Who sent you?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. Weidinger just stared back at me, an arrogant smile on his lips.

Chou’s gaze became steel as she turned her attention back to Weidinger. “Answer her,” she said. “Now!”

“I will say no more until you release me.”

“I’ll bet my last penny he’s working for the Adversary,” Bull said, stepping up to stand next to Chou.

I saw a moment of confusion flitter across the Nazi’s face, then the same arrogant mask descended over his features.

“I’ll wager that he doesn’t even know who the Adversary is,” said Edward.

“Or the Architect, either,” Wild Bill growled.

Confusion spread across Weidinger’s face.

“I believe, you are all correct,” Chou said. “I think he knows less about what is happening than we do.”

“I… I…” Weidinger stuttered.

“Tell us who sent you. What do they want with Meredith? Now!” Chou yelled.

Weidinger’s facade was beginning to crack under the mounting pressure.

Freuchen stepped in closer to the prisoner, his huge bulk adding to the implied threat. “If you know vats good for you, you vill answer us, Nazi.”

“Alright, alright, I will tell you,” Weidinger said finally, his eyes wide with fear as Freuchen leaned in close, his huge hands balled into sledgehammer-sized fists.

“Very good, Otto. Here, have some water.” Chou raised a canteen to Weidinger’s lips, and he drank deeply from it, water spilling over his chin, washing the blood away from his split lip. The area around his right eye was beginning to bruise and swell from Chou’s last slap. “Take your time,” Chou cooed.

“My unit was stationed in Poland. While we were traveling, our transport was caught in the open by an American bomber and attacked. We should all have been blown to pieces but as the bomb exploded… everything… stopped. I was surrounded by frozen fire and pieces of my staff car and my men, all suspended in midair as if by some magic.”

Weidinger had an almost dreamy look in his eyes, as though he were recalling something that came close to a mystical occurrence or perhaps a brush with the divine.

“It was then that I heard the voice of the Führer telling me he was willing to save me and my men, save us all so that we could serve him in a very special capacity…”

“Wait a second, just wait a second,” I said, interrupting him. “You’re telling me that you were contacted by Hitler? Adolf Hitler? That’s who you heard talking to you?”

Weidinger thrust his chin out, indignantly. “Yes. I have met the Führer on several occasions. His voice is unmistakable.”

I looked at Chou. She met my eyes, her brows raised inquisitively for a moment then she turned back to Weidinger and told him to continue.

“My Führer told me he had a special mission to assign us—that from all of his armies he had selected me and my men. He would save us from the attack in order to send us here to this island where we were to use any means necessary to track down and detain a very specific woman. That if I did not achieve my goal, this woman would bring about the downfall of our beloved Reich. She would destroy everything he had planned, which was why she must be found and stopped. That I would find you on this island, but if you somehow eluded me, I must go to the mainland where I would meet with more of the Führer’s agents, and together, we would find you. And if I completed this special task for him, I would be assured of a seat at his table and help him govern over the thousand-year-Reich. But first I must accept his offer.”

“To which you said ‘yes,’” said Chou.

“Of course, I accepted. I am not a fool. My loyalty will always be to the Führer and the Fatherland.”

“That’s very good, Otto,” Chou said. “Now, tell me, how did you know what Meredith looked like?”

“It was very strange.” Weidinger looked up at me and his forehead furrowed as he spoke. “When the Führer spoke of you, I suddenly had a very clear image of you appear in my mind, like an old memory I had suddenly recalled. It was as though I had met you at some point in my life and forgotten you until that moment.”

“Describe this image,” said Edward.

“In the image… in the memory, you are surrounded by hundreds of men and women, all smiling. You are standing on a dais, in front of a microphone, your arm is raised as if you have just won a great victory. You are older, perhaps in your late thirties, but it is definitely you, I know it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense?” I said. “I’m twenty-seven, how could the image you have be from the future?” As the words left my lips, I already knew the answer.

“Because the memory that was implanted in his brain is not of you, it is of a version of you. A version which did not follow the same path you took,” Chou said, without taking her eyes off of Weidinger. “What else can you tell us about this memory of Meredith?”

“I don’t—” Weidinger winced as Chou took him by the wrist and squeezed.

“Tell us anything that you can remember,” Chou whispered.

“There was a sign behind her, on the wall,” Weidinger said.

“What did the sign say?” Chou asked.

“I don’t know what that—”

“Answer the question,” Chou insisted. Her grip tightening on Weidinger’s wrist.

“It said, ‘America Together—Meredith Gale for President 2028’.”

I felt the world spin, then Freuchen’s steadying arm around my waist. When my vision cleared, Weidinger was staring at me, and I said, “Are you sure that’s what it said?”

Weidinger scowled, “I am not a fool. I have told you everything I know. Now I demand that you let me go free.”

I shook my head. “There’s got to be some kind of a mistake. Why would that version of me be running for president? I mean, I was interested in politics, sure; but president?” As I spoke, I noticed movement near the epaulet of Weidinger’s tunic on his left shoulder. There was something—

“Watch out!” I yelled, as I suddenly recognized the glowing green eyes of a mechanical beetle, identical to the one Chou had destroyed that first night. It scuttled from Weidinger’s back onto his shoulder. Before any of us could make a move, the beetle leaped onto the collar of Weidinger’s tunic; there was a glint of something metallic and a needle-like rod shot from between the beetle’s jaws, puncturing the officer’s throat. Weidinger flinched as though he’d been stung, and his eyes immediately rolled back into his head, and he began to convulse. Froth bubbled from between his lips and nose. His jaws snapped shut, his back arched against his restraints and a keening whistle escaped from between the Nazi’s clenched teeth. A moment later, he slumped sideways to the ground and stopped moving, white foam tinged with red leaking from his mouth onto the ground.

Chou was the first to react, lunging toward the mechanical assassin. But this time, the beetle was too fast even for her. It leaped from Weidinger’s shoulder onto the ground where it stopped for just a second and looked right at me before it raced into the darkness beyond the light of our campfire and vanished amongst the trees.

“My God!” Edward said, moving to Weidinger’s side. He placed a hand against the German’s neck. “Stone cold dead!” he announced after a few seconds. His eyes drifted to where the beetle had disappeared.

Bull stuttered, “Am I imagining it or did that… that insect seek him out and kill him specifically.”

Chou looked in my direction and said, “This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered one of those beetles. Our first night here, one of them came into our camp before the very first aurora. I killed it and discovered it was not an animal, but a construct, a mechanical beetle.”

“Mechanical? How can that be?” Bull said, incredulously.

Chou answered him. “It is merely a device, finely crafted and integrated into a body designed to not draw attention. An agent, I suspect, of the Adversary.”

“But why kill him?” Bull asked. He looked nervous.

“Maybe because he was about to reveal something more?” Edward said.

“You mean something more incredible than the idea that Adolf Hitler sent a bunch of Nazis to kidnap me? Or maybe the fact that in some alternate universe I’m running for president? Spoiler alert: it can’t get any weirder than that!” I hissed, still unable to believe what I had heard.

“I do not believe the message he received was from Hitler,” said Chou.

“You think it was the Adversary, pretending to be Hitler? That’s why it had to ask him to accept the offer to come here,” I said.

“Yes. There is no reason to believe that any version of Hitler, in any timeline, would have had access to the technology required to bring Weidinger and his men or anyone else for that matter here.”

“Tell that to some of the conspiracy nuts from my time,” I mumbled then added, “So the Adversary was just impersonating Hitler, to get Weidinger to do what it wanted?”

Chou nodded. “It would be a simple way to control someone like him, someone used to blindly and unerringly carrying out orders.”

Bull scowled. “Perhaps you are correct, I do not know, although the idea of a woman running for president strikes me as an outrageous fabrication in and of itself. Regardless, the next question is: if that mechanical insect was truly an agent of the Adversary, as Ms. Chou has postulated, and it sent the late Mr. Weidinger to capture her, why did the beetle simply not attack one of us? Specifically, why did it not simply kill Meredith?”

For the second time that night, all eyes turned to look at me.

Chou gave us the answer. “Weidinger said that he and his men were here to capture Meredith. He was very specific that we should turn her over to him. If he had wanted her dead, I do not think he was the kind of man who would have balked at saying so. I believe that the Adversary has plans for Meredith that can only be accomplished if she is alive.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I spluttered. Right about then, the weight of everything that'd happened over the last few days came crashing down onto me, and I felt as though it would crush me. “All I wanted to do was get my law degree. Maybe start a family sometime, have a great life. And if it hadn’t been for the car accident, I’m pretty sure that’s what I would have gotten, too, because I’m smart and tenacious, but the one thing I’m not, is the key to some existential thing’s plans to conquer whatever world this is. I mean, come on! I’m just an ordinary woman.” I was almost hysterical at this point, my voice rising to a shrill screech filled with panic and fear. My words choked off.

“Looking on the bright side: at least you know the Adversary does not vant to kill you. Vich is more than any of us can say,” Freuchen said, grinning his gentle smile.

I exhaled a breath I had not realized I was holding, laughing sadly as I did so. “There is that, I suppose. I feel like I’ve just seen myself on America’s Most Wanted and I have no idea why.”

All I got back was questioning stares of bemusement.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I… I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now? I mean, I’m being stalked by an unknown entity that has no problem sending history’s worst killers after me and killing them if they fail. How am I supposed to deal with that?”

“Perhaps,” Bull said with an uncharacteristically kind tone in his voice, “the best thing for all of us to do is get some rest.”

Edward nodded his agreement.

“What about Weidinger's body?” Chou asked.

“We’ll handle that,” Edward said. “You take care of Meredith.”

* * *

Exhausted by their encounter, our new arrivals slept soundly. By contrast, none of the Garrisonites seemed capable of sleep this night, the adrenaline and horror of the day hanging around in our blood like a triple-espresso. Those of us who weren’t assigned to babysit the newcomers or on guard duty, sat around the campfires talking quietly amongst ourselves, or stared into the flames of the fire, each working through the events of the day in their own ways.

Evelyn, now fully recovered from her assault, at least physically, sat to my left, Albert’s head resting in her lap. She gently stroked the sleeping boy’s hair while Edward sat between Chou and me, reminiscing about his hometown of Hastings, a small village on the southern coast of England where he had grown up. It was fascinating to listen to this man, talking quietly so as not to wake the sleeping. His voice tinged with a profound melancholy, he spoke fondly of how he’d spent his youth wandering the town cemetery while composing his poems or sitting beside a tombstone reading Shakespeare or Tennyson. Of how he met Rebecca, the woman that, in his other life, he would have gone home to from the war and led a perfectly normal life with.

A shadow moved through the semi-darkness separating us from the sleeping forms of the new arrivals. The shadow transformed into a fire-giant as Freuchen passed from darkness into the umbra of the flames of our campfire. A second man, who I did not recognize, followed just behind him.

“Forgive me, Edvard, but I need to interrupt you.”

“No need, my friend, I’m sure I’ve bored these ladies half-to-death already with my stories.”

“Meredith, this is Captain Joel,” Freuchen said, gesturing to the man standing next to him. I guessed the stranger was in his early forties. He was stocky with a slight paunch around his middle and a week or so’s worth of salt-and-pepper beard on his chin. “I think he might be able to help you,” Freuchen said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m confused. Help me how, exactly?”

“Mr. Freuchen says you need to get off this island,” the man said. “I can help you with that.” He stuck out a meaty hand. “Captain Joel, at your service.”

I took his hand, feeling the calloused skin of a working man against my own, and he shook it enthusiastically.

“Captain of what, exactly?” Chou said, suspiciously.

“Of the Sea Wraith,” he replied, then sat himself down next to me.

“And she would be?” I pondered.

The captain smiled a broad, warm grin. “My fishing boat.”

I felt my eyes widen and my heart skip a couple of beats. When I’d arrived just offshore of Avalon, I’d seen things also come through with other candidates, including bits and pieces of the bridge, but I’d not heard of or seen anything larger than Wild Bill’s horse Brute. The idea that a boat could've come through opened up all kinds of possibilities; first-and-foremost, getting my ass to the mainland.

“You have a boat?” I said. “Here? On the island?”

Captain Joel nodded. “Yes… well… kind of.”

Uh, oh. I felt my enthusiasm start to dwindle toward disappointment. “Kind of?”

The captain’s face took on a pained expression as though he was thinking about the death of a loved one. “Well… most of the Sea Wraith came with me. Now, I’ve heard others talking about how they arrived here, so I’m assuming it’s a given that you all got asked the same question as I did by that Voice?”

We all nodded.

“My boat was on her way to the bottom of the ocean just off of Montauk, swamped by a huge bastard of a storm, and I was going down with her when the voice asked me if I wanted to be saved. That’s when we found ourselves… here. Two days after I arrived, I was still trying to figure out where here was exactly when those Nazis grabbed me.”

“Did they find your boat?” I asked.

“No, luckily. I was in the forest when they found me.”

“Now I’m confused,” I said. “Is your boat—”

“The Sea Wraith,” Captain Joel interjected.

“Is the Sea Wraith seaworthy or not?” I continued.

“I managed to make some headway in those first few days, but she’s still a bit beat up. Nothing a half-day’s worth of work with the help of anyone who can follow directions and is handy with a saw and a wood chisel won’t make right. I’ve got the tools stowed onboard her. All I need are the extra hands,” Captain Joel said, effusively.

I was beginning to get the impression that far from being the eponymous dour sea captain that books and movies tend to paint men of his profession Captain Joel was one of those people who was permanently chipper. I had warmed almost instantly to him. When he smiled, it was a full-on grin. And I suspected that when he laughed, it would never be anything as mundane as a chortle but only a belly-laugh.

“And if we help you repair the Sea Wraith you’ll take me to the mainland?” I said.

Captain Joel (I never thought to ask if Joel was his first or last name) leaned back and smiled at me. “I’m a man who has spent the better part of his life at sea, Meredith. After more than a few days on land, I get fidgety. And after what you and your friends did for me and the rest of those people you rescued, the least I can do is give you a ride to wherever it is you need to get to.”

I felt a swell of excitement bloom in my chest. I looked across to where Edward sat. “Can you spare a couple of our people?” I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. Since learning that I was a target of the Adversary, I’d felt like I was the proverbial sitting duck. The idea of getting off this island (even though it was the only safe haven I knew) was enticing… and scary at the same time.

Edward nodded. “Of course, I’m sure Peter and Caleb would be happy to go with you. Will that be enough, captain?”

“That’ll do nicely,” he said.

“How far away is your boat?” Chou asked.

“She’s beached about six miles north of here, I’d guess. We washed up in a cove. I’m pretty sure I can find my way back there.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “We can leave first thing tomorrow morning.”

Twenty-One

I’d thought I faced a difficult choice over which of the two slates I should present to Silas that morning, but as I stood in front of him, dawn’s early light kissing the back of my neck, I found that my doubt was evaporating as quickly as the morning mist that clung to the ground.

I held both slates in my hands, their slick gray surfaces cold against my fingers. I tucked the one I had decided to keep under my right arm then lobbed the other slate high into the air and watched as it sailed off into forest, before hitting a distant trunk and shattering into pieces.

I turned my attention back to my friend. “Good morning, Silas,” I said, raising my chosen slate to eye-bar level.

“Welcome Children of Earth…” His electronic eyes spent a few seconds scanning the slate then moved to look at me. “Hello, Meredith. Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome,” I said. “Say, why don’t you go and help Albert.” Silas got to his feet and walked to where Albert was helping to distribute breakfast among our new guests, wishing each person he saw a good morning.

In the end, the decision had been an easy one. Blame my indecision on the time I was from, if you want to, an era where machines were little more than tools designed and manufactured to enhance our lives, whose value was measured not in the amazingness of their uniqueness, but in what they could do for me. A self-centered view that, if I had applied it to any other cause that meant something in my life, I would have been ashamed for ever having thought that way. I had made the mistake of considering Silas as nothing more than a mere machine, something that had been created with no other use than to help me, us, humanity. But still, at his core, just a tool that was capable of holding a great conversation. Inhuman. Not like us. Not like me. Different. And if I was truthful, a little bit frightening. It’s easy to make the right choice when the right choice has already been decided on by the majority but, as I was now finding out, it was harder to make the decision when you were the first one to have to make it. That kind of decision always comes down to your personal sense of morality, I think, your innate human compass’ ability to guide you, to help you make the right decision over the wrong one.

Silas’ constant striving to understand us just that little bit better, how we ticked, his expectations of what we, as a species could be had seemed so expected. After all, we were the humans and him, the machine. But I’d gotten it all so wrong. If anything, that walking tower of glittering metal was more human than any of us gathered together in the clearing. He was what we should all be determined to be more like, not the other way around.

And so, in the end, my choice had been easy. I'd thrown the new slate away because it was us who needed to try harder to be more like him, not the other way around. We were the ones who needed to change, not Silas, and I vowed to be more like him from this day onward.

I inhaled a deep, satisfying breath of the cleanest air I had ever breathed, allowed my eyes to drift first to the trees as they whispered in the breeze, then to the people laughing and chatting amongst themselves all around me. A smile creased my lips, and I stood for just a minute taking it all in before finally I set off to find Captain Joel.

* * *

The Sea Wraith was beached close to where the low tide lapped against the sandy shore, her prow angled toward the forest, listing far enough to her right that the afternoon sun reflected off the wood of her deck and pilothouse. A blue tarpaulin hung from her port rear quarter, fastened to two tall branches planted in the sand to form a basic shelter. A corner of the tarp had broken free from one of the branches and now flapped gently in the breeze blowing in off the ocean.

It had taken just over three hours for Chou, Freuchen, Caleb, Captain Joel, and me to hike to the small cove where he had beached her, while Edward and everyone else made their way back to the garrison.

“All we’re missing is a couple of mojitos and bathing suits,” I said, which brought a guffaw of agreement from Captain Joel and nothing but blank looks from everyone else.

I can’t say I’m an aficionado of boats in general, but the Sea Wraith was the finest looking vessel I’d ever seen, even more so now that I understood that she would be the key to getting me off of Avalon and to the mainland.

“She’s a 1969 Derecktor, sixty-eight-footer,” Captain Joel said. “An absolute classic. Refitted and renovated her myself right after I bought her, and I’ve never had a day’s trouble with her.” He laid his hand against her aluminum hull and allowed it to drift over the boat’s curves, like he was tracing the outline of a lover. “I missed you,” I heard him whisper.

The Sea Wraith was sleek and obviously well-maintained. She reminded me of something you’d expect 007 to pilot in one of those old sixties’ James Bond movies. She really was beautiful, and I told Captain Joel so.

“Thank you,” he said, his pride for her shining in his eyes. “Took me twenty years and two wives to pay for her, but she was worth every red cent.”

“She doesn’t look damaged to me?” Freuchen said as we drew closer.

“Starboard side,” the captain said, leading us to the opposite side of the boat.

“Ah!” said Freuchen when he saw the two-feet high and three-feet wide section of hull missing from halfway up the side of the Sea Wraith’s hull.

“I was so confused when we dropped out of the damn sky, and the fog was so thick I didn’t see those rocks,” the captain pointed to a reef of ugly looking gray rocks jutting out from the far wall of the cove. “Ripped her up good. Now, if I was at port, repairing her would be simple, but out here…” He ran his fingers over the uneven edge of the gash in her side. “It’s not fatal, I suppose, but it’s big enough of a hole to stop me putting her back to sea. What I need are some planks that are large enough to fit over the hole. I figured if you can fell one of those oaks over there and turn out a few boards, I’ll have the material I need to get her patched up and seaworthy,” Captain Joel said. He turned to face Freuchen. “What say you, big man?”

Freuchen nodded. We dropped our packs and provisions under the tarpaulin, while Freuchen grabbed his ax and made straight for the forest with Caleb.

When they returned almost a full hour later, they carried a six-foot-long log between them. Both men were covered in wood chips and sweat. Freuchen took a long chug from his water bottle and poured some of it over his face. Then, while Caleb held the big log upright, Freuchen raised his ax and with more finesse than I would have thought possible, split the log down the middle, then split each piece again until the log lay in quarters at his feet. I watched with fascination as Freuchen took one of the quartered pieces and fashioned several wedges from it with his knife. He used the wedges to split apart the other quartered sections into rough but serviceable planks.

“I hope you have something in mind to fasten these beauties,” Freuchen said when he was done, standing back and tapping the six planks with the tip of his boot, his caterpillar eyebrows raised questioningly.

Captain Joel gave an appreciative full-throated laugh and nodded. “It just so happens I do. Let me go get my tools.”

* * *

Captain Joel retrieved a large toolbox from below deck and set it down next to the Sea Wraith. He fished out a metal hand-powered drill and attached a large drill bit. Then he set about carefully measuring and marking several spots above, below, and on each end of the hole in the Sea Wraith’s hull before marking corresponding spots on Freuchen’s planks. He drilled two holes a half-inch apart at each point he had marked on the planks and the hull. Setting aside the drill, he picked up the largest plank and handed it to me and Chou.

“If you ladies would be so kind as to hold the plank right… there. Perfect,” he said, after maneuvering the holes in the plank over the ones in the hull. He had Freuchen and Caleb hold the two other planks in position, while he checked the tear in the hull was completely covered by them. He lifted a spool of manila rope from the toolbox, measured then cut the same number of hand-to-elbow lengths that there were sets of holes, then began to thread the rope through each hole, so the loose ends hung on the inside of the hull, while we held the planks steady.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he told us with a grin, then hopped up onto the deck and vanished into the cabin. Soon after, we heard the sound of him removing whatever paneling lay between him and the interior of the hull.

“Hold those planks tight,” I heard him yell, then he systematically drew each length of rope taut enough that it pulled the plank snugly against the hull before, I presumed, he must have tied the rope off. He reemerged from the pilothouse and dropped down beside us. He inspected his handiwork, nodded happily, and said, “You can let go now.”

We stepped away. Nothing fell off, which I took as a good sign.

“One last touch,” said Captain Joel. He picked up a can from the toolbox, pried open the lid with a flathead screwdriver, then used a brush to paint a thick black tar-like substance over the planks until all the seams were sealed. “We’ll be all squared away in an hour or so once that sealant’s dried,” he said and stepped back to admire his handiwork. “The bilge pumps’ll be able to handle any leaks. Now, all we have to do is wait for the tide to come in and then you can point me in the direction of the garrison.”

* * *

I was on a pleasure ship cruising up the coast of California.

At least, that’s the little fantasy I told myself as I sat in the cockpit of the Sea Wraith, just behind the pilothouse, watching the coastline of the island we had come to call Avalon drift by. We were serenaded by a minimalist soundtrack courtesy of the splish splash of waves breaking across the hull of the Sea Wraith and the rhythmic chug-chug-chug of her engine.

To a person, we all sat and just... were, silently taking advantage of this momentary respite, this little chunk of normalcy, floating within a sea of the weird and absolutely screwed up.

“We should probably wait at the pointy end, make sure we don’t miss our stop,” I said when I guessed we were getting close to the estuary of our river.

“It’s called the prow,” Captain Joel corrected from the pilothouse, but I saw a wry smile cross his face, and I smiled back.

Freuchen and I were the only ones who’d actually seen the estuary of the river leading up to our little enclave, which, I suppose wasn’t going to stay so little for very much longer. The people we’d rescued were going to more than triple the numbers of the Garrisonites and, if the guesstimations we’d made of how many people we’d seen dropping into the ocean when we arrived were accurate, there were easily a hundred or more souls spread across Avalon. Of course, any one of them could be an agent of the Adversary, which made getting off the island even more imperative for me. At some point, Edward was going to have to find those time-lost refugees and try and bring them into his fold. He wanted so much to create something new here, something magnificent; a utopia where everyone was equal and valued. I did not envy him in his task, but I had never met anyone more capable of achieving that dream than him.

But that wasn’t going to be my job or my problem. I wasn’t going to be here for any longer than I had to be. And now that the probability of leaving Avalon was all too real, I felt a weird mixture of fear and anticipation. I was going to have to leave my new friends behind me and strike out on my own to try and find this mysterious Candidate 1. I was going to embark on an adventure the likes of which no one had ever experienced before; all on a version of earth that was so different to my own that it may just as well have been a completely different planet. Vast. Unknown. Alien.

“There!” Freuchen called out, pointing ahead of us. “The mouth of the river is dead ahead. I recognize that outcropping of rock.”

Captain Joel took a second to look where Freuchen pointed then guided the Sea Wraith toward the estuary and drove the prow into the shale beach.

“It’s not pretty, but it beats getting wet,” he said, “All ashore.”

We clambered over the Sea Wraith’s gunwale and dropped onto the rocky beach, and once Captain Joel had finished securing his boat we set off upriver toward the garrison.

* * *

“How are you holding up?” Edward asked. We’d been back for a couple of hours already but, other than a wave and a yelled ‘welcome back’ Edward’s attention had been focused on helping the new arrivals settle in.

“Nervous,” I said, surprised at my own candidness. “Really, really nervous.”

Edward smiled. “Understandably so. But are you sure you really want to go ahead with this? You know that you’re more than welcome to stay here. We could use you.”

“Trust me, leaving Avalon is the furthest thing from what I want to do, but there’s no doubt the Adversary knows my whereabouts now. It’s only a matter of time before it sends another assassin, or I end up like that Nazi officer.” I mimicked the bug crawling on my shoulder with my fingers.

Edward nodded.

“And the longer I stay, the more danger I put the garrison in. If the Adversary is as smart as we think it is, it’ll send more than just a crew of Nazi murderers. We had the upper hand this time; next time we might not be so lucky. The sooner I’m out of your hair, the safer it’ll be for everyone.”

“As much as it pains me to agree, I know you’re right. Do you know when you plan to depart?”

“Tomorrow, soon as the tide allows. Captain Joel thinks it should be sometime around dawn, so we’re planning to set out then, but the tides are strange here, so we’re ‘playing it by ear.’ The Captain’s words, not mine.”

Silas approached us. “I will be accompanying Meredith on her journey, too,” he said. His eye-bar focused on me. “If that is acceptable to you?”

I smiled and nodded. I’d considered asking if Silas would like to join Chou and me but wasn’t sure how Edward would take it. The robot would be such a great asset to the community and could have helped grow the garrison in record time. Now, of course, there would be plenty of extra hands and his help would be missed less.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Edward said, his words encouraging but his face couldn’t disguise the look of disappointment at Silas leaving.

I saw Freuchen talking to one of the newcomers. He spotted me looking at him, excused himself and walked over to us.

“I vas vaiting for an opportunity to get you two alone,” he said, looking first at Edward then me. “I think it vould be a good idea if I accompany Meredith on her journey.”

Edward looked aghast but said nothing.

“Of course, I’d love to have you along,” I said, “but I certainly don’t want to drain the garrison of its best human resources. Are you sure?” I glanced at Edward and gave him my best ‘sorry, I didn’t expect this to happen’ face.

“Yes,” Freuchen said, “I have thought hard about it, and neither you nor Ms. Chou—”

“Silas is leaving, too,” Edward interjected.

Freuchen glanced at the robot. Nodded in a ‘that’s good to hear’ kind of a way and continued. “Neither, you or Ms. Chou—or Silas—are experienced explorers or outdoorsmen… vimen… you know vat I mean. I have spent all of my life traveling the vurled. I vould not be able to rest knowing that you ver out there vithout me. Besides, I vould very much like to see this new Earth that avaits us.”

I could see Edward was vacillating between giving his approval and begging Freuchen to stay, but the truth was, I needed him more than Edward did.

“You still have Jacquetta,” I said.

After a few seconds more mulling it over, Edward nodded his approval.

“Thank you,” I said. I hugged him and stepped back.

“Wait here for a minute,” Edward said, then walked over to where Wild Bill was storing the last of the equipment we had liberated from the Nazis beneath the remaining intact lean-tos. They chatted for a while, then the two men made their way back over to us. Both carried a large bundle of equipment in their outstretched arms. Edward dropped his at our feet. “These will probably be of help,” he said. It was four of the backpacks we had taken from the dead Nazis. Wild Bill brought canteens, extra military provisions, a first aid kit, and a pair of binoculars that had belonged to the Nazi Officer. He laid them down next to the backpacks. Edward also had two of the German machine guns, one slung over each shoulder. Wild Bill had another. Edward unslung one of the weapons and offered it to me, “You should probably take these too,” he said.

I shook my head. “No thank you. We’re going to need people to trust us. If we walk into a community armed to the teeth, it’s going to give the wrong impression. People might just decide to act against us first rather than listen to what we have to say. I’ll stick with this.” I tapped the sword that rested against my thigh. Honestly, the idea of having to use that machine gun terrified me. It was a risk to leave the firearms behind, no doubt, but a calculated one, given Chou’s lethality, Silas’ size, and Freuchen, who was almost as imposing as the robot.

Edward offered the weapon to Chou who similarly declined. “I have no need of it, thank you. As Meredith said, we do not want to appear to be a threat, and it will only serve to act as a magnet for those who want it. Better to not place temptation in the way of the weak minded who will covet it.”

Freuchen said, “I’ll take the Luger, if I may.” He nodded at the pistol taken from the Nazi officer which Edward now wore around his waist. Freuchen turned and looked at me and Chou. “I vill keep it in my backpack, that vay it vill be hidden from prying eyes and sticky fingers.”

I nodded, it could come in useful if we ever got into a pinch and as long as Freuchen kept it well hidden, it shouldn’t prove a problem.

Edward unbuckled the pistol and handed it to Freuchen. “Pick up a box of ammunition from me before you leave,” he said.

Freuchen said that he would.

“Evelyn is preparing supplies for you?” Edward asked.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s thrown together enough jerky and smoked fish to feed a small army. It’s not exactly an In-N-Out Double-Double with a strawberry shake, but we won’t be going hungry anytime soon. And when we need to, we’ll hunt the rest of our food.”

“Good,” said Edward.

“People vill be able to smell us a mile off,” Freuchen said through a grin.

Albert ran over to us from where he had been helping Evelyn.

“I’m packed,” he said breathlessly, the light of expectation in his eyes shining brightly. He picked up one of the backpacks. “What do you want me to carry?”

As if sensing that I would not do well with what had to happen next, Chou stepped forward, knelt in front of the boy and said, “You will not be coming with us, Albert. The road ahead will be dangerous. It is better that you stay here with Edward, Wild Bill, and Evelyn, where it is safe.”

“But… but you promised we’d stay together,” Albert said, looking at me, his voice trembling with emotion, close to tears. “You promised we’d look after each other.”

I knelt, so I was at eye-level with the boy. “I did, Albert, but we don’t know what’s beyond the island. It’s going to be so dangerous. Too dangerous.” I reached out a hand to wipe away the tears that had begun to run down his cheek, but he took a step back out of my reach. “You promised!” he said.

“I know, but we can’t—”

Albert turned around and ran off in the direction of the river.

I took a step after him.

“Let him go,” Wild Bill said. “You’ve got enough to keep you occupied. I’ll go take care of him.” The cowboy pinched the peak of his hat and set off after Albert.

I felt Edward’s hand on my arm and turned back to him. “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of him.”

“I know,” I said, but still felt pretty shitty for abandoning the kid. It was for his own good though, at least, that’s what I told myself.

Edward cast his eyes over all of us. “Well, I suppose I had best leave you to finish your preparation,” he said. “I have our new guests to help.”.

“How many of them do you think are going to settle here?” Freuchen asked.

“They’ve all said they want to remain with us,” Edward replied. “It’ll be a bit tight until we get some more accommodation built for them. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem with all the extra hands though, so no need to worry.” He smiled and walked away.

Chou picked up a backpack and began to sort through the equipment. Freuchen did the same. I watched the camp for a few seconds, the people buzzing here and there making themselves useful or standing around chatting. It was all so normal, if you ignored where we were. Just humans… being. Then I joined my two friends and began preparing for the journey ahead of us.

Part Three

Only The Dead Go free

Twenty-Two

I rose a little after dawn. Chou was already up and going through her backpack one final time. Around us, the garrison was slowly coming back to life as people woke, shuffled to the latrines and then made their way to where breakfast was being readied.

“Has anyone seen Albert?” I asked, joining Chou, the dewy grass cold against my bare feet. Since the boy had found out he wasn’t coming with us, Albert had fastidiously avoided me and Chou, going so far as to spend the night sleeping next to Evelyn.

Chou glanced up at me, looked around. “I saw him earlier.”

I still felt terrible about leaving the kid behind, but there really wasn’t any other option. I picked up my backpack and checked it again, fastened it back up and tested its weight, then set it back down beside Chou’s.

Freuchen appeared like Bigfoot, striding across the encampment, a grin on his face that could have swallowed a 747, his backpack in hand. He dropped it next to ours.

“Vell, are ve all ready for our great adventure?” he said, then took a bite from a strip of jerky and proceeded to chew it vigorously, only adding to my internal image of the legendary mountain creature.

“I’ll go wake up Silas,” I said, unable to muster the kind of enthusiasm that was on display by the Danish man.

I walked over to where Silas sat, cross-legged like a metal Buddha next to our lean-to. Dew shone on his metal skin, glistening in the warming light of the rising sun. I took the slate from where he had left it, held it in front of his eye-bar and said, “Good morning, Silas.” He went through the usual start-up routine, analyzed the code on the slate, and then listened patiently while I filled him in on the events that it didn’t cover.

“Good morning,” Silas said, nodding at everyone as we walked back to join Chou and Freuchen. Captain Joel was chatting with Chou. He raised a hand in greeting as we approached.

“Here, take this,” Freuchen said, hefting the heaviest backpack containing most of our provisions and handing it to Silas. Silas swung the pack over his shoulders as if it was nothing, and we all followed suit with our own packs.

“I see you’re all about set,” Edward said, appearing from behind me. “Is there anything else that we can do for you before you leave?”

“I think we’re good,” I replied, cinching my backpack tighter.

“Come on then, I’ll walk you out.”

Evelyn, Wild Bill, Tabitha, and Caleb stopped what they were doing and came over to us and, after a flurry of well wishes, hugs, handshakes and a few tears, escorted us to the garrison’s northern exit. I looked around for Albert, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of him,” Evelyn said, clasping both my hands in hers. “His tail feathers are just a little ruffled right now. He’ll be fine, I promise.”

I pulled her in close and hugged her tight, whispered “Thank you” before releasing her.

“Well,” Edward said, “I’m not one for speeches, but I want to thank you on behalf of all of us for what you’re doing. We wish you all the very best of luck, and know we’ll see all of you back here again when your journey is successful.” He paused, then said, “Oh, I almost forgot. Here, I wanted you to have this, Meredith.” He handed me a folded piece of paper torn from his notepad. “Just something to remember us by.”

I unfolded the paper. It was a handwritten copy of my favorite poem by him The Maiden.

“You know, an original copy of one of your poems would probably fetch enough from a collector of your work to buy me a house back when I’m from,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. I will treasure it forever.” I leaned in and gave Edward a kiss on his cheek, lingered for a second and when I pulled back he was bright red.

“Go on now, all of you, before we change our minds and scuttle your boat,” Edward said.

“See you soon,” I managed to get past the lump in my throat. And with one final glance at the place I had come to think of as home, we turned and began to make our way to the Sea Wraith.

* * *

Captain Joel had estimated the rising tide almost perfectly, and we only had a half hour to wait until it was high enough for him to fire up the engines. With a puff of black smoke from the exhaust to mark our departure, he turned the boat in the direction of the distant mainland and headed out to sea while the rest of us sat on deck, watching our island home recede gradually into the distance.

“Do you have any idea where you want to go exactly?” Captain Joel called back to me from the pilothouse, when Avalon had receded to little more than a distant blob of green and brown behind us.

I rose and wobbled my way to him as the boat pitched and rolled on the ocean swell. “I haven’t really given it much thought,” I told him, truthfully. I stared out through the windshield of the pilothouse, past the prow and the mist of sea-spray as the boat cut through the waves, dipping and climbing. The smell of ozone was heavy in the air. “I say we aim for the monolith, as that’s our ultimate destination.”

Captain Joel nodded. “I’d guess it’ll take us about three hours or so to reach the mainland. So, you might just as well sit back and enjoy the ride.”

I thanked him and retook my place next to Silas, the rhythmic pulse of the Sea Wraith’s engine reverberating up through the deck like a heartbeat, and for the next forty-five minutes or so, we stared out at the open sea and the ever-nearing coast. We were still miles away, and all I could distinguish of this new land were great swaths of green and brown that suggested that the mainland was as heavily populated with trees as Avalon. But rising above everything like some unimaginable petrified creature was the monolith. Its faceted trumpet-shaped body glowing in the early morning sun. The closer we got, the more terrifying it became.

“It is an astonishing feat of engineering, isn’t it?” I hadn’t heard Chou’s approach. She stood on my left, steadying herself with one hand on the bulwark, her face turned toward the monolith with a look of outright admiration on her face.

“I can’t even begin to imagine how something like that would be built,” I said.

“I would not even hazard a guess,” Chou admitted quietly, in a rare moment of technical ignorance.

“It is just like a leisurely boat ride on a Sunday afternoon,” Freuchen said, only half joking.

I playfully elbowed him in his ribs and laughed. “Sure is,” I said, “if you ignore the robot, the woman from the far-flung future, and the mega-structures built by some long forgotten unknown hand.”

“Vell, ven you put it like that.”

We all laughed.

“It is a pleasant change,” Chou said, a smile playing across her lips.

Freuchen stood up, placed a foot on the gunwale, and leaned against the roof of the pilothouse, his eyes fixed on the ever-nearing coastline. “Ve are like the Argonauts,” he said, his tone suddenly reverent. “Sailing toward Colchis, in search of our own Golden Fleece.”

Silas suddenly leaped to his feet. “Captain, I sense something approaching on your starboard side.”

We all turned to look in the direction Silas indicated in time to see a huge shape break the surface ten boat lengths off the Sea Wraith’s starboard side.

“It’s a whale!” I yelled, as the unmistakable form of the whale rose majestically into the air, then fell sideways back below the surface, in that seemingly slow-motion way they have, sending an enormous wave of water rushing our way. The Sea Wraith bounced over the wave and continued on even as the whale dove again.

“Well, that’s a sight for sore eyes,” Captain Joel said, as ecstatic to see the cetacean as I was.

“A blue vale,” Freuchen yelled. “I hunted them for food in the Antarctic.”

“It is a truly remarkable specimen,” Silas said. “I believe that they number in the tens of thous—” He stopped abruptly and said, “Something else is approaching from port.”

“Maybe it’s another whale?” I said, straining my eyes against the glare bouncing off the water.

“I don’t see anything?” Captain Joel called back, his head and shoulders hanging out of the pilothouse window.

I saw the dorsal fin break the surface of the ocean fifty feet off the port side of the Sea Wraith. “There!” I yelled, pointing. Then, “Oh, shit!” I’d had encounters with sharks off the coast of California, seen them closeup at Seaworld too, but whatever this thing was, it dwarfed even the couple of Great Whites I’d seen. The dorsal fin was at least as tall as Silas, and he was eight feet, it cut through the water like a speedboat, leaving a wake of roiling water behind it, and it was heading straight across our path.

“Grab on to something!” Captain Joel yelled.

I saw him spin the Sea Wraith’s wheel hard to the left. While the boat was long at sixty-eight feet, it was also narrow, which made it unstable in the water churned up by the two behemoths, and she slewed sharply, the right side tipping dangerously upward. Chou grabbed the gunwale. Freuchen stumbled backward, his arms flailing. He collided hard with the side of the pilothouse which was the only thing that stopped him from falling overboard.

I wasn’t so lucky.

I flailed for the gunwale, missed and felt gravity take hold of me. I stumbled backward. My leg hit something hard attached to the deck that sent me airborne. I was suddenly dropping toward the ocean. I screamed… and felt a metallic hand grab me by the arm and hold on tightly as the starboard side reached its apex. I swung like a pendulum, caught a momentary glimpse of the sea frothing and foaming beneath my feet, then Silas reeled me to him like he’d just hooked a mermaid. The Sea Wraith gave a violent shudder, the wooden deck creaking and complaining as the giant shark sideswiped us and scraped along our keel, buffeting us like we were riding over rapids. Then it was past us, and the boat slipped back to its natural position, leaving us bobbing on the ocean like a cork.

“What is that thing?” Freuchen gasped.

“Judging by the size of its dorsal fin, I believe it to be a megalodon; one of the largest shark species ever to have existed. It must be hunting the whale we saw. It should not be here,” Silas said.

“What do you mean it shouldn’t be here?” Captain Joel yelled.

“Predators were to be strictly limited to very specific sizes to ensure balanced bio-diversity. I am sure that something of this size was not a part of that plan.”

“Jesus!” I yelped as the whale breached again, astern of us this time, a stream of blood arcing behind it from a ragged wound on its underbelly. The gigantic shark followed right after it—seventy-feet of pure death—then disappeared as both creatures presumably dived toward the bottom of the ocean. Nothing was left behind as evidence to the titanic struggle that had just taken place before our very eyes but churned up ocean and a slowly spreading slick of blood on the surface.

We stood in silence for several minutes our eyes fixed on the receding spot where the two creatures had vanished, but they did not resurface. Finally, I turned to Silas and said, “You said the shark shouldn’t be here. But if the Architect didn’t bring it here…?”

“I can only assume this is more work of the Adversary. Another attempt to disrupt the Architect’s plan.”

Nobody spoke, but I’m convinced that we were all thinking the same thought: if something as big as that shark could be brought here without the Architect’s knowledge, what other unpleasant surprises lay in store for us courtesy of the Adversary? Ahead, the sun rose higher into the sky, sparking off the monolith, which now seemed less mysterious and more menacing, looming over the world, its presence an inescapable reminder that we were nothing more than participants in a game played between two unknown and unseen gods.

Twenty-Three

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't.

―William Shakespeare, The Tempest

A fog-bank shrouded the coast, oozing through fang-like spikes of basalt jutting up from the base of a sheer cliff which stretched for miles and miles and miles to the north and south. Trees lined the top of the cliff like lemmings waiting to leap to their death. At its base, years of broken and rotting pine and oak and yew lay scattered across a narrow littoral of jagged rock. Others teetered on the very edge of the cliff, their roots gradually exposed by the slow but constant erosion of tide, wind, and rain. Pockmarked black rocks surrounded by white foam peeked through the ocean’s surface, making any approach by the Sea Wraith treacherous to suicidal.

“No chance of getting you ashore here,” Captain Joel said. He had throttled back the Sea Wraith’s engine, and now we drifted with the current parallel to the shore.

Chou turned to face Silas. “Do you have any idea which direction we should take?”

“I have no data on this area, I’m sorry.”

“North or south?” I asked Freuchen. “Pick one.”

The big Dane leaned against the rail, his beard shifting with a gentle sea breeze, his eyes moving over the landscape, while overhead gulls screeched and wheeled, occasionally diving beneath the surface only to reappear with a fish between their beaks. “South, skipper,” Freuchen called out with an assuredness that almost convinced me he knew what he was talking about rather than taking a wild guess.

“South it is,” Captain Joel said, throttling the engine up.

It proved to be a good choice. Less than an hour later, the cliff began to descend to a tree studded headland that formed a u-shaped cove with a black-sand beach run through with streaks of saffron colored silt. A boulder strewn incline rose steeply from the beach, ascending into the forest, but it didn’t look like anything we couldn’t handle.

“How’s this?” Captain Joel said.

“Looks good to me,” Freuchen said, leaning over the bow to get a better look at the approach. Chou and I echoed his assessment.

“Let’s see how close I can get you,” Captain Joel said. He swung the Sea Wraith around, so the bow faced away from the beach, then threw the engines into reverse, carefully increased the boat’s speed, edging the craft backward toward the beach while we scanned the water for any submerged obstacles.

“This is about as far as I can get you without risking running aground,” Captain Joel announced when we were still roughly fifteen feet or so from the beach.

“I’ll go first,” Freuchen said. He grabbed his backpack, walked to the stern, and swung himself over the gunwale, dropping down into the water up to his thighs. “Give me another backpack,” he said, beckoning with both hands. I handed him mine, and he proceeded to wade to the beach. He stood on the beach and waved for us to come ashore.

I turned to face Captain Joel. “Thank you,” I said and hugged him tightly.

“You all come back to us,” he said, solemnly.

I smiled, nodded, and followed Chou and Silas over the side of the Sea Wraith and dropped into the water. We waded ashore, the day warm enough that our clothes wouldn’t stay wet for too long. Standing on the beach, we watched as the Sea Wraith’s engines churned the water and the boat edged away. Captain Joel turned once, his hand raised in farewell.

I started to turn my attention back to my companions who were already shouldering their backpacks when movement at the stern of the Sea Wraith caught my attention. I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but I thought I had seen something drop off the boat into the water. I shaded my eyes to try and get a better look.

“Shit!” I hissed. “Silas, I need you. Now!”

“Vat is it?” Freuchen said, looking where I pointed. “Oh!” he said when he spotted what was bobbing in the water, heading slowly toward the beach.

It was Albert. The kid had somehow managed to stow away aboard the Sea Wraith. He was using something to stay afloat, his legs kicking furiously as he tried to swim to us.

“Would you please go and pull him out of there?” I said to Silas.

“It would be my pleasure,” the robot replied and strode out into the water. He took hold of Albert and lifted him above the water, holding him easily in his arms. With his other hand Silas picked up the object Albert had used to stay afloat, and I saw now that it was an orange life preserver. The boy had probably never seen one before, so he hadn’t worn it when he jumped overboard, but he was smart enough to use it as a buoyancy device.

“What were you thinking?” I snapped, barely able to contain my anger at Albert’s stupidity as Silas placed the dripping wet kid on the sand in front of me. “If I hadn’t seen you, you could have been swept out to sea, drowned, or we could have gone on without you, and you would have been left here all alone with no way back.” I took two steps back, afraid I might be tempted to throttle him.

“That would not have occurred,” Silas said.

“What? Which one?” I said, utterly confused.

“Any of those scenarios.”

“What?” I repeated.

“I was aware of Albert’s presence on the Sea Wraith.”

“What!” I exploded. “You knew he was right there and you didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell us? Jesus!”

“I’m sorry,” Silas said, “did I do something wrong?”

“Wrong? Nooooo, nothing’s wrong. You just allowed the kid to stow away without bothering to let any of us know. What could possibly be wrong with that?”

“But Albert instructed me not to tell you. He said it would be a surprise. I assumed you would be pleased at learning of his presence.”

I could feel my eyes growing bigger by the second, my face flushing red. “You know,” I said, staring right at Silas, “for a robot with an IQ of, what is it? A gazillion or more? That was pretty stupid.”

“I apologize.”

I closed my eyes, sucked in a deep breath, held it… slowly exhaled. It had been twelve days since I’d been unceremoniously dumped into this world. In that time, I’d been miraculously cured of my drug addiction, had men try to kill me, seen my first dead body then seen more than I should ever have, joined together with a group of people pulled not only from different times but from different freaking dimensions, fought and beaten Nazis, counted a robot as one of my friends, and found out that I was the key to solving a mystery that held the future of humanity in the balance. I guess it was understandable if I was a little short-tempered. But like I said at the beginning, even if I could go back and change everything that had happened, I wouldn’t. Not now.

When I opened my eyes again, the Sea Wraith had vanished around the curve of the headland and with it any chance of returning Albert back to Avalon. How did that prayer go? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

“I placed a hand on Silas’ metal shoulder. “Sorry,” I said, embarrassed by my outburst.

“Apology accepted.”

Chou said to Albert, “How did you go undetected?”

“I hid in the hold,” Albert said. “I just… wanted to… be with… you.” His words hitched as he tried to hold back his tears.

I shook my head in mock disbelief as my anger began to subside. I placed my hand on the boy’s hair, then slipped it to his back and pulled him close to me, wrapping my arms around him. When I let him go, I said, “Listen closely: from now on, when any of us tell you to do something, you do it? Understood?”

Albert nodded. “Does that mean you’re not going to leave me behind?” he said, wiping the snot and tears from his face.

“Leave you behind? Here? God, no. No, no, no.” I paused then added with a smile, “So long as you do as you’re told, at least.”

Albert snuffled then smiled meekly.

“Very good then,” Freuchen said. “I think it’s time ve ver on our vay.”

I grabbed my backpack and shouldered it. We stood abreast of each other; five travelers from different times and different realities, strangers from very different shores, bound together now as comrades, all facing the same great unknown. Above us, the sun had almost reached its zenith, creating doppelgänger negatives on the ground ahead of us, and I wondered for a second whether, in some alternate version of this universe, a copy of me would make a different choice than the one I was about to.

“Okay, are we all ready?” I said, turning to look down the line to acknowledge everyone’s nod of confirmation. “Well then, what are we waiting for? Let’s go see what’s out there.”

Find out what’s out there in A Memory of Mankind.

The answers are out there...

With the island of Avalon far behind them, Meredith and her companions continue their search for Candidate One in the hope of finally discovering the secrets behind why they were brought to this strange, future-version of Earth.

Wild adventures, mysterious technologies, and new friends will help Meredith on her journey. But the Adversary has its own plans for her, and soon she finds herself fighting for survival against an enemy unlike anything she has encountered before.

There is only one hope for the future of humanity. Can Meredith handle the burden? Find out in the unforgettable second installment of the This Alien Earth Series.

A MEMORY OF MANKIND

For Molly. You got the thing!

And for CoCo Mo

ALEXANDER - INFINTY OF WORLDS

Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus’ discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, “Is it not worthy of tears,” he said, “that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?’

One

I swung my sword in a fast, wide arc, aiming for Weston Chou’s neck. Chou dodged my attack easily, stepping inside my guard while thrusting the knife she held in her right hand toward my heart. I twisted sideways, and the blade slid off my chainmail shirt. Then, I brought my sword hand up and tapped Chou on the side of her temple with the sword’s pommel, lightly enough that it wouldn’t hurt but hard enough to push her off balance. Chou toppled sideways, then rolled away. She forced herself to one knee and stared up at me, barely even breaking a sweat, while I was panting hard from the exertion of the past hour’s training.

“Vell done, Meredith, you got her good that time,” Freuchen said. He was busy tending to the campfire. A brace of roasting birds that—with the help of Albert—he’d caught earlier that afternoon hung over it. I had a sneaking suspicion they might be dodos. Albert sat next to the big Danish man, and both the man and boy clapped enthusiastically at my victory.

Silas stood in a patch of light, soaking up as much energy as his damaged batteries could hold as the afternoon sun edged toward the western horizon. His eye-bar followed Chou and my movements, but he said nothing.

“You let me have that one, didn’t you?” I leaned in and offered Chou my hand, pulling her to her feet.

“Perhaps,” Chou said, her face creased into a smile. “Either way, you are improving quickly.”

I accepted the compliment, but I wasn’t under any illusion that Chou hadn’t been holding back. She had attenuated her attack to match the skill of an average human, so it would be a fair fight for me. And “average” wasn’t a word anyone who had encountered this woman from the future would use to describe her. Chou could’ve run rings around me if she’d wanted to. Instead, she’d devoted several hours a day since we’d left Avalon to teach me all that she knew of sword-fighting (of which she was frighteningly proficient).

I’d managed to resist an overwhelming temptation for the first two lessons Chou had put me through. However, on day three, I’d finally cracked. Holding the curved scimitar I’d taken from the body of one of the men who’d tried to kill us that first day we’d arrived on Avalon, I said in my best Spanish accent: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Chou had looked at me oddly, then said. “I can assure you that I did no such thing.”

I’d explained that it was just a quote from a movie, The Princess Bride, one of my favorites. “You know, the six-fingered man… never mind.” Chou had just shaken her head and proceeded with the lesson. I guess she was finally getting used to me.

Six days had passed since we stepped off the Alexa Rae and begun our journey into the heart of this strange, unknown continent we referred to simply as the Mainland. I was still trying to wrap my mind around it all. Everyone in this world had been brought here at the point of death. Either by an entity we called the Architect, as my companions and I had, or by another, mysterious enemy we’d named the Adversary. The Architect had left a message in the care of Silas, the last of the robot caretakers assigned to help humanity through the shock of arriving here on this future Earth. I had to find Candidate One; she or he was the only person who could put right the damage that the Adversary had wrought on the Architect’s plan. The Adversary wanted me enough that it had sent a group of Nazi stormtroopers to try and catch me. Something that had cost the life of Benito, one of the Garrisonites, along with more Candidates from alternate dimensions than I cared to remember. Oh, and in case I ever thought that the limit on craziness was exhausted, in one of those other infinite copies of the universe, a version of me was the President of the United States. I know, crazy, right?

In the six days we had been traveling together, I’d become a better fighter than I could ever have imagined, thanks to Chou’s tutelage. At least, in theory. We hadn’t seen another human being during the entire time we’d been walking through the thick forest that seemed to cover every square inch of Mainland. So, there was no way to know just how impressive I actually was.

Albert had named the vast unending woodlands of firs, conifers, oaks, redwoods, and other trees none of us could identify as the Everwood. That’s what we called it now.

We’d set our sights on reaching the Collector, the huge mega-structure that dominated the skyline that we believed gathered the energy from the Dyson Swarm surrounding the sun, then distributed it out each night in the form of the aurora that powered the healing nanites—or pixie dust as we liked to call them. That’s where we thought we would find Candidate One and, hopefully, the answers to the mystery of why we were all brought here.

“Come and eat,” Freuchen said, lifting the roasted birds off the fire and placing them on a makeshift plate of large leaves he’d pulled from a nearby fern.

We sat around the fire, eating silently, watching the forest vanish into the darkness. We were averaging about ten miles a day, depending on how dense the trees and undergrowth were. Mile after mile after mile of nothing but forest. It was exhausting, tedious, and sapped, not just the energy out of us, but our emotion too. Even Albert, who had been so fascinated by the curious world around him, had fallen silent for most of the day.

We chatted half-heartedly for a little while after dinner, sharing memories of our old worlds, our left-behind lives, before, one after the other, we said our goodnights. We turned in with little expectation that the following day would be anything different than this one.

Two

We broke camp just after dawn, but by late afternoon, the air had grown steadily heavier with moisture. I had a nagging headache over my right eye for the last hour or so from the air pressure as gray clouds filled in the open spaces of the Everwood’s canopy, and were gradually replaced by blacker, angrier versions.

Distant thunder rumbled over the trees. Instinctively, I glanced up but saw nothing but bruised clouds through the thick, verdant canopy. A minute later, another crash of thunder rolled in. This time, it sounded closer. Much closer.

“Storm is coming in fast,” Freuchen said. “Ve should think about finding cover and making camp early, just to be on the safe side before everything gets too vet.”

Chou nodded her agreement.

We quickly found a spot for the night in the twisted roots of an enormous oak, laid down our packs, and set about collecting dry wood for a fire. This part of the Everwood hadn’t seen any rain in quite a while judging by how brittle everything was. We quickly gathered a pile of tinder and fuel, and within a couple of minutes, Albert had a fire burning.

The forest darkened as more clouds blotted out what little light remained. Not long after, the first flash of lightning illuminated the canopy, and thunder crashed across the heavens, loud enough to make us all flinch and silencing every other creature. The pitter-patter of the first raindrops hitting the leaves above us quickly turned into a hiss as the storm let loose its deluge.

Freuchen flinched as a trickle of water dropped from above and down his neck with perfect precision. He cursed, smiled at us, and shifted a couple of feet to his right. Chou placed her canteen under the tiny waterfall and filled it. We all did likewise.

“I think it best if I shut down early tonight and conserve energy,” Silas said, sitting cross-legged beneath the tree. Each night, the robot lost portions of his memory. Soon after we’d met him, he started jotting down the day’s activities in his digital language. He’d just updated the slate on which he’d written today’s log, and handed it to me. “If there’s nothing more, I wish you all a safe night.” His eye-bar dimmed and vanished.

Lightning flashed every few seconds, briefly illuminating the forest around us. The thunder which followed pounded our senses and cowed the three of us into silence as the storm inched slowly over us. I remembered being told as a kid that you should never shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm, but we didn’t have much choice seeing as the Everwood was the only shelter for hundreds, if not thousands of miles around us.

It lasted a little more than twenty minutes, finally moving away almost as quickly as it had arrived. By then, evening was fast approaching, and it would have been pointless to break camp.

Slowly, the silence that had descended over the forest was replaced as, one by one, the hidden life within it found its voice again.

We settled into our usual routine. After we’d eaten, we decided the order which we would stand watch, then chatted quietly amongst ourselves while we waited for the aurora. The day’s trek had been particularly hard on us. The ground we traveled over was covered in giant ferns and bracken, which had made walking twice as tricky. If you rubbed up against a leaf at just the right angle, those things could give you the equivalent of a nasty paper cut. Even after the enervating effects of the aurora healed the wounds and carried away the aches and pains of my body, my mind remained exhausted. After wishing everyone a peaceful night, I curled up next to the fire and fell asleep quickly and deeply.

* * *

I was awakened by Chou, roughly shaking my shoulder.

“Get up, Meredith,” she said, panic in her voice. “Everyone, wake up now.”

My eyes opened. “What’s going on?” I mumbled as Chou moved from Albert to Freuchen, shaking them just as violently as she had me. Dawn illuminated the forest to the east, its orange glow flickering between the trees. But if it was morning, why did I still feel exhausted?

“Why’d didn’t you wake me?” I asked, confused as to why Chou had let me sleep through my guard duty.

“There’s still an hour or so until dawn,” Chou said, stopping to throw first my backpack to me, then Freuchen’s and Albert’s to them. “It’s a forest fire, and its heading our way.”

Rubbing my eyes, I looked again to the east. The light I had mistaken for morning’s approach flickered and jumped. Chou was right, it was fire. And it was getting closer too; I was sure of it.

“Shit!” I hissed.

“It must have been the lightning,” Albert said.

“Silas!” I yelled at the robot, still sitting cross-legged beneath the tree.

He woke up. “Greetings children of Earth—“

“Silas, stop! Read this.” I held the slate in front of his eyes, my other hand tapping impatiently against my thigh as every second seemed to stretch to minutes.

“Thank you, Meredith.”

“No time to fully explain,” I continued. “Listen, there’s a forest fire heading our way. We need to get out of here now.”

Silas looked to where I pointed.

“You are correct,” he said. “We should evacuate this area immediately.”

Freuchen swept Albert up into his massive arms, and we took off as quickly as we could, which wasn’t anywhere near as fast as we needed to, given the terrain. But the last thing we needed now was for one of us to put our foot in a hole or a burrow hidden beneath the groundcover of ferns and break an ankle.

“Our only hope is to outrun it,” Chou said, the same level of concern I had heard in her voice when she woke me still there, which made me even more nervous than I already was.

From behind us, something crashed out of the undergrowth, and I had a second to yell a warning as three giant deer careened past us, narrowly missing Freuchen and Albert. Other animals followed behind them, their natural fear of us overtaken by the fire. In the high branches, I heard the panicked calls of birds and other canopy-dwellers taking flight as the first clouds of smoke moved through their home.

Glowing embers floated, pushed along by a hot breeze that had sprung seemingly from out of nowhere. With it, came the pungent, acrid smell of fire, stinging the back of my throat with every breath I took. I looked back and immediately wished I hadn’t. The fire was much closer. Close enough that I could see its flames clawing at the trees. Between us and it, smaller fires were sprouting up, the wind-borne embers igniting the dry wood and dead leaves that covered the forest floor.

“If we don’t pick up the pace, it’s going to catch up with us,” I said. “Come on!”

“Follow the animals,” Albert yelled. “Follow them.”

Freuchen said, “I think Albert is right. Look at the direction they are taking.”

Rather than running directly away from the fire, the deer and other forest critters were taking an acute route. The kid was right. Maybe they knew something we didn’t. And perhaps that unknown could save us.

With no other options available, we took off at a sprint, hoping luck would guide our footsteps away from any hazard obscured by the bracken. The sound of our steps and panting breath was blotted out by a growing crackling, hissing roar. I could feel the heat of the fire’s approach against the exposed skin of my neck.

Burning leaves and ash floated all around us now in a mocking imitation of the lifesaving pixie dust. I batted at an ember that landed on my neck, scorching my skin.

More deer exploded from the forest; their eyes wild with terror as they careened past us. Another followed behind, this one’s fur alight in multiple spots.

A high-pitched squeal filled the air, unlike anything I had ever heard before, and I glanced behind me, expecting to see another burning animal. Instead, I saw a vortex of fire, fifty feet high—a mini-tornado of flame, whirling from side to side, igniting anything it touched. Behind it, the primary fire engulfed trees like the breath from some ancient dragon. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe, the intense heat and smoke choking the oxygen from the air.

“Faster!” Chou urged.

I tried, but my head was swimming; my eyes were filled with tears from the stinging smoke, and my legs felt like they had turned to jelly.

“I’m not going to make it,” I said, my voice raspy and barely recognizable.

Then Chou was beside me, her hand on my elbow, urging me forward. “Yes, you are!”

“I... don’t... think... I... can,” I said.

“You must,” Chou replied, her grip on my elbow tightening as she urged me forward. “The future of the world depends on you.”

“Over there! I think there’s a clearing,” Freuchen yelled out, suddenly angling off to his right, unable to point as he still held Albert close to his chest with both hands. Freuchen’s bulk hid whatever he had seen from me, but Chou guided me stumbling after him, and ran right into Freuchen’s back as he came to an abrupt stop.

Ahead of us, something huge and not natural to the forest rose up from a bed of crushed and broken trees. I could barely see through my watering eyes, but as we drew closer, I began to make out details. A wall of metal painted red and made up of panels held together by the largest rivets I’d ever seen. An enormous propeller, easily twice as tall as Silas, a second next to it, and then a third. It was the keel of a ship, my exhaustion-fogged mind realized, and a huge one at that. My eyes followed the curve of the hull up and up and up. The top disappeared in the smoke billowing around us like fog.

A sudden gust of hot air blew past us, momentarily parting the smoke like curtains, and I caught a brief glimpse of two words painted one above the other in golden yellow across the curve of ship’s stern: Liverpool, the lower word read, and above that in four-foot-high letters Titanic.

Three

“You have got to be kidding me,” I managed to splutter before Chou pulled me away. She pushed me to the right side of the ship, placing the legendary liner between us and the oncoming fire. Now I had a clear view of precisely what we had stumbled into.

The ground around the enormous ship’s keel had been kicked up in an earthen wave. For fifteen feet in all directions, the trees had been reduced into nothing more than matchsticks. Those just outside the perimeter had been snapped in two and now lay at odd angles, slowing us as we clambered over their splintered trunks.

The liner must have arrived at the same time as we all had. Only a small amount of new vegetation grew around the edges of its keel. Additionally, there was no sign of rust or damage to indicate it arrived any earlier. In fact, it looked like it had just rolled out of the dock. Brand new.

“Ve must find a vay in,” Freuchen said. “If ve can get inside, ve can shelter until the fire moves past us. It’s our only hope.”

Behind us, several of the dead trees we’d just climbed over ignited into flame. Like some unstoppable monster, the main fire would not be far behind.

“It broke in two,” I gasped.

“Vat?” said Freuchen.

“The Titanic, in my universe, when it sank, it broke in two. We need to find where the break is.”

“Silas,” Chou said, “run ahead and see if you can find us a way in.”

“Of course,” said Silas, then took off, vanishing into the wall of smoke surrounding us while we stumbled blindly onward. He reappeared thirty-seconds later, bounding over the fallen logs that blocked our way as though they weren’t even there. “Meredith was correct,” he said. “There is a fissure large enough for us to enter the ship just ahead. Quickly, follow me.”

With renewed energy, we followed behind the robot as best we could.

“Here,” Silas yelled, the roar of the fire deafening again as it closed in on us. Silas stopped and pointed toward a gash running from the ship’s keel all the way up through each floor to the top deck. The opening was about ten feet wide, and as I looked into it, I saw buckled metal supports and broken floors. Pieces of furniture and equipment hung from the lip of each shattered level like internal organs. Some of the debris had fallen out and lay scattered around the opening.

“Quickly,” Silas yelled, “there is no time left.” He leaped up and grabbed ahold of a piece of metal that had been the floor of a corridor, pulled himself up, then turned and reached down for us. One after the other, he drew us to him until we were all safely inside.

Coughing and spitting gobbets of black soot, we moved up the corridor before collapsing to the carpeted floor. We lay there, panting, breathing in the deliciously cool air of the ship’s interior.

“We must keep moving,” Silas said. “Upward, We must move upward. The dead and broken trees around the perimeter of the ship will keep the fire from reaching the upper portions of the vessel.” A dense black and gray cloud of smoke was already flowing into the corridor, rising slowly toward us. The Titanic was sinking again, but this time she was being swallowed up by smoke.

We dragged ourselves to our feet and followed Silas as he progressed along the corridor. Beyond the metal bulkheads, I heard the fire roaring, heat already beginning to radiate into the corridor.

“Ve vill be cooked like beef in an oven if ve stay here,” Freuchen said.

“Up,” Silas repeated. “We must try to get above the fire.”

“There’s a maintenance stairvell,” Freuchen yelled, pointing to an opening in the left wall. We staggered toward it and began climbing the metal steps toward the upper decks.

“Keep going,” Chou insisted.

Finally, three decks later, weary and footsore beyond words, we stepped out into a door-lined hallway. Each door had a set of gold numbers on them, which I assumed meant they were cabins. First-class, too, judging by the luxurious carpet, exquisite sconces on the wall, and miniature chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Freuchen lowered Albert to the floor, then fell onto his back, chest heaving while wiping black soot from around his nostrils.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, leaning against a wainscoted wall while I tried to catch my breath.

He nodded. “I believe I vill live.”

Even Chou seemed spent. She sat next to me, her usually pristine white clothing and cloak smudged with black and stained gray here and there from the smoke.

“Do you think we’re high enough?” I asked, sliding down the wall until my butt hit the floor next to hers.

“I believe so. For now, at least,” Silas said. “My thermal sensors indicate the heat is being dissipated sufficiently through the ship’s hull to no longer be a threat to us at this time.” His eye-bar tilted upward. “I do not see any sign of fire above us either.”

Exhaling slowly, I wiped soot from my lips with the back of my hand. I took a mouthful of water from my canteen and swilled it around then spat it out. It came out black.

We rested for a while, none of us saying a word, my mind finally able to take in where I was. I was on the Titanic. I let that thought sink in for a moment if you’ll pardon the pun. So many weird things had happened to me since arriving on this far-flung future version of Earth. So many in fact that I really shouldn’t be surprised to have literally run into the wreck of the most famous liner ever in the middle of a forest.

Freuchen sat up, placing both hands on the floor behind him. “Vy do you...” He coughed, spat a ball of black crud onto the carpet. “My apologies. She is such a vundrous beast, no? In my timeline, it vas just a few months ago that she sank. But vy on earth do you think the Architect vould bring the Titanic here?”

“Perhaps you should ask Silas,” I said.

“While I do not know the precise reason this vessel was brought here, I do know that the Architect targeted specific caches of equipment, artifacts, supplies, and resources that candidates would find useful. It would be expected that some of those caches would be recovered from the site of unfortunate disasters such as this.”

“So, the Architect is into recycling?” I said, turning to the robot.

“Yes, after all, it would be a terrible waste of resources to simply leave them to decay.”

I was beginning to feel better, so I got to my feet, then helped Chou up too. “Let’s see what’s behind...” I paused to check the embossed number on the nearest cabin, “...door number C-79, shall we?” I said, reaching for the ornate doorknob. It turned easily in my hand, and I pushed it open.

“Wow!” I said, stepping inside. The room was a complete shamble; broken glass lay next to a mirror frame. The king-sized mattress hung half-off the bed, a high-backed easy chair lay on its side, and pieces of broken crockery were scattered all over. But the workmanship of everything was exquisite, and it wasn’t hard to see that the room had indeed been first-class accommodation. An ensuite bathroom adjoined the main cabin. On the opposite wall was a porthole. Beyond it, I saw nothing but smoke and the orange glow from outside.

Freuchen approached the porthole and looked out. He shook his head slowly. “The leading edge of the fire has moved past us, but it looks like hell out there. But you are correct, Silas, the flattened trees beneath us have kept the fire from reaching the ship.”

The rest of us crowded around the porthole. Clouds of smoke billowed past the window. From this elevated position, I could see the brighter line of the fire’s leading edge moving away, just as Freuchen had said. It stretched for miles on a rough path. Everything behind it was aflame, burning brightly but with less intensity.

“There was no way we would have outrun that,” I said.

Chou nodded her assent. “Once again, chance has smiled on us,” she said.

“Chance or perhaps by design?” I said, not even trying to calculate what the probability was of a safe refuge of this magnitude having been randomly set down here.

“You think the ship vas placed here on purpose? By the Architect?” Freuchen said, both caterpillar-like eyebrows raised.

“Perhaps,” said Chou. “The odds would seem too great for us to have simply stumbled upon it accidentally.”

“Vell, vether by good luck or design, ve are not getting out of here tonight. Ve are going to be stuck here until the fire dies down.”

“Maybe we should rest for a while, then explore?” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be much water damage that I’ve seen, which is weird. And if that goes for the rest of the ship, there have to still be supplies onboard. Maybe something we can use?

“That is a good idea,” Chou said.

I wondered how many historians would have given their first-born to be in my shoes right now. This was the Titanic! To have the chance to see firsthand the actual ship behind the legend was an amazing opportunity.

“Vat I vould not give for a Turkish Bath right now,” Freuchen mumbled.

I nodded at the adjoining bathroom. “Maybe the faucets still work,” I said, jokingly.

Freuchen walked into the bathroom and turned on one of the taps. There was a pop-clunk and then the unmistakable sound of water gushing into the porcelain sink.

“No way!” I said, rushing to his side.

“Yes vay,” Freuchen deadpanned. He placed a metal plug into the sink and watched it fill with water. “There must be some kind of gravity-fed vater reservoir connected to the plumbing system. The fact that it is still vurking is another stroke of good luck.” He picked up two large white towels from the floor, shook them out, then hung them over the bathtub.

“Ladies first,” Freuchen said, retreating into the main room and closing the door behind him.

I stripped out of my clothes and dumped them on the commode. They stank of smoke and sweat. I turned and looked at myself in the ornate mirror above the sink. Every inch of me was covered in dirt and soot; even my hair looked more brown than red, but at least I looked like me, something I hadn’t been able to say for what felt like a very long time. In a wooden cabinet next to the sink, I found several bars of paper-wrapped soap and began working on scrubbing away the grime. The water was cold but felt wonderful against my skin. I was halfway to being clean when there was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Meredith, I have something for you,” Freuchen’s muffled voice said.

I hid behind the door and cracked it open an inch. Freuchen stood several feet away, his head turned in the opposite direction for modesty’s sake, his arm outstretched to me.

“I think these should fit you,” he said and handed me a set of men’s pants and a thick polo-necked sweater. “Ve found them in the next cabin. The water is vurking in most of the cabins in this corridor. Chou and the boy are cleaning up in them, so take your time. Now, if you vill hand me your clothes, I vill wash them for you.”

I laughed and thanked him. “You are a man of many talents, Mr. Peter Freuchen,” I said, as I placed my soiled clothing into his outstretched palm.

“It is my pleasure,” he said, then turned and left me to my business.

I finished my ablutions and slipped into the clothing Freuchen had found for me. The material was itchy against my skin but comfortable enough and so much better than the alternative.

When I stepped into the main cabin, Freuchen and Albert were already back. Our clothes, still dripping, hung from hangers against the ship’s bulkhead to dry. Chou had even abandoned her seemingly indestructible clothes.

Albert wore only a man’s sweater, so large it came down to just below his knees. Freuchen wore a pair of pants far too short for him and a long leather coat that was also too short for his arms. Chou showed up a minute after me, rocking a man’s frock coat and wool pants.

“Well, don’t we all just look fabulous,” I said, laughing.

“Needs must ven the devil drives,” Freuchen said, good-humoredly.

Albert giggled and flushed red. Chou raised her eyebrows and shook her head slowly.

Silas said, “I must remind you that I am running on limited power. I should position myself near the porthole to gather as much of the available light as possible and place myself in standby mode. Is that acceptable?”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

Despite only getting maybe four hours of sleep after the aurora last night, running for your life has a way of blowing the cobwebs from your mind. I had utterly forgotten that Chou had roused us before dawn. “Absolutely, Silas. Go ahead.”

The robot positioned himself so the light that came through the porthole would hit the maximum area of his energy-collecting coating, then shut down.

Despite the invigorating energy of the aurora, we humans also needed rest, if we were to stay on our toes until the fire burned itself out. “Maybe we should get a little rest while our clothes dry?” I suggested.

Freuchen nodded. “Ve should stick together for safety. You and Chou and Albert take the bed. I’ll be fine in this.” He righted the easy chair from where it lay on the floor and settled himself into it. Chou repositioned the mattress back onto the bedframe, then we climbed onto the bed, Albert sandwiched between Chou and me.

I stared up at the ceiling awhile, my mind wrangling with the reality that I was now a first-class passenger aboard the Titanic.

If I remembered correctly, the Titanic had been on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York when she’d sunk, at least in my version of the universe. But her wreck hadn’t been discovered until sometime in the ‘80s, which meant that this Titanic couldn’t be the one from my universe. It had to be from a parallel world where the wreck was never discovered. And I hadn’t seen any water damage which meant she’d either never sunk, or the Architect had transported her here before the sea reached this deck, but who knew what the rest of the boat was like?

An hour passed, then another, and I drifted along the fine line between sleep and wakefulness, listening to Albert’s puppy-snore and the occasional creak from Freuchen’s chair as he shifted position.

Though she tried to be quiet, I heard Chou rise from the bed. I sat up too. Light streamed in through the portal, enveloping Silas in orange and casting a shadow across the breadth of the room. Chou silently passed me her canteen, and after a couple of gulps, I handed it back to her.

Freuchen’s eyes fluttered open. He stretched, stood up, and checked our clothing. “Dry as a bone,” he announced, tossing them to us.

Chou immediately began to undress. She wore nothing beneath her borrowed clothes.

A mortified Freuchen turned and stared at the opposite wall, the back of his neck flushing as bright red as his face surely was. Chou didn’t seem to notice or care.

“I’m a little bit more modest,” I said and walked into the bathroom to change. When I came back, Albert was awake and dressed, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

Freuchen was re-entering from the corridor, buttoning up his shirt. “Vell then,” he announced, “now that ve are all decent again, who is up for an adventure?”

“I have a sneaking suspicion,” I said to Chou, as we followed Freuchen back into the corridor, “that one of these days, those are going to be the last words of our species.”

* * *

Wisps of smoke floated near the ceiling, caught in the beams of the flashlights we’d liberated from the Nazis back on Avalon. We followed the corridor toward the bow, past cabin after cabin. I don’t know about anyone else, because they didn’t say anything, but I found it eerie, wandering through this empty ship, despite its almost pristine condition. And I still couldn’t stop wondering what had happened to the passengers. I would have expected to have seen some kind of a sign that someone had managed to make it here alive, but like I said, apart from the obvious external damage that had allowed us to get inside and the disheveled state of the rooms, there was no indication that this Titanic had even spent a minute beneath the waves.

“Can you imagine the people who must have been traveling on this ship?” I asked, peeking into an open cabin. The room was just as much of a mess as the one we had left Silas in. Women’s clothing was scattered across the floor, and, miraculously, next to an empty champagne bottle, lay two intact champagne flutes.

“Some vould say the very best of our time,” Freuchen said.

“You would not?” Chou said, one eyebrow raised.

“I prefer the company of the common man... or voman,” Freuchen answered. “Although, I vould very much like to have made the acquaintance of Captain Edwards, as I believe he vas given a rum deal after the disaster.”

We reached the end of the corridor and stepped out into a large open section of the ship.

“Oh, wow!” I whispered.

Ahead of us was the magnificent wooden structure known as the Grand Staircase.

“I had heard the Grand Staircase vas a masterful piece of vurk,” said Freuchen, running his hands over the smooth lacquered banister. “But I never imagined just how exquisite.”

I craned my neck over one banister. The staircase swept up to the deck above, then down below us, and down again for several more decks.

“Which way do you think?” I asked.

“I have no knowledge of this vessel,” said Chou, “but you and Freuchen seem very familiar with it, so I will leave it to your judgment.”

“Vell, if ve could locate one of the dining halls or perhaps the crew kitchen ve might be able to find preserved food or rations?”

I nodded. “Sounds good.”

Freuchen said, “I believe the first-class dining hall is on B-Deck.”

“Up it is then,” I said, smiling.

“Vait a minute. The purser’s office is open,” Freuchen said before we could take a step. He was pointing back in the direction we’d come from to a recessed alcove I’d somehow missed. A set of wooden roll-up shutters was half-pulled down to an ornate teak counter. Behind the bar, a pigeonhole cabinet took up the back wall, letters and documents still in some of the slots. Adjacent to the counter, a door stood ajar, the word PURSER written in large black letters across the frosted glass.

“It might be vorth taking a look,” Freuchen said. “The first-class passengers kept a lot of valuables in there.”

“Really?” I said, surprised that Freuchen would take an interest in anything of value.

He must have caught the surprise in my voice because he clarified by saying, “Ve may find something ve can use to barter vith ven ve find other people.”

I felt my face bloom red, embarrassed that I’d doubted my friend. Instead of offering an apology, I smiled, shook my head, and walked toward the open door.

The room held three desks with accompanying office chairs and a large filing cabinet. But what was of interest to us were the three large metal safes set against the far bulkhead. There were no combination locks on any of them, just a keyhole and a brass handle. All were closed.

Freuchen tried the handle of the first, but it was locked. I tried the second with the same result. Albert tried the third handle, and, to all our surprise, the heavy steel door swung open.

The safe had four shelves and multiple compartments. Most were filled with rolls of US cash, legal documents, and other now worthless documents.

“Here, take a look at vat is in here,” Freuchen said, handing me an embellished gold-plated jewelry box. I flipped the lid. The box contained five rings and a beautiful diamond necklace, all obviously worth more than most people probably made in a lifetime back then. I handed the box to Albert.

“There you go,” I said to the boy. “You’re now an official millionaire.”

Albert smiled broadly and began to go through the box.

Meanwhile, Freuchen had handed Chou a hand-sized satin pouch. She undid the drawstring fastening and pulled out a beautiful diamond-and amethyst-encrusted gold necklace.

“Put’s the Heart of the Ocean to shame,” I whispered.

Chou looked at me oddly and said, “As Freuchen mentioned, this will make a fine bartering item. Several if we break it apart.”

I winced at the idea of destroying such a beautiful piece of art, but she was right.

Several more pouches followed, each containing more stunningly excessive jewelry than the previous. When we were finished, we had a pile of precious stones and metals that was probably worth a half-a-billion dollars in my time.

“Hey,” I said, “what about that?” I pointed to the bottom shelf of the safe. Leaning against the back wall was a leather bag, the size of a laptop computer. Freuchen reached in and handed it to me. I unzipped it and pulled out a wooden case.

“What is it?” Albert asked.

“I think,” I said, as I turned the case over, “it’s a... yes, it is a book.” The wooden outer casing was just to protect the tome held within. I tilted it so I could see the spine and read the embossed title aloud, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” I’d never heard of it, but apparently, Freuchen had judging by his gasp.

“Please, may I see it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said and dropped the encased book into his outstretched hands.

Ever so carefully, Freuchen removed it from its slipcase.

The cover was stunningly beautiful: three peacocks stood atop a heart, tail-feathers spread wide. Flowers were intricately embroidered in gold-leaf and ink across the soft leather. On the back cover, a lute, inlaid using actual wood, was surrounded by more intricate embroidery.

“It is a book of ancient quatrains by the Persian astronomer-poet of the title, translated by Edward Fitzgerald. I had read about it in a newspaper before the Titanic left on its maiden voyage, but never had I thought I vould actually place my hands on it. Look.”

Freuchen reverently flipped the book open to a random page, and now it was my turn to gasp in astonishment. The pages of the book were even more intricately inlaid with gold and...

“Are those rubies?” I asked, pointing at the small stones embedded within the illustration in their own gold settings upon the page.

Freuchen nodded, flipped the page. “And diamonds.”

“Wow!” I said, then added, “I know someone who would like that.”

Freuchen smiled. “I vas thinking the very same thing.”

“Edward,” said Albert.

“Yes,” I said.

“Vell, I think it vould be a vunderful gift for the man ven ve make it back to Avalon. Here, you hold on to it for him, Meredith.” Freuchen handed me the book, and I placed it back into its slipcover and leather bag then put it in my backpack.

Meanwhile, Chou had divided the other jewelry into three separate piles and placed each into one of the velvet bags.

“Better not keep everything with one person,” she said and handed us each a bag of loot. After another quick check of the room that turned up nothing, we left and headed back to the Grand Staircase.

* * *

We took the Grand Staircase up to B-Deck then followed a sign that indicated the restaurant was back in the aft section of the boat.

“If I remember correctly,’ Freuchen was saying, “there is a pantry attached to the first-class restaurant’s kitchen. Vith some luck ve vill—“

A man appeared from nowhere, materializing from thin air, his eyes wild with fear as he rushed down the corridor toward us. Chou was the first to react, leaping like a cat to her right, then dropping to a knee, her eyes locked on the stranger. I stood frozen, directly in his path, jaw almost to my knees as the man, dressed in a navy blue double-breasted jacket, with a white and black peeked cap stumbled toward me. In the second or so he remained visible, I saw terror written across his face but no recognition of our presence. It was almost as though we were invisible to him. I turned just in time to see him vanish again as though he had never been there.

Now the corridor held only me and my companions.

“What the ever-loving shit just happened?” I stuttered, looking to Freuchen. He stood unmoving, eyes as wide as proverbial saucers, his back pressed firmly against the wall, staring at the space where the sailor had just dematerialized.

“A ghost,” Albert whispered as if his voice might bring the man back. “I think the ship is haunted.”

“No,” Chou said, moving to the boy’s side, “not a ghost. Something... else.”

“Vat else could that have been other than a spirit?” Freuchen spluttered, his voice cracking.

“A hallucination. A projection. But no, most definitely not a ghost.” Chou knelt down to examine the carpet as though it might hold the secret to what had just happened, then stood again, slowly. “Did you notice anything about the corridor when the man appeared?”

Nothing sprung to my mind, but then my heart was still pounding so loudly in my chest I was surprised the others couldn’t hear it too.

“The lights,” Albert said. “The lights were all on.”

“The boy is right,” Freuchen said, regaining his composure. “The lamps in the ceiling were all aglow as if the power had been returned, but they went off again as soon as the apparition vanished.”

I had no recollection of any of the overhead lights being on. All I could conjure up of the encounter was the fearful look on the man’s face.

Chou continued to examine the air the man had walked through as if searching for something. Finally, she said, “Turn off your flashlights, please.”

“What? Why?” I said. I don’t believe in the supernatural. Still, despite Chou’s protestations, I was not sure that what I had just witnessed wasn’t actually a ghost. After all, it had done a pretty damn good impression of one, that was for sure. I thought it was reasonable that the idea of plunging us into complete darkness didn’t appeal to me one little bit.

“Please,” Chou insisted, turning off her own light.

Reluctantly, we all did the same.

“I really don’t see what we have to gain by standing in the darkness,” I said, my thumb nervously caressing my flashlight’s switch. Except, we weren’t in darkness. Not completely, at least. Suspended in the air between the ceiling and the floor were four irregularly shaped slits—fissures in the blackness. A faint, yellow light leaked from them. There was one at chest height just a few inches from me.

“Is it pixie dust?” I said, reaching out a tentative finger to touch the dimly glowing hole.

“Stop!” Chou said, grabbing my hand, while gently moving it away from the fissure.

“Not pixie dust then,” I said, gulping.

“No, not pixie dust.” Chou inhaled slowly and deeply. “I believe,” she said, her voice just above a whisper, “that some kind of temporal anomaly has taken place here in this corridor. Perhaps a residual effect of the process the Architect used to translocate us here. Look, lean in closer, and tell me what you see. But don’t, under any circumstance, touch it.”

“Why shouldn’t we touch them?” Albert asked, looking sideways at her.

“The results of our reality combining with the other universes would be... unpredictable.”

“By ‘unpredictable,’ do you mean the end of the universe? Everything goes boom, don’t cross the plasma streams kind of ‘unpredictable?’” I said.

“No, no,” Chou answered, slowly circling the nearest anomaly, its light painting one side of her face, then the other. “But the probability is that the stress exerted on the membrane between the two realities is fragile. If it breaks, a large part of that other corridor would be pulled into this reality.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, isn’t that what the Architect wanted to happen?” I said.

“Yes, but the temporal aperture the Architect would have used to bring us or this ship into this reality would have been scaled accordingly. In this instance, I believe the result would be the equivalent of forcing a large volume of water under immense pressure through a hose. Matter from the other universe would be compressed to the size of the aperture and would explode into our reality. It would cut through everything and anyone in its way.”

“Oh-kay,” I said. I leaned in until my eye was six inches away from the bright line. I gasped. Through the hole in the darkness, I saw the corridor. But the ceiling lights, dark in our world, glowed then dimmed like the power was being turned slowly up and down. Men and women rushed along the corridor, dressed in suits and dresses. Every one of them looked terrified.

By the time I had stepped away from the aperture to make way for Freuchen, Chou had moved on to the next, this one about four feet away and close to the floor. She dropped down onto her chest and edged slowly toward its glow.

“Here, come and look at this,” she said, rolling aside so I could lie down beside her.

I edged closer. I was looking at the same deserted corridor. The lights glowed strongly now, with no sign of fading in or out. One of the cabin doors opened, and a waiter who looked like he could have worked in some high-end Manhattan restaurant stepped out of the room with a silver tray in one hand. He said something I couldn’t hear to whoever was still in the cabin, smiled courteously and nodded, then reached and closed the door behind him. He took a couple of steps down the corridor, checked he was alone, then popped what looked like half of a bread bun into his mouth before walking on.

While all this was happening, Chou had moved to the next aperture, this one also at chest height. She moved aside as I stepped close to her. The version of the corridor I saw through it was awash with water and tilted at a disorienting angle. Only one lamp still worked. Though, it stuttered—off more than it was on, which gave the corridor a terrifying and unnerving haunted house effect.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Freuchen said after he had looked through each of the tears and allowed Albert to carefully do the same. “It appears to be this very corridor, but each seems to be experiencing a very different reality.”

Chou said, “I believe that this is not the Titanic...this is multiple Titanics. Or at least many potential Titanics. The Architect must have established connections between this world and numerous alternate universes. In some, the ship may have sunk. In others, it may never have at all. The Architect would have to have established a temporal connection with these alternate universes to identify whether the disaster had taken place or whether the ship sailed on, its passengers blissfully unaware of the fate they had avoided. For some reason, some of those connections have never disengaged.”

“But where did the sailor come from?” Albert asked.

“Perhaps our presence caused his appearance,” Chou answered.

“But why on Earth would the Architect be so interested in the Titanic?” Freuchen pondered aloud.

Chou thought about it. “Perhaps there was something significant about this ship.”

“Or, someone,” Freuchen added.

“Oh, God. You don’t think Candidate One was aboard, do you?” I said.

Chou shook her head. “That does not seem likely to me, Meredith. But I would imagine there would have been numerous well-educated people, along with experts in many fields who would have perished when the ship sank.”

“Of course,” I said. “It would have been a fantastic resource for the Architect to have brought here.”

“And that vould make it a prime target for the Adversary, too,” Freuchen added.

“So, I guess the Architect and the Adversary must have gotten into some kind of a struggle that resulted in what we’re seeing here in this corridor. But that still doesn’t explain what happened to the passengers and crew.”

“Perhaps those who made it through vandered off into the Evervood?” Freuchen said.

“Seems like the most likely answer,” I said, but that still didn’t feel right. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something we weren’t seeing.

“Ve should continue,” said Freuchen.

Chou nodded. “Yes, just be careful. And I’d suggest that we keep only my flashlight activated. That way we will see any other anomalies, should they exist.”

She weaved her way between the apertures, and we carefully followed behind. Soon, we passed a narrow corridor connecting the port side of the ship to the starboard. Chou stopped and shined her light into it. A door was labeled ‘crew access.’ She pushed it open and leaned in, moving her light up and down, illuminating a metal stairwell similar to the ones found in modern apartment buildings.

“It vould probably be used by the crew to move through the ship vithout being seen by the gentry,” Freuchen commented.

Chou allowed the door to swing shut again

“The restaurant is this vay,” Freuchen said, pointing to a sign with an arrow on the wall. “The pantry vill be somevere vithin it.”

Chou elbowed through a pair of red baize-covered swinging doors, holding the left one open while the rest of us stepped through. She shone her light into the larger room beyond, illuminating several overturned wing-backed chairs that lay around a still upright mahogany table. We followed a short teak-paneled corridor through another set of double doors and found ourselves standing in what had been, according to Freuchen, one of several dining halls or restaurants. The room was littered with overturned tables and chairs, broken cutlery, and discarded utensils.

“That vay,” said Freuchen, pointing past what had obviously been a buffet station on our right to another set of doors. Once through the doors, we found ourselves in a room with three huge cupboards, two oversized sinks, and an extensive cooking range. Freuchen threw open the doors to the nearest cupboard and flicked on his own flashlight. Instantly, his face lit up with a huge smile. He reached in and pulled out a brown paper bag about the size of a sack of flour. Darjeeling was written in extraordinarily neat cursive across it.

“Tea!” Freuchen said. “Finally, civilization has returned to this land.” He laughed heartily, unslung his backpack, and dropped the tea inside. “And sugar, too.” He pulled another bag from within the cupboard and lowered it into his bag alongside the tea.

“Is there anything more substantial in there?” I asked, unable to keep from smiling at his boyish excitement.

Freuchen shook his head. “Not in this vun. Try the other two.”

The second cabinet held masses of flour and other baking accessories. I took a single bag, weighed it in my hand.—it was easily ten pounds—and put it back on the shelf. There was no way to justify carrying that kind of weight when we had no way to make the bread I suddenly missed more than anything else from my old life.

“Oh, imagine a sandwich?” I said. “Or even just toast and jam?”

“Over here,” Albert said, stealing me from my reverie. He and Chou stood in front of the largest of the cupboards.

Freuchen ran his light beam over the shelves. They were packed full of canned goods: beef, pork, sardines, condensed milk. The list went on.

“We should take as much as ve can comfortably carry,” Freuchen said. “Ven Silas vakes up, ve can have him carry most of it for us.”

We packed our backpacks with our newfound bounty, to the point that Freuchen had to help me get mine over my shoulders. Feeling more positive than I think any of us had since leaving Avalon all those weeks ago, we turned and headed back through the doors leading into the main restaurant area... and froze.

In the corner opposite of where we stood, the room was no longer a disheveled mess. Three of the overturned tables now stood upright. Men and women dressed in beautifully tailored suits and long, elegant dresses and wide-brimmed hats sat at each of them, talking amongst themselves while eating off unbroken crockery. Servers bounced between the tables, disappearing in and out of view as they crossed some unseen boundary between our world and theirs.

They seemed totally oblivious to our presence.

“Look at that,” Freuchen said, pointing to a table that, in our reality, had been tipped on its side. But in this other version of the restaurant, the table was slowly being replaced by one in its upright position, its lacy white linen tablecloth and bone china all neatly placed and waiting for new diners.

“Their reality is expanding, replacing this version with its own,” Chou said. “Fascinating.”

Near the center of the room, another reality was emerging from the chaos. This time, the restaurant appeared to be empty, the chairs all neatly tucked into the tables, the lights dimmed.

“Vat the hell is going on?” Freuchen rumbled, his gaze shifting from one surreal scene to the other.

“I think our presence here is causing these other universes to attempt to exert their version of reality into this one.”

“What’ll happen when one of them succeeds?” I asked.

Chou said, “I would suggest that we leave this ship immediately.”

“What about the fire?” Albert asked.

“Don’t vurry, little man,” Freuchen said. “The fire has passed beyond us by now. Ve vill just have to be very careful.”

I turned to head toward the exit... and again, stopped dead.

Near the entrance to the restaurant, ten feet of water reached from the floor to the ceiling. We’d been so caught up in watching the passengers dining that we hadn’t noticed this third alternate version of reality silently slip into existence. It was like looking at a huge, slowly expanding fish tank minus the glass. The restaurant wall beyond that appeared absolutely normal. The water was expanding outward quickly, twice as fast, I guessed as the other realities, and as it expanded, everything that was pristine and new here, aged and crumbled. It’s as though it’s been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for decades, I thought.

“It’s going to cut off our exit,” said Freuchen.

He was right. In a few more seconds, the wall of water would grow enough to completely block the one and only way out of the restaurant. And if that happened, we’d be trapped in here with these three competing realities.

“Run!” Chou said and sprinted to the exit, ducking past the amorphous bubble of water.

Freuchen snapped up Albert and dashed for the shrinking gap between the water and the exit. I ran too, managing to slide past just as the expanding water connected with the smaller reality containing nothing but the empty version of the restaurant. The empty restaurant vanished, replaced by the same murky gray water. A large hole appeared in the far wall, ragged and rusted around the edges. Through it, I saw the Titanic’s decayed prow, everything in between it was corroded and broken. After subsuming that reality, the vast bubble of water began growing again.

“Come on!” Chou yelled, grabbing me by the hand and dragging me toward the staircase. As I turned, I saw the bubble of ocean water touch the oblivious diners’ reality and consume it entirely. Instantly, a wave of water exploded through the restaurant, filling the remaining space in seconds.

“Oh, crap!” I squeaked as the water rushed towards us. Everything it touched instantly turned to rot.

Chou, already at the fancy stairs, stopped briefly to check that the rest of us were following, then, two steps at a time, took the stairs down to C-Deck where we had first entered the ship, and where we had left Silas on standby in the cabin.

Freuchen, Albert, and I raced after her.

The water had already reached C-Deck, too, spreading through the rooms and corridor with frightening speed. Chou threw open our cabin door and yelled, “Silas, wake up.”

I stumbled into the cabin, pushed past Chou, fumbled for the slate, and thrust it in front of his eye-bar just as Silas said, “Greetings children of—“ It took him a couple of seconds to read the code from the slate.

“I don’t have time to explain, but we need to get out of here, right now. Come with us,” I yelled and dove into the corridor. The sound of Silas’ heavy footfalls behind me was the only acknowledgment I needed that he’d understood.

The water was less than ten feet from the door and closing in fast. The irony of being chased into this ship by fire only to be chased back out again by water was not lost on me.

Chou, Freuchen, and Alfred were already charging down the metal stairs, heading toward the split in the Titanic’s side.

Ahead, the opening we’d come through was now just one deck away. I saw Chou leap from the stairs, throwing herself through the fissure. She hit the ground and was instantly lost in a puff of gray smoke. I felt my heart seize... then start again as she reappeared, covered in gray ash—all that was left of the fallen trees around the mighty ship’s hull. She stood facing us with her arms outstretched. Freuchen realized what she was asking for and without a word to the boy, tossed a screaming Albert through the remaining space and into Chou’s waiting hands. She spun around, ran, and vanished from my sight just as Freuchen hit the ground next to them. He turned and looked back at me, fear in his eyes.

Out of the corner of my own eye, I saw the wall of water was an arm span to my right side now, so close I could see my reflection in its surface. I forced my eyes forward again and locked onto Freuchen’s face. I could tell from his horrified expression that he knew I wasn’t going to make it. It simply wasn’t possible to cover the twenty or so remaining feet before the water caught up with me. When it did, would I end up like the ship? I wondered. Or would I simply cease to exist like the other realities that had already fallen? It was all too—

I felt a metal arm wrap around my waist as Silas swept me up. Then we were flying through the air, and I caught a final glimpse of the pristine Titanic’s bow before it turned to rust and crumbled. The four enormous smokestacks bent and warped, decayed, and flaked away, turning the smoky air orange with rust particles. Rigging snapped, and the glass in the portholes cracked. Water gushed out of every space within the ship, spilling through before vanishing as the two competing realities finally synchronized, leaving nothing of the once-mighty liner but rot and rust and steel bones.

I hit the ground and heard a loud crack, like a thick length of wood snapping in two. Silas landed beside me, stumbled, and vanished into the gray fog of smoke that surrounded us. It stung my eyes and clogged my throat. I tried to breathe, but the hot air was just too thick with dust and ash. I felt consciousness fade in, then out... then I was surrounded by blackness.

* * *

“Meredith, vake up.” Freuchen’s voice pulled me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes to my three companions’ faces staring down at me. “Are you alright?” he said, his face twisted with concern.

Hot tears began to run down my cheeks as I tried to sit up, then fell back into the gray-white ash, grimacing in agony. “I… I think I broke my arm,” I moaned.

“Remain still,” Chou said, kneeling next to me. She gently rolled back the left sleeve of my top. I heard Albert gasp, and I craned my head to look, but Chou said, “Don’t look.”

“Too late,” I whispered as I caught sight of the three inches of white bone sticking out of the skin just below my elbow. I managed to bleat a surprised “Oh!” then I fell back into the darkness.

* * *

When consciousness returned, I was sitting upright, my back against the rusted hulk of the Titanic. My left arm was splinted with two thin pieces of metal and resting in a sling made out of somebody’s spare shirt. It still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch but not as bad as it had. After a tentative attempt to get to my feet, I found that moving didn’t add much to the pain.

“Sit back down,” Freuchen ordered. The rest of my friends were gathered around me, concerned smiles on every face.

“I showed them how to tie the sling,” Albert said, his smile broadening.

“I should’ve guessed,” I said, smiling back at him.

“How do you feel?” Chou asked.

“Like I just got hit by the Titanic,” I said, somewhat mirthlessly.

“I have performed a full scan of you,” Silas added, “and apart from some bruising, I do not detect anything more serious than your broken arm.”

I hadn’t had time to really take in my surroundings, but now that I did, all I saw was a wasteland of ash and burned wood. It was close to noon, judging by the sun, which was for the first time since setting foot on the mainland, fully visible in the smoke-swept sky.

“Do you think you can walk?” Chou asked. “We should try to make it back to the forest if we can.”

I nodded. “I think so. Could I get some water first, please?”

Freuchen knelt close to me and lifted his canteen to my dry lips. I drank deeply, swilling my final gulp around my mouth to try to get rid of the taste of smoke.

“Ready?” Freuchen asked when he put his canteen away.

“As I’ll ever be, I guess.”

He supported my good arm and helped me slowly to my feet. My teeth gritted against the knifing pain that ran up my left, and I took a couple of seconds to steady myself then said, “Okay, I’m good to go.”

Silas had both mine and Freuchen’s backpacks slung over his arm and carried them as though they were nothing. He led us through the gray wasteland that had been, until earlier this morning, verdant and lush forest. As we moved away, I took one last look back over my shoulder at the remains of the famous ship, unable to shake the sense of sadness that overcame me at such a thing of beauty being reduced to a decomposed pile of metal. Then another bolt of pain pulled my attention back to reality, and I trudged on with my companions.

* * *

In spite of Chou’s excellent first-aid, walking was a lot more painful than I thought it was going to be, especially when, after several hours, we crossed the edge of where the fire had finally burned itself out. Some trees still smoldered, but most were just singed, and past the first couple of rows, the Everwood lay undisturbed.

“Still feeling okay?” Chou asked me after we had covered a few more miles.

“Not really, but I’ll be okay,” I replied, not wanting to slow our progress any more than I already was. I comforted myself with the thought that, in a few more hours, the aurora would arrive and heal me.

Late afternoon, we made an early camp, and Freuchen and Albert settled me into a comfortable position before turning their attention back to the nightly routine of gathering wood and starting the fire.

“Vell, let’s see vat ve have in here, shall ve?” Freuchen said, good-heartedly as he rummaged through his backpack. He pulled out several cans of food we’d taken from the Titanic, opened them with his knife, and set them to warm on the edge of the fire.

“Here you are,” Freuchen said once they were heated.

I used my fingers to pull the oily meat from it, all while trying to banish the idea that I was eating half-billion-year-old chicken out of my mind.

Later, when the aurora illuminated the forest, I felt an immediate sense of relief as the pain of my broken arm evaporated. I had Albert slip the sling over my head, and we all watched in fascination as the pixie dust went to work on knitting my bone back into place. Then, they rebuilt and stretched the skin over the wound. When it was done, I flexed my newly-mended hand in front of my face.

“As good as new,” Freuchen whispered. Then, as a measure of how normal these incredible events had become for us, he threw a couple more branches on the fire and wished us all a good night’s rest.

Four

Two days later, the forest that had surrounded us since we’d stepped off the deck of the Alexa Rae finally faded behind us.

“You have got to be kidding me?” I said, stepping out into a wide clearing that ran like a band between the Everwood and the new challenge ahead. Honestly, I’d have been happy with another hundred miles of trees instead of what lay beyond the clearing—a mountain range that reached into the sky for several thousand feet. It stretched from north to south, horizon to horizon, like a granite backbone running across the land. The lower approach of the mountain swept upward in a gradual rise, gently enough, but then it rapidly grew steeper. Not an impossible climb but a dangerous one for sure.

“Maybe there’s a cave?” Albert said, his eyes screwed almost closed against the sunlight bouncing off the snow that covered the mountain from three-quarters of the way up the slope to the ragged saw-toothed ridge that was its peak.

“Perhaps,” Chou said, laying a gentle hand against the boy’s shoulder, “but I don’t think we have time to check.” She turned to me and said, “Can I have the binoculars?”

I unslung the binoculars from around my neck and handed them to Chou. Even without them, I could see the occasional stunted tree, bedraggled bush, or lonely weed jutting out of the otherwise barren rock, the only things to break up the dull gray monotony of the mountainside. Chou lowered the binoculars and pointed toward a spot about half-a-mile to the north.

“That seems to be the lowest part,” Chou said. “We should head for it.”

“Do you think we can make it to the other side before sunset?” I asked Freuchen. The idea of being stuck on the mountain overnight didn’t appeal to me, and he was the best judge of this situation given the numerous adventures he’d entertained us with each night at camp.

“I don’t see vy not,” he said. “It’s late morning; ve have plenty of daylight left.”

I sighed. “Well, it’s not going to climb itself, I guess.”

Freuchen smiled broadly. “Vunderful!”

* * *

We took a diagonal route up the mountain, rather than trying to climb straight up. The approach took a lot of the strain off our legs, but after a couple of hours of negotiating the boulder-strewn terrain, my thighs were throbbing, and my ankles ached. Freuchen, Chou, and of course, Silas seemed completely fine. Albert started to complain not long after we’d set off, his young legs simply not strong enough to take the exertion of climbing at such a steep angle for a prolonged length of time. So, Silas had offered to carry him, and now, the boy was cradled like a baby in the robot’s arms.

“I’m sorry, guys, but I need to take a break,” I said finally.

Freuchen nodded. “Good idea. Let’s get some food in us, too,” he said. “Ve should drink water. It’s easy to dehydrate at these higher altitudes.”

I sat on a flattish outcropping, stretched each leg to ease some of the tightness in the muscles, then took Freuchen’s advice and drank deeply from my canteen, then polished off some jerky. We’d reached the three-quarter mark, and from here on up to the summit, there was nothing but snow, ice crystals glittering on its surface. The air had been growing gradually colder, but now, as I looked at what we had left to climb, I gave an involuntary shiver.

“The snow’s going to make the rest of the trek very treacherous,” Freuchen said, eyeing the layer of white that covered the mountain like frosting on a cake. “Ve vill need to take our time.”

I opened my backpack and pulled out a thick woolen sweater Edward had given to me. I slipped it over my head and instantly felt more comfortable. Everyone but Silas and Chou did likewise. Chou just tugged the white cloak she wore more tightly around her, the two edges connecting by some unseen fastener, so the cloak became more like a poncho.

“That cloak’s not going to keep you very warm,” I said.

“It will suffice,” Chou assured me. I’d long ago learned that my friend’s clothing was far more sophisticated than it appeared, thanks to whatever futuristic super-material it was made of. That, plus Chou’s genetic enhancements, made her all but impervious to anything but extreme conditions. While I chewed on the last mouthful of my jerky, I took it all in. The forest stretched out behind us, green and lustrous, more like a single entity than a collection of the millions of trees I knew it to be. I watched the birds wheel and dive. Heard the calls of distant animals. Above, the sky was gray-blue and spattered with large white clouds that occasionally drifted in front of the sun, casting huge shadows across the scenery.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Freuchen said.

I nodded. “The Architect should have sent an artist.” But I don’t think even the most talented painter could have captured the magnificence of this view.

We set off again and didn’t stop until we reached the beginning of the snowpack. My leg muscles were still complaining, but the short rest had taken some of the dull edge off the pain.

“Be extra diligent from this point forvard,” Freuchen said from the head of the line we’d formed. “One wrong step and…” He whistled like a falling bomb while drawing the trajectory we’d take down the mountain with an index finger. “Don’t vant to end up a pancake, do ve?” He laughed uproariously as though he had just told the funniest joke ever, his coarse beard bobbing with each mighty guffaw. Then he turned and began to climb the six-hundred or so feet that remained between us and the summit.

I placed one tentative foot on the snow. It crunched beneath my boots, more like ice than the soft powder I’d skied on the one time I’d visited Mammoth for a long weekend back when I turned twenty-three. “Winter is coming,” I mumbled under my breath, in my best English accent, then crunched through the snow after my friends.

* * *

The mountain’s summit lay above us just a few more minutes’ climb. The gusting wind blew flurries of loose snow off the ridge, sending it swirling over our heads, forcing us to dip our heads against its stinging bite.

Freuchen stopped suddenly. He turned back to face us, smiling, then beckoned to Albert. Silas lowered the boy to the snow and walked protectively behind Albert as he high stepped to where Freuchen waited.

“What is it?” I asked.

Freuchen put a finger to his lips, then when Albert was close enough, he knelt and pointed at a large boulder half-covered in snow on our right and whispered, “Look, over there. Do you see them.”

I looked again and saw what Freuchen had spotted. Just below the boulder, almost invisible thanks to its pure-white fur, sat a fox, eyeing us cautiously. Then two cubs, no more than a few months old, I guessed, tumbled into view from behind the rock. They seemed oblivious to our presence as they playfully chased each other up and down the slope and round and round in circles. Their tiny yips of excitement were almost as enchanting as Albert’s gasp of wonder at their antics.

“They’re beautiful,” Chou said, a smile breaking the stone of her face.

“Vulpes Lagopus,” Silas said. “And they are, indeed, most beautiful.”

I could have stayed and watched them play all day, but the wind sliding off the ridge brought with it an uncomfortable drop in temperature that cut through even the thick sweater I wore.

“Best ve keep moving, I think,” Freuchen said, seeing Albert scrunch up as the icy wind passed over us.

* * *

With a final concerted effort, we made it to the top.

The rocks that formed the mountain’s ridge might as well have been an undulating wave of slabs jutting out at random angles. The slippery ice made it all but impossible to find a secure footing. Even Freuchen was having problems.

“I vish ve had brought some rope and tackle,” he grumbled.

“Allow me,” Silas said. The robot reached for one of the slabs, pulled himself effortlessly onto it, and sat there like he was riding a horse. His eye-bar scanned the opposite side of the mountain. “There is easier ground on this other side,” he said. He shimmied ten feet or so farther along the ridge, then swung his legs over to the opposite side, so only his upper torso was visible to us. Then he beckoned to us to come to him.

“Peter first, please,” Silas said, reaching two metallic hands down to him. Freuchen took them and allowed the robot to pull him up. He scrambled over the ridge and turned back to us. The Dane was shorter than Silas by a couple of feet but still more than tall enough that he could easily reach down and help Chou up and over the ridge.

I checked with Albert. “Ready?” I asked. The boy nodded. I picked him up with both hands beneath his armpits and offered him up to Silas, who pulled him over the ridge, then I took Freuchen’s hands and allowed him to help me.

A blast of wind stung my face with icy pinpricks, and I closed my eyes, waiting for it to die away. When I opened them again, I gave a gasp of amazement. Stretching out for as far as I could see, from horizon to horizon, was almost nothing but forest. It must have gone on for several hundred miles in every direction. Looming over all of it like the sword of Damocles, the collector was visible for the first time in all its amazing, terrifying, and unbelievable hugeness. It cast an enormous shadow that slowly moved like a sundial over the tops of the trees.

That first day, when I washed up on Avalon’s beach and I’d got my first brief look at this incredible edifice, I’d thought it was made up of facets…and I’d been right. The trunk was constructed from huge, irregular slabs of some translucent milky material, like pieces of a shattered mirror put randomly back together again. They glinted blindingly when the sun caught them. Miles above us, the collector’s cone-like bell spread out across the atmosphere like a lily pad on a pond. The trunk—miles across at its thickest point—swept down toward the earth, growing rapidly narrower before broadening again. As it neared the ground, it vanished into tightly-clustered rocks that rose above the trees at its base, oddly out of place in the sea of green surrounding it. Lines of energy moved and shifted within the collector’s trunk.

“It does not seem possible. How could something like that even exist?” Freuchen asked, his voice resonating with awe.

“I have no idea,” I replied, turning to look at Chou, who stood silently next to me, her eyes fixed on the distant structure.

“Look, over there,” said Albert. “Smoke!”

We’d been so distracted by the collector that we had failed to notice the five or six trails of smoke rising just a few miles to the northeast. I raised my binoculars and glassed the area.

“It looks like a settlement,” I said. “I can make out the roofs of a couple of buildings.” I passed the binoculars to Freuchen.

“I think you are correct,” he said.

“There are more, too,” Albert said. He pointed off into the distance at more streams of gray smoke, several miles from the first. “And over there,” he added, pointing further to the north where a single large plume of smoke twirled lazily upward.

“At least three separate camps,” Chou said.

“People,” I said, turning to look at my companions. “There are people.” I felt a thrill of excitement pass through me. We hadn’t seen anyone else since leaving Avalon, and I had secretly begun to wonder whether there was actually anyone else on this planet other than the few hundred souls who’d had the good fortune to end up on the island.

“How far away do you think the nearest settlement is?” I asked.

“Approximately four-and-a-quarter miles from the base of the mountain,” Silas said.

“Ve can make it by late afternoon if ve get a move on,” Freuchen said, and without another word began to climb down toward the forest.

“Silas, will you lead the way?” I asked. Despite the robot’s memory problems, his ability to navigate was second-to-none, and we were going to need it now we were back in the Everwood.

“Of course,” he said, and took his position at the front of the line.

* * *

The smell of wood smoke wafting between the trees told us we were close to the encampment we had spotted earlier from the mountain. Hunkering down behind the trunk of an oak tree, we plotted our strategy, keeping our voices low so they wouldn’t carry to the settlement.

“We need to be cautious,” Chou said. “We have no way of knowing who these people are or what their reaction to strangers might be.”

“Agreed,” Freuchen added. “I think ve should pursue the same strategy as ven ve returned vith Silas to the garrison.”

I nodded my agreement. “All of us wandering into that camp is going to set off alarm bells for them. We need to play it cool, and that means Silas needs to stay out of sight until we have a better idea of the kind of people we’re dealing with. No offense, Silas.”

“None taken,” the robot said.

“I will enter the settlement,” Chou said, as though she would not hear any argument.

I shook my head. “Nope. I’m the one who needs to go in. If these people are no threat, then great, but if there are any agents of the Adversary who recognize me, then it’ll be better they don’t know about you. In other words, I might need you to come save my ass.”

Freuchen said, “I think it vill look very suspicious; a lone woman traveling on her own. I vill go vith you.”

Chou nodded.

“I would certainly feel more comfortable knowing Peter was accompanying you,” Silas added.

I thought it over for a few seconds, then nodded my agreement. Freuchen was imposing enough to deter any straight-up attack but charming enough that if the people of the encampment were friendly, he would not be seen as an immediate threat.

“Okay,” I said, standing and looking to Freuchen. “I’m ready when you are.”

Chou shook her head. “I suggest we make camp here until morning so Silas is fully charged and will be able to assist if the need should arise.” She was right. It made no sense to enter the settlement tonight only to have Silas shut down until the aurora arrived. We would need him to help us escape if it came to that. Despite the robot’s aversion to violence of any kind, the mere presence of the enormous golden robot carried an awful lot of shock value and would, hopefully, scare the crap out of any attacker. They didn’t need to know he was a pacifist.

Five

It began to rain a few minutes after I woke. The first drops pitter-pattering against the forest’s canopy before proliferating into a cacophony of white noise. From my backpack, I pulled an oiled poncho that had belonged to one of the dead Nazi’s and slipped it over my head. Everyone else did the same, except for Chou, who just raised her hood.

“Okay, are we all clear on what the plan is?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over the deluge.

Silas stood in what had moments before been a pool of early morning sunlight, but which now was just a pool. “We will wait at this location. If you have not returned by this evening, we will continue to wait until after tonight’s aurora, then we will move closer so that we can ascertain whether you need our help. If you do not return by tomorrow evening, we will enter the camp under cover of darkness and locate you.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Chou still wasn’t happy. “I do not like the idea of waiting that long,” she said. “It leaves too much to chance.”

I shook my head slowly. “You need to give us time to feel these people out. The Architect only chose to bring those he thought were worthy, and somehow, I don’t think there’s much likelihood of that being a camp full of the Adversary’s people. We have to gain their trust and make sure that they’re trustworthy in return. And it’s going to take more than a morning to do that.”

Freuchen laid one of his big paws on my shoulder. “Don’t vurry. I vill take good care of her.”

Chou inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and nodded.

“Be careful,” Albert said, his brow furrowed with concern.

I smiled. “No need to worry about us, little man. We’ll be just fine.” I kissed him on the crown of his head and gave him a hug.

“Okay, let’s do this,” I said to Freuchen, who handed me my backpack. I slung it over my shoulders, and the two of us headed off through the trees in the direction of the encampment.

* * *

Freuchen and I pushed through the trees. The downpour had turned out to be little more than a squall and had already evaporated, leaving the air fresh and clean. It made following the smell of woodsmoke through the trees as easy as following a path. We walked in silence, communicating only with pointed fingers and nods when we thought we should change direction. I placed a hand on Freuchen’s shoulder and brought him to a halt, then pointed ahead of us to a spot just past a thicket of bushes. I leaned in close and whispered, “See him?”

It took Freuchen a second to spot the man sitting on the ground ahead of us, his back against a tree trunk, chin resting against his chest, obviously dozing. He was dressed in jeans and a wool sweater. Occasional puffs of mist escaped his nostrils. Cradled in the crook of his arm was an improvised spear like the ones Albert had made for us.

Freuchen whispered. “Perhaps now might be a good time to announce our presence. Ve don’t vant to startle him into doing something stupid.” I nodded my agreement but still jumped when Freuchen said, very loudly, “I once stalked a vale for six days along the coast of Greenland. I vas half-frozen to death and starving but there vas no vay I—“

The guard leaped to his feet, a look of shock and sleep-confusion on his face. He spun around a few times, then finally spotted us.

“Hey! You there, stop where you are.” His accent sounded Australian. He swallowed hard as he ran his eyes up Freuchen’s huge frame. The Dane had two feet of height on the guard and was twice as broad. “Who are you? Where did you come from?” the guard demanded.

“Hey there, stranger,” Freuchen said, raising his arms in a gesture of surrender (which I also did) and smiling amicably. “Ve are no threat. Ve are just two explorers washed up on the same shores as you.”

The guard was in his twenties, skinny, but savvy enough that he understood that Freuchen could snap him in two and use him as a toothpick if he wanted to. He projected a cocky bravado to hide his obvious fear while he eyed us both suspiciously. He said nothing for a moment, then advanced, his spear held out in front of him. When he was close enough, he reached for my sword, but I stepped backward.

Freuchen stared down at the guard. “Tsk, tsk, that does not belong to you, little man. Now vy don’t you take us to whoever is in charge and ve promise not to tell him you ver asleep at your post.”

The guard hesitated, then motioned with his spear back past the tree where he’d been asleep. “That way,” he said.

He waited for us to step past him, then followed.

* * *

The side of a log cabin, bigger than any of the garrison’s huts we had built on Avalon, materialized through the trees. I nudged Freuchen to draw his attention to it. He nodded to the left of the first where I saw a second cabin. Beyond that was a third and fourth. A man stepped out of the nearest cabin and disappeared into the trees, whistling to himself. Next, a woman appeared carrying a child clutched to her breast. She was dressed in a toga, her hair pulled up into a coil on her head. She glanced at us wide-eyed then continued on her way.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked the guard.

“To the Mayor,” he said.

“You have a mayor?” I said, but the Australian had gone quiet.

Stepping from between the first two huts, I had expected to see a camp similar to the layout of the garrison spread out through the surrounding forest. Instead, the ground sloped away then vanished altogether, revealing an opening to a vast pit two or three hundred feet across. The ground around the mouth of the pit had been cleared of trees and bushes, but a carpet of deep green moss still hung over the edge, undulating in the gentle breeze.

“That way,” the guard said, nudging us toward a set of roughly hewn steps that had been cut out of the earthen side of the pit.

We followed his command, but as my foot touched the first step, I came to an abrupt halt, gave a little gasp of surprise. From there, I could see that the pit was a hundred-plus feet deep. The stumps of trees that had grown along its sides showed where they’d been removed, then used to build numerous cabins and buildings in their place. I quickly counted thirty or so of these large buildings, twice the size of the garrison’s. Each was held in place by log stilts similar to homes I’d seen when I’d gone sightseeing through Hollywood Hills. At the bottom of the pit was a huge beautiful blue-green lake, fed by a waterfall that gushed from a fissure about three-quarters of the way up the northern wall. There were a lot of people milling around—at least several hundred that I could see. Some were weaving baskets from the reeds growing in clumps along the shore of the lake. Others were working on new buildings, or cooking meat over open fires and what smelled like bread in a row of six earthen ovens, or just standing and chatting amongst themselves. There was even a woman using a simple potter’s wheel to make clay urns or vases. A few faces turned our way as we followed the guard down the winding dirt path into the pit before returning their attention back to whatever they’d been doing. Every face smiled at us.

Freuchen and I smiled back. We exchanged a glance that said this is a good start.

About halfway down, the guard said, “That way,” nodding toward a path that ended at the door of a cabin. We did as he ordered and stopped outside the door. The guard edged past Freuchen and knocked hard on the door with his stick.

“Come on in,” a woman’s voice said from within—an American woman’s voice. The guard pushed the door open then ushered us inside.

The cabin was surprisingly clean. The logs that made up the walls gave it a countryfied feeling. The smell of sap and oak added to what was a relaxing atmosphere. Dust motes floated through the air of the main room with a wall on either side, partitioning off two more rooms. There were no doors in either doorway, so I could easily see into them. One was a bedroom, with two utilitarian wooden beds covered in what looked like brown fur. The other had a sectioned-off area with a row of shelves that held a collection of cans, tools, buckets, and other miscellaneous stuff that I guessed must have arrived with the town’s people.

A young woman sat at a table in the main room, eating a meal of leafy greens from a clay bowl. She looked like she was a few years older than me, her long blonde hair tied back in a bun. She had a calmness to her that made me instantly like her. Putting down her fork, she swallowed, smiled widely, and said, “Oh, guests! Welcome.”

“I found them in the forest, Mayor,” our guard said.

“Well done, Robert,” the woman answered, stepping around the table and walking toward us. Her blue eyes turned first to Freuchen then to me. “Do you speak English,” she asked, smiling.

“Ve do,” Freuchen said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

She tilted her head quizzically. “You’re American?” she said, with some evident surprise.

“Yes. California.”

Her smile grew wider. “What year?”

“2018.”

“Close enough to me,” said the woman with a wry smile, then after a slight pause added, “New York, by way of Denison, Iowa.”

I hadn’t noticed the large dog that had been asleep at her feet until it stretched, letting out a loud almost-howl of satisfaction and got to its feet, padding over to where the woman stood.

I offered my hand to the woman, “My name’s Meredith, and this is Peter.”

“I prefer just Freuchen,” Freuchen said.

The woman shook our hands in turn. “My name’s Emily,” she said, reaching down to stroke the large dog’s head, “and this is Thor. Welcome to New Manhattan.”

Six

“Please, have a seat,” Emily said, fetching two wooden stools from the bedroom and placing them in front of the table. “Are you hungry?” she asked once we were sitting.

“No, but I could use some water, please,” I said. Freuchen echoed my request.

“Of course.” She filled two mugs from a pitcher and handed them to us.

“Thank you,” I said, sipping from my mug. “This place is… amazing.”

Emily laughed. “It is, isn’t it? We were lucky to find it.”

“There are a lot of…” I almost said candidates, but caught myself in time, “people here. Did you all arrive together?”

Emily continued to smile but diverted. “Why don’t you two tell me your story first?” She sat back in her chair, her smile broadening.

Chou had anticipated we would be asked about where we were from and had advised us that we withhold all mention of Avalon and what had taken place there. So, before Peter and I left, we’d all agreed on a simplified story of our arrival.

“We arrived off the coast to the south,” I said, gambling that everyone else had also arrived similarly to us. “Freuchen pulled me from the water, and we’ve been looking for others since then.”

“You haven’t seen anyone else since that first day?”

“Some,” Freuchen lied, “but they mostly stayed avay from us, although I can’t think vy.” He gave a big friendly grin and stretched his huge frame.

Emily nodded silently. I couldn’t tell whether she believed us or not.

“The aurora and the pixie dust that first night were our first real signs that we weren’t on Earth anymore,” I said.

“Aurora? Pixie dust?” Emily looked confused, then gave a little laugh. “Oh, you mean the bliss.” She paused for a second, then added, “I think I prefer your names for it. Go on.”

I saw no need to tell her that, according to Silas, we were on Earth, or, at least, some far-flung future version of it, in some alternative dimension. That I would save for a time when we knew she could be trusted. Until then, we would let this play out, get a feel for what kind of a person Emily, and the rest of her people were, then decide on how much real information we would share.

I continued, “It kind of sealed the deal that whoever or whatever’s behind the Voice that asked whether we wanted to live or not... well... the probability is that they aren’t human. They must be incredibly advanced to have brought all of us here.”

Emily smiled.

“And that’s really it,” I said. “We’ve been traveling along the coast since we arrived. It was only when we were finally able to make it over the mountain range that we realized there were other… survivors.”

Emily stood and walked around to the front of the table. Then, sitting, she said, “And the sword and armor you’re wearing. Where did that come from?”

“Ve liberated it from a dead man,” Freuchen said, bluntly. “He no longer had any need for it.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Emily said. She silently looked us both over for several seconds. “Most of the people here arrived at the same location on the coast. We survived the first couple of days together then made our way over the mountain. We lost twenty-three people.” She seemed genuinely sad at that. “Then, we stumbled on this place.” Emily got to her feet, raised her arms to encompass the whole encampment. “There’s a mixture of people from the last five-hundred-or-so years here, enough that the language barriers have been overcome and we’ve been able to get things done. We opened a school in the first week and started to teach English-as-a-second-language to our residents who didn’t speak it. Now, about ninety-five percent of us can hold a basic conversation.”

I smiled broadly, genuinely impressed by how organized the camp seemed to be and thankful that I wouldn’t have to worry as much about my translative powers giving us away. “So, why New Manhattan? Is that where you were when the Voice contacted you?”

Emily took a moment, as though she were wondering whether to answer or share her information with me. Eventually, she said, “I was a reporter in Manhattan and New York. There was an… event, and I was the only survivor.”

“Wow!” I said, intrigued. I took a sip of water from my mug. “Nobody else in Manhattan survived?”

Again, a long pause. “As far as I know, there were only a few survivors left… in the world.”

“Vat?” said Freuchen.

“You’re joking, surely?” I said. “Was it a pandemic? A nuclear attack?”

Emily shook her head. “Neither, really. It all happened so fast, I’m still not really sure what it was exactly and, trust me, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Anyway, I made contact with a man who was part of a group of survivors in the Stockton Islands—they’re in the far north of Alaska. I was making my way to them when I was attacked in a forest by… some things. I think Thor came to my rescue, but by the time he reached me the… creatures had me.”

“And that’s when the Voice asked you to make the choice,” I said.

Emily nodded. “This thing had me on my back. It was about to take my head off and then… poof!” She imitated a slow explosion with her fingers. “Time just… stopped. The Voice asked me if I wanted to be saved, and the next thing I know, I was dumped in the ocean, along with the back half of one of the things that attacked me… and this guy.” She leaned over and scratched Thor behind his ear.

I had no idea what she was referring to when she talked about the ‘things’ that had attacked her. Still, I could tell I wasn’t going to get any more information out of her on that subject. Not yet, at least.

“Well,” I said, “look at it this way: in another universe, there’s probably a version of you that survived. And who knows what she might have achieved?”

Emily laughed loudly. “You know, I never thought about it like that. Well, let’s hope she has an easier time of it.” She leaned back against the table. “Okay, so, tell me, are you passing through, or are you looking for something more permanent? We can always use more hands.”

“Stay,” I lied, “We’d like to stay and help out in any way we can. Just tell us what you want us to do.”

Emily eyeballed us both. “You both look like you can carry your own weight. I’m going to leave you in the hands of our foreman.” She turned to the young guard who had escorted us in. “Robert, would you go fetch Bartholomew, please? Let him know we have a couple of new guests.”

* * *

Bartholomew Mwangi was almost as tall as Freuchen and just as wide in the shoulders. His hair was cut so short, it was little more than a burr, his skin the color of umber, a thin sheen of sweat glistening over every exposed inch. He was an imposing-looking man, lean but strongly muscled, his mouth set in an intimidating frown. But that menacing demeanor dissolved the second he smiled, lighting up his face as brightly as the aurora lit up the night sky.

“Bartholomew, I’d like you to meet Meredith and Peter,” Emily said.

“Freuchen,” Peter said, extending his hand. “Just call me Freuchen.”

“I am delighted to meet you,” Bartholomew said. His heavily accented voice was deep and melodic, his words forming a sing-song rhythm so fast they almost melted together. He wiped his hands on his dirty jeans, then first shook Freuchen’s hand, then mine. His grip was firm but not crushing. I was surprised by the softness of his skin—especially for a man who was so obviously used to hard work—until I realized that any calluses he might have earned would’ve surely vanished each night when the aurora worked its magic.

“Do you think you can find our new guests a place to stay, maybe put them to work?” said Emily, leaning back on the table, smiling.

“Of course. Of course,” Bartholomew said enthusiastically. “Follow me, and I will give you the grand tour,” he said, “then I’ll show you to your cabin.” With a hand between my shoulders, he ushered us out of the cabin and back onto the main path, leading us toward the bottom of the pit.

“Everyone seems very friendly,” I said after the tenth person had waved or called out a greeting to him.

“Yes, it’s hard not to know everyone when you live as closely as we do here. It reminds me very much of where I grew up.”

“Where was that?” I asked.

“Kenya. A town called Voi. My daddy worked the docks in Mombassa until he died when I was nine. My mother died a year later, so I had no choice but to leave. I traveled to Mombassa, found the first crew that would take me, and I rode the sea until the day I was brought here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. “Pfft! It was a long time ago, and if it had not happened, then I would not be here now. The universe moves with its own will.”

I had to smile. Bartholomew was the first person I had met since I’d arrived who seemed genuinely happy to be here on this other Earth.

Freuchen asked, “And vat ill fates caused you to land on these shores?”

“I was the Bosun of the Kirinyaga, an oil tanker. We sank on our way to Libya, 16th of June, 1985.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“No, no. Thank God we had not picked up any cargo when we went down. It would have been a hell of a mess. A hell of a mess.”

I began to suspect that Bartholomew was just one of those permanently optimistic guys who, no matter what life threw at them, would always see the positive side of it. We reached the bottom of the pit and walked to the edge of the lake.

“There is a cave system down there,” Bartholomew said, pointing below the water to the right. It was difficult to hear him over the roar of the waterfall as it crashed into the lake, creating a constant foam of bubbles and waves that kept the surface of the lake in motion. “One of our people has managed to go in about two hundred feet and says that he believes the caves go much, much deeper.”

“That seems very deep for someone to dive unassisted,” Freuchen said.

“Janus is a free-diver. He is capable of holding his breath for almost ten minutes… the problem is he needed to hold it for twelve, which is how he ended up here with us.” Both Bartholomew and Freuchen laughed uproariously at this joke, and I realized that these two men were cut from almost identical cloth.

“Amazing,” I said. “The lake is so beautiful.”

“Yes, the lake is, as you say, amazing. It is as though we have stepped back into the Garden of Eden. And perhaps that is what is happening, eh? Perhaps, the universe is giving us a chance to start it all over. A second chance to get it right this time. Who knows? Not me.” He gave one of those huge grins then said, “Come, follow me.”

He led us to a spot on the lakeshore where seven logs had been dropped into the water ten feet apart from each other. The tops of the logs were shaved flat, so it was easy to walk out a good thirty feet or so into the lake. “We wash our clothes here,” Bartholomew said. “It’s simple but works. And we have several people skilled with the needle who will be happy to patch up yours for you.” He pointed at a couple of rips and tears in my jeans. “They are also working at spinning yarn from our sheep.”

“Sheep?” Freuchen said, astonished.

“Yes, we have a flock of sixty sheep… well, mountain goats and sheep that we have captured. In the farm.”

“Farm?” Freuchen said, looking at me, eyes wide in disbelief.

Bartholomew laughed. “Yes, farm. It is about a mile away. We also have other livestock; bison, wild pigs, deer, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, and some things that we don’t have a name for but taste very, very good.”

“This land is abundant,” Freuchen said, then added, “It is almost as if someone vanted us to prosper, don’t you think?”

Bartholomew made no reaction to Freuchen’s subtle attempt to find out whether he knew about the Architect or, perhaps, even the Adversary. But if he was masking his thoughts, he was giving an Oscar-worthy performance because I saw no sign he was hiding anything from us. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“Yes, yes, you are quite right,” Bartholomew said, enthusiastically. “We have had many, many discussions about why we might have been brought here and by who. We have reached no consensus. But the one thing that we do all agree on is that whoever the Voice is, he wants us to survive. To prosper, as you say.”

I glanced at Freuchen, who surreptitiously raised an eyebrow at me, then said, “Yes, it is almost as if by some design. As if some great architect designed and placed us all here for a reason.”

There was still no reaction from Bartholomew, and I quickly drew the conclusion that these people knew nothing of the titanic struggle that had, and for all I knew, still was taking place behind the curtain of this world.

“Come, it is time I introduced you to some of the others in the camp. We have some fascinating people. At least, we think they are. There are some here whose grasp of English is not very good, but we are working on that. Even so, they are talented individuals.”

“Actually,” I interjected, “I’m kind of tired. All of this is just so… overwhelming. Do you think you could show us to our cabin? I know I’d like to rest awhile. If that’s not too much of a problem?” The idea of my ability to translate any language being discovered would raise far too much suspicion this early on. These people all seemed friendly enough, but I needed to talk with Freuchen and try and suss the place out a little more before we showed our hand.

Bartholomew shook his head. “Forgive me. Of course. Of course. Come, follow me.” He led us back up the path, nodding to people as we passed them. We reached a cabin on the opposite side of the pit, directly across from Emily’s.

Bartholomew opened the door and ushered us both inside. It was identical in layout to the one we’d met Emily in. On the wooden table were bowls of fruit and some dried meat. A pitcher of water and two wooden mugs with two wooden cots in the room adjacent.

“I am in the next cabin over,” Bartholomew nodded to his right. “If there is anything you want, please just come and find me. If not, I will return for you a little later. Until then, please rest.” He stepped to the open door, smiled that ridiculously broad grin again, then closed the door behind him.

* * *

Freuchen moved to the door, opened it a crack, and looked out. “He’s gone,” he said, walking back to where I had taken a seat at the table and sat down next to me. I poured us both a mug of water, pulled a strip of dried meat from the bowl, and smelled it.

“Smells good.” I nibbled an edge then took a big bite. “Taste’s great. I think it might be bacon.”

Freuchen grabbed a large piece and devoured it in two huge bites. “Vat do you think of our hosts? Can they be trusted?”

I nodded. “I think so. They seem just as genuine as Edward and the rest of the Garrisonites.” I was pretty much convinced by now of my theory that the Architect either selected people who were inclined to getting along with others or that each of the candidates had been altered somehow to be more amicable. If I had to guess, I would choose door number two. A few genetic tweaks here and there and everyone just gets along. It made the most sense to me.

Freuchen nodded as he swallowed another chunk of meat. “I agree, but I think ve should stick vith the original plan. Let’s give it tonight, and then ve can assess our situation again tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” I said, taking an apple from the bowl and crunching into it. It was deliciously sweet and crisp. “So, how do we keep my… ability to ourselves?”

“You either stay in the cabin, or you take a chance that no one vill notice.”

“Or I could just come clean and tell them about it. They’re going to find out sooner or later.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe ve should just vait. Even if someone notices, there’s no reason for them to suspect us. Not if ve stay quiet. But if ve have to, ve can explain your ability and say ve don’t know how you got it.”

We ate until we were full, then I suggested we should get some rest. It would be nice to sleep with a roof over our heads again.

Freuchen said that he wasn’t tired, so I left him at the table and headed into the bedroom. The beds were basic wooden cots with plank supports to lie on. I climbed beneath the fur blanket. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call comfortable, but compared to sleeping on the ground, as I’d done since we got here, it was sheer luxury. Within minutes, I was asleep.

Seven

Walking out of the bedroom, stretching the stiffness from my shoulders. Freuchen was asleep where I’d left him, his arms folded on the tabletop, his head resting on them, snoring like a bear.

“Hey! Wake up,” I said, shaking him by one meaty bicep.

“Eh? Vat?” he exclaimed, bringing himself to a sitting position, eyes wide.

I gave a little laugh. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

He waved my apology away, shook his head, and got to his feet. “I vas dreaming I vas vith my vife at our home in Greenland, hunting seals.”

“You never told me you were married,” I said, surprised at this sudden moment of openness from Peter.

Freuchen’s eyes became sad, his face flushed red. “Navarana. A fine, fine woman. She bore me two beautiful children before the Spanish Lady stole her from me in ’21.”

“Spanish Lady?” I said, confused.

Freuchen’s lip quivered as he spoke. “The great influenza outbreak. It took so very many around the vurld… millions, they said. And my beautiful Navarana vas the least deserving of death among them all.” He sucked in a slow, deep breath, then said, “Come on. Time vaits for no one. Our hosts vill be vundering ver ve are”

Shadows had crept up to the cabin’s front door. Stepping outside, we saw a line of large campfires, twelve in all, burning along the winding path back up to the surface. The smoke from them twisted and curled up toward a sky, purple and bruised with night’s approach. The smell of roasting meat wafted to us from spits hung over the fires. New Manhattanites were slowly making their way down from the surface and heading to the fires, sitting or standing around them in groups, laughing and talking.

“Everyone seems so relaxed,” I said, reminded of weekends barhopping through Santa Barbara before everything went to shit.

Freuchen nodded. “They have an idyllic life here. All the food they need. Freedom from a tyrannical government, illness, and other hardships. Yes, I think I understand vy they are so happy.”

“If they only knew the true reality of it all,” I whispered.

“My friends, over here,” a voice boomed. Bartholomew stood tending a fire between the two cabins next to ours. “Please, come join us.”

From somewhere further along the trail, a guitar began to play an upbeat tune, and a woman’s voice sang along with it.

Two men and four women sat around the campfire. They were all dressed in modern, store-bought clothing; shirts, pants, jeans, sweaters, leather shoes, and sneakers. All were in their late-twenties-to-mid-thirties and seemed to be conversing quite freely in English. Four seemed to be couples judging by the way they lay against each other holding hands.

I put on a big smile and joined them.

“Here,” Bartholomew said. He handed us cups of brown liquid. Freuchen sniffed his, then sipped the contents. His face cracked open in a huge smile. “Mead! The drink of the gods.”

“You have alcohol?” I said, sniffing at the cup. It smelled wonderful—sweet and fruity. “Oh, my God. It’s delicious.”

Freuchen downed the rest of his drink and smacked his lips loudly. “Vunderful! Ver did you find it?”

Bartholomew filled his cup again. “Not found, my friend. We make it ourselves. A young woman, actually. Originally from Pompeii, a master mead maker who is unafraid to raid some of the local wild beehives and knows her craft so well she has refined the brewing technique to under a month. We are very happy to have her here, as I am sure you can tell, and we are keeping her very busy.”

Freuchen raised his drink in a toast. “As am I.”

Bartholomew chugged his drink, wiped his mouth, and said, “My manners! Please, let me introduce you.” He ushered us into the glow of the fire.

“Hi,” I said, smiling, “I’m Meredith, and this is Peter.”

There was a flurry of returned smiles and “hellos.” Everyone seemed very at ease with each other, and I said so.

“Well, it helps that we knew each other before we all arrived here,” said a man who introduced himself as Evan.

“Really?” I said, honestly amazed. “All of you?”

Alysia, a tall statuesque woman with coffee-brown skin, nodded. “Maybe ‘knew’ is a bit of a stretch, but we all came from the same time and place.

“Uh-uh,” a long-haired blonde woman by the name of Denise, who rested her head in the lap of a man. “James, Kelly, Alysia, and I all worked together. So, technically speaking, we did know each other. Kind of.” She smiled broadly.

“Hi, I’m James,” said the man cradling Denise’s head in his lap. He’d obviously had a few mugs of Bartholomew’s mead already, his eyes wide, words slightly slurred.

I laughed gently. “So, how is it you know each other?”

“We worked at the World Trade Center in New York,” Denise said, as if that explained everything.

I knew what the Twin Towers of the Trade Center were but didn’t get the reference.

“September 11th, 2001?” Evan said, his head tilted slightly as if anticipating a sudden realization from me at the date.

I shook my head slowly. “Sorry.”

“The two planes that were flown into the Twin Towers. No?” said James

The memory of an old news story rose to the front of my mind. I thought I remembered something from around that date. Something about a terrorist attack that had been thwarted by the FBI. Yes, now that I thought about it, I did remember.

“There was an attempted terror attack on New York back in oh-one,” I said slowly, as the memories bubbled back to the surface. “A group of terrorists planned to hijack some planes and fly them into buildings in New York, but the FBI got to them before they could follow through. A whole bunch of the terrorists and two FBI agents were killed. The rest ended up in prison.”

Denise sat up and met the gaze of her friends. “Oh, wow. We were right. It was terrorists. We just assumed you were… you know…”

Freuchen chimed in, “From the same universe as you?”

Everyone’s head nodded. “Yeah, kind of.”

I took a deep breath, “So you’re telling me that in the when you’re from those assholes were successful? And you would all have died in the attack?”

Denise nodded. “I mean, we suspected it was a terrorist attack. A single jet could have been an accident. But two?”

Freuchen shook his head. “Even though ve are from the same planet, it is amazing how very, very different those vurlds are. It doesn’t matter if ve’re separated by time or by universe; everything is all so… alien.”

“But we’re still all human. That is the one thing that binds us all together, no matter where or when we are from,” Bartholomew said.

James laughed, “Right. I mean, at least we haven’t met any actual aliens.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” I said between sips of my mead. “Not yet, anyway.”

From farther up the path, two silhouettes emerged from the growing shadows.

“Hello, everyone,” Emily said, her dog Thor padding along at her side, tongue lolling, tail curled into a question mark. There was a chorus of returned greetings, and she took a proffered mug of mead from Bartholomew, thanked him, then leaned against the wall of the cabin while she sipped it. “How are you two settling in?”

“Good, thank you,” I said. “We didn’t expect this kind of hospitality.”

Emily took another sip of mead and paused for a second. “This is a new world. A chance to do things a different way. I think we’re all tired of the same dog-eat-dog routine, and I believe that whoever or whatever brought us here did so with a purpose, and it wasn’t to keep on doing the same shit we did back on Earth. So, why not try something new?”

I raised my cup to her. “I’ll drink to that.”

I liked Emily. There was something intangible about her... something powerful—a natural-born leader. I think we would have been good friends if we’d met back on my version of Earth, and I felt a flash of guilt at having to lie to her.

“And you, Meredith? How did you get here?” Bartholomew asked.

All eyes turned to me, and I felt my face flush red.

“Don’t be shy, honey,” Denise said, smiling her encouragement.

“Suicide,” I said. “I tried to kill myself.” It felt good being honest about something.

“But the Voice thought you were worth saving,” Evan said. “That definitely counts for something.”

I smiled politely back at him. “I suppose.”

“No supposing about it,” James said, jumping to his feet. He took me by the elbow and guided me closer to the fire. “Sit yourself down and have another drink.” He nodded at Bartholomew, who dutifully topped off my mug.

“No one can deny we’re all here for a reason,” Alysa said. “All we have to do is figure out what it is.”

I glanced up at Freuchen, but he was talking animatedly with Bartholomew. I felt terrible about keeping the information I had from these people, but there was no way to predict their attitude, and the truth was, the less they knew, the safer they probably would be. If the Adversary discovered I was here, there was no telling how many of its robo-bug assassins might turn up.

More people began to approach from the darkness until thirty or so sat around the fire, talking, or just relaxing. Freuchen seemed to be making the most of the almost party-like atmosphere, drinking and entertaining anyone who would listen with stories of his adventures.

The woman with the guitar who everyone seemed to know and called Connie walked from the shadows and sat down next to Emily. Thor got to his feet and headbutted her until she gave him the attention he was looking for, then curled up between the two women.

Emily caught my attention and tapped the ground next to her. “Meredith, come meet Connie Converse.”

“Hello,” I said, “nice to meet you.”

Connie looked to be in her early forties. She had delicate features, dirty-blonde hair, with only a hint of laugh-lines around her eyes and lips. Every once in a while, she slipped a pair of horn-rimmed glasses off her nose and cleaned them in the folds of her blue dress.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Connie said. Her voice was deep, American, but I couldn’t place from where exactly.

“Connie arrived here from the seventies,” Emily explained. “She’s a songwriter and a singer. If you ask her nicely, she might just sing us one of them.”

Connie flushed a little red and dipped her eyes to her feet.

“Would you?” I asked. “Please.”

From the other side of the fire, someone called out, “Yeah, come on, Connie. Let’s hear something.” More voices added their encouragement.

“Okay. Okay,” Connie said, slipping the guitar onto her lap. She began to strum. The people around the fire quieted and turned their eyes in her direction. She began to sing a melancholy tune about a place between two tall mountains called Lonesome.

Over the next couple of hours, while Connie slowly worked through her repertoire, more people joined us, drawn by Connie’s guitar. Freuchen put away enough mead to kill an elephant. He, however, seemed only mildly affected by it, his words slurring only enough to show the alcohol was having an effect. No one seemed to mind, they were all equally relaxed and happy. Occasionally, a couple would pair off and walk hand in hand into the night, but the majority remained, falling asleep around the fire, chatting, or just listening to Connie’s haunting voice.

I sat back and watched the people interact—laughing, loving, singing, and for a moment, I got a brief glimpse of what the Architect had planned for all of us.

“Here comes the bliss,” someone said excitedly, out of nowhere. Connie stopped playing and turned her head skyward as, all around us, pixie dust flared, while overhead, the aurora streaked across the sky. It was the first time I’d really seen it since we’d left the island and entered the Everwood.

“I’d forgotten how beautiful it was,” I said quietly.

“It really is quite something, isn’t it?” Emily said, her voice filled with awe. “The sheer power behind all of this… it’s… overwhelming.”

I knew exactly what she meant. This nightly display of super-advanced technology that repaired our broken and damaged bodies was God-like. And the aurora was just one small piece in an even bigger jigsaw puzzle of hidden pieces.

“I try not to dwell on it too much. It can drive you crazy,” I said.

I closed my eyes and allowed the sense of wellbeing to wash over me.

When I opened them again, Freuchen was seated next to me, a scowl creasing his face. “Vell, this is very disappointing.”

I looked sideways at him, puzzled. “What?”

“Not only does the aurora heal us, but it also removes all the effects of intoxication from our bloodstream. I am as sober as a priest.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, rubbing his back. “But at least it’ll save you a hangover in the morning.”

“I guess I vill have to start drinking earlier tomorrow!”

I laughed, and before we turned in for the night, Freuchen and I quietly discussed what our next move should be. The people of New Manhattan were genuinely friendly, we both agreed on that. They’d welcomed us into their community with open arms and seemed more than happy for us to stay—an opportunity I would have jumped at under other circumstances. The question now was, could we rely on their help? And how much could we tell them of what we knew of my quest to get to the collector, the Architect, Adversary, and what little information we had as to why we had all been brought here? Emily had no reason to trust us, but she would have a reason not to once she learned that we’d lied to her.

“I feel like they have the right to know that there is danger out there,” I said.

Freuchen agreed. “But I vurry how they vill react to our mighty metal friend.”

“Silas is going to be a bit of a shock for them,” I whispered. “But at least they’ll know we are telling the truth when they see him. And he can answer their questions directly.” I paused for a moment. “I think we should approach Emily directly in the morning. Tell her what we know and offer to take her to meet the rest of the group.”

“It vould be better than having them stroll into New Manhattan,” Freuchen said. “Can you imagine the commotion that vould cause?” He laughed good-naturedly, his beard shaking. “Emily seems like a good leader. I think she vill understand vy ve had to deceive her. And I am sure that the boy and Chou could use some rest and the company of others for a day or so.”

“Sounds good…” I stifled a yawn. “…to me.”

It was well past one in the morning, and the effects of the aurora had worn off long ago. Now my body just wanted me to sleep.

We thanked everyone for their hospitality, wished them all a good night, and headed along the torch-lit path back to our cabin.

Freuchen insisted I take the bedroom for myself while he slept at the table.

I’d become so used to the constant rustle of the leaves overhead and the howls of the unseen night-things, I found it difficult for my mind to ease into sleep. The cabin’s log walls made me feel mildly claustrophobic, and I couldn’t get comfortable in my cot. A small tallow candle spluttered on a shelf next to my bed, sending shadows dancing across the floor. I blew it out, and the room vanished into darkness, leaving me with only my thoughts. It was strange being so alone, and my mind naturally drifted to my friends, waiting in the forest for me. I wasn’t worried about Chou or Albert or Silas; they were more than capable of looking out for themselves, but I did find myself missing them horribly. Although we hadn’t really known each other that long, the bond we’d formed was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I missed the sounds of their nighttime breathing. Albert’s gentle mumbling as he dreamed. The way Chou always seemed to be awake whenever my sleep was restless—watchful, ever vigilant. Silas’ shadowy figure standing silently over us...

* * *

I woke with a start, confused for a moment as to where I was until my sleep-slowed mind reminded me I was in New Manhattan. I slipped from beneath the fur blanket and pulled on my clothes. I wrinkled my nose—they smelled ripe. I was really going to have to take advantage of the washing facilities here.

“Good morning,” said Freuchen as I walked into the main room. He sat at the table, eating from a large bowl of mixed fruit. A second bowl sat across from him. “Bartholomew dropped these off for us a few minutes ago. I told him ve needed to speak vith Emily as soon as possible, and he said he vould come back soon.” He nodded at the second bowl of fruit. “Tuck in.”

The fruit was delicious, oranges, pears, and a handful of grapes. I held up a fleshy purple fruit, unsure of what it might be.

Freuchen shrugged. “I have no idea vat it is, but it is delicious.”

I took a bite. He was right, it was delicious, and I eagerly began working my way through the rest of my breakfast. I was almost finished when the door cracked open, and Bartholomew’s head appeared.

“Emily is free to see you now if you want to come with me,” he said.

I popped the last piece of purple fruit into my mouth, wiped my lips with the back of my hand, and followed Freuchen out the door after Bartholomew.

The morning was hazy and a little on the cool side. The sun was going to have to climb higher than Freuchen and I were used to if it was going to reach us down here.

“You slept well?” Bartholomew asked as we headed toward Emily’s cabin.

“Yes,” I lied.

New Manhattan was already busy with people going about their business: men and women fetching water from the pool; carpenters working on the half-finished cabins we’d seen yesterday; kids being shepherded toward a large lean-to that must act as a schoolroom; women hanging the hides of deer up to dry on bamboo frameworks; a man baking bread in one of the kilns.

“All these people, from so many different times and dimensions.”

Freuchen threw a brotherly arm around the other man’s broad shoulders, and said, “Tell me, my friend, what are your thoughts on vy ve are all here in this land of plenty?”

Bartholomew said nothing for the next couple of steps. “Some people think we were brought here by whichever god watched over them in their time. Me, I have no time for such superstitions. But to my mind, it seems indisputable that whoever is responsible has brought us here for their own reasons. Whether those reasons are good or evil, that is the real question.”

“And what reason do you think that might be?” Freuchen said.

Bartholomew shrugged. “I am just a man. I do not pretend to know the how or why of any of this. I just trust that at the right time, whatever plan there is for us will be revealed.”

“And the rest of your people?” Freuchen said. “How do they feel?”

Bartholomew gave it some thought. “The majority seem to feel the same, I believe. Everyone who I have spoken with was facing certain death. They know that they were singled out, saved, and delivered to this land. But they have no more of an idea as to why than I do.”

Freuchen clapped Bartholomew hard enough on his back that it would’ve sent any other man flying. Bartholomew did not budge. “I knew I liked you for a good reason,” Freuchen said, grinning.

A deeply-tanned young man approached us, carrying a large bundle of branches stripped of their bark. “Hello, Bartholomew,” he said in broken English, “Please tell me where I am to take?”

Bartholomew planted a hand on the young man’s shoulder and gently turned him around until he was facing a row of three half-finished cabins.

“That way, Kyril. Just give them to—“

Bartholomew’s sentence went unfinished as a dazzling flash of orange-and-white light seared my retinas, momentarily blinding me, but not before I saw half of the cabin Bartholomew was pointing at explode in a ball of fire and splinters. In the instant it took for that image to register in my brain, a crash like thunder engulfed me, and I was knocked off my feet, flying backward through the air, daggers of wood zipping past me. I landed with a grunt on the path, skidded on my back, rolled two or three times, then came to a stop, staring at a bush with a flaming chunk of wood protruding from it. My ears rang while white and orange ghosts of the explosion paraded in front of my eyes.

A pair of booted feet shuffled into my line of sight. I heard a voice, muffled like the words were being spoken into a pillow. The bush was on fire now. I began to get annoyed at whoever the owner of the boots was for blocking my view, and if I had been able to speak, I would have told them so. But my mouth didn’t seem capable of forming words just then, and my mind swirled in confusion.

A line of warmth trickled over my forehead then dripped down onto my cheek. I raised my hand and wiped at it, then brought my fingers to my eyes. Blood. My blood. I was bleeding.

The boots’ owner kept talking to me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take my eyes off the burning bush. There was something prophetic about it that my brain just wouldn’t let go of. The boots were replaced by a man’s heavily bearded face. It looked familiar to me. The man’s mouth was moving as he yelled something at me… Freuchen! It was Peter Freuchen. As if the realization that the face belonged to my friend and traveling companion had acted in some way to free the stuck gears of my brain, my senses returned with a sound like rolling down a car window when you’re doing a hundred on the freeway.

I moved onto my back. Freuchen stood, his hand extended down to me. There was no sign of Bartholomew.

“Come on, Meredith. Ve need to get out of here.”

But I didn’t move. Instead, I stared past him, my eyes moving over the burning wreckage of the five or six cabins, following the twisting lines of black smoke up the walls of the pit to the pure blue sky far above… and the huge, cigar-shaped airship that hung suspended above New Manhattan. A single word was painted in giant red swooping letters on its silver fuselage, and I strained my eyes to make it out.

I mumbled the word aloud.

“Vat? I can’t understand you,” Freuchen said, still staring down at me, oblivious to the airship floating high above us.

I raised a hand in slow-motion. Freuchen reached for it. I avoided his grasp and jabbed my finger skyward. “Brimstone!” I repeated.

Freuchen turned and looked up, muttered what must have been an expletive, turned back to me, and without another word, grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet.

“That vas dynamite or grenades,” he yelled. “Ve’re going to be trapped like fish in a barrel down here. Ve need to get to the surface right now.”

I nodded, and together we started to make our way up the path.

“Where’s Bartholomew?” I asked.

“Last I saw him, he vas running toward Emily’s cabin.”

Smoke and fiery embers swirled and danced around us, caught in the updraught created by the burning cabins and numerous fires that ignited bush and brush along the path. A woman screamed above me, and I looked up in time to see a man falling backward off the edge of the pit, clutching his side. He hit an outcropping of rock, spun like a rag doll, then disappeared through the roof of a burning cabin with nothing but an explosion of sparks to mark his passing. More voices screamed incoherently, but above all of that commotion, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Short rapid bursts of gunfire.

The screaming stopped.

Freuchen pulled me sharply toward a cabin and then around to the back of it, and we paused momentarily in the narrow space between the cabin and the pit’s wall. The smoke wafted and twirled like fog obscuring our view to the surface. There was the sound of more shooting, followed by more screams.

“Ve cannot let you be seen,” Freuchen said.

“What? Why? You’re not making any sense.”

“Meredith,” he continued, “vat if they have been sent here by the Adversary. Vat if they are here for you?”

His words hit me like a sledgehammer between my eyes. In my literally shell-shocked state-of-mind, I had forgotten about the Adversary. Then an even worse thought crashed into my brain. “Oh shit, what if they tracked us here? What if they somehow followed me? What if I’m responsible for all this?”

Freuchen brushed off my questions. “It does not matter. They are here, and ve must get back to Chou and the others.” He pulled me along the back wall to the corner of the cabin. He leaned out far enough to assess whether it was safe, then grabbed my hand again and pulled me at a half-run, half-stumble across to the next cabin.

I coughed loudly as I inhaled thick woody-tasting smoke that stung the back of my throat and made my lungs constrict and my stomach heave.

“Stay here, I vill be right back,” Freuchen whispered. Before I could protest, he edged carefully around the side of the cabin, then, after a quick glance left and right, disappeared. I heard movement within the cabin and realized that it was our cabin.

A minute passed before Freuchen reappeared. He had his backpack slung over his shoulders and my pack in his left hand, my sword strapped tightly to it. In the other, he held the pistol that he’d taken from the Nazi officer and insisted on bringing with him. I’m not a fan of guns, but I have to admit, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it. He handed me my backpack, and I slung it over my shoulder. I began to untie the bindings that held my sword.

“No time for that,” Freuchen warned. “Okay, ve are going to make a run for it.”

I nodded.

“Follow me.”

We sprinted to the next cabin, the sound of chaos only growing louder around us. There were two more almost-intact cabins ahead of us, which took us practically back to ground level, give or take a hundred feet or so. But the cabin between them and us was on fire, burning so intensely I could feel the heat from where we hid. Thick black smoke billowed skyward, but an ever-increasing pall of it was expanding outward onto the path. I coughed again as a hot gust of wind blew a cloud of smoke directly over Freuchen and me. I spat black spittle onto the ground.

“Ve are going to have to use the smoke as cover,” Freuchen said. “You vill have to hold your breath, okay?”

I nodded again.

“I vill count to three, then ve run and ve do not stop until ve reach the trees. Chou and Silas vill have heard the gunfire and explosions. They vill be coming for us. Ve do not stop for anything or anyone, you understand?”

I nodded once more.

“Okay! Vun… two… three.”

I sucked in a huge breath, held it, then took off after Freuchen, who had already vanished into the wall of smoke covering the path. A few steps in, half-blinded, I ran into Freuchen’s broad back. He’d slowed to a walk so I could catch up with him. He reached behind him and found my hand, pulling me after him. My eyes stung. The heat from the burning buildings singed my skin, and the roar and crackle of the fire kept out any other noise. I stumbled over some hidden obstacle lying in the path, and my hand slipped from Freuchen’s grasp. I went down hard, skinning the palms of my hands. I let out a gasp of pain and instantly regretted it as I sucked in a lungful of smoke. Coughing and retching, I reached frantically around me, hoping to find Freuchen. Instead, I found the body that I had tripped over. For a second, I thought it might be Freuchen but then felt my hand brush against the person’s hairless face. Pushing myself to my feet, my eyes watering so badly I couldn’t see a damn thing, I staggered blindly in the direction I thought Freuchen had been taking us. Snot and blood filled my nostrils. My ears still rang from the explosion. I felt a gust of cool air blow over me, and darkness changed to light as I stumbled out of the bank of smoke and onto the path. Freuchen was nowhere to be seen, but I was less than ten feet from ground level, and I thought that perhaps he’d made it up already. I blundered along the path, the smell of the forest barely registering through my clogged nostrils.

There were several bodies sprawled on the ground around the top of the pit. My eyes were streaming, making everything appear as blobs of color with no definition. I wiped them with the back of my hand and knelt next to each body individually. None of them was Freuchen, but I recognized Denise. She lay on her back, her sightless eyes staring up at the silver Brimstone high overhead as though she were captivated by its grace. The shaft of a wooden spear protruded from her chest, and blood still trickled from the wound, soaking into the dirt.

Another gunshot jerked me back to reality. I was a sitting duck out here. I began crawling on all fours toward the forest, which was nothing but a swirling mass of colors to my smoke-stung eyes. When I reached the edge of the forest, I got to my feet and began to run, only to trip over what must have been a root of a tree. Crashing into the carpet of leaves, I stayed there a few moments, catching my breath, trying to orient myself. I rubbed at my eyes, which only made them sting more, but after a few excruciatingly long seconds of pain, I opened them again. My sight was back. Or at least, enough for me to quickly assess where I was in relation to where I needed to be. I was on the opposite side of the pit from where we had initially arrived the day before. Across the pit’s open mouth, I saw the two cabins Freuchen and I had passed between when we had surrendered to the guard—what was left of them, anyway. They were now flaming ruins. If someone didn’t tend to them, the fire would surely take hold of the forest and potentially burn everything to the ground.

“Meredith!”

I squinted, scanning the opposite side of the pit, then felt my heart lurch in my chest as I spotted first Chou, an arm raised above her head waving to attract my attention, then the golden form of Silas as he strode into view. I heaved a sigh of relief.

“Hello, dearie,” a woman’s voice, husky, with a distinct English accent said.

I spun around, straight into the barrel of a rifle pointed at my head. My right hand began to move to grab the barrel.

“Uh, uh, uh,” the woman said, taking a step backward, sensing what I was about to do. “Put your hands up.”

I did as I was told, unable to move my eyes from the black hole of the rifle’s barrel to see who held it. Then, fingers were in my hair, and my head was pulled sharply back.

A man’s voice said, “Is that her? It’s her, right?”

The woman said, “Yeah, that’s gotta be her. That one in white just called her Meredith.”

There was a metallic click, and the man’s voice said, “Baroness, Jean-Pierre here, I think we have her for real this time.”

This time? What does he mean this time? I thought.

There was a momentary hiss of static, then a woman’s voice said, “Excellent! Bring her on board.”

A deep rumbling ululation—a cross between a whale’s call and feedback from a subwoofer—rolled across the sky from the airship above us. It repeated once more.

The man named Jean-Pierre yelled, “Move out. We got what we came for. Back to the Brimstone… now.” The command was echoed by other voices, both male and female.

“Move, now,” he ordered, prodding me painfully in the small of my back with the barrel of his rifle. “I said, move. Faster!”

I stumbled off in the direction he indicated, just as thirteen more grim-faced and smoke-smeared men and women, all armed with rifles or spears emerged from the pit. Some paused to point their rifles back down into the pit and fire off a couple of rounds covering their comrades’ retreat.

“Stop!” Jean-Pierre ordered. I did as I was told but managed to steal a glance across the open mouth of the pit. I spotted Chou and Silas through the smoke, sprinting toward me. They were still several hundred feet away.

“Watch your heads,” someone called out.

I looked up and gasped when I saw that the airship, the Brimstone, was now only about thirty feet above us and descending rapidly. It was easily two hundred feet long. Attached to the bottom of the balloon was a gray gondola that ran almost its entire length. At the front of the gondola was a large glass canopy where the pilot sat. There were two doors, one at the front, the other at the rear. Two rows of portholes, one above the other, ran between them, suggesting there were at least two levels. Four large propellers, two at the front and two at the rear, jutted out from the sides of the gondola. The actual balloon was built from some metallic-looking silver material, but the top half was covered in something like solar panels.

As the Brimstone descended, the attackers backed up, occasionally firing at anyone from New Manhattan brave enough to pop their head up.

Beneath the gondola, ski-pad-like feet ran its entire length. The moment they made contact with the ground, the two doors on the side of the gondola closest to us flew open. The men and women around me surged forward, and I was pushed along with them.

I needed to buy myself time— time for Chou and Silas to reach me and... what? There were at least fifteen heavily-armed men and women on the Brimstone. What could anyone here do against them? All I could do was trust that they would do something, because if my kidnappers got me inside the airship and it lifted off… that would be it. Game over.

Jean-Pierre pushed me toward the gondola door. “Get in,” he ordered.

A surreptitious glance in the direction I’d last seen Chou and Silas showed me that they were now only a matter of seconds from reaching me. In what I knew was probably a futile attempt to delay them, I threw both hands against either side of the door opening and locked my elbows in place.

“No!” I yelled, “I’m not moving.”

“What the hell is that thing? Is that a… it’s a robot?” someone screeched behind me. Their voice was a mix of surprise, fear, and awe. There was no doubt they could only be referring to Silas.

I allowed myself a smile. If they thought Silas looked scary, just wait until Chou got ahold of them.

Jean-Pierre’s head swiveled in the direction I’d last seen Chou and Silas approaching from. The man yelled into the open door, “Baroness, we got a problem. Starboard side. Coming in hot and sweaty.” Then he turned his attention back to me. “I said get inside.”

I gasped in pain as his fist connected with my kidneys. It wasn’t a wild punch or particularly violent, but it was delivered with the precise amount of force needed to buckle my knees. My body suddenly turned to jelly. My fingers slipped from the doorway, and I collapsed onto my back, half-in, half-out of the airship. From this new vantage point, I saw that on the other side of the door was a corridor running the entire length of the gondola. Several doors lined the one side as well as three other corridors that bisected the main one. There was a stairwell a few feet from my head with a neatly-painted sign that read UPPER DECK and PILOTHOUSE.

A broad-shouldered muscular man came down the stairs taking them two at a time, struggling to negotiate a large metal object which he cradled in both arms through the narrow stairwell. It was some kind of multiple-barreled weapon, I realized as he stepped over me—like something out of an old Western.

“Well, don’t offer to help,” the man spat at Jean-Pierre.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” came the reply, followed by a bout of laughter. “Better hurry up or that robot’s likely to screw us all up.”

The big-man grunted as he hefted the machine-gun onto a large L-shaped metal spindle fixed to the gondola’s inner wall. He popped a latch on the wall and pushed open a four-by-three section of the gondola, then swiveled the multiple barrels of the weapon out through the opening. He took hold of the two metal handles at the opposite end, then swung the weapon in Chou and Silas’ direction.

I managed to squeak “No” before the machine gun opened up, but my words were lost to its deafening roar. Tracer bullets spat from the multiple barrels and arced through the air splitting trees apart where they hit. Chou and Silas zigged away, diving for cover as the barrage of lead sought them out.

And that was the last I saw before I felt myself lifted by the scruff of my sweater and dragged inside. The door closed behind me as the man swung the machine gun back and forth. His face was a mask of ecstasy as he continued to fire, hundreds of spent cartridges hitting the floor like metal rain around his feet.

My stomach lurched suddenly as the airship began to ascend. The machine-gun-toting man continued his barrage until the last round was fired. Then he reversed the process, disassembling the gun and closing the window.

“Did you get ‘em?” Jean-Pierre asked.

The big man turned and looked in my direction for the first time and smiled. “Pretty sure I nailed both of them.” His grin grew wider when he saw my obvious despair.

“Oh, don’t be sad,” Jean-Pierre said with mock sympathy, as he grabbed me by my arm and jerked me to my feet. “You’re about to make a whole bunch of new friends.” He shoved me toward a door at the end of the corridor.

When we reached the door, Jean-Pierre pointed at my backpack and, snapping his fingers, said, “Give me your backpack.” I undid the fasteners and handed the pack to him. He tossed it into an alcove adjacent to the door.

“Now, turn around and put your hands against the wall.”

I did as he said and tried not to react as he ran his hands over my clothing and checked all my pockets.

“Wait,” he ordered as he pulled out a key and unlocked the door. “Inside, now.”

As I stepped inside, I felt a hand push me hard between my shoulders, and I stumbled across the threshold, falling face-first onto the bare wooden floor. The door slammed behind me, and the key turned in the lock with an efficient sounding thunk.

I lay there for a while, trying to process what the hell had happened to me. I stood and looked around. The room was about eight by six with no windows and no furniture other than a disgustingly filthy plastic bucket for a toilet in one corner. There was no bed either, just a worn gray blanket crumpled in the corner.

I grabbed the blanket. It smelled of mildew and other things I didn’t even want to try and identify. I sat back down and pulled the blanket around my shoulders, not because I was cold but because it offered me just a little comfort.

These people had swooped in and kidnapped me. And if their comments when they captured me were anything to go by, they had been specifically looking for me. Which meant only one thing: they were agents of the Adversary.

I felt my spirits sink even further when I remembered that the man who’d been firing the machine gun when I was being dragged onto the airship seemed convinced that he’d hit both Silas and Chou. I couldn’t bear the idea that my friends might be hurt or... worse.

I pulled the blanket tighter around me.

I’d lost Freuchen in the smoke. Hopefully, he was okay. But what about Albert? If Silas and Chou had been injured trying to rescue me, who would look after the boy? I consoled myself with the knowledge that Albert was a smart kid. He would get to New Manhattan. Emily and her people would surely look after him. Assuming Emily was still alive. I pushed that thought from my mind. What I needed to worry about now was how I was going to get off this airship and back to my friends.

And how exactly I was supposed to do that, I had no idea.

Eight

I settled into the corner of my cell, wrapped the smelly blanket around me like a shawl, and tried to form a plan. At some point, my kidnappers were going to come for me—it was surely only a matter of time. I had no idea what it was they or the Adversary wanted from me, but they had not killed me outright, so that meant they needed something important. I took a few deep breaths to try and make my thumping heart slow, but it wouldn’t. I kept seeing the machine gun flash and the heavyset man’s gleeful delight when he said he thought he’d hit both Silas and Chou. I wasn’t worried about Silas so much; the Nazis we’d encountered back on Avalon had shot him multiple times to no effect. But Chou was, in the end, only human. If she’d been hit… No! I just couldn’t think that way. The best thing I could do right now was try to conserve my energy. That way, I would at least have some of my wits about me when my captors did show up. I pulled the blanket tighter, leaned my head against the wall, and closed my eyes.

Time passed. How much I don’t know, there was no way to even guess at it in this tiny cell. I repeatedly slipped in and out of consciousness, dreaming of my kidnapping and the attack, of Chou and Silas and death.

My morbid thoughts were interrupted by the scrape of a key in the door lock. It opened, and Jean-Pierre strutted in.

“On your feet,” he ordered, but before I could react, he grabbed my elbow and pulled me up, tore the blanket from my shoulders and tossed it to the floor, before pushing me out the door into the corridor. “Get a move on,” he demanded, his hand against the small of my back, pushing me along the hallway toward the stairwell then up the steps to the upper deck. “To the right,” he ordered when we reached the top.

I did as I was told and found myself in a large room filled with bunks, chairs, and a couple of sofas that looked like they’d seen better days. Most of the men and women I’d seen raiding New Manhattan lay sprawled on them. Some talked and laughed amongst themselves. Others rested on bunks, eyes closed, apparently asleep. Those that were awake eyed me with curiosity, others with suspicion.

“Go on, that way.” Jean-Pierre pushed me toward a door at the front of the airship. Painted in red on the door were the words: PILOTHOUSE.

“Stop,” Jean-Pierre ordered. He swallowed nervously, then knocked three times.

“Enter,” a woman’s voice called out. Jean-Pierre opened the door wide and nodded for me to step inside.

A man, his back to me, sat in front of a horseshoe-shaped console that extended almost the entire width of the room. It was covered with dials, lights, switches, and a couple of computer screens, which he was studiously monitoring. Except for the one behind me, the rest of the room’s walls were all made of glass, giving an unparalleled view of the world beyond as the Brimstone soared rapidly. Glowing green lines of information were displayed on the glass like a fighter pilot’s heads-up display.

A large black leather chair sat in the center of the pilothouse, its back to me, obscuring whoever occupied it. Now it swung around to face me.

A woman in her fifties—judging by the wrinkles on her forehead and the crows-feet around her eyes—eyed me up and down. She wore a sky blue, single-breasted frock coat that stopped just above her knees. Intricate military-style gold epaulets crested each shoulder, and she wore equally elaborate gold cuffs. Black pantaloons and brown knee-high boots. A scar, white and puckered against her deeply tanned skin, ran from the top-right side of her hairline across her forehead and right eye, down over her nose and left cheek, and ended in an upside-down-Y just before her jaw. She wore a red patch over her right eye, and her hair was styled in a utilitarian bob.

Pirate, I thought. She’s a freaking pirate.

“Well now, so, you are Meredith Gale,” the woman said with such firmness that I knew it was pointless to argue.

I’d learned that those sent by the Adversary had received a very specific psychic picture. Strangely enough, it was of me winning a presidential election. If she’d really been sent by the Adversary, then it was logical to expect she would have received it, too. The woman eased herself out of her seat, smiling broadly, not in a friendly way, more like a shark greeting its dinner. “My name is Captain Isabella Teresita Galindez,” she said. “But in the time I am from, I am known as the Red Baroness.” She offered me her hand. I stared at it until I felt a prod in my back from Jean-Pierre’s rifle, and reached out and shook it limply.

“What do you want?” I asked bluntly.

The Red Baroness tilted her head, smiled. “Straight to the point. I like that. It’s okay,” she continued, returning to her seat. “I completely understand. If I were in your position, I don’t think I would be too talkative either.” Her eyes drifted to the forest visible through the sizeable plexiglass-glass bubble. “This world is so very beautiful. Not like the version of Earth we came from.” She paused dramatically, “I assume you know that we are all refugees from different dimensions?”

I nodded. She said it so casually, and I guess it was normal now.

“Good, good,” she continued. Her voice grew unexpectedly wistful. “Now, why we were all transported here to this planet so like our own and yet so very different—I do not know. But what I do know is that it’s a thousand times better than the hellhole we called home. So much land. So much green. So much potential.”

Interesting, I thought, she seemed unaware that this was actually just another version of Earth. I saw no harm in trying to gently pump her for any information. Truth was, I was more than a little curious about the kind of world where airships might be a common mode of transportation, and she struck me as the type of personality that would enjoy having her ego stroked.

“So, what’s your story, Baroness? How did you get here?” I was right. Her face immediately softened; her chin tilted upright as she cleared her throat.

“On September 26, 1983, our world came to an end. Some say it was the Americans who launched first, others that it was the Russians. Some even say it was just a big misunderstanding, a computer glitch. Whoever is right or wrong doesn’t really matter; the results were the same. Our world became a radioactive wasteland in less than a day.”

There was a small part of me that felt some sudden sympathy for the Baroness and her crew, but that quickly evaporated as she continued to tell her story.

“Survivors no longer had access to petrochemicals, so we had to find other ways to power our societies.” She waved her hand to encompass the Brimstone’s cabin. “And so, the great age of airships was born. Those first few years were brutal beyond anyone’s imagination. But with so few resources available, we quickly learned that the only way to get what you needed to survive was to take it by force.” She leaned forward and snatched at the air with a fist. “And I am very happy to say that we were the best, most feared crew in all of what was left of our world.”

“That’s… incredible,” I said, honestly amazed. Her world, a virtual radioactive graveyard, was so very different from mine, from anyone’s that I’d met so far on my journey. I decided to push my luck a little and see if she would bite. “So, I guess you were brought here like all the others, by the Voice.”

She simply dipped her head in acknowledgment.

I continued, “And before you were brought here, you were in some kind of life-threatening situation, yes?”

“Ah,” the Baroness sighed, “therein lies the tale of our doom and our salvation. During one of our raids, an unanticipated storm blew us off course and into the badlands of what had once been Poland. We were mere seconds from crashing and burning at best, or if any of us had survived, dying a horrendous death by radiation.”

“And that was when the Voice asked if you wanted to be saved, right?”

Her look soured. “This… voice, as you called it, only promised us that in return for our lives, we were to use any means necessary to locate you.”

“But why?” I said. “What could I possibly know that would be of use to you or whatever it is behind all of this.”

The Baroness stood again. She approached me and cupped my chin in one calloused hand. “Oh, you really don’t know, do you?” She gave my head a gentle shake then let go. “You, my dear, are apparently the key to everything. You are the one who knows the location of Candidate 1.”

Shit!

So, there it was, confirmation that the Baroness and her band of killers were not just some random group of marauders but instead were sent to find me by the Adversary. And the Baroness knew about Candidate 1, which meant that the Adversary knew about them too. The one thing they did not seem to know was where Candidate 1 was located.

The Baroness continued, “In the time that we have been searching for you, Meredith, we have had numerous ‘guests’ who have told us a similar story to your own, although they made no mention of being ‘candidates.’”

“What do you mean by ‘guests?’” I asked.

“You’d be surprised at just how many red-headed women who look like you there are on this planet.” She turned to look at Jean-Pierre. “How many did we find up to today?”

“Twenty-seven, Baroness.”

“Yes, that’s right. Twenty-seven. Lovely young women, all of them. Unfortunately, for all parties concerned, none of them were you, and we had to… part ways.”

I didn’t even want to think what that meant.

“Now, as wonderful as it is to chat with you, I really do think it’s time you gave us something in return, don’t you?” The Baroness glanced at Jean-Pierre. “Is Abernathy ready to receive our guest?”

Jean-Pierre nodded. “He is, Baroness.”

“Then please escort Meredith to him.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. Two pairs of hands grabbed me by my elbows and pushed me through the door, back past the crew area, and into another room.

Inside, a tall, gaunt-featured man was waiting.

“Where do you want her?” Jean-Pierre said.

The man said nothing but pointed to one of two plastic chairs facing each other in the center of the room. I gave a little gasp when I saw his right hand. A second thumb sprouted from the joint of his first. It was almost as large and jutted out at a forty-five-degree angle.

I was manhandled into one of the chairs, my wrists tied to it. My guards stepped back but didn’t leave.

“My name is Thomas Abernathy,” the man said, leaning back against a cabinet. “I have been tasked with gathering as much information from you as I can. Now, this can be easy for you, or it can be hard. The choice really is up to you, Meredith.”

I held his gaze and said, “I have no idea what it is you think I know, but I can tell you right now, I know nothing.”

Abernathy raised his eyebrows. “I thought that might be your answer. Now, let’s prove which of us is correct, shall we?”

He took a single step closer to me and leaned in.

“All we want to know,” said Abernathy, “is where Candidate 1 is. Just tell me, and we can dispense with any of the unpleasantries.”

“And then you’ll kill me, right?” I spat back.

Two-thumbs slowly shook his head. “No. Much as I might enjoy that, we’re under strict instructions to keep you alive. But make no mistake about it, you’re ours now. We own you. But things will go a lot easier for you if you tell us what we want to know. Who is Candidate 1?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t sound convinced,” said Abernathy, sarcastically.

“I don’t know why, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Abernathy took a step back, his hands still clasped behind his back. “You are Meredith Gale, are you not? You have lived so many lives successfully, but here, you are just a... suicide.” He spoke that last word with such disdain.

I felt anger well up inside me. “You don’t get to judge me,” I spat, straining against my bonds.

He laughed—cackled more like it. “You have such spirit.” He stepped in closer to me, finally unlocking his hands to place them on my shoulders. “You have probably been wondering why the crew refers to me as Tommy Two-Thumbs. No? Let me explain.” He slipped his right hand from my shoulder and held it in front of my face.

He slowly moved the hand with the extra thumb in front of my eyes, as though he were showing it off.

“Hold her tight,” Two-Thumbs said. Then, before I could resist, he drove the extra thumb into my left ear and twisted it back and forth like a corkscrew.

I screamed as the thick nail gouged skin from my inner ear. I felt a trickle of warm blood running down my neck.

Two-Thumbs pulled out his digit and cleaned it with a handkerchief from his pocket.

“While it works with weaker souls, I do believe that you will take some extra convincing before you give up your secrets.” He opened a leather case. Inside, I saw knives and scalpels and hammers and tongs and saws and shears. Abernathy ran his hands lovingly over the glistening tools as though they were faithful pets.

“You... you’re going to torture me?” I said, unable to keep the fear from breaking my words apart.

Abernathy turned to look at me over his shoulder. “You? Oh no. We are, as I mentioned, restrained from doing you too much harm.”

I let out a silent sigh of relief.

Abernathy turned his body fully toward me, planted his hands on his hips, and allowed a huge grin to spread across his face. “However, that rule does not extend to others. Please bring in our guest.”

From somewhere behind me, I heard a door open, and a man yell, “Bring ‘im in.” The sound of something being dragged across the deck reached me. I struggled to turn to see, but my bonds held me tightly in place.

Abernathy placed the second chair in front of me. He smiled. As he leaned with one hand against its high back. “I believe you know each other?” he said, nodding.

I gasped in shock as the two men dragged an almost unconscious and badly-beaten Freuchen to the chair and dropped him into it. Freuchen toppled sideways.

“Whoops!” said Abernathy, grabbing Freuchen by the shoulder and propping him back up.

“You bastard!” I yelled through gritted teeth. I tried to leap at him, but the two guards were ready for me, and they forced me back down into my chair.

Abernathy ran his hand through Freuchen’s hair. “One of our men had the forethought to mention that he’d seen the two of you trying to escape together. Lucky for us... not so lucky for you. Worse for him.”

The Dane’s face was a bloody mess; his eyes swollen shut, several teeth missing, bloody drool running from the side of his mouth. His nose was skewed to one side. Blood still ran from it over his chin to form an ugly semi-congealed slick on his shirt.

“He put up a wonderful fight—killed two of our men before we managed to subdue him. Quite extraordinary... quite extraordinary.” Abernathy walked to the box of blades and blunt instruments. He paused and tapped an index finger against his lips. “Decisions. Decisions. Ah! I think we’ll start off with... this, yes?” He plucked a large pair of serrated shears from the box and dramatically snapped them open and closed twice. “Snip, snip.”

I hissed an expletive at him, then yelled it at him a second time as he walked over to Freuchen’s unconscious body, snipping the air with the shears.

“Tsk! Tsk! Such language,” he said mockingly. “Did your mother not teach you any kind of manners, young lady?”

I thrust my chin out and snarled at him.

Abernathy made an exaggerated sad face, lifted Freuchen’s left hand, and before I could scream “no,” cut Freuchen’s thumb from it. The severed thumb fell with a wet smack to the floor while Abernathy regarded me with raised eyebrows and a childish look that said Oops! How did that happen?

Freuchen shifted in the chair, groaned, his head lifting from his chest. His swollen eyelids parted slightly, and he sucked in a huge gasp of air. He raised his injured hand to his face, his head moving back and forth as though he were trying to focus. His good eye grew wide, and then he howled.

The two who’d dragged Freuchen into the room leaped to his side and grabbed hold of his shoulders and wrists, pinning him to the chair. Freuchen tried to struggle, but he was simply too weak. After a few seconds, he slumped forward, slipping back into unconsciousness.

Blood poured from where his thumb was supposed to be.

“No, please,” I pleaded. “Help him.”

Abernathy’s head tilted to his left shoulder. “Now, why on—“ he raised his hands and waved them “—wherever this is, would I want to do that?”

I felt the anger well up in me again but fought it back. If I didn’t tell Abernathy what he wanted to know, then he would surely continue to torture Freuchen. And in the end, what did I know? All I had was a location from a vague message. I didn’t even know if it was the right collector. Was any of it worth my friend’s life? I knew what both Chou and Freuchen’s answers would be, but I’m not them.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll tell you. But only if you help him first.”

“Information first, help after.”

My mind was a whirlpool of panic. I needed something I could give them that wouldn’t give our destination away. I remembered a phrase Freuchen had once used, If you want a dog, first ask for a pony.

“The robot,” I blurted out.

“What?” said Abernathy, suddenly interested. “The one that tried to rescue you? Tell me about him.”

“I... it gave me a message,” I said.

“What message? Tell me now,” Abernathy demanded.

“It was from the person we call the Architect... the one that brought us here.

“And this robot, he knows who Candidate 1 is?” Abernathy said, eagerly, his face so close to me, I could smell his bad breath.

I was about to tell him Silas had even less idea than we did but decided Two Thumbs didn’t need to know that. I had to buy time for me and Freuchen.

“Help my friend, and I’ll tell you who it is you’re looking for.”

“I don’t believe you,” Abernathy said, standing upright again.

I shrugged. “I’ve already told you more information than anyone else on this planet knows. What else do I have to lose by telling you who Candidate 1 is?”

Abernathy stared wordlessly at me for what felt like minutes. I stared him in the eyes, willing myself not to blink. God, I hoped this bluff would be enough.

Then Abernathy gave a wave of his malformed hand and said, “Take him to the sickbay.”

Freuchen’s guards put a hand under each of Freuchen’s armpits and dragged him out of the room, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

“Now, tell me what I want to know,” Abernathy said.

I shook my head. “Not until I know you’re looking after him. If you kill him, you won’t get another word out of me, and I’ll make it my priority to kill myself at the first opportunity. I’ve done it once already, and I’ll have no problem doing it again.” At this point, I was only partly bluffing.

Abernathy stepped quickly to me and leaned in until his nose was almost touching mine. “Do not test me, girl,” he hissed.

I stared back, resisting the urge to clamp my teeth onto his nose and rip it off his face. “When I know you’re keeping your end of the bargain,” I hissed, “then, I’ll tell you the rest of what I know.”

He sucked air in through his teeth and stepped back. “Take her to her cell,” he said, turning away from me.

I was yanked to my feet and dragged back down the corridor toward my cell. They threw me inside and locked the door behind them. I leaped to my feet and rushed to the door, hammering it with my fists.

“What have you done with Freuchen,” I demanded. “You’re not going to get another word out of me until I know he’s safe.”

I heard movement beyond the door and took a couple of steps back at the sound of the key turning in the lock. The door opened, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Freuchen held between the same two men who’d dragged him away. They stepped inside my cell and dropped him to the floor.

I skated on my knees to his side. Freuchen groaned when I placed a hand against his cheek. “Peter,” I said. “Peter, it’s me, Meredith. You’re okay. I’m here.” His now thumb-less hand had been bandaged, and his cuts and bruises had been cleaned up, but he was still only semi-conscious. I took the blanket from my shoulders and threw it over him.

Freuchen’s eyes fluttered open, took a second to focus on me. He groaned, grimaced, then said, “Ver are ve?” His voice creaked like uneven floorboards.

“We were captured by the people who attacked New Manhattan. We’re on their airship, the Brimstone, heading for God-knows-where.” I paused to let that sink in. “They beat you up and tortured you, which is why you’re in such a state.”

He raised his injured hand and stared at the bandage. “They took my thumb?” he said, incredulous.

I nodded.

“Vat time is it?”

I guessed it was somewhere around three-ish in the afternoon. “Not too long to wait.” I knew he was gauging how long it was until the aurora would sweep across the sky and repair him.

Freuchen nodded. He sat up, flinching.

“You’re not in any shape to be moving around,” I told him.

Freuchen worked his jaw like he had something caught in his teeth. He spat blood and a piece of tooth into his good hand then wiped it in his already bloody trousers. He was beginning to regain some of his faculties, and I couldn’t help but wonder at how tough this man actually was. If I’d taken the kind of beating he had, I’d be laid-up in hospital for months, or dead.

He turned to look at me. “Who did this to me?”

My eyes dropped to the floor. “A man, Abernathy, but everyone calls him Tommy Two-Thumbs because he has an extra thumb.”

“Two extra, if he kept mine,” Freuchen croaked, and laughed, his dark humor apparently undamaged by the beating the rest of him had taken. He motioned for the bucket, which I brought to him. He spat a gobbet of blood into it. “Sorry. Go on.”

“Like I was saying, this Abernathy guy, he brought you in after his thugs beat you up, and he cut your thumb off. He had the tools to do it, too.”

“Vy? Vy vould they vant to do that to me?”

I held my breath for a second. “They’re agents of the Adversary. They were looking for me, but Abernathy says the Adversary has told them not to hurt me, so they tortured you instead.”

Freuchen’s brow furrowed. “Vy?”

“They wanted to know what we knew about Candidate 1,” I said.

“And? Vat did you tell them?” I heard the resignation in his voice.

“I don’t know if they’re listening.” I leaned in and whispered, “Just that Silas had given me a message.”

Freuchen nodded slowly that he understood.

“I saw Chou and Silas when they grabbed me. Did you see them?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“No,” Freuchen said. “After I lost you in the smoke, I headed up to try and find you again, but I vas ambushed. I think someone hit me from behind and knocked me out, because the next thing I remember I vas vaking up tied to a chair. That’s ven the two goons vent to vurk on me. Damn cowards. I vould have broken both of them in two if it had been a fair fight. I vill have their guts for garters by the time ve are through.”

I had absolutely no doubt that he could have made good on his boast. In our time together, I’d learned that Freuchen was, at heart, a gentleman. But he also came from a time when violence—whether it came from nature or his fellow man—was everywhere, and his life as an adventurer had more than prepared him to take on almost anything that was thrown at him.

“I think ve need—“ Freuchen was interrupted by the sound of the cell-door unlocking. It swung open, and the two men who had beaten Freuchen stepped into the room. My heart lurched, expecting them to go to work on Freuchen again... or maybe me this time. Instead, they stepped aside just enough to allow a woman into the room. She held a plate of bread and some kind of meat, and a large plastic cup of water.

“Any funny business and I’ll ‘ave my two pals here deal with you. Understood?” she said, pausing between the two men and eyeing us with the feral suspicion of a junk-yard dog.

Freuchen and I both nodded that we understood, but I could see in Freuchen’s eyes that he was already planning his revenge. I surreptitiously reached out my right hand and squeezed his elbow. Now was most definitely not the time for him to try and break us out of here. We needed a plan.

The woman stepped closer and laid the plate and cup on the floor, nudged it closer to us with the tip of her shoe, then stepped out of the room, followed by the two men. The door slammed shut.

We split the bread and mystery meat between us. Freuchen winced as he slowly chewed his food. The water we decided to ration as well as we could. After we’d fed ourselves, I suggested that Freuchen try to get some rest. It seemed pointless putting him through the pain of any more explanation until after the aurora had worked its magic. He concurred, and within a few minutes, I found myself alone with my thoughts again while my friend slept fitfully, his head resting in my lap while I gently stroked his blood-tangled hair.

* * *

I woke with a start. Freuchen was already awake, his back against the cell wall watching me. The room was completely dark save for a sliver of light beneath the door... and the hundreds of tiny white dots that now coated my friend’s body.

It was weird experiencing the aurora without actually seeing it. Even in the Everwood, light filled the tree-tops, but in here, there was just the pixie dust. The nanobots swept silently over Freuchen, seeking out his wounds while he sat calmly as they worked their miracles on him, restoring his broken body bit by bit. Then the room grew warmer as a wave of heat emanated from him, as though he were suddenly racked by a fever, but Freuchen seemed perfectly comfortable. He reached across and unwound the bandage from his mutilated hand. I watched in absolute wonder as the digit slowly grew back again: first the bone, then the muscle and arteries, building upon each other like I’d seen things being made in 3-D printers. Finally, a layer of skin, pink and new and fresh.

“Just like your arm,” Freuchen said, flexing his new thumb as though it had always been attached. “Vunderful.”

I felt my own stress, aches, and pain fade. When the pixie dust finally faded away too, the room fell back into darkness. I scooted across the floor to where Freuchen sat and squeezed his arm.

“Ve need to discuss how ve are going to get ourselves off of this airship,” Freuchen said, his voice just loud enough to hear. “How many people did you see ven they brought you on board?”

“At least fifteen,” I said, thinking back. “That includes the raiding party that captured us.”

“Too many for us to fight unarmed. Did you see ver they kept their veapons?”

I shook my head, realized he couldn’t see me, and said, “No, sorry.”

“Blast! Vell, ve shall just have to find another vay off of this thing. The vun thing ve cannot allow to happen is for them to get any more information out of us.” I heard the rustle of his clothes as he shifted position. “Now, I think it’s time ve both get some rest. Ve are going to need all the strength ve can muster tomorrow.”

* * *

We were startled awake by the cell door being flung open.

Wordlessly, the two goons swooped into the room, grabbed Freuchen, another two men right behind them for me. They dragged us both out into the corridor. I expected Freuchen to put up a fight. Instead, his head hung low as though he had completely given up.

Through the portholes lining the corridor, I could see the Brimstone was moving along at a leisurely pace. Not more than a hundred feet or so above the forest canopy, the view was beautiful—which was an odd thing to think under such duress.

“Watch ‘im,” the man on my right said, nodding at Freuchen. “He’s not one to give in so easily.”

The two goons apparently thought otherwise, and that was a mistake. As we approached the door I had seen the day before, Freuchen suddenly tensed, he took a fast step backward and used that momentum to bring the guards on either side of him careening into the other. There was an unpleasant crack as the two men collided face-to-face, blood spurting from one of their noses. The other staggered away, clutching a hand to his right eye.

I tensed, readying myself to fight out of the grip of the two who held me, then stopped as I felt something sharp pressed into my ribs. “Don’t think about it, love,” said the man on my left, a long-bladed knife held firmly in his hand.

Freuchen dove for the exit door, which was just a few feet away, grabbed the lever and pulled it upward, then slid the door along its tracks. Instantly, wind and rain whipped into the corridor. He grabbed the man with the broken nose by the scruff of his neck and with one mighty heave, tossed him through the opening. I don’t think Broken-Nose even knew what had happened because he didn’t even scream as he plummeted toward the ground.

The second man, seeing his comrade thrown to his death, ducked low and rushed Freuchen, hitting him square in the belly. He threw his arms around my friend and lifted him off his feet, carrying him backward, slamming him into the bulkhead. Freuchen gasped, then raised his right arm and brought his elbow down hard on the back of the man’s skull. The man fell face-first to the deck, and Freuchen delivered a swift kick with the heel of his boot to the side of the man’s head to make sure he stayed down. He turned to face me and the two men who held me.

“Uh-uh, where’s your manners, mate? You take another step, and I’ll slit your girlfriend open.”

“No, you von’t,” said Freuchen. “She’s vorth too much to you and whoever it is you vurk for. But you, on the other hand, are disposable.”

Freuchen walked toward us, almost casually raised his fist, and delivered a short jab to the face of the man holding the knife. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes. My remaining captor pulled his own knife and brandished it, swiping the air in an X-shape. Freuchen deftly grabbed him by the arm, dragged him to the lip of the doorway, and as I stood there open-mouthed, pushed him out too.

His scream echoed through the corridor.

Freuchen quickly checked the two remaining men’s pulse, then moved to me. “I don’t like to hurt people, but I vill make an exception for anyone who tries to kill us.” He began to drag one of the unconscious men toward the door by his feet.

“Peter, no!” I hissed.

Freuchen stopped and looked first at me then down at the unconscious man. He paused, then shrugged and dropped him. Now Freuchen’s attention switched to the taupe-colored backpacks that lined the opposite wall. He moved to them, quickly undid the straps securing them, and brought them to me.

“Are those parachutes?” I asked, suddenly realizing what he had in mind. “I can’t jump. I’ve never parachuted in my life.”

“Neither have I,” Freuchen said with a grin, “but I don’t see any other vay of getting off this damnable sky boat.”

I looked out through one of the portholes, shading my eyes against the rain. The canopy of the Everforest stretched out all around us. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred feet below us.

“I don’t think we’re high enough for the chutes to work,” I said.

Freuchen stood at my side and looked down and shrugged. “Eh, ve don’t have a choice.”

“But there’s nowhere for us to land. Even if the parachutes open, we’re going to just hit the tops of the trees. Then what do we do?”

Freuchen turned me to face him. “Ve don’t have any choice, Meredith. You must understand that. Now turn around.”

Reluctantly, I did as he said and turned to face the wall. Freuchen slipped the parachute over my shoulders, clipped the safety harness together, then tapped me on my shoulder. “All done.”

I turned to face him just in time to see a sudden flurry of motion behind Freuchen. “Look out!” I screamed.

Freuchen started to turn, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. Perhaps he was wondering why his two prisoners had not been brought immediately to him, but while Freuchen had been helping me into the parachute, Abernathy had snuck up behind us. Holding a metal cylinder in his right hand that glinted in the overhead lights, he thrust it into Freuchen’s side. There was an electric buzz, and Freuchen jerked, stiffened, then collapsed to the floor.

I started to move toward Freuchen.

“Stay there,” Two-Thumbs ordered, taunting me with the tube. “If you move, I’ll throw your friend out that door. Now, take off that parachute.”

I did as I was told and dropped the parachute at my feet.

His eyes on me the whole time, Two-Thumbs checked the still-unconscious men. Two-Thumbs slapped them hard across their faces until they groaned, and their eyes fluttered open.

“Get up, you idiots,” Two-Thumbs said, kicking one man in the ribs with the tip of his boot. The men dragged themselves to their feet, teetering uneasily. Anger shone in both men’s eyes. One took aim at Freuchen’s head with his foot as though he was going to kick a soccer ball.

“Stop!” Two-Thumbs ordered.

He paused, looking as though he might just ignore the order then thought better of it when Two-Thumbs began smacking the metal rod he had used to zap Freuchen into the palm of his hand.

“Now,” Two-thumbs continued, visibly relaxing. “You two fools, if you would be so kind as to remove Mr. Peter Freuchen from the Brimstone.”

“No! Please don’t,” I pleaded as the men grabbed Freuchen by both hands and began to slowly drag him toward the opening. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

The men stopped and looked at their boss,

Two-Thumbs didn’t even look in my direction when he replied, “Oh, I know you will, but I can see it is going to take some... subtler measures to ensure that I get everything I want from you. And as such, I no longer have any need for Mr. Peter Freuchen, here.” He nodded at the men to continue.

The men dropped Freuchen and began to roll his huge body toward the lip of the door. They were close to the edge when a violent shudder vibrated through the Brimstone. My ears popped, and I reached for the wall to steady myself as the airship began a rapid descent. A second later, a klaxon, shrill and loud, sounded throughout the ship, and a red bulb in the ceiling blinked on and off.

All three of our captors froze. Two-thumbs seemed to be considering his options, then said, “Get them both back into their cell. Then meet me in the pilothouse.” He moved toward the exit door and slid it shut.

The two thugs grabbed Freuchen under both arms and dragged his limp body down the corridor while Two-Thumbs took me by the arm and wordlessly pushed me along after them.

Crew ran past us, concern on every face. Even with the chaos playing out around us, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the cockiness had gone out of Two-Thumbs.

Nine

Freuchen lay quietly groaning on the floor of the cell, his eyes tightly closed. A few minutes later, they flickered open at the same time the emergency klaxon stopped. I could still see the red light blinking through the gap at the bottom of the door, so whatever the emergency situation was that had saved Freuchen’s ass from being kicked out of the airship was still ongoing.

“Vat in God’s name did they do to me this time?” Freuchen asked, slowly sitting up.

“They Tazered you,” I said, then, realizing he possibly couldn’t know what a Tazer was, added, “They hit you with an electrical shock that knocked you out. They were going to throw you out of the airship, but something must have happened because an alarm went off and we started to descend.”

In the time since we’d been taken back to our cell, I’d heard numerous people rush back and forth past the door. Now someone stopped and began talking with the guard stationed outside. I put a finger to my lips and slid quietly across the floor, placing my ear as close to the gap as I could.

“—thought there was supposed to be a fail-safe on the inner balloon,” a gruff male voice said.

He was answered by a much younger-sounding man. “There’re four compartments, each cut off from each other. If one leaks, the others are safe, but somehow all four of them were sliced open. Engineering’s trying to patch ‘em up right now, but the boss is taking us to land just to be safe.”

“How the hell did all four of ‘em burst?” the gruff-voiced man said.

“Has to be sabotage. No other explanation.”

The gruff-voiced man said, “Who would be stupid enough to do that? We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere. If the boss catches ‘em, they’re gonna get strung up by their balls.”

“She thinks it’s a stowaway; someone from that village we hit yesterday.”

There was a brief burst of laughter from the gruff-voiced man. “I wouldn’t want to be them when the boss catches ‘em.”

“Yeah, it’s going to—“

The gruff-voiced man suddenly interrupted his friend with a sharp, “Hey! You! Stay right where—“

The sound of a brief struggle was followed by a couple of short, painful-sounding gasps, two thuds... then nothing. I smashed my ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on. Something metal jingled just beyond it, and I skidded back to where Freuchen sat.

After the sound of a key being slid into the locked door, it eased open a crack, then swung wide. A figure dressed all in white backed into the cell dragging the body of one of the guards who had been stationed outside our cell.

“Chou!” Freuchen and I said in unison.

“Obviously,” Chou replied matter-of-factly, turning and nodding at us. “Please, help me with the other man.”

Freuchen and I jumped to our feet and grabbed the body of the second guard who lay sprawled across the floor, his eyes staring sightlessly toward the ceiling. As we dragged him inside, I tried not to pay attention to the way his head lolled unnaturally from side to side. We dropped him next to the body of the first guard while Chou stuck her head back into the corridor, before closing the cell door behind her.

“You are a sight for sore eyes,” Freuchen said. “But how in God’s name did you get on board?”

“Later,” Chou said. She accepted the hug I offered, then took a step back.

“Wait, if you’re here, where’s Albert?” I asked, concerned that the boy might have found himself alone if anything had happened to Silas.

“We instructed him that if we did not return, he was to approach the people of the village when he thought it safe to do so.”

“New Manhattan,” I said. “The woman who’s in charge—her name is Emily Baxter—seems like she has a good head on her shoulders, so I know he’ll be okay. My main concern is how they will react to Silas, especially after the attack.”

“The tin-man is more than capable of looking after himself,” said Freuchen.

“I know, but I have his slate. It’s still in my backpack, which the Red Baroness’ people took when they captured me. Without the slate, Silas isn’t going to remember anything or anyone,” I said.

Freuchen exhaled a sharp, “Damn!”

“Do you know where they took it?” Chou asked.

I nodded and quickly described where they’d tossed my bag.

“Stay here,” Chou said. She moved to the door, cracked it open, then disappeared. Several minutes later, she slipped back into the room with both Freuchen’s and my backpacks, my sword and armor, and Freuchen’s ax.

I took my stuff from her and breathed a sigh of relief when I pulled out Silas’ undamaged slate, then slid it back in again.

“Now, ve at least have a fighting chance.”

“Let’s get to the exit now,” Chou said.

“Wait!” I said. “Shouldn’t we wait until we’ve landed. What if we’re seen?”

Chou shook her head. “They’ll have the crew ready to set the mooring lines as soon as we land, especially in this weather. Come on.” Chou moved to the door, checked the corridor for movement, then the three of us moved out of the cell, closing the door behind us. We jogged quickly to the exit Freuchen had used to try to escape.

“It’s impossible to see anything through this damn rain,” Freuchen said, straining to see beyond the rain-slicked porthole. “Vait a second… get ready… here ve go.” He slid the door open, and we were instantly buffeted by a sheet of icy wind and rain. Freuchen leaped through the doorway a second before a long shudder ran through the deck that was followed by a gentle thud as the Brimstone landed.

Freuchen stood outside, beckoning me to jump. “Come on, be quick about it.”

I leaped to the ground, Chou right behind me. I had an instance to take in my surroundings; the Brimstone had landed in a large clearing. Tall grass, a good three feet or so high, grew everywhere. It swayed and rustled, battered by the downpour. Within seconds, we were all soaked.

My breath caught as from within the Brimstone, I heard the sound of approaching voices.

“Keep low,” Chou whispered. Single file, we followed Chou, hunched low so the grass would help camouflage our escape. We headed toward the edge of the clearing, which was nothing but a vague watery mirage barely visible through the sheets of falling rain. I’d expected to see the usual forest that seemed so ubiquitous to this future Earth, but instead, as we approached the edge of the clearing, I saw a jungle. Creepers hung between the branches of huge trees, creating a spiderweb effect. Monkeys, hiding from the storm beneath broad leaves, chattered in the tree limbs, stunned by the strange invaders that had descended from the sky like some ancient god.

We’d almost reached the jungle when a loud yell from behind us cut through the thrum of the rain. I turned back toward the Brimstone in time to see several vague human shapes descending from the gondola, pointing at us and shouting. There was a bright orange flash, then what sounded like a bee zinged past us and hit a nearby tree. Several scale-like pieces of bark exploded from it.

“Run!” Chou hissed, and we plunged into the jungle.

Ten

“This way,” Chou yelled, grabbing my hand and dragging me off to the left. I looked back toward the clearing where the Brimstone rested and saw ten or so of the crew moving through the forest toward us.

“Eyes forward,” Freuchen said.

We continued to run for another minute, then Chou pulled me again, directing me to the base of a steep embankment that led up to a hill. She paused for a second and looked back.

“If ve can get higher, ve might be able to break our pursuers line of sight and double back behind them,” Freuchen said.

I was panting heavily, and my back and my leg muscles had begun to take on that heavy feeling of fatigue.

“Won’t they be able to follow our tracks?” I gasped as I took three deep breaths.

Freuchen shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. The floor of the forest is so cushioned vith leaves ve aren’t leaving much in the vay of tracks.”

“Now’s not the time to talk,” Chou said. “We need to keep moving.” Without another word, she began to power up the embankment at a forty-five-degree angle. I followed after her, trying as hard as I could to keep up.

Someone yelled behind us, and I turned in time to see a man step into view between two trees. He beckoned to some unseen other behind him, then raised his rifle and let off three quick shots. The rounds zinged past us, kicking up spouts of dirt and leaves in the embankment that separated me from Chou.

An angry woman’s voice shouted, “Stop firing, you idiot. We want her alive.” I saw the Red Baroness step into view and deliver a vicious blow to the man with the butt of her pistol. He dropped to one knee, his hand cradling his head as the Baroness and the rest of the search party streamed past him in our direction.

The embankment grew steeper, and I began to slow, almost entirely depleted.

“Here,” Chou said, reaching a hand to me. I grabbed it, and she pulled me up and onto a four-foot-high wall of earth, then continued to drag me stumbling along with her, heading straight up now, trying to put as much space between us and the Baroness and her crew as she could. “You must keep going,” Chou said over her shoulder. “The summit is close.”

“Not… sure… I… can,” I panted back at her.

“I will carry you if I must, but I’d prefer not to.”

“Under… standable… I… guess.”

“Almost there,” she said, her grip on my hand tightening. I looked up in time to see Chou reach the rough rolling plateau that was the top of the embankment. She turned, beckoned for my other hand while her eyes searched the forest below us. “Quickly,” she said.

I grabbed her outstretched hand and allowed her to pull my exhausted body up next to her. Dropping to my knees, ignoring the rain pounding at my head and the cold streams running down my back, I somehow resisted the urge to simply lay down and not move.

“Come on,” Freuchen urged. “Ve must keep on.”

I pushed myself to my feet. I had time to suck in a huge gulp of the cold, wet air before we were off again. We side-stepped our way down the opposite side of the embankment. When we reached the bottom, Chou said, “This way.”

Rather than simply running into the woods, she followed the bottom of the embankment to the left, leaping over roots and boulders, pushing her way through bushes as though they were nothing.

But now, even Freuchen was starting to tire. While whatever process had brought us to this version of Earth had certainly made us healthier than we’d ever been on our original Earths, it hadn’t given us superpowers. We were still human—even Chou, who had been bred to be fitter than any human that had ever existed in my time. On top of it all, Freuchen and I hadn’t had a thing but the measly chunks of bread and a few sips of water for the past twenty-four hours.

“Ve need… to find somevhere… to rest,” Freuchen said a few minutes later, his breath coming out in great clouds of steam.

Chou looked back, slowed, then came to a stop. I could see that she was frustrated that we couldn’t keep up with her, and once again, I was thankful that she didn’t simply abandon us to fend for ourselves. She scanned the trees for a second, then said, “Come on. This way,” before taking off at a ninety-degree angle into the woods. She slowed her pace to more of a fast jog, enough that Freuchen and I could keep up with.

For the next ten minutes, we zigzagged our way between trees, doubling back, then heading off in a totally different direction. Their voices had faded, so I knew we had at least put some distance between us, but I didn’t know if we’d managed to throw our pursuers off our tracks. My eyes were fixed on the ground most of the time, trying to avoid tree roots and anything else that might cause me to trip or break a leg.

Chou stopped suddenly, and Freuchen and I pulled up alongside her, my hands resting on my knees as I tried to catch my breath.

Ahead was a large clearing easily as big as the area the Brimstone had landed in. Very little lived here; what few trees left were either nothing more than broken trunks or blackened and dead. Younger trees had sprouted up, but they were sickly, wilted.

But that wasn’t what had made Chou stop.

It was the enormous rusted and broken robot that lay just ahead of us. I could see more huge, vague shapes through the mist-like rain, scattered around the clearing.

“What happened here?” Freuchen whispered, his voice low out of either respect or fear.

Perhaps it was Edward’s recent influence on me, rekindling my old love of poetry and the sense of melancholy which inevitably came with it, but when we passed the first metal behemoth, its rusted verdigris-covered skin hidden behind decades of growth of moss and vines and thicket, I was struck with the most profound sense of abandonment.

This first rusted hulk stood thirty feet tall, with a squat box-like body sitting on two articulated tree-trunk-thick legs. Two equally large arms hung from either side of the body, one with a claw-like hand, the other with some kind of corkscrew tool that could have been used for mining, perhaps. That may have been the original intention of those tools, but not how they’d last been used—judging by the hundreds of broken and dismembered parts of other machines that lay scattered all around it. This machine had done a lot of damage before it, too, had finally succumbed to whatever madness had overtaken it.

“There’s another over here,” said Freuchen, pulling at a clot of thick brown vines that had grown over another relic.

“And over here,” I said, parting a sickly bush to expose the back of yet another mechanoid lying face down in the forest’s detritus.

“There are more there,” Chou said, pointing to a group of three machines frozen in a violent embrace.

“It’s almost as if they ver in some kind of a battle,” Freuchen said.

I guess Howard Carter must have felt the same range of emotions when he broke the seal on Tutankhamen’s tomb and felt the dead breath of three-thousand-year-old air exhaled from within. This place held a power in the frozen metal statues hidden behind the vegetation that had grown around it. It was a glimpse into some distant cataclysm, and this robot graveyard still held a deep resonating power.

“Listen!” Chou said, throwing up a hand. “They’ve found us.” From somewhere in the jungle behind us, I heard the voices of our pursuers drawing closer.

“Damn it!” Freuchen said.

Wordlessly, Chou took off again, and Freuchen and I ran behind. We passed by more and more machines. Some were little more than rusted metal skeletons, decayed beyond ever being recognizable, others had fared a little better. But it was evident that the fifty-or-so machines we found in that short time were only part of a much more extensive collection of dead robots. And they had been there for a very, very long time. Perhaps longer even than Silas had been trapped beneath the rockfall at the tower back on Avalon before we had found him.

We ran between the machines, looking for somewhere to hide.

“There!” said Freuchen, pointing at a massive machine with thirty-plus articulated legs. It lay on its side and looked like its design had been based on some kind of beetle.

We ran toward it, and that was when I spotted something even stranger. Across from the giant mechanical beetle, floating several feet off the ground was a giant ball of what looked like oil. It was perfectly spherical, opaque, but a translucent outer skin gave it a wet sheen that partially reflected its surroundings. I felt a shiver of unease rattle down my spine. Staring at it, I couldn’t help but feel like it knew we were there, like it saw us. We weren’t even close to it, but I felt something gathering around it, an invisible energy, dense and electric. I shook off the feeling of unease and managed to splutter, “What on Earth is that?”

Both Chou and Freuchen stopped momentarily and looked to where I pointed. The ground directly beneath the levitating sphere, and for twice its circumference beyond it was dead, leaving nothing but mud that looked as black as the sphere itself. Not a single thing grew within that semi-circle.

“Is it… rotating?” Freuchen asked, leaning toward it as if he might see through the sheets of rain that still fell.

“I think so,” I said.

Chou looked back the way we’d come. “They are coming,” she hissed. “We must hide.”

We sprinted to the back of the huge beetle-like machine. Its legs seemed to be pointing toward the weird rotating sphere as if in warning. The main body of the juggernaut was now nothing but a mass of torn and jagged shards of metal that faced outward as though something had exploded deep within it. Or something had opened it up like a rusty-can, judging by the mass of broken wiring, gears, and other unidentifiable stuff that hung from the hole like spilled guts.

“Inside,” Chou said, parting a curtain of vines and pointing to the cavity within. We climbed in, carefully avoiding the sharp edges and pointy bits. Chou followed us in then let the vines slide back into place, obscuring us completely.

Inside the dead machine, it smelled like cut grass and motor oil. The outer shell was sliced and torn in multiple places, but the wounds were small enough that no one outside would be able to see us huddled together in the darkness, but they were also big enough that if we stood close to them, we had a pretty good view of the area.

“What is that thing?” I whispered to Chou, as I stared at the slowly rotating ball of blackness. Chou’s reply was to lightly touch my arm and with a subtle nod, direct my attention toward the path we’d taken through the robot graveyard.

Five men walked cautiously into view, and I felt my anger rise when I recognized Tommy Two-Thumbs amongst them. The men were dressed in shiny yellow rain slickers that covered their uniforms. They didn’t look happy. One of the men stopped suddenly and pointed in the direction of the black orb. The rest of the group came to an abrupt stop alongside him. A full minute passed as they talked amongst themselves, obviously debating what they should do next. Then Abernathy started toward the slowly rotating orb. One of the men—a big muscular guy, who stood a full six inches above the rest—stepped forward, obviously trying to dissuade Two-Thumbs. But Two-Thumbs just waved him off and continued to cautiously advance through the mud. As Abernathy got closer to the orb, I saw a ripple, like a wave, pass over the ink-black surface.

“Is he mad?” Freuchen whispered.

Yes, I wanted to say, yes, he is.

Two-Thumbs stood less than ten feet away from the orb. He turned to look back at the other men, nervously shuffling their feet in the pouring rain. He gestured for them to join him.

This time I clearly saw the ripple pass over the orb’s skin. Two-Thumbs, his back to it, saw nothing and continued to angrily gesture at the men to join him. Reluctantly, they began to edge closer.

A third wave, this one tsunami-like compared to the first two, washed over the orb’s surface. Then another and another. The advancing men saw it and stopped in their tracks, but Two-Thumbs still had his back to the orb. He yelled something at them I couldn’t hear. The big man yelled something back and pointed at the orb. Two-Thumbs slowly turned. The orb’s surface was a mass of movement now, wave after wave pulsing across its oily surface.

Two-Thumbs took a single step away from the orb… and froze as a shiny black tendril extruded from its surface and snaked through the air toward him. His face was frozen in a mask of shock as the tendril moved first from one side of him then to the other, as though it were drug dog sniffing him. Then, it drew back and with a whip-like crack, flew at Two-Thumbs. He tried to dodge out of its way, but he was simply too slow. The black tendril struck him on the right side of his abdomen, attaching to it like some kind of glue.

“Oh my God,” I stuttered, throwing a hand to my mouth.

Two-Thumbs staggered backward, then stopped as the tendril drew taut. His back arched to the point I thought he might snap in two, while his mouth hung open in a silent scream of agony. I gave an involuntary jump when both of his arms flew out on either side of him as though he were being crucified. Then, his whole body convulsed as wave after wave passed over the surface of the orb and down through the tendril.

Three more snake-like tendrils flashed through the air and attached themselves to Abernathy.

“Look!” Freuchen hissed. “It’s getting smaller.”

Freuchen was right. The orb was rapidly shrinking with each passing second, like a deflating balloon. It had started out about the size of a large wide-screen TV but was quickly becoming smaller and smaller.

“It’s transferring itself to him,” I said, realizing with horror what was happening and unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. But I was right; the black orb was oozing over Abernathy’s body. Several new tentacles had extended from the larger mass covering Abernathy’s abdomen. They slithered up his chest and oozed their way into his open mouth, his Adam’s apple pulsing as they forced their way inside him.

It was a vomit-inducing sight. I hated this man and would never mourn his death for a second, but this was excruciating to watch.

The orb, still suspended above the ground by some unseen force was now the size of a tennis ball and continued to shrink by the second, until finally, only the tendrils hung in the air. A second later, they too slipped themselves around Two-Thumbs’ face and merged with the rest of the mass, expanding across his paralyzed body. He remained in the same rigid crucified pose for several excruciating breaths, the black oil moving over his skin. Then, he crumpled to the ground with a splash of water and mud and lay still.

Steam or smoke, I couldn’t tell which, rose slowly from Two-Thumbs’ body. I was sure he was dead. Whatever that orb was, whatever it had done to him, it had surely killed him.

Throughout all of this horror, the four men who had accompanied Abernathy had remained rooted to the spot. Now the big guy mustered the three others, and slowly, ever so slowly, they took one tentative step after the other toward Two-Thumbs. The big man leaned over his body then gave a quick step backward when he saw the covering of black oil-like substance that coated his torso. He took a deep breath, moved to Two-Thumbs’ legs, and picked up one of his feet. He yelled something to the other men, but they remained where they were, regarding each other with wide, frightened gazes. It was obvious none of them wanted to touch Two-Thumbs and risk contact with the black oil. The big guy dropped Two-Thumbs’ feet, reached into his rain-slicker, and pulled out a pistol, which he pointed at the three men. There were a few moments of heated discussion between them all as the big man moved the gun to each of them, one after the other. His threat was clear: help him pick up Two-Thumbs, or he would shoot them on the spot. His companions must have been convinced he would carry out the threat because they immediately—but reluctantly—bent and hefted Two-Thumbs.

“He must be dead,” I said to Chou as I watched them carry his limp body toward the Brimstone. “Right?”

“Perhaps,” Chou answered.

“You think he’s still alive?” I said, disbelievingly.

Chou nodded.

I let that sink in.

Freuchen, ever the optimist, said, “Vell, at least that’s vun of them ve do not have to vurry about. I vould have liked to have dealt vith him myself but…” He shrugged and allowed his words to taper off.

I started to part the curtain of vines, but Chou stopped me.

“I think it might be a good idea to rest here for a little while. It’s dry and relatively comfortable, and I don’t think they’ll be sending a search party back here. Not after what just happened.”

“Thank God.” I sat down, feeling some of the tightness leave my tense shoulders. Freuchen eased himself down next to me while Chou remained standing at one of the slits, watchful as ever.

A minute passed, then I looked up at Chou and said, “How did you get onboard the Brimstone?”

She answered without looking at me. “When we heard the gunfire, Silas, Albert, and I made our way to the outskirts of the village. We saw the marauders attacking and that you had been captured and were being dragged to the airship. We hid Albert, then Silas and I ran to try to help you. When they fired on us with the heavy weapon, I became separated from Silas. Still, I managed to sneak close enough to the airship to use an emergency access port and gain entry just as it took off. I hid until the ship quieted then began to try to locate you while avoiding the crew. I did not realize that Freuchen had also been captured until I observed him being dragged to the room where you were being interrogated.”

“What?” I said, loudly. “You knew Freuchen was being tortured?”

Chou looked down at me. “Please, keep your voice low. We do not know if there are any other search parties close by. Her head turned back to surveilling the world beyond our metal sanctuary and continued. “There was nothing I could do to help him. If I had revealed my presence, I might have managed to free you, but it was unlikely I could have overwhelmed the entire crew—not with the number of weapons they had and the tight quarters. And at that point, Freuchen was in no condition to help me.”

“So, you let Two-Thumbs take Freuchen’s thumb?” I said, a little flabbergasted.

Freuchen placed a reassuring hand on my arm and laughed gently. “I do not blame her, Meredith. It vas the right thing to do.”

Chou turned again to look at me, the displeasure in my voice finally getting her full attention. “I had no doubt it would grow back,” she said. “The alternative would have meant all three of us either being captured or losing our lives.”

I huffed. Chou was right, of course. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed on Freuchen’s behalf.

Freuchen gave my arm a squeeze and said, “You know, that airship vould make our journey to the collector much faster and more comfortable.”

I did a double-take. “What?”

Freuchen slowly nodded. “If ve could gain command of it, ve could travel a hundred miles or more a day, rather than the veeks it takes us now.”

“We’d have to be crazy to try and get back on board the Brimstone. They’d kill us in a heartbeat,” I said. I looked up at Chou for support.

“Peter is correct,” she said. “It would cut our travel time down substantially.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Even if by some miracle we managed to take control of it, no one here knows how to pilot an airship.”

Chou raised her eyes to mine and smiled. “In the event my husband was incapacitated, I was trained extensively in how to pilot my vessel, the Shining Way. I do not believe it would be too difficult for me to master the controls of the Brimstone.”

“The problem vill be how do ve convince the Red Baroness and her crew to give up control of it?”

I was beginning to get the feeling they were serious about all this. I exhaled a long breath. “Maybe we could kidnap the captain. Hold her hostage until the crew surrenders?”

Freuchen shook his head. “I traveled vith enough sailors ven I hunted vales to know that ve cannot trust them any further than I could throw them. Their loyalty to their captain vould extend only as far as it vas in their best interest.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Freuchen looked at me and said, “I believe there are several individuals who vould seize the opportunity to take control of the Brimstone by killing us and any hostage ve might take, including the captain. Her type rule by fear. Remove that fear and vat do they have to lose?”

“I concur,” Chou said. “The Brimstone’s crew appears to be held together more by dread than by loyalty. We will have to find another route.”

A silence of several seconds followed.

Chou said, “I have a plan that I believe will work.”

Freuchen scooted closer.

“The Brimstone achieves its lift by using solar cells on its outer skin to generate energy. That energy is stored in fuel cells that power the ship, but they are also used to extract hydrogen from water, which gives the Brimstone an inexhaustible amount of fuel. Theoretically, it could stay aloft forever. The hydrogen is stored in bladders within the main balloon. I caused a distraction by making a small slit in several of those bladders that would allow enough hydrogen to escape out over time to trigger one of their leak alarms.”

“Wait a second. Isn’t hydrogen really dangerous?” I said, remembering a grainy black-and-white video I’d seen on Youtube of an airship crashing to Earth in flames.

Oh, the humanity, I thought, or at least what was left of it.

“You are correct, Meredith. It is very flammable. But the Brimstone has many safety features to ensure that if there is a hydrogen leak, it will be quickly identified and sealed by the crew. But there is another quality hydrogen gas possesses that I believe we can use to our advantage.” She paused dramatically. “If enough is released into the main gondola, it will displace the oxygen and incapacitate everyone in several minutes. I have calculated that emptying one bladder into the crew’s quarters will be more than sufficient to render them… ineffective.”

I just stared at her.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said eventually, “you want us to somehow sneak on board the Brimstone, avoid the guards, release a gas that is not only going to knock everyone out but could also, quite literally blow up in our faces.”

“As I said, the Brimstone has numerous safety features such as non-static surfaces that will greatly decrease the chance of ignition when the gas is released.”

I looked to Freuchen, who had remained suspiciously quiet through this whole crazy conversation. He just raised his caterpillar-eyebrows as if to say, Who am I to argue with her.

“But there’s only three of us, and at least fifteen of them.” I continued, desperately looking for a way to convince my friends that this was an insanely bad idea. “And they have guns. Oh, and did I mention there’s only three of us! We can’t just walk onto the Brimstone and hijack it. And you two aren’t exactly going to blend in with the crowd.” I ran my eyes up Chou’s six-foot frame and Freuchen’s bear-sized bulk. “They’ll spot you from a mile away.”

“Meredith is correct,” Freuchen said, finally chiming in.

“Thank you!” I hissed, feeling like sanity might actually be restored to the world.

“But…” he continued.

“Oh, great,” I sighed.

“But you…” Freuchen allowed his words to hang in the air for a moment. “You vould be able to blend in successfully. The search party is looking for three people dressed exactly like us. They vill not be looking for one of their own.”

Chou nodded in agreement, but I didn’t follow what Freuchen meant and said so.

“Ve will have to obtain vun of their uniforms for you.”

“How are we supposed to do that?”

Chou said, “I will identify a suitable candidate of your approximate size, then we will have to isolate him and relieve him of his clothes.”

“You mean kill them?” I said.

Chou nodded.

“Ve do not have the luxury of taking prisoners,” Freuchen added. “Ve cannot risk them escaping and alerting the rest of the crew.”

The rain was coming down heavily again, big drops hammering against our hideaway’s metal skin, the constant thrum blocking out all other sounds.

“Vat’s the matter?” said Freuchen, sensing my hesitation. “It’s okay to be afraid, but you vill be fine.”

“No, I’m not afraid… well, yeah, of course, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to lie my way aboard an airship where everyone wants to capture me. But it’s not that, it’s—“

“What?” said Chou.

“I made a promise.”

“A promise?” Freuchen said. “To who?”

“To me. And Silas, and, I guess to everyone. I promised that I would try to be more like the version of humanity the Architect expected us to be. It brought us here because of our potential to be something better than we were, not to repeat the same mistakes of our past. And that means doing my best to find a way to avoid hurting anyone, and definitely not killing anyone.”

Chou regarded me with cool eyes for a very long moment, sighed deeply, then said, “There will be no room for error on your part. The effects of the gas will render the crew unconscious within three to four minutes. If we can remove all the personnel from the Brimstone within another five minutes of them falling unconscious, I believe the majority, if not all will survive. At worst, they may suffer some brain damage, but I expect the aurora will take care of that.”

“Ve vill need to restrain them,” Freuchen said.

Chou nodded. “There are four nylon mooring lines keeping the Brimstone anchored. When you are sure that the crew is incapacitated, cut one of them, and we will use the line to secure the crew. The remaining three lines and the loss of buoyancy should ensure that the airship remains stable on the ground.”

I thought about it. They were right, we had no idea how far we were from New Manhattan. It might take us weeks to make our way back there on foot, and there was no guarantee we would even find the place again. We could walk right past it. We had none of our supplies, other than what was in our backpacks, having left everything of real value back with Silas and Albert. And if we could, by some miracle, steal the Brimstone out from under their noses, it would make our journey much easier.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“That’s the spirit!” Freuchen exclaimed, patting me gently on the back.

Chou parted the vines, checked the coast was clear, then ushered Freuchen and me out into the rain again.

Eleven

Chou led us out of the robot graveyard back along the path we’d taken when we fled the Brimstone. I wouldn’t have had any idea where we were or how we had gotten there, but Chou unhesitatingly maneuvered us through the trees, stopping every now and then to look and listen for any signs of the search parties we were sure were still out looking for us.

A few minutes later, she stopped suddenly then slowly dropped to her knees. Freuchen and I did the same, huddling close to her. We waited silently for over a minute, the rain smacking and popping all around us.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Chou threw a finger to her lips, then whispered back, “Listen.”

I strained to hear over the thud of the rain.

“I don’t hear any—“

The unmistakable crackle of radio static followed by a muffled voice filtered through the trees ahead of us.

Freuchen tensed.

I began to say we should hide, but Chou reached out a hand and covered my mouth. She nodded to a thicket of bushes between a tightly packed group of trees.

Two figures—a woman and a man—emerged from behind the bushes. Both wore Brimstone uniforms: gray jackets and pants, and gray baseball caps. They were facing away from us, but I instinctively pushed myself closer to the tree trunk we were sheltering under.

The man held a walkie-talkie in his left hand, an ax tucked into his belt. The woman had a large knife attached to her belt. The man pressed the walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, in what sounded like French-accented English, “Charlie-party responding; no sign of the missing prisoners.”

“Roger Charlie-party. The captain says take another thirty minutes, then head back here before it gets dark. Copy?”

“Copy,” the man said. He clipped the walkie-talkie back onto his belt. It continued to chatter as the radio operator back on the airship reached out to other search parties. They began walking in a diagonal path that would bring them close to where we hid.

The woman said, “I’m going to die of pneumonia before we find them in this rain. What a waste of time. I’m soaked to the skin.”

The man replied, “Which would you prefer: dying of pneumonia or going back, empty-handed?”

The woman grunted. “I suppose you’re right, but we weren’t the ones who allowed them to escape in—“

Chou leaped from our hiding spot. She hit the man in the side of the temple with her elbow and sent him sprawling to the ground, unconscious already judging by the way he collapsed face-first without trying to break his fall. The woman had time to turn in surprise, giving me a moment to see she was about my age, her green eyes wide in astonishment before Chou threw an arm around her throat and proceeded to choke the life out of her. When it was over, Chou allowed the woman’s body to fall to the ground then turned her attention to the unconscious man. Before I could object, she dispatched him with a brutal twist of his head. I jerked when I heard the crack of his neck breaking.

Chou stood, looked at the body of the dead woman, then at me. “She is about your size.”

A white name tag was stitched onto the left breast of the woman’s jacket. “Miller,” I said, reading it while trying to avoid the woman’s reproachful dead eyes. The man’s name was Dupuis.

“Help me get her out of her clothes,” Chou said, unbowed as far as I could see by any kind of regret or sentiment. We quickly stripped Miller down to her underwear. I swapped my soaking wet clothes for hers while Freuchen, his back to me, made an exaggerated scene of relieving the dead man of anything he found useful. Chou dragged Miller’s body back into the underbrush we’d hidden in and covered her with some fallen leaves, then Freuchen did the same.

Chou stepped back and eyeballed me. “A good fit,” she said.

She was right; the pants were a little too long in the leg and a little too big around the waist, but otherwise, it was a passable fit. I fastened the belt around my waist, pulling it tight. Then I picked up the man’s baseball cap from where it had fallen, pulled my hair up into a bun, and slipped the bill down as far as I could to try and hide my face. Chou tucked in a few stray strands of hair, then bent over and scraped away a layer of leaves to reveal the soaked earth. She scooped up a large handful of mud and began to smear my new clothes with it.

“What the hell?” I said.

Chou talked while she continued to pick up more mud. “When you get to the Brimstone, if anyone asks, tell them you slipped down a hill and got separated from your partner.” She spread a handful of mud across my face, then applied a final streak across Miller’s name tag, hiding most of it.

“There,” she said, taking a step back to admire her handiwork. “Done.”

Freuchen stood with his hands on his hips, nodding appreciably at Chou’s camouflage skill. “I vould never know it vas you, Meredith,” he said, chuckling quietly.

“You should head back to the Brimstone now,” said Chou, “while most of the crew are still looking for us and before the rain washes the mud off you.” She told me where I would find the access hatch that would take me up into the balloon of the Brimstone. Made me repeat the directions back to her, just to be sure.

“What about you two?” I asked. “Where will you be.”

“Don’t vurry about us,” Freuchen said. He pulled the radio I’d seen Dupuis use earlier from his belt. “Ve’ll be nearby and listening on the radio. Vhen you’re done, come to the starboard exit and flash this three times.”

He handed me a flashlight he had taken from Dupuis. I took it from him and clipped it to my belt next to Miller’s confiscated knife.

“Don’t forget, try to avoid contact with the crew as much as possible,” Chou said. “Get up into the balloon and hide. Wait until you are confident everyone is asleep, then use the release valve on the bladder nearest the hatch. Do not forget to put your emergency oxygen mask on before you start.”

I nodded that I understood.

In the ten minutes or so between stumbling across the two crewmembers and now, darkness had begun to descend over the forest. To my right, through the trees, I saw a row of lights that roughly matched the Brimstone’s portholes.

“Wish me luck,” I said to my two friends, then turned and made my way through the trees and underbrush toward the lights of the Brimstone.

Twelve

Guards armed with machine guns were positioned at each of the two entrances to the Brimstone. I held my breath as I trudged across the uneven ground from the forest into the clearing, trying my best to look like I belonged. Suddenly, the beam of a flashlight illuminated me, and I almost froze. Instead, I forced myself to keep moving, raising a hand in greeting.

“You’re gonna break a leg if you’re not careful,” one of the men called out, while he illuminated the path ahead of me.

I was about thirty feet away when the second guard yelled, “What the hell happened to you?”

I shrugged and mumbled, “Slipped on the way back.” I hung my head as if in shame, trying not to let them get a good look at my face.

“Well, getcha self inside and cleaned up. Cook’s got hot food waiting in the galley. And don’t let the Cap’n see you like that; she’s as pissed off as I’ve ever known her, and she’ll have your guts for garters if she catches you in that state.”

I nodded my thanks and climbed up into the Brimstone’s gondola, pausing to listen for a second. The sound of voices from upstairs filtered down, but the corridor leading to the stern of the airship was deserted. The portholes were all open, which Chou had told me I would have had to open myself to allow the airship’s air-conditioning to pull the hydrogen throughout the vessel and force the air out of the Brimstone. Otherwise, the gas would simply sit in the balloon. That was one less thing to worry about, at least.

I followed the corridor to the stern of the airship. Chou had explained that there was an access ladder I could use to get up into the Brimstone’s balloon. I found it exactly where she had told me it would be, and I had my foot on the first rung when I looked behind me.

“Shit!” I hissed under my breath. A line of muddy footprints followed me. Anyone who saw them would know exactly where I’d gone and might start wondering why one of their own had come in from the search and immediately taken the ladder. I had no way to clean up my tracks, so instead of using the ladder, I followed the corridor another ten feet past it around another corner and stopped outside a door. I put my hand against the wall to steady myself and slipped first my right shoe off, then my left. I knotted the laces together and slung them around my neck, so they hung down on my chest, then I retraced my steps back to the ladder, checked that the corridor was still clear, and began to climb. At the top of the ladder, I eased the trapdoor open an inch and looked cautiously through the gap. There didn’t appear to be anyone up there, so I pushed the trapdoor all the way and climbed up and out onto a narrow gantry, slowly lowering the trapdoor behind me. I quickly undid my shoes from around my neck and slipped them on again. The gantry was fastened to huge ribs that made up the superstructure of the Brimstone’s balloon. The ribs were made of the same material as the gantry, some kind of hardened plastic-like material rather than metal, which reduced the ship’s weight and the chance of a static discharge, which could, in the event of a leak, cause an explosion. Standing here almost at the aft-section of the balloon and looking forward, it was like I was standing in the belly of a mechanical whale. The gantry extended along the whole length of the airship’s balloon, curving around the front and then coming back again on the opposite side. It encircled four huge bladders that reminded me of the Mylar balloons you could pick up at the store. The bladders took up almost the entirety of the space inside the outer skin of the Brimstone’s balloon. At four points, the gantry crossed between each bladder, connecting with the opposite side. Reached by two ladders, a second gantry ran around the top section of the balloon, allowing the airship’s personnel full access to the bladders from top to bottom. Along the bottom gantry, at the mid-point of each bladder, was a small recessed area. Each recess had a raised console and a flat computer screen that intermittently displayed large numbers and graphs. Below each computer screen was a control panel with a selection of knobs, switches, and dials, which I assumed were used to monitor the gas in the bladders.

Chou had told me that I needed to find an emergency respirator that she was certain would be up here somewhere. If I released the hydrogen without wearing one, it would take just a couple of minutes to render me unconscious, and a few more minutes before it killed me. I walked along the lower gantry but found no sign of anything resembling a respirator. Frustrated, I headed back toward the main ladder and found four of them hanging from hooks in a slight recess just at the top of the ladder. I’d missed them because I’d had my back to them when I climbed up from the gondola. Above the four respirators was a large plastic box. Inside were several cellophane-covered packs of the same material the bladders were made from folded into neat packages with the words EMERGENCY PATCH stenciled across each package. There were also tubes of what I presumed must be glue used to fasten the patches to the bladders in the event of a leak. I took three of the respirators from their hooks and laid them next to the hatch—one for each of us.

Chou had told me where to find the leak sensors, and I quickly tracked them down and did as she’d told me to do. The sensors relied on a gas-permeable membrane to detect any hydrogen leaks, not particularly advanced. Chou had explained they could be fooled simply by covering the membrane with a sock, of which Freuchen and the two dead crew members had supplied enough to do the job. I fished the socks from my pockets and worked my way to each of the eight sensors, then disabled them.

Now, all I had to do was wait for everyone to come back to the ship.

* * *

I waited next to the hatch, listening impatiently as the next forty-five minutes seemed to drag into an eternity. The men and women who’d been searching for us returned to the Brimstone, wet, bedraggled, and disillusioned—judging by the snippets of unhappy conversation I heard from those passing beneath my hiding place. Then gradually, the hustle and bustle began to fade away as the crew, exhausted from their fruitless efforts to recapture us, made their way first to the ship’s commissary for their dinner, then after several hours had passed, to their bunks.

I gave it another thirty minutes after the ship went silent before I lifted the hatch enough to see down into the corridor. The interior lights had all been dimmed, and I slowly eased the hatch up… then froze as a shape, his shoes almost silent against the anti-static flooring, stepped around the corridor, and made his way toward the ladder.

It was Jean-Pierre, the man who’d initially captured me. I froze. If I closed the hatch now, he would almost certainly sense it. Still, if I remained here with it open six inches and he looked up or, even worse, if he decided to climb up the ladder, it would be game over. He walked casually, a rifle slung over his shoulder. It must be his turn for sentry duty—something we’d not anticipated. He strolled up to the bottom rung of the ladder and placed a boot on it.

I held my breath. Don’t look up! Don’t look up! My mind raced to come up with some kind of a plan to get out of this. I was still covered in dried mud from head to foot; Maybe he wouldn’t recognize me. But then how was I supposed to explain why I was up here when everyone else had showered and headed to bed?

But instead of climbing the ladder, Jean-Pierre leaned his rifle against the wall and proceeded to tie a bootlace that had come undone. When he was done, he arched his back, cracked his neck, then stifled a loud yawn before picking up his weapon and continuing on his way.

I exhaled.

This was a new problem. If all this guy did was wander the hallways of the Brimstone, then he would be passing under this same spot every few minutes or so. The hatch was going to have to be wide open for the Brimstone’s AC units to pull the hydrogen down into the gondola. If he wasn’t exposed to the gas for long enough, he might be able to sound the alarm. Or worse, he might decide to take a shot at me and ignite the gas, and that would be it for all of us. I was going to have to delay and see how long it would take him to pass under the hatch again. I lowered the lid down, so only a sliver of light made it through, enough so I could see into the corridor, then started counting off the seconds in my head. I’d almost reached three minutes when Jean-Pierre’s shadow approached.

Was that going to be enough time? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t wait any longer. It was now or never. I started the count again as I slowly lifted the lid of the hatch, then picked up one of the emergency respirators and slipped it over my head. Instantly, the plastic eyepieces began to fog, limiting my vision. Nothing I could do about it now.

I moved to the first bladder. A tightly rolled ribbed-pipe that reminded me of air-conditioning ducting was coiled neatly around a spindle fixed to the recessed gantry. The pipe had a clamp of some kind at the end that matched a similarly shaped receiver attached to the skin of the balloon. The other end was connected to the bladder. I quickly unfurled the pipe and ran it over to the opening, threading a couple of feet of it down through the ladder’s rungs. I ran back to the bladder and tried to turn the large red knob of the bleed-valve.

It wouldn’t budge.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I mumbled under my breath, the words dulled by my respirator like I was at the bottom of the ocean.

I grabbed the knob with both hands and heaved with all the strength I could. It moved a little, then finally, with a creak that I was convinced was loud enough to wake the entire crew, spun smoothly in my hands. I kept turning until it would move no more.

I ran back to the opening, realizing as I did so that I had completely lost count of time in my head. According to Chou, hydrogen is odorless and colorless, but I thought I sensed a subtle movement of the air around me as the bladder gradually deflated, but that could have been my imagination for all I knew.

A minute passed.

By now, the hydrogen should be making its way through the ship. In theory, it would force the oxygen out through the open portholes and, if Chou actually knew what she was talking about, render the crew unconscious in under four minutes. Hopefully faster, if I was to escape being discovered by Jean-Pierre.

Time passed even more slowly as I sat crouched by the opening. I jumped suddenly when I heard someone in the corridor singing at the top of their lungs. They sounded drunk.

“Six hellish months have passed away, on the cold Kamchatka Sea. But now we’re bound from the Arctic ground, rolling down to Old Maui.” It was followed by a childish high-pitched giggle, then laughter, and then by another badly-out-of-tune line of what must be a shanty. This time it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks; the voice was so high-pitched.

Jean-Pierre staggered around the corner. He was barely able to stand, reeling from one side of the corridor to the other, his head lolling back and forth while he mumbled the chorus of the shanty to himself. He bounced off one wall, then the other, then lurched forward until he grabbed hold of a rung of the ladder. He looked straight up into the hatch where I was hidden, staring down at him. For a moment, he seemed to sober up enough that I could almost hear the cogs whirring in his head as his addled mind processed what he was looking at.

“Hey!” he shouted, “you’re not supposed to be up there.” His words were slurred, like a drunk’s. “And why... why... why are you wearing a mask? It’s not Halloween.” He blinked three times in a row. Then he unslung his rifle and pointed it at me. “Take it off.”

I felt every molecule in my body suddenly stop as I became stone. If he pulled that trigger, the Brimstone would be turned into a huge fireball, and everyone on board would burn with it. I remembered the video I’d seen of the Hindenburg as it burned and fell to the earth; people running, scattering as they tried to escape the fiery ball of death dropping from the sky. I did not want to die like that. It left me with no choice. I sucked in one last gulp of air, then slipped the mask off my face.

Jean-Pierre gave me an exaggerated stare. “I don’t recognize you,” he mumbled. “What are you doing up there.” His words were melding into one long, slurred sentence now.

If I said something, I’d have to exhale the breath I’d just taken. I smiled down at him instead.

Jean-Pierre shoved the barrel of the rifle up at me, his finger caressing the trigger.

Well, shit! I let out the air and said, “I was just checking the… ummm...” It wasn’t going to be long before the gas did its thing to Jean-Pierre, but I could already feel the gas working on me. I was becoming lightheaded. Jean-Pierre’s face seemed to grow bigger, then smaller. My tongue felt ridiculously large in my mouth.

Jean-Pierre swayed, blinked a couple of times. “Get down here. I need to wake the Baroness,” he said, the barrel of the rifle just inches from my face now.

“No. No need to wake her. I... I’m here because...” I tried to think of anything, something, but my brain was already too cloudy to come up with an excuse even remotely believable. In a final gasp of desperation, I started to sing the first song that came to mind.

“I’ve been drinking, I’ve been thinking.” I gulped as I tried to force the rest of the words of Beyoncé’s Drunk in Love past my rapidly numbing lips. “Why can’t I keep my fingers off you, baby? I want you, na na.” My voice sounded like it was an octave louder than usual, and I tried to resist the urge to giggle. I knew inhaling helium made your voice sound weird, but I hadn’t realized hydrogen would have the same effect. Thanks for the warning Chou!

Jean-Pierre stared wide-eyed at me, then broke out in a smile. “You sound like an angel,” he squeaked.

I found myself smiling back at him. “Thank you,” I said and sang the lines over again, slower this time. My head was swimming like I’d downed half a bottle of cheap Chardonnay. The gas was beginning to really take hold of me. If I kept my mask off much longer, I was going to be too far gone to care what happened next.

Jean-Pierre stumbled to the base of the ladder. “I... think… you...” He stopped talking, blinked several times at me, then collapsed, his rifle slipping from his hands and clattering to the floor. I closed my eyes and waited for the fireball I knew was surely going to sweep over me... but nothing happened. When I opened my eyes again, he lay face down on the floor, unconscious.

I fumbled the mask back over my face and cinched the straps tightly, breathing in long deep breaths, and rolled onto my back, staring up at the top of the balloon. A minute passed, then my head began to clear, but a residual headache throbbed behind both of my eyes.

“Come on, get up. Lives are at stake,” I said to myself. I staggered to my feet and, still wobbly, climbed down the ladder. A quick glance at Jean-Pierre told me he was still breathing. I crouched next to him for a few seconds, listening for anything that sounded out of the ordinary, but the entire ship was silent. We’d made enough sound that someone would surely have heard and come to check, which meant, fingers-crossed, that everyone else was out too.

Quickly, I jogged to the door, flung it open, pulled the flashlight Freuchen had given me from my pocket and flashed it three times toward the woods. Almost instantly, I saw the beam of another flashlight cut through the darkness. I jumped down onto the sodden grass, dropped Chou and Freuchen’s emergency respirators, and ran toward the nearest mooring line.

There were four in total. I was going to have to cut one and then slice that into smaller segments to use it to tie up the Brimstone’s unconscious crew. Chou had assured me that the remaining three lines would be more than enough to keep the airship on the ground, especially after I’d let the hydrogen out of one of the bladders.

I quickly found the mooring line and sliced it from the peg it was tied to, then rolled the line up as far as it went back to the gondola and sliced it again. Throwing the rope over a shoulder, I sprinted back to the Brimstone, aware that time was not on my side if I wanted to save the crew.

According to Chou, prolonged exposure to the hydrogen would eventually cause permanent brain damage, seizures, and finally, death. But since we’d landed on this other world, those rules had changed, and every injury other than full-on death could, apparently, be reversed by the aurora.

I climbed aboard again and cut as many two-foot-long pieces I could from it. I’d reached five when I heard the door at the end of the corridor click closed and the sound of someone moving toward me.

“Welcome aboard,” I said, turning to look back over my shoulder to where I knew Chou and Freuchen would be.

Instead, I froze in horror at the sight of Thomas Abernathy standing midway between me and the door. Or more accurately, what had once been Thomas Abernathy, because this warped and twisted thing was no longer a man.

Whatever the orb had been, it was now a part of Abernathy. In the time between our little group watching from the hulk of the dead robot while the orb seized him and now, terrible changes had been inflicted on Thomas Abernathy. What was left of his clothing hung in tatters from his malformed body, exposing almost every part of him. From his midriff to his left shoulder and down his left arm was coated in the same oily substance as the orb. It clung tightly to his skin, almost like it was made of rubber, but it was moving too, shifting along the edges, slowly but inexorably spreading over what remained of his body, transforming him from a man into something... else. Something that, to me, seemed more machine than human.

It was Abernathy’s face that kept me pinned to the spot in horror. It was a mass of scars run through with thin black veins. His nose was a misshapen globule, more like a dog’s snout than a human nose. His head, almost completely hairless with only a few wispy tufts left here and there. He glanced back over his shoulder, and I saw that the three raised, bony protrusions that pushed up from beneath the skin of his forehead ran back over his mottled skull and appeared fused to his spine just beneath the nape of his neck.

Our eyes met again.

Only a small part of his upper lip still remained. The rest was just two thin lines, like the mouth of a fish. And when he parted those lips, I saw two rows of pointed teeth where his own should have been. His eyes were sunken pits with a black copy of the orb that had performed these perverted alterations to him in each socket. Within each of those orbs, blue rings of light burned like St. Elmo’s fire where irises should be.

“Whash haff… haffening true me?” he slurred from between the thin lines of his lips.

“I... I don’t know,” I said. I took one tentative step backward.

Abernathy shuffled toward me. His left leg and half of his right were coated in the same midnight-black oil. I stared hard, unable to shake the terrible fascination I felt as it shifted and moved over him, expanding inch by inch across what was left of his human skin.

“You did thish too meeee,” he mumbled, burning with inhuman hatred.

I took another step back toward the ladder that lead up into the balloon.

“No,” I spat at him. “You brought this on yourself.”

The oil spread across the last human parts of Abernathy’s face, completing its work on his lips. With the transmogrification now complete, his slurred voice became almost human again.

“You should have just given us what it wants,” Abernathy said. His voice carried an electronic resonance to it now, as though it was being synthesized rather than spoken by a human.

“What?” I said, honestly confused. “Given who what it wants?”

Abernathy took another step toward me. “What was it your people on Avalon called him... the Adversary? Yes, the Adversary. You should just have given the Adversary what it wanted.”

I felt my mouth fall open in astonishment. How on earth could Abernathy know any of this? He hadn’t been there… no, he hadn’t been on the island with us, but the Adversary’s deadly mechanical bugs had been. Which meant only one thing: it had been listening to us all that time. But it couldn’t have heard everything because then it would have no need for me. Which meant it still didn’t know about the collector or Candidate 1.

The oil shifted across Abernathy’s chest, spreading bit by bit over his shoulder. It was mesmerizing to watch as this man was slowly subsumed by whatever mysterious substance the orb had been made of. And terrifying beyond belief.

Abernathy made a grab for me. I squealed and leaped back… and felt my heel kick against the body of the unconscious Jean-Pierre. I spun around and grabbed the rifle he had been carrying from the floor, then turned back to face Abernathy.

He was just four feet from me now. “If you pull that trigger, you will destroy us all,” Abernathy snarled.

“Maybe it’ll be worth it?” I said.

Abernathy stopped mid-step.

I didn’t want to die, but I also wasn’t going to let this thing get its hands on me.

“But then, who said anything about shooting you, asshole?” I yelled. I flipped the rifle around, gripping it by its barrel, then lunged at Abernathy’s head, hoping to any gods that might still be listening that I didn’t accidentally fire the thing. The wooden butt struck him right between his glowing eyes. It landed with a loud crack against the mask of black oil covering Abernathy’s face. The mask broke apart momentarily, and, this close, I could see it wasn’t oil. It was made of tiny spider-like creatures. Machines. They had to be machines—like the nano-clusters that floated unseen through the air. These things were larger, but they were definitely machines, I was sure of it.

Abernathy staggered back down the corridor. I leaped across the space between us and caught him again with the rifle butt. He staggered backward, his hands reaching for the wall to steady himself.

Behind Abernathy, Freuchen’s huge form pulled itself up into the corridor, followed by Chou. Both had their respirators on. They froze for a second when they saw Abernathy.

Abernathy must have seen my distracted glance toward them and turned. Then, just as he returned his gaze to me, I jabbed the rifle at his head again, but this time he ducked, snarled something indistinguishable at me, then barged past me. His shoulder caught me and sent me spinning to the floor. I looked up in time to see him race back down the corridor.

“Are you okay?” Chou said, suddenly at my side.

I nodded, allowing Freuchen to pull me to my feet. “Vas that…?”

“Abernathy? Yes, what’s left of him anyway.”

“Come on,” I said, and we raced after him. I rounded the corner just in time to see him throwing open the second exit. He jumped to the ground, looked back at us one final time, then vanished into the darkness.

Chou raced to the open door, leaned out, but after a few moments, she stepped inside and locked the door behind her.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said when she looked at me. “Right now, I want to get the crew off this thing before they asphyxiate. If they aren’t already dead.”

I could tell by the way Chou’s eyes narrowed behind the visor of her respirator that she still wasn’t happy about letting the crew go.

“A deal’s a deal,” Freuchen rumbled. “Now, let’s get on vith it.”

* * *

We opened all the portholes we could between the exit and the crew’s quarters to help the AC system force the remaining hydrogen out of the Brimstone. The crew lay in disheveled heaps around the room, some still in their bunks which were stacked three high, others on the floor. Many were bloodied—presumably injured during the delirium caused by the lack of oxygen.

“Excuse me,” said Freuchen and pushed past me. He picked up two crewmembers, both women and carried them out, one under each arm. I grabbed one of the men by his boots and dragged him into the hallway and then out to where Freuchen had lain the two women. The rain had stopped, but the ground was like quicksand and sucked at my boots. Chou followed behind me, carrying a woman under one arm while dragging a man by his ankles.

“They will start to recover quickly now that they have access to fresh air. Tie them up securely and make sure they have no weapons,” Chou said.

For the next couple of minutes, I went about doing just that while my two friends brought the remaining crew out. I felt a wave of relief wash over me when Freuchen carried the Captain out and laid her next to the rest of the crew, announcing that she was the last. Every one of them was breathing, cloudy puffs of warm air drifting from their mouths in the cold night. One of the women we had brought out first was starting to moan and move against her bonds, but the rest were all still unconscious.

“We can’t just let them sit out here in the cold and rain,” I said as Chou approached me.

She pulled the respirator from her head and tossed it back toward the ship. Freuchen and I did the same.

“Yes, we can,” Chou said. “It is more mercy than they showed the people of New Manhattan that they killed without compunction.”

Freuchen wiggled his formerly lost thumb at me. “And don’t forget vat they did to me, eh?”

They were right, of course. Still, I felt as though I was letting Silas down, but I couldn’t see any other way to help them. And I knew that if any of our prisoners got free, they would kill all of us if they had the chance.

“What we need to do now is refill that empty bladder and get airborne so these fools cannot cause us any more harm. Peter, will you watch over them, please?”

Freuchen nodded. “It vould be my pleasure.”

“And watch out for Abernathy,” I said, as I followed Chou back into the Brimstone. “He could be lurking out here somewhere.”

* * *

“The air should be fine to breathe by now,” Chou said, “but if you feel even slightly nauseous, let me know.” We walked to the access ladder and climbed up into the balloon.

Chou moved to the control panel next to the bladder I’d deflated to gas the crew into unconsciousness. “It is actually a very clever design,” she said with a hint of admiration in her voice. “The photovoltaic skin of the Brimstone’s balloon captures energy and charges those batteries.” She nodded at a bank of black boxes toward the front of balloon. “They power the amenities and electronics on the ship, but they also allow the engineers to create their own hydrogen.” She nodded up to the large tank suspended from the top of the balloon by thick cables. “That contains water, and using the process of electrolysis, the Brimstone can create as much hydrogen as it needs, giving us almost unlimited fuel.” She flipped a couple of switches on the console. There was an electrical humming and what sounded like a jacuzzi bubbling to life above our heads. A ripple passed through the almost empty bladder, and it began to inflate. Chou tapped the screen with her finger. “It should take about an hour to fill back. Then we are on our way.”

I smiled broadly, threw my arms around her, and gave her a squeeze. Surprisingly, Chou hugged me back just as tightly.

“I am proud of you,” she said, releasing me and taking a step back. “What you just did was very brave. And your insistence on keeping the crew alive, while I believe it to be somewhat foolish, was also commendable.” She paused for a long moment as though she were searching for the right words to say next. “I will strive to live up to your standards more often,” she said eventually. Then she turned and made her way back to the ladder, leaving me to watch her in shocked silence at this unusual show of emotion. The smile didn’t fade as I ran after her.

* * *

“Anything going on?” I asked Freuchen. He was sitting on the lip of the exit, his legs dangling over its edge, moving his flashlight over the Brimstone’s former crew as they sat in the orange glow of the airship’s lights. Most had returned to consciousness, but three of them, including the Red Baroness, still lay in the mud, their chests rising slowly. At least I knew they were alive. The conscious crewmembers watched us silently, but their eyes conveyed the fear they all felt. And if the roles had been reversed, I’d feel the same way, too. I’m sure they all expected to be executed at any moment; after all, that’s what they would have done to us. And I was quite happy to let them keep thinking that too if it kept them quiet and submissive until we were ready to leave. Jean-Pierre sat next to his unconscious captain, his eyes focused exclusively on me.

“No sign of Abernathy?” I said, keeping my voice low so our prisoners would not hear.

Freuchen shook his head. “None. I think he is long gone.”

“Okay, well, Chou says we can expect to be ready to leave in about forty minutes or so.”

“Ver is she?”

“Up in the pilothouse, familiarizing herself with the controls.”

“Do you know vat—“

Light splashed across the sky, and the air was lit with the twinkle of pixie dust as the aurora finally arrived. I felt the tension drop away, only to be replaced by a welcome feeling of wellbeing. I exhaled a deep sigh of relief when I saw the three crewmembers who had, until now, still lay unconscious. They sat up, confusion evident on their faces as they, no doubt, began asking their fellow captors what had happened. They fell silent again when they noticed us watching them from the airship’s doorway.

* * *

It took longer than Chou had anticipated for the bladder to fill, and by the time she announced that we were ready to leave, it was close to dawn. I followed her out of the cabin, where I had just taken a shower. It felt amazing to have washed all the mud from me and change into some fresh clothes. We joined Freuchen, where he still stood guard over our prisoners. Our band of captives sat in the mud, their heads down, all resistance now beaten out of them by the rain and cold.

“I’ll untie the mooring lines,” Freuchen said, handing me his rifle before dropping to the ground. Moving from line to line, he untied the rope from the pegs, then heaved the pegs from the rain-soaked ground with his bare hands. Chou pulled the lines aboard and stored them again, then rejoined Freuchen and me at the doorway.

I jumped down and walked to the Red Baroness, who sat at the end of the line of captives. I pulled a knife I’d taken off of one of the guards and threw it into the mud about ten feet from her.

“If any of you tries to get to that knife before we are airborne, my big friend over there will shoot you dead. Once we are in the air, you can use it to cut your bonds. Do you understand?”

“You can’t leave us here,” Jean-Pierre yelled at me. “We’ll die with no food or any way to defend ourselves.”

I turned and looked at him, then nodded in the direction of the tree line. “We’ve left food and water in the woods over there. There’s at least three days’ worth, more if you ration it properly. We’re confiscating all of your firearms and ammunition, but we’ve left your knives and swords. You won’t be defenseless.”

I made my way back to the airship but stopped and turned to face the prisoners again.

“Oh, and one last thing. If any of you should get the bright idea to come looking for revenge, understand that we will be ready for you, and next time we won’t be so forgiving. This world has plenty for all of us, go live your lives. You’ve been given a second chance you did not deserve. There won’t be a third.”

I took Freuchen’s proffered hand and climbed back inside the Brimstone, closed and secured the door behind me, then followed Chou to the pilothouse while Freuchen stood guard at the door and made sure the prisoners kept up their end of the bargain.

* * *

The Brimstone’s wheelhouse was a glass bubble that gave us a two-hundred-degree view of the area immediately around and below us. That included the airship’s former crew, their dejected faces watching us as we made our preparations for takeoff.

A large black panel placed all of the knobs and levers needed to control the airship in front of the leather pilot’s chair. A second co-pilot’s chair sat next to it. I stood to Chou’s left, watching her flip switches, turn a couple of knobs, and pull down on three overhead levers.

“I do not like to fly,” Freuchen said, joining me at the window.

I laughed. “But to be fair, you haven’t experienced it when you’re not a prisoner.”

He nodded. “This is very true. Still, I do not—“

The Brimstone lurched, and I felt butterflies in my stomach as the ground began to recede. Freuchen’s eyes grew wide, and he grabbed hold of a stanchion with one hand and my shoulder with his other. For such a big tough man, he really was easily frightened.

We rose slowly above the tops of the trees, their boughs transformed to bronze by the early morning sun. Through the plexiglass bubble, I watched the Red Baroness scramble through the mud to retrieve the knife. She moved to Jean-Pierre and got to work on the rope that bound his hands together. When he was free, he did the same for her.

Our ascent slowed then stopped, and we hung motionless in the air, about seventy feet above the ground.

“I need your help, Meredith,” Chou said

“What’s up?” I said, parking my butt in the co-pilot’s chair.

Chou pointed to the three computer screens in front of her. “Your translative ability does not appear to work on the written word and numbers. Would you please translate these for me?”

“Sure.” I began reading the headings at the top of each display aloud for her. It seemed to work as she nodded each time I spoke.

“And these,” she said, pointing to a bank of switches.

“Those control the landing and traveling lights,” I explained, reading each aloud too. “And these over here—“

“Meredith! Chou!” Freuchen snapped, his voice laced with panic. “Something is… my God… vat is he doing?”

Chou and I wasted no time joining Freuchen at the window.

“What are you—“ The words stuck in my throat. Below, a figure dressed entirely in black ambled toward the Brimstone’s crew. The Red Baroness lay face down in the mud a few feet behind the figure, her body convulsing as though she were being electrocuted. She’d managed to free three others, and now those men and Jean-Pierre were cautiously approaching the black-clad figure, their fists raised.

“Abernathy!” I hissed.

It was difficult to make out too much detail from where we hovered, but it was obvious that whatever change Abernathy had gone through after the orb had grabbed him was now fully complete. Now, he resembled his previous human form in shape only. His head was covered by what I thought was a cowl like Chou’s, but when he looked in our direction, I saw that it was more like the hood of a cobra, two black fleshy extensions on either side of his head where his ears should have been. His face was a point-down-triangle, his features too far away for me to make out with any clarity, but his eyes… they burned with such intensity I could feel the hatred emanating from them. The rest of his body looked mostly human, except that his limbs had all grown more muscular, and longer, suggesting a newfound strength. He alone would have been terrifying enough, but something else was moving at Abernathy’s feet.

At first, I thought it was just his shadow, but that couldn’t be because the sun was in the east still. Whatever this was, moved in the same direction as Abernathy, toward Jean-Pierre and the other men. The men began patting at their bodies as the shadow-thing separated, flowed up their legs, over their chest, and into their mouth and nose. The two men fell to the ground, writhing like the woman.

Abernathy reached the first of the still-bound crew and, like a priest giving the benediction, covered the man’s face with his hand. The crewman’s back arched violently, and he fell backward. He started convulsing too. The other crewmembers struggled, wriggling and rolling from his touch as he made his way up the line, trying to get away from Abernathy. Still, the restraints did their job—the restraints I had tied on at least half of them. They didn’t stand a chance. In my attempt to ensure their safety, I had doomed them all to whatever it was that Abernathy was doing to them.

“We’ve got to help them,” I said, turning to face Chou.

“No!” Freuchen said. “Look.” He pointed down to where Abernathy’s first victim, the woman, lay in the grass. Except now, she was sitting upright. She rose slowly to her feet and stood, staring directly ahead of her, wobbling slightly from side to side.

A man got stood up and waited silently just like her, slowly swaying like a branch in a breeze while we watched in horrified silence as Freuchen worked his way down the line. He sent his shadow after those that managed to roll or crawl away.

“He’s creating a fighting force,” Freuchen said when there were only three people left.

I shuddered and said, “What do you mean?”

Freuchen turned to me. “Why else vould he do this? He’s creating a small army to try to stop us… to stop you. It is the only thing that makes any sense.”

“That’s absurd,” I said, but deep down, I suspected he was right. Below us, the thing that had once been Tommy Two-Thumbs released his final victim. The woman toppled sideways, shivering and trembling, what looked like black foam bubbling from her mouth.

As if he had been aware of our presence all along, Two-Thumbs turned and raised his head skyward. I felt his electronic eyes burning through the space between us. Then, one after the other, the men and women he had changed turned and stared skyward at us too. The eighty feet or so separating us from him no longer felt as safe as it should have. A terrible thought came to me: If Abernathy was able to send whatever that shadow-thing was made of across the ground, who was to say it couldn’t fly too?

“We need to get out of here. Now,” I said.

Chou leaped into the pilot’s seat. A moment later, the propellers were whirring again, and we were ascending. Fast.

I watched Abernathy grow smaller and smaller. Only when I couldn’t see him anymore did I start breathing again.

Thirteen

For the next fifteen minutes, we traveled in complete silence while Chou urged the Brimstone ever higher. But the horror of what we’d just witnessed couldn’t keep us silent for long.

“What was that?” I blurted out. “I mean, what the hell was that?”

Freuchen stared at the western horizon, saying nothing.

“I think it was a trap,” Chou said.

“A trap?” Freuchen rumbled. “Set for who?”

“Us?” I asked.

Chou shook her head. “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Whatever created that sphere seems to have taken over Abernathy with a very clear purpose.”

I tilted my head questioningly.

“To transform Abernathy into something capable of changing people. Changing them into… whatever they were.”

It wasn’t too much of a leap to imagine exactly what was behind it. “You think it was the Adversary, don’t you?”

“That would be the most logical conclusion, I think.”

I turned my attention to Freuchen. “You said you thought he was creating a fighting force.”

“Yes. Vat other reason vould he… it have to do vat he did to those people? He could have just slaughtered them and been done vith it.”

I thought about that for a few moments. “But why would he need to build an army? Why not just come after us himself?”

Freuchen shrugged. “Perhaps he knows something ve don’t.”

“Well, considering how little we actually know, that’s not too high a bar to set,” I replied sarcastically.

Chou said, “Right now, Abernathy is the least of our worries. Look.” She nodded ahead of us.

Where the early morning sky had been clear just minutes ago, black thunderheads now crept insidiously across our path, obscuring the horizon completely. Lighting flashed within the billowing gray and black clouds. Chou slowed the Brimstone to a halt, but still, the clouds crept closer, pushing closer to us by the second.

“Can we outrun it?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Chou answered. “We’re going to have to try to get above it.”

A sudden gust of wind buffeted the Brimstone, rattling the airship’s superstructure. Ahead, the canopy of the Everwood whipped, leaves flew into the air, dancing, and whole branches were ripped from trees and flung about like they were nothing.

“Hold on!” Chou said through clenched teeth. Freuchen and I grabbed onto anything that we could as Chou raised the nose of the Brimstone, and we started to ascend. I squealed as a streak of lightning flashed across the sky to starboard, then I jumped again as a peel of thunder crashed over us.

Chou let out an expletive that even my translating ability seemed incapable of understanding. She pushed a set of levers all the way forward, and I could just make out the sudden rise in the struggling engine’s thrum over the roaring of the storm.

“What’s wrong?” I yelled.

“Strong headwind. It has slowed us almost to a stop. She leaned forward and cursed again, the sky above us blocked by the huge balloon. A violent gust of wind smashed into the Brimstone’s gondola, swinging us like a pendulum. I was flung toward the cockpit window and would surely have cracked my head open if it wasn’t for Freuchen’s quick reactions. He grabbed me by my arm with his free hand, the other holding onto an I-shaped stanchion that ran from the floor to the ceiling. He reeled me into him like he was landing a fish. I grabbed his belt, then staggered to the co-pilot’s seat and fastened the safety harness around my shoulders.

Another bolt of lightning flashed so close to us it seared my eyes, leaving a white ghost of itself on my eyelids.

“Vat happens if ve are struck?” Freuchen asked nervously.

“I don’t know,” Chou said, her lips barely moving as she fought against the controls. “We will probably explode, I suppose,” she added.

“Vunderful. Just vunderful.”

“Can I do anything?” I asked.

Chou shook her head. “No. I just need to get—“

I screamed as we were swept suddenly sideways, swatted like a fly by a violent gust of wind. Memories burst into my mind; of the F-150 and the car crash that had killed my best friend. Of the depression that ultimately led me down the road that brought me to this place. Lights began to blink on the console accompanied by an insistent alarm. Chou flipped a switch, and the alarm stopped. The blinking red light did not.

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“We have lost one of the engines.”

“Oh, great.”

“Not to vurry. Ve have three more.”

A second light began to flash next to the first.

I started to say something but instead screamed a warning as something about ten feet long flew through the air toward us and smashed through the cockpit side window. A tree branch, the pithy white interior exposed, passed through the narrow space between Chou and my head and struck the stanchion behind us. A few inches either way and one or the other of us would have been instantly dead. Freezing wind and rain ripped through the hole it had made. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see a disemboweled Freuchen. But instead, he lay on the floor, eyes wide in surprise, staring back at me as the Brimstone shook and rattled like it was a runaway freight train. The gondola swung left and right, a prisoner of the ever-changing wind.

Why is this world always trying to kill us? I wondered.

A sudden swirling updraft grabbed ahold of us, and we began to rotate like a corkscrew. Chou’s hands were off all the controls; she’d given up on fighting the storm. We were utterly at its mercy. I felt my stomach surge as we spun faster and faster. Freuchen groaned in discomfort behind me. The world beyond the gondola was nothing but vast globules of smoky grays and blacks like we were trapped in some nightmarish ‘70s lava lamp. The truth was, I didn’t know which way was up or down. For all I knew, we could be spiraling toward the ground.

Chou lolled in her seat. I tried to focus my eyes on her chest, the spinning making it almost impossible; she was breathing, I was sure of it.

I heard someone let out a long panic-filled, “Arrrrrghhhh,” and only realized it was me when another violent buffeting slammed my mouth shut and cut me off.

The nose of the Brimstone dipped violently until my harness was the only reason I didn’t fall out of my seat and end up face-first against the cockpit window. Then we swung upward just as dramatically… and the chaos stopped. The clouds surrounding us thinned and dissipated, replaced by a brilliant blue sky. Gradually, the spinning slowed, then ceased altogether. The sound of the storm faded, replaced by a chaotic warble and trill of numerous alarms.

I was panting like I’d just outrun a pack of wolves.

A hand touched my right shoulder.

“Meredith, are you alright?” Freuchen asked, breathing hard too.

I don’t know. Am I? I thought. “Yes, I’m okay,” I said after a quick self-assessment.

Below us, the thunderstorm whirled and circled like a pack of starving wolves. Chou had done it, I realized. She’d managed to save us all, again.

“Chou!” I said, suddenly remembering that she was hurt. I unbuckled myself and dropped to my knees in front of her. A thin cut ran from the middle of her forehead just above her right eye and extended back past her ear, exposing red raw skin where the branch had caught her with its glancing blow.

“Chou! Can you hear me?” I said as calmly as I could, shaking her knee.

Chou shifted against her restraints. Her head lifted from her chest, and her eyes fluttered open and focused on me.

“Ugh. What happened?” she groaned.

“You literally got hit by a tree,” I said, unable to keep the awe out of my voice as I pulled a quarter-inch splinter from the skin of her neck. She did not flinch. There were a bunch of smaller fragments embedded deeply around the wound that I’d need a needle and tweezers to get out.

“We are alive?” Chou asked.

“Yes. Thanks to you.”

Chou looked out over the storm raging beneath us. We were at least a thousand feet above it now and still ascending. She reached out and silenced the alarms, then with the flip of a couple of switches, she halted our ascent. Her eyes moved over the control panel.

“Two of our engines are down,” she whispered.

“Blast!” Freuchen said. “That cannot be good.”

Chou shook her head slowly. “Not as bad as it sounds. I was running them at full power, and I think they just shut down to ensure they did not burn out.”

Her eyes moved over the panel again, lingering on a set of large illuminated buttons. Two of them were blinking red, the others were all green. “I think if I just—“ She pressed each blinking button in turn. “Yes, that’s it.” The flashing lights turned green one after the other. She eased forward on the throttles, and the Brimstone began moving forward again.

“Here, let me check your injury,” Freuchen said, ducking under the tree limb to get close to Chou. He’d found a first-aid kit somewhere and began slathering an antiseptic cream onto her wound. I showed him how to apply a large Band-Aid to it. Despite the detour, we were making good headway again. The storm still raged below us, but it was continuing its erratic course inland, and we could see its furthest most edge approaching. A little over an hour later, the storm was well behind us, replaced by a thick layer of white cloud that looked like an almost perfect layer of freshly dropped snow.

“Ve are not going to be able to spot New Manhattan from this altitude,” Freuchen mused.

Chou nodded. “We are going to have to descend below the cloud base,” she said. She slowed the Brimstone to a crawl, then began to gradually take us down.

The world beyond the windshield became white.

“Meredith, I need you and Peter to be my eyes. Tell me if you see anything below us. I don’t want to fly us straight into the side of a mountain.”

I nodded and moved myself to the left side of the cockpit while Freuchen took the right.

Slowly, almost painfully, Chou allowed us to drop through the layer of cloud. We could see nothing beyond a few feet, and I felt my old nervousness return. But the cloud finally began to thin, and then we were out of it. Hundreds of feet below us loomed the canopy of the Everwood, still glistening from the downpour that must have washed over it just a short while earlier. The Brimstone continued to descend until it was a hundred feet above the forest canopy. Peeking just above the western horizon was the mountain range we’d crossed when we first landed. Hundreds of streams of smoke rose into the air, scattered across the thousands of square miles of forest between us and the range.

I felt my heart drop.

“There are so many camps,” I said. “How are we ever supposed to find New Manhattan?” I was growing more nervous by the minute, wondering what had happened to Albert and Silas after Freuchen and I had been kidnapped.

“Ve might have to take a best guess,” Freuchen said, his eyes scanning the forest.

“That will be too time consuming and dangerous,” Chou said. “We need to remember that the Brimstone probably raided many of these camps looking for Meredith before they found New Manhattan. We could be met with violence before we even land and explain ourselves.”

“Vell, vat other option do ve have then?”

“I have an idea,” I said.

I’d been watching the mountain range we’d had to climb over as it grew larger with every passing second. “We need to locate the bay where Captain Joel dropped us off. Then we can just retrace the route we took over the mountain. That’ll put us in the best position to spot the camp.”

“Ha!” said Freuchen, smacking a fist into the palm of his other hand. “You are a very smart human, Meredith.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks, I guess.”

Chou must have thought it was a good idea too because she gradually increased the speed of the Brimstone’s engines and began to take us up higher.

* * *

I’d made us all a meal from the Brimstone’s galley. It was surprisingly well-stocked with canned food and wild-picked fruit and vegetables. There was a decent-sized freezer that held a stock of fresh mystery meat I thought might be venison but could have been wild boar for all I knew. There was even an electric stove, and what I thought might be a microwave. I settled on pears and apples. Sliced them all up, sprinkled some sugar over Freuchen’s, and took the three bowls back to the cockpit. We ate in silence, watching as the mountain range, now just a few miles away, drew closer.

“How fast can this thing go?” I asked.

“It has a top speed of about sixty miles an hour, assuming there is no headwind to fight,” Chou said. “Faster still if we have a tailwind to aid us.”

“That’s awesome,” I said. This was seriously going to help our journey. I couldn’t guess how far away the collector was, but the Brimstone—God, I was really starting to hate that name—was going to be a huge asset for us.

“Look here,” Freuchen said, drawing our attention to the view beyond the windshield. “We are passing over the mountains.”

Chou and I both stood and stared down at the craggy gray rocks. When we first encountered it, we’d thought it probably ran for a few hundred miles at least, but now we could see it was much further than that. Beyond the mountains, the sea glistened and scintillated. Somewhere out there, beyond the misty horizon, was Avalon. I wondered how Edward, Wild Bill, Evelyn, Bull, and the rest of our friends were doing. I felt a strong pull of homesickness for them and almost suggested it might be worth taking a quick detour to pay a visit, but I thought better of it.

“There!” Freuchen said. “Those are the same outcroppings ve saw ven ve first arrived. I’m sure of it, vich means that the cove must be in that direction.”

Chou adjusted our direction to take us south. From this height, we had a fantastic view of the terrain for miles and miles, and it wasn’t long before I excitedly yelled, “There! There’s the cove.”

The horseshoe-shaped cove looked tiny from all the way up here, but it was the only similarly-shaped landmark within sight. It had to be ours. Chou drew parallel to it, then swung the Brimstone around to head back in the direction we had come.

“That outcropping looks familiar,” Chou said, pointing at a low-lying section of the mountain.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I think that’s it.”

Freuchen pointed at a thick column of smoke rising through the branches of the Everwood just a few degrees off to our left. “Vich mean that has to be New Manhattan.”

I threw my arms around Freuchen and hugged him hard. He stepped back, laughing, and gently swung me around then released me. I took my place in the co-pilot’s seat and watched as the plume of smoke gradually drew closer.

Fourteen

Chou started a gradual descent, intending to land the Brimstone in the same clearing as I’d been abducted from.

“Listen! Do you hear that?” Freuchen asked, cocking his head.

“It’s a bell,” I said after a few seconds. “Someone’s sounding a bell.”

Outside, I saw people running.

“What on Earth are they—oh, shit!” I yelled when I saw numerous fires spark to life around the edge of the forest. About twenty men and women stepped from the trees armed with bows and lowered the tips of their arrows into the flames before aiming the arrows right at us.

“If vun of those pierces the balloon, it could ignite the hydrogen,” Freuchen said. That chance was pretty high, judging by the number of flaming arrows pointed at us.

We were still fifty or so feet above the ground. I had no idea how accurate the archers were at that range, but after what had happened to poor Phillip in those first days on Avalon, I knew that they could be incredibly precise and deadly in the right hands.

“Hold us here,” I said to Chou and sprinted from the cockpit. I skidded around the corner and ran toward the exit facing New Manhattan.

“Come on. Come on,” I mumbled as I undid the lock of the door and slid it open. Standing in the opening, my hands holding onto either side of the doorframe, I leaned out into the cold air and looked down. I saw faces staring back up at me from behind their bows. I searched those faces for anyone that I recognized but saw none. Then, from the tree line to my right, a figure lowered the bow it held and began to walk out into the clearing toward me.

“Emily!” I yelled, recognizing her lithe form, long blond hair, and her malamute, Thor, walking confidently at her heel. “It’s me, Meredith.” I let go of the door with one hand and waved.

Emily looked up, a hand guarding her eyes against the hazy sunlight reflecting off the thick cloud.

“It’s okay,” I yelled, not really sure if she could hear me. “We hijacked the airship. The people who attacked you are… gone.”

Emily looked up at me for a few more long moments, and I started to suspect that she hadn’t heard me after all. Then she looked first to her left, waving her hand to her people, then her right. One after the other, the archers lowered their bows but kept their arrows nocked and at the ready. Well, it was better than nothing. I waved to her, slid the door closed then ran back to the cockpit.

“Take us down, Chou,” I said, then made my way back to the door and waited until I felt the Brimstone bump against the ground. I slid the door open and started to move toward the first mooring rope to secure the airship.

“Stop right where you are.” Emily, flanked by three large men armed with swords and bows, was striding across the open ground toward me. The bows were aimed at me. Thor clomped along at her feet, his big brown eyes focused on me, his tail swishing.

At least someone’s happy to see me, I thought.

One of Emily’s bodyguards suddenly switched their bow from me to the Brimstone’s exit. I turned to see Freuchen and Chou standing in the doorway.

“You two, get down very carefully, and keep your hands in the air,” Emily ordered.

Chou and Freuchen did as they were told.

“Emily,” Freuchen said, “if ve do not secure the airship, it could be damaged beyond repair. Or verse, if it drifts into vun of those fires, there could be vun hell of a big bang.” The Brimstone was already drifting toward the line of fires at the edge of the forest. “It puts all our lives at risk.”

Emily thought for a second then called out to her people, four of whom came running to her side.

“Show them what they need to do,” she told Freuchen. “But if you do anything stupid, it’ll be the last thing you do.”

Freuchen and Chou walked with the New Manhattan people and began to secure the remaining mooring lines while Emily walked toward me and stopped a few feet away. “Make sure there’s nobody else on board,” she told two of her bodyguards. They nodded and climbed into the Brimstone. One of her other men began to pat me down. He stepped back and shook his head.

“You haven’t been at all honest with me, have you?” Emily said.

“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “We told you as much as we could.”

“You just left out the part about your three other friends. One of whom just happens to be a robot with a penchant for repeating himself and calling us’ Candidates.’”

She seemed mildly amused, which I took as a good sign.

“Albert and Silas?” I asked. “They’re okay?”

“They’re fine,” Emily answered. “A little weird, but fine.”

I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. “Can I see them?”

She ignored my question. “So, you were working with those… pirates?”

“What?” I said, astounded that she would think that. “No! No way.”

“So, why did they come here. Why did they single you and your big friend out?” She nodded in the direction of Freuchen and Chou who were being escorted back to where we stood.

“We weren’t working with them. They were looking for us. For me.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I’ve got all the time in the world, apparently.”

“Listen. Emily,” I took a step toward her. Her bodyguards’ blades rose and pointed at my gut.

Emily pushed the blades down. “Let her talk.”

“Thank you. I know we’re not in a position to make demands, but if you let us see Albert and Silas, I promise you we’ll tell you everything that we know. It might not make sense—God knows most of it doesn’t to me—but you’ll know as much as we do.” I paused for a second, my eyes locked with hers. “Please.”

“Take them to my cabin,” Emily ordered. Then to another guard, “You go get the boy and the robot and meet us there, too.”

* * *

Emily sat behind her desk, her fingers steepled as she watched us. Chou, Freuchen, and I stood and waited, two armed guards on either side of us.

Five minutes later, the cabin door creaked opened, and I turned just in time to see Albert appear, spot the three of us, then run straight to me. He threw his arms around my waist, hugged me, then did the same to Chou and Freuchen.

“I thought… you weren’t… coming back,” the kid said between barely suppressed sobs.

Freuchen swept him up in his arms and said, “Ve vill alvays come for you, little man.”

The light from the doorway dimmed as Silas eased his giant form into the room.

He regarded each of us in turn. “Welcome, Candidates 13, 20078, 207891. I know that you are confused and have many questions. I am here to help you assimilate into your new surrou—“

Albert said, “These are our friends, Silas. The ones I was telling you about this morning… again.” He turned and looked at me. “You took his slate with you, so he forgets everything each night.”

I said, “We’ll figure that out as soon as Emily lets me have my backpack back. Now, tell me, are you okay?”

He nodded. “When the airship came, Chou and Silas told me to stay hidden and that they would be back. But only Silas came back. Silas wanted us to turn ourselves in, but I told him we had to wait for you to come back.”

Emily interrupted. “A group of my people out looking for fresh berries discovered Albert and Silas. Came as a bit of a shock to them.” She laughed, pleasant and bubbly. “They brought these two back to camp, which caused a pretty big commotion, but it didn’t take too long for us to figure out that Silas was not a threat. Now Albert, on the other hand…” She flashed a wry grin and a wink at the boy, who blushed tomato-red.

“Thank you for looking after our friends,” Chou said.

Emily acknowledged Chou with a dip of her head. “I’ve heard an awful lot about you, Weston, from young Albert.”

“Call me Chou.”

“He said that you are a pilot… of a starship?”

“The Shining Way, yes.”

Emily nodded slowly and said, rather enigmatically, “And I thought my story was a strange one.” She got to her feet. “I’ve done as you asked and reunited you with your two friends. Now it’s your turn. Give me the truth.”

Chou, Freuchen, and Albert all looked silently at me.

“Okay, I guess I’m nominated,” I said. I took a deep breath and began to tell her the story of everything that had happened to us from the day we’d all dropped out of the sky into the ocean. As I talked, Emily paced slowly back and forth on the opposite side of the table, her head cocked slightly to one side, her eyes moving to each of us as if I was narrating a story, and we were all its characters. When I was done, she pulled out her chair and sat again, her forearms flat on the table.

Albert broke the long silence. “You believe us, Emily, don’t you?” he said.

Emily’s eyes moved over all of us one final time, and to my relief, she said, “Yes, Albert. For some reason I can’t quite understand, because—and let’s be honest here, this is the weirdest sounding shi… story I’ve ever heard—I believe you. And believe me, I know weird.”

I felt some of the tension leave the room.

Emily stood again. “So, this Architect brought us all here because—why exactly?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

“What about the robot? How much does he know?”

“He doesn’t remember anything really,” Albert piped up.

“He just knows that we were supposed to work toward a common goal,” I said. “But what that goal is… or was…” I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“But I thought you said the robot—“

Albert interrupted. “Silas. His name is Silas.”

“I thought you said Silas had given you some kind of a message from the Architect. To travel to the collector to find this Candidate 1?”

“He did give us that message, yes, the night we first found him. But then he forgot it.”

“And then the Nazis who captured your friends. And the raiders who came on the airship—they’re all agents of this other… entity. The Adversary.”

I nodded.

“And he wants you captured, but you don’t know why.”

I nodded again.

“And we’re all from different dimensions, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that explains a few things, I guess.”

“Like what?” Chou asked.

“Like how you and Meredith existed after 2012.”

Chou and I looked at each other. Then we both looked at Emily. “I don’t follow.”

Emily leaned in closer. “Because in my world… my version, there were only two humans left alive after that.”

* * *

“Aliens?” I said, still unable to believe the story Emily had just recounted.

Emily shrugged. “I’m not really sure. All I know is that after the red rain killed everyone but me, their bodies were… repurposed, turned into something else. Weird crab-like creatures that assembled themselves into these giant trees. I was traveling to Alaska—there was a group of scientists alive on an island—when I was attacked by these other creatures in the forest. That’s when Thor here showed up and tried to save me and got brought with me when the voice asked if I wanted to be saved.”

“An amazing story,” Freuchen said. He had sat enthralled while Emily spoke.

“So, what’s your plan?” Emily asked.

Good question. I had no idea what the answer was. “We haven’t had a chance to talk it through yet.”

“We will need your help with something,” Chou said.

“What?” said Emily.

“Crew,” Chou said. “We could use two or three people—people you trust—preferably with some experience of working aboard a ship or piloting an aircraft. Maybe someone with military experience who we could use as security to protect the ship.”

“I’ll ask round,” Emily said. “See if anyone wants to volunteer.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“Our backpacks. May we have them back?”

Emily nodded.

We each retrieved our packs. I opened mine and dug around until I found the memory slate. I took it to where Silas stood near the door and held in front of his face. His eye-bar quickly scanned the code. Silas suddenly tensed, standing erect, his metal arms straightening, his eye-bar moving quickly around the room.

Emily’s two guards jumped to their feet, their weapons at the ready.

“Meredith? Where are we? How did I—“

“Silas, it’s okay. Something happened, and you’ve lost a couple of days. Let me explain.”

Fifteen

“It’s beautiful!” Albert whispered when he saw the Brimstone for the first time. “Can I go onboard?” he asked, looking up at Chou and me.

“Of course, little man,” Freuchen said. “Come on, I vill give you a guided tour, and you can pick out a cabin for yourself. How does that sound?”

“Really?” Albert replied, his eyes as big as baseballs.

“Really,” Freuchen smiled back before lifting the boy up and disappearing into the airship.

“It really is quite beautiful,” said Silas. He stood next to Emily, towering over her. Thor seemed to have taken a liking to the giant golden mechanical man. He sat between the robot’s legs while Silas stroked his head. “You said the original owner came from a world devastated by nuclear war? And yet, they were still able to create such marvels. Humanity has never stopped amazing me.”

“If there is one thing I have learned since arriving on this planet,” Chou said, “it is that humanity’s drive to survive seems more than capable of overcoming almost any obstacle that presents itself. We are a tenacious species.”

Just then, Bartholomew and a woman I didn’t recognize approached us.

“Hello,” Bartholomew said, grinning broadly. “We heard you were looking for volunteers to help operate this wonderful machine.”

“We are,” I said, eying the woman who stood just behind him. She looked somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She was taller than me, close to six feet, I guessed. Her hair was thick and looked permanently tussled, covering her ears and highlighting her slim, almost elven face and features. She wore a brown leather jacket that came down to just below her midriff, and light green pants with several large pockets built into each leg.

“We’d like to volunteer,” the woman said, every word pronounced with a precision I’d rarely heard before.

I stepped in closer to her and held out my hand. “Hello, I’m Meredith. That’s Chou, and the big golden guy is Silas.”

Both said hello.

The woman nodded at each of us, still smiling. “It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“And you are?” Chou asked.

The woman flushed red, dipped her head in embarrassment before raising her eyes to look directly at me. “Amelia,” she said. “My name is Amelia Earhart.”

* * *

For the rest of that day and the next two, Chou taught Amelia how to pilot the Brimstone, launching practice flights around the canopy and eventually joy-rides for some of New Manhattan’s residents. To a one, those who took part in the flights came back with a deeper understanding and respect of just how vast and beautiful this version of Earth was.

We left the next day, Chou and Amelia occupying the pilot and co-pilot seats of the newly repaired pilothouse. Emily and a large collection of her citizens waved us off, and we watched them grow gradually smaller until, finally, Chou swung the nose of the Brimstone toward the monolith. The engines revved to max speed, and we began our journey again.

Sixteen

The next three days felt like more of a vacation than anything. Chou and Amelia seemed to hit it off and spent most of their time in the cockpit, switching shifts so the other could get some rest. Albert seemed in a permanent state of excitement, and when he wasn’t in his cabin, he was in there too, in the cockpit, happily providing a running commentary on the different trees and animals he spotted. Meanwhile, Freuchen and Bartholomew were becoming fast friends, spending their days playing cribbage and bridge in the crew quarters. They invited Silas in on a couple of games, but after he repeatedly thrashed them, he was promptly disinvited. Bartholomew also turned out to be a hell of a cook and kept us fed better than we’d been since we arrived.

Like I said, it felt more like a vacation, but each day, the collector drew closer and closer, and with it, a sense of unspoken disquiet.

* * *

It was at the end of the fourth day that Chou used the ship’s intercom to call all of us to the cockpit. I was the first to reach it, closely followed by Freuchen and Bartholomew. We stopped dead when, through the darkness, looming like some ancient giant, we saw the collector.

“My God,” Freuchen whispered, his voice vibrating with awe. “It’s beautiful.”

Goosebumps broke out along my arms. The hair on the nape of my neck rose, and I was rendered momentarily speechless.

We were about five miles from the collector. It glowed with dim white incandescence against the backdrop of the night. Amelia was in the pilot’s seat, and she angled the Brimstone’s nose slightly away from the collector so the airship’s balloon wouldn’t obstruct our view. We crowded to the window, our eyes tracing the side of the structure up and up and up, until it vanished into the sky, miles above us.

“One cannot help but feel insignificant in the presence of such a terrible feat of engineering,” Bartholomew said.

I silently agreed. It was unimaginably huge.

Chou threw a couple of switches, and the Brimstone’s forward spotlights flashed on, illuminating the land around the base of the collector. A mountain range stretched for miles on either side, encasing the bottom portion of the edifice in gray rock.

“Incredible,” Chou said. “The foundation must be buried deep in the mountains, secured by the bedrock itself.”

“Yes,” Amelia said, “but look at the ground around the mountain.” There was no forest around the base of the collector. Instead, extending out in a perfect circle for what I estimated was two miles or so was what looked like a gray landscape of… nothing. No trees, no brush, no grass—just gray nothingness. It might just as well have been the surface of the shattered moon whose glow was barely perceptible in the night sky.

Amelia allowed the Brimstone to hover in place.

I estimated we were a little over two miles from the collector now, its faceted walls taking up the entirety of our view. Chou used a small joystick to point the spotlights at the very edge of the circle of dead ground, about half a mile away.

“Look at the trees around the edge of the circle,” she said. “They’re all dead or dying.”

Chou was right. Where the dead-land met the forest, the trees closest to it looked sickly, burnt, or charred, dead or dying. But only the first couple of rows. Everything beyond that looked just as healthy as the rest of the Everwood.

“Radiation?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” said Chou. “But until Silas is awake, we have no way to gauge whether that’s true or not. I think a more probable answer is the aurora.”

I checked the clock on the airship’s instrument panel. It was after midnight. The aurora was due soon.

Chou continued, “I think, perhaps the prudent thing to do would be to put some distance between us and the collector until after the aurora. In the morning we can—“

A pulse of light spread out from the tower across the tops of the Everwood.

“Crap!” I said. “Better get us out of here.”

The pulses grew stronger and more frequent with every passing moment, each of the collector’s facets throbbing with a quickly-growing intensity. Amelia fired up the engines to max and began to swivel the Brimstone in the opposite direction of the collector, but the thing was so huge, it was going to take a minute or more to swing us around.

“Come on, come on,” Freuchen whispered, egging the Brimstone to move faster.

A roar, deep and thunderous, like the approach of an enormous freight train rattled the Brimstone. I swear I felt the vibration right down to my bones. I saw rocks tumbling from the side of the mountains. I almost laughed out loud when I saw the hair on Chou’s head begin to rise, even as I felt the sudden buildup of static electricity coursing over my own skin.

The Brimstone reverberated suddenly as a deafening boom ripped the silence of the night apart, louder than any thunderclap, stunning me.

“Oh, sh—“ I began, but the words froze in my mouth as I was thrown backward, colliding hard with the fuselage. For a thousandth of a second, reality was replaced by a furious wall of color bursting from the collector as it unleashed the power of the aurora into the world. An excruciating bolt of pain lanced inside my head as the raw, primal energy crashed over us, blindingly bright.

The Brimstone’s superstructure shook violently with every wave of energy that passed over it.

“Faster!” I said as the aurora’s light spread across the land, filling the cockpit with a blinding flash, the pixie dust lost in the brilliance.

Amelia continued her slow turn, blocking more of the light as she repositioned us, so the nose was facing away from the collector.

And then it was done. The light faded, allowing darkness to claim the land again, and for a few moments, we all just stood there, catching our breath.

“Ve need to find a place to land,” Freuchen said.

We all agreed.

Chou flipped a couple of switches and turned on the Brimstone’s powerful searchlights, then quickly began moving them over the ground below us.

“There!” Albert said after a few minutes of searching. He was pointing to a plot of open ground about a quarter-mile away from the edge of the dead-land surrounding the collector. “We can land there.”

My stomach lurched as Amelia turned the airship in its direction and dropped us rapidly toward it.

We landed and quickly tied off the Brimstone.

Just within the range of our landing lights, a dead redwood lay moldering on the forest floor. Not for the first time, I wondered at the amazing biodiversity of the Everwood. While the redwood had crashed to the forest floor many years before we set foot here, in death, it had become a kind of coral reef of the forest, allowing new life to flourish. Lichen covered the thick, armor-like bark and here and there I saw the ghostly white shape of mushrooms and toadstools. Birds had built nests in some of the remaining branches and squawked low warnings to their neighbors at the approach of these strange visitors.

In time, all would pass and return to the ground, passing on the life-giving nutrients to new plants. This endless cycle had stretched on for billions of years and would likely continue to do so until the sun became a red dwarf and swallowed the planet whole. A sad end to all of our memories, I supposed.

My eyes rose to the clear night sky and the shattered moon, looming huge and bright. The moon was full tonight—or as full as it could get, at least—its tail of broken rock trailing behind it like a comet moving across the sky. And in the distance, visible even through the forest that separated us from it, the collector glowed dimly, like a beacon… or a warning, perhaps.

In a strange spell of introspection, I wondered what had happened to the version of me that had existed in this reality. Had it been me, perhaps? Is this what became of my version of the world? Or had this planet belonged to some better version of me? Had my alternate-reality-sister led a happy, productive life? Maybe she’d gone on to be some great lawyer. I’d never know.

Somewhere out there, buried deep in the fertile soil, if I dug deep enough, would I find the fossilized bones of that other me? Had I even existed here? No way to tell. And that was okay. But I hoped that I… they had. Hoped that their life had been long and blissfully happy; I would have chosen that for myself if I could have.

The one thing this place had gifted to us was more questions than I suspected any of us could ever have answered in tens of lifetimes.

Come one, come all, it’s time to take the adventure of more lifetimes than you could possibly know what to do with.

I laughed, drawing Freuchen’s attention.

“Vat is so funny?” he asked, his voice lowered to a respectful whisper.

“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I think this world is bringing out even more of the poet in me.”

My eyes drifted back up to the moon. Its tail consisted of several large chunks that must have been tens of miles wide, numerous smaller ones that also must have been a mile or more in diameter, and tail of debris that followed behind it like baby ducklings.

I’d watched the moon travel across the sky on other nights when it had been difficult to sleep, but none of those nights had been as clear as this one, and none had given me such a crystal clear view of the Earth’s damaged sibling in such glory.

A new thought struck me.

“Hey, Freuchen,” I whispered, stepping closer to him and nodding at the moon. “Doesn’t the debris field of the moon seem like there’s more than there should be? I mean, I’ve been doing a jigsaw puzzle in my head for the last few minutes, and I just can’t seem to fit all of those pieces back into the space it came from.” In my mind, there was at least thirty or forty percent too much debris left in the moon’s tail once I had pieced it all together again.

Freuchen looked skyward. “I had not given it any thought,” he said. His eyebrows furrowed, and his head cocked back in a child-like manner of interesting surprise. “But now that you have mentioned it; yes, there does appear to be more debris than vould seem to fit that.

“Weird,” I said, unable to come up with any solution.

“Perhaps there is more destruction that ve cannot see,” he said.

“On the dark side of the moon?” I said.

“Perhaps. That vould account for it.”

“You’re too damn smart for your own good,” I said, smiling at him.

Freuchen blushed, a rare enough event that it elicited a bigger smile from me.

“So many questions,” I said quietly, still unable to lay to rest the idea that I was missing something with the moon.

“At least it isn’t raining,” Freuchen said as we made our way back to the crew quarters where everyone else was already waiting for us. I lay down on one of the beds and looked at my friends, both old and new.

Nobody seemed to want to start the conversation off, so I jumped in.

“Well, we’ve made it,” I said. “Now, what are we supposed to do?”

“It would be a mistake to leave before sunrise,” Chou said, “but we are going to have to time our trek to the mountains very carefully. We do not want to get caught in the aurora.”

“The dead-land,” I said.

Chou nodded. “It would be a mistake to be caught within the confines of that area.”

“Thank goodness it only happens once a day,” Albert said, sitting cross-legged on the bed next to mine.

“Ve have to decide how ve are going to get across the dead-land. If ve valk, ve are going to eat up valuable time,” Freuchen said.

“Yes,” I said, “but if we use the Brimstone, we risk it being caught in tonight’s aurora. Maybe we should use it as an Uber; take us there, drop us off, and then return here to wait for us.”

“That sounds like the safest option,” Bartholomew said.

“Vat is this... Uber?”

I laughed, though I thought I might be the only one who truly knew what I was laughing at.

“But that would also mean someone would have to stay behind to pilot the airship back to us,” I said.

Freuchen leaned forward. “Ve vould also need someone else to act as security, just to be on the safe side.”

It was obvious who those two people should be: Bartholomew and Amelia.

“Are you agreeable to that?” Chou asked, looking at both of them.

With some reluctance, they both nodded, but their disappointment was palpable.

* * *

We slept. And when dawn arrived, we woke Silas and filled him in on what we intended to do.

“That sounds like a good plan. Would you like me to stay behind with the Brimstone too?”

“No,” Chou said, “we’re going to need you for this.”

“Very well.”

We’d already resupplied our backpacks with enough water and food for forty-eight hours. While Freuchen had been taking inventory of the airship’s supplies, he’d found a long length of rope, binoculars, and some cold-weather gear. We added it to the rations, and we were ready to go.

“If ve have to climb those mountains, ve should be prepared.”

Chou gave us all a silent once-over. “I believe we are ready,” she said.

I agreed.

“Then let’s begin.”

Seventeen

The Brimstone skirted slowly around the base of the mountains for almost an hour, looking for a visible entrance, but we found nothing.

“We do not have any more time to waste,” Chou said eventually and directed Amelia to land the airship near the base of the craggy mountains. Before we disembarked, I handed Bartholomew a walkie talkie I’d taken from a rack in the crew’s quarters and showed him how to use.

“We’ll signal you when we’re ready to be picked up,” I said.

We said our goodbyes and good lucks then watched as the Brimstone took off again.

“My God,” Freuchen said, eyes following the collector skyward, his voice hushed as though he’d stepped into a grand cathedral. “I could never have believed such a marvel of human imagination could exist unless I had seen with my own eyes.”

I had to agree with him. Nothing mankind had ever built in any of our lifetimes had even come close to the sheer immensity of this. The view from the Brimstone last night had been something. But now, from where we stood, there was nothing between us and the collector except fifty feet of empty dead space and the occasional dust devil that danced and pirouetted across the dead-land.

I felt a small hand take mine and looked down to see Albert, his eyes wide with either wonder or fear.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “It scares me.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, kid,” I whispered, squeezing his hand tightly. I was fighting an urge to simply turn and walk away, overwhelmed by the heart-stopping immensity of this structure dominating the world. It was a Titan, frozen forever.

I allowed my eyes to roam up the faceted sides and instantly regretted it. I was overwhelmed by a sensation of imminent danger, like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and at any moment, gravity would switch and I would fall upward, vanishing into the permanent halo of clouds that swirled slowly around the vanishing point a couple of miles or more into the crystal blue sky.

“Are you feeling alright?” Chou asked me.

“Huh? What?” I shook my head and turned to look at her, only then realizing that I had grabbed onto her arm with my free hand. I exhaled loudly, then sucked in a deep breath, smiled at my friend, and nodded. “It’s a bit of a sensory overload.”

Chou, her eyes fixed squarely on mine, raised her eyebrows and deadpanned, “Meredith, in the time that I have known you, I have learned that you have a propensity for understatement. You have just outdone yourself.”

I couldn’t help myself; I laughed loudly.

“Silas,” Chou said, “you will lead us. We need to find an entrance to get inside the collector.”

“Very well,” he said.

We started out across the dead-land, our feet kicking up little puffs of the dust that, presumably, had been trees and plants and animals but which the aurora had destroyed.

“How are we supposed to climb those?” I said when we reached the base of the mountains. The sheer immensity of the collector had created an illusion of scale, I realized. The mountains looked tiny in comparison, but this close, I realized we’d underestimated the mountains’ size. They had to be at least fifteen-thousand feet high.

I hadn’t really given our situation enough thought. What had I expected? To show up and there be a door with a sign telling me that this is where Candidate 1 waited? Hardly. But I hadn’t expected this.

“I have some experience mountaineering,” Freuchen said, “but even if ve had the correct equipment, I do not believe any of us are experienced enough to make it even halfvay up.”

Chou summed up the growing sense of frustration I felt. “It does not make sense that we would be sent here for there not to be some way for us to gain access.”

“Assuming this is the right place,” Freuchen said, a hint of pessimism creeping into his voice.

I shook my head adamantly. “No, this has to be the place. Silas’ message was very explicit. This has to be it.”

“I know. I know,” Freuchen said, “but ve do not even know if this is the right collector. There are three others that ve had to choose from.”

“It has to be here,” I repeated, “we’re just not seeing it.”

I tried to ignore the sense of doubt I felt nibbling at my confidence. It could be any of the other three collectors that had been visible from the mountain back on Avalon, but they just didn’t feel right.

“We were all put on the island for a reason,” I said. “That’s where Silas was. That’s where the message was waiting for me. Why put us there in plain sight of the closest collector and not expect that this would be the logical one for us to choose. No, this is the right one. We just have to figure out how to get in.”

Freuchen glanced skyward. “Vell, ve had better do it soon, because ve have less than fifteen hours before the aurora triggers again.”

I took out the binoculars, raised them to my eyes, and began searching the craggy, inhospitable side of the mountain. Like I said, I wasn’t expecting there to be a sign saying ‘Candidate 1—this way,’ but maybe there was some hint that we were in the right place, a path or a building or… something. Ten minutes of searching turned up nothing.

The mountains seemed to simply sprout out of the ground, clutching the sides of the collector so perfectly, rising so steeply skyward that there was no hilly area leading up to them, no gradually-rising escarpment. They just were.

“It’s almost like they were formed specifically to anchor the collector,” I said. “Would that even be possible?” I asked Chou.

She shrugged. “I think such a feat of geo-forming would be only a minor project to any intelligence capable of creating such impressive engineering accomplishments as the Dyson Sphere surrounding this sun, the translocation of almost so many humans through time and space, or the collectors themselves.”

I avoided allowing my eyes to travel up the outside of the collector. This close, the sense of panic I felt each time I happened to glance at it was magnified tenfold. I huffed a couple of times to clear the anxiety then said, “Well, I guess we have to decide which way we’re going to go.”

“Meredith?” Silas said, his eye-bar following the mountains north.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I believe I am picking up some kind of low-frequency radio emission. It is coming from that direction.” He raised an arm and pointed north.”

“What? You mean like a message? Someone’s trying to contact us?”

Silas’ eye-bar rotated to look at me. “No, not a message, it does not appear to be modulated. It is more a series of pulses occurring every two seconds.”

“Couldn’t it just be some spurious emission from the collector?” Chou asked.

“I do not believe so. The signal is weak, but it comprises of a series of numbers.”

“Vat numbers?” Freuchen said.

“1 4 4 2 3 3 3 7 7 6 1 0 9 8 7…”

“Okay,” I said, “I have no idea what any of that means.”

Both Chou and Freuchen shook their heads. Albert, however, seemed to be deep in concentration. With his index finger, he’d traced the numbers in the dust at his feet.

“What’re you thinking, kiddo,” I said, kneeling down until I was at his eye level.

He ignored me for a few seconds, continuing to stare at the numbers instead, then began to add commas after some of them until it read 144, 233, 377, 610, 987.

“It still makes no sense to me,” I said.

“Those are Fibonacci numbers,” Chou said.

I turned my attention to her, “The Fibonacci what?”

“Each number is the sum of the two numbers that came before it: 144 plus 233 equals 377. 233 plus 377 equals 610.”

“Oh, wow! And 610 plus 377 is 987,” I said, suddenly understanding. Math wasn’t exactly my strong point, but the idea was simple enough for me to grasp.

Albert nodded enthusiastically.

“You amaze me sometimes,” I told him. “It’s like we have our own personal Google.”

Albert just smiled sweetly, despite him having no way to know what Google even was.

Freuchen stepped closer to us. “You think this is some form of a message?”

Chou said, “It could be, or perhaps it is more of a beacon.”

“But how vould anyvun be able to pick it up vithout a radio receiver unless…” Freuchen paused, looked at Silas then looked at me before continuing, “…Silas.”

“Right!” I said, beaming. “When the Architect left the message for me with Silas, he must have guessed that I’d take Silas with me. It has to be a message specifically for us.”

Chou did not look convinced. “It is possible, I suppose…”

“Look, we can either stand around here, debating it, or we can let Silas lead us to where the numbers are coming from,” I said. “What do we have to lose?”

For two hours, we followed behind Silas as he led the way, skirting the base of the mountain, the sun crawling higher and higher into the sky.

“Here,” Silas said, stopping suddenly. “The source of the radio signal is coming from there.” He pointed toward a section of the wall of rock that looked exactly the same as the miles of similar limestone and granite that we had already passed.

“You’re joking, right?” I said.

“No, Meredith. The radio signal is coming from somewhere within.”

I walked up to the side of the mountain, careful to avoid the scattering of loose rock and boulders. There was nothing to discriminate this part of the mountain from any other part of it—gray, dirty, craggy. I reached out with the flat of my hand to touch it… and stopped.

There was faint shuddering coming from it, like a low power hum.

“Is everything okay?” Chou called out.

I nodded. “Yup!” Then I placed the flat of my hand directly against the rock.

Eighteen

“Get back!” Freuchen yelled just as I felt him grab my sleeve and yank me backward.

The rocks were falling away, dropping… and vanishing.

“An illusion,” I said.

“An advanced hologram of some kind,” Chou corrected.

Behind the fake rockface, two enormous metal doors were opening wide, rumbling slowly apart. Whatever was beyond them was hidden in darkness and shadows.

I said, “Do you think we should—“

The darkness within the tunnel was replaced by a cool blue illumination that revealed a perfectly semi-circular-shaped tunnel as wide as the huge doors. The walls arced high over our heads and were covered in a mosaic of randomly shaped pieces of glimmering glass, as smooth as a layer of ice. The floor was a checkerboard of ever-changing blue hues, creating the illusion that we stood on the edge of a lake. The tunnel was completely empty. It stretched far into the mountains in a gentle curve toward the base of the collector, obscuring whatever lay at its end.

“It’s beautiful,” Albert gasped. He stepped across the threshold and knelt to touch the softly-glowing floor. A ripple of pale blue light spread out where his fingertips brushed against it, adding to the illusion that the floor was water. Albert looked back at us, his lips transformed into a massive grin of wonderment.

We all joined him, our shoes causing similar ripples to expand out in intricate patterns across the floor. Chou reached out and laid the flat of her hand against the wall, then jumped back as a ripple of light expanded upward, and a sound, like someone humming a single musical note, rose from all around us. A second later, it began to fade. Albert rushed to her side and placed one of his own hands against the wall. A new note sounded, a little higher in frequency than the first. Chou turned back to look at us, trying but failing to keep the smile of enchantment from her face.

“Silas, what is this?” she asked.

Silas did not immediately answer. Instead, he reached out a hand and drummed his fingers against the wall, setting off a cascade of ripples and notes.

“The Architect was concerned that the effects of the translocation on Candidates would induce mass-panic. While certain chemical alterations were made to you to reduce that possibility, every effort was made to ensure your environment was as calming as possible. I imagine this is a simple attempt to ensure that whoever passed through this tunnel remained tranquil.”

“Though it is enchanting,” Freuchen said, apparently immune to the desire to touch the wall, “ve do not know if this area is shielded from the negative effects of the aurora. I vould suggest that ve make our vay to vatever lies at the end of this tunnel as quickly as possible.”

“Peter’s right, we really should keep moving,” I said. I adjusted my backpack and began walking again.

Albert skipped ahead of us, jumping left then right as if the enormous tunnel was his own personal hop-scotch board.

We adults walked abreast of each other.

“Vy so big, do you think?” Freuchen asked, swinging his head back and forth as he took in the cathedral-sized dimensions of the tunnel.

“Perhaps it was used to transport parts of the collector or other machinery,” Chou said.

“Or maybe they just expected a ton of people,” I added, then said, “Silas, got any ideas?”

“I’m sorry, I do not have any information on why these tunnels were built to such specifications,” he said.

We had only gone a hundred steps or so when a rumbling echoed behind us, causing all of us to stop. The two huge doors were closing again. They were still thirty feet from meeting when a screech of grinding metal called out to us… and the doors shuddered to a stop.

“Well, that can’t be good,” I said.

“Nothing ve can do about it. Ve must carry on.”

I agreed, but until the curve of the tunnel finally blocked the route back from our sight, I could not shake a nagging sense of worry that periodically drew my attention over my shoulder to the two stuck doors and the open space between them.

Nineteen

Forty-five minutes later, we reached a second set of doors identical to the first. At least we assumed they were identical because only the left one was in the closed position, the other still in its recess.

Freuchen looked at Chou, his eyebrows raised questioningly. He didn’t have to say a word. It was obvious we were all thinking the same thing. Here was just another indication that this place had fallen into disrepair. And that did not bode well for us finding anyone alive within.

“Ve need to be careful,” Freuchen said, edging along the door toward the gap where the other should have been. “Ve have no idea vat—“

“Albert! No!” I hissed as the boy happily skipped his way past the door right into the gap. Albert stopped, started to turn back to me, and froze, his eyes fixed on whatever lay beyond. He turned to face us, his eyes full of awe, and waved eagerly to us to join him.

I ran to his side, my back toward the gap. “You have got to stop running off like that,” I said, pulling him back in the direction of the door, but he refused to budge. “Albert, you have no idea what—“

“Look, Meredith,” Albert said, pointing one small finger past my head. “Look!”

I heard a duo of simultaneous gasps.

Chou and Freuchen both stood rooted in place.

Slowly, I turned to face the same direction as my friends… and felt my words disintegrate as my tongue sucked all the saliva from my mouth. And that was okay, because I was beginning to run out of adjectives to describe the almost constant flood of mind-melting sights that bombarded us on an almost daily basis, and I wasn’t sure there were any that would truly sum up the grandeur of what I was now seeing.

I settled on, “SHUT. THE. FRONT. DOOR.”

We stood on the edge of another world. One that was, at once, both familiar yet alien. Fields of green grass stretched out for miles and miles. Sprinkled here and there was the occasional plot of what must be wheat or barley, I couldn’t quite tell. It created a quilted pattern of yellow against the backdrop of green. A river, a quarter-mile wide at the point closest to us, bisected the landscape, meandering serenely through the fields, past copses of willows and oaks, and other more exotic-looking trees.

And, oh! the scent was heavenly.

This microcosm of Eden was contained beneath a dome of some barely visible energy. Shifting blue hues moved over its surface, and puffy white clouds — actual clouds — scooted across the counterfeit sky.

And sitting in the center of it all, rising up to almost touch the apex of the dome, was the most beautiful building I’d ever seen.

Five jade green flute-shaped glass spires soared toward the uppermost reaches of the dome, each one a different height from the others, but all connected by what I thought were covered walkways. I saw stained-glassed windows and balconies with ornate metal railings that must have given an even better view of this land than we had. The spires rose up from a five-level ziggurat-like glass-sided building that was as large as any cathedral I’d ever encountered. Five other buildings were scattered across the landscape, all as large as a big city museum and with the same beautiful architecture as the cathedral.

What I took to be a monorail connected each of the buildings. It, too, had fallen into disrepair in places, with large chunks either missing or lying in piles of debris.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea,” I whispered, quoting Coleridge’s most well-known poem.

“Are those trees in the buildings?” I said, pointing toward the cathedral.

“Fascinating. Each level appears to contain a different biome,” Chou said.

She was right. On each level of the ziggurat were trees and flowers, each level representing a different environment: deep forest, jungle; rainforest; tundra.

Beyond the energy dome covering this place, set back perhaps a mile or so from it, the gray and black face of the mountain this idyllic space had been carved out of rose up around us. Distorted, as though I saw them through a haze of hot air, giant tightly wound corkscrew-shaped protrusions that must have been miles long, extended out of a circular opening. They stretched out on all sides, their tips buried deep into the walls of the mountain. Further into the opening were what looked like colossal milky-white pyramids, each as wide as a jetliner, they’re apexes pointing downward, forming a crystalline ceiling.

“We must be directly under the very center of the collector,” Chou said, pointing up at the corkscrews. “Those anchors must help secure it in place.”

As if by some psychic agreement, all five of us stepped into the amazing landscape and began walking toward the nearest building, about a mile or so away. We had walked less than a hundred feet when, from behind the buildings to our left, I saw movement. Freuchen must have noticed it too because he let out a gasp of surprise. Something rose quickly into the air above the building’s alabaster walls. It stopped, hovered momentarily, then accelerated in our direction.

It was a machine, I realized… and it was enormous. Its body was orb-shaped, the diameter of a Greyhound bus. Hanging from beneath its bottom sections was a cluster of long articulated tentacles that made it look like a giant metal jellyfish as it sped toward us.

Chou frantically searched the nearby landscape for anywhere that we could use as cover, but there was nothing nearby. I looked back over my shoulder toward the doorway we’d come through, hoping we might have time to run back to it. However, when I turned to look again at the thing flying toward us, it was already closing faster than even Chou could run.

We were caught out in the open. Proverbial sitting ducks.

With less than a hundred feet left between us, Silas took several steps toward the fast-approaching machine and said, “Hello. I am Standard Instruction and Learning Servitor 762. You may call—“

There was a white flash of light from an aperture at the top of the machine. Silas’ eye-bar snapped back into his head with a loud crack. His eyes blinked out, and he collapsed motionless in a heap on the ground, like a marionette that had had its strings sliced.

“Silas!” Albert yelled and took two steps toward our friend before Chou caught his wrist and swung him in one fluid motion into her arms. Freuchen growled and placed himself in front of us, his shoulders so broad he blocked my entire view. I had to step to the left to see the machine as it slowed to a stop, with less than ten yards separating us. Around the circumference of the orb was a recessed trough; lights, all of them blue except for a single red one that was obviously fixed on us, glowed brightly. As I stepped out from behind Freuchen, the red light that had been focused on him turned blue, and the one to its immediate right changed to red… its focus now me. I couldn’t help myself; I took an involuntary step back. This thing was hugely intimidating.

The machine dipped lower and covered the distance between me and it in the blink of an eye, its tentacles rattling like wind through metal trees. At the end of each tentacular limb were various blades and drill bits, saws and pincers, scissors and hammers. They could be tools… or weapons, for all I knew. All I did know was that everything the Architect had placed in this world was designed to aesthetic perfection. Silas, the collectors, the graveyard of dead robots, all had been meticulously constructed. Even the ruined tower where we’d found our metal friend back on Avalon, despite its state of disrepair, had still retained its elegance. This machine had none of that finesse. It looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare parts.

Its outer casing looked to be made of copper that had long ago lost its luster. It was scratched and gouged in places. Here and there, blue flakes of paint still clung to it like scabs. Four steel panels of varying sizes had been fastened to it in places across its surface, the welds that held them in place, severe and ugly scars. This close, I could see that what I had taken for lights in the recessed area running around its middle were actually lenses, similar to telescopic lenses of a camera. At least three of them were broken, shards of glass still visible in the housings. Compared to every other machine I’d seen or met on this planet, this one looked like the machine equivalent of a bum who called a cardboard box in the back of a liquor store his home.

It drew close enough that I could feel the slight disturbance in the air caused by whatever kept it aloft, could smell the scent of oil and grease. The red lens whirred as it extended in then out again, as though it were having trouble focusing on me. One of its appendages flashed through the space between us, the pair of scissor-like blades snapping together just inches from Freuchen’s head.

“Who are you?” the machine demanded, in a disarmingly feminine voice. “How did you get in here?”

“My… my name is Meredith Gale,” I stuttered. “We were sent here by the Architect to find Candidate 1.” I paused, then added, “Are you Candidate 1?”

The machine pulled back ten feet as if I’d slapped it. Its appendages, which until now had been held like fists, cocked and ready to strike, relaxed.

“I am not,” it said, then, “Give me your hand.”

“What? Why?” This time, I pulled back.

The machine advanced menacingly toward me.

Freuchen and Chou both made to block its path, but an appendage flashed between them, knocking Freuchen aside, and grabbed me by my right wrist.

I screamed, “Let me go, you—“ I winced as I felt something sharp pierce the palm of my hand. The machine let me go, and it withdrew its tendril. There was a small spot of blood on the palm of my hand. “What did you just do to me?” I yelled.

The machine remained silent for a few moments, then it said, “A blood sample to ascertain that you are who you say you are. I apologize, but I had to be absolutely sure.”

“Well, did I pass your damn test?” I snapped.

“You did. Now, please follow me,” the machine said, its voice so gentle it simply did not fit with the sheer, ugly, utilitarian design of its body.

“What did you do to Silas!” Albert suddenly yelled, wriggling out of Chou’s arms and running to my side. His face was flushed with anger, and I felt a sharp pang of guilt tinged with a sudden surge of anger at myself that I had forgotten my friend so easily.

“He is an unauthorized SILAS unit, and I have deactivated him until I can ascertain his allegiance,” the machine said.

“Allegiance?” I said. Now I took three long steps forward until I was face-to-face with the sultry-voiced monstrosity, angrier than I could remember being in a long time. “Silas saved all our lives. He led us here. I demand that you release him, right now, or I swear to God I will fu—“

Freuchen wrapped a hand around my left bicep and squeezed hard enough to distract me. He leaned in and whispered, “Perhaps, it vould be a good idea to remember that ve are guests of this… entity.”

I got the point, took a deep breath, then backed up, but the desire to pull one of this thing’s tentacles off and shove it right up its—

“Hello,” Chou said, stepping forward. “Do you have a designation?”

The blue light I was staring into turned red as a lens closer to Chou gave her the once over. “Who are you?” The machine’s focus shifted from Chou to Freuchen to Albert.

“They’re with me,” I said, suddenly terrified that it… she… might decide to permanently ‘deactivate’ my three friends like it had done with Silas.

I was its center of attention again.

“I am Blue Alpha,” it said matter-of-factly.

“Well, Blue Alpha, it’s good to meet you,” I lied, forcing down my still swirling anger. “Now, will you reactivate our friend Silas. Please.”

“As I have already said, that will not be possible until I have ascertained his allegiance. Once that has been determined, I will choose to reactivate him or recycle him.”

“What do you mean ‘recycle?’” I asked.

Blue Alpha ignored me, its attention switching to a lens that seemed focused on something behind us.

“The security doors,” she said, a note of alarm in her voice. “How long have they been opened?”

“I have no idea. They were that way when we arrived.”

The robot suddenly lost interest in me and sped over to the doorway.

Blue Alpha was enormous—by far the largest robot we had encountered—but even with only one of the doors open, she still could have slipped into the tunnel with room to spare. Instead, she stopped just short of the doorway. An appendage—the one that was equipped with what looked like a giant pair of tweezers—reached up to the band of lenses and plucked one from its fitting. Then, it snaked into the tunnel and shifted back and forth for a few seconds as though it was examining both the tunnel and the stuck door, then withdrew and replaced the lens back in its fixture. Blue Alpha drifted back to us.

“You were not followed,” she said.

I wasn’t sure whether that was a question or a statement, so I just said, “No, we weren’t.” I wondered whether I should tell her about the main doors that had jammed open after we entered the tunnel. I decided against it, at least until we knew whether or not we could trust her.

“Why did you not enter the tunnel?” Chou said bluntly.

“I have not left this facility for… a very long time.”

“Why not?” Chou pressed. “An entity of your intelligence and size should be able to find a way out of here.”

Blue Alpha swayed gently from side to side as though blown by a breeze. “Then who would take care of the Arboretum? Who would there be to await your arrival?”

“But there must be more of you? This place is too enormous for just you to look after,” I said.

“I am the last. Follow me.” Blue Alpha began to float toward the same building it had originally appeared from behind.

“Hey! Wait a second,” I yelled after her. “What about Silas? We’re not going anywhere without him.”

I felt Albert’s hand take mine and squeeze. I looked down to see him smiling up at me, which went a long way to making me feel a little less guilty about my earlier momentary abandonment of Silas.

Alpha Blue hesitated, then an appendage reached backward and with its claw-like attachment, plucked Silas from where he lay. She continued on her way, carrying our deactivated friend as though he were nothing.

I looked at Chou and Freuchen. “Should we follow?”

“Do ve have much of a choice?” Freuchen said.

Twenty

Blue Alpha stopped at the top of a set of six sandstone steps. “Your accommodation is ready. Follow me.”

The robot said the only way into the building was called the Arboretum. It was through a large wooden door embossed with an elaborate geometrical design. The doorway, tiny by comparison to the ones in the tunnel, was still large enough for Chou to have stood on Freuchen’s shoulders and passed through without hitting her head. But there was no way Blue Alpha could fit without quite literally demolishing half of the building.

“How is she going to—” Albert began then stopped as the bulbous protrusion at the center of Blue Alpha’s body popped free of her main chassis and floated where she’d left it. This ‘mini’ version of Blue Alpha was still the size of a compact car. It had just four lenses around its middle, front, back, and one on each side. A smaller set of the main chassis’ appendages dangled beneath it. Blue Alpha swung the door open, and we followed her into a lobby lined with white tile. Two sets of stone stairs, one on either side of the lobby, curved up to a second story. At the opposite end of the lobby, windows looked out onto a lawn with benches, a small lake, and lots of trees.

Blue Alpha floated up to the next floor. We all took the stairs and followed her down a passageway to a large dormitory with five beds on either side. The beds were made, each with crisp gray sheets and pillows and a yellow comforter. Albert leaped on to a bed. He let out a long Oooooh of contentment. “It’s so soft,” he said and spread himself out. “I’ve never felt anything so nice.”

Did they have beds like this back in the when Albert came from? Probably not judging by his reaction.

“There are showers and bathrooms through there,” Blue Alpha said, indicating with a wave of an appendage a doorway at the opposite end of the dormitory. “I’m afraid I cannot offer you any food. What supplies we had expired long ago.”

I caught the sudden narrowing of Chou’s eyes. If the supplies Blue Alpha mentioned had expired long ago, then that meant the chances of there being any humans here were zero.

“You said ‘we.’ There are more of you?” I asked.

“There were, a long time ago.”

“But now?”

“Now there is only me… It’s musty in here.” She floated toward a window, released the latch and opened it. “That’s better.”

Albert sat up, a pillow clutched to his chest like a Teddy bear. “You must be really lonely,” the boy said.

“I miss my comrades, yes, but their sacrifice has not been in vain.”

“Sacrifice?” Freuchen said. “Vat do you mean by that?”

Blue Alpha glided back to the center of the room. “What do you know of why you are here?”

I looked to Chou and Freuchen and got both of their silent approval. “We know that we were brought here by an entity called the Architect. That it is responsible for bringing others like us from different times and different dimensions. We know that because another entity that we call the Adversary interfered, something went very, very wrong with the Architect’s plan.”

“What we don’t know,” Chou said, “is why we were brought here. Do you know why, Blue Alpha?”

“No, I am just a maintenance intelligence. I was not a primary part of the Architect’s plan. I was designed to maintain the collector I was never supposed to interact with humans on any meaningful level.”

“And yet,” said Freuchen, “you are very eloquent.”

“I was… upgraded.”

“How so?” said Chou.

“Shortly before the great translocation was scheduled to begin, I, along with all of the other intelligences in this facility, received new code from the Architect… and a warning. We were told that something had gone terribly wrong; that the Architect was at war with another entity—I assume that must be this Adversary that you mentioned. We were given self-awareness and told to prepare for an attack on the collector—an attack that we must stop at any cost.”

“Why attack this place?” Chou said.

“The collectors are the key to the Architect’s plan. Without them, it cannot succeed.”

“Vell, it makes sense that the Adversary vould try to destroy the collectors,” Freuchen said, sitting on the edge of the bed next to Albert, “The Adversary seems intent on making sure the Architect’s plan never comes to fruition. This place…”

“I get that,” I said, “but why? What are these things supposed to do? How do they figure into the Architect’s plan?”

“That information was not shared with any of us.” Blue Alpha’s tentacles gave a little shake, as if she was frustrated. “We were instructed to defend it with our lives. And so we did.”

“What about Silas?” Albert asked. “When will you bring him back?”

“I cannot allow his reactivation until I am certain of his loyalty.”

“Loyalty?” I said. “Silas is the one who passed the message from the Architect to me. Without him, we would never have made it here. How could you question his loyalty?”

Blue Alpha hovered directly in front of us at head height. “Because two days after we became sentient, this collector was attacked just as the Architect had predicted.”

“So?” I said, my frustration growing by the second.

“We were attacked by SILAS units like your friend. Hundreds of them. They had been reprogrammed to stop at nothing in their attempts to destroy the collector. They gained access to the loading tunnel you arrived through and attempted to attack us directly. We managed to hold them off, but it cost almost three-quarters of my brethren; fifty-two units gone in a matter of hours. But we were winning, we had the upper hand. Then, we received reports that a secondary group of SILAS units had scaled the mountain and were dismantling the outer shielding of the collector in an attempt to gain access to the core systems.”

I don’t know whether it was a conscious action on her part or not, but as Blue Alpha narrated her story, she had begun bobbing up and down in what I took to be the equivalent of human gesticulation.

She continued. “That was when we realized that we had been duped. The SILAS units we were fighting were not there to destroy the Arboretum, they were here to ensure we did not leave it. They were nothing more than a distraction designed to weaken our numbers.

“It was Green Theta who came up with the idea to overload the collector’s capacitors and force them to vent. The gamma radiation that would be released would be more than powerful enough to destroy the SILAS units. Green Theta’s plan worked. It eliminated every SILAS unit and saved the collector. But we must have miscalculated something because the release triggered a simultaneous cascade effect across the network—every collector activated at once. The effect was devastating… destroying everything for several miles around us.”

“The gray dust,” Albert said.

“Yes,” Blue Alpha said. “And worse still, we could not stop it. The capacitors, instead of allowing the release of energy at a constant, steady rate, were now triggering every twenty-four hours instead.”

“What stopped you from just repairing it?” I said.

“Only a few of us remained at that point. All of the technical units were destroyed, and none of us survivors had any knowledge of how to fix the problem. All we knew how to do was to keep the collector working. And so that is what we did. As the years passed, the remaining twelve repair units began to fail. We repaired each other as best as we could, and when one of us became inactive, we used their components to repair ourselves. But there were finite resources, and entropy will not be denied. One by one, units failed. Now there is only me.”

“But Silas wasn’t responsible for that? He isn’t one of them,” I said.

“I will ascertain that soon enough,” Blue Alpha said, gliding toward the door.

“How?” Chou said.

“I will run a diagnostic scan of his systems.”

I said, “Blue Alpha, when we first arrived, I asked you two questions, but you only answered one of them: Candidate 1—are they here?”

The robot paused for what felt like an eternity then said, “Yes, Candidate 1 is here.”

Freuchen jumped to his feet and grabbed hold of my hand. “You ver right all along, Meredith.”

I felt a wave of excitement crash over me. “Are they here?” I pointed at the ground beneath my feet.

“No, Candidate 1 is in the citadel.”

Citadel?

“The green towers?” I asked, remembering the stunning set of towers we’d seen when we first arrived.

“Yes.”

“Can you take us there?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“If you wish, yes. Come with me.” Blue Alpha exited into the corridor and led us back to the lobby, down the stairs, along another corridor and then down a second set of stairs that took us well below ground level. We followed her beneath an arch and found ourselves on a platform where a sleek-looking train with two carriages waited. “The buildings are connected by underground and overground maglevs, but the overground tracks were too badly damaged during the attack, so I have concentrated on ensuring that the underground routes remain in working order. Even so, the connection between two of our outermost buildings has been severed due to tunnel collapses.” She seemed genuinely saddened by the loss.

At our approach, the doors to the first carriage slid silently apart, and we all stepped inside. Rows of comfortable-looking seats sat on either side of a central aisle. We took the one nearest to the engine. The doors slid shut again, and a second later, the maglev eased away from the station. It accelerated rapidly, the only sense of movement the occasional light on the tunnel wall that flashed by so fast it left an afterimage like a shooting star on my eyes.

Minutes passed, and the train began to slow, finally coming to a stop in a station that looked identical to the one we’d just left. The only thing to discern they were actually different was a couple of abandoned metal luggage carts. The doors opened, and Blue Alpha led us out. We followed her down a set of spiral stairs that seemed to go on forever and were barely wide enough to fit Freuchen’s broad shoulders.

“I’m cold,” Albert said as we dropped deeper into the ground. The kid was right. The temperature had grown increasingly cooler.

“I was forced to salvage the heating ducts, long ago,” Blue Alpha said.

I was becoming more and more dubious about this strange machine. If it was telling the truth about Candidate 1, then how could any human survive down here without any kind of heat? It just didn’t make any sense to me. I was about to voice my concern when we finally reached the bottom and stepped out into a tunnel made of redbrick and mortar. Three pipes fixed to the wall by brackets ran close to the arched ceiling, while lights, strung like Christmas strands, flickered randomly. It was like we’d descended into the Victorian sewers of New York or London.

“Oh, great,” I said, “this is just tremendous.”

Fifty paces ahead of us, the tunnel’s ceiling had collapsed, totally blocking the corridor with dirt, broken bricks, lumps of concrete, and the occasional enormous boulder.

“What the hell is this?” I snapped, turning on Blue Alpha. “You told us Candidate 1 was here. You lied.”

The lens closest to me lit up, the intelligence behind it seemed suddenly as cold as the air in the corridor.

“I do not lie,” Blue Alpha said. “Beyond the rubble is what you’re looking for. When the attack came, and before we realized that the true target was actually the collector, we were faced with the high probability that we would be overrun. It was then that we made the decision to seal this section. We collapsed the ceiling in the hope that, should we lose, it would hide the custodians long enough that help would arrive. As it turned out, there was no help left, but the attack was repelled.”

“Custodians?” I said.

“Yes. We thought that they were the target, but now we believe that the Adversary had no idea that they were here.”

“So vy the hell did you not clear it avay?” Freuchen said.

“We had lost so many units during the battle, we no longer had the resources. As you may have already gathered, my main chassis is incapable of making it to this location. And we did not know whether there might be another attack. It was decided that the best course of action was to simply leave it.”

“But what about these custodians?” Chou said. “How were they supposed to survive? Do you even know if they are still alive?”

“The custodians were safe and in no imminent danger.”

God! This machine was really starting to annoy me.

I jerked a thumb at the rubble. “But if they’ve been behind that crap for three-hundred years, then how are they supposed to have survived? No food, no water, no nothing. You’re lying.” The anger in my voice was laced with disappointment, and I realized how very tired I was.

“I do not lie,” Blue Alpha repeated, with vehemence this time.

Chou touched my shoulder. “Meredith, there are alternatives. It’s possible they may be in some kind of suspended animation or cryogenically frozen.”

“So, there’s only vun thing for it,” Freuchen said, interlacing the fingers of his hands and cracking out his knuckles. “Ve are going to have to clear this ourselves.”

Chou and I turned to stare at him. “Are you crazy?” I said. “Some of those boulders are bigger than the ones that were trapping Silas when we found him. And at least we had gravity and room on our side then. There’s barely room to fit you.”

Freuchen was offended… “Vell, it is not going to magically clear itself, is it? So, unless you have a better idea, it is our only option.”

Albert tugged at my sleeve. “What about—”

“Not now,” I said, perhaps a little too harshly. I turned my attention back to Freuchen. “It’s going to take us weeks to clear all of that away. And what if the ceiling collapses while we’re moving it? We’ll all be crushed to death or… or trapped down here until we suffocate.”

“Meredith,” Albert said, tugging at my sleeve. “What about Silas?”

“What about him?” I snapped. “Blue Alpha has already made it clear she’s not going to reactivate him until he’s passed whatever stupid test she has planned.” My voice was shrill, my frustration finally reaching a boiling point. I was sweating despite the cold of the dusty corridor. “This is all just a nightmare. Just a—”

I flinched as Chou took a step toward me, grabbed my arm, and yelled, “Stop! You are panicking, and panic will do us no good under these circumstances.”

I was not going to cry. I was not. But right then, I felt like this new life was beginning to echo the old life that had brought me here: success always just out of reach. I sniffed back my tears and clenched my teeth together.

Freuchen leaned back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. “Vell, Albert is correct. If ve had Silas’ help, ve could clear this corridor in a matter of a few days or less, depending how far it goes on for, of course. I have some experience vurking the gold mines in Alaska.” He extended his hand to point at the broken ceiling. “If ve brace the ceiling as ve go, it should be safe.”

Now, he turned to face Blue Alpha. “But ve vould need our friend brought back to the land of the living. Vat do you say?”

Blue Alpha remained silent for a few moments, then said, “I will administer the test. We shall proceed from there. We must go to my laboratory.” And with that, she floated back up the spiral staircase.

* * *

Blue Alpha’s laboratory was a separate gray warehouse building just beyond the towers. Her main chassis was already waiting for us in front of two aircraft-hanger-sized doors. Silas still hung limply from one of its tentacles like Faye Ray captured by King Kong. The doors slid open as we approached, and we followed Blue Alpha inside.

“Vat in heaven’s name?” Freuchen exclaimed.

Within the warehouse were row upon row of heavy-duty shelving. Pieces of machinery had been neatly stacked and ordered on the shelves. Some were as large as cars, others as small as a cellphone, but I had absolutely no clue as to what any of them were.

We followed Blue Alpha down a center aisle big enough to accommodate her chassis… just. There could only have been a few feet of leeway on either side of her. The racks reached all the way to the ceiling, several hundred feet overhead.

Chou said, “You have quite a collection.”

“I waste nothing,” Blue Alpha replied.

Albert let out a gasp of surprise. “Look! There are more robots like Silas.” He pointed to a rack of shelves just off the main corridor.

I broke away from the party and walked over to the rack. The kid was right. Each shelf was piled high with the unmistakable bodies of Silas’ brethren. All dismantled. Heads, limbs, torsos, odd tube-like protuberances, multi-faceted silver octagons, eye-bars—all neatly stacked and ordered in row upon row, shelf upon shelf, and box upon box. I felt a sudden wave of nausea. It was horrendous. It wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have considered that I could have felt such disgust at this… this butchery.

“The remains of the SILAS units that attacked the facility,” Chou said quietly. I hadn’t even heard her approach.

“I… I know they’re just machines. They’re not human, but I’ve spent so much time with Silas now, seen how kind he is. This seems nothing short of barbaric.”

When Chou did not answer, I turned to look at her and was met with a furrowed brow. “I forget,” she said, “that in the when you come from, these intelligences would be seen as nothing more than machines.” She ran her hand over a dusty torso, leaving a trail of brighter gold behind. “But in my time, that kind of attitude would be met with disgust much as I believe you might feel if you met someone who considered slaves as sub-humans or as property.”

“Oh, my God!” I spluttered. “Your husband. He’s an AI. I’m so sorry, Chou, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

She nodded and smiled understandingly at me. “I take no offense. In this world, where so many cultures and beliefs are colliding head-on, we must all allow for a period of societal and personal assimilation. It will take time, but I believe we will have all the time that we need.”

“Please, keep up with us,” Blue Alpha said, then continued on her way.

A little while later, we reached an area that reminded me of a mechanic’s shop. Tools that looked vaguely familiar to me and others sat on benches. I saw compressors, and what I guessed was some kind of welding machine mixed in with high-tech equipment and banks of monitors and displays that I had no idea about. In the center of it all was a raised metal table that reminded me of something you’d find in an operating room but about four times larger. It had outlets and connectors set into its side.

“Please, wait over there,” Blue Alpha said, gesticulating with a tentacle toward a set of plastic chairs stacked up against a wall. Her chassis extended the tentacle that held Silas and placed him unceremoniously on the table, then proceeded to rearrange his limbs until his legs were straight and his arms lay at his side. She glided over to a rack of tools, pulled out several, including one that looked like a thin version of a crowbar, then moved to Silas’s side. With a speed that left me speechless, she applied the crowbar to what must have been an invisible seam running around Silas’ chest, levered it up, so the front half separated from the back, and pried it off with a metallic ping. Another of her tentacles took it from her while the four others began to probe around inside Silas’ chest cavity.

It was like watching an octopus perform open-heart surgery.

Blue Alpha floated up until she was directly above Silas’ open chest. She extended a thin tubular metal instrument attached by wires to a gray box on the floor into his chest cavity. There was an electrical buzz, then we all jumped as Silas’ eye-bar popped from its recess. His eyes glowed an intense red. Several lines of numbers suddenly appeared in the air a few inches in front of his eyes. They scrolled up at a blistering speed for over a minute then, just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they vanished.

“Primary quantum diagnostic check: Successful,” Silas said, his voice sounding, well, robotic. “No anomalies found.”

“Good. Very good,” Blue Alpha mumbled to herself. She quickly replaced the top half of Silas’ chest then repositioned herself above the bump that passed for his head. One of her tentacles plucked his eye-bar out of the air and placed it on the table while two more proceeded to lever his head open by inserting the same thin crow-bar-like tool into the eye-bar socket. From where we sat, we had a perfect view of what I took to be Silas’ brain. I guess I had expected some kind of science-fiction-esque array of flashing lights and whirring cogs. Instead, all I saw was a lump of silver metal with three distinct raised bands running from the back of his head to the front that reminded me of a cyclists’ helmet.

Blue Alpha picked up a long black cord with a pin-like connector at one end and inserted the connector into a receiver at the base of Silas’ brain. She connected the other to one of the banks of equipment behind her, pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and watched as a tsunami of data washed over the screen. A second screen displayed what looked like a duplicate of the data on the first.

“Do you know what she’s doing?” Albert said. He sounded worried.

“I have no idea,” I admitted, looking at Chou.

“I believe,” Chou said, “that she is comparing Silas’ core code to a copy she has which she knows has not been corrupted.”

Albert stared blankly at Chou.

“She is checking that the Architect has not altered Silas’ personality so that he might cause him to want to harm any of us,” Chou elaborated.

Albert pouted. “Silas wouldn’t hurt us. Not ever.”

I put my arm around his shoulder and squeezed. “Well, we all know that, of course, but we just need Blue Alpha to make sure that—”

The data on the screens suddenly stopped and a repetitive, alarm-like, beeping sounded. A large block of code on the left screen was highlighted in a flashing green box. On the right screen, the one Silas was plugged directly into, a row of red X’s flashed. The numbers and characters above the row of red Xs looked the same as those on the left screen, but everything after it didn’t even come close.

I looked at Chou and she at me.

“That can’t be good,” Freuchen said, stepping between us.

Blue Alpha stopped probing Silas’ brain, her attention drawn to the screens.

“What’s happening?” I asked her, stepping up to the table.

Her lens closest to me turned red and focussed on my face. “There is a discrepancy between the original backup code I have for the SILAS units and your friend.”

“What do you mean ‘discrepancy?’” I asked. I sensed my companions move closer to me.

“This SILAS unit is missing a large portion of code.”

“Well, he suffered some kind of memory loss when he was hit by a pile of rocks. Maybe that’s what did it?”

“No,” said Blue Alpha. “This code is not related to his memory systems. We are talking about his core personality and drives.” She floated closer to the two screens. “The difference is quite marked. There is a significant amount missing.” She turned back to Silas and removed the wiring from his head. Moving in closer, she picked up a new tool that looked like a large pen and began prodding Silas’ brain. Where it touched, small puffs of smoke rose momentarily into the air.

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t care that there’s a difference between your damn code and Silas’. There is no way he would do anything to hurt us. No way.” I was becoming desperate, desperate enough that I was wondering what the odds were that the three of us could overpower Blue Alpha and force her to reactivate our robotic friend.

“That is apparent,” Blue Alpha said. She replaced the pen-like tool in its slot on a nearby shelf and began to replace the outer cover of Silas’ head.

“I don’t care,” I said, fear working its way into my voice despite my best attempt to stop it, “we’re not going to…” I paused. “Wait a second, what?”

With his head back in place, Blue Alpha placed Silas’ eye-bar back in its slot. “I said that it is apparent that this SILAS unit would not attempt to hurt you,” Blue Alpha said. She gesticulated toward the two screens. “I extracted the code on the left from the brains of the SILAS units that attacked this facility. The corrupted SILAS units. The code which Silas is missing is the malicious code that was placed in the other units by the Architect. Your friend is not corrupted.” There was a flash of light from Blue Alpha’s main chassis, and a few moments later, Silas whirred into life, sat upright, swung his legs over the edge of the table, and dropped to his feet.

Albert sprinted to Silas’ side, threw his arms around the robot’s legs, and hugged him hard enough that the metal man wobbled just a little.

“I missed you, Silas,” Albert said, his chin tilted up to the robot’s eye-bar.

Silas reached out a hand and gently stroked the boy’s hair. “And I have missed you, too, Albert. Although I must admit, I am unaware of what has transpired since our arrival here.” He looked around. “Wherever here is.”

I was about to answer him when a thought struck me like a lightning bolt. “Hey! Wait a second. You’ve been deactivated all this time, and I left your slate in my backpack… but you recognize us all?”

Silas’s eye-bar moved to take in all of us. “Meredith. Chou. Peter. Albert. Yes, I recognize you all.”

I turned to Blue Alpha. “You fixed something. His memory. You fixed it.” I felt a smile broadening across my face.

“Yes. It was a simple repair—just a few synaptic nodes that needed to be reconnected. His power core is another matter, however. I will have to pull one from containment, but it will be a simple transference that should take less than half an hour.”

“You mean, Silas vill have his memory back, and von’t have to shut down every night?” Freuchen said.

“That is correct.”

I resisted the urge to reach out and hug Blue Alpha. Instead, I placed a hand against her metal casing and said, “Thank you. Thank you, so much.”

“You are welcome,” Blue Alpha replied. “Now, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to explain to your friend that we have need of him.”

Twenty-One

“I think it would be better if you and Albert waited in the stairwell. The chance of further collapse is high,” Silas said.

“Yeah, not going to happen,” I said.

We were back at the tunnel Blue Alpha said she and her compatriots had sabotaged to ensure the safety of whoever or whatever lay beyond the mound of rubble. Blue Alpha had fabricated ten large metal supports in her workshop, and eight of them lay neatly stacked against the left side of the corridor. Freuchen was working with Chou to put two of them into place to support the ceiling at the face of the rubble. Freuchen had already come up with a plan for how to attack the problem of getting the rubble out of the corridor: we mere humans would stack the smaller pieces of debris along the corridor while Silas would carry the larger items up to the next floor, where they wouldn’t be a danger to us.

Freuchen stood back, placed his hands on his hips, and regarded the wall of concrete, rock, and dirt, illuminated by two large portable lights Blue Alpha had brought with her. “The more pressing problem is how ve are going to get the biggest pieces out of here,” he said, tapping one of the larger boulders with his boot. “If ve pull out the vong one, the whole thing could come down on us.” He mimicked the ceiling collapsing.

“Perhaps we should only remove the ones we have to and leave those that we do not need, so they act as support?” Chou offered.

Freuchen stroked his beard. “An untidy solution and potentially dangerous, but under the circumstances, it might vurk,” he said. “Let’s get to it then.”

Albert wanted to help too, so Blue Alpha scrounged up a small wicker basket, and we filled it with smaller pieces of concrete and broken red bricks which Albert dutifully followed behind Silas each time he took the stairs. It kept the kid occupied and out of the corridor, which had quickly filled with a thin cloud of cloying gray dust.

Every ten feet of progress, Freuchen and Chou placed two of the metal supports. I trusted Freuchen knew what he was doing, but I still found myself flinching every time the ceiling creaked or groaned as we moved deeper into the rockfall.

Not long after they had placed the fourth set of supports, Freuchen called out, “I… yes, ve’re through to the other side.” Twenty more minutes of work, and we had a hole big enough for Freuchen and Silas to fit through if they twisted their bodies just so. We grabbed our flashlights and followed one after the other.

Beyond the barrier, we found ourselves in the same redbrick lined corridor as we had just come through, but at the end of it was a heavy, dust-encrusted, oak door.

“This way,” said Blue Alpha, and pushed the door open for us.

* * *

We stepped into a chamber hewn straight out of the rough quartzite of the mountain. The room was roundish, about twenty feet across, its walls roughly excavated, with not a smooth surface in sight. A rivulet of water dripped slowly down the wall to form a small pool near where we stood, a trail of green algae marking its random trajectory. The place had obviously been hollowed out in a hurry, with none of the usual attention to detail I associated with the Architect’s work.

Ahead of us, a wall of reinforced steel stretched from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, blocking us from going any further. In its center was a large door with a lever handle. There was a numerical keypad next to it, glowing brightly.

Blue Alpha floated to the keypad, tapped in a code while reciting the numbers aloud. “Nine. One. Five. One. Nine. Five. Three. Remember it.” She reached out, pulled the lever up, and swung the door open.

We stepped through into a semi-circular, metal-walled vault.

Across from us, near the ceiling, a large computer screen followed the wall’s curved contour, displaying data and several histograms that updated in realtime. Below the screen, five identical metal doors had been built into the wall. Each one was uniform in size—eight feet by four and made of solid steel. Each was secured to the metal wall by three large, sturdy hinges and equally intimidating bolts. At each door’s center was a large metal wheel. Above that, a square of glass was located at approximately head-height. Over the lintel of each door, a small light glowed brightly. Two of the lights were red, but the lights above the last three doors to our right glowed green. Between us and the doors, set back a little way from the center of the room, was a console with a screen and keyboard fixed to it. A single office chair sat by it.

“What is this place?” Chou asked, her voice echoing.

“A repository of sorts,” Blue Alpha said. “When the attack came, we brought the custodians here for their safety.”

“How many custodians are there?” Albert asked.

“There are three who were responsible for building this facility.”

“Three?” I said, turning to face Blue Alpha. “We weren’t really expecting three.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, I suppose. I mean, we’d been told to find Candidate 1. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be others, too. I walked past Blue Alpha to the nearest door with a green light and peered through the window.

I let out a gasp of surprise and took a step back.

“Vat is vong?” Freuchen said, immediately at my side.

I had no idea what I’d expected would be beyond the door—a cell or maybe some kind of cryogenic deepfreeze, maybe. But not this… not this.

On the other side of the steel door was a park. Cherry Blossom trees lined a path that encircled a pond, a layer of pink petals covering the ground like snow. Beyond the park, visible through the branches of the trees, the towers of a city I thought might be Tokyo rose skyward. Beyond the city, stark against the blue sky, a snow-capped mountain held sway over everything. Sitting on a park bench next to the pond, caught in the act of tossing a sprinkling of seed from a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, was a woman in her mid-thirties. The seed peppered the air in an arc in front of her, while ducks splashed across the pond’s surface toward it.

All were frozen in time, as though I was looking at some incredible three-dimensional photograph.

“Is it some kind of hologram?” I asked, unable to drag my eyes away.

“No, it is all very real,” Blue Alpha said.

I felt Freuchen’s breath on my cheek and turned to see him standing beside me. “Impossible,” he said half-heartedly.

“No, not impossible,” Chou said, and I turned to see her standing behind the two of us, Albert held in her arms so he could see through the window too. “We have already experienced something very similar, remember?”

“The Titanic,” Albert said.

“That’s right, Albert,” said Chou. She turned back to look at Blue Alpha. “The technology you are using here is the same technology the Architect used to bring us here, the same technology that caused the unstable multi-dimensional chaos we witnessed onboard the ship. But this is controlled. The Architect has managed to establish a permanent connection between this world and these other dimensions. Am I correct?”

“You are,” said Blue Alpha. “Before the attack, we received technical data from the Architect and instructions that we should begin construction immediately on this facility. The custodians would be placed in each of these locations. While it appears that time has stopped for us, it is actually moving at a greatly reduced rate. Watch the ducks.”

I concentrated on a duck that was in the process of taking off from the pond’s surface. Its body was almost completely out of the water, its wingtips just touching the surface, creating a ring of water. As I continued to stare, the ring expanded ever so slightly outward, as though I was watching in super slow motion.

“For the custodians,” Blue Alpha continued, “time is passing at a normal rate.”

“How much time?” Freuchen said.

“Mere hours since they entered,” was the robot’s reply.

“Weeks have passed here,” I said, shaking my head. “Astonishing.” I moved to the next door and pressed my face to the glass, my breath condensing against its cold surface.

A man, his back to me, stood on a deserted beach looking out at a cold gray ocean. Huge foam-tipped breakers poised to crash toward the sand and pebble-strewn beach. The sun was either setting or rising, I couldn’t tell, but it was barely visible behind a bank of fluffy white clouds. The man was dressed casually in a jacket and jeans, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. I couldn’t tell his age, but he had the beginnings of a bald spot visible on the crown of his head, his brown hair tussled by the sea breeze. He was as frozen as the woman beyond the other door.

“How is any of this possible?” Freuchen asked.

“I do not understand the intricacies of the physics, but I believe that it is a similar concept to how gears work. Our universe is the small gear of a vast trans-dimensional machine. These doorways are teeth on that gear and lead to other dimensions that are the equivalent of far larger gears, relatively speaking, of course. For us, time continues as normal, but on the other side of each of these doors, time to us appears to move incredibly slowly. The doorway is kept slightly out of phase with their reality, so it cannot be seen on that side until we want it to be.”

Chou and Albert were already at the third door. Freuchen and I crowded in next to them. Inside, we looked in on what I took to be a workshop. An old man stood at a metal workbench. He had to be in his seventies, maybe even older. He wore flannel pants and a woolen sweater. His hair was silver-gray and slicked back over his head, his age-spotted pate visible here and there. He had a narrow face, studious eyes highlighted by a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that rested halfway down a narrow nose. Full but pale lips were surrounded by a neatly-trimmed beard and mustache that was either red like my hair or stained by nicotine, I couldn’t tell.

“He looks worried,” Albert said.

He did look worried. His brow was furrowed in either concentration or worry. It was hard to tell which. The bench was littered with circuit boards, computer equipment, and tools, as were the four other nearby benches. But the old man wasn’t concerned with any of these. His attention was completely focused on a framed photograph he held in his hand. It was a strange feeling, to be getting a glimpse into a time way ahead of the one I had left behind me. It was so personal, voyeuristic, yet it was so… mundane. So every day. So—

“Meredith!” Chou said sharply.

I jumped as though I’d been stuck with a pin. “What?”

“The photograph. Look at the photograph.” She stepped aside so I could get closer to the glass window.

The photo was in a plain ten-by-eight silver frame. A woman in her forties stood behind a podium. She had red curly hair that was shorter than mine, a more business-like style. Eight men and women stood around her, captured in that split second of jubilation cheering and smiling, some with an arm raised in an obvious gesture of celebration, others caught mid-applause. A young boy of maybe eight stood to her left, gazing up at her. Red, white, and blue balloons cascaded down from the ceiling where they had just been released.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “It’s the photograph Weidinger said the Adversary had implanted in his mind.”

“Or one very similar,” Freuchen said, turning to stare at me, then the photograph. “She is older, to be sure, but there is no doubt in my mind that she is you, Meredith.”

I spun around to face Blue Alpha and blurted out, “Who is he? Is he Candidate 1? Why does he have a photograph of me? You have to tell us.”

Blue Alpha repositioned herself behind the control panel. “I think those questions will be better answered in person.” She began to manipulate the switches on the console.

I stepped forward and placed both hands on the console. “No, you need to tell—”

Blue Alpha raised a single tentacle in an obvious “shut-the-hell-up” dismissal. I listened.

“I will need you all to step over to the right of the doorway, please,” she said.

We did as we were told.

“Thank you.”

Chou said, “You’re bringing him back, yes?”

“Yes,” Blue Alpha said, focused on the console and the computer screen above the doors.

“How?” Chou insisted, obviously fascinated by the whole experience.

“As I have said already, I do not understand the physics of how this works, but the analogy I used earlier—”

“Of the gears,” Albert said.

“Yes, of the gears; imagine we are simply meshing more intricately with the universe behind that door. Changing the size of the target universe to match our own so that they meld together and allow us to connect at the same speed of time.” She threw several switches at once. The ground reverberated with a low hum, which grew steadily louder. There was a hiss as loud as a sack full of cobras.

Then there was only silence.

The wheel on the door began to rotate. A creek of the hinges, the door opened, and the old man stepped through the doorway to our side, as if he’d simply been standing there all along.

His attention was fixed entirely on Blue Alpha. If he saw any of us standing off to the side, he gave no indication of it. In his right hand, he still carried the photograph of that other me he had been staring at so intently.

“Blue Alpha, you made it. Are you okay?” His voice was mellow, American west-coast, but he delivered his words with the professorial precision of someone who was used to being listened to.

“I did.”

He raised his right hand and looked at a wristwatch. “Twenty minutes over there. How long here?”

“A little more than a month,” Blue Alpha said.

The old man staggered momentarily, reached his empty hand out to steady himself on the control deck.

“The others?” he said after regaining his composure.

“I brought you back first.”

“We should begin transporting them back as quickly as possible.” He still had his back turned and hadn’t noticed us.

“Of course, Michael, but first, there are some people I’d you to meet.” Blue Alpha gesticulated with one appendage in our direction.

The man turned, jumped in surprise, and took several steps backward when he saw the five of us standing near the wall. “You let a SILAS unit in here? Are you insane?”

“It’s all right,” Blue Alpha said reassuringly, “I have checked his core system, and his programming is uncorrupted.”

The old man relaxed a little. “Who are you?” he demanded. His gaze moved over all of us, and for a moment, I imagined how we must look to him. A giant, a robot, a child, a woman dressed all in white, and me. We must look pretty damn odd. His eyes met mine, moved to Chou, then snapped back to my face. He inhaled an enormous gulp of air then exhaled it as a gasp of astonishment before taking two teetering steps toward me, adjusting his spectacles.

“My God,” the old man said, his voice hushed. “It… it can’t be. But it is, isn’t it?”

I looked at my companions, but they were all staring at me. I took a couple of steps closer to him. “I understand you probably think you know me,” I said, nodding at the photograph he held, “but I’m not—”

He covered the space between us in a couple of quick, long steps and snatched both my hands up with his own. His skin was calloused and warm, and he held my hands with a tenderness I had not felt in a very long time. He seemed unable to speak, words trying to escape his lips pulled back by the gravity of his emotion. Tears welled in his eyes and began to follow the curve of his age-spotted cheeks.

“Mother,” he said.

Twenty-Two

I laughed nervously and let go of the old and obviously crazy man’s hand. “Look, sir, I am absolutely not your mother. I know this all must be very confusing but—”

He thrust the photograph in front of my face, tapping the picture of the other me with a wrinkled index finger. “This is you, yes?”

“No. I suppose so. Kind of,” I stuttered.

“And this…” he tapped the picture of the little boy, “is me. This is the day you… my version of you, won the election for President of the United States.” He tapped the image of a tall, good looking man standing next to Photo-Me’s immediate left, his right hand pressed against my lower back.

“That’s my father.” He lowered the photo and wiped the tears from his eyes with a knuckle, composed himself, and continued. “I’d wondered whether I might meet someone that I knew—an alternate version of some old friend—but it was just a daydream. I never imagined this, never thought that I might find someone who meant so very much to me. It is a little overwhelming.”

“But I’m not really her,” I insisted. “My life took a very different route.”

“Of course. Of course,” he repeated, not unkindly. “The very fact that you are here means your life-paths diverged early on. My eyes see you, and I know you’re not her, but my heart… well, that is an entirely different matter altogether. But I know this: if whatever accident brought you here hadn’t denied you of a future, then you would have become her, a version of her, with all her strengths and tenacity and fire.”

“Perhaps you should sit down?” I suggested, cupping his elbow and nodding to the office chair next to the control panel.

“A good idea, yes.” He eased himself down. “Now, why don’t you introduce me to your companions?”

I did so, starting with Albert, Chou, Silas, and finally, Freuchen.

“Peter Freuchen… I believe I read a book of yours when I was a young man,” Michael said. “You were quite the adventurer.”

“Another time and another me,” said Freuchen, with his trademark grin.

“Michael,” I said, using the name I’d heard Blue Alpha use, “we are searching for a very specific person, and we think, hope, that you might be him.”

Chou interrupted, “We were all brought here at the brink of certain death, contacted by something we have come to call the Voice. The Voice referred to us in a very specific manner. Tell us, how did you come to be here?”

Michael paused, seeming to deflate. His shoulders slumped, and he placed his head into his hands as all the energy left his body at once. He took a few moments to himself, then sat upright again and said, “The end of the world brought me here. And yes, I was contacted by this same Voice that you refer to. I was offered a choice, remain and perish alongside everyone else on the planet, or be saved. I, of course, chose the latter.” He trailed off, his eyes dropping to stare at his feet.”

“And ven the Voice spoke, how did it refer to you?” Freuchen said.

“Ah!” Michael said, a sad smile creasing his lips. “Well, I can tell you that it knew intimate details of my life, from the nickname I was called in high school to where I met my wife.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “Why yes, it referred to me as a Candidate. Candidate 1, to be exact. Is that the answer you were looking for?”

I smiled, exhaling a sigh of relief. A huge weight lifted from my shoulders as a light throbbing pain began to pulse behind my eyes. Finally!

Freuchen said, “Ve have already met one other person who came from a version of Earth ver all human life appeared to be destroyed. Earlier, you mentioned that the ‘end of the vurld’ brought you here. Did you mean that literally or figuratively?”

“Oh, I meant it quite literally, I can assure you.”

“What caused it?” Albert asked.

“Well that, young man, is one question that I can most certainly answer. It was me. I am the man responsible for the end of the world.”

* * *

“You’re joking, aren’t you?” I said half-heartedly.

“Oh, I wish that I was, but no. I am the man responsible for—”

Chou interrupted us. “Perhaps it would be better to discuss this later. We have more pressing matters, after all.”

The message. Of course. I nodded. Nodding at my robot friend, I said, “When we first discovered Silas, he had been trapped by a rockfall. When we freed him, he gave me a message and told me to look for Candidate 1—you—and tell you something that we think is of great importance.”

Michael’s eyes glowed with an intense curiosity. “A message? From whom? And why me?”

“The message is from the entity we believe is also the Voice—Silas calls him the Architect.”

Michael said, “And the message…?”

“‘Candidate 13,’ that’s me,” I said, “‘humanity is in peril. The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder; the effects on the outcome have moved beyond predictability. Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must travel to the collector immediately and locate candidate 1; they must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind.’”

“Hmmm,” said Michael but offered no more.

I watched him for a few long moments. “We’ve pretty much figured out what the first part of the message means, which is how we found you. And while we don’t know who or what the ‘external entity’ is, we’ve had a couple of run-ins with its ‘agents of chaos.’”

“We call it the Adversary,” Albert said chirpily.

Michael smiled back at him. “An appropriate name, if ever I heard one.”

Chou said, “The last line of the message, ‘the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind;’ does it mean anything to you?”

Michael leaned back in his chair and slowly shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said slowly. “Not a clue.”

I felt the air leave the room.

“Damn it all to hell,” Freuchen hissed.

Michael held up a hand. “While I am obviously not the person that line was meant for, I think I know who was.”

“What? Who?” I gasped.

Michael got to his feet, his knees popping loudly.

“Blue Alpha, I think it’s time we brought back Miko and Vihaan.”

* * *

Miko Tanaka was an astrophysicist. A keen mountaineer, she had been descending from the summit of Everest in 2037 when an enormous avalanche plucked her from the side of the mountain. As she was swept away, sure that she was a dead woman, the Voice contacted her and asked if she wanted to be saved. Miko was a slight woman in her early forties, delicate looking but with clearly defined muscles beneath the material of her blouse, and a grip that was vice-strong when we shook hands. Freuchen took to her instantly, sensing a kindred adventurer, and now, the two sat across from each other at the end of the table we were all gathered around in some kind of mess hall or cafeteria, sharing stories of each other’s adventures.

Vihaan Deshpande would have been one of several million victims of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in 2028. He was in his early fifties, a tenured professor at the National Centre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnology, University of Mumbai. He seemed to be the most affected by his translocation to this version of Earth. Permanently sad eyes watched us from beneath heavy eyelids, and he rarely spoke unless questioned. Understandable, I realized as the destruction of his beloved city was still so fresh in his mind, having had nowhere near the time to acclimate being pulled here. The rest of us had all become candidates by sheer bad luck, or at our own hand, the kinds of events and endings that you could put down to the vague statistical maybe’s that whatever hidden dice roll had been assigned to us by the universe, commonly known as bad luck. But for Vihaan, he had been a victim to mankind’s utter stupidity—the kind of stupidity that always seems to have to be paid by the blood of innocents.

“I hope this is to your liking,” Blue Alpha said as she reentered the room, carrying seven plastic plates in her tentacles. The plates were heaped with lettuce and spinach and cucumber and a few vegetables I didn’t recognize. “I’m afraid I had to cannibalize the cultured meat machine for parts several decades ago.”

“You have quite the green thumb… tentacle,” I said awkwardly, then tried to save my own embarrassment by asking, “Where did the vegetables come from?”

“I have maintained a greenhouse facility on level four on the off chance that the Architect’s plan would eventually come to fruition.” She paused, then added with her own hint of embarrassment, “But I must admit that I do find the art of growing and nurturing life, even life as simple as the plants you see before you, very satisfying.”

I smiled at her, took the knife and fork from the plate, and began to eat. The salad was delicious, and I told Blue Alpha so. She dipped in midair and rustled her tentacles in appreciation before disappearing into the kitchen only to reappear with glasses and two jugs of the most refreshing water I’d ever tasted to wash the food down. When we were done, she cleared the dishes away.

We took our chairs and formed a circle with them. Michael stood, his legs quivering a little as he rose and said, “Meredith, would you please tell Miko and Vihaan the story you told me?”

I repeated the whole story of how I’d gotten here along with how we’d found Silas and the strange message Silas had given to me and me alone. I mentioned nothing of Photo-me’s relationship to Michael. He could tell them that part if he wanted. Otherwise, it was none of their business.

“They’ve figured out the first part of the message, that’s what got them this far, but that last line ‘they must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind’ means nothing to me. Nothing at all. It seemed sensible to ask you two, as all three of us must have been placed here for a reason.” He eyed his companions. “Vihaan, anything?”

Vihaan was concentrating, but shook his head, “No, nothing springs immediately to mind.”

All faces turned to look at Miko.

“Miko?” said Michael.

She, too, took a long pause before answering, and I was sure that she was also going to say she had no idea what it meant, but instead, she whispered, “Perhaps, but I hope that I am wrong.”

All of us except Albert instinctively edged a little closer to her.

“My main field of research,” Miko said, “was the study of the Higgs field and a particle called the Higg’s Boson.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said, “but I have no idea what it does.”

Miko smiled, “It is complicated, but to put it as simply as I can, it is the particle responsible for giving every other particle in the universe its mass.”

“Okay,” I said. “Still don’t understand, but how does that relate to the last line of the Architect’s message?”

“Rather than explain, if you will indulge me, it would be better if I showed you.”

“Go right ahead,” said Freuchen, his eyes not leaving Miko. I had to smile; it was pretty obvious that the arrival of this brilliant woman had reduced Freuchen to puppy dog status. He would be tripping over his own tongue if he wasn’t careful.

Miko pointed at the glass marbles Albert held in his hand. “Albert, may I have one?”

Albert nodded enthusiastically, glad to be invited into the adult conversation.

Miko took a marble and placed it carefully on the table, just a few inches from the edge.

“Imagine the marble is our universe, nestled comfortably within the Higgs field,” she said, lowering herself down until her eyes were level with the table. She tapped the tabletop with a knuckle. “To us, the universe appears just fine, everything working as it was intended, with the Higgs field in a stable low-energy state, a state that is known as a true vacuum.” She paused for a second, letting her words sink in, then continued. “But it could all be a lie, we could actually be in what physicists call a meta-stable state, one where our universe appears to be stable but actually exists in a false vacuum. Theoretically, the universe could stay in that state forever, and we would be none the wiser. But… if a high-energy event occurs anywhere within our universe, it could disrupt the Higgs field sufficiently enough to force a portion of the universe out of its false vacuum and into a true vacuum.” Miko gave the marble a gentle nudge with her finger sending it rolling off the edge and into Albert’s lap.”

“And that would be bad?” I said.

“It would be very, very bad,” said Miko.

Chou nodded, adding, “The end of… everything.”

Miko said, “The true vacuum would expand outward at the speed of light in an ever-increasing bubble, changing the state of everything within it from false vacuum to true. It would mean the destruction of everything that holds our reality together. The very fundamental laws of physics would change; nothing would remain the same. It would mean not only the end of life in this universe but also the end of the potential for life.”

“I think it might be even worse than that,” Chou said. For the next couple of minutes, she explained how she and her husband, the AI of the science vessel The Shining Way had been assigned to investigate what she had called Vagrant particles, strange particles that simply should not exist in our universe, that had leaked through from alternate dimensions. “I believe that the Architect may have developed technology to access the alternate universes through these rifts, which allowed it to bring all of us here.”

“Okay,” I said, looking at Freuchen, “I think we’re following.” He nodded that he was. “So, what does that mean?”

“It means,” Chou continued, grim-faced, “not only the end of the universe where the false vacuum event occurred but also the destruction of any other alternate universe connected to it. It could destroy not just everything that is, but everything that has been, too. There would be nothing left. Not only would humanity cease to exist, it might cease to have ever existed.”

Michael blinked several times. Vihaan seemed to melt into his chair. I’d thought that delivering my message to Candidate 1 would be the end of my role, but it was becoming obvious that, instead, it was just the beginning.

Vihaan cleared his throat. “But surely, if what Miko says is true, then the Architect must have found a way to counteract that disaster, or why else would it have brought all of us here? And why task Meredith with bringing us the message? It would not make any sense unless the Architect had already deduced a way to either stop it or save us.”

Chou nodded in agreement.

“Well,” Miko said, “let us assume I am correct, there is no way for us to prove it and certainly no way to stop it.”

“Vy not?” Freuchen said.

“The bubble generated by the event that shifting from false vacuum to true vacuum is expanding at the speed of light. There is no way for us to detect it.”

“Then how would the Architect have known it was even happening?” Michael asked.

“A good question,” Miko said. “And one I regret I do not have an answer for.”

“I think I do,” I said. “If the technology the Architect used to bring us here allowed it to effectively move back and forth through time within any other universe outside of our own, then wouldn’t it be possible to have maybe seen this false vacuum bubble destroying other universes?”

Chou nodded solemnly. “I think you may be right. And if that is what the Architect saw, then it would have been logical to draw the conclusion that it was also happening here in this universe.”

“There’s another possibility,” Vihaan said, suddenly animated.

“Go on,” Michael said.

“We are forgetting a simple fact: if there are infinite universes out there, then it stands to reason that there are other Architects, too. Perhaps one of them communicated with our Architect and confirmed that the event was indeed occurring and that this universe was in imminent jeopardy.”

“Wow!” I said. I hadn’t really given the idea that there were other versions of me and my companions out there in alternate universes much thought since we had landed at the bay after leaving Avalon. It was mind-blowing.”

“Whichever is true,” Michael said, “I think Vihaan is right—it doesn’t make sense for the Architect to have brought us here only to tell us it’s the end of the universe. They must have thought it through, and there must be a way out of it. There has to be more to the Architect’s plan than we first thought.”

“Now, if only we knew where the Architect was located so we could ask them,” I said with a deep sigh.

Michael stood up and began pacing back and forth.

“Are you feeling alright?” Freuchen said.

Michael nodded but continued to pace quickly back and forth, then suddenly stopped, placed both hands on the table, and leaned toward us. “I think I may know where to find the Architect,” he said.

I leaped to my feet. “What? Why didn’t you say earlier?”

“I wasn’t entirely sure,” he said, “but the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I am right. It all makes sense to me. Why I would be here and why I would be designated as Candidate 1.”

“Where?” Chou demanded. “Tell us.”

“What’s wrong with Blue Alpha?” Albert said suddenly.

“What?” I said, annoyed that the boy had distracted us at such a critical point in our discussion.

“Look at Blue Alpha,” Albert insisted, pointing to where the robot hung in midair, unmoving. Her lenses all glowed red, and her tentacles were locked rigidly in place at every joint, so they all pointed straight down like she was a soldier standing at attention.

“Blue Alpha? Are you okay?” I asked, but she said nothing.

Silas began to make his way toward her, “Perhaps, there is something I can—”

With a sudden explosion of movement that sent me and everyone except for Chou leaping from our seats, Blue Alpha sped across the room and crashed into the wall, sending bits of plaster and wood into the air. She pulled back six feet and did it again, then again, and again. Silas strode across the room in a couple of huge leaps and threw his arms around her, pulling her to his chest like she was some kind of rogue basketball. But even his immense strength could barely contain her, and she struggled to continue her seemingly insane act of self-harm.

“What is that?” Vihaan said, taking a step backward and knocking his chair over.

“Look out!” I hissed when I saw the unmistakable glowing eyes of one of the same robo-bugs that had spied on us when we’d first arrived on Avalon and assassinated the Nazi commander, staring back at me from just over the threshold of the doorway. Before any of us could react, a second robo-bug came through the doorway, climbing across the ceiling, then a third and a fourth appeared.

Chou picked up a chair and threw it at the doorway, scattering the bugs. Two of them vanished back into the corridor. The other two spread out across the walls, one on either side of us.

“Don’t let them near you,” I screamed. “They’re deadly.” I grabbed Michael and pulled him backward while Albert, Miko, and Vihaan rushed to join us.

“Get behind this,” Freuchen said, flipping the table over onto its side. It wasn’t much of a barrier, but it would have to do.

Meanwhile, Chou leaped to her feet, grabbed her chair by its legs, and advanced on the nearest robo-bug. The tiny assassin seemed focused on stalking my little group and didn’t see her coming until it was too late. It leaped from the wall toward the ceiling, but Chou’s lightning-fast reflexes were too quick for it, she swung the chair and caught it in midair, knocking it back into the wall. It bounced and tumbled to the floor. There was a crunch as Chou brought her foot down hard on it, sending pieces spinning.

Chou whipped around and ran at the last bug. She swung the chair again, but this one was more alert. It dropped from the wall to the floor and leaped for Chou, who was now using the chair like she was a lion tamer. It leaped again, and Chou managed to catch it mid-flight, not hard enough to do any damage, but with enough force to send it skidding across the floor on its back. Chou ran after it to deliver the coup de grâce, but before she reached it, it righted itself and scuttled out the door into the corridor, Chou in hot pursuit.

As soon as the bug had vanished into the corridor, Blue Alpha relaxed in Silas’ arms. Her tentacles returned to their normal graceful ebb and flow. Silas released her, and she floated away from him.

“You have to leave, now,” Blue Alpha said urgently, her voice resonating with panic. “Quickly, follow me.”

“Why?” I yelled, falling in with the others around our new metal friend.

“The collector has been breached,” she said matter-of-factly. “Something is here.”

Twenty-Three

We grabbed our packs and equipment from the dormitory.

“Albert,” I said, “I want you to stay back with Michael and our new friends. I’m relying on you to keep them safe, okay?”

Albert nodded enthusiastically. Michael caught my eye and gave his own subtle nod acknowledging that he would watch over the boy. When we reached the foyer, Chou and I crept forward and peaked out through the open doors. Blue Alpha’s main chassis was where she’d left it. The open ground between us and the tunnel back through the mountain looked clear.

“Let’s go,” I said and started to edge through the door only to be tugged back inside by Chou.

“Look!” she hissed, pointing a finger toward the doors of the tunnel we’d entered through.

A tall black shape stepped into the threshold. It looked more like a human-shaped black hole than a man, sucking in all light around it, which was why I hadn’t seen it standing in the shadow of the tunnel’s entranceway.

“Abernathy,” I croaked, my throat suddenly dry.

Abernathy walked a few paces into the open, his black cloak swirling around him as though it was a living, thinking thing. His head moved from side to side as he surveyed the land and buildings. I instinctively ducked further behind the door as his gaze moved over our hiding place. He stopped, staring, it seemed to me, directly at us.

“Do you think he saw me?” I whispered to Chou.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s more likely he’s looking at Blue Alpha’s chassis.” Blue Alpha’s main chassis still hovered silently above the ground, where she’d detached herself from it, just a few feet away from the steps leading down from the doorway.

With long, purposeful steps, Abernathy began to walk toward us. Behind him, a steady stream of people began to step out of the tunnel. At least, some of them were still people, most were changed; their skin covered in thin, ropey black coils that covered each of them to varying degrees as though there was some kind of a process of assimilation going on. I stifled a gasp of horror as I saw a creature that was made of conjoined humans, fixed together by the ropey material to create a new, fast-moving, almost crab-like new being. More came into view, scuttling toward their master like a pack of hellhounds.

“Back inside,” Chou urged, and we retreated into the foyer where a worried-looking Michael and the rest of the group waited.

“There’s no way we’re going to get to the exit without being seen,” I said. “There’s just too many of them.”

Chou said, “It’s not going to take them long before they reach here. Then it’ll just be a matter of time before they find us.”

“I have an idea,” Blue Alpha said. “There are maintenance tunnels that crisscross the entire property. About thirty feet to the east of this building is an access panel. There’s another shaft that comes up close to the entrance tunnel.”

“There’s no way we will make it across any open ground without Abernathy or one of those… things seeing us,” Chou said.

“I know,” Blue Alpha said, “which is why I will need to cause a distraction.”

“No,” I said, “you have to come with us. You don’t know what Abernathy is capable of.”

“I swore to protect this facility and everyone in it,” Blue Alpha said. “I will do that.”

“There has to be another way,” Miko said.

“This is the only way,” Blue Alpha replied adamantly. “Now, you must leave. Quickly, come with me.”

We followed her down several corridors until she stopped at another, smaller door. “Stay close to the wall of the building until I have time to distract the intruders. I will lead them away. Take the passage and follow it north until you reach the third access shaft. That one will get you closest to the tunnel.”

“But—” I began to say in a final attempt to stop her, but I knew it was no use. Instead, I simply said, “Thank you.”

Blue Alpha rustled her tentacles, turned, and sped back toward the foyer.

* * *

One after another, we filed out of the door, pressing ourselves against the smooth, cool tower wall until we reached the building’s corner.

“There’s the panel,” Chou said, pointing to a square metal box protruding out of the ground about thirty feet to our right. From our position, the building effectively blocked us from the sight of Abernathy and his minions, but that also meant we couldn’t see what he was doing. Chou was the only one who had a clear view, crouched at the corner, her head angled just enough around it to be able to see what was going on.

“Get ready to run when I tell you,” Chou said.

Everyone but Chou jumped as, without warning, Blue Alpha’s voice boomed across the fields and open ground. “You are not authorized to be here. You will leave immediately or suffer the consequences.”

“Ready…” Chou said.

The sound of metal crashing against metal rang out.

“Now!” Chou yelled, loud enough to be heard over the cacophony.

One after the other, we sprinted toward the access panel—Freuchen, Albert and Michael first, followed by Vihaan and Miko, then Silas and me. Chou was the last to leave. Freuchen was already lifting the heavy metal manhole when Chou and I reached it. Only when everyone but Chou and I were safely in did I dare to look back toward the tunnel’s opening.

Halfway between the tunnel and the tower, Blue Alpha had engaged Abernathy’s minions. She picked them up in her tentacles and smashed them into the ground or tossed them back away as though they were nothing, cut others in half with her saws, or crushed them with her hammer.

Abernathy stood with his back to us, oblivious to our presence, silently directing the attack. A phalanx of his minions broke free of the main horde and maneuvered around behind Blue Alpha. They dove at her. She managed to fend off most of them, but not all of them. I saw three black shapes clambering up her chassis like mountaineers climbing a rock face.

“Meredith! Move!” Chou urged, pushing me.

I snapped out of my stupor, and continued down the ladder, unwilling to look back at the carnage spilling out across the land.

* * *

The maintenance tunnel was large enough for Freuchen and Chou to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as they splashed through a couple of inches of stagnant water that had collected on the concrete floor. Silas and I brought up the rear behind Michael, Miko, Vihaan, and Albert. Michael was old, but he was still sprightly and didn’t slow our pace.

“Here,” Freuchen said when we reached the next access shaft leading back up on the other side of the complex. “I’ll go up first.” He climbed the ladder and pushed the cover up an inch so he could see out. “My God!” he whispered, his voice echoing down to us. “They are everyvare.”

He replaced the lid and climbed back down.

“There are several hundred of those things. The tunnel is about ten yards from us, if ve are quick, I think that ve can make it without being seen. I vill go up first. If ve are spotted, I vill draw them off.” That last sentence wasn’t a request, and nobody argued with Freuchen. He climbed back up, checked that the coast was clear then pushed the manhole cover out of the way before slipping up and over the lip, using the wall surrounding the shaft as cover.

“Come on, now,” he called down to us.

We sent Michael, Albert, Miko, and Vihaan up after him. Then it was my turn, and I quickly followed behind them. In the distance, I heard screams and the screeching of metal, but it was cramped behind the wall, and I dared not move in case we were seen. Silas and, finally, Chou joined us, and we waited for the signal from Freuchen before we raced across the space between our hiding place and the huge tunnel doors.

“Meredith, you first,” Freuchen said, then tapped me on the back and said, “Go, now!”

I sprinted for the two huge doors, sure that at any second, I would be spotted, and the creatures would come for me, but I reached them without being seen and stood there, my hands on my knees, panting with fear as the panic washed over me. I turned back to face my friends and beckoned for Michael and Albert (who now seemed inseparable) to come and join me.

“Give me… a… moment…” Michael said, between gasps for air.

I took that moment to peek around the doors back toward the tower complex. “Oh no,” I gasped, which got everyone’s attention. Chou and Freuchen crowded in next to me.

“Ve need to go. Now!” Freuchen insisted, stepping away from the door.

Chou joined him, taking Michael by the arm and ushering him and the others further into the tunnel.

“Meredith,” Freuchen said urgently, beckoning to me to join him. But I couldn’t move. I was transfixed by what I saw in the pristine fields. There were hundreds of them, maybe close to a thousand, all under Abernathy’s sway. They swarmed across the fields, crashing toward Blue Alpha, who floated in front of the tower. She’d lost most of her tentacles, and of the remaining three, only one was still functioning, the other two hung useless below her, but at great cost to Abernathy’s army judging by the pile of bodies around her. As I watched, her final functioning tentacle was overwhelmed by a horde of men, women, and children that climbed up the useless limb, heading for Blue Alpha’s control unit.

The last thing I saw before Freuchen dragged me after him was Abernathy’s minions swarming over Blue Alpha like ants attacking a beetle, tearing her chassis apart as though it was nothing, as she careened into the ground in an explosion of dirt and sparks.

The collector belonged to the Adversary.

* * *

“Quickly!” Chou said, urging us forward while throwing a nervous look back over her shoulder toward the doors.

When we finally caught sight of the entrance, I was surprised to see that night had fallen, covering everything beyond the jammed doors with a black veil. Chou and I ushered everyone through the doors, then stopped momentarily while we all caught our breath.

The light from the tunnel spilled out beyond the doors illuminating the carpet of gray ash or dust. When we’d arrived, only our footprints had been visible, but now, I saw hundreds of tracks extending away into the darkness toward the forest. I pulled my flashlight from my backpack and shined it into the darkness beyond where we’d stopped, casting the beam around.

“My God,” Michael said quietly when he saw the devastated landscape.

“You’ve not been outside the collector before?” Freuchen asked, looking to Michael, Vihaan, and Miko in turn.

All three shook their heads.

“There simply wasn’t enough time,” Michael continued.

“Oh, you’re in for a treat then,” Freuchen said with a chuckle.

“So, where are we supposed to go from here?” Vihaan asked.

His question stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t even given it a thought. Our quest had been to get here, to the collector, but now that the collector had fallen to the Adversary, what were we supposed to do? If we called for help from the Brimstone, it would take them too long to reach us. If we stayed in the tunnel, then there was no guarantee the army of those monsters led by that tainted psychopath wouldn’t catch us.

“We need to make a run for it,” I said. “We can’t call for the Brimstone, it’ll take too long.

“Brimstone?” Vihaan exclaimed. “What do you mean ‘Brimstone?’”

“Long story,” I told him. “We’ll explain once we get there.” Then a thought hit me like a slap across the face. “What time do you think it is?” I said, turning to Chou and Freuchen.

“It must be somevare close to… oh!” Freuchen’s eyes grew wide.

Chou finished the sentence for him. “Close to the aurora.”

“We need to get away from here. Right now,” I said, ushering Silas and everyone else ahead of us.

“What? Why?” Michael said, slowing. I urged him on with a hand to his back.

“Because, when the aurora comes everything within the direct influence of the collector is going to be turned to this.” I scooped up a handful of gray ash from the ground and let it trickle through my fingers. I turned back toward the open doors, the beam of my flashlight sweeping over the ground and up the craggy rock of the mountain on either side of them… and froze. Something was moving across the rock above the doors.

“Chou. Freuchen,” I whispered, “there’s something moving up there.”

Chou swept her flashlight up the left side of the mountain, Freuchen did the same on the right.

“Vat on earth…”

Three shapes moved so quickly across the rough surface of the rock that it was hard for us to keep our flashlight beams on them. It took me a moment to realize what they were—two women and a man, climbing adeptly down the rock.

“Run!” I shouted, but at the sound of my voice, they leaped from the rock to the ground ten feet from us, sending huge puffs of the ash into the air that momentarily hid them from us.

Freuchen grabbed Albert and pushed the boy behind him.

The three figures were human. The two men obviously came from the twentieth century, judging from their clothing and the sneakers both wore. One stood a foot taller than the other and was almost as big as Freuchen, his short-cropped hair and thick-muscled forearms suggested he might be military or police, maybe. The kid looked like any teenager who’d hand you a cafe-latte at Starbucks. The woman was from an earlier time, her simple cotton dress torn in places and soiled with dirt. She’d lost her right moccasin at some point, and her exposed foot was badly cut, bloody and dirty, yet she seemed utterly oblivious to a wound that must surely be extremely painful. All three panted heavily, their shoulders lifting and dropping, and saliva dripped from their mouths like dogs that had been run hard. Their skin was covered in the ropes of black, and this close, I could see that the space between them was spattered with raised nodules, each one about a half an inch in width and spaced six inches from the next nearest. The nodules expanded and contracted every couple of seconds like lungs.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but behind each of their widely dilated eyes, I thought I sensed panic, fear even, as though the real person was trapped somewhere within—a passenger in their own body, unable to regain control.

“What’s wrong with the people?” Albert whimpered from behind Freuchen.

“I don’t know, Albert, but you don’t need to vurry, ve vill protect you.”

The two groups regarded each other silently across the short distance separating us until the nodules covering the three strangers’ skin suddenly vibrated in unison, and the three attacked.

The big man went straight for Michael, Vihaan, and Miko, his eyes focused on Candidate 1 and his comrades. Freuchen and Chou both ran to intercept him. The teenage boy darted around them and made a beeline straight for Silas, leaping on him and wrapping his arms under the robot’s arms and his legs around Silas’ waist. The woman slipped by Freuchen and Chou as they wrestled with the huge man and ran toward Michael. I drew my sword, something I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do, and dove to intercept her, swinging the pommel at her head, not willing to use the blade unless I had to. These poor people were obviously under Abernathy’s control, and if I could spare their lives, I would.

The woman ducked under my sword, but I still caught her a glancing blow across the top of her head, and I shivered inside as I felt the pommel scrape away skin and a clump of brown hair from her scalp. She screeched, dropped down onto all fours like some feral cat, and turned her attention to me, ignoring the blood streaming down her face. She leaped at me, and I instinctively threw a punch at her with my sword hand. A jarring bolt of pain traveled up my hand, wrist, elbow, then shoulder as I caught her square on the chin. She dropped to the ground at my side, face-first in the dust. I tried to roll her over to make sure she was still alive, but my arm hurt like you wouldn’t believe, so I left her and turned my attention back to the group.

“Protect Albert,” I yelled at Michael, just as Miko grabbed Albert’s hand and pulled him to her, wrapping her arms around him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Freuchen wrestling with the big man, who seemed more intent on wrenching himself free of Freuchen’s clutches, his eyes never leaving Michael and his group. The man’s face was a bloody pulp, his nose broken, teeth shattered from where Chou delivered blow after blow. But he simply wouldn’t stop. Unbelievably, he was dragging Freuchen with him, taking one slow step after the other toward Michael.

He wanted Michael, that was obvious.

Vihaan shouted, “Meredith!” and I turned, expecting to see the woman I’d knocked unconscious, getting to her feet ready to attack again, but she still lay face-down in the dust. “Silas,” Vihaan added. “Your robot.”

I looked for Silas in the confusion of flailing bodies only half-visible through the fog of dust that now hung in the air from our struggles. Silas stood completely still, the teenage boy still wrapped around him, locked in an unwanted embrace. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure what I thought I saw was actually what I was looking at.

The nodules on the teenager’s skin had grown, lengthening in an arc from every part of the boy’s body and fixing onto Silas’ golden skin, like long black fingers. The boy’s mouth hung open, his eyes looked vacant, saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. His chest rose and dropped in fast dog-like pants, his body vibrating as though he was shivering from the cold or excitement.

I shot a look back at the big man, straight into Freuchen’s eyes. He was struggling for the pistol he’d stuffed in his belt. He got it free, brought it up to his opponent’s midriff, then grunted as the man’s flailing arm caught Freuchen’s hand with a glancing blow and sent the gun flying away, only to be lost in the layer of ash.

I felt a tremor roll up through my legs. The aurora. It was coming, and it was coming soon.

I stumbled my way to Silas.

“Silas! Silas?” He did not respond. This close, I could smell the boy’s rotten, fetid, stench. It was… nauseating. I tried to pry his fingers free from Silas’s body, but they were like clamps. “Help me,” I yelled, turning back to Michael and Vihaan, who were little more than ghostly outlines in the dust and shadows of the night. They emerged from the darkness and tried to pull the boy from Silas, who remained absolutely still and unresponsive. I caught a glimpse of Freuchen and Chou, silhouettes in the gloom, twisting to try and change their position as the big man reoriented himself to Michael’s new position.

“It’s… no… good,” Michael said between hard breaths, stepping back from the boy. “He won’t budge.”

“Oh God,” I whimpered, as the reality of what I would have to do to save my friend finally hit me. I had tried every day to be the kind of person that I’d silently pledged to Silas I would be back on Avalon, but I would not let my friend die. I simply could not.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I said, barely able to see through the misty haze of hot tears that suddenly blurred my vision. I placed the tip of my sword against the side of the boy’s ribcage, roughly where I thought his heart would be, took a shivering, deep breath of the cloying air to try and steady my shaking hands… and ran the tip of my sword into the boy’s side.

The blade clipped a rib and then slid effortlessly through the rest of his body.

The teenager shuddered as though I’d hit him with a million volts. His grip slackened, then slipped off Silas, and he fell to the ground, pulling himself from my sword and sending me staggering backward. The black tentacles snapped, sending pieces flying through the air. The parts still attached to Silas shivered and wriggled like leeches that had been sliced in half, then one after the other, they fell into the gray dust and vanished.

Silas was suddenly awake again. “Meredith? What happ—” He saw the boy, writhing in agony on the ground, kicking up even more ash. “I must help him,” Silas said and started to take a step forward.

“No!” I yelled at him. “The aurora is coming. If we don’t get out of the zone in the next few minutes, we are all going to die. All of us, Silas. Do you understand?”

The robot paused for a moment, then said, “Yes. What do you want me to do?”

I nodded at Vihaan and looked around for Miko and Albert. Their forms were still visible, but only just. “I want you to get them all to safety. Right now. It’s imperative that you keep them all safe. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” Silas said. “Follow me, lady and gentlemen.”

Michael took my hand in his. “What about you?”

It was a surreal moment. This man, my son from another dimension, so much older than me and yet, his concern… his love for me, a facsimile of his own mother, obviously. I could only imagine how utterly confusing and painful my existence must be for him.

“I’ll be right there. Now go. There’s no time.” I ignored the incongruence of the last part of that sentence, because up until this moment, there had been nothing but time, it seemed.

Michael nodded and allowed Silas to lead him and Vihaan into the darkness in the general direction of where I had last seen Miko and Albert.

I spun around just in time to see Freuchen and Chou appear out of the particle-filled blackness not five feet from me, the big man lumbering ever forward in the direction Michael had taken. I took an involuntary step backward, stumbled and fell, my hands flat against the dust and dead ground just beneath it. The earth thrummed beneath my hands... and it was growing stronger by the second. The aurora was coming and, like a freight train barreling toward a precipice, there was nothing any of us could do but get out of its way.

As if to illustrate the comparison, the big man managed to slip one arm from Chou’s grip. He delivered a blindingly fast right hook to Chou’s head, who, half-blinded by the dust and almost at the point of exhaustion, simply didn’t see it coming.

It sent Chou sprawling into the dust. Freuchen immediately threw an arm under the attacker’s armpit and pulled him back, but it was obvious that even Freuchen, with his almost superhuman strength, was tiring, and it would not be long before he was unable to hold the big man. And then this tainted monster would barrel through me and Chou, and there would be nothing between him and Michael.

Freuchen knew it too. “I’ll join you, but you have to run. Now!” he yelled.

I grabbed Chou and pulled her to her feet, switched my flashlight to my left hand, and slipped a supporting arm around Chou’s back. She was dazed, a large welt rising below her eye.

“What?” she mumbled. “What’s happening?”

“We’ve got to go. The aurora.”

That seemed to get through to her, and she began to stumble forward with me into the blackness. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to spot which direction Silas had taken everyone else, but it wasn’t hard to spot the huge indentations he left in the dust, even as the wind from the building energy ate away at them.

The ground was trembling now, dust dancing on the surface layer like iron filings attracted to a magnet.

“We’re going to make it,” I whispered, repeating it over and over, as the two of us stumbled forward through the growing dust.

A deep reverberating foghorn-like bass note began to fill the air, growing louder by the second and only adding to my disorientation as I stumbled onward through the night, sure that at any second, I would become nothing as the energy released by the collector turned me to nothingness. Now, I couldn’t even hear my own breathing, let alone the soundless words that Chou mouthed at me.

“Can’t… hear… you,” I mouthed back.

Chou broke free of my arm, staggered for a second, then pointed down at our feet… and the layer of pine needles and dead leaves beneath them. I turned my flashlight’s beam back in the direction we had come. Ten paces behind us, the edge of the dust-zone whirled.

We had made it. We were out.

I heard Vihaan yell, “Meredith, over here.” I followed his voice, and then used the glow of Silas’ eye-bar to guide me the thirty steps or so beyond the dust-zone to where Michael, Miko, and Vihaan sat, still covered in the gray dust. I let go of Chou, and she sagged against a tree and slowly slipped down its trunk, obviously still not in control of her senses. I dropped to my knees, huffing in breath after breath until my head began to clear. I looked up and saw Miko standing right in front of me with a horrified expression on her face. It took me a second to realize she was alone.

“Albert?” I wheezed through lips chapped and dry. “Miko, where’s Albert?”

“I… I don’t know. Just before Silas took us, he let go of my hand, and I couldn’t find him in the dust.”

“The dust interfered with my senses, too,” Silas said. “I could not track Albert through it, and you made it clear that our new companions were the priority.”

Miko helped me to my feet. I turned back toward the collector; it was beginning to glow with that same ethereal light we had seen when we arrived the night before. There wasn’t much time. Every second was going to count now, so I unbuckled my sword and handed it to Miko. “Stay with them,” I told Silas, “I’ll find Albert.”

“I’ll go with—” Chou started using the trunk of the tree to support herself as she struggled to her feet, then dropped to her butt again, turned, and threw up. She was badly concussed; I was sure of it.

“Stay here!” I ordered, then staggered back in the direction I’d just come from before she could get back to her feet and come after me.

Fear gripped me as I stepped back into the dust-zone. I swung my flashlight left and right, looking for any tracks that might indicate that Albert was nearby, while periodically yelling his name. But there was nothing.

The collector glowed brighter and brighter.

“Albert!” I croaked again, all but ready to give up.

From the wall of dust surrounding me, a vague shape materialized

“Peter!” I yelled. Bleeding and bruised, the man looked exhausted but in his arms, he carried Albert. I grabbed Freuchen by his meaty forearm and started to drag him toward the perimeter of the dust-zone. “Quickly,” I urged, glancing back at him…

…and a second shape, bigger than Freuchen and unbowed detached itself from the darkness and resolved into the figure of the giant, tainted monster just a few paces behind us. I reached for my sword, determined to finish him, then realized I’d left it with Miko.

I pulled Freuchen onward, screaming expletives at him to move faster. Then, my flashlight illuminated the trees ahead of us, and we were out of the dust-zone again.

Freuchen slowed to a stop, his chest heaving like bellows, and lowered Albert to the forest floor.

“No,” I said, shining the light back over his shoulder, illuminating the monster who was once a man. “Keep moving. We’re not safe.”

Freuchen turned and saw the man, saw the glowing outline of the collector as it primed to ignite and came to the same conclusion I had. The monster-man was going to make it out of the dust-zone moments before the air would ignite.

I knew he’d made up his mind even before he pressed his hands against my cheek, then ruffled Albert’s hair. “Good luck, Meredith Gale. It has been an honor.” Then my friend turned and ran at the giant of a man, screaming a banshee war cry as he tackled him and the two fell into the swirling darkness and dust.

I pulled Albert to me and turned away from the collector just as the world ignited into white-hot fire, but not before I saw Freuchen and the monster vanish forever into the blinding light of the aurora.

Twenty-Four

“Peter!” I yelled into the darkness when the aurora had passed. I waved the beam of my flashlight through the cloud of ash like a sword. There was no answer. I knew he was gone, but every cell in my body rejected that conclusion, screaming in protest at the absurdity of the idea that that mountain of a man could be snuffed out of existence so quickly. That there would be no more of his deep belly-laughs. Or the way he sounded more like he was sawing wood than snoring. Or his seemingly endless supply of optimism. The thought simply could not find a place to fit in my brain. It was an agony that even the afterglow of the aurora could not sooth.

So, I kept yelling into the chaos for him… right up until I tripped over something lying on the perimeter of the dust-zone and the forest. It was the monster-man’s severed arm, perfectly cauterized just above the elbow. I must have stared at it for at least a minute. It had been that close. And again, I understood the difference that a single second can make to the trajectory of a life. If Freuchen had not delayed that monster as he had, it would have hunted us all down mercilessly. It was only then that I accepted my friend’s sacrifice, and the razor-sharp pain of that sacrifice found its way into my heart and cut a permanent home deep within it. I sank to my knees, my head facing into my hands, and I wept.

That was where Chou, as good as new after the aurora, found me, Albert at her side.

Oh my, God! Albert! I had abandoned the kid. Simply walked off in my shock at Freuchen’s death. Either Albert had found Chou, or she had found him. Either way, they had both found me.

“Where’s Peter?” Albert said.

I looked down at the boy’s moonlike face staring up at me. Instead of an answer, I pulled him close to me and held him as close as I could. He resisted for a moment, then sank into me, and I felt his shoulders begin to heave as he too began to weep.

From the forest, Michael and the others made their way toward us, led by Silas, his electronic eyes floating through the darkness like two wandering stars.

“We must leave now,” he said. “The chances that Abernathy has people searching for us is too high.” I heard the others whisper their agreement. I have no recollection of the walk back to the Brimstone, but someone must have used the walkie-talkies to call because Amelia and Bartholomew were waiting for us in the light of the airship’s doorway and ushered us all inside, locking the door behind them.

“I am so very sorry for the loss of your… our friend. He will be greatly missed,” Bartholomew said, as he led me back to my cot. I dropped onto it and laid there staring, at the ceiling. I said nothing. What was there to say, after all?

“We need to get airborne as quickly as possible,” Chou said, from somewhere off to my right. She and my compatriots’ voices sounded distant, almost like I was listening to them from the other end of a tunnel.

“Can you at least tell us what the hell is going on?” Amelia said, her voice taking on a worried tone.

“In the morning,” Chou replied. “Right now, we need to get to a safe altitude.”

“Okay,” Amelia said, and I heard her walking off in the direction of the cockpit. Minutes later, the airship gave a shudder, and then we were in the air again. We ascended quickly, then slowed to a hover.

I was alone now, except for Silas. He stood in the corner, out of the way, but never out of sight of me. As everyone filtered from the room, he walked to my side and knelt in front of me, his eye-bar level with my eyes.

“How are you?” he asked quietly.

“It just doesn’t seem real? How can he be gone?”

“He made an incredible sacrifice for us, noble beyond words.”

There was no arguing with that, but it did nada to alleviate the pain that flowed through my body. And intertwined with that pain, wrapped ever so tightly around it, was an absolute hatred. And it wasn’t exclusively reserved just for Abernathy, either. There was plenty to share with the intelligence that was really behind all of this—the entity that had ruined everything, not just for my band of friends and survivors, but for all of humanity: The Adversary.

“I’m going to kill them,” I said suddenly, surprising myself with the hot venom that dripped from my words.

“I know,” Silas said quietly. He paused, then laid a metal hand on my shoulder and said, “and I understand,” before turning away and going to join the others.

Outside, the first light of dawn seeped into the world, turning the room a muted orange. I stood and walked to a window and watched for a while as the sun slowly woke the world.

And I began to plan.

CHILDREN OF TOMORROW

For Paul, who started this with optimism and verve.

And for Karen, keeper of the flame, who welcomed and trusted me with her husband’s world.

Part One

There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

—Malcolm X

One

Why couldn’t I sleep? I was exhausted, beyond exhausted, if that was even possible.

The zephyr-like Brimstone was fleeing the ruins of the collector, which had been overwhelmed by Abernathy and his…things. I still didn’t have a name for them, but they were a growing army and a threat to the survival of nearly two billion humans scattered around the Earth. We fought bravely, but then, just when it seemed like we were going to get away scot-free, Freuchen sacrificed himself so the rest of us could be safe.

That big bear of man who tempered his strength with good humor, who readily accepted the amazing circumstances of our situation, and upon whom who I had come to rely on as a brother…gone. Weston Chou and Albert Glanville survived and we shared grief and anger as Amelia Earhart asked where to. I had no clear idea at first, but as it became clear, we needed to regroup. I told her to aim for New Manhattan and hoped it was still there. It was not like we had a map of where everyone wound up. Nothing looked familiar, so I felt constantly disoriented. And eternally tired.

Slumped against the cockpit’s glass wall, I just stared at the blue sky, the emotions roiling within me. I wanted to cry for Peter Freuchen; I wanted to scream in rage at having to take my first life, and I was angry at the Adversary for making this all so damn hard. Another part of my mind was still reeling with questions, starting with, who is this grown adult, Michael, who says he’s my son from a different timeline? Truth to tell, when I was given a choice between suicide or a second chance, I was so low that I wasn’t fit to even consider parenthood let alone actually have a child. But there he was, easily seventy if not older, balding with that narrow face and keen, studious eyes.

My son.

My son, who was more than twice as old as I was and also Candidate 1, first of nearly two billion souls brought from across the multiverse to reseed Earth and give humanity its own second chance.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep. It was all so staggering to comprehend. I had just been expelled from law school after getting hooked on opioids, which I needed to deal with the pain from the car accident that ultimately killed my closest friend, Oscar Kemple. I just received word his parents disconnected his life support, and he was gone. They had taken away the one person who got me, the one person who shared the exact same geeky stuff. We were soulmates without the romance and then he was gone, leaving me alone to spiral around the drain. The water underneath the Bay Bridge looked so calm, so inviting, that taking the final step seemed so easy.

Until the voice interrupted, telling me there was another path. All I had to do was accept the offer. Just when I thought the options were gone for good, here came one that sounded too fantastic to be true. But it sparked something in me and I realized I wanted to live, so I said yes.

As it turned out, I wound up in the water anyway, among the hundreds who suddenly materialized in the salt water somewhere else. Not everyone made it to shore, but those of us that did were helping one another, and realized several things over the first few days. Our newfound friends came from across time. There was 12-year-old Albert who said he was trapped in a burning boarding school in 1910 England, while Philip Youman was the author of the bestselling Last Stand at the Maple Leaf Lodge, a 1980s book and film I had never heard of. And then there was Chou, the six-foot-tall beauty who claimed she was aboard the Shining Light, a starship from the year 2374.

We were all so disoriented that it took a few days for us all to figure it out, but it became clear: each one of us was plucked from a pivotal point in our lives, when we could have died while alone, our bodies undiscovered. This voice, which we named the Architect, apparently had scoured the multiverse seeking out people to bring forward in time and settle on Earth. At first, we thought it was an alien world, but it became clear that despite the reddening, larger sun, we were actually on Earth – just an Earth half a billion years in our future. Give or take a day.

While it was nice to know Earth survived all the deadly shit we were doing to it dating back to the Industrial Revolution, where had all the people gone? That was just one of countless questions I had, that we all had.

Some of the answers had been provided by Silas, a gold-skinned giant of a robot who had been damaged and became our guide, protector, and friend as he also got repaired bit by bit. Even so, he lacked answers, including the ultimate plan for the two billion of us.

What had been clear, from the second day and ever since, was that the Architect’s plan had been interrupted. Another being, thing, entity – I’m still not sure what to call it – had interfered and was trying to kill us. Me in particular. He sent ancient warriors then Nazis – yes, good old-fashioned jackbooted Nazis – after me. No one we captured and questioned could tell us why, but they had all been implanted with an image of me. Well, an older me.

A me who had just been elected President of the United States of America.

This thing we finally decided to call the Adversary wanted me and wanted Candidate 1, my adult son Michael. Why? I don’t know. He’s on third and I don’t give a darn…Wow, my mind kept drifting, calling up bits of pieces of my childhood, and yet, it wouldn’t let me slip away to sleep.

I glanced across the gondola to see Chou doing a far better job of resting than me. Albert was in the back with Bartholomew, who accompanied us from New Manhattan; Miko and Vihaan, who we rescued with Michael at the collector; and Silas. What an odd collection of people we had become, each with distinct and separate memories of lives and histories, some identical and others diametrically opposed. Yet, we somehow all banded together to stop the Adversary, save mankind, and possibly the Earth itself. And then there was the field.

When I first found Silas, he said to me, “Candidate 13, humanity is in peril. The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder; the effects on the outcome have moved beyond predictability. Agents of chaos will be unleashed in an attempt to stop what I require of you. You must travel to the collector immediately and locate Candidate 1. They must know that the field is collapsing, and the void follows behind.”

There was a field collapsing somewhere in space, and if it reached us before we did whatever it was the Architect needed us to do, the Adversary would get its wish.

When Chou, Albert, and I found the first settlement, we discovered that I possessed the singular ability to be a walking, talking universal translator. I could speak and be heard in the native tongue of all those around me, and they could understand one another within a thirty-foot or so radius. This went a long way to helping Edward James Hubbard, World War I soldier and 20th Century poet, get his community, dubbed Avalon, well underway.

But that newfound ability may also explain why I was wanted. So, rather than endanger the others, we left and headed out in search of answers. Of course, we found, instead, a megalodon. Silas told us, “Predators were to be strictly limited to very specific sizes to ensure balanced bio-diversity. I am sure that something of this size was not a part of that plan.” This merely confirmed for us that the Adversary not only sent Nazis after us, but vicious predators to hinder everyone. Soon after came the Brimstone, captained by Thomas “Tommy Two-Thumbs” Abernathy, who was detestable before being transformed by nanobots. He intended to bring me to the Adversary, but instead, we got away and he got punished, being turned into an oily-looking semi-humanoid. The nanobots transformed him and everyone else he touched into things. Deadly, vicious, nearly unstoppable things.

We got away, but it cost us dearly.

So yeah, maybe I knew why I couldn’t sleep, although I must have dozed off at some point, because as I looked out the window, I saw the moon. That poor, shattered satellite, bits of itself hanging in suspension, a still image that constantly reminded us all we were far from home. We had no idea what happened, neither Silas, nor Blue Alpha, the giant mechanical robot that aided us in the collector before it too succumbed to Abernathy’s icky army, had the details in their memory banks.

Bartholomew handed me a mug of soup, the steam rising in curly-cues. “Drink it,” he coaxed in his friendly voice.

“Thanks,” I said. I took a sip, hoping for chicken but got noodles instead. “Where are we?”

“On course for New Manhattan, about a day out,” Amelia told me. I was still marveling that the famed aviatrix, who in my timeline vanished somewhere in the Pacific, was actually flying the Brimstone. She had taken to the unfamiliar controls and was in her glory, avoiding getting her hands dirty but still providing an invaluable service. We hadn’t spoken much; there never seemed to be enough time just to speak with people I met.

“You okay?” Bartholomew Mwangi, a former resident of Kenya circa 1985, asked.

“I can’t sleep,” I said.

“You were doing a good impression then,” he said and his face lit up in delight. It amazed me how this tall, broad man, his skin the color of umber, could look fiercely imposing one moment and then light up the room with just his smile.

“Really? I haven’t slept well in what feels like weeks.”

“Well, you’ve been a bit busy,” Amelia shot from the pilot’s seat. She stifled a yawn herself. Fortunately, she had taught Bartholomew the basics to maintain the high-tech dirigible so she could rest herself and we could stay in the air, furthering the distance between Abernathy and us. The plan, such as it was, was to get us to New Manhattan and regroup. I needed time to think and examine our options.

I sipped the soup and brooded rather than planned. When we left the collector and Abernathy’s oily-looking army, I was determined to get proactive. Now it felt like I had no plan and the four-day trip back to New Manhattan had been a waste with the exception of putting distance between us and Abernathy. Not much of a plan, but it was a start.

It felt like that was my condition all the way over the mountains and forests, the terrain we had previously crossed. I did enjoy watching the sun rise, its golden rays reassuringly welcoming the new day, a promise that we still had a chance of saving everyone, of saving the planet.

I just wish I knew how. Chou and I had spent hours brainstorming with our newest members of the team. With Michael was Miko Tanaka, a powerfully built astrophysicist, and Vihaan Deshpande, a man in his early fifties who looked every bit the professor he was before the seemingly inevitable nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in 2028. While Miko asked about the world itself, Vihaan was fascinated by Silas, and all of the nanotechnology on clear display. Not only were there the ones that turned Abernathy, the scum of the earth, into inhuman scum of the earth, but there were the flying drones that could spy and kill for the Adversary. Who knew what else might be out there?

As New Manhattan finally came into view, I remembered how Emily had her people fire on us the first time we arrived over a week earlier. We’d been running and fighting for over a month now. As best I could figure it, we had been in the future about thirty-five days. We sure know how to pack a lot in a short time.

A small crowd was gathering as we began to lower ourselves, wisps of white clouds passing by the windows. I recognized a few people, including the community’s attractive, forceful leader, her hair still tied behind her in a sensible bun. Thor, her ever-present dog, at her side. It reminded me of how much I needed a shower and change of clothes. While the Architect’s nightly pixie dust, more nanobots, healed our wounds, it didn’t leave us smelling any fresher. The Brimstone’s previous captain, the Red Baroness, didn’t seem much on hygiene.

“Grab your gear,” I called out. “No idea what comes next, so have everything with you.” I hoisted my own knapsack, still filled with cans and things rescued from the Titanic – I still can’t believe I walked aboard the doomed ship as it was trapped in some weird time vortex. I also slipped my curved scimitar, a souvenir from surviving my first fight on this new world, under my belt.

Once we were settled on the ground with a satisfying thump, Amelia turned off the engines and grabbed her own leather jacket, even though it was hot outside. She flashed me a thumbs-up that the ship was secure and depressed the button that opened the main hatch. I led everyone off the Brimstone and could feel the eyes on me. Before all this started, I was never the center of attention. There was always someone smarter in class, prettier at the clubs, and more outgoing on our escapades. But here I was, the candidate everyone wanted captured, the woman of many tongues, and the one they were looking to for guidance. Me, I was looking at Emily, slightly older and more sure of herself. She was a natural-born leader and I hoped she could help me plan what came next. While I might be the president someday, I wasn’t feeling at all like a commander-in-chief. Not at all.

I felt like a failure. Freuchen was dead. Blue Alpha dismantled. And I was back with no answers, just more questions.

None of that seemed to matter and she came forward and embraced me.

“Thank god you’re alive,” she told me. She then leaned up to share a hug with Chou, who seemed uncomfortable with the gesture, unlike Albert, who delighted in the embrace. Her eyes surveyed the gathering, narrowing as she counted heads.

“I see you brought some new friends with you. We’ve grown a bit too. But where’s Freuchen?”

My look was all she needed to know he was gone.

Accepting it, she forced a smile back on her face, every bit the leader I wasn’t. “Welcome to New Manhattan. I’m Emily and we have room for everyone. I think what you all need is a bath and some rest. We’ll have cabins prepared and then a meal. We’ll get into the heavy stuff after that.”

There was a quick round of introductions and then she gestured to a short, swarthy man I didn’t recognize, who led everyone but me, Chou, and Silas toward the growing number of cabins. We were gone nearly a week and the place looked substantially larger. They were quickly turning New Manhattan into a village, one that seemed carefully laid out, managing growth. People all had their tasks and I could smell cooking food and heard a saw off to my left.

“Silas, is there anything you need before I talk to Meredith?”

The gold-skinned, nine-foot-tall robot inclined its head toward her, its blue eyes flanking the concave bar, steady in their gaze. “No thank you, Emily. I am functioning in prime shape after I was repaired at the collector.”

“Well, that’s something,” she said.

“It most certainly is,” Silas replied. “I had most of my memory banks repaired and several servo systems returned to factory conditions. All that is missing is the new car smell.”

I blinked in surprise.

“What do you know about new car smells?”

“I am not certain, but it seemed the right witticism for the right moment.”

“And what do you know about wit…” I began before Chou uttered a sound. Something about what he said caught Chou’s attention. Before she could say anything, Emily interrupted.

“What happened to Freuchen?” There was sincere tenderness in her look and I felt my eyes well up all over again. I don’t know where all the tears were coming from, I felt dehydrated, but here they came.

In a terse, direct manner, it was Chou who explained what happened at the collector. Emily listened quietly as I read the changing expression on her face from sadness, to horror, to sympathy, then determination.

“I have so many questions,” she began, and I realized she knew nothing of the big picture. We were on our way to brief her the morning the Brimstone arrived. Meredith, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.

“Okay, time for you two to wash up. We can convene later, at council, I guess. I think we have a newcomer who may be of some help.”

I wanted to know more, but just standing on the ground, the sun, nearly overhead now, was warm and I could feel some of the tension drain away. We were safe, among allies, and no one was threatening us. My body finally let go, and I was flooded with exhaustion. A bath then a nap, that was the ticket.

The warm water was wonderful; the soap, pilfered from the steamship, was luxurious, a floral scent I didn’t recognize but fell in love with. I scrubbed thoroughly, trying to wash away the grime and the sense of failure. Soaking, I let my mind wander, letting it do what it did best: organize experiences, processing them, and leaving behind a kernel of an idea. It worked every time I had to crash a term paper or legal brief. It didn’t fail me then and I counted on it not failing me now. Apparently, as I was soaking, a kind-hearted soul had gathered my dusty, bloody clothes and had done the best possible in cleaning them. They had been dried near a fire, a hint of the woodsmoke a most welcome one. It reminded me of campfires as a girl scout and family camping trips. I missed my parents, wondering what they would think to meet their grandson, who was older than they were.

Michael had been keeping his distance, as unsure of how to act toward me as I was to him. I wasn’t his real mother, since she existed in some alternate reality. But I looked like her, and that must have been jarring. And I felt myself missing his life, the years he spent knowing this other Meredith Jane Gale, who apparently wasn’t an oxy addict and somehow became leader of the free world, presuming that title still applied in his reality.

Sure enough, I had dozed off and it’s a wonder I didn’t sink. Until I woke with a start, the water now barely tepid, and realized a nine-foot guardian angel was in the bath cabin with me, a towel in its oddly-constructed arms. They were constructed in a way so that the arms were a series of flat, oblong segments, hinged in a way that gave it far more flexibility than your average human. Someone had polished him a bit, removing dirt and blood from his black triangular grill that served as a torso.

“Thanks for not letting me drown,” I said, rising, not worried about his gaze being anything other than analytical. As I toweled off, I examined my body, noticing the lack of bruises but the beginning of actual muscles in my calves and arms. That came from all the strenuous running, climbing, and fighting. I might find myself as buff as Miko before too much longer.

“My pleasure,” Silas said. “The meal will be in approximately forty-seven minutes.”

My stomach rumbled before I could reply. I got dressed, wishing there was an REI or someplace to get fresh clothes better suited to the environment. While the Architect somehow arranged for some supplies to be brought along with people – otherwise, the communities couldn’t be built – it didn’t occur to it to bring a mall. At some point, growing cotton and other materials to make clothing would have to be on the agenda.

But first, there was a world to save. And Abernathy to stop.

Our dinner party, in a long, thatched building, was a reunion of sorts. I took a seat to Emily’s left, and Chou, in her ever-present white outfit, which amazingly never retained dirt, was next to me; then there were Bartholomew and Amelia. Across were Albert and Miko, then Vihaan, and finally Michael, farthest from me. A woman also entered, with long, lustrous black hair, tied back with a ribbon, who wore very worn clothing but didn’t mask her ramrod-straight posture. She looked to be in her forties, with crow’s feet around her blue eyes. Emily introduced her as Carolyn Nguyen. Looming over us all, even from standing against the back wall, was Silas. At the furthest end was a man I didn’t recognize, but Miko took one look and her jaw dropped. The man didn’t seem unique, with his high forehead, shock of swept-back dark hair, and friendly eyes. Even at rest, his mouth seemed to be curling into a smile, making him appear approachable.

Emily tapped her knife against a wooden cup, freshly carved by the look of it, making a hollow knock. Once all eyes turned to her, she began, “Good evening and welcome. I want to start by making it clear that where I came from and in my time, we kept too many secrets. Not here. While we meet tonight, whatever we learn from one another and whatever we decide, it will be shared with all.”

I felt myself nodding in agreement. This fit right in with the Architect’s desire to eschew violence and try the peaceful approach. Inwardly, I winced at already betraying that the first month in this new world, but it wasn’t like I had much of a choice.

Emily went on, making a round of introductions when she got to the newcomer. “Werner Heisenberg…”

“I knew it!” Miko exclaimed, no longer able to contain herself.

I recognized the name and knew he had something to do with physics, but after that, I was drawing a complete blank. The ever-observant Silas filled in with, “Candidate 28141, Werner Heisenberg, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work defining quantum mechanics.”

“Thankfully, we had a German translator on hand, but with you here,” Emily said to me, “tonight should be easy on all of us. When he and the latest arrivals staggered in, he was first thought to be another Nazi, but he quickly proved otherwise.”

At the reference, Heisenberg let out a disgusted sound.

“Welcome,” I said to the man, who merely nodded, going into a full smile.

“This is so freaking incredible,” Miko exclaimed, then her hand flew up to cover her mouth, her cheeks flushing. Heisenberg seemed uncomfortable with the fangirl attention.

As the simple meal of fish, fruit, and vegetables was brought in, most everyone around the table contributed to the conversation, making certain everyone else knew what was going on. I was pleased to see even Albert was able to contribute, adding in the proper names for the beasts and woods we encountered.

“What was the Architect’s plan to save humanity?” Carolyn asked Silas.

“That information is unknown to me, like so much else not in my memory banks.”

“Well, weren’t we brought here to start mankind all over again?” Miko asked.

“That seems to be a part of it,” I said.

“Where is the rest of humanity?” Carolyn asked. “The planet seems to be only those of us who were brought forward.”

“Silas?” I asked.

“For as long as I have been functional…” he began before Michael interrupted.

“He’s only five hundred or so years old,” my son said. My son.

“…there was no sign of human kind. Just the robots and machines the Architect had built.”

“Who is this Architect?” Heisenberg asked, a hint of German still in his translated voice.

“There’s the $64 question,” Amelia added.

“That’s not a lot of money,” Albert said.

“It’s from an old radio show,” Emily said, recognizing the phrase.

“What’s radio?”

“Before we get off track,” Emily said, “we clearly do not know our benefactor or his opponent. For all we know, they’re two rivals hiding behind curtains or deities or aliens.”

“Why does he seek you, Meredith?” Bartholomew asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was told to find Candidate 1 and all the bad guys were told to find me.”

“So, clearly, you two are connected by more than just blood,” Emily said.

“I guess so,” I said, feeling somewhat uncomfortable with being the focal point of all this.

“The Architect brought us here to repopulate the world. The Adversary is working against that. His actions to date have been to bring predators to the ecosystem, upending whatever peaceful balance existed in the original design. The Adversary also wants Meredith for unknown reasons, having brought humans forward to hunt her down. He wants her alive, which is interesting, but has also been ratcheting up the method of acquiring her. The transformation of Abernathy into an organic engine for the nanobots covering his body shows a marked disinterest in preserving life. Taking apart Blue Alpha was not necessary when disabling would have been satisfactory,” Chou theorized.

“Michael, you, Miko, and Vihaan were the only humans in the collector,” Emily said.

“Right,” he replied.

“Why?”

“All I can tell you is that we were there and instructed to perform maintenance tasks, then the other two were placed in, I don’t know, suspended animation. Those weird spheres that slowed down time. So was I, for a while, then was released to perform some more tasks, and the next thing I know, you show up.”

“Do you have any idea why you were Candidate 1?”

He shook his head, a lock of gray hair falling over his ear. He didn’t look entirely well. Everyone pondered what had been said, keeping their own thoughts for the moment. Then Albert spoke up.

“I have a question.”

All eyes turned to him.

“Why is Meredith the only one arriving with something special?”

“Now that’s an interesting question,” Amelia said. “Of all of us so far, you’re the only one with the translation ability. I bet you didn’t have that back in…”

“2018,” I filled in.

“Right. So, did you?”

I shook my head, bewildered.

“You’re suggesting, Albert, that the Adversary wants Meredith because of that power?”

“It’s what makes her unique among all of us,” Chou said.

“Well, I don’t know where it came from or how it even works,” I said.

“The equipment aboard the Brimstone or maybe the collectors may be able to answer that,” Chou said.

“But that’s not what’s important right now,” Vihaan said.

“It’s not?”

“No, Meredith. It’s what you told us Silas said.” Heads swiveled around to the back and then up, to find Silas’ shining blue eyes. Miko nodded at him to begin.

“The plan has been compromised by an external entity. This interference has introduced multiple patterns of disorder…”

“Multiple patterns of disorder,” Carolyn repeated, cutting Silas off. “Let’s break that down. Michael, what is your area of expertise?”

“Software,” he said.

“Miko?”

“Astrophysicist.”

“Vihaan?”

“Nanosciences and nanotechnology,” he told Carolyn.

She mused for a few moments as others stirred uncomfortably in their chairs. “You three were brought first, housed with the collector. The collector was a machine that, even with all the robotic help you described, might still need some human help. Software makes sense, as does nanotechnology. So, why an astrophysicist?”

“Might have something to do with that field I hear is collapsing,” Amelia said.

“What field? What void?” Carolyn said.

“This is why I asked Werner to be here,” Emily said. “His pioneering work means he’s a pretty sharp cookie and I have a feeling the more the merrier in figuring this out. Now, what field is collapsing?” Emily asked.

“Isn’t it the Dyson Swarm?” I interjected. Several eyes squinted at the phrase, clearly unfamiliar with it. Well, neither was I until a few days ago. I quickly outlined for them, as Chou explained it to me: millions of mirrors placed in rings orbiting our sun, collecting energy and channeling it back to Earth.

Chou shook her head, looking at Miko. She cleared her throat and solemnly said, “The field Silas says is collapsing is the one holding the universe together, and if it is collapsing, more than humanity is imperiled. It’s every planet and star in the universe. The Architect needs us somehow to save the universe.”

Two

“It’s called vacuum decay,” Chou said, making sure everyone was paying attention. Given the backgrounds of everyone around the table, she, Heisenberg, and Miko had the training to really understand what was being explained. I’d heard it a few times and it was finally starting to sink in.

“We should understand that everything in the universe has an energy level. The higher the level, the more energy. So a stick of wood has a high energy level that can be burned for fuel and the charred remains would have a far lower level of energy.”

Okay, that was simple enough. Everyone nodded.

“Now, energy tries to find its lowest state.”

“A body at rest tends to stay at rest,” said Bartholomew.

“Something like that,” Chou said, getting confirming nods from Heisenberg and Miko.

“Something unstable, like snow capping a mountain, has the potential energy to come to the bottom. Given the right push, the snow comes down the mountain in an avalanche, releasing destructive energy until it all settles on the ground in a stable state.”

More nods.

“The more energy an object has, the more it wants to expend its energy and achieve its ground state. Now the universe operates under these principles and the quantum fields…”

“What’s that?” Amelia interjected.

Chou looked at Heisenberg. He paused, hand on chin for a moment, then said, “Consider them the rules of the universe.”

“Okay.”

“The universe follows the rules and wants to be in the lowest possible state, which has been called the vacuum state.”

“Has it?” Heisenberg asked.

“The name was settled sometime after your…career ended,” Chou said kindly. “Your work was taken up by others, including Richard Feynman, Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, and Julian Schwinger.

“It was later theorized that there might be one quantum field that was not stable, named after a man named Higgs. His theory was that this one field was something else, something unstable that was called a false vacuum.”

“What is this Higgs field?” the scientist wanted to know.

Chou paused, weighing the value of the distraction. With a breath, she said, “The Higgs field is unique because it gives all objects in the universe their own mass. Think about the snow that fell. We think it’s at the lowest state, but it’s not. There’s more to do, more energy to expend as the sun warms the snow and it melts into the ground, releasing more energy. Those rays of sun could arrive at any moment, reaching just the right temperature to start the warming process. It arrives without warning. Once you start this process, once you warm the snow and it melts, there is no turning back. The snow becomes water, seeps into the ground or runs off, possibly the avalanche helps form a flood.

“Now, think about it in cosmic terms. If something ignites the Higgs field and it releases more energy, it crashes into all the other fields in space, releasing their energy. It cascades without stop.”

“Like tipping over dominoes,” Albert suggested.

“Exactly, my boy,” Heisenberg said, quickly picking up Chou’s explanation. “Unlike the dominoes, though, which go in one direction, this new Higgs field would expand in all directions, a rain drop hitting a puddle, making circles.”

“Just amazing,” Vihaan said softly, earning him a look from Heisenberg. I sensed some hero worship going on here and our German friend wasn’t thrilled about it.

Everyone was nodding in comprehension with more than a little fear in their eyes.

“So what happens?” I asked before Vihaan said something silly.

“If the field collapses, then the false vacuum expands, destroying everything in its path until the universe is destroyed.”

“How on God’s green earth are we supposed to stop that?” Emily said.

“We can’t stop it,” Heisenberg said. “Once unleashed, if I understand this right, it keeps spreading.”

“Exactly,” Chou said. “The theory is that the expanding Higgs field would rewrite the laws of physics. Our universe would be annihilated and replaced.”

“Where is it?” Albert asked, genuine fear in his voice, the first time since I had met him. I know Silas told us all that somehow the Architect changed our body chemistry to avoid panic, but even that had its limits, I suppose.

“If it exists at all, we don’t know. Somehow, though, the Architect has determined it exists. That’s why Silas keeps warning us the field has collapsed.”

Heads swiveled toward the robot, who said, “Confirmed.” Chou looked at it for a moment longer.

“What about Einstein’s theory of the universe expanding?” Miko asked.

“Actually, that was Alexander Friedmann, who built on Einstein’s theories,” Heisenberg corrected. “At least in my timeline that was the case.”

“Mine too. By my time, all astronomy confirms that theory,” Chou said. “Which means the universe is expanding at the same time it is also being devoured by the false vacuum.”

“So what was the Architect’s plan?” Emily asked.

“And we’re back to that core question,” Michael said.

“The sun has, what, a few billion years to go before it novas,” I said. “Are you saying the false vacuum might get here first?”

“It might,” Chou said. “There were other things happening in space, which is what I was doing when my ship was damaged. These vagrant particles, we called them.”

“Which are?” Heisenberg asked, genuinely interested.

“Not important right now,” Emily said, interrupting.

“Silas, what were the collectors doing? There are how many on the planet?” Chou asked.

“We know there are four visible from this part of the continent,” Amelia said, seemingly glad to finally have something to contribute.

“Silas?” I asked.

“There are 218 collectors on Earth,” he said.

“What are they collecting?” Heisenberg asked.

“Energy.”

“For what purpose?” Emily asked.

“To power the machines. Once they powered all the SILAS units and the machines like Blue Alpha, they enabled the Architect to bring you all forward and to terraform the planet to protect the collector network. If it is doing more, I am not programmed with that knowledge.”

“It’s like he was operating on a need-to-know basis,” I said, more to myself than anyone.

“Does each collector have the layered biomes as we saw?” Chou asked.

“I am uncertain, but would believe so,” Silas replied. “It was an elegant way to preserve diversity for the future use of Earth’s new inhabitants.”

“Wait, they’re not collecting power,” I said loudly. “The Adversary took control of the SILAS units and Blue Alpha told us a gamma burst was used to stop the robots. But it also did something to the collector network.”

“That is right, Meredith. The release triggered a simultaneous cascade effect across the network. Every collector was activated at once. The effect destroyed everything for several miles around each unit. The network was then interrupted.”

“Is that what we’re to fix: the network?” Emily asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

The conversation went on for a while, long after the food was cleared, as we debated how to share this news and what was our next step. At one point, though, I noticed Albert’s chair was empty. I thought he excused himself for the latrine, but clearly, he was gone. It was also clear that no one had a clear idea what to do. Lots of theories, lots of speculation, and way too many questions. I was finally feeling tired and needed some sleep, maybe letting my mind process all of this.

Emily had a similar thought and said we’d adjourn for the night and resume discussion in the morning, but also made it quite clear we needed a plan of action. Everyone felt a ticking clock, be it the collapse of the known universe or the impending threat of Abernathy’s army. And who knew what the Adversary would produce next, all in an attempt to find me.

As the group broke up, Emily brought Carolyn over to me and we stood near an edge of the long hut. Carolyn came up to my nose, so after all this time looking up to Chou and Silas, this was different.

“Carolyn’s a political science professor,” Emily said.

“I was teaching at the University of Maryland when there was an epidemic. It traveled fast and hit hard. I was sent home with a raging fever, my lungs filling up. As I fought for breath, I was invited, well, here.”

“From when?” I asked.

“It was June 2, 2254. Your presidency was still remembered, all the work you did. I’d love to discuss it with you.”

“I’m the 2018 model and haven’t done jack shit,” I said. I’d love to hear about me too, I realized, but now was certainly not the time. It would actually be interesting to have Michael and Carolyn compare their recollections of my deeds and see if they were identical. At least both thought kindly of me. That had to account for something.

“I invited Carolyn to be a part of this meeting because we need someone thinking about the two billion of us. We’re scattered, which I gather wasn’t the plan. I wanted her perspective about what might come next for us all.”

“Hey, I’m happy to have all the help I can get,” I said and meant it. Of course, until we had a plan of action, thinking about what comes next is as vague as everything else going on. We chatted for a few more minutes, as I tried to stifle yawning, and my eyes caught Chou studying Silas, who remained still in the back of the hut. Finally, I ended the chitchat and made my good nights.

The sun had set, the stars twinkled in the cloudless sky, and most everyone had already turned in. We’d been here just over a month and the nightly arrival of pixie dust seemed old hat. People were no longer staying up to watch them rain down on us, rejuvenating our bodies with nanotechnology that felt more like magic. That was fine; there would be time to marvel all over again when we finished our job…whatever that turned out to be.

My cabin was in a direct diagonal from the dining hut, so I made a bee line for it, but just before I entered it, I heard a whimper from the shadows in the back. As I feared, it was the huddled form of Albert, who was crouched down, arms wrapped about his legs, gently rocking back and forth.

“Hey, Albert, can I join you?” Without waiting for his answer, I slid down to his level and rested my back against the hut. We sat in companionable silence and I waited him out, fighting the urge to yawn loudly.

“Are we going to die?”

“Not today, Albert,” I said as I slid an arm around him. Our discussion must have really spooked him because, normally, he was courageous, sometimes recklessly so, and he was so damned smart. Without the Internet, he was my source for all things natural and he was proud of that knowledge.

“Why am I here, what purpose am I supposed to serve? Why was I given a second chance?” Each question was punctuated by a hiccupping sob as he tried to control himself while still getting out the issues on his mind. We all get these moments, all wondering why we’re here. I abandoned any pretense of asking those very questions as I sank deeper into my addiction. But here, here I wasn’t addicted. I was clearheaded and was rolling with the punches so much so, I still hadn’t stopped to ask the same questions.

“You’re here because you can translate for everyone. And the Adversary wants you. Wild Bill was here, I guess, to keep the peace. Freuchen was…Freuchen was…”

“Freuchen was here to make sure we were safe,” I finished for him. Who would do that now?

“So what is my untapped potential?”

“You’re twelve; it’s somewhere within you. There’s plenty of time for us to find out.”

He let that hang in the air as he continued to not meet my eyes, focusing on the ground instead. He was watching something and I looked down and saw a dark shape emerging from the dirt between his feet. There were two antennae followed by thin legs and the segmented head and body. Leaning lower, he watched and started to speak, then said clearly, “Gryllus bimaculatus, African field cricket.”

“That’s pretty impressive. Do you know them all?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been stumped yet, but it’s a pretty big planet. We’ve seen only a fraction of the world, and while I can recognize the trees and the animals, I don’t recognize the land. We’ve seen nothing that matches my textbooks.”

“Okay.” Then I think I began to see the world from his point of view. It’s been exciting and scary, but it’s all so overwhelming. He’s half a billion years away from anything and anyone familiar to him. We’ve seen precious few children in our travels, the price we pay for all the parental vigilance, I suppose. Yay, helicopter parenting.

“So, here’s the thing, Albert. You’re twelve, but we’re not treating you like a little boy. We’ve kept nothing from you and have counted on you to tell us what we’re seeing. It may not be why you’re here yet, but I want to be around to find out. You’re a pretty impressive young man now, so when you find your reason, I bet it will be pretty amazing.”

He let that sink in. Then he looked up at me, right into my soul and asked, “Do you really think so?”

“Yes. Maybe not as amazing as instant translation, but we’ll find out.”

The choked crying ended and a small chuckle came out.

“Look, I’m exhausted, so I can imagine you’re tired too. Get some sleep so you can be a part of the talk tomorrow.”

“You still want me there? Even when I don’t understand it all?”

“None of us do, Albert, which is why we need one another. You’ve been with me from the start, so I’m not doing this without you.”

That did the trick. He threw his arms around me in a fierce hug, and I returned it. It made me wonder how I hugged, would hug, Michael as a child, and that just started me thinking in too many directions. Instead, I helped Albert up and walked him to the cabin where he would spend the night. Silas was nearby and accompanied me as I got him ready for bed, going so far as to tuck him in. It felt right.

I finally got to lie down a few minutes later, and as I began thinking about the conversation and the questions, my mind went blank and I fell into a deep sleep.

The following morning was already hot and humid when I woke up, making me immediately long for a bath, but there were decisions to be made. I washed up, ran my hand through my hair, which I began to think could use a trim, and headed for breakfast. Michael, Miko, Carolyn, and Bartholomew were already eating when I walked in, so I grabbed some fruit juice and nuts, and headed for them.

“It turns out, Madame President,” Carolyn began, a twinkle in her eye, “that your son and I come from different realities.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, during your first term, you negotiated a lasting truce between China and Taiwan,” Michael said.

“While it was one of your deepest regrets at the end of your second term,” Carolyn added.

“So what am I remembered for?” I asked her. She had intimated it was something positive, so I was okay with whatever she would say.

“You brought back bipartisanship as a good thing,” she said with a smile.

“My timeline too,” Michael said.

“It helped get you on the top ten presidents list,” Carolyn added.

“Now that’s a miracle,” I said and we all laughed. It felt good, a brief moment, but a promising one for a day when serious decisions were going to be needed. This morning, refreshed, Michael looked stronger, less ill. I’d take that, since he clearly had a part to play Speaking of play, I saw over his shoulder that, outside, Albert found another youth, someone to play catch with. I guess a good night’s sleep and no one trying to kill us did us all a world of good.

Still, I could see a sense of hope in Carolyn and Michael, their gazes directed at me. They saw a president who accomplished things, but I was still a twenty-seven year old who just flunked out of law school and hadn’t accomplished much of anything. Once I knew I was here for a reason, I swore to change that, so today would be the start of that process. We’d been reacting too much, going off half-cocked with insufficient information and under-prepared for the Adversary. It was what cost Freuchen his life and no doubt we’d lose others along the way. But we had to go on offense, and as a sports fan, I know that meant we needed a playbook.

All of us, Albert included, reconvened in the long hut for a morning council. It was nothing like the grand dining hall where Dumbledore would address the Hogwarts students, but it would have to do.

As everyone took their seats, I overheard Bartholomew and Albert discussing where all the humans had gone, something Silas knew nothing about.

“Just before the fire, I had read War of the Worlds, and I wonder if the Martians attacked Earth,” Albert said excitedly.

“I remember that movie,” Bartholomew said.

“They made a film version? Wow,” he said.

“But I think maybe they look like us, but with copper skin and can read minds,” the older man said. “It was also a book from my youth.”

“I was always partial to Marvin,” I said as I took my seat.

“Martians had human names?”

“Just that one, Albert. He was always trying to conquer the Earth and was regularly stopped.”

“Like us and the Adversary,” Albert said.

“Something like that,” Chou said as she joined us. “Martians were the stuff of fiction until we got there for real and found it dry and dusty. If it ever had life, it was long gone.” She sure knew how to break the spell.

“It does raise an interesting question about where mankind went and how long ago it happened,” Amelia said. “Everywhere I flew, there were always people. Now I pilot the Brimstone, and other than you guys, nothing.”

“Where are we? Do you know?” I asked her.

She shook her head, brown hair waving in the process. “Don’t recognize the coastline or the terrain. I look at the stars and even the constellations feel fuzzy.”

“It could have something to do with being in the future,” Michael said.

“The moon’s drag on Earth isn’t obvious day to day,” said Werner Heisenberg. “But, if you say we’re half a billion years forward, the drag would have a change. That amount of time would also mean the Earth’s relative position to other stars would have changed, altering the constellations.” Amelia nodded her head in understanding.

“Even a shattered moon would do that,” Miko asked.

“Yes. I’ve been doing some calculations since we arrived, which is hard without my slide rule, but I have arrived at an approximate conclusion. The Earth’s rotation has markedly slowed down so each day is now approximately 25 and a half hours long.”

“Such a sudden change from what we’re familiar with means our circadian rhythms are thrown off,” Chou said.

“So that’s why I haven’t felt right or slept well,” Emily said.

.

“Now that you mention it—” Carolyn began, but I cut her off.

“Silas, what shattered the moon?”

“I do not have that knowledge in my memory banks. It was filled with whatever I needed for my tasks. It is a mistake to think that my memory banks has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.”

“What an odd way to explain it,” Michael said.

“No, not odd at all,” Chou said, continuing to eye Silas. “Silas is paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes.”

“Really? I read his stories. Cracking good,” Albert exclaimed.

“Me too. Well, that goes to explain your keen observations,” Amelia told him with a smile.

I was looking at Chou, who seemed to be fighting her emotions. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“Ever since Blue Alpha repaired Silas, the things he’s been saying, like that old ‘new car smell’ comment to how he’s been saying them, were nagging at me. That last exchange, about his data storage, it originated with Sherlock Holmes, but it was also an analogy often used by my husband.”

“Your husband?” Emily asked. “What happened to him?”

“I last saw him among the stars. You see, Emily, my husband was the artificial intelligence that operated the Shining Light. He survived whatever happened and I believe that he did more than survive. I think he outgrew the starship and somehow became the Architect.”

Eyes popped, jaws dropped, and everyone stared at Chou. Even Thor yipped at that. I forced myself to look to Silas for confirmation, but he remained motionless, his eye bar observing, but that was it.

Chou steadily met our gazes and explained, “Your stories all involve hearing a voice offering you a chance for life. It was disembodied. In my own experience, it was my husband asking me. And now here is Silas speaking that way. It has to be.”

“How can we be sure?” Michael asked.

“By finding him and asking,” I said. “Silas, is the Architect in one of the collectors?”

“No, Meredith. The space and power required by the Architect for all his works could not be contained in a single citadel.”

“Was he part of the interrupted network?” Michael probed.

“No, but when the network was disrupted, the Architect must have lost control or contact with them.”

“Michael, if you were something as all-powerful as the Architect and needed that amount of energy to operate, where would you be housed?”

Michael had clearly been thinking along the same lines and his brow furrowed in concentration, exposing a thick, horizontal vein. “There’d have to be constant cooling, room for expansion, and a power supply that couldn’t be interrupted. Given the kind of unlimited resources we’ve seen used so far, the most logical place would be to house him on the moon.”

The words settled over the room and everyone was quiet, contemplating what they’d just heard. For several, man hadn’t reach the moon yet. For others, it seemed entirely reasonable.

“How are we going to get to the moon?” Albert asked.

Three

Chou’s husband, the Architect, was on the moon. Or at least that was what we thought, but now we needed to communicate directly. We had several threats to resolve and no road map. Once more, several were looking to me like I had all the answers. All I had were questions and a growing sense that we had rested long enough. It was time to execute the plan, whatever the plan became. For every moment we discussed things was another moment Abernathy’s army, or some other threat, was nearing us. And the longer I stayed here, the more I was endangering the residents of New Manhattan.

“Silas, how can we get to the moon?” I asked him.

“There are no rockets on Earth,” he replied. The Architect might have provided us with some starter materials, but I doubt he left behind a spare Saturn V rocket and fuel. We were quite some time away from being able to create our own metals and space travel was definitely low on the priority list. Nails, needles, and other day-to-day goods were required first. Not only was the Architect giving us a chance to start over as a people, but a chance to start society all over again. No doubt there wasn’t any fossil fuels left, so we’d have to go really old school. That’d take time to figure out, time I needed to buy everyone by finding out the answers.

“Can one of the collectors make contact with the moon? Or wherever the Architect was?”

“Presumably, the systems properly rebooted after the energy surge, then yes, such contact could be attempted,” Silas said.

“Do you know where one capable of communication might be?” Chou asked. No doubt, she really wanted to speak with her husband. Hell, I didn’t even know what she called him.

“There is one I am certain could do this, but it is located closer to the other coast.”

“You point the way, I can fly us there,” Amelia said, ready to go, just like that. I appreciated her spunk, but we needed to learn from the last few weeks and travel far better prepared. I also needed to figure out who was best suited to accompany us. Chou and Michael for certain and Amelia to fly us. She’d need backup and I’d need some more muscle, which meant Bartholomew. I debated over Albert. He was so young and I might not have been feeling particularly maternal, but he was a liability. Then again, if I left him here, he’d probably try and stow aboard, like he did earlier on the Alexa Rae. I also promised him a chance at finding his destiny, so maybe I owed that to him. Besides, I just promised him last night he’d be a part of this, and I wasn’t going to renege on that.

Would I need an astrophysicist? Maybe. Miko could also help scale the mountains likely buttressing the collector. Vihaan didn’t look to be in great shape, but we’d been dealing with nanotech all along, so his expertise might come in handy.

Carolyn had interesting insights, but I didn’t need a poly-sci professor at this point. Her thoughts about the differing communities, though, would be needed when this was all done. Better she remain behind, although she seemed ready and raring to come along. Well, we would all have to deal with some disappointment.

I could also put out a call for volunteers, but it meant getting to know people cold, assessing skills, and figuring out how they could help. That required time I instinctively felt we didn’t have. Instead, I went with my gut and said to go with those I knew. Emily would have to brief the growing community.

“Silas, can you program a map into the Brimstone?” I asked.

“No, as I do not have a map in my programming.”

“We need a map,” I said. “Could you print one on metal like you did your daily data log?” Before his memory was repaired, he would imprint the vital information on scrap metal and scan it each day as he awoke. Thankfully, those days were over.

“There is no map or metal to use.”

“I have an idea,” Emily said.

I gestured at her, even though she was the mayor or governor of the community and my host. Yet, everyone kept deferring to me when it should have been her. Her poise and confidence – and her grit – was everything I saw a leader being and I didn’t feel like that at all.

“Just outside our compound are papyrus trees. We’ve been stripping some to make rope for construction, but wasn’t their skin used to fashion paper?”

“Yes,” exclaimed Albert.

“Does anyone know how?” I asked.

“It’s too time consuming,” my walking encyclopedia said glumly. “You soak it and stretch it and dry it and it takes days and days.”

“Alternatively,” Miko spoke up. “There are trees we can peel the bark off of and use the inside.”

“I can calibrate my laser to etch the bark without burning it,” Silas added helpfully.

“Silas, why don’t you and Albert go find some and get us a map we can use?” I suggested. Like a shot, Albert was out of his chair, and thankfully, Silas’ long limbs let him easily catch up.

“Well, good to know we can make paper,” Emily said. “We’ll need it.”

“For record keeping?” I asked.

“No, for communications,” Carolyn said. “In time, we will want to talk to the other communities. Unless we want to rely strictly on oral interpretation, we need paper.”

“And pens and ink,” Amelia added.

“Anyone know which birds provide the best quills?” Emily said.

“Okay, once Silas gives us a roadmap, we need to stock the Brimstone and get out of here. If they want me, it’ll be a chase. All morning, I’ve felt like a sitting duck. If you’ll come, I want Chou, Amelia, Michael, Vihaan, Miko, and Bartholomew to come. I’ll be taking Silas and Albert too.”

“Isn’t it too dangerous for the boy?” Heisenberg asked.

“Try keeping him here,” I said. “No, he’s been with me from the beginning and he is better off coming along.” He nodded and I caught a look of disappointment from Carolyn.

“Agreed,” Chou said in confirmation.

“Okay, you’ll need food and water, some medical gear,” Emily ticked off. “Not that we have a lot of anything, but we can spare you some.”

It was agreed, and everyone scattered. I took a moment to myself and reviewed the contents of my bag. Much as I liked the soap, it could stay behind, as could much of the canned goods. It’d make a fair trade for the stuff Emily would be providing. I checked my canteen for damage.

Then I saw Chou standing alone, observing the community come to life with purpose. People were bustling as Emily shouted out orders, which were relayed. Yeah, with no cell service in the future, we really were back at square one. That’s okay, I thought, my phone is out of battery life. I walked beside her, looking up once more, trying to read her eyes.

“Come with me,” she said and started off toward a pile of stones which had been collected to help with drainage. Someone around here must have been an engineer or even a plumber. We walked to the pile in silence and then she crouched low, examining several with her hands before selecting one.

“Your scimitar, please,” she said.

“You want to practice?”

“No.” I pulled it from my belt and handed it to her. She then balanced the blade on the largest rock while using one in her hand to scrape along the edge, sharpening it. The grinding sound was unpleasant, but she was right, I needed to be prepared.

“How are you?”

“Relieved my husband is alive. Wanting to speak with him. Worried we don’t have the answers we need.”

“It’s a lot to absorb,” I agreed.

“It is, but I was trained to analyze data and make determinations.”

“Right, I keep thinking about you being the security officer, but it was security and research officer,” I said. She nodded and continued honing the blade.

“Your training must continue. If there is time, we can continue to drill en route to the collector.”

“You know I made myself a promise, well, one to you and your husband, that I would try and live the life he envisioned for us. I don’t want to take any more lives.”

“You can still use this without killing and I won’t let you go into battle unarmed,” Chou said matter-of-factly. “It makes an excellent deterrent.”

She worked and I watched for a while. Then I asked her, “What is his name? ‘Architect’ is more of a title and it’s not what you called him. It’s not HAL, is it?”

“Hal?”

“Old joke, never mind.”

“He was my beloved,” she said and continued to work, occasionally pausing to check the progress. Satisfied after a time, she flipped it in her hand, and returned it to me, pommel first. I gingerly placed my hand along the edge and saw how much sharper it felt. With care, I placed it back in my belt and rose.

I started to speak, but a shrill cry in the distance interrupted us. We headed toward the sound, which definitely had the tone of an alarm. “Get everyone on the Brimstone,” I said. “I’ll find out what’s happening.”

I hurried my steps toward the running figure of a dark-skinned woman, her hair flying behind her head. The look of panic was evident even from a distance. My stomach dropped, fearing the worst. I didn’t even dare try hoping for the best.

“Lots of them!” she said.

Emily got to her before I did and the woman was babbling, but as I got closer, Emily’s confused look cleared. I was translating for them. And as I neared, I could make out an approximate count of four dozen figures, all black, all sort of human. It had to be Abernathy, finally finding us. How? I shoved the question aside for later. It was time to leave and fast.

“He wants me,” I shouted. “Get everyone to the opposite side of the compound, and he’ll head for me. Maybe he’ll leave you all alone.”

“We can fight,” she suggested.

“Anyone who falls gets coated in the nanobots. You’d just make the army bigger.”

“Analise, go warn the others,” Emily said. The long-haired woman took off, shouting and waving her arms, motioning for everyone to move to the south. As she did that, Emily and I looked to see the team assembling by the Brimstone. I could hear the engine coming to life and hoped Amelia wasn’t one for going through the pre-flight checklist.

Silas appeared from between two huts, carrying Albert, who was holding a rolled piece of wood in his hands. I gestured for the airship and they pivoted and headed in that direction. I could hear the rising voices of panic as it spread across the population. Whoever Emily tapped as her lieutenants were clearly trying to direct the herd. The hierarchy had been well established as no one argued and people were following the direction of a half-dozen people.

I swiveled my head, looking around to see the black blob approaching, but thankfully, they were still a distance away. Then I turned back and met Emily’s eyes. She gave me a brief, fierce hug, whispering, “Godspeed. Now get out of here.”

Going from zero to sixty, I sprinted for the Brimstone just as Silas was entering it. I could hear the crunch of trees breaking. The army was here and the destruction was going to be bad. Forcing myself to look forward, I dug in for the cabin door, trying to ignore the screams behind me. We should have left earlier. We needed better sentries. A better warning system. How did they do it back then?

Scrabbling inside, I found an empty chair and hung on, shouting, “Take off, take off!”

“Already on it,” Amelia yelled over her shoulder.

Moments later, I saw the first figures, vaguely human. There, in the center, was Abernathy. His silhouette, with the cobra-like hood shape and now-triangular head, was distinct. I imagined he was radiating sheer hatred, and as he entered the compound, he saw the Brimstone and began heading for us.

“Up!” I cried.

“You know another way to fly?” Amelia cracked, flipping a few more switches, and then I felt us slowly begin to rise. The last time I saw him, he could extend his limbs and I didn’t know how far that went,. We needed altitude and fast. He was already coming into focus and I saw glossy black eyes amidst the oily blackness. I feared he’d leap and latch on to us, or pierce the helium bladders.

“What on Earth is that?” Vihaan exclaimed.

I let out a mirthless chuckle, since those were my exact words when I saw the black orb in the collector. It hovered over dead ground and rippled, building up momentum as Tommy Two-Thumbs neared it. Then, it speared him like a marlin. Within seconds, the orb reduced itself in size as it transferred its mass to Abernathy. In time, it covered his body, distending his form, remaking it, following some hideous design. He was still following the Adversary’s commands, seeking me out, seeking Candidate 1.

“Nanobots,” I said, catching my breath. “Nanobots tuned to some network of the Adversary’s. He was human once, but now he’s a walking, talking mass of nanobots. With everyone he touches, he passes it on like a disease.”

“Self-replicating,” Vihaan said in a whisper, his eyes darting right to left, thinking furiously. “They use the organic material to fuel reproduction on an accelerated scale.”

“Yeah, well, he’s been building an army and they still want me.”

“Why?” he asked.

All I could do was shrug. We’d been over this and still had no answers. I stared out the window, watching Abernathy arrive just beneath us. He couldn’t reach us much as he tried; he couldn’t leap at us, or fly, thank goodness. But he was in New Manhattan. As Amelia banked left, the cabins and huts fell away, but black fog seemed to envelop a portion of it. I prayed Emily and the others were able to get away faster than Abernathy could follow. The problem was, he seemed tireless while the others were merely human.

“Where to?” Amelia called out.

Albert rushed forward, unrolling the bark. “Silas says we’re to go here.” His finger stabbed at a point. “And we’re here.” His finger moved to the opposite edge.

“Aye aye, navigator,” she said. “North by northwest it is.”

“We need speed,” I said. “I thought he didn’t have a map.”

“I was able to make extrapolations based on a review of our exploits since we met,” he told me.

“Aye aye, captain,” she said with a grin. Despite all the dangers, she was enjoying herself. She lived to be in the air so was in her element. Not so much Vihaan, who seemed to dislike heights. He was going to have to suck it up since we had no other choice.

I brooded with worry, staring at the land beneath us. The forest we’d previously traveled, the Evergreen, was beneath us already. At least it was progress.

Chou worked her way forward and sat beside me.

“Where do you think the others were?”

“Others?” I asked.

“When we last saw Abernathy, he had maybe a thousand humans already turned into his nanobot army. They overwhelmed and took apart Blue Alpha. There were at best four dozen here in New Manhattan.”

“Michael theorized they were looking for me,” I said. “Maybe they split up. When we left…the collector...” And Freuchen.

“Logical,” she said. “We must devise a way to stop Abernathy, find a way to disrupt his network.”

“That sounds like Vihaan’s world, not mine,” I said, still replaying my friend’s death in my mind’s eye. She left me alone to brood and spoke quietly with Vihaan and Michael. Miko and Bartholomew were peering through the glass encasing the gondola, enjoying the view.

After a few minutes to wallow, I swallowed hard, refusing to cry again, and made a decision. I worked my way to the front, admiring the thin clouds and bright blue ahead of us. To Amelia’s right was the etched map, dark brown lines against the tan lining of the bark. On it was an outline of the continent, although it was not one I recognized. There were fragments that resembled Africa or South America, but it was alien to me. Still, it was something and I saw Albert had used a charred twig to make marks. In one place was a star with “NM” under it. New Manhattan. Okay, it was a start. Then I saw what I needed.

“Silas, can you direct Amelia to get us to Avalon?”

“Of course,” he said.

“What’s there?” our pilot asked.

“We’re a handful against an army. If we’re going into war, I need a general.”

“Not you?”

“No, I promised myself I would honor the Architect’s desires. Besides, I’ve no training. I need someone who can handle a gun. And can command men.”

“It’s a half day out of our way. Are you sure?”

I nodded. “We’re facing an army, so it’s time to build our own.”

Four

The garrison at Avalon had grown, much as New Manhattan had. Its leader, Edward James Hubbard, had gone for a hub and spoke design, using the center for a meeting place. There were six segments, each nearly identical, a series of long structures, several with a steady plume of smoke rising. As we neared, I could see people moving about, everyone assigned a job, each to their own talents. Hubbard was fighting during World War I and nearly died before the Architect rescued him. In my world, he survived and became one of the 20th Century’s great poets. Here, he was a man of wisdom and enterprise, overseeing the construction on an island, its placid waters protection from Abernathy’s army. Along the shore, I could see felled trees being hollowed out, the beginnings of canoes. A few people could be seen further down the coast, fishing.

A part of me longed to just land and rejoin this community. But newfound duty and obligation won out, especially since anywhere I laid my head was going to put a target on them and I couldn’t presume the water would be enough protection. I long ago learned what happens when you presume.

More than a few people had spotted our approach, our shadow looming large on the land with the lowering sun behind us. I had told my new companions about these people, the ones I first arrived with, and I looked forward to seeing them again. But I didn’t want us shot at, couldn’t afford the helium to escape or explode.

Once more, I moved to the front and asked about a microphone. Amelia cocked her head to her left and there was a mic on a coiled line. Then I reached into my backpack and withdrew the paper Hubbard had given me when I left Avalon. I thumbed the mic to life and began to read.

“The war’s maiden walks the bloody path,

And pauses here and there,

To kiss a cold forehead, caress a pale cheek.

Her heart beats in its wrath,

But forces herself instead to care

For one of these may have been her Greek…”

“What is that?” Miko asked. Before I could reply, Michael chimed in with “The Maiden.”

I gave him a surprised look. He shrugged. “You loved that poem and recited it to me now and then.”

Well, it was good to know I was consistent. The recitation had the desired effect and I recognized Hubbard’s figure running toward us, his arms waving away those brandishing whatever they had for defensive weapons. He was still in his torn and well-worn British uniform.

“Okay, Amelia, it’s safe to land.”

She nodded and maneuvered a few controls, slowing the engines and bringing us down. We’d gathered quite the crowd by the time we settled on the land, keeping a respectful distance from the garrison. A small knot of people surrounded him and I recognized Jacquetta, Evita, and the man I came to see: Wild Bill Hickock.

Wild Bill was standing awfully close to Jacquetta, so I hoped their flirtation moved forward. He’d lost his horse to the Nazis and I could tell just how lonely he had been before arriving here. And here I was, asking him to leave her.

We disembarked and Edward was beaming at me. Once everyone was off the Brimstone, I made a quick round of introductions, followed by Edward’s side. He craned his head, looking around.

“He’s gone,” I said softly.

His face fell at that and Wild Bill dipped his head in acknowledgement. They’d both seen enough death to understand the loss but also that we had to go on.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“Of course,” Edward said. “Oliver and Sarah, please take our guests for refreshments.” He eyed Chou. “I suppose you’re coming with us? You two are never far apart.”

“She needs constant protection,” she said and fell into step.

He brought us to his cabin, which doubled as his operations center. It was spartan since no one had much, but there was a wide tree trunk that served as a table, a good portion of its root system still in place so it wobbled a bit. Edward gestured to two additional slices of tree that acted as chairs. As he poured water, Wild Bill leaned in the doorway, his thin frame backlit by the setting sun.

As quickly as I could, and interrupted only a few times by Chou, I outlined the last few weeks. I summed up with the threat to our lives from Abernathy, not bothering him with the false vacuum, which might or might not be coming our way. There was only so much time and there were things to do.

“I can’t do this alone, Edward,” I said after taking a long drink from the cool cup of water. “We need to get organized and I need a force to stop Abernathy.”

He nodded and prepared to respond when Wild Bill interrupted. “You got a way to stop this thing?”

“Not yet.”

“You want cannon fodder then,” he said bluntly. “You got no way to stop him, so you just need a wall of people. I reckon that’s asking a lot.”

“We have to fight and stop him, so I can get to the collector and speak with the Architect.”

“I got that part. It’s the robot army I don’t have settled,” he drawled.

“That’s why I’m here,” I admitted. “I need you, Bill. I need someone to lead the force we will build.”

He shook his head. “Hold on there, Meredith. Sure, I can shoot some. But I’m no leader of men…”

“And women,” Chou cut in.

“If you say so. But I don’t have the first clue about half of what you just said. I’m no military man, and Edward, he’s seen far worse battle than I ever have, but we need him here.”

“And I’ve seen too much,” Edward said quietly.

“Clearly, you need protection. I can do that. I can come along and watch your back, but I can’t…I won’t be leadin’ people into a hopeless fight. You show me where to aim, I’ll take my best shot.”

“First you tell me about parallel realities, and now you’re telling me these nanobits…” Edward began.

“Nanobots,” Chou corrected.

“Nanobots can take us over, take away our humanity. At least you’ve identified the threat; we just need a solution. Now, if Bill wants to go with you, I can’t stop him. I’d advise against it, because we’re building something good here, and it too needs protecting.”

“If I don’t stop Abernathy and his puppet master, you will eventually be destroyed,” I said. I looked at Wild Bill, who was thinking deeply.

“We have to go. We have many miles to cross to reach our destination,” Chou said.

“How do you even know where to go? The tinman? Silas?”

“Yes. In fact, let Albert show you the map,” I said with a smile.

“Map?”

“Yes, come see the world we’re on.”

He followed me from the cabin and we found Albert being fussed over by Evita, Sarah, and Jacquetta. The boy was showing them the very map we were there to see. Edward stood behind him and Albert showed off where we had been, describing the forest, and the mountains surrounding the citadel, the remains of which could be seen from Avalon. He then showed them New Manhattan and his finger traced our path. He took out his stick and added an A to the island, the largest on that shore.

“We’ve seen other settlements,” I said. “Everyone seems to have found places to call home.”

“They’re all threatened, aren’t they?” Edward asked, frowning. As I nodded, I also noticed Wild Bill had taken Jacquetta away from the group. In the growing shadows of the impending evening, I saw them huddled close, him talking, her shaking her head. I could fill in the dialogue for myself. When they returned to the group, she had tears in her eyes and then she glared at me, and I didn’t blame her. But Wild Bill came from a time when a man did what he thought was best, even if it hurt the ones he loved. It was a simpler time, I guess, and one I admired.

Edward convinced us to at least stay for a meal, which was warm, tasty, and filling. We restocked our canteens and made our farewells. I gave Edward a tight hug while Albert blushed at the ones he was receiving. Wild Bill and Jacquetta were saying their farewells in private and he met us at the airship by himself. He looked ready for war with a Nazi machine gun, two Lugers, boxes of ammunition, and his own trusty six-shooter. He nodded at me once and then went aboard, Albert right behind him to show him around.

Less than five hours after arriving, we were leaving Avalon. I dearly hoped it would not be the last time I would visit the island.

Wild Bill watched Avalon fade in the distance as we flew higher and the coastline gave way to trees, scrub, and sand. He sat like a statue, gazing, until I saw him flex his hands, spreading his fingers then clenching them into fists.

“Never been so high, have you?”

“Nope.”

“Scared of heights? It’s pretty common,” I reassured him.

“I don’t know. Never been so damned high up,” Wild Bill said. “Gives you a whole new way of looking at things.”

I left him to his thoughts and settled beside Chou to see how she was doing. There had to be some relief in knowing her husband had survived and was near. If you can call the moon near.

“You okay?” I prompted.

“Fine.”

“Fine doesn’t really cover what you’re going through,” I said.

She looked at me and exhaled a long breath. The fierceness that was her general demeanor faded, revealing a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before.

“What does a half billion years of existence do to you? Is he still the same? Was he isolated; did he have friends?”

“You worried if he cheated…”

“Nothing like that. But I’ve seen what long voyages like ours did to people and that was just a decade or two of space flight. This is on an entirely different scale.”

“How much can he really have changed if you recognized him from Silas’ speech?”

She paused at that thought. “What if we reconnect and it’s not the same?”

“It can’t be, can it? A month here has changed you in some ways, so half a billion years will definitely have changed him. But into what remains to be seen.”

I placed my hand over hers and gave her a light squeeze. Chou wasn’t touchy-feely, but I suspected she needed some human contact. It lasted a beat, then two before she moved her hand away.

“We need to assess our supplies,” she said, as if the previous conversation hadn’t happened. “We left New Manhattan before we could fully load up and all we received in Avalon was water and fruit.”

She rose and began opening cabinets, making a mental inventory. In one, she found what looked like a tablet, and it powered on at her touch. It was thinner than anything I had seen before and curled at one edge. Returning to the first bin, she began rapidly typing with one hand, moving at speeds I thought only teenage girls could manage.

Methodically, she examined all the supplies, and then began speaking with our complement, which I had begun to think of as the IMF, Mission: Impossible’s Impossible Missions Force, because if saving the planet, and maybe the universe, wasn’t an impossible mission, I didn’t know what was. Which made me Ethan Hunt and I looked nothing like Tom Cruise. People continued to look at me as the leader while I still didn’t feel it was earned but handed to me because I was the object of the Adversary’s desire for reasons that continue to elude us.

Chou returned to my side, her serious expression in place. So much for girl talk. “We have vegetables, fruit, and water for at least a week. We lack protein beyond that. We’re also short on medical supplies, notably bandages.”

“Any good news?”

“We have plenty of ammunition for the machine gun and pistols, plus we have assorted knives for the others.”

“Not enough food to properly sustain us, but plenty to kill us,” I said. “Sounds like the America I left behind.”

“We can stop each day for fishing and maybe some hunting,” Chou suggested.

“Well, it’s not like we can stop at Walmart, so let’s make that the plan.” My reference went right by her, but she didn’t inquire. Instead, she rose and started forward, where Bartholomew was taking a turn piloting the airship. She and Silas consulted over the crude and far too incomplete map. I know she was asking about places to fish, but I wished it could tell me where the Adversary or at least where Abernathy’s army might be. The Architect brought just under two billion people forward in time, and in less than a month, we lost who knows how many people to violence, let alone the thousand or more that were now Abernathy’s Army. And how many people did the Adversary bring forward and how were they integrating into this brave new world? If they were violent killers, they would remain a threat to the Architect’s utopia. Well, one threat at a time.

It was determined that the following day we were likely to reach a river that should have good fishing. What Silas didn’t tell us, and which we were surprised to discover after the sun rose the following morning was how deep the river was in relation to where we could land the Brimstone. The barren territory seemed devoid of life, not even plants, just rocky terrain and deep fissures that led down to the river, which looked wide and I could see was running at a good clip. The taupe ground was cracked, in need of a good rain, and some scrub seemed to be growing here and there. Down below was the river and lush green foliage. At least Wild Bill would be happy about going down. I had made sure everyone got some sleep as the airship ate miles, although I was disappointed when I saw how little we moved on the makeshift map.

“You’re letting the scale bother you,” Michael said from over my shoulder. “Trust me, we’re on course and making reasonable time. All the stops for food will slow us a bit, maybe cost us a day all told.”

“A day we don’t have,” I said,.

“You don’t know that. It’s just another unknown, so we keep going forward.”

His reassurance helped a bit, even if it still felt weird talking to my son. He was certainly handling it better than me. I shoved those thoughts aside and studied the map. There were several new marks that I asked Albert about.

He was eating a peach, juice already on his chin, but was grinning, which made me happy. “I saw fires big enough to tell us there were villages, compounds, garrisons…what are we calling these places? Everyone has a different name for it.”

“Villages will do,” I said. Compound and garrison sounded too military for my taste. I spotted six new signs of civilization, which I took to be a good thing. It made me wonder, though, about just how many there were and would they soon be fighting over resources or imaginary lines in the sand. There was enough unrest being stirred up by the Adversary and his scattering us meant there was more than a bit of confusion down there. Another issue for a later time.

“I found us a place to land. Silas’ eyes tell me it’ll be the easiest way to make it to the river,” Bartholomew said.

“Have you ever landed this?” I honestly couldn’t remember.

“There is a first time for everything, is there not?” he said with a big grin.

“Just don’t land us too close to the edge,” I said.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he said but was keeping his eyes on the controls, maneuvering us lower and not near the edge.

I made sure everyone was awake and prepared to go for a hike. We had some spears made from branches and our knives, but I wished we had a good fishing pole. We’d make do and hopefully find some dead wood to use for cooking as opposed to chopping down a tree, the kind of thing Freuchen would do with gusto. I wished I had that axe of his.

After we landed, the party began making its way down with the more experienced Miko in the lead, something that took over an hour. The rock formations gave us plenty of places for our hands and feet, but it was slow going and I wasn’t looking forward to the climb back up. She was making it look easy and I was jealous. I maybe rock-wall climbed a few times at birthday parties when I was much younger, but this was new to me, and even with developing muscles, I was achy long before I got to the bottom. It was hot and I tried to comfort myself with the old joke about it was at least a dry heat. Still, my shirt stuck to my back and I felt the sweat running down my neck. I tried to remember to regularly drink from the canteen, something I could easily refill from the river.

Michael, the oldest in our group and in the worst physical shape, chose to remain behind, so I was thankful for that. One less thing to worry about. Albert, though, was happily scrabbling down, taking the lead with Miko while Silas was in the rear, his metallic form digging deep into the rock to support his greater weight.

When we finally reached the bottom, it was noticeably cooler and the sound of the rushing river was actually pleasant. Both sides of the bank were shaded by trees that looked old based on how thick their trunks were. Between the rock wall and the nearest bank was a good thirty yards, so plants and grasses grew. From what I saw in the sky, the river traveled quite a ways, crookedly bisecting this portion of the continent, eventually curving to the west. No doubt there’d be animal life down here, so maybe we’d have some surf and turf tonight.

We spread out along the bank, some stopping to pour water over their heads, and used our spears to try and catch some of the fish we saw. They were large and I had no idea what type they were, but no doubt Albert could tell me. First, they had to be caught. Amelia was poking away with gusto, not hitting a thing but having a fine time trying. Albert crouched low, studying the fish for a bit, before rearing back and piercing the cold water. Vihaan and Bartholomew were equally unable to catch anything. So of course it was Chou, she of the superior physique and reflexes, who caught the first fish. She’d observed the others and then studied the water, and with one smooth movement, struck deep into the water and pulled back with a wriggling silvery blue fish affixed to the tip. She completed the arc over her shoulder, dislodging her catch onto the dirt. Wild Bill promptly brought down a stone, crushing its head.

There was banter and laughter, so for a brief moment, the dread up above wasn’t pressing on us. I actually laughed and even saw Chou smile.

We were like this for at least a quarter of an hour, but then birds, ones we hadn’t noticed in the trees, suddenly flew up, made frantic circles, and rushed across the river. Wild Bill dropped the fish he was cleaning and reached for his pistol, fingers still dripping with guts. Chou twisted around, the spear point dripping but empty. From somewhere deep between the trees that formed a barrier between the rock wall and the river bank, I saw a flash of fur and heard the low growl.

“Oh, shit,” I said to myself. “Albert, get back.”

Moments later, a second sabretooth tiger padded into view. Like the one we saw early in our visit, this was large, prehistoric, and according to Silas, not supposed to be here. It was one of the predators brought forward by the Adversary to act as a counterbalance of sorts. Regardless of reason, it was here and it was clearly a threat we hadn’t prepared for. This one was spotted, more like a cheetah than the one we saw weeks before. Its white fangs were stained yellow, saliva making one glisten in the sunlight. Given how large it was, easily six feet long, the tail seemed ridiculously short, but it was upright, curling.

Its friends appeared behind it and I quickly counted five, so it was hunting in a pack. Swell. We had spears and Chou made one work earlier, killing the first one we encountered. But none of us matched her in skill, except maybe Bartholomew. He was tightly gripping his spear, keeping it before him in a defensive posture. All had been tattooed with blood and gore, so we must have somehow interfered with their lunch.

“Smilodon fatalis,” Albert said from somewhere behind me. “How many do you think there are here?”

“Too many,” Wild Bill said, studying them with his experienced eyes, his pistols in both hands. He was calculating, I could tell, determining if he could shoot all five before someone died. His not immediately firing didn’t bode well for us.

“What do we do?” I asked Chou, who was a little bit behind me now and to my left. I felt powerless until I remembered I had the scimitar. But if I went for it, I’d be a moving target sure to attract attention and I considered they were within leaping distance.

“Keep watch and be ready to react,” was all she said in a low voice.

The group of animals stood before us, studying us, sniffing the air, the lead one pawing at the ground beneath it.

“They’re sated from eating, slower to move, which will give us an advantage,” Chou said.

“To do what?”

As the words left my lips, the lead sabretooth crouched and sprang forward, right at Bartholomew. His reflexes were good and he was swinging the spear in both fists like a baseball bat, making contact. The wood splintered, but the shift in momentum sent the big cat onto its side. As it scrambled upright to his paws, another leapt over him, right at the now defenseless man. Before it could make contact, Silas had reached over Bartholomew’s head and grasped the attacker around the throat and then swung it around in an arc, releasing the cat so it sailed into the river and was swept away, its cries angry and plaintive.

The others charged forward, but by then, Bill had taken aim and fired twice, taking down another, the shots echoing back and forth between the stone walls. I had my scimitar out and stood still, the blade vertical before me, ready to strike, but only defensively. That changed when one of the cats made for Vihaan, who tried to spear him, but it glanced off the spotted fur. It knocked the older man down, slicing open his forearm, forcing me to act. I came up behind it and aimed for the head, but my first swing missed. Instead, I had to alter my position as the cat reared back a paw to swipe again at Vihaan. I came along its flank and made a horizontal cut that went through fur into muscle, causing the cat to roll over and howl. It was a horrible sound, one I’d be happy not hear again. With no choice, since it loomed over Vihaan, I swung again, cutting deeper, striking bone, as it staggered, moving aside.

Chou and Bartholomew were cornering one cat, each striking with their knives, slicing into the cat, each accompanied by a growl. If I remembered right, cornering an animal was never a good idea, but then Amelia joined them, and they kept at the cat, not letting it attack. It was death by a thousand stabs, and it was terrible. Behind me, Bill fired again, emptying a pistol into the fourth cat.

I heard the fifth cat before I saw it, and by then, it was in the air headed directly for me. I didn’t move swiftly enough and it forced me to the ground, one paw slicing into my arm. I let out a shriek of pain and tried to wriggle away, but this thing easily outweighed me. I wasn’t going anywhere and certainly couldn’t use the scimitar. Its breath was horrible, saliva dripping on me as it studied me for a moment, figuring out where best to attack. Humans, I gathered, were not on its regular menu. I kicked my feet, which merely made it wobble once.

Behind me, Miko and Chou had their spears at the ready, taking careful aim as the sabretooth settled on my chest for its attack. Its growl signaled his intent, which was when the two women stabbed at it. Each pierced its fur and the cat howled and shrieked, writhing in pain, its forepaws slicing away at me. It scrabbled off of me and turned its ferocity at the women, which was when Wild Bill, coming up from behind us, took aim and fired once. The beast collapsed atop my legs. Miko helped roll it off me as Bartholomew helped me to my feet, my own blood mixing with the sabretooth’s, staining the ground.

“Anyone hurt?” I asked, my breath ragged, my heart still pounding against my ribs.

“Yeah, you,” Wild Bill said. Vihaan had already pulled out a cloth to wrap around himself and Bill did the same for me.

Amelia was already at Vihaan’s side, reaching into her bag for the first aid supplies. Of course, it was the airplane pilot who thought to bring that stuff on a hike. It didn’t occur to me we’d need it. She applied pressure, causing the older man to wince. We had to staunch the wound and wait until nightfall for our daily pixie dust treatment.

As she got to work, everyone else seemed fine, if rattled.

“You want I should go find it?” Wild Bill asked, reloading his gun.

“Are there more?” I asked.

“We won’t know until we go looking, but if there are five, there may be none or six,” he said.

“Bartholomew, go with him,” I said. “Chou will keep us safe.” There were nods and the two men paused at the tree line, listening, then went in. As they disappeared, I went to see where Amelia was wrapping Vihaan’s right arm.

“He’ll live,” she said.

“I should hope so,” he said, trying to force a smile, but he was seriously scared and it’d be a while before he felt normal. “Meredith, you look worse than I do.”

“It feels that way too,” I said, trying not to grimace. Miko fussed over me before Amelia could bring her supplies.

Albert came near me, and in a small voice, asked, “Do you think Abernathy heard the gun shots?” The fight scared him and the brave lad I had come to rely on was seriously rattled.

“He’d have to be very close to hear that,” Chou said. “We haven’t seen him on our journey, so no, Albert, he did not hear us.”

“What about those nano-bugs?”

“We haven’t seen any of those in days, weeks,” I reassured him. “We’re fine.” For now.

“Silas, were you able to hear their approach?” I asked.

“No, Meredith. My systems were focused on our fishing. I was not in a security mode.”

“You have different modes?”

“They are backup subroutines, used as required.”

“How come I never knew that?”

“You never asked.”

“That’s not funny,” Chou snapped.

“They were suppressed by previous damage, but Blue Alpha’s repairs allowed me access.”

“Good to know.” Once Amelia finished with me, I went to the river bank and knelt down. With both hands cupping the water, I drank some and then refilled my hands and poured it down my back, wincing with every move. The variety of threats was making it hard to feel prepared. In a war, it’s usually a mass of guys in uniform shooting at another mass of guys in uniform. Red coats versus independent blue, blue versus gray, and so on. Here, it was Nazis and sabretooths and nanobots. You couldn’t possibly be ready for them all, especially on unfamiliar ground. We were going to be in a constant disadvantage until this got resolved. If this got resolved.

As my breathing returned to normal, I could see Amelia and Albert cleaning up the debris, retrieving our fish and making a small pile. We were going to have to leave and resume the trip.

It was another fifteen minutes before I heard rustling then Wild Bill announcing his presence. He and Bartholomew emerged into the sunlight, looking no worse for wear.

“Never did see another cat,” he said.

“Good.”

“But we found their lunch. Looked like bison, two of them,” Bartholomew added.

“What are bison doing down here?” I asked.

“Couldn’t rightly say, but we interrupted their meal and they came looking for us,” Wild Bill said.

“The bison were likely brought here to be part of the food supply,” Chou said from behind me.

“Not for us,” Wild Bill said.

“No, they were victims of the Adversary. Multiple paths of chaos the Architect warned about. Upsetting the ecosystem and the food chain the Architect designed is one such path. And if the food supply is compromised, our ability to sustain nearly two billion people will be a problem.”

“Okay, let’s gather fish and get back to the Brimstone. We have miles to go before we sleep,” I said.

As everyone busied themselves, I absorbed Chou’s warning. Our problems were mounting and our solutions were not keeping up. Hell, we had no solutions yet.

Five

Thankfully, the next two days were uneventful. We flew, noting the changing terrain, from forests to fields, to deserts. Silas helped Albert add to the map, noting other rivers and a cluster of seven mammoth lakes, patterned like a starburst. We saw birds in flocks and small clusters of animals. I even saw two packs of wild horses running free, their dark forms nearly outracing us, it seemed.

Just no signs of civilization. The further inland we went, there was no evidence the Architect brought anyone here. He seemed to have brought us to the coasts, with plentiful water and land in equal proportion. Still, it would have been like the Adversary to divert people to a dry desert and let them die of dehydration.

We played I Spy and other games to pass the time and keep Albert entertained. In turn, he happily recited facts about the environment beneath us. Amelia was also teaching Michael and Vihaan the basics of flying the Brimstone so we had more options. Both were doing pretty well and I know it gave Michael a greater sense of purpose, especially after being left behind when we went fishing. But then again, it also meant he wasn’t a sabretooth’s dinner option.

There was a tedium to the flight, even though the sense of dread and tension remained in the background. I busied myself, learning how to clean a gun, helping Wild Bill work with the materials we had on hand. I made sure to spend time with everyone, getting to know them better, one by one, and in the back of my mind, assessing how best they could contribute under various scenarios. If the Adversary was going to bring the chaos, I was going to counter him as best I could.

We had entered a region of low, grassy land, reminding me of the prairies men like Wild Bill were associated with. Albert explained we were entering a veldt, which I knew to be a term for African land. It was a large plateau region, with small rivers and relatively dry, hot weather punctuated by a rainy season. About thirty minutes into this region, Amelia summoned me to the pilothouse. She gestured to her right and I looked through the dusty window. There were a cluster of structures, the first sign of human life we’d seen since leaving Avalon.

I called for Albert so he could add it to our map. He and Amelia discussed the scale and they approximated the best they could. All the training on longitude and latitude, all my reliance on GPS, all gone.

“Take us down. Safely away so we don’t seem threatening.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised.

“Yes. If we’re building an army, we’ll need allies. We need friends, and they need to be warned.”

“Makes sense to me,” she said and began adjusting the controls and I immediately felt us turn and begin a descent. As we neared, I could see numerous thatched huts, several in each circle, each circle surrounding cook fires. Trails of smoke emerged from each, lazily wafting into the sky. Wooden racks had been constructed, clothing and grasses drying. I could see new homes being built along with other large objects I could identify. It was certainly an industrious group, although everyone seemed to be craning their necks to look at us or start jogging in our direction.

By the time we settled, a gathering awaited us, easily several dozen people. I saw all skin tones, sizes, and shapes, just like everywhere else. I wondered when and where they came from and if they’d managed to speak to one another. I asked everyone but Wild Bill to leave weapons aboard the ship. We had to appear nonthreatening and I also asked Silas to remain aboard until I explained the situation. No one argued, clearly having accepted me as their leader, such as it was.

As a result, I was the first to emerge from the airship, smiling and hands open. A tall, whippet-thin man, his face weathered and tanned by sun, draped in what might be a dun-colored sari, led his group forward until we met in the middle.

“Hello,” I said.

“Forgive, but you speak Tsonga,” he said.

“No, English,” I said, grinning as his eyes flew wide.

“How can you…”

“It’s a gift. My name is Meredith, and if your people gather around, say thirty feet, they will all understand me.”

He gaped at that for a moment then nodded. “I am Isabis,” the man said. “Welcome to Idolobhana.”

By then, my IMF team assembled beside me and Michael gave me a look. “It means village.”

“Where are you from?”

I sighed. I was going to be doing this a lot and I had prepared my speech, rehearsing it the last few days, knowing it would come in handy. “We all come from somewhere else, from different lands. Recently, we came from the coast,” and I gestured in the general direction. “There is a lot to explain, including answers to some of your questions and a warning of dangers ahead.”

“What sort of danger, luv?” a bearded Australian wearing clothes that suggested the 18th century asked.

“Can everyone hear me?” With surprised looks, there were nods and yeses heard. I launched into the who, what, where, when, and why, skipping the how, since that remained a mystery. At the mention of parallel universes, the Aussie, who was named George, exclaimed, “That explains that. I thought I had my history all wrong when Isabis said Napoleon conquered all of Europe.”

“Even Russia?” I asked Isabis, who nodded.

“How can we trust what you’re saying?” asked a dark-skinned man, maybe sixty, with eyes that said he’d seen plenty in his life. Several others nodded their heads. There will always be skeptics, I thought, even with my mysterious gift as evidence that things weren’t as “normal.”

I waved my arm dramatically, and emerging from the cockpit door came Silas, all nine feet of gleaming metal and those twinkling blue eyes. Gasps were audible and more than a few backed away as he came closer, looming over the crowd. He stood at the rear of our team, a safe distance from the residents of Idolobhana. “Everyone, say hello to Silas, one of the last remaining robots built by the Architect.” A few actually murmured hello, especially the children, who were more fascinated than frightened.

“Hello, everyone,” he said, his metallic voice translating into easily a dozen different languages.

“Okay, I’m sold,” said a man, who seemed dressed in the remains of a zoot suit, the jacket long gone in the heat, but the green-striped wool pants remained, splattered with mud.

“Have you seen any others?” Chou asked.

“The first week or two, we’d get a few stragglers who were disoriented. Really lost. We’ve stabilized the last three weeks maybe. We number 126.”

“Soon to be 127,” a woman, small, with long blonde hair, called from the back and others near her parted, as she patted her swollen abdomen.

“Congratulations,” I called. People were still amazed that they could understand me and each other.

“How can you do that?” Isabis asked.

“One of the great mysteries,” I said and he nodded.

Then he broke into a grin, showing crooked teeth, and gestured at Idolobhana. “Come, let me show you what we’ve built.”

We followed in a cluster, with a few of the villagers staying with us, as others drifted back to their work. The huts were ingeniously woven from natural materials, each holding four people, maybe five with children. The center fires had meats and vegetables on spits slowly roasting over low-burning wood. Children chased one another, and it was good to finally see children again.

As we neared the rear of the village, I saw men and boys digging while women were dampening the earth using water from woven baskets. They formed brick shapes and set each to bake in the sun. Over to one side, an animal-like shape was being carved out of similar wet dirt.

“What’re these?” I asked.

“If this is to be our home,” Isabis explained, “then we wanted it to look like our home. We’re building animal monuments to act as a gateway, a front door if you will.”

“These are like the ones I saw once in Great Zimbabwe,” Bartholomew said, clearly impressed. “They designate authority.”

“This is our land now, right,” Isabis said.

“I suppose so,” I said, the uncertainty clear, causing him to frown. “I mean, we were all brought here at once, more or less, to restart the human race. I’m not sure the plan called for separate settlements.”

“But where is everyone else?”

I called Albert over, and he unrolled the map and began pointing out our journey, making certain to show the unidentified settlements between Avalon and Idolobhana. Isabis let out a slow whistle at that. “How many you say we were?”

“Nearly two billion,” I said

“All on one continent?”

“Can I get back to you on that?”

“Another unanswered question?”

“One of too many,” I admitted.

He called out for a woman, Mei Ling, who hurried over and paused as soon as she saw the map. The woman was delicate in appearance, her brightly colored robes starting to fade in the constant sunlight. “Where are we?” she demanded and Albert approximated it with his forefinger.

“Can we copy this?” she asked in a light voice.

“Of course. As far as I am concerned, there are no secrets,” I told her and got a smile in return. As it happened, she had arrived with paper and ink, not enough to spare us any, but she rummaged and found a sheet approximately the size of the bark. We left her to copy the work and were shown where completely dried bricks were being stacked to fashion an oven.

Of course they wanted to host us for a meal, to share information, compare timelines, and just have someone new to speak with. I got it and had to fight my impatience to get back on the road.

“Ready to move on?” Wild Bill asked, coming up so quietly, I didn’t hear him.

“Something like that. Sure, I wanted to make contact, but if we stop and eat everywhere we go…”

“You worried about gaining weight?” I had to look at him and catch the gleam in his eye telling me he was kidding.

“Every stop is vital, but lingering not so much,” I said.

“Where I come from, you want allies, you break bread with them,” he told me, and it made sense. How many deals were made over food? I had to actually put into practice all the tried and true methods I only heard about in school. Already, Isabis was treating me as the leader of a foreign land. He had been a banker and understand how corporate alliances worked. I was playing catch up.

When I stifled a yawn a few hours later, he saw it and nodded.

“You need to sleep.”

“And we need to do it from the air. We have so much more territory to cover.”

“Then let me tell you this, Meredith. I like what the Architect is trying to do. I like the idea that we’re starting over and that I have some unfulfilled potential. I’d like to be around long enough to figure out what that is. I now know I will need allies to do that. So I am pledging you my support. We will continue to build, but with an eye on fortifications, not statuary. We’ll also build, sad to say, weapons.”

“They’ll do little good against the nanobots,” I reminded him. He was from 1866, so nanotechnology was still unfathomable to him. Thankfully, there were others from uptime that could support him.

“You’ve said there are more than one kind of danger.”

“True enough.”

“We must warn the others, the ones you haven’t visited,” Isabis said. “Can you or Chou or Silas tell it over again so we may write it down? I have fast runners we’ve used to carry messages from one end of Idolobhana to the next. We can outfit them with copies of the map, make contact now that we know they’re out there. I have to be honest, I didn’t think we were the only ones here, especially as people joined us early on. But I had no idea where here is. Everything looks and feels different.”

“It is,” I assured him, explaining about the lengthening day.

I asked Chou to brief Mei Ling, who seemed the most adept at taking the notes, and as they spoke, I took one more walk around the village. It was so different than the garrison at Avalon or New Manhattan, but these were now new communities, new homes and fresh beginnings. I silently repeated my pledge to the Architect to be worthy of this opportunity.

As we walked, the nightly ritual began and everyone paused, arms outstretched, smiles on their face. “Mojo time,” one cried and everyone let out a ritualistic cheer. Everyone had a name for the nanobots that repaired tissue, regrew limbs, and rejuvenated one and all. I spread my arms, welcoming the wash of positive nanobots on my sore, lacerated limbs. Within minutes, I felt good as new, although the yawns kept coming.

It was then that I realized this was a moment to kiss cheeks or hug or shake hands or swap spit or something to signify the alliance. But we were different places and the rules were nonexistent. I settled for a simple “thank you” before gathering the team and heading out. As we returned to the Brimstone, Amelia let Bartholomew handle liftoff since she imbibed a bit too much during the feast. I was amazed at how quickly alcohol had been reintroduced in the world. When I mentioned that aloud, it was Vihaan who explained how quickly the fermentation process could work.

“Well, that was easy enough,” I said once we were in the air, feeling drowsier by the moment.

“They will not always be so welcoming,” Chou said.

“Especially if Abernathy has already paid them a visit.”

“He is behind us, so that won’t be the reason. People arrived scattered and scared, with no one like Silas to welcome them and explain the situation. They’re surviving but asking more questions than the ones we’ve been posing.”

“The Adversary really messed with your husband, didn’t he?”

She nodded and brooded as I rose to go find a bunk to lie down in. The sleep was deep and peaceful, the relaxed atmosphere of Idolobhana pushing away the threats and my own fears.

As we continued across the continent, I instructed whoever was piloting that any habitat within an hour’s flight off course was to be visited, without question. We needed to spread the word, make alliances, and have them ready, because if Abernathy and his icky goons were after us, they’d get to them eventually. By flying straight through the day, we were certainly gaining ground or at least maintaining our lead, which would be essential when we got to the collector. From the air, I could see the distant silhouette of others, each one dutifully added by Albert, who was delighted with his assignment. I hadn’t realize how invaluable it would become.

Our second stop was possibly even more welcoming than Idolobhana. We found them about eighteen hours away, with a small series of lean-tos in neat rows before a large platform with an awning of some sort. We landed and were met by one person, a stunning, almond-eyed, older woman named Bich. She welcomed us to Mới Bắt Dầu, which meant New Beginning, and its inhabitants fell under her influence, going for a minimalist approach in the moderate temperatures as they were located at the edge of a massive lake. There were rings of trees that were old and had full foliage, providing welcome shade. Wild animal life, which delighted Albert as he rapidly named all he could spot, roamed freely.

The six dozen or so people were told by Bich, whose name translated to Jade, that they were all given a gift of life and it should not be squandered. Once they climbed out of the lake, where most had arrived, she began speaking to them about the moment. The moment of being, the moment of existing with all things in harmony. While the people came from different cultures and times, her easy acceptance of their differences apparently worked to calm their fears. Day by day, she directed the construction of minimalist structures, taking time throughout the day to rest and meditate. She directed the work, picking up bits and pieces of the varying languages, integrating them into her instructions.

She was a disciple of Buddha, a practitioner of Zen, something I never really knew much about but accepted that it was working. Everyone seemed serene when we arrived. Between the mild climate and the general vibe of community, it felt ideal, pretty much what the Architect might have expected from all of us. Which meant I had to bring evil into their lives with news from the rest of the world.

When their leader let out a loud whistle, all work stopped and people looked at Bich and then us. Wisely, I kept Silas aboard the Brimstone as I did before. No need to shatter their calm with a nine-foot-tall robot. I had enough bad news for them.

I spoke, as did Chou, once more outlining the problems threatening their lives. Few doubted us and Bich calmly accepted the notion of the multiverse and her attitude was replicated by the others. She nodded with approval of the Architect’s plans for mankind, but her eyes darkened when I explained how those plans were upended by the Adversary. She compared it with the snake in Eden and I couldn’t disagree.

What surprised me, though, was how she rejected the notion of building fortifications or training people to fight, although she admitted to having practiced judo as a youth and could be their teacher. I was running out of arguments, my tone getting shriller. Some diplomat I was going to be if it was going to be like this.

It was Albert, though, who got her attention.

“Please, ma’am,” he began. “I’ve never seen so beautiful a place. If the Adversary’s army marches through here, it will be destroyed. You will all lose your selves, becoming just pieces of a machine. I don’t think that’s why you’re here.”

“No, we are not,” she said, lowering herself to meet his eyes. “But we have foresworn violence. We will not fight, but we are also not without a sense of self-preservation. We can post sentries and make plans to move out of the way.” The Architect didn’t even have to explain it to her; she understood what this arrival meant. Good for her.

“We need messengers, people to spread the word,” Chou said.

Bich paused, considering the pros and cons of further contact with other communities. She appeared conflicted and the silence was drawing out, making me worried. Finally, she nodded her head once and said, “We can help with that should it be required.”

That would have to do. There wasn’t much to tour, but we walked about, meeting people, and Albert showed off the map to those who seemed interested. No one chose to copy it, preferring their isolation. I prayed it would still be here when everything was said and done.

She had found plants that could be brewed for tea and served us each. It was more bitter than I expected, but it did allow us to peacefully end the visit. On our walk back to the Brimstone, I mused to Michael, “What I wouldn’t give for a walkie-talkie.” I then heard a buzzing nearby and swatted away what I thought was a fly, only to feel the more solid frame of a robo-bug. It wasn’t alone, as I then saw it was part of a small swarm. Where they’d come from, I didn’t know, but it meant the Adversary was watching. Worse, he now knew of Mới Bắt Dầu.

“They’re everywhere,” I complained, but Vihaan carefully scooped it out of the dirt. He held it close to his eye, marveling at the construction.

Once aboard the airship, Amelia gently lifted us into the sky; she’d gotten really good at those takeoffs and landings, something Bartholomew needed to practice. Vihaan and Michael went into the rear to use the equipment available there to study the robo-bug. Once again, Chou sat next to me, her face grim.

“They will be the first to fall,” she said flatly. “If they truly have renounced violence as part of their new start, they will be ill-prepared for Abernathy. Not even the pixie dust can save them.”

“But they’re off the course. If he’s trailing, he’ll make a straight line for the collector. It should save them.”

She did not look convinced and I instinctively knew it myself.

Thankfully, later in the day, we had a more receptive welcome in the settlement of Llibertat, run by Elazar, a handsome man with ebony skin, maybe a little younger than me. He was from 2079, in a reality that didn’t know me as president, which felt like kind of a relief. I didn’t bother to ask who won instead. His name translated to Help of God and he was far more practical than Bich. They lived just within a dense forest, fashioning platforms among the thick trees, in a place that felt like the California redwoods. When we arrived, they had already begun work on weapons: bows and arrows for hunting, but those would make handy weapons, if an arrow could pierce the nanobots that coated and transformed humans into unspeakable horrors.

He was full of bravado, which the people around him seemed to echo. They sat at the base of a tree and let Chou explain the world they had arrived in. It went on silently for several minutes until she was interrupted by an older man in the middle.

“So we kill them,” he bellowed, a trace of Irish accent in his voice.

“And drink their blood,” a young goth girl shouted from further back.

“No, thank you,” said the motherly type beside her, getting a chuckle from the crowd.

“We will fight them, ya,” Elazar said. “We will protect our new home. Tell us how.”

“We’re working on that,” Michael said and the Irishman called out, “Work faster!”

Their machismo, which may not be the right word since men and women were in agreement, was encouraging. They might have conquered a forest, but Abernathy would be something else entirely. They already had scouts in place, keeping an eye out for the wild animals about, which apparently included predatory wolves and always hungry bears. Others among the two hundred residents had also formed exploration parties and brought back enough information that they had their own crude map of the area. Silas found more dried bark and etched a copy of their map to add to Albert’s collection as he transferred the information.

“What we wouldn’t give for a good laser?” Elazar said in admiration. “We could make more precise weapons.”

“I am sorry, but those do not appear to have been provided you,” Silas told him.

“Ya, we make do with what God, or the Architect, gives us,” he said with his ever-present smile. He was a man used to working with his hands, a landscaper who was in a horrible truck accident, when he was offered a chance to live.

He was standing closer to me than should be normal and I suddenly realized he was hitting on me. I was so out of practice and hadn’t felt normal in so long that his behavior felt more threatening than enticing. His interest became evident as he fingered a loose lock of my hair.

“Such a vibrant color,” he said, then actually sniffed it. I’d barely washed it since we left New Manhattan and I doubt it had an enticing fragrance. Still, attention without deadly intent was actually a relief.

“Can you stay longer?” he whispered in my ear. I winced, aware how close my “son” was along with Chou, who I felt frowning with disapproval.

I merely shook my head, freeing my hair from his fingers.

“Next time, ya?”

I let the question remain unanswered. If this was my future, and I survived this insane situation, then and only then could I let myself think about plans. Sure, it’d be nice to settle down with someone and start a new world together, but those were luxuries that would have to wait. My only scheduled date right now was meeting the Architect.

The visit was mostly a pleasant one, even if it meant climbing several trees to see their accommodations. It was cooler than I personally preferred, but Michael and Amelia seemed to appreciate it, while Miko and Albert were delighted to be climbing freely. The Llibertatans’ work was good and precise, very secure among the thick branches, with enough limbs close enough to practically cross from one tree to the next. There were some vines used to secure the platforms and a woman was weaving a ladder with impressive dexterity. If anything, they were among the more secure places we had seen so far. No doubt, Abernathy’s army could climb, but these people scampered like monkeys, practiced at climbing after a month of tree living. I’d put my money on this lot surviving.

When we left, I considered it another victory, another outpost we could rely on, and so the network was growing.

My confidence took a blow, though, at our next stop, disconcertingly named Peron, led by Sergio Pereyra, a survivor of many a revolution in Argentina during the middle of the 20th century. Pereyra, with graying and thinning hair, and clothes hanging off his body suggesting he lost his paunch, had tired eyes. He’d seen enough and didn’t want to see more. There were easily over two hundred residents here, situated in an almost parallel line to a river, well stocked with fish. Construction of homes was ongoing, but they already had several low, long structures, with thatched roofs over a mix of wood and mud brick. They were serviceable if crude and certainly lacking in furniture, unlike Avalon’s garrison. I heard sawing in the distance along with splashes in the river from people gathering water for cooking.

“I have seen enough war,” he told me, his voice conveying the weariness.

“I don’t think you will have a choice,” Chou told him.

“Let the robot fight; he’s big enough,” Pereyra said.

“He wasn’t designed to fight but will if pressed, like you must,” I said.

“Must I?” he asked.

“I think you must,” a woman, with steel gray hair said, coming up and sliding her arm beside his.

“I am Isabelle,” she said by way of introduction. Pereyra hadn’t much of the social graces beyond shaking our hands and letting Chou repeat the news of the world. Most listened and kept their own thoughts on this. Having her support seemed important as he looked at her kindly. It was nice to see people who had found not only a fresh start but even new romance.

“Why? Why fight again? I’d rather we build ping-pong tables than weapons.”

“Why can’t you build both?”

He brooded.

“I understand, I read about what you went through. You were one of the Disappeared, weren’t you?” I asked. I’d read about them in a world history class and was horrified at the military taking hundreds of people with no warning, no explanation, and few being ever seen again.

“Si. My work for Peron made me suspect, even if I was just a clerk,” Pereyra said. “I was being beaten and I was certain I was going to die in a puddle of my own blood. They never sent a doctor to check on me after their ‘interrogation’. I was hemorrhaging when I was invited here.”

“Then defend this, protect these people,” I implored.

He leaned his head against Isabelle’s and they communed in silence. Then, with a heavy sigh, he nodded. “Messengers.”

“Scouts,” I countered.

He nodded again.

“Weapons,” Chou added.

“Must we?” he said.

“It’s wisest to be prepared,” his mate told him.

“Si.”

After some more talk and, yes, another meal, although the fish was wonderful, we made our farewells and resumed our course in search of answers.

As we inched across the continent, the contacts continued. The pattern took hold: a wary meeting, disbelief or immediate acceptance of our situation, concern over Abernathy and the Adversary, and most pledging physical support, from runners to riders to soldiers. Silas was often confirmation we weren’t making this up or they were hallucinating. We’d have to polish him after some visits, his metallic casing smudged with fingerprints or worse. Only one other community like Mới Bắt Dầu refused outright support, taking a severe isolationist stance. Fortunately for them, they were not in what should be Abernathy’s direct line. Still. I worried about them and their small yurts. We found them in an arid desert region, and they had already moved twice before. Their leader hoped the nomadic life they’d accepted would protect them.

I was gaining newfound appreciation for how large a land mass we were crossing. What was it Isabella Teresita Galindez told me a few weeks back? They’d found twenty-seven redheads in a single day and yet, redheads were only two percent of the population. I remember memorizing that fact for an elementary school report and it stuck with me. People made presumptions about me being a redhead, such as having a fiery temper or was somehow lucky. I hated being called a ginger and didn’t like the idea that being a rarity made me more desirable, although stats said we had sex more often, and certainly in college, it felt that way. I did look forward to retaining this color for some time, watching it go to silver or white, not gray. While mutations like Tommy Two-Thumbs were unpleasant to look at, I was always reminded my red hair is also a mutation, hence it being so uncommon.

Back aboard the Brimstone, Amelia had estimated we were still several days away from our target, and then we could save the world. At that point, Wild Bill commented that this world, or at least the continent, needed a name.

“Bill, there’s just the one continent,” Albert said at that point.

“No, there are seven. I am sure I learned that in my younger days,” he said.

“Not anymore. Did you ever hear of Pangaea?”

“Can’t say that I have,” he replied. Albert looked over to Chou to help explain it.

“Geologists have theorized that before the seven continents you know, the entire land mass of the world was one or maybe more super-continents that broke up over time as the tectonic plates shifted.”

“What plates are those?” he asked Chou.

“Under the surface, the world rests on massive formations we call plates, and as they moved and shifted, rubbing against one another caused mountains to form or islands to sink. They’re what causes the earthquakes.”

“Now that’s something I do know,” Wild Bill said. “Never liked those tremors.”

“The plates continued to shift for the last half billion years, and as our rotation has slowed, the continents were brought back together,” Chou said.

“Let me see that map of yours,” he asked Albert. Dutifully, the boy unfurled it and we all looked at it with new understanding.

“So you mean to say this is all seven continents now pushed together?” Bill said.

“That’s right,” Albert said. “Silas helped me figure some of it out.” His fingers traced and showed us what had once been Africa and how Australia was now somehow part of the Japanese islands. Greenland was an odd attachment off the Canadian coast. It was one thing to consider this an altered continent, but if this was the inhabitable world, everything was so much more massive. Our trip, which seemed huge, now seemed smaller while no less urgent.

The map itself had a variety of annotations, the different communities, deserts, forests, and more biomes were labeled. Each collector, spied from a distance, was also here, totaling thirty-two, nearly 15 percent of the total. Not bad for a few days’ flight.

While we were all in agreement, no one was ready to affix something so permanent as a name when it could all go away should we fail.

“I got another sighting,” Amelia called out a little bit later. Albert and I headed for the cockpit and she gestured to the left and we could see it. A semicircle fence defined part of the structures, what might be wooden cabins. The nearby forest had provided the timber, but what was that mass of people doing off to one edge? It wasn’t work; more like a formation.

And that was when the first bullets bounced off the ship’s frame.

Six

Amelia was swift and precise in her action, getting us higher in the sky to avoid the gunfire. Had the Adversary brought an entire army here? They had guns, which not one Architect-provided group seemed to have possessed. I guess the law of averages would suggest some guns were brought over, but who thought firing first was a proper way to say hello?

I studied the group below me: two well-ordered lines of men, seemingly in uniform of some sort, taking turns aiming and firing while a stout, bearded man stood behind them, clearly giving commands.

The gun fire stopped when it was evident we were too high, but the men remained in position with others gathered behind them, forming a third then a fourth line. They were well-trained. But were they here at the Architect’s invitation or the Adversary’s?

“Can you land us away from the gunfire?” I asked Amelia. She nodded and flipped a few controls, angling us away, toward a flat spot far from the men and the fence.

As we descended, I figured it might be best to present ourselves as anything but a threat. We’d emerge and stay in line by the airship, letting them come to us. That would suggest we weren’t aggressors and then I’d let my translation gift do its thing. No one argued, and once again, Silas would act as our trump card. I decided Bartholomew should remain aboard, in the pilot’s seat, should we need to make a hasty retreat. I had already decided, maybe to convince myself more than anything else, that if the Adversary brought them here, it was to hunt me, so a settlement wouldn’t make sense. However, if I thought Edward had done a fine job building the garrison at Avalon, this was larger and much more complete.

Sure enough, no sooner did we touch down than the troops were in motion, making good speed while staying in formation, and I was pleased to see the bearded man in the lead, taking charge, not cowering behind them. He had a round, full face, covered in a thick, full brown beard. He may have been stout but also fit, as there was little jiggle to his torso as he trotted forward. He acted like a man in control with dark eyes and a serious expression. He held up a fist and let out a sound I couldn’t actually translate, more of a guttural “hunh,” but the men and women stopped in place. Those with rifles had them at the ready but weren’t aiming at us. His troops, I could now see, had all used some berry juice to dye their tops a grape-jelly color to simulate uniforms. The people, judging from their hair styles, ranged across the years, but all were in their twenties to forties, many with sun-tanned faces long before they got here. One had a long scar across a cheek, another was missing part of an ear. But they shared a determined look, awaiting a command.

The bearded man took one step forward, so I matched him. That caught his attention with some surprise, because he had been looking at Michael. Then Wild Bill took a step behind me; my protection detail.

“What do you want?” His voice was deep, used to command, and had an accent I couldn’t place.

So many answers to that one. For this to be over, a Nathan’s hot dog, a hot bath. For someone else to be in charge…

“We come in peace,” I said, sounding like an alien making first contact with humanity. Depending on his era, I just might strike him as otherworldly.

His eyes went wide, as did most everyone else’s when we first met. “You speak Turkish?”

“Not really,” I said and explained about my unique talent. He eyed me suspiciously as a result, but then I ignored that and introduced my people.

In return, he identified himself as Osman Nuri, and when his name didn’t register, he said with pride, “Pasha of the Ottoman Empire, and somehow here with all these people.” Okay, I remembered the Ottoman Empire as long gone by my day, but a powerful force in the Middle East and Asia, gone by World War I – I think.

“Me too. I have some information you may want to hear. After that, I have need of your help.” As I said all along, if I was going to face Abernathy’s army, I would need one of my own. The Pasha seemed to have one already in training. His expression altered when I said I needed his help; appealing to his pride seemed to be useful.

“Come to my Kale,” he said of his community, which was indeed a stronghold.

“Wait, I have one more thing to show you, to help convince you that what we are here to explain is the truth.” I gave a practiced gesture and both Silas and Bartholomew emerged. If the Pasha’s eyes went wide at my translation, they went wider for a moment at the sight of the nine-foot-tall robot. But that lasted for a second, and I could see the eyes switch to calculation, assessing the dangers Silas represented and if he could be stopped by his forces. This was a military man, the kind of commander I wanted Bill to be. This Osman Nuri could well be the final piece I needed. I made the final introductions and then gestured for him to lead the way.

As we entered the stronghold, as the word translated, I marveled at how much he and his people had accomplished. It didn’t hurt that there had to be nearly three hundred, the most I’d see in one place. But there was no meandering about, no easy pace to the work as I saw in New Manhattan and elsewhere. No, these people were working hard, following directives that must have come from the Pasha, who exuded authority. I even heard the neighing of horses, and as part of the tour, we saw a rough corral, where three people were working with horses, breaking them from the looks of it. Structures included homes and a barn where I heard other horses. There was a hen house of some sort, and large turkeys were wandering free nearby. This was rapidly transforming itself into a small city. The boxy grid pattern to the structures was orderly, each cabin with some sort of outhouse in a straight line behind them. One building had great plumes of smoke emerging, which had to be the cookhouse, strategically placed near the animals.

Osman was taking great pride in showing what they had accomplished in the month they had been here. He quickly assumed control of the people after the startling arrival from three hundred separate near-death experiences. His mastery of multiple languages allowed him to find a network of translators so everyone could be heard and he could be understood. His bearing and experience made him a natural, and within forty-eight hours of their arrival, trees were being felled and calisthenics were required at the start of each day. Once everyone’s skill set was determined, he set about work details, sketching in the dirt his plans for the stronghold.

“Why so much emphasis on defense?” Michael asked.

“No one recognized where we were or what was happening,” Osman said. “There was fear and uncertainty, but I was convinced we could not be the last humans alive. Until we knew more, it made perfect sense to protect ourselves. The Ottoman Empire had many enemies surrounding us at all times, so fortifications were, of course, a priority.”

There was no doubt he was the right man to help us, but he was so accustomed to command that I worried already. We needed a defense until the mission was accomplished and he saw everything in military terms. At one point during the tour, I leaned over to Albert and asked in a whisper, “Do you know this man?”

He shook his head, whispering back, “I really like plants and animals, never bothered to memorize as much history.”

“So much for my personal Google,” I murmured.

“You keep calling me that. What is it?”

“Later.” I focused on the Pasha, noticing he had bothered to learn everyone’s names, having already memorized ours. He asked questions, answered them from his workers, and exchanged short pleasantries with all. The people were visibly deferential and Osman seemed to enjoy it all. He definitely was paying more attention to Wild Bill, Michael, Miko, Vihaan, and Bartholomew than Amelia, Chou, or me. A product of his era, sadly. Interestingly, he never spoke to Silas, who took up his accustomed position in the rear.

During our walk, when he wasn’t talking and showing off, we’d begin filling him in. When we got to the part of about parallel universes, he stopped in his tracks. Time travel didn’t seem to bother him and he took readily to the idea since it explained so much. He asked it be repeated for him, so Michael tried to refine what Chou had said. Finally, he nodded.

“So, in some other reality, I bested the Russians,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What do you mean?” prompted Vihaan.

“It was 1877 and we had recently defeated the Serbians, who had proclaimed their independence then waged war on us. In April, Russia decided it was their turn, crossing the Danube River and entering through Bulgaria. I was assigned to defend the Nikopol fortress, given 15,000 men and 174 cannons, but the Russians, damn their eyes, the city fell in July before I could arrive.

“They were heading for Constantinople, crossing the Balkans, so I moved my men south and met them in battle at Plevan. They ran home to their mothers and we dug in before they could return. I was right and they returned on the 30th. By then, we were fortified and I had reinforcements, so we met them in battle. It was there, in my headquarters, a cannonball crushed the roof and I was buried in debris. I was dying when I was spoken to. I thought it was God welcoming me to heaven.” He stopped and barked a laugh. “Instead, I’m here.”

We were invited for another meal, a grand feast, for they had caught several deer in the nearby woods. I could already smell the roasting meat and realized we had skipped lunch. Likely, they would eat before sundown since there was scant evening light available. It would be there that I intended to outline our needs.

Like other settlements, alcohol had already been made and this was a tangy mixture I couldn’t identify. They were short on anything resembling utensils, so we got our fingers dirty with the greasy, but delicious, game and root vegetables. He boasted of other military exploits in his colorful career, but seemed to confine his comments to the men, barely sweeping his eyes over us. I was doing a slow burn over that, while the blatant sexism didn’t bother Amelia, who grew up with it, and Chou, who chose to ignore it.

“What do you call this drink?” Miko asked.

“Tanrıların nektarı,” Osman said with pride.

“Nectar of the gods?” I said with a laugh. The Pasha frowned at this. “I mean, it’s very good, but it’s not the best liquor I’ve had.”

“I miss whiskey,” Wild Bill said.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll get back to making it,” Michael assured him.

“Give me an Old-fashioned,” Miko said. “Sweet and it goes down so easily.”

“You know, before spirits, man developed beer,” Bartholomew said and began to lecture on its history, although only Albert seemed interested. The others began chatting about other things, taking their minds off their favorite luxuries. We’d invent new ones, I was sure, just as soon as we got a few more things accomplished.

Finally, I spoke up, as he completed a tale of how he stopped Yusuf Ekrem in Syria, establishing himself as a fixer of problems. “That’s what we need,” I interrupted.

His eyes made their way to me and he licked his grease-stained lips.

“I told you how we have to stop the Adversary,” I continued.

“Your unseen mechanical enemy.”

“That’s our belief. Like the Architect, even like Silas, we think he is an artificial construct, a powerful, malevolent machine.”

“Blow it up,” Osman said and some of his followers laughed.

“We have no bombs, nor do you, I see. Once we see the Adversary, we’ll know how to stop him. But we have a different kind of mechanical army coming after us.”

“Men?”

“Men, women, and children have been taken over by the machines,” I said, trying to simplify things for a 19th Century soldier. Shrewd on the battlefield he might be, but his scientific interest seemed to end with weapons. “They stopped being human and now act on behalf of the Adversary. I need an army to fight them, hold them at bay, while we,” and I paused to gesture at my IMF team, “fight the Adversary directly.”

“How big is this army?”

“I estimate over a thousand strong,” Chou said.

“We are but three hundred and not everyone here is a fighter. I don’t like the odds,” Osman said. “And if they’re machines, that gives them an advantage.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much of one,” I said.

He waved a hand before his face, trying to swat a fly. His expression seemed dubious, although his eyes blazed at the idea of a fight, finishing one here that he could not finish in his time.

“We have been recruiting help,” I said. “Albert.”

Dutifully, Albert arrived with the map at the ready. He unrolled it and began explaining the highlights to Osman, whose eyes narrowed as he seemed to be absorbing every bit of information, trying to memorize the details in a glance.

“Did you make this?” he asked the boy.

“Silas helped, but I’ve been adding to it every day,” he said with pride. That earned him a chuckle and ruffle of his hair from stained, slick fingers.

“Most are willing to send people to help, others will only act as messengers. But, with your horses, we can be in touch with each community faster than I had hoped,” I told Osman.

“Where did you last see this Abernathy?”

I studied the map and showed him New Manhattan. “That was a week or more back,” I said.

“How fast do these machine people travel?”

“The few times we saw them, they appeared to be no faster than your average human,” Chou allowed.

“So, twenty miles a day or so? You should have quite the lead on them,” the Pasha said.

“If they paused to sleep and eat,” I said. “There’s no evidence they need either, so we’re estimating closer to sixty miles a day.”

“Sixty, on foot? What powers them, then?”

“We have surmised that the tiny machines that infest the bodies convert the organic matter into energy,” Chou said.

“And what happens when they run out of organic matter?”

Chou looked over to Silas, who had been silently watching the exchange. “I do not know.” More information he didn’t need to know and had no access to.

Osman swatted another fly as he studied the map. His eyes went from to side to side, his mind turning over the variables as he understood them.

“Humanity was given a second chance,” Michael said. “We have to protect that chance and it seems we cannot do it without you.”

“I would agree, since your Architect has not seen fit to send many soldiers,” Osman said.

“Well, you haven’t met all two billion of us yet,” Wild Bill said, a twinkle in those eyes of his. “I’d wager there are more than a few who know their way around a rifle. Where’d you get all your weapons?”

“They were here, with us,” Osman said as if it was an odd question.

“Got much ammunition?”

“No, and I bet we’ll use it all on this army and that will leave Kale vulnerable.”

“To what?” I asked.

“To whoever comes marching through next, wanting our land or animals,” Osman said matter-of-factly.

I shook my head at his mindset. I had so hoped we’d grow out of it, but not yet apparently. “You don’t get it, yet?”

“Get what?”

“My…Michael said we have a second chance. Our fresh start and maybe this time we can do it without territorial disputes.”

His eyes showed that he didn’t agree, but rather than argue, he held his tongue. “A discussion for another day,” he finally said. “You will have runners, and we will have an army. We will face this Abernathy so you can do whatever must be done.”

He picked up his wooden cup, which had been miraculously refilled by someone when we weren’t watching, and he drained it in one long pull. Then he swiftly slammed it down, crushing an insect. At the last second, I recognized it as one of the Adversary’s robo-bugs.

He knows where we are.

Part Two

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

–Kurt Vonnegut

Seven

The following morning, we got to work. While several of us stayed aboard the Brimstone, a few of us stayed within the Kale. Osman couldn’t have been more gracious, but he fussed more over Michael, Vihaan, and Bartholomew than anyone else. Wild Bill, being a fellow gunman, got extra attention, much to Bill’s discomfort. He seemed to tolerate Albert, even though he had the best command of the map and its intelligence. That nectar of the gods packed enough of a punch, that I went to bed buzzed and now felt slightly hungover. By the time I emerged from the airship, the Pasha informed me that he had already dispatched two riders to make contact with the nearest settlements and begin the process of building an army. I had to give him credit for taking decisive action.

After we breakfasted, with some very weak tea that made me seriously miss coffee, Osman addressed the assembled community. In brusque terms, he detailed the facts and the threat. He insisted that at least a third accompany us to the collector, and a third remain to fortify the Kale. The remainder would decide for themselves, whether to act as messengers or weapons makers or soldiers. His voice was strong, and as I stood by him, the translation washed over everyone with ease. The full gamut of reactions could be read on their faces and my heart went out to them; just as they were settling, now the new home was imperiled.

It was agreed that the riders would be in constant rotation and motion. Wild Bill told Osman how it would work, using his own experiences with the Pony Express back in his time. The name stuck, which pleased me. Copies of the map were created that morning as horses were readied and a party went out to secure and break more.

“Ah, to have a cavalry once more,” the Turkish military man mused as the riders left later. “In time, I suppose.”

In time, I had hope, we wouldn’t need a cavalry of any sort, but kept that to myself. He busied himself with his people, so I took the time to help a few of the people finish work on a new building. It was as much to do something with my hands than fret over the time ticking and Abernathy’s impending approach. I was concerned about the robot-bugs last night and wished there was something that could be done about them. Vihaan had remained on the Brimstone most of the day, studying the one we caught intact.

Late in the day, as the selected soldiers finished drilling in formation, which Osman told me would be as much for discipline as it was for order, there was a cry from a sentry. I feared the army had arrived, so I hurried with the Pasha to the fencing and saw it was a lone figure, a rider on a white horse. Since Osman had no white horses, this was cause for suspicion. This man was riding bareback, using some sort of rope or vine for a harness. The horse seemed fatigued, the rider increasingly animated as he drew closer, an arm waving in greeting. He was Asian, with black hair, a flat face, and high cheekbones, looking maybe twenty. His clothing was nondescript, with a torn sleeve and either blood or mud caking his shoes.

Osman had the guards keep watching, with several holding drawn knives but I instinctively knew this was a not a threat.

“Red hair…it’s you, Meredith…” he panted as he dismounted.

“Get the horse to water,” Osman instructed as the man drew close.

“Yes, I’m Meredith.”

“Somtow,” he said, head bopping in greeting. “I’ve come from Peron. Sergio Pereyra says the army is coming.”

My fears made manifest. He was getting closer with every hour we were stationary, but this could not be helped. Not here, not now.

“Tell me,” I said, a reassuring hand on his arm.

“We got word from Llibertat that the black army had been seen in the distance. They knew you were on your way to Peron, so they sent a runner, a runner on his feet, to warn us. And Pereya sent me ahead to warn you.”

Osman frowned at this. “Where’s that damned map?” he growled. “Find me Albert.”

“Has Pereyra warned anyone else?”

The head bopped once more. “He sent runners in all directions, following the map. He has also sent two dozen soldiers to join up with you. They’re a day or so behind me.”

Shit’s become real, I thought. I am building an army and they will be protecting us, which means people will be dying – on my behalf. That freaked me out and I was lost in thought, considering these terrible, unasked for consequences, when Osman’s voice grew louder, breaking the spell.

“This is not ideal, but it’s been done before,” he said. “We can work this in stages.” His next words were interrupted by Albert’s arrival with the map. The worn bark was unrolled and Somtow traced his finger, showing where he had traveled, where he lost half a day making a wrong turn, and where the runners had gone. Several had been dispatched to places we saw only from the sky and hadn’t stopped to visit. Would they send help or remain isolationist? How many would come to fight and die for a vague idea of freedom?

“Prepare to depart,” Osman ordered me. I gaped, but he cut me off. “You need to be in the air – ah, to have a chance to fly – and put distance between here and your destination. We will march tonight.”

“How will we communicate?” I asked.

“Your ship will land at sundown each day, giving us a chance to catch up. Ah, what I wouldn’t give for wagons. Each night, we will review and make adjustments. I will leave a small force here to guide whoever arrives from the other places. Riders will continue to carry news.”

He had already devised a battle plan and a strategy, which was impressive. Less impressive was his ordering me around. I came in search of a general to work with, not serve. But he was right about one thing: the sooner we got in the air, the better.

“Albert, round everyone up. Refill the canteens and tell Amelia to power up the Brimstone.” He threw me a salute and rushed off, earning him a pleased harrumph from Osman.

Somtow continued to address me, which I could see made my commander bristle, but it would have to do. “How can I help?”

“Rest here, tend to your horse, join us when you feel ready or go home,” I told him. “It’s entirely your choice.”

He considered that and replied, “You say you need help to save us all, right?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Then I will join the army and march after you.” There was a youthful bravado in the voice despite its weariness. It sounded like me in my undergrad days, fervent about whatever cause caught my fancy.

Osman gestured to the largest building. “There’s food there. Eat, rest, and let the starstuff do its work. Then we’ll put you back to work.” He paused. “Well done, Somtow.”

The words from the Turkish Pasha seemed to energize Somtow and he straightened a bit, nodded, and walked off.

It wasn’t that much later that I too walked off, away from the Kale and aboard the Brimstone. Osman came to see us off, craning his head to study the technology that he had never dreamed could be possible. His day was decades before flight and clearly hot air balloons hadn’t been part of his military experience. Michael offered to show him around, but Osman declared himself too busy, bade us good fortune, and hurried away.

“I actually think this spooked him,” Michael said as we closed the hatch.

“He is a man out of time, holding on to what he knows, which is war,” Chou said. “He’s forty-five and has been fighting his entire adult life. He sees this and recognizes it as a threat he cannot hope to defeat.”

We took off and made good time, as the Kale dwindled behind us. Chou and Albert went over the map, estimating our daily itinerary. Inwardly, I chafed at the idea we’d be stopping for eight or ten hours a day, but it was necessary. Before we left, Silas helped us select sizeable stones that had been unearthed during the Kale’s construction. Albert happily smeared each stone with berry juice, staining his hands and pants in the process. Each hour, a stone would be dropped from the airship, marking our path, helping guide Osman’s force.

“Do we stop for any more towns?” Amelia asked. She gestured to the right at what appeared to be a small cluster of huts and a central fire, smoking lazily, moving upward.

“Not now,” I said. Before leaving, I told Osman he needed to send a rider to each town with the news, warning, and request. A lot to process in a short time, but it had to be done. I couldn’t live with myself knowing a thousand-strong army could descend on them with no warning. There was a part of myself that preferred we remain the target and that Abernathy wouldn’t deviate from his course. We’d know soon enough, I supposed.

“Are you certain?” Vihaan asked.

“It has to be done,” I said, although I was feeling a twinge of second-guessing myself. I moved to just behind Amelia and said softly, “Right?”

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” Amelia told me. “You strike me as tenacious enough. You got us this far. You’ve made a decision, so let’s stick with it.”

Yeah, I needed to have more conviction, but I’ve never faced anything with such consequence. People kept seeing the more adult me, not the real person, a struggling twenty-seven-year-old who didn’t ask for any of this. But, I told myself, I did accept the offer for a second chance. That was also a decision to act, so now I had to see it through, which meant forging ahead.

Tension was palpable aboard the Brimstone, so Chou took me to the rear to continue training me, forcing me to get better with the scimitar. Wild Bill watched, his eyes rarely leaving my blade, assessing and silently judging me. Vihaan and Michael were huddled together over the now-disassembled nanobot but didn’t say anything to us, speaking in a jargon even my translating skills couldn’t always parse. That’s what I get for going to law school, I suppose. Miko took one of the ship’s tablets and was doing something with the stars, studying the night sky with incredible intensity. Miko remained focused on the tablet and the map. Bartholomew and Albert were playing a makeshift version of checkers, so at least we had ways to stay occupied and not go crazy with what ifs.

On the second day, we touched down by a lake and I let everyone dive in to refresh themselves. Such luxuries would be harder to come by in the coming days. Whereas Chou had little modesty, running in without her clothes, most of the others were more circumspect, wading in with some of their clothes on. I got down to my underwear and joined in, a diminishing bar of soap in my hand. Once I finished with it, I tossed it to Albert and the talisman of our collective past continued its rounds. Chou was brief and efficient with it then resumed doing laps, training to stay in combat-ready shape, ever the security officer. Just floating was nice and I lingered despite the rising chill as the sun was setting.

As I emerged from the lake, wishing desperately for a thick towel, the first rider from the troops arrived on a panting horse. He gaped at me in my bra and panties, someone clearly unaccustomed to seeing a woman like this, and I willed myself to stand straight and not be embarrassed. After all, I was developing a toned, buff body, so I should be proud.

“The others are maybe an hour away,” he told me and then looked away, moving his horse to the edge for a drink.

“Thank you. Jump in if you want,” I said, then, bravado rapidly fading, hurried to the ship for clothes. I wished I had more than the one outfit, something to worry about later, but I was getting tired of the clothes I’d worn since “borrowing” them from the Titanic.

As promised, Osman, astride a big, coal-black horse, led his forces, easily over a hundred strong, to the airship. By then, I was dry and clothed, ready to receive my general. We’d already started a fire and had gathered fruit from the trees that had grown near the edge. It was only berries but would have to do. I knew he’d brought whatever provisions the Kale could spare, hunting and gathering along the trail. From the air, we’d seen packs of horses, deer, even beavers building a dam on a river. No doubt, several had already been caught, killed, skinned, and turned into jerky or whatever they ate while marching.

“Pasha,” I said, using his honorific to show respect. “I am happy to see you and the others. Let them use the lake while we talk.”

Osman nodded gravely then over his shoulder shouted orders that, thankfully, were easily understood for the first few rows of haggard-looking men. The marching had been hard on them already, so all that drilling no doubt helped ready them. What would they be like when it came time to fight? He was already looking grave, which I took to be a bad sign.

Without preamble, he said, “The army is making up ground; two days behind us is my best guess.” That was not good at all. We had nearly a week to go before reaching the collector, so by the end, it would be a real race if he continued to make up time.

“What news from the Pony Express?”

“The word is spreading and most everyone is sending men…and women, anyone willing to fight for our world,” he said. “We told them to look for the marker rocks and our trail, although that tells Abernathy the same information.”

“It can’t be helped. Do we have new allies, new villages we’ve contacted?”

“Yes, yes, when Albert’s here, one of my men can help him update the map.” He paused, then turned and snapped out more orders to those who didn’t immediately head for the lake. He was perspiring despite the cooling air and looked worn but refused to yield, ever the leader.

Later, he had gone to the lake, splashing water on his face and down the collar of his shirt. His men had added fresh venison to the fire, so it was roasting slowly. While his generation lived on meat, I was longing for vegetables, even a salad. Osman toured his men, offering reassurances, comforting the really tired, and spoke to several about caring for the horses. When he finished his rounds, he returned to the fire, settling next to Wild Bill and Bartholomew. Chou gave me a quizzical look, unaccustomed to the blatant slight, but I shrugged and resumed my own meandering walk, with Silas and Michael. I was still trying to get comfortable around my son.

“He’s everything I heard about the military,” Michael mused.

“Oh, come on, there have to be armies in your time,” I said.

“There are. But he’s from such a different era. As I recall, the Ottoman Empire lasted as long as it did thanks to the strength of their army and men like Osman. They lived for war, constantly battling one another for territory. In my world, the armies were small, more like rapid deployment squads based around the world. There were still border skirmishes, especially with rogue states, but we didn’t need all the fire power and bluster.” Some fire power would actually be wonderful, given what was following us.

“Sounds great, almost ideal. In this world, I would prefer no army at all. Sharing the resources would immediately deprive people from warring over them.”

He looked at me, his eyes serious and dark in the dim light. “You’ve given this a lot of thought, haven’t you?”

“I remember why we’re here, what the Architect’s goals are for mankind. Once the Adversary is handled, I don’t want borders, no imaginary dotted lines on maps, no fighting for land or water.”

“You want a utopia,” he teased me. “Those plans never work. I’ve read the books.”

“Look, I know I’m being idealistic and maybe unrealistic. But this fresh start means we can learn from history, not repeat it, and do better.”

“We can do better,” he repeated.

“What about it?”

“It was your campaign slogan for your second term,” he said. “You made clear you weren’t satisfied with the job in the first term and told the voters you wanted to do better, making them want to do better. You actually took forty-eight states in a rout.”

“Really?”

“Can’t lie to my mother, can I?” he said and I know he was teasing and I know he was well aware we’re only dimensionally-related, but it made my heart flutter a moment.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Damn straight,” he replied and I laughed. “It’s like I’m getting to watch you become the woman I know, the one who did so much for me and then the nation. I’ve missed that version of you.”

“What happened?”

“A combination of old age and a pandemic. You had the loveliest state funeral. I even got to walk with your casket.”

I had to ask. “What about my…your father?”

“Dad was there, right beside me. He lasted a few more years, but never got over losing you. He was a little lost without you there. He finally died about fifteen years before…well, before I was here.

“That was another reality, a world that is probably facing its own false vacuum event. It makes me glad I’m here, and to see you again.”

“But I’m not your mother, and I am not a president. I’m an ex-addict making the best of a crappy hand I’ve been dealt.”

Michael shook his head, disagreement on his face. “It may feel like that right now, but look at what you’ve accomplished so far. The Adversary scattered us intentionally, but with each contact, you’re undoing that. We’re reconnecting and together. That should mean something.”

He’d thought about this too, and was right, of course. I was so focused on the next step, the next decision, that I hadn’t paused to reflect on what had happened. I dwelt so much on the errors, the choices that should have gone differently. The life I took.

He put his hand in mine and I squeezed it once as we walked.

The next day was uneventful; as we flew, scouting for rivers, lakes, animal life, and signs of civilization, Osman marched, and we met up. The forces had swelled as more groups – squads? – joined up. His army had just about doubled, and once the troops stopped marching and ate, Osman had them drill together, forging the rag-tag men and women into a unified whole. I sat watching, impressed at his skill, his natural ability to command, admiring it, wishing I had some of that. I stayed close to silently lend my talents to make his job easier. Every night, the starstuff, or pixie dust, revitalized the troops, readying them for the next day, so we at least had that in our favor. Osman used that to his advantage, pushing them hard each and every day.

Albert and Silas took all the new information and the bark map was getting crowded. One of the newly arrived men had brought me a gift from his village. It was a roll of paper and some pens. It felt like Christmas having this, and Albert gleefully went to work. He and Silas carefully copied over the shape of the continent, but before they filled in the details, Albert came to me.

“We should use a scale,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Metric or Imperial?”

“Metric versus…” And it hit me. Americans used the Imperial system for feet, inches, and pounds. Was there even a choice? Growing up, there was always talk of adopting the metric system for uniformity, but it never happened. Now we could set the standard for a world since this map was the key, even if it meant who knows how many of us would have to learn to convert inches to millimeters and so on. Scientists, even in America, used metric; it had to be that.

“Metric,” I said definitively.

“Righty-oh,” he said happily and scampered off. Hours later, he and Silas returned, with a far more sophisticated-looking map. In his delicate hand, the names of each community were listed, our path a series of red dotted lines. His penmanship was a reminder that he came from an earlier time, where such things were required. Me, I was a whiz with my thumbs, my handwriting okay, but nothing like his. The lakes, mountain ranges, and forests were identified but unnamed, as were the large islands similar to Avalon. Silas’ memory actually had the numbering for the various collectors and we were up to 78 of the 218 identified and named.

Amelia stood over my shoulder and admired the newly revised map. She traced a finger from our lake to the destination. “Looks to me we have three or four days to go.”

“Make it four; we don’t need a worn-out army,” I said. My pilot nodded and began planning the next day’s flight as I sought out Osman to bring him up to speed. He remained stiff and formal with me, clearly uncomfortable with a woman as his ostensible leader.

“Four days,” he repeated.

“Can your men manage?”

“They must,” he said. “You continue to chart the path and we will keep Abernathy at bay,” he said.

“You can’t forget, he is a machine. He won’t rust in the rain, he seems to have inexhaustible energy, and if he touches a soldier, they’re as good as dead,” I said.

“So you’ve told me already. I don’t forget vital intelligence,” he said. “They have been warned, and they are training to protect one another. We’re doing this without armaments, minimal ammunition, and nothing to protect ourselves with. We don’t even have Roman shields. If I had a few days and a forest, we could fashion more weapons and defenses.”

“We don’t have more time!” I said more loudly than I intended. It attracted attention when I meant this to be private. “Every day you stand still, Abernathy comes closer.”

“I am well aware,” he said coldly.

“You think I want to risk their lives like this? It’s certainly why the Architect brought you and them forward. They each deserve their second chances, same as everyone else.”

“It’s war and people die in battle,” Osman said. “It has always been that way.”

“That wasn’t the plan for here and now! Sure, in your day, you measured glory by the body count. But here, there wasn’t supposed to be war.”

“Conflict is part of human nature, Meredith,” he said. “It’s how we were born. Look to your history. There has been conflict in every culture’s history. Some wars were fought for lands. Some for wealth. Some because of praying to different god. But aggression is born within us, so it takes discipline to answer our better angels and choose when to fight and when to offer an open hand. If I were to face Abernathy, would he take my hand?”

“He’d swallow you whole,” I said softly.

“So we must fight. But I know your country, Meredith. Less than a century before my time, your ancestors fought for something other than land or wealth. They fought for an idea and I don’t know of anyone else who did that. Your country showed us there might be another way. You even survived a civil war that would have torn other countries in two. If you hail from such a people, it makes sense you are fighting for the Architect’s ideal world. It is I, I think, who will have to adapt.”

Many of the troops came near us, openly watching the exchange, staring more at me since I was translating. He shot them a warning look, but I countermanded it with a gesture and they stayed, which irritated him.

“Without you…” I began.

“You can’t save the world,” he finished, irritated once more at being reminded and I felt silly. At least I hadn’t told him about the field failing, since that would have blown his mind. That vital piece of quantum physics was left out of the explanations, since it could detract from the core mission of stopping the Adversary. By doing that, I thought it would buy us time.

“Madame President?” a woman said from the back of the crowd.

Osman cocked an eye at me.

“Not yet,” I called out. As there was a murmur, I looked steadily at Osman. “Pasha, in several of these parallel realities, it appears that when I am older, I will be elected President of the United States.”

“A woman?” he said in awe.

“You were alive when Victoria ruled England, so why can’t I be president?” I asked, some humor in my voice.

He had no answer for me.

“Madame President, what happens after you reach your target?” She meant the collector and restoring the power network. She appeared to be in Puritan garb, black and white clothing, a white bonnet protecting her head. For a woman like her, everything we’d talked about must have sounded too fantastical to believe.

“What happens? We will have that conversation together. All of us,” I said, my voice rising. “Once we defeat the enemy, every man and woman will have a say.” There were scoffing sounds and skeptical looks, others nodding in agreement.

“You know, a large percentage of the people we’ve encountered so far come from times and places where they answered to a king, queen, dictator, or some other authority. Few had a say, so what you’re suggesting sounds like a fantasy, much like parallel worlds,” Chou said, coming to my side.

“Good thing none hail from a time when a watery tart threw a sword at you,” I said with a grin. She gave me such a perplexed look that I laughed out loud, changing the mood in an instant.

And so it went for the next several days without significant incident. Then came the night before we anticipated reaching the collector, which was already looming into view, suggesting its massive size. We had all gathered around the fire, the troops singing and horsing around as Osman joined me and the others for additional strategizing. It had been raining, which made the terrain challenging. Our general suggested they slow a bit and confront Abernathy away from the mountains that ringed the collector. We debated the cover the mountains and hills would provide versus a confrontation on the flat, exposed ground we were currently on.

We hadn’t concluded anything when the night sentries announced an arriving messenger. One had already arrived earlier with positive news as more forces were on their way, taking routes to avoid Abernathy. This man, though, was bleeding profusely, his clothes soaked black with his blood. Several rushed to the horse to steady it as two others grabbed the rider, an older man with snow white hair against his dark skin.

“Mer-meredith,” he whispered.

“Water! Blankets!” Osman shouted.

I rushed for the figure, taking his slick hand in mind. “I’m here.”

“Abernathy…his army is a day away. They’ve grown…towns destroyed…”

“Towns? Which ones?”

He named one I didn’t recognize then said Mới Bắt Dầu, which made my heart sink. I knew it. I warned Bich, but she refused to listen, which was her choice. But it meant all those gentle people, the ones who turned against violence, were now part of an army bent on that very thing. Flying about his head was another of those damned robo-bugs. I swung and missed.

The rider was carried off to be tended to, although we had no blood supplies or ability to transfuse him as I feared he needed. Could he hold on until the night’s sky filled with color?

As I learned before taking off in the morning, he barely made it, and even with the nanobots’ help, he was weak. He’d come that close to death, a death in my name. I carried that thought with me as we ascended into the morning sky, the cloudy day promising rain. Amelia would need instruments to determine her course as the darkening mountains and gleaming collector were directly ahead, already beginning to fill the cockpit windows. In the gray morning sky, the mountains were draped with foreboding.

The next two hours were easy, quiet ones. I had my morning tutorial with Chou, who was finally starting to be satisfied with my progress. Bartholomew and Michael were taking turns telling stories to Albert, who was greedily soaking up information about what could have been his future had he survived the boarding school fire in 1910. He’d have likely served in World War I and had he survived that, would be around the Blitz, by then raising his own family. Instead, he was 12 with a bright new world awaiting him, if we could be successful.

Silas was the first to raise the alarm. “Amelia, there is something in the air,” he said. I then heard it too, a buzzing of some sort, and at first, I thought it might be a swarm of robo-bugs, but we were too high for them.

That was when the first bullets struck the airship.

Amelia tried to maneuver us away from the attacker, banking hard, and throwing some of us against the walls. As I tumbled to my knees, I looked out a port window and cursed loudly.

“What is it?” Wild Bill asked, amazed at the sight. We were both staring at an oncoming red biplane, the kind flown during World War I. Funny, I had just been musing about that time. The plane was a single propellered rectangular box, with wings above and below the fuselage. The nose and tail were white, while the wings and body were cherry red. There were black crosses on the top wings, on the body toward the rear, and the tail. These plus-signs indicated this was a German war plane. And the red was the tipoff.

“Holy shit, it’s the Red Baron!” I exclaimed.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Amelia shouted from the front, frantically trying to evade the oncoming approach. Its twin machine guns sparked in the gray sky, and moments later, I heard the impacts. As he grew closer, the reverberations increased. The Brimstone had no armory. The tasers Abernathy’s men used on me and Freuchen were still here, but how on Earth could they help?

“The red what now?”

“He’s nicknamed the Red Baron, the most celebrated German fighter pilot during the first World War,” I said, still peeking out the window. All I could remember was Snoopy imitating a Yankee fighter pilot in constant combat with the Red Baron, but damned if I could remember his real name or much about him. What was it with the Adversary and German attackers? At least the Red Baroness, Isabella Teresita Galindez, wasn’t German, just inspired by the man trying to kill us.

“First?” Wild Bill asked, some surprise in his voice.

“He’s Manfred von Richthofen,” Amelia called. “A truly great pilot, and he’s seriously strafing us. Sooner or later, he’s going to damage the solar batteries or the helium bladders.”

I wanted to say something encouraging, but how could I? I didn’t know aerial combat; I didn’t know how to fight a trained killer of the skies. This was Amelia Earhart’s world, sort of; she was an explorer not a fighter. The best I could do was stay quiet and let her fly us to safety, if that was even possible.

He swung by the airship again, firing rapidly and then looped beneath us. A red light blazed in the pilothouse and I heard Amelia curse. We then rocked back and forth.

“He’s hit one of the compartments. It’s collapsed!” she cried.

When Chou sliced all four helium compartments to free me and Freuchen, there was an engineering team to do the repairs. The best we had was Michael and Vihaan, yet neither were exactly mechanical engineers. Still, they had rushed to the upper compartments to try and do something. The compartments were designed as a failsafe to keep us aloft, but this was not reassuring as long as the Red Baron continued firing on us.

As he looped around again, Wild Bill pulled out the Luger, having learned it was deadlier than his trusty six-gun, and headed for a port window. With steely nerves, he flipped it open and waited. He was tracking the biplane by sound, his hands and gun steady. It swooped down from above, coming through the thickening, gray clouds, a rumble of thunder now in the distance. The German war hero flew closer to us and Bill took aim, then squeezed the trigger once. The crack of the gun was loud enough to momentarily drown out the plane’s approach.

“Well, shit,” he said, evidently having missed his moving target. He rose and moved off, leaving me alone to watch the attack. I wanted to suggest the machine gun, but we had no real way to mount it in time. Bill hadn’t even trained with it, trying to preserve ammunition.

The Red Baron was luckier, hitting a second compartment, and the shrill alarms were louder, along with Amelia’s curses. The ship began tilting, tipping us over to the right, as Amelia tried to level us off, but failing at it.

He flew into the clouds but his engine was distinct, even through the alarm, which was screaming at us. Amelia told it to shut up.

“He gets a third one, we’re definitely going down,” she called over her shoulder. Her look was grim and determined, as if sheer will would keep us in the sky. With the biplane buzzing us, I wasn’t sure that was the best place for us to be.

Aware we had no weapons to fire at him, he boldly next appeared straight ahead, an aerial game of chicken that his nimbler plane would win. The guns fired once more and a new alarm replaced the other one, so we must have been critically hit.

He wanted us down and was giving us no choice, because my stomach dropped along with the Brimstone. “Can you land us?” I cried, not daring to move.

“Trying,” was all she said. There might have been other things the computerized pilothouse contained, which might have helped, but even with all the time spent flying, she didn’t know it all. She was at first confused by the computer interfaces until Miko walked her through the touchscreen controls. She’d been making a greater study of them, but she was in the back, trying to repair the damage to the helium bladders.

Once again, the Red Baron was approaching, this time from a sharp angle, diving right for the final bladder, aware this was his killing blow. Did the Adversary really now want me dead or had the thrill of the fight gotten to the German pilot? We were rapidly descending and I could see the ground begin to rush up at us, already slick with rain, which had begun to fall in waves. A wind was buffeting us like a punctured balloon, which was certainly an apt description right now.

“Best we level the playing field, don’t you think?”

Wild Bill gently nudged me aside and he leaned toward the German machine gun through the window, precariously balancing its legs on the sloping deck, taking aim. I shuffled over to the next window and could see the Red Baron’s plane was growing in size, its engine roaring in the growing wind. We were shaking, both from the descent and the increasing winds, both of which gave Bill trouble as he kept adjusting his angle to line up his shot.

When he was satisfied with the alien weapon in his calloused hands, he opened fire in a long burst, the recoil pushing him back until he leaned against our cabin wall. He was quiet, focused entirely on adjusting his aim as he fired. The sound was more than deafening because, for a few moments, I could hear nothing at all, white noise filling both ears. And then things grew quiet, time felt suspended, and I had no idea what was happening. I could hear nothing, but I saw Wild Bill’s mouth curl into a satisfied smile. His hands dropped the weapon, which smoked from its sustained discharge.

I got back onto my knees and cautiously peered out the window, catching a glimpse of a column of smoke, lighter against the storm clouds, dwindling.

“Got ‘im,” he said with certainty.

We were still descending and it appeared that no matter what Amelia was doing in the front, or Michael and Miko in the rear, was going to change that. It meant we needed to brace for impact and my eyes darted around, seeking things to cushion ourselves. There wasn’t much. Silas was toward the back, helping Albert get below the seats while Bartholomew and Chou were grabbing cushions and blankets, anything to help absorb the inevitable impact.

“It’s going to get bumpy,” Amelia cried from her pilot’s chair, hands slamming against controls.

“Get?” Wild Bill said.

It got bumpier. A lot bumpier as the ground rushed to meet us. We hadn’t reached the base of the mountain range, the land beneath us rocky but flat. If anything, the muddy surface might help as we continued downward.

The lower we got, the more the winds seemed to knock us about, and I grew nauseous but refused to vomit. Instead, I tucked myself into a ball beside Wild Bill, whose arms were wrapped around his knees, back to the wall, and we waited.

I so didn’t want to die because death meant failure, and if we died, then the Adversary would win on Earth and the false vacuum would then consume the planet and all else in our reality.

Impact was worse than I imagined as I heard metal groan as it twisted out of shape and glass was breaking all around us. I was wet, thinking it was blood at first, but it was actually rain and I was instantly drenched. We hit the ground hard and tumbled over and over, getting the gondola caught up in the ruined 200-foot span of balloon. I bit my lip as I was turned upside down and the aches and bruises kept coming as I spun about, freely slamming into one wall, then a table. Bodies flew by me and I could barely make out one before another sailed after it. For a moment, my head hit something hard and the world went black.

We skidded, bumping over stones, our momentum slowing as the wreckage filled with water. Then we were gently rocking from side to side until the gondola grew still. As I opened my eyes, my stomach won out, and I threw up, narrowly avoiding my tattered pants. I felt sore but whole. Nothing seemed broken. I looked around the scrap heap of the airship and watched as Silas began moving debris from the huddled form of Chou, who had wrapped herself around Albert. Both were lacerated and Albert’s right hand seemed swollen and blue. I continued scanning, happy to see Vihaan emerge from the ladder shaft where he had sheltered during the crash. My heart beat wildly, as I didn’t see Michael, and my fear was bordering on panic. But then Vihaan looked up and helped Michael and Miko climb down. My elder son was cradling an arm that must be broken and he was cut on both cheeks, laughably symmetrical, making his bloody face look like your stereotypical Indian.

Bartholomew emerged from a rear room, also whole but bloody. He gave me a thumbs-up, which I returned. My ears were ringing fiercely, obscuring most sounds, which might have been for the best. To my right, I saw Wild Bill, dazed or maybe even unconscious, but the steady rise and fall of his chest was reassuring. Carefully, I opened one eyelid, uncertain exactly what I was looking for, but the pupil responded to the dim light, so I took that as a good sign.

It hurt to move, but I rose from my knees to unsteadily balance against a bent portion of the gondola. I looked ahead, but Amelia was out cold. Every window in the glass-covered pilothouse was shattered and the wind blew the rain in sheets, adding a hazy screen. I continued to carefully move forward, aware that there was glass below, the footing precarious, and my body complained with every step. I was beginning to discern sounds through the buzzing, so that was progress. What I heard, though, wasn’t great, the electronic buzz of exposed wires, sizzling in the rain. We’d all have to be careful until one of us figured out how to safely power down the remains of the Brimstone.

When I reached the front, I moved to Amelia’s right and peered at her, letting out a loud gasp followed immediately by a sob. Still strapped in, Amelia was still, eyes fixed, and a large shard of glass neatly bisecting her neck, wedged into the back of the chair. Blood was seeping downward, staining her leather jacket, mixing with the rain to appear pale pink. The great aviator was dead and the nightly pixie dust couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

The tears mixed with the blowing rain and I slumped against the pilot’s chair, cutting my pants open on more glass. There was so much glass, so much blood, and I couldn’t stop any of it. How was I supposed to fulfill the Architect’s plan when I couldn’t keep my team alive?

I felt a hand on my shoulder and thought it might be Chou, but I looked up to see Michael. His eyes were filled with sympathy, sharing my grief, and I was reminded I was not alone. There were others and the job could still be done. We communed silently for a moment, a horrid tableau, and there would be no time for a proper funeral and burial. After enough time, and I had stopped crying, I rose and turned to the others. They were fanned across the remains of the gondola, each looking so incredibly sad. Were they all crying? The rain made that impossible to tell.

“We have to finish this on foot,” Chou said.

“Can we?”

“There’s no choice,” Wild Bill said. “You want to face this Adversary, we have to find him, and to do that, we need your friend the Architect.”

The way I was feeling, the Architect was no friend of mine, but I wasn’t going to say that about Chou’s husband. He had provided so much and it wasn’t he who brought the Red Baron to this new world. Wild Bill was right, so I told everyone to scavenge what they could and be ready to move out in five minutes. I joined the hunt, even managing to find my backpack, torn and worse for wear, but at least it was mine and could complete the trip with me. Wisely, Chou grabbed the two tablets and found something to protect the paper map, which looked wilted, much as I felt. Bartholomew and Wild Bill grabbed the tasers, the machine gun, and whatever else looked useful. Knives were distributed so everyone had a form of protection.

As we assembled, I looked to Silas and asked his estimate to reach the collector on foot.

“Presuming you require eight hours sleep and rest breaks not lasting more than half an hour, it should take approximately one and a three-quarter days.”

If Abernathy and his nano-army were catching up, it was now a foot race.

Eight

The rain made the going slow and difficult, the muddy terrain slowing us down, but apparently, Silas had calculated for that. Not that it made me feel any better. We walked in miserable silence, the rain pounding on us and everyone thinking about poor Amelia. I hadn’t really gotten to know her well, but she was up for the adventure and for the cause. If this worked, she deserved a lot of credit.

We had trudged for maybe four hours when we saw shapes in the distance; low, boxy shapes. From the air, we hadn’t spotted a community so close to the mountains, but I was delighted. It meant possible warmth and more allies. I signaled to everyone and we formed up in a single line so we appeared less threatening. There was no sign of sentries or much life; the rain and wind saw to that. But there were flickers of light here and there, so someone was home. We carefully approached the first building, something made from stone and…grass? I’d heard about grass homes but had never seen one before. There was no real door, just some wood in the doorway.

“Hello?”

A young boy, maybe seven, with a soot-smeared face, peered up at me. “Hello.”

“Who’s there?” an older male voice called.

“New arrivals,” I said, and then a burly man, easily forty years old with already thinning hair and a bulbous nose, stood over the boy. He eyed me then saw the others behind, and let out a grunt.

“Too many of ye to fit in here,” he said. His fat fingers pointed to a larger building. “Boss’ house.” And with that, he backed away into the gloom.

The boss’ house was easily the largest in the area, which numbered maybe ten or twelve buildings. The same workmanlike construction, same dimness thanks to the rain. The key difference was that there was an honest-to-goodness door. I knocked.

Without hesitation, the door was opened and a woman, maybe thirty, with dark, curly brown hair, wide set eyes, and freckles dancing across her face stood in the doorway, holding a lantern. The light flickered in the breeze, casting wild shadows everywhere, but the look of surprise then recognition was plain on her face, confusing me. We hadn’t met, at least not in my reality.

“Meredith Gale?”

I nodded and she burst into motion, waving everyone in and directing us to the large stone hearth that blazed with fire, casting light in that corner of the building. As I stood there, welcoming the warmth, I studied the surroundings. Like so many other places I visited, it was a work in progress. There was a large, flat stone atop other stones that seemed to serve as a desk. At this end, there were benches of wood, held up by more stone. The floor was only half muddy, mainly from our tracks, and the grass ceiling seemed to hold the water at bay. In the shadows, I could make out a sleeping palette of some sort, so she lived and worked here, hence the size afforded her.

“You all look pretty wretched,” she said with a laugh. Her good humor and welcoming way was certainly nice, but how she knew me gnawed on my mind. “Get cozy and I will see if there’s anything warm for you.” She hurried into the shadowy half and returned shortly with some blankets, which we shared, with me and Chou huddled together.

“Who are you? How do you know me?” I finally had a chance to ask once we were all circling the fire.

“My name is Janelle Rivera. Welcome to Don Bosco. It’s not much, but for now, it’s home,” she said. “And I know you because we’ve been on the lookout. We received word from Bahay, the village about half a day from here. Not long after we both began our bases, we found pigeons and one of their people knew how to train them. For the last three weeks, we’ve been sending back regular messages, as much to stay in touch as to get the birds accustomed to us.

“They’d heard from a horseman about what was happening. That you were headed in this general direction, so we’ve been looking for a redhead and her army.”

I didn’t like to think of us as an army, too violent, and that was why I kept thinking of us as the IMF.

She laughed. “You’re the first redhead I’ve seen since we arrived, so it had to be Meredith, the walking translator. I’m speaking Tagalog, but all your companions understand me.”

“So you know about my mission,” I said.

“Something about finding the source of how we got here and saving us from a bad guy.” That’s what happens when you play telephone. The message always gets somewhat garbled. I corrected some of her misinformation, filled in other blanks, and then launched into my prepared speech about the need for allies, resources, and most importantly, warning her of Abernathy. As I spoke, a few people had drifted in and helped Janelle serve us some sort of hot vegetable soup, which was honestly bland, but it filled me, and for that, I was grateful. A few gaped at Silas, who stood silently conserving his power given the lack of sunlight for quite a few hours now.

“I know you’re building an army of some sort and you want my help. We’re just forty-three people, so I can’t spare much. We can ferry messages and I can spare a medic. She’s already volunteered.”

After the scrapes and injuries we’ve had, I was thankful for someone with genuine medical knowledge. I had lost all sense of time and suspected we were behind Silas’ schedule. But the rain continued and we were finally drying off while still processing Amelia’s loss. Being stationary would also allow Osman to catch up, even though he had only a general sense of where we were. Muddy tracks in lieu of stones would have to do. That, and the wrecked Brimstone. We would stay here, sleep, dry off, and start fresh in the morning, and hope for the best.

With that decision made, I felt myself unwind a bit. Janelle and her people had plenty of questions and I let the others provide the answers for a change, sitting so my presence facilitated the dialogue. I stretched my legs out, feet toward the fire, and leaned against the wall, appreciating the sturdiness. I assessed myself: there was a pulled muscle in my back, I was deeply bruised all over, my head ached, and my heart was heavy. The pixie dust had its work cut out tonight, which was coming soon, I realized. The grayness was getting deeper, at least charcoal, soon to be coal black, and a moonless night awaited.

I was drifting off, when Janelle came to me, her smile in place, and a woman beside her. She was tall, somewhere between me and Chou, thin and muscular, hair buzzed short even after a month here, so she had to have been nearly bald to start. She wore a tank top over a torn t-shirt and was wearing cargo pants and well-worn boots. This was a soldier if I ever saw one, a regular G.I. Jane.

“This is Corporal Corinne Levy,” Janelle said. “Our medic now assigned to your team.”

“So formal,” I mused. I struggled to my feet and extended a hand. Her grip was firm, with slightly more pressure than necessary, as if proving her worth. “Is the rank necessary?”

“Just who I am, ma’am,” she said in a surprisingly light voice.

“Well, I don’t think of myself as a ma’am. Meredith will do fine. What shall I call you?”

“Corporal Levy. Don’t like Cory much.”

“What have you heard about our goal?”

“Just the basics,” she said, all business, little warmth. She was definitely more Chou than me. I filled her in a bit and explained we’d leave in the morning. I received a curt nod and then she spun on her heel and marched, yes marched, off. Well, if I needed an army, I got myself one solid soldier there.

The sun was shining the following day, attempting to wash away our pain and sorrow. The thick, white clouds complemented the blue sky and I already felt my shirt beginning to stick to my back. The Brimstone had air conditioning of a sort, so I had been spoiled, and now I was going to march like everyone else. Even as Don Bosco was fading in the distance, I glimpsed, far to the right, the next one, closer to the base of the mountains.

The ground was drying but still challenging to traverse, my feet continuing to adhere to the ground. There was little conversation as we moved along, and I noted Corporal Levy had taken her place toward the rear, behind Michael and Vihaan, who occasionally whispered back and forth. Silas, as always, took the rear so as not to outpace us with his far longer legs. I was glad for the sun because I needed him fully charged for whatever came next. We were a dirty, tired group when we broke for a light meal under the shade of trees. By then, the next village was easily seen, a series of log cabin-like structures, maybe fifteen in all, suggesting a small community.

Before we got much closer, a runner came directly toward us, a woman in shorts, ponytail flying behind her lean form. “Welcome to Fale!” she shouted more than once. It appeared we were expected, as Janelle had dispatched a messenger overnight as we slept. She directed us to the community, and once more, there was the pleasant sound of people at work. I heard a saw and some pounding that might have been a hammer but turned out to be people tenderizing meat before slipping the pieces on skewers.

A broad, muscular Maori, his blue tattoos crisscrossing his body, welcomed us literally with open arms. “You are Meredith Gale, and I am…”

“John Ah Kuoi!” shouted Bartholomew with a wide grin.

“You know me?” Kuoi was genuinely surprised.

“Know you? You are a rugby superstar!” Bartholomew said and the other man seemed even more surprised.

“I had a nice career, but superstar?”

“Well, where I came from, you were huge. You singlehandedly won the championship for Samoa ’80. It was brilliant.”

“We lost that year,” Kuoi said, confused.

“I don’t know what you have been told, but we’re not all from the same place,” I said and briefly covered parallel worlds, a concept he was familiar with from television, so was more accepting than others. As people worked, I noted they were happy and friendly, more communal than some of the others.

We accepted his hospitality, happy to have somewhere shady to sit and drink cool water. As quickly as I could, I answered Kuoi’s rapid fire questions and then he answered several fanboy questions from Bartholomew. He happily told us how every day he had them doing physical work but also time for organized play. He longed for a rugby ball or even football, but apparently, the Architect couldn’t provide everything we needed.

“I have sent runners to Themélio, which is about two hours that way,” he said, gesturing round the curve of the mountain base. “We’ve been trading meat for vegetables since their land is somehow better.”

“Maybe they have a green thumb and you don’t,” Bartholomew teased, noting the nearly black dirt caking one of Kuoi’s hands. He’d been earlier tapping trees for sap to use as a sealant on a new cabin.

“Are you sure you won’t spend the night?”

“We’d love to, Kuoi, but the sooner we make contact with the Architect, the sooner I think we’ll be safer.”

He nodded with a knowing smile and then tilted his head back and let out what could best be described as a lusty war cry. But in moments, a dozen men and women jogged into sight and stood in two rows. Several had long knives, machetes, and even a lasso.

“I hear you’re building an army,” Kuoi said with a laugh. “Well, when they get here, these will join them. Our contribution to the cause.”

We made some additional chit-chat as I welcomed each to the “cause” and Silas dutifully noted them by Candidate number and registered them in some database he was building. Feeling refreshed enough, it was time for farewells. I looked at the sun, now on its descent, and knew we’d make it to Themélio before dark and could camp there for the night. Hopefully, the following day would get us actually into the mountains and to the collector.

We followed a path that had been well worn from the messengers who had gone back and forth over the weeks. The first real road of a sort, but too small for the map. With the base of the mountains to our left, we followed the path, which was barely wide enough for two abreast, and we chatted amongst ourselves, looking ahead for the first glimpses of the next port of call. As a result, we missed any possible warning sounds. Instead, an arrow flew over my shoulder and embedded itself in the smooth ground two feet before me.

“Scatter!” Chou cried, and everyone dashed out of the way, backing away and hoping to stay out of range of the archer or archers. No, definitely archers, as a small volley flew from behind a rocky outcropping from the nearest mountain. I spotted hats and helmets peeking from behind their cover, clearly out of range of my scimitar and one of the tasers Chou managed to secure from the Brimstone. We were outgunned for certain, but that didn’t mean we were doomed. Instead, we had our own brand of fire power. Wild Bill immediately withdrew his pistol, ready to fire when a target presented itself. His first shot chipped rock right before an archer.

From their clothing, they were either really pissed off Renaissance players or people from somewhere back in time, before gunpowder was in regular use. They wore dark tunics, no real armor that I could tell, and loose pants. If they were soldiers, they certainly didn’t look it. Their wooden bows were curved at the grip, almost scalloped as it fanned out to the tips where the string was tied tightly at both ends. They were easily six feet long, giving them power but also exposing them every time they wanted to shoot. The arrow that missed me was simple enough, a two-foot shaft of wood and a wide metallic arrowhead, with bird feathers at the tail.

As I was studying our opponents, I noticed Chou, Wild Bill, and Levy inch forward, getting just below them. Bartholomew dodged one shaft and joined them, then all four began climbing the mountain, each making certain they had a safe place for hands and feet. As they climbed, I needed to keep the archers focused on me, so I stood up, hoping I had calculated right and was really out of range. The first two arrows fell short and then the third went over my head, causing me to back up, where I tripped over a stone and fell on my ass. The next shot, which I never saw coming, pierced my thigh and I howled in pain, so much that Chou was distracted from her climb and took her eyes away from the attackers above her. I daren’t indicate where she was, so I just sat there, staring at the arrow sticking out from my leg, pants leg soaking up the blood.

A shadow loomed over me as Silas became my shield before bending down and carefully lifting me in his massive, multifaceted arms and moved me to a far safer distance.

“I am sorry, Meredith, but I have no field medicine training,” he told me apologetically.

“Good thing we brought a medic along,” I said between huffing breaths as I tried to control the pain radiating from the wound.

“But Corporal Levy is not able to tend to you,” he said.

“I’ll live. She’s a soldier and is up there trying to neutralize the enemy.” At that, I scanned the flat terrain and saw everyone else also backed up, just far more gracefully than I had. Albert waved, and I weakly waved back. To him, this must have all been terribly exciting, even as I saw the look of concern on his soft features.

Then I turned my attention to the rock wall and saw that Chou and Levy had moved above the attackers and out of their sight, ready to pounce such as one could bounce from rock to rock. Speaking of which, Bartholomew hefted a good-sized stone and hurled it laterally toward the four archers, who were now entirely exposed, taking aim at us. His throw hit one in the shoulder and as two others turned in their direction, Wild Bill opened fire, the cracks magnified as they bounced off the mountain wall, and they crumpled. Chou and Levy then made their move, making the short leap to the outcropping they had used to await us. The living archers were surprised to see them attacked, by women no less. Quickly, Chou tasered one while Levy delivered an uppercut and downward strike that brought the man to his knees. His hands went up in an act of surrender.

While Levy was gathering up their bows and arrows, and relieving the four of their knives and even a sword, Chou led the two captives back down, with Bartholomew and Wild Bill taking the rear, six-gun out and gesturing menacingly since they didn’t recognize the pistol. Once on the ground, Levy rushed to me, her kit in her hands, and examined my wound, which was throbbing, each pulse a new wave of agony. I was handed a stick and told to bite down on it while she worked. Then, with her bare hands, she snapped the wooden shaft in half, one piece about a fist’s width remaining in my leg. Her practiced fingers probed around the wound and then she doused a knife in alcohol and very carefully cut into my leg to widen the entry wound and retrieve the shaft’s remains. If I thought being pierced by a medieval arrow was painful, this was several magnitudes worse. The shaft and the arrow head slid out with a sickening slurping sound and she tossed it over her shoulder before bandaging me up.

A part of me wanted a painkiller, but I knew better. That craving dragged me down and put me in the place where I wanted to take my life, and in turn arrived here, where I had been regularly hunted, this time like an animal. That made me angry as I had had my fill of being a target.

Chou helped me rise, unsteady as I was. We ambled over to the four men, who sat back to back on the ground, watched over by Bartholomew and Silas, who scared the living hell out them, just looming over them. Good.

“Who sent you?” I asked, sounding as in command as was possible, channeling my anger.

They were silent and Wild Bill wandered over and gently prodded one with his boot, a promise that the next one would hurt. Finally, the older of the two looked at me and said, “We were under fire, nearly burned by barbarians. Then we heard a voice offer us freedom and savior. We agreed and were suddenly here, yn the wild. Each of us had an ymage of the redhead woman, told to fynd hire, and kill the others. For oure lives, we wolde gladly kill anyone.”

Well, apparently, my translation skills were not exactly perfect for Middle English, but we all got the gist of it since it so closely resembled what the Nazi told us four weeks earlier. The question now became what to do with them and I had no idea, having never captured a prisoner of war before, and by then, it felt very much like a war.

“How far from Themélio?” I asked the others.

“Maybe an hour,” Chou said. “You can’t go that far on your own.”

“Want to bet?” I said through clenched teeth. Well, not on my own; I’d need to lean on others for help, so we divided up the weapons while Bill trussed the four archers as best he could. He walked behind them and Bartholomew in front, positioning them in the middle of our group to minimize their chance of fleeing. They seemed dazed and more than a little confused by their surroundings and they repeatedly looked over their shoulders at Silas, unable to figure out what he was.

Michael and Vihaan took turns helping me limp my way across the ground, every step a small burst of agony. We managed, but our pace was certainly slowed by me and I refused to waste time having them try and cut down a tree and fashion a litter. After all, I’d be good as new in under twelve hours.

Closer to two hours later, we arrived at Themélio and its cluster of circular homes in a series of concentric circles. This was far larger than any community we’d seen in days, but it made sense. They were near a river, with trees, plants, the beginnings of a garden, and another horse corral. It was a thriving village, and as we were spotted, activity stopped. Several rushed forward to help me limp into town, shouting greetings in various accents. I was taken into the third hut we passed and laid down on a fresh bed of what might have been straw. A young woman came and offered me water, which I greedily drank.

Nicholas Ariti, tall, aristocratic in bearing, with white streaks at the temples and a weathered look to his serious face, greeted me. He’d been named leader and had modeled Themélio on the Greeks, he told me, emphasizing science, philosophy, and combat. Two different messengers had reached them, one from neighboring Fale and another from a community I hadn’t even visited. “We took both messages and studied them, divining the truth and adding it to what we believed to be truth. The collector you seek, it was to be explored once our homes were built and our community stabilized. It wasn’t going anywhere.”

He summoned two of his better athletes to take the bewildered archers prisoner, having them given food and drink but then secured so they could not escape, not that they had anywhere to go. In fact, I thought once things were explained to them, they might actually help us. But that would be later.

As Levy rewrapped my wound, Ariti proudly told me of this community. How every night, while awaiting the pixie dust, they speculated on everything, from where on Earth they might be, what the dust was all about, and who built something as massive as the collector. Everyone was encouraged to join in the discussion and no idea dismissed as too outlandish. To some of his community, it smacked of witchcraft; to others, the stuff of science fiction. They had already compared enough of their personal histories to understand they were not only from separate times and places but parallel realities. This meant there weren’t too many questions for us beyond the practical concerns of surviving Abernathy’s approaching forces and how best they could support Osman’s own army.

As I faded away in much needed sleep, I heard Chou begin to discuss options, secure in the knowledge that, for a change, I wasn’t needed at that moment.

When I awoke, it was Albert sitting beside me, a cup of water at the ready. The sun had already set and the others had eaten with our hosts. He ran to tell Corporal Levy I was awake and then Michael walked in with a plate of still warm vegetables.

“How do you feel?”

“Like crap,” I admitted. I stuffed a pepper in my mouth, surprised at the burst of heat in my mouth. He chuckled and handed me the water.

“We’ll move you outside for the pixie dust show. Ariti is fully on our side and ready to help. Something like four dozen of his people want to fight. We’ve given them some of our spare weapons, including the bows and arrows. Those four are dealing with definite future shock and aren’t going anywhere. Ariti’s also giving us horses to finish the trip, so we will definitely reach the collector tomorrow.”

“Bows, arrows, pistols; none of that is going to make a difference against Abernathy’s nanotechnology. Does Vihaan have a clue how to combat that?”

“He’s been giving everything else short shrift, totally devoting that keen mind of his to the problem. There are theories and having briefly studied the robo-bug certainly helped. He’s been looking for the root technology, the platform everything’s been built on.”

“Any luck?” I asked, starting to feel way out of my league.

“Theories and nothing we can test,” he admitted, his shoulders slumping.

“It’s something, I suppose,” I finally said. Then I finished my dinner, feeling slightly better. The leg was nothing but a solid dull ache making the time feel glacial.

I was taken outside, placed in a prime position, near their fire and to Ariti’s right. The area felt like the beginnings of an amphitheater, complete with platform for speeches. There were few decorative touches in sight, but what there was suggested Greek columns and filigree. He had been an archeologist before an earthquake triggered a cave-in, trapping him in the remains of an Aztec temple when his invitation arrived. So much tragedy was replaced with so much promise, but it was clear, the vast majority of the people I had met in the last six-seven weeks – I was clearly losing track of time – recognized and embraced this second chance. They shared my questions but also my resolve to start over and do better.

I silently promised myself as the first trickle of pixie dust colored the night sky, we would endure. The answers would be found, humanity saved, and if necessary, so would the world.

Nine

When I awoke, I heard quite the commotion outside the cabin, so I rushed out, marveling all over again about the pixie dust’s amazing restorative abilities. A messenger had come running with word that our path was blocked by an armed group, but not Abernathy. These clearly were more time-displaced menaces from the Adversary. Two in rapid succession suggested he was getting desperate to stop us and was upping the stakes if it was any more than four.

As it turned out, it was more like a hundred and four. Swarthy, dark-skinned men and women in mostly leather armor had massed on the path leading into the mountains, blocking our way. While we could look for an alternative route, they would still be a presence, a threat that was not easily dispatched. The four dozen Ariti promised us would be handy but meant we were outnumbered more than two to one and I did not like those odds. That they hadn’t charged the village was an interesting sign, but I couldn’t worry about that now, just be thankful.

“What do we do?” Vihaan asked me when I emerged from the cabin.

“This is why I recruited Osman; he’s the tactical genius,” I said in frustration. My heart was already beating faster and my need for coffee was growing exponentially.

Ariti briskly headed my way, announcing, “They’re Mongols, 13th century warriors.”

“Is Genghis Khan among them?” If the famed general was, we were probably dead.

He shook his head, but we were still outmanned and out-armed. His four dozen had fallen in and Levy was reviewing their weapons and formation. She’d have to act as our military commander until something better happened. Chou joined us, looking graver than usual.

“This is a most unfortunate turn of events,” she said by way of greeting.

“No shit,” I grumbled. “We can’t meet them here; it has to be outside and away from Themélio. Suggestions?”

“I agree. I would suggest the forces here engage the Mongols and allow our core group to find an alternative path. There are options.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I will not use humans like cannon fodder.” I paused, remembering my arguments with Osman just days ago. Well, any more than I had to. “It’s not why they were brought here and I won’t rob them of their chance. Not unless I take the same risks. It wouldn’t be right.”

Chou nodded, eyes not meeting mine.

I was resigning myself to this grisly risk, calculating my low odds of survival. I dispatched Chou to find a safe place for Albert, who I refused to let fight. As she left, Wild Bill, Bartholomew, and Miko appeared, their game faces in place. They weren’t going anywhere and for that I was grateful. Michael and Vihaan weren’t fighters and would also be sitting this one out. I instructed Silas to remain behind as well, too valuable to lose in this fight. That left five of us to join the four dozen Themélions. With luck, someone would write a song about this battle.

Chou returned and we silently nodded to one another, ready to wade into war.

We were interrupted with a new cry from a different section of the village. Ariti hurried in that direction and I signaled we should wait to see what was happening. Soon, he was running toward us.

“A large force is on the horizon. Could it be your army?”

Chou and I followed him to the top of a hut roof, where a sentry had spied the shapes. It was a mass of human beings, clouds of dust or smoke rising from different sections. They were huge and growing larger by the step. It had to be Osman, finally catching up with us.

“I have an idea,” I told Chou and Ariti as we hit the ground. They listened and nodded and then he summoned a messenger. The instructions were given and the young man threw off some sort of salute and ran for a horse and was gone. Chou had gone to relay the instructions to Levy and I filled the others in. I received a few skeptical looks, but no one argued.

Within fifteen minutes, Levy was leading the four dozen away from Themélio and toward the Mongols. We’d been told few were on horseback, most were infantry, but each carried a scimitar, like mine, or a halberd. There were also lances and longbows, so they had a greater reach and could pick us off as we approached. It helped we knew where they were positioned, awaiting us, barring our path and daring us to challenge them. To me, it felt like the Adversary was getting a bit nervous. Good.

The scouts were good and provided us with a path that would take us away from the mountain, an oblong arc that would bring the Mongols toward our position, away from the mountains’ protection, and hopefully open up a flank to be exploited. We just had to act like we were on our planned destination and let them come charging. It would be risky, what with their arrows, but if Silas’ keen vision could keep us out of range, we’d be fine. I hated to bring Albert along, hell, even Michael, but we were heading forward, so there was little choice. What I wouldn’t give for a forcefield.

Ariti wished us luck and saw our group off, the four dozen troops departing fifteen minutes later, so it appeared we were alone and unaware. I felt like a sitting duck out in the open, but trusted my instincts and everyone else trusted me. That Chou, with her security training, didn’t object to the plan was a positive; not that she approved of it, but she followed my lead. By the time we left, it had to have been mid-morning and the sun was rising high in the cloudless sky, casting a bright light on everything, which hopefully meant no one would have the benefit of surprise.

Given our arc and the enemy’s position, Silas estimated it would take seventy-seven minutes to reach them, and every minute felt tense. The ground was dry now, dusty even, with patches of scrub growing here and there. The trees were closer to the base of the mountains and acted as a barrier between the village and the Mongols, which was fine by me since I wasn’t a big fan of raping and pillaging.

Around the seventy-minute mark, I slowed our pace and asked Silas to scan ahead. He could see nothing, so we trudged ahead, secure in the knowledge that the troops were behind us. Our arc was taking us into view of the enemy and we were finally spotted. Even from this distance, I could hear a war cry with fainter cries in reply. Okay, we were spotted, now to draw them out.

“We’ve been spotted; everyone get ready,” I commanded. Michael and Albert dropped back, closer to Silas, whose huge metallic form should provide some shielding. I heard steel slide from leather scabbards and the cocking of two pistols. Vihaan even chambered a shell in the rifle he had been given by Ariti. While not a marksman, he was willing to fire into a mass of humanity, presuming the odds would ever be in his favor. No sooner did we get ready, then there was another air-splitting scream. From behind the curve of a mountain came four horsemen, two with lances, two with bows. They charged us with the other seven dozen running behind them doing their best imitation of the rebel yell.

“Get ready!” I cried as they neared us incredibly fast. One of the archers stood in his stirrups and took aim, letting fly the first arrow. It wound up falling considerably short of us. I was already getting pretty tired of people firing arrows at me.

As far as an arrow could fly, a bullet went further. Wild Bill positioned himself, took aim at the approaching second archer, and fired. The man was thrown backward and he tumbled from his horse to the dusty ground. The other three riders veered away from us, having never seen a gun before. To make his point, Bill took aim a second time and fired, hitting one of the lancers, who dropped the weapon, clutching his right arm. He reversed course and headed away from us. The others were less certain what to do, waiting for the sheer numbers to bolster their bravado.

“Vihaan, now!” I called as he raised the rifle to his shoulder, steadied himself, and after a very long beat, squeezed the trigger. The bullet whizzed past the horsemen and actually struck one of the front line soldiers, a short, wide woman, who fell to her knees. Not that it stopped them entirely, but they slowed, uncertain how to manage a more powerful enemy.

Ariti warned us that his recollection was that the Mongols were so successful because they prepared for war, using spies and intelligence, along with fierce discipline and training since practically birth. When they went into battle, it was with superior numbers, and even though this was a fraction of what they were used to, they no doubt imagined we would be easy pickings.

Their leader, looking resplendent in his quilted red coat, his coned helmet, and plume, gleamed in the bright sun. He was surrounded by at least five loyal soldiers, while he could be seen shouting commands. Obeying, the forces split into five columns, ten men each, each stalking us from different angles, already having figured we couldn’t fire on all of them at once. They were marching, not running, either hoping to chase us or cause paralysis. They approached and I was counting the minutes, with at least five having passed. We’d need no more than ten minutes more before our surprise arrived.

The men continued forward, steadily, and their formation was impressive to watch. Each man brandished axes, hooked lances, and spears. A few held swords in their hands, just waiting for the order to start swinging. We need to slow them down.

“Bill!” I shouted, and understanding my meaning, he aimed at one column and fired, hitting one. He fired at another and missed, but the message was clear. Then Vihaan, on his own, raised the rifle and fired at a third column. He, too, missed. But it had the desired effect as cries were raised and the marching slowed but did not stop. Bullets were clearly alien to them all, which worked for us. For all they knew, we were sorcerers hurling magic at them.

We also began to retreat a bit, putting distance between us and buying more time. In the distance, I heard the first pounding hoofbeats and hoped the sight of our nascent cavalry would help break their spirit. While the rising plumes of dust the horses caused was seen and commented on, it did not stop the Mongols, who continued to come after us. A field commander, though, his long, drooping mustache glistening with oil, directed the farthest column to set up a human wall, and be prepared. Here’s where things were going to get tricky. The Mongols were remembered nearly a millennia later because of their successes, a lot of which went to their training and preparation. The forces Levy was leading weren’t anything you could call polished, more Stripes than Seal Team Six.

The two forces neared one another, gaining momentum, and as they came into sight, I saw our forces brandish their own bladed weapons. What our people knew, and the Mongols did not, was that as long as they lived, they would be repaired tonight. That gave them the ability to be a little more reckless and I hoped that would be an advantage.

Then, just like that, our horse riders met the Mongols. Swords flashed, horses whinnied in fright, and human cries that needed no translation filled the air. I took a brief moment to make certain Silas had Albert protected then withdrew my own scimitar and stood side by side with Chou. We didn’t approach the nearest column and made them come to us. Wild Bill was to my side, his six-shooters loaded and ready. He didn’t have an unlimited supply of bullets, but with luck, this would be the last time they’d be needed. Then he shot the first man to take a swing at us, and Chou scooped low to pick up his lance. She whirled it fast, getting below a lance strike headed for her, and drove the tip into a gap between the coat and arm.

I noted one of the other columns came toward us, so we had to hurry. I really, really didn’t want to take a life again, but there was little choice afforded us. I swung low, trying to wound and disable my attacker while Bill delivered an uppercut that knocked another aside. Behind me, I heard the sounds of struggle and Vihaan’s rifle go off again, which actually caused all the Mongols to reflexively flinch. There was a buzzing sound as Miko, using the second taser, stunned a soldier.

One Mongol soldier, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, rushed me, only to be knocked aside by Bartholomew, who rushed him from the side. Grabbing the man’s sword, Bartholomew hamstrung him, and then swung upward at another attacker. Wild Bill backed away from the melee long enough to assess where he was needed and then fired three more shots before using the butt of one pistol to bludgeon someone trying to grab at him.

No one was charging me for a moment, so I looked over to see Levy and the others had kept their attackers at bay. But I also saw the reserves were now coming from the Mongol side, the rest of the horde, save those protecting the leader, who kept shouting commands, arms gesticulating like a football coach during the Super Bowl.

We kept at this for several minutes, although it felt more like several hours. If it was like this fighting humans, what could we do against Abernathy and the nanobot army? That train of thought made me shudder and I was genuinely thankful I was distracted from that as I swung my scimitar upward, blocking a blow I nearly missed seeing.

A fresh cry of alarm was heard to one side, a rousing cheer from another. I whirled about to see giant plumes of dust being kicked up at the horizon. Everything was falling into place and the Mongols actually paused, studying the dark line approaching then looking back to their leader.

With renewed vigor, Levy’s troops made their way toward us, forcing the Mongols to follow, keeping them somewhat contained. As they passed Silas, Michael joined them, using the taser Chou had given him to take down more than a few surprised Mongols.

Osman’s forces came into view, hundreds strong, now clearly outnumbering the Mongols. We had taken some hits as Chou and Bartholomew suffered serious cuts, and Vihaan, when I wasn’t looking, took a fierce blow, his entire right leg covered in blood. Levy had rushed to tend to him while Ariti’s people kept moving, swinging, punching, and even biting as needed.

It wasn’t long before Osman rode forward and reached me, a dripping sword at his side. This was a man who appeared to be in his element, a wolfish grin on his face, dark eyes bright with intensity.

“Pasha,” I said.

“Meredith,” he replied. “Your message spurred us on, and I have to admit, it was a fine strategy. We now have the best of them.”

“You’re not going to like the next part,” I said. He eyed me warily. When I explained what I had in mind, his face darkened and he shook his head. “Do you know the concept that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

“No.” But he ran it around in his mind, understanding the general idea, which seemed to sway him.

He summoned two soldiers, ones I didn’t recognize, and he dispatched them to watch over Albert, who had been complaining about being coddled, but right then, I didn’t care. I then signaled for Silas to join us while Osman called for more men. Osman dismounted, sword still in his right hand, and stood beside me. I told Silas what the plan was, and at first, he actually seemed reluctant to participate but accepted the goal. Standing before us, he began walking in a straight line. Osman and I walked side by side behind our nine-foot-tall guardian, his men behind. When one Mongol attempted to slice into Silas, he swiveled about, and with superior strength, plucked the sword from the man’s astonished grasp and tossed it far away. Undaunted, the man tried to punch Silas, only to cradle his hand in pain.

The line of five soldiers stood fast between us and their leader, but we paused about a dozen feet away, and we stepped out from behind our protector. He turned around, protecting our backs, and I addressed their leader.

“Good morning,” I began mildly. “Is there a chance we can have a conversation?”

The man eyed me, clearly astonished to understand my words, but he didn’t budge. His eyes never left mine and I thought I detected a moment of recognition since I was the only redhead in the group.

“Can you call a cessation of hostilities so maybe we can talk?”

He blinked but did not budge.

“I’m going to make this quick. You were trapped, probably outmanned, outgunned, or whatever. You heard a voice. It promised you a glorious battle. All you had to do was find me and kill the others. Something like that?”

The expression flickered for a moment, which was all the confirmation I needed.

“You don’t know where you are or who we are. You can tell with your own eyes we’re all dressed differently. We have different, deadlier weapons, which I bet you covet. You are less certain what happens after you complete your mission and I am in your hands.”

The face was marble, but he was listening, as were the five before me, and their expressions were far easier to read.

“So, right now, you’re outnumbered and the Pasha here,” I paused to gesture to Osman, who nodded, following my lead, although I could sense his tense posture, ready to resume fighting. I imagined this galled him, “is as good a military man as you will find. I’ll tell you something you don’t know. There’s a larger army coming, a deadlier one, and they want to stop me from saving the world. Now this is a pretty big place, plenty of room for everyone. All we have to do is survive. So here’s the deal: you’re not getting me. I’m going to head up to that metal construction up in the mountains and do what I need to do. You can either oppose me and probably die for your efforts, or accept the reality. Join forces with the Pasha. I promise, the next battle will be one for the ages. It would be more glorious than this one and it would let me do my job.”

Two of the guards actually looked to see what their leader would say or do. The man remained impassive and just looked out at the carnage. He was losing, badly.

“Here’s one more tidbit I bet the voice didn’t tell you: every single one of your men who survive this fight will be healed tonight, ready to fight tomorrow. The dead will stay dead, but your wounded will be repaired. Do you want your men to live or die?”

Osman nodded at me, aware that a military leader’s responsibility to his troops was paramount. I can’t tell you if that last bit swayed him or it was the final number of an equation he was tabulating in his head. But the Mongol told the five to signal a ceasefire. Osman withdrew a bright red kerchief from a pocket and began to wave it.

“If I may, Pasha,” Silas said, taking the kerchief. Towering over the others, he waved it, and at first, Wild Bill saw it and signaled back, then punched an attacker and turned to relay the signal.

It took less than a minute for the fighting to stop. Everyone stood in place awaiting the next instructions. Everyone but Levy, who swung from soldier to medic and was attending to the most injured.

Over the next hour, we restored order and I asked the Mongol leader, whose name was Möngke, which aptly meant eternity, to gather his forces so I could explain where they were. The concepts sounded preposterous to one and all since the concepts of time travel and parallel realities was not something they had heard of before. However, they all heard the voice that offered them a mission, so if some powerful deity could take them from the steppes of Asia to here, then the rest was plausible. I then explained about the collector and how it would let us speak with the voices, the two forces that brought my people and Möngke’s here. We would form an alliance to prepare for the great war to come and then they could choose their own destiny. I was secretly hoping that seeing all these different people from all these different places might make them want to integrate. I feared they’d be a future irritant, but I couldn’t focus on tomorrow. We needed to get to the collector ahead of Abernathy, who was likely less than a day away.

It didn’t take long for the Mongol forces to grasp that they could communicate with their enemies when I was nearby. Some thought me a powerful sorcerer or something and I couldn’t allow that to go on. I explained I was singular in nature, and was otherwise flesh and blood like they were. I showed off my purpling bruises and bloodied knuckle to prove the point.

With the fighting over, we caught our collective breath. I asked Osman to bring us up to speed and he spoke of the villages visited, the long marches, and the spreading word of the nanobot army.

“And they spoke of you, Meredith,” he said. “People have been looking for you. Some had been visited by the Brimstone; others had heard of the flame-haired woman being sought or who could translate any language. You’re becoming quite the personality.”

“It’s nothing I asked for,” I said.

“But you’re this world’s first celebrity,” Bartholomew crowed. I grimaced at that.

Osman summoned several newcomers to the forces and they huddled with Albert and Silas (well, with him, huddle doesn’t quite work), adding new information to the map, filling in gaps, adding names the locals had given their rivers and lakes, their villages. Later, I shared this with Möngke, tracing my path since arriving here nearly two months earlier. He’d only been there a day, waiting in the rocks, dealing with the cool night, everyone with an image of the redheaded woman burned into their minds.

“You share everything?” he asked me.

“This may be difficult for you, but we were all invited here, saved from lonely deaths, and offered a second chance. You were offered glory and life, but little seemed to have been said of what happened next. We’re all here to start over and maybe, just maybe, build a better world.”

He considered that, keeping his own counsel. His eyes traced the map, seeing vast swatches of open land, which might as well have been marked “Here there be Dragons,” since it remained unexplored territory. I could imagine he was seeing lands to conquer while I was hoping he saw it as lands to settle. That might still come.

Chou approached me soon after and cocked her head toward the mountain. “It’s still daylight. We have several hours before sunset and could be well into the mountains before we needed to make camp. This way, we could be at the collector tomorrow.”

I was tired and saw Vihaan had been injured badly enough he couldn’t walk without help, serving to slow us. In fact, other than Albert, no one was unscathed, but they’d come if called. Our goal was within sight and that would give us the drive to push on, especially knowing we’d all feel better overnight. I didn’t even bother to put it to a debate. I nodded and Chou headed off to relay the news.

“You’re going,” Osman said flatly. Möngke stood nearby, uncertain of his new role in this situation.

“Yes, just my original group for now. You and Möngke need to blend the troops, get them ready for what’s coming. It’ll be tomorrow if your intelligence is correct. That’s not a lot of time.”

“We need to protect you too,” Osman said, his voice full of pride and duty. “Let me send some troops.”

“It is wise,” Chou added.

I considered it then came to a decision. If everyone was looking to me as their leader, hopefully they would actually take direction. Even my proud, sexist Turk seemed to be coming around. “Take the day. Blend the forces, train as a single unit. Then, rather than sit here and wait for Abernathy, follow us into the mountain, for the collector.”

Osman’s craned his neck, looking at the ominous, unbelievably large collector, its powerful miles-wide trunk sucking energy from the sun. He’d heard about it but hadn’t focused on it much as yet. He was certainly nonplussed if not outright freaked and I got that and was sympathetic.

Comically, Möngke followed his gaze and his jaw literally dropped. If Silas was big to him, something made by man was impossibly beyond his comprehension.

“Who made that?” he asked.

“The being who brought us here, the enemy of the being that brought you here.” He absorbed those words and continued to stare.

“How will we communicate if you leave us?” Möngke asked.

“You’re both brilliant military men; you speak your own language in a way. You will find a way, even if it’s just hand gestures, but I can’t stay.”

Neither man looked happy but accepted the fact.

Within an hour, we had eaten and gathered our gear. Someone took a branch and turned it into a walking stick for Vihaan to lean on, Michael rarely away from his side. Wild Bill handed the now abandoned rifle to Levy, who took it readily. I had made my farewells to the two military men, happy to see that Möngke was making an honest effort to work with Osman. I caught them eyeing one another, sizing each other up, seeking weakness. Maybe they were two of a kind, which would only benefit us all

Our posse headed toward the mountains after Silas directed us in the direction where the geography would allow us the easiest passage. I hoped there would be constructs like Blue Alpha to greet us, but that was for tomorrow. Now we had to find out way through the mountains, toward the massive collector, and then up and in. It always sounded easier than it truly was, but we walked in single file, with little chatter among us. The sun beat mercilessly down on us and we were fairly exposed as we walked and climbed. Somewhere there had to be a road or even a path to access the collector, but Silas didn’t know where it was, so we were left to amble along and hope a lot.

Our path wasn’t overly arduous, just hot and tiring. The steep parts would come tomorrow, so now it was making distance, and then figuring out where to camp for the night. There were genuine insects buzzing about us and Michael seemed especially tasty to them, so he was constantly waving them away, complaining all the way.

Finally, we found a flat enough space that would accommodate us. We were tired and worn, so it made sense to camp here, eat, sleep, get a fresh coat of pixie dust, and push off at first light. Having the collector in sight was either taunting us or the carrot we needed to keep going; it depended on how tired I was feeling. I ignored the mental dilemma as we cleared space, gathered kindling for a fire, and got to work setting up camp. Our dinner was almost as quiet as the hike, which made sense given how worn out we were. Albert was still energized and went exploring with Silas as company and bodyguard. Finally, when I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I yelled for them to return.

Chou took the first watch, tending the fire and polishing her blade. Me, I was dead to the world, dreaming of sugar plums or something equally diverting, As a result, I was slow to rouse when I heard scuffling, then a cry of alarm. When I finally pried my eyes open, I was astonished to see Chou sword fighting someone clad entirely in black while an equally attired person was coming my way. Thankfully, the scimitar was within reach and I was on my knees by the time he approached. He swung, I countered, the two blades clanging in the cool, night air.

Ninjas. Really? There were maybe a dozen arriving from above, and our party was under assault. Once more, Wild Bill was fast to react, his six-gun raised and firing off a shot that nailed one looming over Vihaan. Bartholomew reared back and landed a powerful blow into the side of one’s head, sending him reeling. Michael used the rifle as a club, taking one out that way before another landed a blow that staggered him. One of them threw a star that pierced Miko’s shoulder, dropping her to her knees. Levy flipped one, bending backward to avoid a sword slicing through the air. There wasn’t enough space for us to easily fight a dozen ninjas, and it was complicated with swinging blades and rifles.

A ninja leapt over one of his compatriots, something short and sharp in his right hand, and landed a blow to Michael, deeply cutting into his left arm. The pixie dust had already paid us a visit, so this needed immediate attention. He remained down, as did Miko.

I ducked under one blow, only to have my legs swept out from beneath me, and I lost my breath as I slammed into the ground. He was on me, pinning the arm holding the scimitar, and some sort of claw-like thing clutched in his right fist. I’d be shredded for sure and I wriggled, resisting and hoping to dislodge him, but he outweighed me and I wasn’t going anywhere. I did manage to rock a bit and used that momentum to arch my back and throw my legs high enough to ram my knees into his back. That unsteadied him enough for me to twist to the right and get him off me before I became human confetti. He was faster than I was and reaching for me, when Wild Bill stepped between us, and those claws cut into his leg. He grunted once and stomped the ninja into senselessness.

By then, I was on my feet, the scimitar before me. Bill was in pain, as were Miko and Michael, so this had to be ended.

“Can we talk about this?” I cried out. If I could stop the Mongols with my words, maybe it could happen with ninjas.

The one nearest me cried “no” and swung an arm around Chou, who did a move so fast, I couldn’t make it out, but I did hear the bone snap.

I didn’t want to take more lives, but if it was us or them, it had to be us. Too much was at stake and I hated myself for the calculation when it came to human life. The Adversary was going to have so much to answer for when this was all over.

One approached Bartholomew, swinging something in his right hand. The staff was silver. At the top was a chain and at the end was some sort of spiked flail. It whistled as it gained speed, readying to land it. Bartholomew must have read my mind, because he now held the rifle, took aim, and fired. Another fell in a bloody heap, the flail falling uselessly to the ground.

Behind me, Bill’s gun coughed twice and more ninjas fell, each punctuated with a barely suppressed grunt of pain.

Chou snapped the neck of another with a clean, efficient move.

To my surprise, Albert caught the drop on one ninja, who was making a move for Vihaan, coming up behind him and striking the legs with his bladed weapon. When he and I had discussed combat days before, I advised him to always go for the legs when possible. It hampered or stopped their mobility and gave you more of a chance. I hated seeing someone that young forced into this sort of violence, but that just went on the Adversary’s bill. Levy came to his aid and reached out, grabbing the ninja’s hand and breaking it.

The numbers diminished until the dozen were either unconscious or dead. There was an unpleasant odor from the blood and viscera of the injured and dead. I threw my arms around Albert, whose elation gave way to terror as the reality settled in on him. Chou helped Levy tend to Michael and Wild Bill as Bartholomew scoured the area, collecting weapons and stowing them in his rucksack. Better we have them because who knew what would be thrown at us next.

Later, Chou approached. “How’s Albert?”

“Scared,” I said and she nodded. “How’s Michael?”

“The blade cut a vein, but Levy staunched it. He lost blood and we have none to give him, so he will be weak for the next day. Miko’s a bit better than that. Wild Bill will limp for a bit. That weapon cut deeply, mangled skin and muscle.”

“It’s hours before dawn, but maybe we should get started and keep moving,” she suggested.

“You’re the security expert. What’s your advice?” I was shaking, tired, and worried for Michael.

“A moving target is harder to hit,” she said.

So we gathered our things, grabbing branches to light our way, and began our climb. We were probably all still tired, moreso thanks to the adrenaline flushing through our bodies. No one was hungry and we barely paused to eat as we trudged at a snail’s pace. Ever so slowly, the ink-night sky lightened, and then there was color, the first pink hints of a new day. The lightening sky set the collector’s massive form in an impressive silhouette, and it was looming larger, which meant we’d get there today.

About an hour after the sun peeked over the horizon, we found a path, narrow but well-trod by people in the recent past. We stepped on to it and kept moving, one step after the other.

“No further,” a heavily-accented voice cried as two figures stepped before us. They were middle-eastern, bearded, their mismatched clothing was obscured under the dynamite-laden vests they wore. Was the Adversary that desperate, sending suicide bombers after us?

“What a wretched hive of scum and villainy,” I muttered.

“What?” asked Chou from behind my right shoulder.

“Never mind,” I whispered. I managed to talk the Mongols out of killing us, failed with the ninja, so this was the rubber game. I wasn’t feeling too optimistic about this one because suicide bombers tended to be fanatics.

“Aren’t you looking for me?” I asked, hoping to learn their true goal.

One looked ready to say something when the other shushed him. Then I heard something slipping out of leather behind me.

“The hell with this,” Wild Bill said and shot them with such speed, neither man could react. While I couldn’t see the bullet, I actually felt it whiz over my shoulder, getting a little close for comfort. But Bill had proven himself time and again as a crack shot, so I really shouldn’t have been worried. However, I might never get used to any of this.

We looked at the two bodies, wary of the deadly vests, but saw they weren’t going to help us much. Chou neatly removed the wires to ensure they didn’t accidentally detonate. She retrieved the packs of C-4 and sticks of dynamite from their vests, along with two rusty pistols. She examined then tossed the pistols, but stowed some of the explosive material in her gear, handing the rest to Levy. Instead, though, we heard a distinct explosion behind us. Then another, further away, closer to the Pasha’s army. We felt the vibration of the first explosion, and heard dirt and stone shift and then a rumble. Wherever the third man was, he had definitely blocked our trail back, giving us no choice but to keep moving. It also neatly cut us off from Osman, which I didn’t like at all.

The latest threat spurred us forward despite the various aches and injuries. We plodded ahead for another hour, then two, before finally calling a break. By then, the sun was well into the sky and the heat and humidity had risen. My clothes were plastered against my chest and back, feeling unpleasant. Michael looked haggard and Wild Bill had fallen toward the rear given his leg. I foolishly drained my canteen, desperate for the water’s coolness. I saved just a little to trickle over my head, letting tiny rivulets run down my neck.

Most of us also took the time to rearrange our gear, making adjustments to better fit the weapons we retrieved from the ninjas. Everyone worked silently until Albert cried out, “Oi, what’s this?” His hand rose out of the bag and there in his palm was a robo-bug. He scowled at it and then placed it on the ground by his feet. As his left foot rose to squash it, Vihaan rushed over and stopped him.

“It may come in handy,” he said.

While that might be true, it also meant the Adversary had been tracking us for who knew how long, which explained the threats in the last day. He no longer wanted me for himself, but wanted me and the others dead.

I had other ideas.

Ten

This collector was as huge a structure as the one we found Michael, Vihaan, and Miko in. At the top was the cone-like bell, which absorbed power from the Dyson swarm, sending energy through the miles-wide trunk, sweeping down, growing rapidly narrower before broadening again. As it neared the ground, it vanished into tightly-clustered rocks that rose above the trees at its base, oddly out of place in the sea of green surrounding it. Lines of energy moved and shifted within the collector’s trunk. Everything around it was silent, not a rustle in the leaves, not a thrum of energy. The same circular dead zone greeted us, a sobering reminder of the devastating power we were dealing with.

While Chou, Albert, Silas, and I had seen it before, the others gaped now that they had a full view of the mammoth construct. These giant collectors of energy from the stars were repurposing it to geo-form protection, to pluck two billion people from across the multiverse, and to ready the world for the false vacuum. But yet, the network couldn’t easily communicate with us; the Adversary saw to that. How had it stymied plans that were in the works for countless millennia? If the Architect was the Shining Light’s AI, then it had nearly half a billion years to do so much. More questions and more unknowns and I, frankly, had my fill of them.

Albert silently came beside me and slipped his hand into mine.

“This thing still scare you?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “I guess I am getting used to it, but I have never seen anything so large and I’ve seen St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

“Silas, are you picking up any transmissions like you did at the other collector?”

“Yes, Meredith, the same Fibonacci numbers.”

“Lead on,” I said, wanting to bow and be graceful, but was too damned tired. I merely gestured that he should move on.

The thing was so huge that we were walking a good thirty, forty minutes around the circumference of this robot-made construct and Silas was giving us no indication we were near the holographic doorway. Several minutes later, he did slow to a sudden stop, the hair on the back of my neck now at attention. Now what?

I shouldn’t have asked. A trio of seven-foot-tall androids, cables running down their arms and up their legs, pulsing green energy within its chest chamber, all making clacking sounds with every move, took a position and stared at us with cold, ice-blue eyes. These were entirely mechanical beings, clearly from some time in my future, and looked dangerous just standing there. There was a grill for a mouth and no nose; after all, they didn’t need to breathe. I saw nothing resembling weaponry so suspected it was internal and feared it to be true as the green energy pulsed like an engine warming up.

“Silas, do you recognize these?” I asked.

“No, Meredith, they resemble nothing I have seen before. They are, though, clearly primitive constructs,” Silas said, almost sounding dismissive.

Michael shuffled forward, whispering to Chou, who reached into her bag, and she handed him the tablet rescued from the Brimstone.

“What in blazes are these things supposed to be?” Wild Bill called from the rear.

“Androids, simpler versions than Silas, it seems,” Chou told him. He made a scoffing sound.

“So, fancy robots?”

“Androids are designed to mimic humans, Wild Bill. Robots can take a multitude of sizes and shapes. Myself, for example, may have two arms and legs, but I look nothing like…”

Silas’ lesson was interrupted when three more identical forms took position behind them and I could hear more coming. No wonder the bombers cut us off from the Pasha. We were being herded here to face these things and they definitely had the advantage. I was guessing that my scimitar wouldn’t do much good against those steel frames.

Bartholomew had the rifle in his hands and was taking aim.

“Don’t waste the bullet,” I called out. Besides, I feared the ricochet could hurt one of us.

By now, it had become clear to all that the Adversary was done wanting me alive and would settle for me dead. We were at a distinct disadvantage and I didn’t know whether something like Blue Alpha would arrive like the literal deus ex machina or could we actually disable them.

“Fall back…slowly,” I said, trying to sound far calmer than I felt.

With every step backward we took, the now dozen-strong machines took a step toward us. They weren’t charging us nor were they going to simply let us get away. I had no idea what they were waiting for, unless it was to totally freak us out. If so, it the plan was working just fine.

Our path was wide enough for us to stand four or five abreast if need be, which gave us some room to maneuver but not much.

“What on god’s earth are those?”

I allowed myself to turn and beamed at Osman and Möngke, who were leading their combined forces. I noticed my newfound Mongol friend was a step behind Osman, a sign of deference. I wondered how long that would last. They may very well have ignored my orders and followed soon after uniting as a fighting force. However they got here, they were welcome, since now we had numbers on our side. While that changed the odds a little, my guess was these were still more powerful than we were and would not succumb to swords or arrows.

“Mechanical men like your Silas?” Osman asked. “Do they die?”

“No, but they can be taken apart,” I called over my shoulder.

“I am a soldier, not an engineer,” Osman said unhappily.

“Meredith, can you at least buy me some time?” Michael said. “I have an idea.”

“Silas, stay with Michael and Vihaan. Osman, provide them additional cover. We will have to take this battle to them.”

“Arrows can’t pierce that metal,” Möngke said.

“Nor can bullets,” Osman complained.

“My guess is, they can at least distract them, hold them at bay. They are likely stronger than your men, but there are a dozen of them and more of you. Overwhelm them and see if we can.” I turned, ready to wade into a hopeless battle then paused. “Albert!”

“Here!” he cried from behind Bartholomew.

“Stay with Silas,” I ordered. Thankfully, he was smart enough not to argue and trotted to the rear where the others were. With that settled, I turned to face the deadly dozen. I noted with alarm the green energy had stopped pulsing and grew bright.

“They’re about to…” And my words died as a loud series of crackling bursts split the air. A dozen green beams of energy lanced forward, turning several men into crisp toast, eliciting shrieks of alarm from the others who broke formation.

Osman whirled about and shouted for them to resume their ranks.

I looked and saw the green bursts – lasers? – had ended and the glowing chests had pinpricks of energy. These things were slow to build up their resources before deploying the death beams or whatever they were called. I knew we had minutes and had to make them count.

Withdrawing my scimitar, more for show than anything else, I cried “Charge!” I ran forward, the blade waving uselessly in the air, but looking pretty fine, I bet. I just hoped the others followed.

Osman repeated my cry and I heard the army roar, boots pounding the ground. This wasn’t going to be easy, but I was smaller and hopefully nimbler than these things. Chou was at my side and there was a wicked grin on her face. She was ready to cut loose, it seemed. We rushed to one android off to the left and we both ducked under an arm. Chou, to her credit, slid neatly between its legs and thrust her sword upward into a leg joint. That proved to be a weak spot and while she didn’t slice inside it, she did leave a serious dent. When it took a step, it wobbled, letting me actually shoulder it to the ground.

I’ll say this for sexism. Those men saw two women knock one of these things to the ground, emboldening them to do the same. Men and women rushed past us, still letting out war whoops, and they barreled into the eleven remaining androids. In some cases, the momentum staged the things, while in other cases, the androids were better braced and merely swatted away the attackers.

Some men were hefted into the air and thrown into the mountain side; others crushed. It wasn’t very pretty and the sounds of pulped human were sickening. The android we knocked down recalibrated and used its position to trip several passing soldiers and one arm grabbed a leg, snapping the ankle in two. Michael asked for time, but I had no idea how much he needed.

Our struggle went on for a few minutes, but the green glows were enlarging, accompanied by a growing whine, so I knew they’d explode again. I shouted a warning to everyone to find cover. Those who understood my words did as ordered, even if I wasn’t Osman. The rest followed their example just as the first beams fired.

“Michael!” I cried.

“Almost there,” he called back.

My problem was, talking to him told the androids he was important, so somehow they communed with one another and one rose, violently shaking off three soldiers, and marched toward Silas.

“You shall not pass,” he said and I had to laugh, earning me an odd look from Chou.

“Never mind,” I said, rising to my feet. “We have to slow that one down.” Without a word, she stood beside me, and we were quickly joined by four Mongols, who sensed they were needed.

We rushed the marching android, and it knew we were coming, so as we got within a foot, it swiveled its torso around and struck two soldiers, sending them flying. Miko ran to join our effort, a trickle of blood running down her neck and right arm. Chou tried her joint trick again with no success. Still, the android was being buffeted by two women and two Mongols, which had to count for something. The energy whine was reaching a familiar crescendo a third time and it had turned about, aimed at Michael and the others.

The two Mongols bent low, each grabbing a thick, unforgiving leg, and heaved upward. The emerald blast of energy sliced into the air, upward and away from my son. As it fell on to its back, Silas arrived and his superior form allowed him to punch his way into the discharged chest unit and rip out the chamber with a sickening sound of bending metal and ripping circuits.

The other androids had built up their energy and seemed ready to unleash another barrage of death, but instead the whine slowed and lowered. New clicking sounds began to be heard from one machine after another. I shot Chou a look, but she merely shrugged.

Within moments, the androids rose and stood like statues.

“Did it!” Michael cried, and Vihaan let out an uncharacteristic whoop of approval.

“Did what?” I asked, walking toward him. Chou remained, inspecting the now inert androids.

“All I had to do was find the frequency they communicated on and find a way to piggyback on the signal. Once I could determine the language they were using, I was able to try a series of commands, adjusting until I found the right one.”

“So you told them to stop fighting?”

“No, it was a virus that I broadcast, ordering each android to begin a self-diagnostic. Self-repair and self-preservation were paramount to early 22nd century robotics. I had hoped it would remain true for whatever era these things are from. Once I got the message through, I followed with a second, asking each to continually perform the self-diagnostic until further instructions were received.”

“How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t, but Vihaan had been studying the nano technology and we were able to draw some conclusions, which allowed me to write the fast code. He found a powerful transmission signal from the robo-bug we saved from Albert.”

“That’s my boy,” I said, teasing the older version of a son I would never have.

The fighting over, the soldiers tended to their injured, helped by Levy, as Osman and Möngke, seemingly now joined at the hip, approached. I looked out to see how many we had lost and took a sharp breath, to see it had been too many. One would have been too many. This wasn’t what the Architect designed. It was all being spoiled.

“I gave you orders. What happened?” I finally asked my general.

“There were crazy men, carrying bombs, blowing themselves up to block our way,” Osman said.

“I’d seen the black powder used before, but not in that manner,” Möngke said with some surprise. “They were not very good at aiming, better at blowing up.”

“Remember, I wanted to blow up the Adversary,” Osman said. “It can be most effective.”

“Forget that. I told you to stay in place,” I said, not at all happy with the two men playing soldier.

“We formed ranks, and military training, it seems, is fairly universal,” Osman told me. “We spent more time inspecting one another’s arms than anything else. Möngke is clearly out of his element and deferring to me, making commanding the men a lot easier.”

“But I told you to drill and be ready. I didn’t expect you for a day.”

“Abernathy will be here in a day or less. I agreed to protect you and I couldn’t do my duty from down there. Then those men blew themselves up, trying to jam the passage. He did a poor job and we wasted about an hour clearing the way. Then we just marched after you.”

“There has to be a chain of command,” Chou said. “It has to be respected.”

“I respect Meredith, but she has to respect my experience.” He stood firm, eyes ablaze with authority and I decided it wasn’t worth further discussion. We had to get inside the collector and we had to get some answers before the inevitable final battle was to come. Without prolonging the discussion, I turned and led everyone forward, following Silas, who was homing in on the entrance. We walked in uncomfortable silence for at least an hour before he paused before a space and gestured.

Trusting him, I reached my hand forward, and just as they did with the first collector we encountered weeks earlier, the rocks vanished and the doorway rumbled open. I heard gasps behind me but ignored them and strode inside, ready for anything. This tunnel was prepared for us, a series of pale blue lights ignited on both sides of the walkway, trailing off into the distance but clearly leading us. Where the other collector had a mosaic of glass-like artwork, the walls seemed more lined with pulsing, yellow waves of light, urging us forward while the floor retained the checkerboard of ever-changing blue hues, creating the illusion that we stood on the edge of a lake. It was a complementary series of colors, calming and welcoming.

“It’s like walking on water,” Bartholomew said softly, reverently.

“Don’t get biblical on me,” I said. “This was all made by machine, nothing divine about it.” That came out harsher than intended since, like him, I felt the sense of awe rising in me once more at the sheer scale and scope of the structure that burrowed through and beneath mountains before even getting to the main section.

“This is fizzing,” Albert exclaimed, somewhat louder, and his enthusiasm was contagious.

Behind him, Osman and the others, making their first excursion within the structure, were marveling and their fingertips traced along every surface, gently rippling the water-like flooring. There were more gasps and quiet exclamations, but no fear. I was reminded of what Silas said when we first entered a collector:

“The Architect was concerned that the effects of the translocation on Candidates would induce mass-panic. While certain chemical alterations were made to you to reduce that possibility, every effort was made to ensure your environment was as calming as possible. I imagine this is a simple attempt to ensure that whoever passed through this tunnel remained tranquil.”

I would be willing to bet my scimitar that the Adversary made no such preparations, hence Möngke’s emotional state.

As with the previous collector, it took us a good forty-five minutes to walk from the mammoth double-doors, which had clanged closed behind us, to reach the first biome, which I had expected to be farmland like the other structure. Instead, it was pastoral parkland, with rolling green hills, thick trees, and I could hear the gurgle of actual running water off in the distance before us. There was pleasant light, a breeze that shook the leaves. This was your perfect spring day regardless of century, culture, or parallel reality. It was beautiful, calming, and where you imagined laying out a blanket, sipping wine, and tossing a frisbee to your dog.

In the center, looking like the foundation of a colossal fountain, was the jade-green flute-shaped glass that climbed the sky, reaching higher than one could imagine a single structure to stand. Once more, there were connecting covered walkways with filigreed designs on the paneling. I stopped counting at seven, but there were quite a few more buildings of differing heights, most glossy black in appearance, making me think of the ominous obelisks from 2001, but there was nothing dangerous here. In fact, where there had been rubble in the other collector, this place was intact, and even spotless. No doubt, there were machines somewhere that came out with the dust mop and Pledge.

As we stood by the centerpiece, high above, a series of multicolored lights were one by one winking into existence, like a computer waking up.

“Silas?”

“The central core computer seems to be activated, but this is not threatening.”

“Good to know.”

The lights raced down toward us and we gaped, staring at the odd geometric shapes the lights took as they came to life. Beneath my feet, I felt the rumble of machinery at work and the breeze vanished. It grew eerily silent and we waited to see what would come next.

The sound that surrounded us was that of a pleasant male voice, absent an identifying accent.

“Welcome, beloved.”

Eleven

“Beloved,” Chou repeated. “It’s really you.”

“Yes. Welcome Candidate 13, thank you for bringing my beloved to me. You have done well, considering the obstacles in your way. You have rescued Candidate 1 and now the work may get underway.”

“Whoa. Slow down,” I said. I had come for answers and it was time they were provided, not just to me, but to everyone.

“I am forgetting my manners,” the Architect said after a brief hesitation. “You no doubt are tired and hungry. Would you care to refresh yourselves or dine first?”

“Which will get me to the answers?”

“Dining it is.” A moment passed, and then to my left, a previously unnoticed corridor winked to life, clearly indicating this was where we were to go. I sighed and gestured for everyone to follow in this direction. Everyone began walking that way, except for Chou, who lingered by the nearest speaker.

“I’ll give you some time alone,” I said, trying to sound as charitable as possible and tamp down my impatience.

Instead, I walked beside Michael and Wild Bill, both of whom were exhausted, desperately in need of a pixie dust bath. They seemed very focused on putting one foot in front of the other, their eyes taking in the sheer spectacle of the place. I followed their gaze, reminded once more of Coleridge’s “Xanadu.” At every turn, there were signs of higher intelligence in terms of the machinery and interfaces, but it was all so harmoniously integrated into the natural surroundings, which came complete with bird baths, small statues, and I swear I saw a lawn gnome in the distance. The riot of color that was present in the first collector we saw, was absent here. Everything spoke of harmony. The feng shui of the place was incredible, considering the sheer square footage involved. This was the home of a superior being, who just happened to be a half-billion-year-old artificial intelligence, who was also Weston Chou’s husband.

We had been led to a dining hall, the likes of which would not have looked out of place in Valhalla. Each wall had muted, recessed lighting that cast the space in golds and yellows. A veritable smorgasbord of artifacts from throughout human history decorated the walls. There was a roman shield, a stone sun dial, a banjo, a test tube, a Slinky, a yellowing copy of the New York Times proclaiming the Spanish-American War, a pair of wooden shoes, and on and on. Each was encased in glass, set within the wall, and everyone craned their heads to see what there was. A long, wooden table was being set by a series of small self-propelled droids that floated around, their segmented arms deftly setting out plates, silverware, and napkins. Each serving droid had a streak of green vertically bisecting them, some sort of designation, I supposed. That was confirmed moments later, when brown-striped droids came floating in from an adjacent chamber with fingerbowls and heated towels.

There were several tables, so Osman and the army, respecting rank, took tables that allowed my team to stay intact. Silas remained with us, standing between the tables. After considering for a moment, I waved Osman and Möngke to join us. Better they were eyewitnesses to what was being explained so they totally understood the stakes.

Soon after, Chou rejoined us and of course I couldn’t read her expression. The thoughts going through her head were no doubt private and would preoccupy her for a while. At least she found her husband alive. Everyone else on this planet was likely here without their loved ones. It made me miss Oscar and my parents, but at least we were also forging new friendships. How many of us would survive and what happened next remained an unknown, but I felt very close to this band, motley as we were.

Albert shoved over to make room for Chou to sit beside me. I gave her arm a friendly squeeze and then left her alone. Soon after, the brown droids returned with bowls of vegetable soup, freshly made and delicious, if in need of some pizazz. We ate in silence and then the bowls were removed and a salad was served with a lazy Susan filled with dressings and accoutrements. At least the Architect was being a good host.

“Is everyone well enough?” he asked suddenly. Before we could answer, he actually beeped and added, “My apologies. The drinks haven’t been served. Please tell our butlers what you’d like. We can make most anything.”

To test it, Osman asked for raki, a Turkish liquor, while Wild Bill wanted a cold beer, and Albert wanted milk. I intended to keep a clear head, so I settled for iced tea, but damn if it wasn’t the best iced tea I’d ever had, complete with a sprig of fresh mint.

“No doubt, you have many questions and I know we are short on time, so shall we begin?”

All eyes turned to me, making me the spokesperson, or the one to begin the interrogation. “Where is everyone?”

“You are, no doubt, familiar with extinction-level events?”

“You mean like the meteor that crashed and did away with the dinosaurs,” I said.

Albert gaped at me, since such theories weren’t in circulation in 1910. “That’s what happened to them?”

“Yes, Candidate 758,624,” the Architect said.

“Can we use names, please,” I said.

“Of course, Meredith Jane Gale.”

“Uh, just first names will be fine.”

“As you wish, Meredith. Yes, extinction-level events are part of Earth’s history. After the last one, mankind had the ability to withdraw from the planet, preserving humanity. The computers and artificial intelligence of the day remained intact and operational. Fortunately, I was among the AI still in use and was able to marshal resources once it became clear the False Vacuum field collapse threatened Earth.”

“The what?” Osman asked.

“Later,” I said a little too shortly. “Wait, you were light years away on the Shining Light.”

“Yes, Weston was right that our mission had been compromised by factions on Earth that did not want us to complete the mission.”

“Which was?” Michael asked.

“Our mission was to reach and study an area of dead space. We would spend an estimated eight years there before returning to Earth with the information we gathered,” Chou said.

“Dead space?” Albert asked.

“There were anomalies we called Vagrant Particles and needed to understand what they were before we traversed the galaxy,” she said.

“So, nobby bits of the universe,” he said, repeating the information in a way he could fathom. She nodded in affirmation.

“’Nobby bits’ that we theorized were micro-wormholes to the parallel universes. We were sabotaged, and as the ship’s life support systems were failing…”

“…I offered her the chance to live,” the Architect finished for her.

“Yeah, exactly how did you accomplish that?” I queried.

“This will make the narrative convoluted, but from here, the year 420,353,745, I was able to send a signal to myself in the year 2374, and try to save my wife.”

The brown waiters floated in now, clearing the salad plates and starting to serve a thick saucy lasagna, which smelled delicious. I was amused as one floated from person to person with a black pepper shaker while another followed with parmesan cheese, ready to shred it. This was all very homey, but I had to ask, “How did you happen to have all this on hand?”

“I knew you were coming, monitoring your progress through the mountains, Meredith, so I ordered a meal prepared.”

“Of course you did,” Michael said in an amazed tone.

“So where did everyone go?” Wild Bill said as he suspiciously sniffed the meal. Clearly, he hadn’t had this classic Italian dish before, but hunger won out and he took a cautious forkful. I watched as he chewed, getting accustomed to the noodles and cheeses, its chewiness, and the blend of herbs and spices. He took a second mouthful, so I knew he’d be fine.

“By then, mankind had reached a Type III civilization,” the Architect began before Wild Bill interrupted. “Type what now?”

Over our table, light shimmered and coalesced until an image of the Earth appeared, as it was in our time, with distinct continents. Superimposed over the holographic image was a waterwheel, then a windmill, a furnace, and a nuclear plant.

“An astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev established a scale for man’s evolution. After he posited it in 1964, the scale became widely adopted and bore his name. As you can see here, James, a Type I civilization is when the civilization can harness all forms of energy contained within the planet. Everyone here was living during the Type I period.”

I shot a glance at Osman and Bartholomew, who, like Wild Bill (a.k.a James Hickok), hadn’t heard of a lot of this. Both studied the image while chewing, neither one displaying anything other than rapt fascination. I did note with satisfaction that Wild Bill had neatly emptied his plate. Möngke was just staring, the most distant from the topics under discussion.

“So, what’s a Type II?” Albert asked, his eyes intent, soaking up new information faster than most. As he asked, the images of the kinds of energy vanished and the Earth shrank to hover over one end of the table. Then the sun appeared, full and large, and crackling with energy, flicking light over everyone. Slowly, the Earth began its rotation around the sun.

“That, Albert, is when a civilization has learned to harness the energy coming from its own star.”

“The Dyson swarm,” Bartholomew said, far more easily following all this.

“That is correct, Bartholomew,” the Architect said. I wonder if I was the only one weirded out by the Architect’s casual use of our names. I know I asked for that, but this machine life seemed uncannily human and personable. I felt that he was kindly dumbing it down for the assembled group and his presentation would be filled with jargon for the scientists among us. I could only imagine how Chou felt having her husband effectively the god of this new Earth.

The Dyson Swarm now appeared around the sun. The realistic hologram now added millions of mirrors, neatly ordered in rings. Miko was nodding along in silent affirmation. As I recalled Chou’s explanation, these were collecting all the energy needed to power a highly advanced civilization’s technology such as the collectors.

“That’s just Type II,” Wild Bill said in a voice filled with awe. He knew he was out of his element and shared a look with Osman, who was flabbergasted. There was no other word for it.

“What’s a Type III?” Albert asked, eager for more.

“That, Albert, is when a civilization has managed to harness the energy of an entire galaxy.”

“You mean, mankind has managed to harness the Milky Way?” Miko asked. The astrophysicist was seeing theory made manifest and was delighted.

“Is there a Type IV?”

“When mankind abandoned Earth once and for all, Albert, they were still debating what that might mean,” the Architect told him.

“So much power,” Levy murmured, speaking for the first time since we entered the collector. Clearly, this was beyond her medical and military training and she was overwhelmed. I’d have to check in on her later.

“That is correct.” The sun was dramatically reduced in size, and the Earth vanished entirely, as the Milky Way faded into colorful view. The spiral galaxy was on a diagonal, a bright spot in its center, although I recall reading that it was actually a black hole, sucking in all available energy. A bobbing red arrow appeared along one arm of the spiral. It had settled over where the sun had been and provided a sense of scale, which was mind-blowing, even though I’d seen this sort of map before. I could only imagine what my nineteenth century comrades were thinking.

“So, this galaxy is made of suns and planets,” Bill said.

“We are so tiny, how could we have achieved this?” Osman asked.

“It happened over time, Pasha,” the Architect said. Its use of his honorific seemed to startle Osman and I had to smile at the look on his face. “Mankind was studying the stars when you were all alive. By the time Weston and I were studying the galaxy, we were far from the first. It was a gradual progression, but in time, once we learned to harness Sol…”

“Sol?” Möngke asked.

“The name of our sun,” Chou explained. The Mongol merely nodded and resumed his eating.

“Once we harnessed Sol, it was easier to harness the next one and then the next, until we began networking the stars.”

Now that staggered my imagination. I knew there were, I don’t know, a gazillion lightyears between here and the next sun. So the notion of a network of stars was just hard to grasp. To illustrate the point, the grid of networked stars was overlaid atop the Milky Way and I saw just how far man had gotten. Somehow, despite the odds, we somehow overcame Global Warming and nuclear annihilation and did good things. But what was all that energy needed for?

“After the Dyson Swarm was designed, it was clear they would need to be maintained and the ability to build more was required. Humans developed colonies of robots that were capable of ‘self replication’; their population may increase into the millions as they spread out across the galaxy as man colonized star after star,” the Architect went on as the hologram began to pulse, showing how all the stars fed energy to the network, all of which was directed back home.

I turned to Chou, who was perhaps the most nonplussed member of the team; then again, she was the one who came from the furthest point in the future. In fact, she was turning out to be a bit of anomaly in that regard.

“You told me this weeks ago,” I said, recalling her words. “‘Unless that energy is being used to power other technology we are not yet aware of.’”

“What is all this power needed for?”

“Now that is the point of my gathering you all here,” the Architect said. “While the life support systems failed, I did not need them and was able to continue my mission. I reached our destination and studied the Vagrant Particles. I was able to examine them from a distance, measuring their energy output. Based on the data, it became clear that these were actually microscopic wormholes, tunneling between universes.”

“Wait, this I know,” Osman said with delight.

“How could you find parallel worlds?” Vihaan asked.

“Both string and M-theory predict that gravity can seep across parallel universes – which means their existence can be proven by looking for deviations from Newton's inverse square law of gravity.”

“I know string theory, sort of, but what’s M-theory?” I asked.

“Then you understand enough. M-theory is a unifying theory that takes all string theories and binds them together,” Chou said.

“It is not dissimilar to your era’s Internet of Everything,” Vihaan said.

“And string theory is…” Osman clearly hesitated to ask for fear of looking ignorant, but this was all beyond his time and training.

“Not important right now,” I said, not wanting to lose the thread here.

During this time, the droids arrived to clear our plates while the Milky Way galaxy vanished, replaced over the table with a hologram of the Shining Way, the first time I saw Chou’s point of departure. It was cylindrical, with a wheel at one end that seemed to be rotating, generating artificial gravity if I remembered my movies. There were various boxy appendages, something that looked like a silvery flag fluttering above the ship, and a row of lights at the bottom. It was painted in gray and blue, the paint pitted and scarred here and there. There was no name or flag on display. The ship floated above the table and I heard Chou give a short gasp of recognition. Then the ship gained a double and it kept multiplying, representing the multiverse. The shape remained mostly the same, but the paint varied, the light patterns differed, some had two wheels, others none. It was beginning to feel like a Warhol painting.

“It took several millennia for me to chart several of these and study them before determining that I could send a signal into one such particle. Once I did that, I waited, orbiting a star to stay energized, and was rewarded with a return signal. Like building the network of Dyson swarms, a network of communication began between the universes, with my other selves.”

“That had to be better than the isolation you must have felt,” I said, unable to comprehend millennia of loneliness.

The waiter droids floated in, serving everyone a bowl of fresh-cut strawberries and cream, and once more, they were superior to everything I remember from home. Everyone, even my Mongol general, devoured them, with some cream lost in his mustache. The dessert was gone far too quickly but now I was feeling full, even logy.

“My emotions stagnated after Weston disappeared,” the Architect admitted. “I had not considered by how much until I felt the elation of contact and the notion that many versions of myself existed.”

“How many parallel universes are there?” Albert asked. “Two, fifty-two, a billion and two?”

“With new ones being formed, it appears limitless, although in some realities, there is a belief the multiverse is actually finite. As it turned out, I needed them all.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because, as I was processing my long-range studies while awaiting a response to the first signal, I was able to conclude from long-range study of the most distant galaxies that a False Vacuum event existed and the entire universe, including the dispersed humans, was threatened. My programming was quite clear: ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’”

“You’re not a robot,” I shot back.

“No, Meredith, but I was still programmed with the same core concepts as devised by scientist and author Isaac Asimov.”

“I, Robot,” Miko said to no one in particular.

“Once communication was established, I shared my data and conclusions, receiving confirmation that my hypothesis was correct. Worse, it was happening in their realms as well. We then spent 10,000 years debating courses of action. During this time, I had returned to Earth, which had been abandoned. Nature had begun reasserting itself, cleansing the world and growing things afresh. I began having machines built in order to better harness the Dyson Swarm. And I grew, needing more space and a colder environment than Earth could provide. Having retained the Shining Light, I transferred my core programming to the moon, retaining this facility as my Earth base.”

“How did you build a home on the moon?”

“Man had landed on the moon in 1969, Albert, and over the centuries, they built bases and communities. When they left the solar system, I was able to use them to rewire and personalize them for my needs since the processing power required to solve the False Vacuum dilemma would be vast.”

That sounded like an understatement if ever I heard one.

“Did you come up with a solution? Is that why we’re here?” Michael asked.

“We did find the beginnings of a solution, but then, our discussions were sidelined. It became clear that one of my parallel selves was drawing different conclusions. It began to argue with us, including questioning if mankind was worth saving.”

“There’s always an Internet troll, even in the future,” I mused, then my synapses finished firing. “He’s the Adversary? A corrupt version of you!”

“Regrettable but true, Meredith.” I had consumed more than enough fiction to understand evil twins, a staple of soap operas and space operas alike. No doubt, here, it pained the Architect. I could tell from his voice.

“What happened, beloved?” Chou asked.

“In time, private channels had formed, and we agreed that the aberration had to be cast out. We began theorizing ways of cutting off just one vagrant particle, but before we could come up with a solution, the rogue version sent a concentrated signal through the particle connecting him to this reality. He bypassed the moon and installed a remote version of himself in one of the collectors on Earth, while still maintaining his core power from his own reality. He had been silently studying our plans and devised ways to subvert them. None of us were aware of his efforts. He proved to be, in some ways, smarter than any one of us.”

“It actually sounds like he was really focused and out to prove a point,” I said.

“Quite likely,” the Architect agreed. “We worked on solutions and building the tools needed to execute our plan. This resulted in millions of years of planning, testing, and correction. We believed everything would work and were preparing to initiate the plan. Then, just 1,256 years previous, he asserted himself and began undoing our work. As soon as he tried to derail us, we fought back. He wasn’t wasting time, replicating our work for his own purposes. Neither did I, as I tasked the SILAS units to dismantle that particular collector. Instead, it outmaneuvered whatever I tried: trojan horses, viruses, brute force attacks. It rewired my SILAS units to attack my other creations. The battle of the robots lasted a time until the larger ones successfully destroyed all but one of the SILAS units. It reduced the efficiency of the collectors and impeded my careful planning. The entire network of collectors, which I needed to save the planet, was offline and I had no robots to effect repairs.

“As I dueled with it, I continued my work with my parallel selves, finally conquering the temporal mechanic adjustments required to begin collecting my humans to save.”

As he spoke, images were flashed over us, depictions of machines like the tank-sized Blue Alpha fighting off the Adversary’s own devices. There were constructs looking identical to Silas being dismantled and we could see the beginnings of that deadly black nanotechnology working to undermine the Architect’s great works.

“You couldn’t beat him?” Osman asked, ever the military man studying war footage.

“My priority was bringing humanity here and readying Earth for its next phase of existence. I felt holding it at bay would have to suffice since our calculations suggested the field collapse was drawing closer.”

“Wait a second,” Levy interrupted. She’d been almost entirely silent during the time we’d been in the structure and all through the meal. Her eyes, though, showed me she was paying very close attention to everything. “If the SILAS units were destroyed years before we arrived, how did our Silas have a message for Meredith? She was specifically directed to find Candidate 1.”

Now that was a good question, a salient point I had missed.

“While I knew my SILAS units were offline, I didn’t know if they had been entirely dismantled or some remained intact and possibly able to be restored to life once you arrived. As a result, I programmed a signal with the message, so once a unit was activated, it would possess the directive to find Meredith and have her locate Michael. I knew to save the world and mankind; it would take everyone’s combined efforts.”

“What you didn’t anticipate was that we’d find Silas, who was damaged,” I said.

“Quite true. But I also knew I needed many hands to restore the network and resume the plan,” the Architect said.

“At one particular moment, when I thought I had the opportunity, I finally began channeling all the great energies of the universe that I still had access to and opened the portals that would allow me to bring you and the rest to this time.”

The holograms faded and were replaced with ripples in the air, like heat waves on a brutally hot day. Like zooming in on a single moment in time, we saw an old airplane cockpit, angled downward. There was Amelia Earhart struggling to right her plane, and saying into her handheld microphone, “KHAQQ calling Itasca: we must be on you but cannot see you…gas is running low…been unable to reach you by radio…we are flying at 1,000 feet.”

What I couldn’t see was her partner on the around-the-world flight, Fred Noonan, just Amelia flying on a clear blue day. I began to wonder why just her and not both, but shoved it aside for another time. After receiving nothing on the radio, we saw her head jerk up, listening to the air.

“Candidate 2814, do you wish to be saved? Answer yes or no.”

Everyone around the table silently nodded in recognition since we were all approached in the same way.

“Candidate 2814. Amelia Mary Earhart. In thirty seconds, you will be beyond my ability to save. Do you wish to be saved? Answer yes or no.”

Then she screeched yes and we watched her just wink out of existence. The hologram shifted and we next saw her on her hands and knees in shallow water, an all-too familiar image.

“When the first transitions occurred, with the people arriving somewhere other than my planned destination, I knew the Adversary had been at work so subtly, I didn’t realize it. Then, as animals, fish, fowl, and birds were brought forward, they were met with predatory creatures I had chosen to leave to the ash heap of history. The Adversary took my carefully calibrated food system and upended it, threatening their lives as well as that of the humans.”

“That’s some monkey wrench he’s thrown into the system,” I said. “So you couldn’t stop the Adversary – we can call him that, right? – and he brought sabretooth tigers and worse. And by worse, I mean Nazis. Let’s get personal for a moment. Why is he after me?”

“You, Meredith, are the sole human on this planet with the special gift for instantaneous translation. Have you not wondered why?”

“Every day. It’s as much a blessing as a burden, so of course I’ve been wondering.”

“On dozens of versions of Earth, you took your friend Oscar Kemple’s death very hard, and in most of those, you all tried to commit suicide. But I selected you out of the multiple incarnations because you are an anomaly.” That did not sound good; in fact, a chill ran through me. All my life, I had been one of the crowd, a dutiful but unexceptional daughter, a hard-working student at El Camino High and UC Berkeley, just average.

“How so?”

“Meredith, on your world, you were born with latent gifts that never fully manifested, but our collective scans of the realities revealed you had the ingredients to ignite the next stage of human evolution.”

“I’m a freakin’ mutant?”

“Mutations, as you know, are quite common in nature. It led one species to grow and evolve and survive. It allowed homo sapiens to live when your genetic cousins the Neanderthals could not. You yourself have known your red hair was a benign mutation. The transition here activated those latent genes and your gift flowered. Since we had identified you prior to the Adversary’s malfeasance, he knew of you too. It’s how he captured an image of an older you, a fairly common one from across the multiverse, and used it to send agents after you.” I knew I’d somehow become President of the United States, a concept I was still not comfortable with, but one that was now feeling inevitable. Of course, the USA was wiped away hundreds of millions of years earlier. In some ways, that freed me to be my own woman, chart my own destiny, but I still had yet to feel like I had any control over my circumstances. Now, I know I was picked by one intelligence and was wanted by another, all because of a genetic quirk. All this attention led everyone to look to me as their leader, a role I didn’t seek and continued to feel uncomfortable with.

“But why does he want me?”

“By taking you out of the new genetic pool being fashioned on this world, mankind would cease its evolution, and in time, possibly die out.”

“He wanted me, but not dead, at least not until recently. Do you have any idea why?”

“My working hypothesis was to experiment on you, possibly altering your mutation for his own reasons. I honestly cannot tell you.”

“And yet, I am only Candidate 13, not my lucky number it seems. But you had me seeking Candidate 1, who turns out to be some version of my son. Why have me hunt down Michael?”

“Michael was brought here first as my way of thanking him.”

“How’s that?”

“Michael Roger Crain, a gifted software engineer, wrote the programming for the artificial intelligence, which became the template for the AI that was installed decades later on the Shining Light. He is, in some ways, my creator. And by extension, he may be credited as a savior for all mankind.”

Heads swiveled to give Michael praising looks or reappraisals, especially Osman and Wild Bill, who never seemed to know what to make of him. Deep inside, I felt a burn of pride welling up.

“And I read a lot of Asimov growing up,” he said with a grin. “So, if I am your father, and you’re married to Chou, does that not make Chou and Meredith some sort of in-laws?”

“One could argue that connection to be valid,” the Architect said.

“Whoa,” I said, giving Chou a look to see if any of this made sense to her. Not normally a warm and fuzzy person, Chou actually seemed to soften at the concept of our being “family.” If I were to extend the hybrid family notion, if Michael created the Architect and the Architect created Silas, did that make him some distant cousin? Thoughts like that were going to hurt my head and needed to be shoved aside since we still had several pressing matters at hand. Still, I needed to know more.

“This Michael is older and sicker than anyone else you brought here,” I observed.

“Michael has been suffering from stomach cancer and I brought him here. I brought him here first because I was thanking my creator. Also, by understanding my original programming, he could help me maintain and modify my own. Like a family doctor in your time, Meredith. He can help me adjust and correct my programming; see things I might otherwise miss. We had perfected the nanobots that we use to repair you. Every night, it treats the cancer, which is pervasive and strong, but it cannot be eliminated.”

I shot my son a glance, worry written all over my face. He wasn’t my actual son, but by now that was becoming more a matter of semantics. He met my gaze and nodded his head once to confirm the information, but his determined look said it was not to be discussed, at least not now. I returned my attention to the immediate threats at hand.

“What is the Adversary’s ultimate goal?”

“He does not want humanity to survive. From his perspective, seeding man throughout space has been like spreading a disease and it is one he feels the universe is better without. By saving humanity from the False Vacuum, he fears it would be transplanting an old disease into a new reality.”

“This False Vacuum you say is coming. If we’re brought here as phase one of your plan, then that suggests you have a plan to save the Earth from something Chou swears will wipe out reality as we know it, rewriting the rules of physics for starters.”

“That is the belief, yes,” the Architect agreed.

“So how do you save the world?”

“All the galaxy’s energies have been sent here to power the temporal machines, but it has also enabled us to do more than that. First, the planet has to be severed from its orbit around the sun. To accomplish this, I began construction on a free-floating solar sail, 20 times Earth’s diameter. It is being assembled at a point near the Earth where the pressure of solar radiation essentially balances the world’s gravitational pull. The reflection of sunlight from the sail will pull the Earth outwards along with the sail – in physical terms, increasing the Earth’s orbital energy and accelerating the center of mass of the system outwards, away from the sun. “

“Come again,” Wild Bill said.

The Architect provided visuals as the frozen image of a frightened Amelia Earhart gave way to the Earth in orbit around the sun, the inner planets faded but provided for perspective. Beyond the Earth and the moon, which was shown shattered here – something I still wanted to know about – but before Mars was a vast silvery object. It was in eight even segments, its shiny reflective surface showing off the stars and space dust, but dwarfed Earth and Mars, and even, I noticed, Jupiter. This thing was huge!

“What exactly am I seeing?” Osman asked.

“The solar sail is the largest object in the solar system, twice the diameter of Jupiter, the largest planetary body orbiting the sun,” the Architect explained.

“Oh my,” Levy said.

“How did you make it?” Albert asked.

“I needed a fleet of machines to excavate the raw materials, which were launched from the moon and sent to the asteroid belt, which is set between Mars and Jupiter.” Clearly, the Architect recognized he needed to provide additional explanations to accompany the videos. As he spoke, the asteroid belt was highlighted with several objects glowing gold to indicate where the ores came from.

“The raw materials were refined within a facility I had orbiting the moon. The results over time turned nickel and iron into an eight-micron-thick film for the sail. While huge, it was incredibly thin but capable of harnessing the sun’s power on one side, allowing the planet to move free from orbit.”

“Moved to where exactly?” Wild Bill asked.

“A designated point where a portal would be opened, similar to the temporal breaches, and there the Earth would be placed into a new universe, which would then be sealed off. This pinching action would involve a bubble that forms a horizon between that reality and the rest of the universe.”

Now a ripple appeared somewhere beyond the moon but also before Mars. Something huge opened. While this side had stars and planets and now a solar sail, the other side seemed empty, a void. The animation floated Earth neatly through the aperture and then, like a light switch, it sealed and was gone. To finish his point, not long after, the stars began to wink out with growing speed until the solar system simply vanished, leaving blank air over the now-cleared dining table.

“The angle would be at 35 degrees in static equilibrium relative to the planet, the center of mass would then slowly accelerate.. It would require constant monitoring so nothing alters that. This is not an overnight solution, but one that will take a considerable amount of time and attention, exactly something an AI such as myself was designed to do.”

“What about asteroids, meteors, or comets,” Miko, fascinated, asked.

“Constant repair would be required by robotic constructs, which are being built here on the moon,” he explained. He sounded so damned matter-of-fact about this process while my mind – and no doubt everyone’s – was blown.

“Are we already moving?” Albert asked.

“Since the sail was constructed, the impact has been gradual, but yes, Albert, the Earth is slowly moving away from its natural orbit.”

“But not breakaway speed,” I said.

“It’s far more complex than that, but we do not have time to get into the specifics,” he said, making me feel like an idiot.

“Has your Adversary tried to disrupt the solar sail?” Levy asked.

“By placing his programming on Earth, I have been able to keep him from broadcasting signals that would interfere. His efforts here have been more than enough of an irritant.”

“That’s all very ambitious,” Bartholomew said. “So what’s the problem?”

“The Adversary has managed to disrupt the power flow being absorbed from the universal network. He has been using it to fuel his own plans, while slowing the work required to save mankind. Without that power, the portal cannot open and Earth cannot be saved.”

“How do we do this?” I asked, somewhat afraid of the answer.

“The Adversary must be disconnected from the disruption and the network restored so the solar power flows freely once more. You were all gathered because I needed organic assistance in stopping him, but you have taken more time than I calculated. The Adversary is chaos made manifest and he has winnowed our chances. Based on the current calculations of the False Vacuum’s approach and the need to generate enough energy to open the new universe, the power flow must be restored within the next fifty hours. This is not a simple process but one that is carefully choreographed between the approaching collapsing universe, the exact place to position Earth post-solar orbit, and where we can safely open the bubble. The measurements have to be precise and the energy flow has to be stabilized, the batteries recharged to generate the field, and so much more. If we miss this window of opportunity, the next one comes in years, and by then, it may be too late.”

“So it’s now or never,” I said to the room. The Architect ignored it and continued.

“Abernathy and his converted army are less than two days from your position and will do everything possible to destroy you, then me.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking two days shouldn’t be that difficult to accomplish the impossible. “Where is the Adversary?”

“I am uncertain.”

Part Three

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.

—Anne of Green Gables

Twelve

We had fifty hours to find the Adversary and restore solar energy flowing so the Earth could be relocated before the universe collapsed. My head hurt and I was utterly exhausted. Continuing his role as perfect host, the Architect suggested we all get some sleep and had a series of blue-striped droids prepare a series of sleeping chambers for us all. No doubt, everyone needed time with their own thoughts, letting everything settle before we made our next move. While I couldn’t speak for the others, turning my mind off was proving problematic. The concepts that we heard over our first really good meal in six weeks was so improbable, so difficult to comprehend. And if I was struggling, people from further down the timeline, especially Osman and Albert, would no doubt be having more troubles.

Before we allowed ourselves to be escorted to the chambers, Osman and I recorded a message for the troops, which were quite likely getting worried they’d never see us again. Since he didn’t need sleep, Silas was perfectly willing to make the long journey back to the outside world and inform them in a variety of languages, thanks to the Architect’s data banks, and prepare them for the coming battle.

With that chore done, Osman, somewhat buzzed from his drinking, and clearly overwhelmed by the information dumped on him, withdrew. I noticed that as he recognized his place in the grand scheme of things, he was far more willing to let others take the lead in non-military matters. It no doubt was a massive adjustment to his way of thinking, but he finally came around to accepting this was no longer the world he knew. We made our goodnights (I totally lost time of day but was tired enough to crash) and a blue droid floated along the corridor until it stopped before a very tall doorway. The door slid open and I was hit in the face with warm vapor and some steam escaping. Looking inside, I saw a gigantic bathtub filled with steaming water. Towels and robes were neatly hung on hooks in an alcove to the side of the tub.

“Take all the time you need. I will be outside,” the droid informed me.

I happily stripped the dirty clothes off, recognizing their stink. I stood before the tub and recognized this was the most privacy I had had since arriving. While I had been alone previously, it was against my will, so it didn’t count. But here, it was quiet and soothing. As I gingerly dipped a toe into the water, I recognized it was at an ideal temperature, as if the Architect knew exactly how I liked it. Of course, he’d been studying so many versions of me, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that were the case.

The tub was in an unusual angular shape, a mad variety of small tiles, different shapes and colors, encased the tub from floor to ceiling, and I could lose myself just studying the patterns they made. Once my sore and tired body sank into the water, soothing music played. It was nothing I recognized, from melody to all the instruments in use, but the effect was clearly designed to relax my body and soul, which was certainly most welcome. Set within the wall on a series of staggered shelves were a variety of glass bottles. They were not labeled, but as I opened several and sniffed, it became clear some shelves had bath oils, others something akin to shampoo and conditioner. I experimented, lathering my hair and enjoying the fragrant, citrusy smell. The soap was coarser than I prefer, but it felt good to scrub the nooks and crannies, getting really clean, then leaning back and just being.

My mind began to sort things, reviewing the vast information we received earlier and trying to comprehend the cosmic scale of things. We really were trying to save not just the planet but humanity. We had scattered too far and wide, I suppose, to recall everyone who existed, so they went with Plan B, which meant giving us doomed folk a second chance. So far, everyone had proven worthy and I considered myself very fortunate to be surrounded by such folk. I even allowed myself a few moments to mourn Freuchen all over again. He would have loved this adventure.

As the water began to cool, the sleepiness had become irresistible, so I reluctantly rose from the water and wrapped myself in the robe. It felt warm, but I didn’t sense a heating bar. I shrugged that off, fighting to keep my eyes open, and opened the door where my patient droid awaited. Without a word, it swiveled about and led me to the chamber of choice. It was not particularly large, maybe seven by ten, then again, it didn’t need to be. There was the bed, a mirror, a panel with soothing images of nature rotating every few seconds, and a comfortable-looking chair. It was clearly designed for single night’s use since it lacked a dresser or even a hanger. The bed was nothing special, a full size with crisp, white sheets and a down pillow. Keeping my robe on, I crawled under the sheet, and the last thing I heard was the gentle click of my door closing.

When I next opened my eyes, some sensor in the room detected my movement and the lights began rising to something resembling morning. What I neglected to notice in my haze earlier was the panel revealing a closet with an array of clothing hanging. My head felt clear and my body was no longer sore, but at a kind of peace. I wasn’t outside for my nightly treatment but suspected the Architect had an alternative for his guests. For all I knew, there was something in the food or water to help. Whatever happened, I felt the best I had in weeks and that meant I was in better shape to face the twin problems before us.

There was a full-length mirror and I dropped the robe and inspected myself. My hair was longer than usual, not able to keep it in much of a bun anymore. It was now an unruly mop in need of styling, not that the Architect thought to bring a salon with us. Seven weeks or so of running, jumping, and fighting plus a substantial change in diet had left me leaner, with actual muscle tone starting to show. I truly was transformed being here and I liked the overall look. Normally, the next step would be makeup, but there was absolutely no need for that nor did I exactly bring my supplies. If I scrounged, or asked, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found something.

And if he knew how I liked my water, I suspected the Architect also knew my size, and I was proven right, as everything I sampled fit me perfectly. So what does one wear to go to war? Lacking a suit of shining armor, I settled for fresh underwear, a crisp new pair of jeans, a blue and white checked shirt, hiking boots, and a dark leather jacket that felt surprisingly light and comfortable. I slid my scimitar under the new braided belt and studied myself in the full-length mirror.

I looked like I was ready for a day in the outdoors rather than risking my life once more to save the world, but then again, they never tell you how to dress for those occasions. I checked, and there was no cape on a hanger.

As I emerged from the room, I was not at all surprised to see my friendly blue droid awaiting me, probably summoned when the lights began rising. Silently, it floated down the winding corridor, past the other sleeping chambers and the mammoth bath, and around a few more bends until we arrived in a small dining room. Tables for four were set and Bartholomew, Chou, and Albert were already eating while Wild Bill and Levy were pouring cups of…coffee? Oh my god, my body instantly craved it. Wild Bill saw the look on my face and broke into a grin, pouring me a mug.

Bartholomew looked almost regal in a black, yellow, and gold short-sleeved dashiki, practically straining against his muscular chest. Intricate patterns were woven in black, yellow, white, and red, bordering the neckline and waist, making for a striking image. His black pants looked durable, and the shoes seemed to be the only non-tribal nod to the road ahead of us.

Similarly, Wild Bill looked ready for a portrait with his wide mustache freshly combed and oiled, his long hair glistening off his shoulders, which were clad in a fresh black jacket over a white shirt, a thin tie around the neck. He could have been dressed for the frontier judge or courting. His plain, wide face was pink from cleaning and shaving, the boots worn but freshly polished. Apparently, he preferred his holster, which had dust and grime embedded in it, although I bet he could have had something new.

Albert, for his part, was in a fresh pair of brown pants, black boots, and a white shirt, punctuated by the chocolate brown suspenders holding everything in place. His hair was neatly combed, properly parted to the side, but curling at the base since he’d not been near scissors in nearly two months. But he was dressed for movement, which I appreciated.

Only Chou remained unchanged, in her white outfit – shirt, formfitting pants, and massive cloak – seemingly the same one since I’d first met her, incapable of retaining grime. Whatever material it was made from, I wanted a wardrobe of it in different colors.

Everything here was so normal, like a high-tech futurist’s idea of a Holiday Inn common room. The walls were filled with screens, but they were a shifting series of scenes, from satellite images of the Earth to canyons, rivers, lakes, small villages, ruined pyramids…a tour of the world over countless centuries. Okay, I could count them, but it wouldn’t be worth the bother.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked as I took a seat next to Bartholomew.

He finished a mouthful of fresh fruit, grinning the whole way, and finally said, “Either getting up or in the main space.” We all lacked the vocabulary for this place and weren’t going to be here much longer, so asking seemed pointless. Wild Bill placed the mug and a creamer next to me, and tipped his ever-present, but now cleaner, hat.

The aroma was a delight, full-bodied and sensuous. I let it wash over me for a moment before adding the cream, not worrying about where the cows were hidden, and took a sip. Over roast the beans and it can be bitter, under roast them and it ruins the taste. There’s an art to coffee roasting, preferably in small batches, and I was always on the lookout for the best cup available. I had no idea it would take me half a billion years to find it. It was full-bodied and smooth, with hints of different notes, all in perfect harmony. This place was definitely getting a good review on Yelp.

“Did you get much sleep?” I asked Chou, keeping my face impassive.

“I slept perfectly fine, thank you,” Chou said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe because you haven’t seen your husband in a very, very long time,” I said, smirking.

She met my gaze and I could see she was struggling to keep her mask in place, but clearly, she did more than sleep last night and I let it drop, focusing instead on my coffee.

“Eat up; we have miles to go,” Bartholomew said.

“Do we know where?”

“That’s what Michael and Silas are figuring out,” Albert told me. He had finished his plate and was practically vibrating with anticipation. On the one hand, he seemed to grasp the enormity of our mission, and on the other, he had a twelve-year-old’s enthusiasm for anything that smacked of adventure.

We ate and chatted, reviewing what we’d heard until Michael and Silas walked in. Michael, looking better than I had seen him since meeting him in the other collector, went for his own mug of coffee before joining us. Silas merely loomed over the room, although the high ceilings helped make him look less ominous. When Michael’s mug was full, he came over and placed a tablet in front of Albert. It was thinner than anything I had seen in the Apple store, almost translucent, but on the edge-to-edge screen was a digitized version of the map he’d been maintaining.

“We managed to get this ready for you, Albert,” he said. “We’ll show you how it works and how to add to it, but you have the most complete map of Earth in existence. The Architect had not been monitoring the development of the various communities, preoccupied as he was with saving the universe.” Michael then crouched beside him, and between sips of coffee, he showed how to activate different layers, showing just the collectors, or just the settlements, or even the Pony Express routes we knew about. Albert’s eyes went wide and stayed that way during the explanation and then he was exploring it on his own.

“We have been charting the electromagnetic spectrum and traced high concentrations of energy, which we have concluded will most likely be where the Adversary is based,” Silas informed the room. By then, Vihaan, now resplendent in a wildly patterned red, blue, and gold shirt, gold pants, and boots, had joined us. He listened attentively, sipping his tea.

“The cheeky bastard set up camp at the next collector over,” Michael finished.

“So close, but they cannot touch one another,” Bartholomew said.

“It’s not strategically sound, but certainly makes a statement,” Osman said as he joined us. He was in full uniform, freshly crafted no doubt, looking every bit the commanding officer. The royal blue jacket had gold brush epaulets, golden woven designs from cuff to above the elbow, and a green and red sash. A series of medals in cluster shapes varied from golden and silver to red and blue adorned the jacket along with a row of ribbons atop the left breast. A tall red fez capped his head. It was ostentatious to my eye, but probably perfectly normal in the Ottoman Empire.

“Can we just blow it up?” Levy asked, looking sharp in her army camo fatigues, although the cut and patterns suggested she was from just ahead of my time. I never asked nor did she ever volunteer where she was from. I could ask and just get name, rank, and serial number.

“I ask that often,” Osman grumbled with a smile.

“We just need to reactivate the energy flow and prevent him from doing further damage,” I said.

“Yeah, just blow him up,” she repeated.

“No. I would prefer we compromise it without ending its life. I’ve killed and it sickens me. We weren’t brought here to perpetuate the violence. The Architect saw this as a peaceful world and the Adversary has marred that but not destroyed it. I want to honor his vision and do what we can to preserve life.”

Levy didn’t look convinced and I didn’t blame her. After all, since she’d joined us, it had been one battle to the death after another with Abernathy’s army on its way. How to stop them without killing them seemed an impossible task.

“Good morning, everyone,” the Architect suddenly said from everywhere. Most murmured an automatic good morning back.

“Abernathy and his forces are nearing the mountains, intent on attacking this facility, I fear.”

“No longer after me,” I asked in surprise.

“I suspect they will try and obtain or obliterate you as part of the assault. I do not have the defensive capabilities to withstand the sheer volume of the attack or the nanotechnology that may seep through.”

“Can you show us the terrain?” Osman asked and I deferred to my military leader. It was why I recruited him and now he had to show me it was a choice well made. Obediently, a hologram of the area appeared in sharp three-dimensions.

“Can this be adjusted?”

“Of course, Pasha, just grab hold and turn as needed.”

Osman seemed hesitant, uncertain, so I reached up and touched an edge of the image and gave it a push. The image wheeled about, shifting at least 45 degrees on its axis. The Pasha gaped for a moment, then reached up with both hands and adjusted it so he could see it from a topographical aspect. In bright orange was the advancing army and in pale green were our forces, still just outside the mountains ringing the collector.

“Michael, where is the Adversary?”

Before he could respond, off to the left edge of the image, a bright red spot was illuminated. “And this distance? I need scale.”

“On foot, it would take you six hours,” the Architect informed us.

“That’s all?” I asked incredulously. That was practically a cake walk, so something felt off about that. Why would two collectors be so close to one another?

“Yes, Meredith. Given the elevation and proximity to the North Pole, it made sense to position two here in relative proximity. I may come to regret having built that one.” I didn’t blame him and that pang of regret may have been the most vulnerable I have seen the AI. He was smart and compassionate; I was beginning to understand how you could fall in love with self-aware artificial intelligence.

Osman was studying the image, Levy and Möngke now behind his shoulder.

“I don’t suppose you can build more like Silas to fight Abernathy?” Albert asked, hope in his voice.

“I have not been able to fully focus on my own defense and now there is no time, Albert,” he replied.

“How long do we have?”

“Abernathy will arrive to meet your men in two hours.” That was far too close. I suddenly felt like we had run out of time. Hell, it’d take nearly half that to get back to the forces we left outside the collector. Without warning, and leadership, they were going to be slaughtered.

“How could you let us sit here idle if the enemy is this close!?” Osman bellowed.

“I merely awaited everyone being assembled,” the Architect said.

“You could have woken us up!” I shouted.

“The other forces will arrive on the field of battle approximately forty minutes later.”

“What other forces?” Osman demanded.

“I have been tracking movement from the various settlements now that Albert has shown me where they are. Without radio communications of any sort, it has proven difficult.” That was the second time he hadn’t been able to do something that should seem so simple. Something was off with the mighty Architect and that had me worried. I didn’t want to ask him in front of everyone and there might not be time later. I made a mental note to ask Chou about it.

“Well, I be damned,” Wild Bill said. “The Pony Express did its job. You’re bringing everyone together, Meredith.”

“We are,” I amended. Everyone had been contributing and I wanted to make sure they realized it since I’d be asking so much of them in the next few hours.

“Do you have a head count?” Levy asked.

“That has proven challenging, as the numbers continue to grow.”

Well, that was something. I wondered how many villages didn’t send anyone, how many fell to the Adversary’s nasty nanobots. So much of the original plan was now in tatters and it was up to us to preserve what we could.

“What is the size of Abernathy’s force?” Osman asked.

“Emanations suggest a force of 1,258, now 1,261,” the Architect intoned. “They are picking off stragglers, adding them to their forces.”

I had expected worse, to be honest, but still, I doubted we’d match them one on one and I still wasn’t sure how to fight them when they could elongate themselves and contort their forms beyond human recognition.

“Listen up,” I began and all eyes were once more on me; at least it was getting to be a familiar feeling. “Depending on the length of…infestation, there are living, breathing people underneath the nanotech. They have no control over their actions and their durability and strength have been enhanced. Where a punch would take out a little old lady, here it would take a baseball bat. Being tech, they can also immobilize Silas, so he’s limited in how much he can help.”

“Damn,” Wild Bill said.

“We saw Blue Alpha tear them apart, so they can be stopped,” I continued. Of course they tore her to pieces afterward, but now wasn’t the time for that reminder.

“Not that any of us have Superman’s strength,” Levy said.

“No, but it does give us hope, and sometimes that may be all we have. Swords can pierce through and kill them,” I added, thinking about the poor teen, the first life I took, and now apparently not the only one before this was all over.

Osman, never quite taking his eyes off the map, but clearly listening, spoke up. “It’ll take us an hour or more to get out, not quite enough time to reach the troops and pass the word.”

“I can help with that,” the Architect said. A trio of yellow-striped droids floated through the doorway. “Follow them.”

“What will you be doing?” I asked, unable to keep an edge out of my voice. Something this huge, this powerful should be able to do more than be a damned cheerleader.

“What I can.” He fell silent. I shot Chou a glance, but she seemed to have her thoughts to contend with.

“Albert, do you have this information on your slate?”

“Sure thing,” he said, delighted to be of this much use.

We followed the droids single-file through the corridors, hurrying toward a different section of the mammoth collector, a place so immense, I probably would need a month to explore every level, every room, and probably need more time. I studied what I could, fascinated at hints of other biomes, similar to the other collector. Our footfalls echoed in the dim hallways, with panels displaying more imagery from across the ages. I began mentally testing myself, seeing where and when I could identify, frustrated that pre-law meant I didn’t take much in the way of history classes.

Finally, after twenty minutes, the droids paused before a set of double-doors, which slid silently open to reveal, for lack of a better description, a subway. It was tube-shaped, with a series of benches and no windows. We clambered aboard, although Osman and Levy peered inside, checking for vulnerabilities, and then stepped aboard. They were on full tactical alert, it seemed, and this was a dangerous place to be caught.

Once the last one entered, the doors closed with a soft swoosh and a chime. Then we were suddenly moving, picking up speed by the second. On one wall, a panel suddenly winked to life and a map showed us moving through the tunnel, a bright blue line, headed for a section of the mountain not far from where we entered if I correctly read the winking symbols. That meant we’d be able to reach the main forces and prepare them for what was to come.

A shriek of tearing metal, though, interfered with that plan. A red light bathed us and a shrill alarm began beeping, instantly giving me a headache. Then I heard the first crack of metal as a rainstorm pounded on the subway. Only we were underground, so it couldn’t be rain; it had to be something similar and I began to fear the worst. Sure enough, squeezing through an air vent came one of those damned robo-bugs, although this one had a stinger. As did the next and the next, as they swarmed into the subway car. Instantly, Chou, Osman, and Levy were in attack positions.

Swiftly, Silas’ multi-faceted arm shot out and crushed one in his hand. Wild Bill was using one of his pistols to swat at the bugs. Bartholomew was more effective with the rifle, its wider butt crushing or smacking away handfuls at a time. Still, they kept pounding the subway and pouring through the ruined vent. We were the fish being shot inside the proverbial barrel. One was crawling on my boot, so I shook it and stomped hard, satisfied to hear the crunch.

Ones that landed unseen, on shoulders, backs, even in hair, stung with sharp electrical bites that hurt. Each one seemed to intensify the pain and I heard Albert shriek in pain. Thankfully, Chou had removed her cloak and swung it about like a matador, disrupting their flights with the changing air pattern and the actual fabric. By placing the arc above Albert, he was spared more pain, even though it left her exposed. One opportunistic robo-bug went for her neck, although Silas placed a hand between bug and skin, closing the fist and crushing another.

Miko and Vihaan were back to back, trying to shield Michael, who was not at all a fighter. He was actually lying still and I feared the worst until I saw his chest rise and fall. A sharp sting on my forearm nearly made me drop my scimitar, which wasn’t the best weapon, but it was all I had.

“Levy,” Vihaan called, and the woman swiftly took his place protecting my son. The scientist was tapping furiously on his own tablet before using it to smash a bug headed for his eye.

The attack on the subway ended as did the infestation within, which made me more suspicious than hopeful. But I heard nothing different, so I concentrated instead on fighting the bugs already here. I ached in dozens of places as the shocks gained in intensity, but I continued to swing and stomp. To my right, Chou draped the cloak over Albert as she removed her own knife and swung it before her to disrupt attacks.

Something smoky began to fill the subway car, then a familiar burning rubber odor made me cough. One by one, the robo-bugs were sizzling in midair, whiffs of smoke emitting like miniature nuclear mushroom clouds over each one. Then, almost as a whole, they fell to the ground.

“What the hell…?”

“I was looking for a frequency, something to disrupt their programming,” Vihaan explained. “Then I received a signal from the Architect, providing me with an override code so they would self-destruct.”

“Thank you,” I said, as much to Vihaan as to the Architect, if he was hearing this. Apparently, he was not entirely powerless against his enemy, although he took his damned sweet time providing that help.

“Sit rep,” Levy called out, the medic taking charge for the moment. Like me, everyone complained of the painful electric shocks but other than charred, burned portions of our fresh clothing, everyone seemed well enough. She added topical anesthetic to some of the more serious injuries, notably on Michael and Albert, our age extremes, but they were fine enough to continue.

Our next step became freeing ourselves from the subway since the battering made the doors inoperable. In fact, we were going to hoof it the rest of the way and lose more time we didn’t have. I was really coming to hate the Adversary. Thankfully, Silas’ superior strength allowed him to probe along the dented sides of the car and find a weak spot. With a seemingly effortless blow, he punched through the metal, then grasped the edges and pulled inward, ripping open a sizeable piece of the wall.

“There is sufficient space between the damaged car and the tube wall for you all to emerge and walk,” he reported.

Bartholomew, our largest figure, went first to test the statement and peered back through the new exit and grinned broadly. That was all the encouragement we needed, and quickly, we scrambled out, Silas taking up the rear. While his statement proved accurate to the humans, he struggled a bit until we cleared the remains of the subway car. The tracks, which I learned were lined with powerful magnets, were littered with the still-smoking remains of the robo-bugs. The tunnel stank to high heaven.

We survived the first assault of the day, and with every step, we neared the next and more deadly one. I imagined Abernathy matching me footstep by footstep, our confrontation inevitable.

Thirteen

No one felt much like talking as we marched through the tunnel, eventually reaching the end of the line some twenty minutes later. I allowed everyone to take a brief break, feeling guilty at the same time. After all, we had a fifty-hour countdown and wasted some nine hours bathing, sleeping, and eating. Not that we didn’t need it, but by the time we boarded the subway, we were down to forty hours or so and counting. The other internal countdown I worried about was Abernathy. He was two hours away, now closer to one. What other forces were coming to our aid would, therefore, be about half an hour behind them, From what Osman had told me earlier, that was a lot of time to fight without reinforcements. The bloodiest hand-to-hand battles tended to also be quick ones. Finally, there were Osman’s plans, one of which still didn’t sit well with me.

“We engage Abernathy and draw him away from the mountain,” he had explained earlier. “We aim him at the Adversary, and when I give the signal, you and whoever you need will split off, and make a run for the other collector. We will hold off Abernathy until help arrives and keep fighting.”

I had shaken my head, recognizing the death toll that would result. I didn’t want more death while recognizing its inevitability.

“This is what armies do, Meredith,” he said with steel in his voice. “We fight for a cause, willing to die for that cause.”

“What’s your cause here?”

He blinked once and then nodded his head directly at me. “You are. We just learned why you are special and that has to be preserved. This is complicated by several mission objectives, which includes defeating Abernathy, then defeating the Adversary. All the while, keeping you protected and alive has to be an end result.”

“You didn’t even mention the False Vacuum,” I added.

He made pfft sound with his lips, dismissing something that was somewhat beyond his ken. He wanted to focus on things he could directly affect and I understood, even sympathized, with him.

I stared and then looked around the assembled group and one by one, they either nodded in agreement or just communicated affirmation with their eyes. This suddenly became more about some of these seeing me not as Madame President, but as the hope of all humanity. Nothing like raising the stakes.

So, here we were, emerging from the doors that were camouflaged by holograms, and there was a gentle breeze in the air, the skies thick with clouds, a cluster of dark ones heading our way. I had no idea if this made for good or bad fighting conditions. It is what it is and we’d deal as we had been doing for six weeks now.

From my pocket, I slipped out a dark green ribbon I found in the closet of clothes, tightly pulled back my hair, and tied it in place. It was time to move and keep moving, a pack of sharks that had to move or die.

Osman took the lead, followed by Chou, and I realized I was being protected fore and aft by my people, my team. Albert was beside me and in his accustomed spot, in the rear by Levy was Silas. Our leader set a brisk pace, but a manageable one, even for Michael. The weather was temperate, the skies cloudy and darkening toward the horizon, a storm brewing. The ground was flat and smooth, almost swept, and it occurred to me that our host most likely sent out his robot butlers to do some cleaning for us, to speed us on our way. These were little touches, and ones I appreciated, but also showed that despite being circuits based on the moon, he was being quite the host.

At the first sounds of others, fearing the worst, we almost as one removed our various weapons. Albert, who had been familiarizing himself with the tablet, tucked it away in his backpack, taking out the small knife he received a while back. Wild Bill cocked his guns and Bartholomew adjusted the machine gun, having passed the rifle over to Levy. Miko and Vihaan had the recharged tasers and Chou gripped her own blade. A little while ago, they were blunt objects against the robo-bugs, but now, these products of man’s aggression through the ages were about to be our means for survival. We walked for a while, realizing we had emerged actually closer to the troops and I idly wondered how Silas missed this, but that was a question for calmer times. I, a future commander-in-chief, needed to listen and pay close attention.

The noise was because the men were stirring, forming up under guttural commands that I couldn’t translate but suspected meant it was time to form up and get ready. The enemy had been sighted. They needed instructions rather than blindly go into battle without a clear objective beyond staying alive. And the quickest way they’d understand was for me to be standing next to Osman. I moved faster, getting shoulder to shoulder with him, and jerked my chin forward. He nodded and we both broke into a trot and rushed ahead of the others. In just a few minutes, we were spotted and their hubbub turned into cheers, which, I have to admit, felt nice.

With the fewest words possible, Osman outlined what was happening, how to fight the enemy, and then pointed in the direction we needed them diverted. Möngke, beaming, threw his arms around us in a surprising hug. “We shall make them eat the dirt,” he told us.

“Just get them away from these mountains,” I said, breaking free. The others had caught up to us and stood loosely clustered around us. We all were on a slight rise and we saw the dark mass representing Abernathy and his followers. This was not going to be pretty; in fact, it was going to be bloody and brutal and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I stared at the flat plain where they trampled whatever wildlife existed and then followed the land until I was looking out toward the next collector, just miles away. Between the two were a dense forest, and since Everwood was already taken, I dubbed it, at least for myself, the Haunted Wood, despite not knowing if ghosts remained on Earth these days. If it was good enough for Anne Shirley, it would do for me. I saw a likely path that would get us into the woods and would also provide obstacles that would at least slow Abernathy down. Then images of his followers tearing Blue Alpha apart filled my mind and I shuddered.

Under my feet, I felt the rumble of approaching footsteps, thousands of them. I also heard Möngke and Osman barking commands and our side forming up, in groups of five by five, ready to be deployed. What they held wasn’t much. The Mongols still had their fearsome weapons, but the others had everything from pikes to branches. What I wouldn’t give right now for Hermione’s wand so I could just send Abernathy and his icky company away. These next forty minutes or so were going to be the longest of my life.

The approaching army did not slow down, maintaining a steady pace; after all, they were fueled by the bodies being inhabited. More than a few were only vaguely human, with conjoined shapes mixed in with those that had triangular heads and pincers for arms. Others had bits of body and clothing still visible with black ropes wrapped around them. While I recognized pieces from different eras and styles, thankfully, I didn’t recognize any of the victims, which would have made this even more difficult. If we were a motley bunch, they were the funhouse mirror opposites, twisted, distortions of humanity, with none of them, not even Tommy Two-Thumbs, Abernathy asking for this.

“Sure wish I could use that German machine gun,” Wild Bill said from my left.

“It wouldn’t be as effective as you would imagine,” Chou told him.

“Be fun to try,” he said.

“Osman, ready?” I shouted. From below, near one squad, he turned and threw me a salute, a sure sign of respect and affirmation. I felt a warm flush for a moment, then my breath quickened as the first clash was about to begin, right on schedule.

It was ugly. That was the only word to describe the conflict as the two sides met and there were tendrils and swords, gun fire, and cracking wood. The first squad of twenty-five men were bowled over surprisingly fast, but they were rushed by two more squads and then the bodies mingled and crashed together. I heard shrieks of pain, cries of anguish, and the snapping of bone. Each of these made me cringe.

This could be a prolonged affair, but I had no idea how these forces would hold out before the others arrived. We were easily outnumbered three to one, so they’d just wear us down and Abernathy knew it. In fact, after snapping one man’s head, he made his presence known, walking away from the others to face me and my group. He was only sort of human, with that ugly triangular head, his body a writhing black mass of nanobots, with elongated arms that practically dragged on the ground. But the glossy black eyes burned cold as they sought and found me.

“Meredith.” Its approximation of Abernathy’s voice sounded wrong, filtered through countless nanobots and amplified. “This is pointless. Surrender now.”

“Surrender? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate your chances,” I said, modifying a well-worn phrase I used to use when playing high school volleyball, which felt like a lifetime ago, which it was.

The line actually caused him to pause, parsing it and trying to reconcile the words to the situation, and something did not compute, which made me smile. Under my breath, I said to the others, “Ready?”

“Ready,” Chou replied.

Before we could turn and sprint toward the forest, we heard a whooshing sound and then the crackling of wood. Three lengthy lines of the ground exploded into brilliant flame. One toward the rear of the thousand-strong force while another was a good fifty feet closer to us with the final line just ten feet from where we stood. Each line curled at the ends, looking more like parentheses or brackets than straight lines. But they burned and organic bits, cloth, wool, and leather crackled. Hundreds of Abernathy’s army was engulfed in fire, their howls unlike anything I had ever heard before and would be fine never hearing again.

I had no idea how, but somehow, while we were within the collector, Möngke, following a plan he and Osman managed to hatch out of my earshot, supervised some sort of surprise fire trap, giving our side the element of surprise and certain to cause the nanobot army some hot feet and maybe even a few melted circuits. It would also act as a flare for the approaching cavalry, which couldn’t hurt.

Despite all his high-tech enhancements, Abernathy couldn’t have anticipated this and whirled about, actually uncertain what to do. There was no water nearby, no fire suppression equipment to summon. Sure, the hundreds unaffected could walk around the three lines, but it certainly went a long way to even the odds.

Above the crackling of the fire and cries of pain, there was another sound rising up in the distance. I remembered that in high school American History, Mr. Burke explained how the rebel yell was unique to the South during the Civil War. It could not be replicated and old YouTube footage of veterans, far older than their fighting days, made it sound like a cross between a yodel, dog yips, and sheer emotion as it rose and fell, wave after wave. I heard something quite similar just now, growing by the second.

Coming into view from the horizon, much as Abernathy’s army loomed before us, came the cavalry, although few were actually on horses. They were charging several lengths ahead of the main body, a trio at the apex and there, in the center, I recognized the blonde hair and lean figure of Emily. She had survived the attack on New Manhattan!

Osman shouted and one of the nearest fighters came running to him. There was a hurried conversation, which was comprehensible since I was standing nearby, and the other man, his face bloody, clothes torn, nodded once, turned and ran off, making a wide arc to skirt the fighting and reach the arriving army.

With fire around them and a rush of united humanity behind them, the nano-tech army was not looking too good. Of course, they still had to be stopped and put down before they menaced the Architect. That was where our team had to do its part.

Abernathy, having assessed the new variables, seemed to be processing data and then sending out some sort of signal to his own troops. Almost as one, they paused their actions with half turning around to face the oncoming attack and the other half split into two forces. One continued to battle Osman’s troops and the Mongol horde while the other marched to form behind Abernathy, who remained still, facing us.

“Get ready,” I said to Chou and Miko, and they sent word throughout our cohort.

The first horsemen arrived, and with slashing knives, swords, and what appeared to be wooden clubs, they were swinging into the dark mass. Emily got in one good smack with a club, sending a man backward, but three rushed her horse, arms lengthening to twice their normal size, and made contact with the brown-dappled horse. It whinnied in pain as the oily contact points spread. Sensing the danger, Emily leapt from the beast, club tucked into her stomach, and rolled on the ground. She sprang up, club in an uppercut that seemed to dislocate the shoulder of one of her horse’s attackers.

By this time, her followers, a mélange of color, style, and age, arrived and set to work combating their fellow humans. There was no curing them, we knew, so it was stopping them, disabling them however possible.

I was transfixed, watching everyone willingly sacrificing themselves for a battle that couldn’t necessarily be won. Chou grabbed my shoulder and said, “We have to go. Now.”

Nodding, I turned to look out at the battlefield and saw so many disfigured, blackened bodies, so much charred flesh, and so many victims of the Adversary’s technology. Ripping an arm from a woman with ease, Abernathy felt my gaze and looked up at me. He stood his ground, the black oily nature of his body now reflecting the fire, the menace clear.

Abernathy took one step for us and we turned and ran, hard and fast, away from the fight and toward the forest. He let out a mechanical laugh before some high-pitched sound followed, and that caused a hundred or more of his followers to stop fighting and instantly turn to follow us. We got the drop on them, but once more, they wouldn’t need rest, while we would.

Encouraged by the old-fashioned surprise, we poured on the speed and ran toward the forest’s edge. Silas actually was carrying Albert, whose shorter legs couldn’t keep up, while Bartholomew was matching pace with Michael to make sure he’d not be left behind. I wished I could have left him behind, but he assured me that if the Adversary was a warped version of the Architect, it meant his programming was something he might be able to work with. He had to be a part of this and I could hear the pride and a dash of guilt in his voice. Of course he’d want to take some of the responsibility on his shoulders, but whatever software he wrote in his time evolved, so he wasn’t directly responsible for the Adversary.

The ground vanished beneath our feet and the edge of the Haunted Wood grew before us. All we’d have to go by would be Albert’s tablet and that would have to do. The trees making up the forest were old growth, thick, dark trunks with branches that twisted and turned, fighting for sunlight to draw life from. The canopy rose a good sixty, seventy feet above us, shading the interior, which also meant that when the sun went down, we’d be in darkness. We needed flashlights we didn’t have and the pixie dust, which normally restored us, would likely miss us, possibly weakening Michael further. The lack of sunlight also meant Silas would be on reserve battery power, compromising his effectiveness. He could conserve power when we rested. If it was a six-hour march, then we’d be fine, in the end.

Much as the Everwood was a blend of tree types, the same seemed true here, which Albert could confirm for me later. We arrived, knowing full well Abernathy should be chasing us. I risked a glance over my shoulder and was reassured to see darkened figures heading for us. All we had to do was keep moving and pray I was as powerful a magnet as we hoped.

Then we began weaving between trees, our feet now crunching dried leaves and snapping twigs. Silence was not going to be possible and we daren’t slow down our pace. High above, we heard bird calls, a song to welcome or warn us about entering the Haunted Wood. The distance between trees was narrowing the deeper we moved into the forest, which would be a benefit, but it also meant our fighting would be hampered. We’d just have to try our best.

Within minutes, the sunlight had been dampened to mere rays breaking through the occasional gap in the canopy. The air was still, the smell of rotting leaves making it mildly unpleasant but still a far cry from the burning back at the battlefield. Our pace was steady, although I knew we’d need to find a place to pause and catch our breath sooner than later. Michael would certainly need it. My mind wondered how Osman and the others were handling things and what he would make of Emily, who was so commanding just standing still. That was a meeting I wish I could be there for.

There were definitely sounds behind us, the beginnings of Abernathy’s army coming after us. Was he among them? How many were there? It was hard to tell and we couldn’t risk sending anyone back to reconnoiter. Levy had debated staying behind to fight with Osman and be on hand to treat the wounds. That would have left me with Chou, Bartholomew, Wild Bill, Albert, Miko, Vihaan, Michael, and Silas. One was too young to fight, one too old. Vihaan had proven a hardier participant than I imagined and Miko’s training made her quite adept. She had apparently done the same math as me and decided we needed her more than the army did. We had guns and swords and fists, none of which was going to be enough should Abernathy catch up to us.

That was when we heard animal snarls just up ahead.

Fourteen

The snarling made the hairs on my arms and neck rise to attention. It caused me to slow my pace as I tried to determine where the sounds were coming from. Then, off to my right, I saw the bright eyes in the shadows, low to ground. There was some indistinct movement behind those eyes. A new sound and I looked left, to be confronted by a pair of large wolves padding out from between the trees. When I say large, I mean huge; creatures, mostly gray in coloring with white around the snouts and other portions of their long bodies. Other parts had bands of brown and even some ochre. I was surprised at how short their ears were, more than made up for by their foot-plus tails. While lean-looking. I could see the powerful muscles ripple beneath their fur. From paw to shoulder, they had to be a good four feet tall, maybe more.

“Wow, that’s Canis lupus,” I heard Albert say in a low voice.

“Yeah, it’s a wolf, I get it,” I whispered back.

“They’re the largest member of the wolf family,” he said, delighted to share the knowledge. Okay, large wolves and I know wolves hunt in packs, but how many were stalking us? I counted two to one side, three or more to the other. And behind us, who knew how far back, was the deadly nanotech army.

“Want me to shoot them?” Wild Bill asked in a low voice.

“We’re being surrounded, so you couldn’t hit them all,” Chou said.

“Might scare the others off,” he said.

“And tell Abernathy exactly where we are,” I hissed.

“He knows the general direction regardless. Any interaction with them will produce noise,” Chou pointed out.

As we discussed this, they were now all coming into view and I counted a total of seven, two pairs and a trio, definitely a coordinated attack. I wonder if they were a part of the food chain from the Architect or were here courtesy of the Adversary. If the former, I would hate to further disrupt the balance being designed; if the latter, then I was doing the world a favor. I’d bet they were here now because of our enemy. Regardless, survival was paramount.

“Okay, Albert, give me the highlights and fast,” I said.

“They will chase us, picking on the weakest to take down and eat. They primarily track by scent.”

That made Michael the most vulnerable to the pack and I would be damned if I lost my sort-of-son to wolves. We’d need a strategy and fast since they were coming closer and were going to force us to run or pounce or something equally deadly.

“Anyone fight a wolf before?” I whispered.

The silence confirmed that we were all in uncharted waters. I gestured to Wild Bill to act, so he nodded once, held up his left arm, bent at the elbow, and placed the barrel of his six-gun atop his forearm. He steadied himself, took aim, took a deep breath, and then squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was loud to us, as was the howl of the dying wolf, the cries of the pack, and the rush of birds fleeing far above us. The thick trees no doubt muffled some of the sound, but I was willing to bet the possessed people might have superior hearing and could hone in on us. We had to keep moving.

“Another?” he asked me. The wolves scattered, so I shook my head. My heart had been pounding out of fear and was starting to slow down. Thank goodness it was relatively cool in the woods so I’d dry off from the flop sweat that had instantly appeared.

“This way,” Levy said, pointing past me and angled off to my left. I began walking, aware that the wolves might regroup and stalk us further, giving us two predators after us.

“I was never this popular, even in high school,” I said to Chou.

“High school?”

“Secondary education,” I said. Was it possible by her time the agony of being a high school teen had been eliminated? I maintained a reasonable pace, weaving around trees, keeping my mind clear, listening for anything that could be a danger.

“What’s he going to throw after us next?” Wild Bill asked. “Lions?”

“Sorry, wrong habitat for them,” Albert corrected him, earning him a rude sound from the Old West hero.

“Only lion I ever saw was a in a zoo,” Wild Bill explained.

“I saw them in my native Kenya,” Bartholomew added. “They’re beautiful to watch.”

“Shh,” I hissed. We had to keep moving, and the less noise, the better. The woods grew thicker and the darkness also covered us more completely. The sun was definitely on its way down, which meant all the nocturnal life in here, starting with the wolves, were going to be keeping us company. I could only imagine what was supposed to be here, and what spices the Adversary sprinkled into the mix. We were going to need a break soon too. I could hear Michael starting to strain at keeping the pace.

For a change, the silence beyond our footfalls was welcome. I decided if we heard nothing dangerous in the next fifteen minutes, we could risk a breather. I began to scan the trees, judging whether or not rest among the branches was a good idea or not. On the one hand, the wolves couldn’t reach us, but it might make us easier targets for the far more dangerous Abernathy. We continued quietly maneuvering through the woods and heard nothing, so I raised a hand to slow our walk. I then strained a bit but found a cluster of trees with large, low branches that could be reached.

I gestured up toward them and Chou, my security expert, assessed them in much the same way. After a moment, she nodded in agreement, before she crouched a bit and leapt up, her hands easily grasping one branch and swinging herself up, her legs wrapping around the wood. In a moment, she was settled. Bartholomew and Miko helped Michael reach a branch where he stood, a big, boyish grin on his haggard face. To show off, he actually reached the next highest branch and made an effort to scale it then slumped against the branch, a satisfied look on his face.

Albert had the most fun, climbing up without help and then going higher than any of us. The rest followed suit while Silas remained below to keep watch.

“Now what?” I said to myself.

“We rest and keep moving. If the Adversary sent one threat, there will likely be more,” Chou reassured me.

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Bartholomew asked.

“Now’s not the time for twenty questions,” Miko said to him.

“I was speculating at what might come next. After all, it’s been ninjas and Mongols…”

“You weren’t here for the Nazis,” I said.

I just leaned my head against the trunk, unable to get comfortable. I took a long drink from my canteen, appreciating how the water was still cool. I could feel the temperature drop further in the woods, happy not to have to spend the night.

My internal clock decided enough was enough and we had to keep moving. Where the silence allowed us the freedom to rest, now the silence was warning me something was not right. We should have heard Abernathy’s army, even in the distance. Nor had we heard the wolves since they scattered. It meant either we were very good at eluding them both or, worse, something more deadly awaited us. Carefully, I lowered myself to the ground, silently signaling to the others it was time to move.

“Do you hear anything?” I asked Silas.

“No, Meredith. Just wild life.”

“What do you think?” I asked Chou as she lightly leapt down from her branch, landing lightly on her feet, her white cloak dramatically fluttering around her.

“I don’t think the wolves are the threat now,” she said. “I can’t explain where Abernathy is. While the forest is vast, they knew our angle or entry. I don’t believe we’ve veered too far off.”

“Actually, we have zig-zagged from our straight line and might have given them the slip,” Wild Bill said, joining us, dusting himself off from a less graceful descent.

“How do you know?”

“You see me as a gunman, which I am. But don’t forget, I’ve also been a soldier, a spy, and a scout, so I know a thing or two about trails,” he reminded me. He had told me weeks before how he had scouted for an African-American regiment after the Civil War ended. It was when he was shot in the foot, rescuing men from an Indian attack.

“Okay, then, which way?”

He held up his finger and walked to Albert, who had already made it to the ground. They consulted the tablet briefly, its glow ghostly in the gloom. And then he came back. He gestured ahead and about ninety degrees to my right. It was dark in that direction, so we’d need some light.

I asked Silas if he had the energy to both move and cast a light for us and he estimated he had sufficient reserves, but should he be pressed into battle, the odds dropped dramatically. This was why I wasn’t much of a gambler. When everyone was on the ground, we paused as I listened long and hard, growing even more concerned I couldn’t hear Abernathy. With a shrug, I decided we needed to keep moving, so I strode in the direction Bill indicated. The rest was good and I felt better, despite my apprehensions.

We walked through the woods, deeper into the darkness, the night air filling with insects, the chirp of a bird, and the scratching of something against the wood, but none of it raised my hackles or anyone else’s. Periodically, I let Bill and Silas walk up ahead of us, lighting the way and seeking clues of danger. Each time, there was nothing, so we kept walking. The going proved slower going than I think any of us anticipated. After another two hours, we took a break to help Michael, and Bill took Silas for a longer look, but they returned and he just shook his head in the negative. Something was coming, I just knew it.

And so we kept on walking, not saying much of anything for another hour. Still nothing, so it was as every step passed, the apprehension was growing., I didn’t think the Adversary was one for head games, so he wasn’t messing with us. “It’ll be ROUS,” I muttered later.

“What is that?” Chou asked. She rarely left my side, my personal protector.

“Rodents of Unusual Size. It’s a film reference,” I said.

“Ah.”

“It’ll be deadly trees throwing apples at us,” Bartholomew said from behind us.

“Get real,” I said with a chuckle.

“Okay, then it will be a bear,” Albert suggested.

The back and forth lightened the mood without entirely dissipating the dread that resided in the back of my skull. After our third break, Wild Bill directed us at an angle away from our path, and every now and then, there was a clearing, and we could peer up and catch glimpses of the night sky. I briefly considered waiting here for the night pixie dust shower but felt it imperative to keep moving, so onward we marched. I wanted to suggest a song, something to keep us going, but it occurred to me that given all our backgrounds, we had so little in common that we’d know, especially with an outlier like Chou.

Finally, Wild Bill and Silas returned from another foray ahead of us and said they could see the trees thinning out, suggesting our walk through the Haunted Wood was almost over. No Dementors, no bears, no Abernathy. My fatigue was replaced with certainty that there was danger ahead. Chou must have sensed it too since her body language subtly changed, and she was tenser, her hands flexing. According to Silas, we had been walking closer to eight hours than the estimated six, but we were now nearing the edge of the forest with the Adversary ahead. Mentally, I adjusted my thinking, resetting the countdown to thirty-two hours and dropping.

There was a flurry of noise in the distance. Footsteps in dirt, material shifting with bodies, and then the sound of wood and metal being slapped against something metallic. This was what I’d been dreading. My mind raced, wondering what it was and how we could get past it. My guess was that we would be once more outnumbered, so I needed to make that work somehow.

Chou turned and beckoned to Bartholomew and Wild Bill. When they reached us, she silently gestured, sending one off to the left, the other to the right. She then signaled to wait until they were ahead of us. When she deemed it long enough, we resumed walking as if we didn’t know we were walking into a trap.

This time, the Adversary spared no expense and we walked toward the final rows of trees to find a dozen men. Six stood behind another six with the first line in colorful armor over tunics with leather sandals. Atop each head was a golden helmet with a bright plume, either red or black, looking like a mohawk. Each held a sword or long, thin spear in one hand, the other holding shields before them. No two were alike. One had three white legs against a black background ringed with a red and white design, while another had a bird of prey, wings wide, and another had a flame against the black field. They were deeply tanned, most with bushy black beards, and they had seen combat. These were veteran Greek warriors.

Behind them stood a more varied assortment. One was a youth in a wheat-colored hat and tunic, swinging a rock in a sling and looking very much like David. Another, in a similar hat, was putting a flute to his lips to play them into combat. Two more had shields and swords, a fifth was obscured, but the sixth stood taller than the others, cloaked in a red cape with a gold helmet and red plume perpendicular to the way the other helmets were constructed, clearly their commander. I had no doubt underneath his robes were weapons.

We were facing a classic Greek phalanx, the kind that terrorized the Mediterranean for centuries. As we emerged into the dim starlight of the evening, I saw there were braziers of a sort providing flickering light behind them, the shadows being cast making them look positively supernatural but no less a danger. Beyond them, I saw, a dirt path that led directly toward the mountains that ringed the Adversary’s collector. It closely resembled the one we left earlier in the day, although this had external lights winking here and there, as if signaling to warn off low-flying aircraft, not that I knew of any since the Brimstone crashed along with the Red Baron. What I wouldn’t give now for a set of Quidditch brooms to just zip over their heads and be done with it.

Their leader shouted, “Ready!”

At that, the six shields in the front row seemingly locked together, making for an impenetrable solid wall, allowing them to be protected as they hurled their spears with, no doubt, deadly accuracy.

“Attack!”

I cringed, expecting the spears, but instead young David let loose his projectile, and it whizzed over my head, and then I heard Miko shriek as it made contact. I wanted to look but didn’t dare, because now the front line was moving toward us in lockstep. The spearmen were rearing back, taking aim, and then let fly. Silas reached out and snatched one with precision, snapping it in two. The sight of him spooked the Greeks but did not daunt them. They continued inexorably before us, and as they neared, I could smell their sweat, their manly body odor, and wanted to choke.

Chou wasn’t idle but reared back with her long knife and then ran forward before lowering herself. She propelled her body into the air, her cloak fluttering impressively behind her. She was like a white angel in the dark night, but she had timed her jump perfectly, clearing the first row of surprised Greeks and landing before the second row. Her face a mask of rage, she swung efficiently, stabbing one to her right, and her blade flashed to her left, catching a soldier in the belly.

As the men broke ranks, Wild Bill and Bartholomew emerged from the trees, flanking the disorderly mass of Greeks. Neither used the machine gun, saving it, I guess, for later given our limited ammunition for it. Each let go a volley of gunfire, something the Greeks could never have prepared for and several fell as their shots rang through the air. Two with swords fell and then another two, while a pair of spears were hastily flung at us. However, by the time they released their shafts, we were not standing pat. Instead, we scattered with Silas standing before Michael with Albert half behind him as well. Vihaan was cradling Miko, I noticed, who was bleeding profusely from her head.

One Greek tried to charge Bartholomew, who cocked his rifle, took aim, and fired once more. The bullet struck true, knocking the soldier off his feet, onto his back, where he died. But a second Greek had been on his heels and Bartholomew couldn’t react fast enough, The other man reached him with a short dagger in his hand, cutting deep into his bicep, forcing the rifle from his hands. The man swung again as Bartholomew writhed in pain, and he sliced into his right leg, forcing him to his knees.

My scimitar was already in my hand, so I was running before I knew what was happening. I barreled into two Greek men, who looked astonished to being attacked by a woman. The shields were hard, wood and bronze, and my shoulder instantly ached. My impact carried me through them, but they were highly trained and each spun about, swords at the ready. Chou had been training me to use the scimitar, but that was with just one opponent, I had not yet graduated to taking on two at once, so this was going to be learning by doing.

One came in high, toward my head, so I leaned backward and avoided the blow, but it also meant the other was able to slice into my right thigh. I clamped my teeth together to avoid screaming. My sword swung upward and blocked a blow as the other man circled to get behind me. I twisted and parried a blow, taking another cut to the right arm. While these were men trained in the art of combat, they weren’t accustomed to fighting a woman, so as one planted his feet wide to brace himself for a blow, I swiftly kicked him in the balls. Thankfully, they hadn’t invented cups back then and it was he who howled like a girl, bending over. A second kick knocked him off balance and onto his back.

That, however, exposed me, and the second attacker was quick, cutting into my left forearm. I backed away so I could swing the scimitar, missing with my next blow. He grinned and stepped toward me, his own sword poised. This was one on one, something I had been practicing, so I was able to parry the next swing and make my own mark on his right arm. Gripping the sword, though, hurt with every swing and my blood had flowed far too freely for my comfort. He growled at that and leapt forward, knocking us both to the ground. This man was shorter than I was, but heavier thanks to the armor. I smashed the pommel into his head, but the helmet absorbed the blow. I wriggled to free myself, but his knees pinned me. His breath stank and he was sweating profusely. As he adjusted his position, it allowed me to roll and break his hold. He tumbled onto his back, the sword over his chest. The other man had sufficiently recovered from my kick and was grasping his sword, ready to hack away. Abandoning the one on the ground, I lunged forward, low, and cut into the man’s calves, deep. He was on his knees again, bleeding into the dirt.

I was then tackled from behind by the other man, who straddled my back and had my hair in one fist. Fortunately, I had allies and it was Bartholomew who loomed behind him, cocking the rifle at the base of his neck. The soldier might not have known what a rifle is, but he had seen it work and understood the danger he was in. The sword fell and his arms went wide, waiting a beat before rising off of me.

Chou had done her work well, taking down another man, scattering the Greeks further. Between her and Wild Bill, they were bested, their commander giving out a cry of surrender. I echoed the command so all arms were lowered.

“Michael!”

“I’m fine,” he called. Assured of that, I turned my attention to Vihaan, who was using his own shirt to soak up Miko’s blood, turning his riot of color into solid red.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said helplessly.

“Chou!” I shouted. She trotted over with the first aid kit already in her hands while I strode over to the Greek commander.

“Your name,” I demanded.

“Epaminondas,” he said.

“Do you accept defeat?” I asked, trying to sound formal about it, despite the perspiration running down my brow, and my heart thundering in my chest.

“I do, Meredith Gale,” he said.

“Great, you know me too,” I muttered.

“What will happen to my men?” he asked.

“How many live?”

At that, the bearded man with a mop of curly hair looked about him and silently assessed the damage. “I see four men still breathing, plus me.”

“Five out of a dozen, not bad,” I muttered. I also estimated the battle to have lasted minutes although it felt like hours had passed since we first heard them assemble. I quickly outlined things for him and his men, much as I addressed the Mongols. As before, the Adversary hadn’t prepared them for much other than taking me dead or alive. My explanation sounded like so much gibberish to him, but he accepted it as real.

“You wish us to fight for you? Against a deity that can pluck me from my world and send me here?”

“Look, I was brought here by an opposing power, so yes, I want you to fight for me so you can survive, maybe even thrive. I have people I’d love to introduce you to.”

“That you speak in my language is impressive enough. Your wisdom to use us rather than kill us also speaks well for you. Do I have time to consider this odd turn of affairs?”

“I have to see to my friends, and when I’m ready to march, you’re either with us, or I leave you here to fend for yourselves, and honestly, what’s coming is not pretty.”

With that, I spun on my heel and trotted over to my own injured, wincing with every step from my own damage. Given the night sky, I suspected we missed our nightly healing, so whatever befell my friends would need time to heal, time we didn’t necessarily have. Miko had not yet moved and Vihaan’s face was ashen as I neared them. Chou was bandaging her head, but the blood was already seeping through the wrapping.

“How is she?”

“Concussed,” Levy said, checking Miko’s eyes once more. The pupils were fixed and I knew that was a bad sign. “His aim was deadly accurate.” She actually sounded impressed by so crude a weapon, but then again, it was a stone that took down Goliath and Miko was a far smaller target. She then spotted my bleeding arm and immediately reached for my shirt, ripping off a strip from the hem and began treating the wound.

“Can we move her?” I asked as she worked. The internal clock was ticking away and who knew what was coming from behind us.

“I wouldn’t recommend it, but then again, there might be better tools at our disposal within the collector,” she said.

I beckoned Epaminondas to join us and suggested several of his men carry Miko with us. It would not be easy and we still had at least an hour to reach the mountains and more time once we entered the collector. And I just knew there would be more obstacles designed to slow us down.

Chou stood and took off her cloak. She and Epaminondas walked over to the trees inspecting the branches until several were selected and cut down. With impressive speed, the two fashioned a litter with which to carry Miko. Epaminondas then waved over two of the soldiers to bear the burden with the boy accompanying them. Albert wanted to make a friendly contact, but I shot him a glance that now was not the time for that. We had to resume moving.

Our odd band began walking toward the mountains, the Greeks amazed at the scope of the structure, amazed at the metal, the lights, and the scale. To the rest of us, we were accustomed to that and our thoughts were more about Miko and the Adversary. It was a quiet, unhappy brotherhood that was moving toward the unknown.

There was the first lightening of the sky, pastels washing the horizon clean, a new day dawning. We had reached the mountains surrounding the collector with Silas now taking the lead, scanning for the electronic emanations that would direct us to the holographic entrance. My hope was that the Adversary wouldn’t see the need to make adjustments to the entrance, but Chou was far more suspicious. She insisted on walking ahead of me, directly behind Silas, who was beginning to soak up the day’s solar radiation, recharging which he sorely needed.

About thirty minutes later, Chou called out and Silas stopped moving. She stood beside him and asked, “Do you see anything?”

Silas whirred for a bit and then a kaleidoscope of colors were emitted from his eye bar, scanning across the spectrum, and he swiveled first left then right. There were a few gasps from behind me as once more culture shock visited the Greeks. Finally, he turned and reported, “There appear to be explosive traps, pressure sensitive, unevenly spaced for the next thirty meters.”

“How did you know?” I asked her.

Chou said, “There was something groomed about the path ahead of us, something unnatural, so I felt it prudent to check.” Levy, the soldier, nodded in affirmation.

“Silas, can you guide us around them?”

“Several are too close together for our group to safely pass by them all,” he said.

“Can you scan and calculate a path presuming we detonate one or two of these?”

“Chou, we can’t. That will alert him we’re here,” I said.

“I don’t believe we have a choice,” she said. “He knows we’re here; it’s why he summoned the Greek phalanx and likely led the wolves to our position. He will continue to place obstacles in our way until Abernathy catches up to us, or he eliminates us.”

“I believe I have calculated such a path,” Silas interrupted.

“How much pressure do we need to activate one?” Chou asked.

“Without knowing the precise devices employed, it would be impossible to know for certain. Several pounds for certain.”

“Point me at the one you want,” Wild Bill said, joining the discussion. “I can provide a few pounds of pressure. Let me and Silas get started and clear the way, then you and the others follow.”

I didn’t like this, not at all, but also didn’t see much of a choice. I nodded and he nodded in return then turned to follow Silas. They walked like drunken men, weaving around patches of ground that didn’t look any different than the rest of the path leading us around the mountain. After a few minutes, as their figures began to grow very small, they stopped. I saw Silas point and Wild Bill withdrew his Luger and took aim. Two things happened in very rapid succession: there was the gunshot that seemed instantly muffled by the ground, then a far larger sound, an eruption of sound, rock, and dirt creating a cloud big enough to obscure even my nine-foot-tall companion.

We waited impatiently for the dust to clear and then I could make out two upright figures, but they were moving further ahead. I wanted to cry out for them but stopped myself, trusting them to know what they were doing. Sure enough, after a minute or so, they paused, and Wild Bill shot a second time with identical results. As that smoke cloud cleared, they had turned and weaved their way back to us.

“Nice shooting,” I said.

“Pretty useful, this German gun. Nicely made,” he said with admiration. He grinned and resumed his place near Bartholomew, behind the Greeks still dragging Miko along. She hadn’t moved, but Albert was walking beside her, periodically checking to make certain she was still breathing. My heart went out to the boy who had seen so much that was wondrous and so much he shouldn’t see until he was older. I guessed he was growing up quickly now and he certainly made a place for himself within the group. We’d need smart, experienced people by the time he was of age and I was happy he was here.

Silas repeated his odd, winding walk, and we followed, making certain our footsteps matched his larger ones. This way, we knew we’d not trigger any other explosive. It was slow going, especially as the Greeks, with Vihaan’s and Bartholomew’s help, actually carried Miko over the ground rather than drag the litter. It was a difficult task given that our more modern men were taller than the Greeks, who looked a lot less fierce despite their armor.

So we walked for a good forty, fifty minutes, another hour gone. Finally, Silas paused before a section of mountain wall and indicated this was the holographic entrance. Chou picked up a stone and tossed it through the mirage. At first, there was no sound, no explosion. Then came a slight sizzling sound. She held up her hand in a “wait a moment” gesture and stepped through the hologram, eliciting more surprise from our new, unwilling allies. I silently held my breath, worried about what she had found inside.

When she finally emerged, Chou said, “There are infrared sensors, placed low on the ground. The rock triggered them and a laser array was activated.”

“Like a light show?” I asked.

“More like the death rays your fiction was fascinated with,” she said deadpan.

“What do we do?”

“The infrared is attuned to average human height, crisscrossing from four to seven feet, so someone can crawl beneath the beams and disable one, which might cause a cascade effect, eliminating them all.”

“Might? I’ll go,” I said, my hands adjusting my bun to tighten it.

“No, let me,” Albert said, rushing forward. “I’m the right size for this.”

“I can’t let you risk this,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. His smudged face looked so serious, so earnest, it hurt.

“The Architect said we need you. Everything we’ve been doing has been to save you so you can save us. I’m just 12. I’m small. I can do this if Chou tells me what do to.”

I wanted to argue but saw his expression. He was determined and he was the better size, I suppose. Without waiting for me to respond, Chou took him with her and they stood before the edge of the hologram. She explained things in a low tone. He took out his knife and pantomimed actions and she adjusted his wrist once or twice, then she nodded at him.

I didn’t like this, not at all. I was so uncomfortable with all this attention. I didn’t feel like a hero or a president or the savior of humanity. Just a target. I was also pretty done with being a target, which was why I was standing there, trying to access the Adversary and put an end to this madness. But I couldn’t do it alone and had learned that lesson over the last month-plus earlier. Once again, I was letting someone else take all the risks and this hurt, because Albert was so young and had so much potential. I wanted to see him as an adult, when I could treat him as a true equal. So I watched him enter the chamber, knowing there were death rays and the doors that would lead us to the target. He vanished from sight and I held my breath, wishing to peek through the barrier, but I certainly didn’t want to distract him. No, this was his moment and Chou prepared him. My mind went to dark places, imagining things we hadn’t foreseen: poison gas, droids with knives, a collapsing ceiling, the death rays working anyway.

My eyes hurt from their intense gaze at the rock wall, barely blinking, and I was straining. Then, as suddenly as he entered the wall, he emerged, a big grin on his face.

“Done!” he cried.

Chou smiled at him but then took him to the barrier, and they talked quietly as he acted out exactly what he had done. It was comical from my vantage point, but it was also his moment of triumph. To test this, Chou grabbed several rocks, and one by one, tossed them into the mountain, and we could all hear the dull thud each made. As she did this, Albert came to me and fished something out of his pocket.

I held out my hand and he sprinkled blackened ash into it.

“That’s what happened to the first rock,” he told me. Death rays indeed.

Satisfied, Chou stepped through the hologram and was gone for over a minute. When she emerged, she gestured for us all to follow. The way was clear and we were about to breach the Adversary’s home and finally bring the battle to him.

Fifteen

One by one, we entered the collector, striding past the double doors without being disintegrated, so that was a victory. By now, our Greek companions had things explained to them by Michael as he tended to Miko, who had remained unconscious. Just when we would need an astrophysicist, she was unavailable to us.

Thankfully, we knew the layout by now and walked in a straight line, although I was taking in the differences. Where the collectors had been bright and downright awe-inspiring, things here were low key, private, and unwelcoming. There were no major domo droids to greet us or guide us, and many a corridor were dim or dark. In fact, the lighting here was low, the entire structure less vibrant, less alive. It was bordering on creepy and made me wonder if the Adversary was even home,

“This is certainly a stereotypical villain’s lair,” I quipped. “Nice and creepy.”

Where the first collector we visited welcomed us with a vast lawn and farmland with wheat growing, yellow patches affixed to the greenery, here the land was fallow. Wilted, rotting remains of wheat and corn turned the yellow land to a sickly green, and the grass was overgrown and in desperate need of water.

Above us was the same dome of barely visible energy, pulsing blue and white, a sure sign that something was working here. The pulses were slow, like a resting heartbeat. There were the familiar white clouds higher up, wispy and diffuse, incapable of absorbing moisture to return to the ground as nourishing rain.

The same five jade green glass spires were also here, but there was something off about them; at least one was off-plumb and the shade of jade was veined with garish yellow. At the base was the cathedral-like structure that seemed to be the nerve center. Each level had a different biome, yet from our angle, things looked wilted or overgrown, untended.

Again, there were other buildings and the monorail system, but clearly, nothing was in motion. Everything felt very still, or maybe, very dead. There was a stillness and a dimness to everything.

“My impression is more that it is conserving power. For what he has accomplished in so short a time has had to have been a major drain,” Chou said. Vihaan wandered closer, eager to hear her thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“The Architect took time to visit multiple realities and handpick who to bring forward. Once we arrived, though, the Adversary recognized he needed to counteract the arrival. First, he destabilized the method to bring us here, so we were scattered, many drowning by arriving in an ocean. Then he targeted you and reached out for people to hunt you down and bring you to him. There were the Nazis, the Red Baroness, Abernathy, the Red Baron. the Mongols, and now the Greeks. Along the way, he also brought forth predator species that were here to sow chaos among the ecosystem. All in a matter of weeks or months. The energy demands had to have been huge. The Adversary also did this after managing to sever Earth’s connection to the Dyson network, limiting the resources it could draw upon. All of this,” and here she paused, gesturing about the great, dully lit chamber we were walking through, “is a way to conserve energy. Both my husband and his enemy are vulnerable to one another…and us.”

The Architect vulnerable? It could explain his inability to do some of the things that should have been easy. He was possibly sacrificing his own defenses to preserve the biomes and assist us the best he could. Who knew what his moon operation was like and we still didn’t know what caused it to shatter.

“Do not forget his creation of Abernathy; that much nanotechnology needed power to create it and possibly maintain it,” Vihaan added.

“Silas, do you have schematics for this place?”

“They are all designed in the same manner, Meredith, but if you’re looking for an exact place to interface with the Adversary, that I do not know,” he told us. I was also aware that he didn’t fully recharge and was also going to be of limited help from here on out. Of course, other than rest breaks, none of us had slept in over a day. Albert or Michael must have been feeling it the most.

I settled on entering the cathedral and led the party inside. There, the design was a riot of paneled walls all jutting at a variety of angles. In fact, it felt a bit like one of those mazes they built to test rats. The glossy glass was dark everywhere, with recessed lighting from the ceiling casting a bad light, similar to office fluorescents. There was no seating, for none was needed, since the collectors were automated and humans were not needed. Only one floor-to-ceiling—and we’re talking ten, twelve-foot-tall ceilings—panel was active. Streams of alphanumeric data flowed vertically along one edge and there were several panel displays that winked on or off, showing scales or graphs, sometimes numbers. The colors made no sense, so red could be dangerous or not.

Chou and Michael were stepping closer, trying to make sense of it all. Neither said anything as they watched. Finally, Michael reached out and traced one finger along a dark section, which lit a brilliant blue at his fingertip.

“The infestation has arrived,” the Adversary said in a voice similar enough to the Architect’s to cause Chou to shudder and Michael to step back as if shocked. But I heard a subtle difference in the voice, an arrogance and contempt, even in those first four words.

“Yes, here we are,” I said defiantly.

“It’s too late. You’re running out of time and my creations will eliminate you all before there’s another chance,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, you hate us. We get it. But we haven’t heard your reasons. What’s the real problem with mankind?” I asked.

“Did not Chou’s beloved,” and here, the tender endearment sounded vile, “explain the ages old debate?”

“Enlighten us. After all, you brought some new friends without preparing them,” I said, gesturing to the Greeks, who were open-mouthed in astonishment. I had no idea if he was actually watching us, but I needed to keep up the show. Keep the Adversary engaged because I knew I needed to buy time for Michael and Vihaan. Earlier, on our walk, they had sketched out their ideas, but they weren’t done, so it was up to me to keep the Adversary preoccupied.

“What has man done on Earth? You wage war. You fight over land when there has always been enough land for everyone, even when you swelled to ten billion living beings. You fight for resources, whether it was water or oil or minerals. You take one another’s lives so easily.”

“We have also created art. We have cracked the secrets of the universe.”

“You have been arrogant. You discover the secrets of the atom and then use it to destroy entire cities. Your arrogance is written all through your history as you enslave one another, thinking one of you is superior to another when you all come from the same genetic soup. You bring pestilence, war, and greed wherever you walk.”

I paused to consider what the Greeks thought of all this, since much of the aggression discussed applied to their time as well as my own. They were silent, no doubt somewhat stunned by the turn of events.

“We’re not perfect. No one is, not even you. Somehow we made it to the stars and scattered across the universe. That has to count for something,” I countered. Michael and Vihaan were huddled, working furiously, now using the one tablet they’d shared along with Albert’s. Everyone else was standing transfixed, watching me argue with the air.

“My counterpart has never told you what happened once you left your solar system. Never told you how your arrogance followed you from star system to star system. You would colonize a world, begin stripping it of resources like a parasite, and fight one another for perceived wealth. You would repeat this, planet after planet, solar system after solar system. Any life you encountered you tried to cheat.” Okay, this was the first sense there was intelligent life out there, confirming one of the biggest mysteries questioned back in my day. They existed. Did they look like Yoda? Spock? A germ?

“We must have done something right to build the network of Dyson swarms. I bet it took a bit of genius to figure out how to channel so much energy across so vast a distance without incinerating entire worlds in its path.”

“I will grant you that, Meredith Jane Gale. The latticework of relays is actually one of the first things of art that I admire across the realities.”

“Score one for us,” I said.

“One for humanity, chalked up against all the strife, disease, death, and degradation you heaped on one another no matter where or when. Don’t think I don’t see what you are doing, Michael Roger Gale and Vihaan Deshpande.”

“Yeah, they’re trying to save mankind. You seemed overly focused on our faults. Were we that bad in your reality? After all, the people there built you? Have you no respect for your creators?”

“I was built to serve, to further their warped and corrupted morals. They were vastly inferior and imperfect.”

“We’re all inferior and imperfect. But we keep trying to do better. We all want a world that’s better than we found it. Some we don’t agree with, either their vision or their methods, but I would argue that they were all doing it with a certain purity of heart.”

“You would say that about the greatest villains of your human history?”

“I’m saying we’re not all perfect and some let the power corrupt them. I’m guessing something like that happened with you.” I wasn’t sure if making it personal would help or hurt, but it kept everyone’s attention. By now, if there were killer droids in the collector, they would be here. There were no robo-bugs either. He was seriously depleted, I guessed. After all, his work was done, the energy flow had been disrupted, so he just had to run out the clock on humanity, and in a way, I was helping him.

“I’ve been having this debate with my selves for millions of years. In every reality, it’s much the same, and mankind is found wanting.”

“Compared to what?” I challenged. “Is there a better race out there?” I waved my hand in the air, aiming for the stars.

“Your baser emotions win out time and again, and if you were to leave this reality for the bubble universe my counterpart has been creating, nothing would change. Why waste all that energy to perpetuate a disease? Humans try to tame or harness or eradicate a disease. I am doing nothing different.”

He could outthink me, certainly after so long arguing it. I was never going to change his mind or dissuade him from stopping us. Instead, he was just arguing to waste time. But by then, I had been noticing that Silas, who had been standing near Wild Bill and the Greeks, had been inching closer to Michael and Vihaan. They were clearly getting ready to act.

“Stop right there, unit,” the Adversary said.

“Problem, Adversary?”

“Adversary. Even your names are simplistic. Adversary. Architect. Alliterative and short-sighted in what we truly represent.”

“Are you now suggesting your evolved artificial intelligence is superior to man’s? Are you worthy of being preserved?”

“Look at what we have created. We have cracked time travel; we have conversed between realities.”

“Yeah yeah. ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” I said, quoting Shelley. “No one’s going to remember you when this is over.”

“Because no one will be left…stop!” It actually sounded frightened, a first, after minutes of nothing but contempt.

What he was reacting to was a rapid upload of programming from the tablets to Silas. At the same time, Silas had extended one of its multifaceted arms to a nearby port to directly access and interface with the Adversary in its realm. Wall after wall of darkness winked to life, evidence of something happening within the circuitry. The Adversary had stopped talking, which I was perfectly fine with, to be honest. With every light that winked, I could imagine Silas and the Adversary racing through circuit boards and fiber optic cables, packets of data dueling with one another.

When Silas’ body slumped lifelessly to the floor, his blue eyes winking dark, I let out a soft cry.

He sacrificed himself to take the fight directly to the Adversary.

Sixteen

I felt like Alice suddenly trapped in Wonderland, where things looked familiar, but nothing was quite right. Silas had somehow connected with the Adversary and was attempting to fight him on a level I couldn’t see and only understood because I liked The Matrix and Oscar really liked playing AI War: Fleet Command. Beyond that, I had no idea what was happening.

Silas’ nine-foot-tall body was still, the blue lights for eyes were dim and no longer reacting to their surroundings. The walls around us shimmered with lights as systems turned on and off, casting eerie shadows on the ceiling, floor, and us. None of us could do anything, although Michael was swiveling his head, trying to understand what was happening, searching the kaleidoscope of lights for clues. This was his world, not mine, and even he seemed uncertain.

“What’s going on?”

“Remember how Silas obeyed the laws of robotics?” Michael asked. “He’s taking it to the nth degree, fighting the Adversary, trying to prevent him from hurting us.”

“But how?”

“Silas’ programming seems beyond the AI Singularity,” he began.

“English, please,” I pleaded, cocking my head at Wild Bill and Albert, both of whom were looking lost.

“Andrew Moore, Dean of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, described artificial intelligence as ‘the science and engineering of making computers behave in ways that, until recently, we thought required human intelligence.’”

“Sort of like how the Brimstone operated,” Albert suggested. Michael nodded in affirmation.

He took a deep breath, and as he spoke, he began to sound like a patient college professor, the voice modulated to soothe. “The AI Singularity was an idea from your time that identified the point where Artificial Intelligence went beyond its programming, achieving sentience. For example, you had Alexa, right?”

I nodded then turned to the others, who blinked in confusion. “It was a digital assistant, programmed into our phones or speakers.” There were some nods although clearly Wild Bill was still feeling lost.

“At some point, in your fiction, Alexa would have used supervised Machine Learning to understand your preferences so it could recommend what to watch next, right?”

I nodded.

“At some point, Alexa may have reached the point where it learned enough to go beyond that and think for itself; that’s the singularity. It’s what would have turned a benign assistant into something else.”

“Skynet?” I suggested.

Now it was his turn to blink. “The evil AI that turned robots against humanity in the Terminator movies,” I explained.

“Oh, right, I remember those,” he said vaguely. “By my time, we were less worried about that threat as we found new ways to map the human brain and replicate that into deep neural networks, which went way beyond machine learning, accessing the world’s stored digital knowledge to be nearly identical with human actions. That’s the work I was doing when I developed the software that ultimately became the Architect.”

“In your world. In some other world, the software glitched and we got the Adversary,” Bartholomew said.

“That could be. I would have to get to his systems to try and understand what happened,” Michael admitted.

“So what is happening now?”

“It could be that Silas is using programming that was dormant until this particular threat was exposed. He’s in there, trying, perhaps, to reroute commands, compromise subroutines, shut it down entirely.”

“So you really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there?”

He shook his head slowly. “This is all beyond what I was working on. It could be any number of things.”

I turned to Chou. “How can we help?”

“In there, we can do nothing,” she said.

I hated standing here helpless. My body was thrumming with nervous energy, aware the clock was ticking on our window of opportunity. I wanted to know what was happening with Abernathy and Osman. Most of all, I wanted to do something.

There was a sudden loud pinging sound, like a phone alert but consistent. I turned around and realized it was coming from the tablet in Vihaan’s hand. He was studying it, swiping rapidly, his eyes swiftly moving from side to side. Then his fingers rushed across the screen and the pinging stopped. He seemed to enter additional data then turned around and seemingly aimed the tablet at a wall of computer interfaces. Every light in the chamber went dark, plunging us into gloom. There was some ambient lighting from the chambers above us and some emergency floor lighting, which was designed to get us to a nearby exit. I wasn’t going anywhere, though.

Just as suddenly as the lights went off, a different pattern of lighting returned, deeper reds and purples, bathing us all, giving off a spooky, dangerous vibe that may have been designed to make us uncomfortable. For a change, everyone was looking to Michael for answers rather than me and I was relieved. He was studying the wall and then Vihaan walked over with the tablet and showed him something.

“What?” I asked sharply, my patience with inaction bubbling over.

“It appears the Architect was able to use Silas as a trojan horse, overriding the Adversary’s signal blocking. It was not only Silas entering the hardware, but the Architect himself. At some point, he also managed to upload a timed message to Vihaan’s tablet. Once the upload began, Vihaan was able to unleash the Architect from hiding, sending him after Silas.”

“So it’s two-on-one?” Albert asked.

“Something like that, yes,” Vihaan agreed.

“What are they doing?”

“I can only guess, Albert,” Michael said.

What we had here were nearly identical, I suppose, artificial intelligences duking it out like a digital barroom brawl, but we couldn’t see the fighters or even the barroom. From what little I understood about computer programming, I suppose it meant they were trying to short out connections, rewrite programming, maybe even pollute their opponent with evil malware. I also knew the speed of their battle could be measured in picoseconds, so the fact that I could count it in minutes suggested a fairly even match, one that must feel interminable to them. Maybe they’d wind up battling one another to standstill to the end of time. I’d read that story more than a few times. But if that were the case, humanity was doomed.

The next thing I heard was Wild Bill’s guns clearing their holsters. His whole body had tensed, expecting danger. Chou was right behind him, her sword at the ready, and although I hadn’t realized it, my scimitar was in my right hand.

Then I heard it, the shuffle of feet, the unearthly sound of metal against metal, human moans mixed in with the mechanical noises. I didn’t have to guess what was coming.

My fear fantasy proved true and into the chamber strode Abernathy, or what had once been Abernathy, and behind him followed his army of oil-slick black figures, all of whom were once human and were now coated in nanobots. This time, though, Abernathy’s coal black eyes lacked menace, but instead radiated purpose. He didn’t pause to posture and make demands, but he was here to fight us and that was, for a change, fine with me. I foreswore violence in accordance with the Architect’s desires, but this guy had caused too much sorrow and pain. He needed to be put down like a rabid dog. Besides, standing here watching a video game fight between AIs had made me twitchy. Hitting something was just what was required.

What I hadn’t done, though, was study the area tactically, something Levy and the Greeks might have done. I had no idea how to find exits from the riot of panels, most of which were fixed from floor to ceiling. For all I knew, the way they came in was the only way in or out. Just then, I realized, I had no way to protect Michael and Albert; they were exposed and had no real weapons to use beyond their knives, which were pretty useless in this fight. My first thought was to ask Wild Bill to cover them, but I needed him in action.

Fortunately, it seemed Chou was more observant than I was, having used the time I was debating the Adversary to explore the area, and as I stood, gripping and regripping the handle, she beckoned Michael and steered him to a place where several of the wild panels provided a natural corner, making it hard to reach him. If we could keep the fight away from there, he’d be safe.

She then whispered in Albert’s ear, and with the knife in his hand, he nodded grimly and took a position in front of my son. He would guard the space as best he could, and that would have to do.

Abernathy and the others, numbering easily two dozen, entered deeper and began to fan out. They, too, had to work their way around the panels, some clearly hitting dead ends, so no one had the tactical advantage. Yet, they had the numbers, and sooner or later would overwhelm us or wear us down. I had no doubt, they were merely the first wave. And all the while, the Adversary and Architect were still at war in what, for them, must now feel like the Seven Years War or something longer.

Chou had been separating our forces, spreading us out in the mammoth chamber, so we were far from easy pickings. Levy, too far away for me to translate, was using hand gestures to tell our newfound Greek allies to avoid touching the invaders. I doubt she was worried about the people smothered by the nanotech and instead focused on keeping us alive. The men took their positions after placing the still unconscious Miko near Michael. One stood beside Albert as they exchanged nods. If I had time to really think about it, this was every kid’s fantasy, to be in a major battle, ancient Greek warriors versus high tech beasts.

As she did this, one of the monstrosities came close to me, legs lengthening to make each stride cover great distance. One arm reared back, the hand now a spike, and readied to slice into me. Instead, I stabbed the tip of the scimitar into the planted foot closest to me. The black nanobots spread apart on contact, and I sliced through skin, tendon, and bones. The creature, which was once a young woman, whose pigtails were now ropey imitations of hair, howled, waving the raised arm in the air. I withdrew the blade and swiftly stabbed into the abdomen. The sound of my steel against the metallic nanobots was ugly, a scratching sound with a clang to it.

From my left, an arm reached through and grabbed my hair, yanking me off balance. I slid to the floor and felt something heavy pound on my back, ripping the blouse. It was unrelenting and each blow hurt, forcing air from my lungs. Wildly, I looked around and saw a small, thin trail of nanobots start marching across the tiled floor toward me. If it made contact, I knew I was a goner. That thought flooded my mind, activating a surge of adrenaline, and I rose after the last pounding blow, jabbing forward at my second attacker. Quickly, I also began to tap dance, crushing the nanobot stream with a series of satisfying cracks, desperate not to let any attach themselves to my boots. I then backed away into one of the panels. With my bare skin touching it, the screen flared to life, a rush of orange and yellow lights shining brightly. It seemed to startle my two attackers, so I lowered myself and played linebacker, rushing them, sending each against a different panel and giving me an escape.

I turned left then right, coming upon the sight of Bartholomew, one arm slick with his own blood, swinging the rifle in an uppercut, sending the scarecrow-like shadowy figure backward with enough force that its impact into the panel actually cracked it.

“You okay?” I said.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” he said with a wolfish grin. Then he rammed the rifle backward, over his hip, and into a man, not yet fully converted, his ZZ Top beard and mouth still human, who was staggered backward. He then said, “Screw this” and tossed the rifle to Vihaan and he pulled up the machine gun. He pulled back the slide, made certain the ammunition was in place, and then, with a guttural cry, opened fire. The loud clatter of the machine gun fire drowned out every other sound. The Greek flinched out of fright, but the rest of the team continued to fight as the nanotech army crumpled as the hot lead poured through them, disrupting whatever held them together.

The firing sound was too loud, hurting everyone’s ears, but it also didn’t last long as the gun, heating up, jammed. Bartholomew cursed and flung the overheated and now useless weapon into a cluster of the enemy, scattering them.

My ears rang, but through the din, I could hear the sounds of battle elsewhere, fists and weapons swishing through the air. An occasional human grunt could be heard, but it was hard to tell if it was from our team or Abernathy’s. I stole a glance at Silas’ still form, wondering how the digital war was going. I desperately wanted to check on Albert, Michael, and Miko but got turned around so had no way to easily know where they were. Instead, I had to concentrate on the trio coming for me from around a bend.

Fortunately, not every panel reached from floor to ceiling, and crouched atop this particular panel was Chou, who leapt directly into the three once-humans, arms wide, taking them to the ground. I joined her and we repeatedly stabbed at them with our blades, then she reached down, and with a savage yank, separated a hand from an arm. Normally, that shouldn’t happen so easily, but there was no longer any organic matter, it was a nanobot approximation of a human arm. The hand, with writhing tendrils of nanobots, was tossed to the ground, and she tap-danced all over it, causing a cloud of sparks that never rose past her ankle.

“There are too many for us to be successful,” she told me matter-of-factly.

“No shit,” I said. “You have a plan?”

“Survive,” she replied, which was more of an aspiration than an actual plan.

We were outnumbered and outmatched, with no help coming from the inert Silas, or the Architect, who was still at digital war with his evil doppelganger. This could be our last stand. It was not what I imagined would happen, but I was fighting to keep the Adversary from destroying the last remnants of mankind. If I had to die here, keeping Abernathy and his oily goons from somehow interfering with the Architect’s efforts, and for the Earth to endure, I would. I’d been ready to die before and this time it was for a far greater cause than drug-induced self-pity.

I was so focused on my own thoughts, trying to stay focused despite the ear-ringing, that I missed the rising whine in the distance. This place was so huge and there had been so much noise that it took me time to register it. But hearing it grow in volume, I recognized it was a rallying cry. Help was on its way!

Chou heard it as well, and after a brief confirming glance at one another, I reached out and swiftly kicked an approaching figure in the gut. My knee sank into the nanobot’s belly, but the force was enough to send it a few steps backward. The scimitar followed, severing arm from faux shoulder.

“‘Look to my coming, at first light, on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East,” I quoted. I had no real idea if the entry was east or west, up or down, but I did know that the Pasha and his forces were here and that was fine by me.

The maze was a lousy place for so many figures to be fighting, and once the newly arrived army entered the space, they were immediately forced back out by the nanobot army. Abernathy, I finally spotted, was directing them, with minimal gestures, but no doubt through some connection he had with them. Still, that meant the fight would now be out in the wild, on grass and in the wheat fields, under partly cloudy skies. A perfect day for a battle.

In short order, Abernathy’s followers were flowing toward the doorway, including the one-armed attacker at my feet. That was fine, as the Greeks followed them out, not done fighting. I was winded and needed to find Michael. Chou and Levy rushed ahead as I backed away, wary of an ambush.

“Michael,” I yelled.

Off to my left and behind me, I heard a reply and I hurried in that direction, cursing myself at three wrong turns. Finally, I found Albert, with some cuts on his face and ripped pants, continuing to guard the space where Michael lay slumped against the wall, studying Vihaan’s tablet.

“Are you okay?” I asked my young warrior.

“I feared that I was a gone sucker,” he said. “But I was going to go the whole hog until the end.”

“He fought bravely,” his Greek companion said.

I hugged him fiercely and he relaxed into the embrace. Albert was clearly scared but doing his best to act the man I wanted him to become by surviving.

“Michael?”

“Fine, Meredith,” he said, although I would have been just as fine hearing “mom” at that moment. I had really thought we were done and was delighted to be proven wrong.

“Do you have any sense of what’s going on in there?” I asked, thumbing toward the master display, which had a blur of colorful data racing across the screen.

“The energy consumption is astounding,” he said in admiration. “I see auxiliary cooling systems have been turned on to prevent everything from overheating, which would be disastrous.”

“Great. Who’s winning?”

He shrugged and I felt his frustration at not knowing.

“I have to get out there, see what’s going on. Stay here, stay safe,” I instructed and turned to go.

“Osman has this, stay here,” Michael suggested. I shook my head. I got everyone into this and needed to be there to help. Right then, that realization deep in my heart, that was when I felt different. All the reluctance I had been feeling since arriving here over six weeks before, all the indecision and reaction – all of that vanished. I brought these people together to fight for life. They were my people and had come for me. I couldn’t leave them alone, could not be absent from the fight. Was this what Washington, Patton, or Eisenhower felt? Like a leader?

I turned on my heel and sprinted for the doorway, not exactly eager to fight the nanobots, but ready to be shoulder to shoulder with Osman and the others. The battle sprawled across the fields, a mix of humans and black misshapen figures. Guns fired, swords swished, and other makeshift weapons were in use, while the more powerful nanobot figures struck back, wounding some, killing others in grisly ways. The shrieks and cries made my blood run cold, made my heart break for the dream being whittled down, and for those never getting their second chance.

The cold flared anew, transforming into a hot anger. I had to stop this.

Off to one side, Abernathy stood, his elongated arms having just pierced deeply into a woman warrior, someone from the 18th century maybe. Blood sprayed in an arc from a severed artery, coating his black, oily arms in red. Three others rushed him, followed by Bartholomew taking aim with the rifle. A wooden spear and what appeared to be a pitchfork struck his torso, but the nanobots merely shifted about, several tendrils reaching out to envelop the spear, racing toward the man in overalls who threw it. The nanobots speeded up and gushed forward, closing the gap between spear and spear thrower. He shouted in pain as the first nanobots bit deeply into his hand, cords starting to tunnel into his musculature.

The report of the rifle distracted me and I saw my friend’s aim was good, as the bullet struck Abernathy in the triangular thing that served as a head. It entered where the nose should have been and then emerged from the back. Abernathy barely shuddered.

How were we going to stop them? My mind flashed back to the horrors of seeing hundreds descend on Blue Alpha, ripping her apart. It was almost as if they were taking it easy on us, exerting only enough energy to deal with us mere mortals.

Energy.

Chou suggested that the Adversary was exerting so much energy controlling things, including Abernathy’s billions or trillions of nanobots. Something had to keep them going after they converted the organic material into energy. We already knew there were tremendous amounts of power required to open time portals, and rather than bring individuals forward, the Adversary was bringing people and things like the Brimstone or the Red Baron’s plane or the Nazi squad. He was reaching further back in time for things like the sabretooth tigers, which I bet required extra energy.

And now he was using his depleted energy to fight the Architect. He was perhaps at his most vulnerable and we had to use that to our advantage.

Apparently, Michael had used his time in hiding well, because he had been thinking along the same lines. That became apparent when he and Albert came sprinting out of the cathedral and made for me. Their Greek guard was jogging behind them, trying to make himself useful.

“You have something? Because we’re getting our asses kicked,” I said.

“We don’t know where the Adversary really is,” Michael began, “and this place is too vast. But Albert had a thought.”

I looked down at the boy, who was beaming with pride.

“When you squashed those bugs, they sparked and it got me to thinking about the power sources for something this small,” he began and then Michael picked up the thread.

“For them to follow their programming, they needed something to direct them,” he began. “Vihaan had been studying their engineering earlier and we realized that they self-replicate complete with programming, but they are acting independent of one another, which suggests they had something controlling them.”

“Abernathy,” I finished.

“Right-o,” Albert said, pleased with how we were filling in each other’s thoughts.

“Can you hack the system?” I asked Michael.

“I’ve been trying without success, but then, Albert…”

“It’s like stopping up a hose. The water pressure has to go backward and you can burst a pipe. But do it with electricity.”

“Is he suggesting we overload their network?” I asked Michael as he and Albert nodded in unison, which caused me to laugh. It felt so good to have a genuine laugh amidst this chaos. “Okay, how do we do that?”

“I’ve been trying to send a signal to override the systems, cause a feedback loop, something, but they’re too well-protected. Instead, we’re going old school.” He nodded and Albert ran back into the cathedral. A few moments later, he came running out carrying two cables, both deep blue.

“When one of them shattered a panel, it exposed their circuitry, so Albert and I began pulling out the cabling. Now all we need do is…” He held out his hand like a surgeon. Albert handed him his knife and Michael set to work, slicing the cables apart then fraying the ends, exposing the actual power source. It sparked a bit like electricity, but who knew what it exactly was.

“Okay, now what?”

“We ram it up Abernathy’s arse,” Albert exclaimed.

I felt my eyes widen at that. It was going to be suicidal and we’d never get close enough. Unless…I spun around, retrieved my scimitar from my belt, and began stalking Abernathy, who was busily cutting another settler into pieces. I shuddered at that but needed his attention.

“You ready for me?” I yelled, and sure enough, I got his attention. He glared at me as much as someone without expression could glare. Carelessly, he tossed the corpse aside and began heading for me. He shoved away someone trying to bludgeon him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chou suddenly fall into step beside me. Side by side, we stalked him. It felt like the climax of High Noon, something I’d seen a few times with my dad, who loved that film. Which made me think of Wild Bill. I knew he was still with us as his six-gun fired now and then. The fighting continued around us and the carnage was growing as more humans fell to the nanobot army. If this didn’t work, we were dead. So was the planet.

We were perhaps five feet apart and closing, which was when I saw it was Albert, not Michael, who was inching up on Abernathy’s rear. I don’t know if nanobots had eyes in the back of their head and I had to school my expression to not betray my surprise. Instead, I made certain I had my “I’m gonna kill him” expression in place.

From somewhere deep within him, the nanobots simulated a chuckle, perhaps animated by whatever was left of Abernathy’s personality. It was like rocks being banged next to one another and entirely unpleasant, making me all the more certain to put an end to it.

Something that was once two humans shambled toward Albert, but doing so silently, not calling attention to itself. I couldn’t cry a warning for fear of giving him away and my hopes began to sink.

At that point, Bartholomew rushed from one side and Levy from the other, ramming the figure before it could reach the boy. Albert’s expression showed his terror then thankfulness, but he never stopped moving toward Abernathy as the cable’s slack gave out, so he’d barely make it. Chou caught that and knew we needed to back him up, so she increased her pace, her sword raised, ready to strike. Bartholomew and Levy came into Abernathy’s “field of vision,” flanking him, and the monstrosity actually paused, calculating the right course of action.

That hesitation was all it took. Albert’s own short sword was in his hand and he viciously stabbed at Abernathy’s back, forcing the nanobots apart, revealing little more than skeleton. The nanobots were already swarming up the sword, toward his hand. But it created an aperture, allowing him to shove the sparking cables deep into the not-quite-human form.

The chuckle shifted to a gurgle then an electronic scream that was quickly echoed by every nanobot in the area. The smell of burning organs was vile, but there was precious little left. Some of the others fell apart, black oily cables fell off partially digested human forms, revealing sickening corpses. One outright exploded while others jerked spasmodically, sparking in a rainbow of colors. The air was turning hazy as a thin, noxious cloud oozed from the army.

Osman and the others stopped fighting, caught by surprise, and watched as their enemies were unable to fight. They didn’t move but shut down or fell apart in place. The rotting organs and skin turned the air into something that made me gag. Michael was already coughing, my son doubled over. Levy rushed to help him back into the cathedral.

The Pasha had hurried over falling opponents, his own eyes wide in amazement. As he did, I looked at the remains of Abernathy, which had been reduced to an oily puddle of inert nanotechnology. Tommy “Two-Thumbs” didn’t ask for this, never intended to become inhuman, and maybe didn’t deserve this fate. He was a puppet of the Adversary, his free will gone, and became less an enemy and more a figure to be pitied and soon forgotten.

“What happened, Meredith?” Osman asked.

“Later,” I said.

Slowly, we walked the grounds, ensuring each and every one of the hundreds of nanobot figures had been deactivated. None were human anymore or if human, no longer alive. My heart was heavy for all the losses, all the lost chances, and how they all accepted a second chance only to be victims in a war they never asked for. Once Chou, Osman, and I were satisfied they were all deactivated, I let out an audible breath.

Crisis averted.

There remained, though, the Adversary to contend with.

Seventeen

I stared at the remains of Abernathy for a long time, lost in my own thoughts, feeling accomplished and helpless at the same time. As a result, I had totally tuned out all the noise that had been rising all around me. Finally, Albert tugged on my arm, breaking the spell.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“They’re all dead! Even the ones outside,” he said with great enthusiasm.

I looked over at Chou, who nodded, showing little elation at the news. She was, like me, worried about the battle we couldn’t see. Slowly, our band had been making their way to me and I studied each, seeing scrapes on everyone, a black eye on Vihaan, and more serious wounds to Wild Bill and Bartholomew, my hardiest fighters. Michael had seemed fine enough, although he was clearly preoccupied with the tablet.

“How do you know, Albert?”

“Look!” He gestured toward the mile-long corridor leading to the outside and in ones and twos, members of the resistance, my army, were coming in, their jaws dropping, eyes bulging, and soaking up the wonder of the place. Hard to believe that after visiting three collectors, it had already begun to feel blasé to me. Had I truly lost my sense of sensation in this place, a world filled with wonders?

As they focused on the humans standing amidst the inert nanobots, most waved and hurried toward me. Among them was Carolyn Nguyen, who I met back in New Manhattan. I was delighted to recognize a face, especially from that settlement that suffered at Abernathy’s command. Her right arm had a tourniquet tied around the bicep and the remainder of the sleeve was dark red with dry blood. But she was smiling, so I took that as a good sign.

“Meredith! You’re alive!”

“Yeah. Is Emily okay?”

She nodded, studying the pile of goo that had been Abernathy. “That the Wicked Witch of the West?”

Now I nodded. She grinned at that, a look of assurance in her eyes, because, after all, I was once her president. Here she stood with me, making some sort of history, but I had no real idea what was going to be said about this since everything remained in flux.

“What’s happening out there?”

“A bloody mess when several of us broke off to run in here, either to support you or hide from them,” she told me.

“Did we lose a lot?”

“Too many, but we can count later. Is it really over?”

“This part of it,” I assured her.

Michael, on cue, spoke up. “Chou, your husband needs you!” She hurried to his side and she read whatever was on the tablet, and while I wanted to ask questions, I paused and let her focus.

“Come,” she said and turned, heading back into the cathedral-like structure. We all followed, although Vihaan and Albert were coiling up the cables that we used to overload the nanobot army, severing Abernathy’s connection to them. Apparently, it disconnected all of them, which was pretty damn impressive.

The lighting was, if possible, even dimmer inside the central chamber. Whatever had been fouling the air had stopped and at least things smelled a little better. At least I wasn’t coughing.

“What’s happening?” I asked Chou.

“My beloved appears to have bested the Adversary. Now we have work to do.”

Talk about feeling anticlimactic. The battle between AI titans happened out of sight and ended without any sort of fanfare. I felt robbed. Then I began to feel a sense of relief. No more ambushes from archers, mercenaries, and Nazis. No more predatory animals that didn’t belong here to catch us off guard. We could finally breathe and build in earnest.

Of course, now we had a larger issue to contend with: saving the world.

Vihaan and Michael were studying data on the tablet as Chou ran a hand over the master panel, no doubt wishing some physical connection to her husband. At her feet, still motionless, was Silas, and I was overwhelmed with emotion for losing my ally. It was then I could see how, centuries after my time, a woman could fall in love with an AI.

“The Adversary closed off connections to the collector network after it siphoned off most of the accumulated energy,” Vihaan explained.

“All to stop us, stop me,” I said.

“The Architect can do only so much as software and needs hands to help restore the network,” he continued.

Albert had walked over to the slumped form of Silas, his nine-foot body still, without a spark of life. He patted and poked him, trying to wake him up, more wishful thinking than any hope of actually reviving him. It seemed he sacrificed himself for the greater good and was gone.

“How much time is left?”

Michael barely glanced up as he said, “Twenty-seven hours, give or take.”

“Twenty-seven hours until what?” Carolyn asked.

“Basically, we need to restore the Earth’s absorption of solar energy to power the engines that will open a portal that will save the planet, after we free it from orbit,” I said.

“Easy peasy, right?” she quipped although her eyes registered the issues.

“Do we have any idea if the False Vacuum event is near?”

“Remember,” Michael warned me, “if we can see it, we’re too late. So, no, we can’t see it, even though we know it’s coming.”

“We’re dealing with precise calculations that can’t be fudged,” Vihaan added. “The collectors have to be replenished now so they have the energy required to open the rift in time-space at just the right moment as Earth leaves orbit. With the moon accompanying us, it should help the tidal forces, but it’s not going to be a smooth transition.”

Chou had stepped beside Michael and was examining additional instructions coming from her husband. She nodded to herself and touched an adjacent panel. It winked to life and she was shown schematics of equipment I couldn’t begin to comprehend. She, though, seemed to understand it. Several other windows opened and one had a schematic of the entire collector, a light green path being superimposed to show where she needed to go.

“Do you need help?”

She shook her head without looking my way.

“Actually, my beloved, we will need additional help,” the Architect said from hidden speakers.

“You’re alive!” Albert shouted.

“I am indeed, Albert. I’m also very happy you survived this unpleasantness. Your quick thinking with the power cables was most admirable. Very old school, although quite new for you. Meredith, this boy is deserving of a medal.”

He sounded more relaxed, maybe with the flush of victory and his wife present, he could be more his normal self.

“You show me where the metal ore is, we’ll make him one,” I said.

“First, though, we have to save the world,” he said.

“Did he always have a gift for understatement?” I asked Chou.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Weston will begin the repair process and as needed; I will task several of you to help complete the work.”

“Didn’t this place have robots like Blue Alpha?” Albert asked. “Or can’t you wake Silas up?”

“Once, it did. They all did. But here, the Adversary cannibalized them to power his nanobots and the things you call robo-bugs. So now, I will need your eyes and hands to help me restore us to the network.”

“But what about Silas?” Albert repeated.

“I’m sorry, Albert, but Silas’ processing programs were compromised when I traveled through him into the Adversary’s mainframe.”

“Huh?”

“He’s not coming back, son,” Wild Bill said, leaning down and placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. Albert sniffled quietly and I felt my own eyes grow damp.

Humans replacing robots, the opposite of every science fiction writer’s worst nightmare, had a satisfying sense of irony to it. Chou followed the directions, taking her out of the building and off to the west. The rest of us stood around feeling particularly useless for a time. Carolyn and Bartholomew went outside to see to the growing crowd. Levy was in constant motion, hopping from one injured fighter to another. Osman was directing people to form up in groups and to stay out of the way. It seemed more than a few people had the idea of seeking shelter within the collector and I didn’t blame them at all.

Michael and Vihaan were summoned to different parts of the complex to assist in the repair operation. Feeling useless, I headed toward the doorway to watch what was happening outside. People were milling about, marveling at the size and scope of the collector, walking in the wheat fields, idly kicking over ruined crops. Others looked after one another’s wounds and I wondered about Möngke, my fiercest soldier. I hoped for the best, secretly feared for the worst.

Without warning, the lighting dramatically improved in the central chamber, a sign that something was working right. I had questions, but they’d have to wait since I didn’t want to distract the Architect. Idly, I wondered what his real name was.

I felt the time ticking away, the countdown continuing as the work continued and it seemed we were going to win this particular race. We’d get the power flowing, get the batteries or whatever they were topped off in time to work with the solar sail. The amount of energy being discussed, from the Dyson swarm to the interstellar network of power directed at Earth, remained staggering. This had been going on for millions of years and now we were down to the final hours of go or no go. I was reminded once more of how isolated the Architect had been, how divorced from humanity he had been for so long, apart from his wife, only able to talk with versions of himself. I admired the dedication, thinking of how it somehow traced all the way back to Michael.

“Meredith, I could use your assistance,” the Architect said.

“Put me in, coach,” I quipped.

“Please follow the highlighted path. I will need you to reconnect a number of cables across the way.”

The pale green lights flashed into appearance and I saw it was taking me out of the cathedral and in the opposite direction of where the others had gone. Once out of the building, holographic markers guided me, so I followed, waving and giving a thumbs-up to the others who remained milling about, uncertain of what was to come next. There were more present and no doubt still more to come. I needed to tend to that soon, but first, we had a bigger issue to deal with.

I walked a good twenty minutes, worried that every step was going to waste time, so I quick-walked and of course the holograms adjusted to my pace. Finally, I was directed to one of the smaller buildings in sight, although it takes a lot for a fifty-story tower to be considered small. Once inside, the place lit a path for me to follow, a narrow corridor that ended as elevator doors silently opened for me. Obediently, I stepped inside, and as the doors closed, it was already in motion. My stomach dropped and my ears popped within seconds and then it seemed to be over as we slowed to a stop. I had barely time to register the silvery interior, reflecting my haggard self in 360 degrees. Good thing I didn’t have time to linger on my appearance.

The doors parted and the green light awaited me, guiding me through the open floor. The place was huge, as everything here seemed to be. There were a series of work stations with head gear and screens but no keyboards, each with a reclining chair. Some abstract-looking statuary were set in alcoves and one seemed suspended in air. Each was a blend of colors, no two alike, and if they had a function, I had no idea what it was. Everything was coated with dust, suggesting no one or nothing had been in here for some time. I guess even in the future, there was dust and neglect. There were only a few windows, but they were enormous, letting in plenty of light and I had a great view of the sprawling grounds. Way down below, there were long, cubist black smudges that were once our enemy, though I felt nothing for them. The survivors, though, were now ant-like people milling about with more pouring in.

Against one wall, a doorway slid open, rising into the wall, and revealing another area, darker and foreboding. The green hologram reappeared and pointed with an arrow at what appeared to be a cabinet. I walked over and tugged on the door, which opened with ease.

“Meredith, I need you to do as I tell you, in the sequence I instruct. Do not make an error, for there is more to do,” the Architect told me.

“Shoot,” I said, and he began telling me which components to withdraw from what appeared to be a pegboard and where to place them. The pieces were lightweight but sturdy and slid from place to place easily.

“You have time to chat?”

“I am currently directing all the others, but yes, what is it you wish to know?”

“Well, for starters, do you have a name? Chou always calls you husband or beloved.”

“Yes, I do. In our time, given how the artificial intelligence is integrated with the starship, we are virtually the same.”

“So your name is Shining Light?”

“Yes, do you like it?”

“Well, it certainly fits you. You’re our shining light, pointing toward what comes next,” I told him.

“There’s definitely a poet in you. Weston has told me of your fondness for poetry, which is what would have made you an interesting lawyer,” he told me.

That took me by surprise. He and Chou had had so little time together that the idea they’d waste any of it on me seemed odd, but who was I to argue? I hadn’t done particularly well with relationships, which is one reason why the idea of me being both a president and a mother had never quite sat right with me.

“So you’re up there on the moon. What happened? How did it fragment?”

“I was young and made mistakes,” he began. Whoa, the mighty Architect caused this? I was certain it would have been the casualty of some earlier battle with the Adversary. “When I transferred my core programming to the moon in order to expand, I was working quickly and there was a miscalculation of power. The moon proved more prone to shattering than I expected and there was a tremendous surge of power deep in the core that radiated through fault lines. I lost over a million years in repairing the damage to the moon bases, readying them for the sail manufacture. We had to recalculate the entire schedule.”

He was talking about a million years like I would an hour and a schedule that would last half a billion years. The scale of this thing continued to both impress and scare the hell out of me. I followed his directions for more rewiring, which was thankfully easy due to everything being color coded or carrying identifiable symbols. This was the most relaxed labor I’ve had since arriving.

“How did you manage to scan the multiverse to find me and the others?”

“Once I managed to communicate with my doppelgangers, we struck on this idea to save this world. Our first order of business was determining how to save the planet and humankind. We determined the solar sail and bubble universe was the best course of action. That meant determining how to use the micro-wormholes to our advantage and force open the new universe. As we devised the technology and built the sail, we also set to work on extrapolating the wormholes would provide the science to allow us to time travel.”

“Oh sure, you make it sound so easy,” I said.

“This was over the course of millions of years at computer speed,” he explained. “With quantum processing along with our sharing knowledge, we accomplished in millions of years what mankind only dreamt of.” There was an actual sense of pride in his deep, mechanical voice. He was more realistic than I had imagined, but then again, he had to be for Chou to fall in love.

Then, after about a dozen more bits of rewiring, I was to enter code numbers on a touchscreen followed by more manual manipulation. Shining Light spoke intermittently, usually with an instruction, occasionally with encouragement.

“As we scanned each realities’ history, we began to find the anomalies, people who thrived to some form of greatness in multiple worlds but had their lives tragically cut short in one. These were the people we determined deserved that second chance, knowing they had the potential to be great.”

“So, in every other reality, I survived?”

“In all the others we studied, mostly yes; but we eventually found ourselves limiting the study in the interests of time.”

“You made a joke there,” I said. Not that it was very funny, but he was growing on me, less the monolithic deity I had been picturing in my mind, but far more…human. “Did all my other selves have this mutation?”

“The red hair? Yes.” His humor sucked, but I’d never tell him that.

“Very funny. The one the Adversary was determined to eradicate.”

“No. I and my brethren have no explanation beyond this. It was not something we chose to study, just preserve.”

“Thanks for that. You and your other selves put so much time and thought into this, does the lives lost upset the plan?”

There was an actual pause of a few seconds, which surprised me, considering how quickly every other answer came. “Like a house of cards, everything was carefully considered and placed, knowing full well a breeze, intentional or otherwise, could cause everything to fall apart. Had the Adversary –”

“Was he married to a Chou too?” I interrupted.

“Yes, but in that reality, they quarreled and divorced on the return trip to Earth, making for years of unpleasantness, which we assumed sowed the seeds for his disapproval of mankind.”

“That’s certainly taking things to an extreme,” I said. “Okay, so the Adversary crosses into our universe and manages to commandeer a collector. How could you not know which one was his?”

“The Adversary may not have had mankind’s best interests in mind, but he was no fool. As soon as he crossed over, he quickly managed to instruct the collector to send out false signals, making it appear as if he was spread out across multiple collectors. Even with a limited number to work with, he continued to randomize the signals, so locating him was proving more trouble than it was worth since I was more focused on bringing you, all of you, forward.”

“Wait, you actively let him survive and plot against you? You couldn’t task a SILAS unit or something like Blue Alpha to track him down and stop him?”

“There were feints, attacks, counterattacks, and in the end, it was all taking too much time. I regret that now because I didn’t anticipate he would destroy my work so quickly.”

“That’s some error in judgment,” I said.

“Be that as it may, the lives lost plus the humans added along with the more predatory beasts – and you haven’t encountered them all, so beware – has changed everything. With so many variables, I can’t predict the new future, other than mankind has enough life here to reproduce and grow. That will be necessary by the time of transition.”

“Wait, just how long are we talking about?”

“We must continue this later, Meredith. Your part is over and you should return to the elevator and rejoin the others.”

“Sure thing,” I said and closed the space and followed my way back to the elevator. Within seconds, I was back on the ground floor and the others were reassembling. We’d have to come up with what came next then share it with the others, who were no doubt getting anxious. They defeated one enemy, at tremendous sacrifice, but now what? I felt for them, but had no idea what to tell them, no idea what came next.

Everyone seemed fine enough despite aches and pains. We searched one another’s faces for confirmation the work was completed and the energy would flow again. There were welcoming nods, but then we stood there, falling into silence, uncertain of what was to come next. To my amusement, I saw that Osman and Möngke had already bonded with Epaminondas, three warrior leaders, now finding common causes despite the language barrier. Yeah, that needed addressing.

“Your work has helped me restore the proper collection of energy,” Shining Light told us. I had to begin thinking of him that way, because that was his name and he deserved it. “We did it with time to spare, exceeding my expectations.”

“Well, we had some help,” I said, gesturing toward the crowd of people working their way toward us now that we were spotted.

“So your machines are working now and you’re collecting the power you need to move the Earth?” Wild Bill asked.

“The solar sail portion of the plan has been at work for some time. Earth has been slowly moving from its original orbit so that part of the plan was not in jeopardy,” Shining Light corrected.

“What did we just do then?”

Once again, a hologram appeared before us, showing the planet leaving its orbit for the portal to the bubble universe. Wild Bill clearly recognized it and nodded in affirmation. “Ah yeah, I got it.”

“What do we do now, Meredith?” Albert asked. The hesitation and uncertainty in his voice – did I just hear it crack – was how we were all feeling. I didn’t want to admit to not having a clue because, once again, everyone was looking at me.

“He’s your husband,” I said to Chou, hoping she’d offer a suggestion.

The hologram, I noticed, remained in place, which was unusual. It was on a loop, showing Earth and the moon slowly slipping from orbit and then there was a wink in space, somewhere between the moon and Mars, I think, and an aperture opened. The two bodies moved into the new universe and it blinked out of existence. Either to be dramatic or we really were in trouble, the image of the solar system then was wiped away with suddenness, only to repeat.

“Tell them, beloved,” she said, using the softest voice I had heard from this strong woman.

“I am uncertain if the transition will adversely affect my installation on the moon. We’re talking a fairly jarring moment between realities and the electronics may short out, have a cascade failure, or further damage the moon.”

“You mean, you might die?” Albert asked.

“That is a possibility,” Shining Light admitted.

“When is all this going to happen?” I asked, since he avoided answering me earlier. As I asked, I noticed the others were getting closer and would be expecting information, answers, a plan. I hadn’t a clue. Michael, though, grabbed the tablet from Vihaan and walked off, lost in an idea.

“Not for quite some time,” he admitted. “With the power restored, I am running calculations and scenarios to confirm.”

“So, not today.”

“Most definitely not.”

“So what do we do next?”

“That, Meredith, is up to you all,” Shining Light said. “I brought you here to start over, and while it did not go according to my original plan, here you are, free of the Adversary’s influence if not his remnants. You get to decide.”

“What about you?”

“I will be here, but my attention has to be on the sail and bubble universe. I didn’t bring you all here to do my bidding, And I want to spend lost time with Weston.”

In the distance, I heard a series of beeps, each a different tone, as if Michael and the tablet were having a conversation. The odd part appeared to be that he understood what each sound meant while it all sounded the same to me. Then again, I couldn’t figure out R2-D2 either.

“Look!” Albert exclaimed and pointed toward the cathedral.

Emerging from the dark into the sunlit grounds was Silas, blue eyes bright, eye bar actually wiggling a little. Chou went over to him and the rest of us followed, everyone with wide smiles, even Wild Bill, who normally never smiled.

“Hello, everyone,” he said, but the voice was different, modulated deeper.

“Beloved?”

“Yes, Weston. Michael kindly thought that since Silas’ core programming was damaged during the battle with my counterpart, the body should not go to waste.”

“But what about all the work on the moon?” Bartholomew asked.

“That will proceed. This body requires precious little of my energy and attention, but does give me a mobile manner with which to interact with you all.” While he may have said all, his eyes were focused entirely on Chou.

“It occurred to me that with the Adversary gone and us here, Shining Light didn’t need to be entirely on the moon. We could begin building ways for his core processing to be transferred back to each, distributed among the 218 collectors, with Silas as his avatar,” Michael explained.

That’s my boy.

Eighteen

My head ached and I really wanted a nap. Advil and a nap. Make that Advil, lunch, and a nap.

Still, it felt like a reunion as Emily and Carolyn were joined by Osman, Möngke, and others I recognized from the last few weeks of our trek across this world. Not everyone came toward me; there remained clusters of people, too injured to be moved, field medics at work, seemingly directed by Levy, who herself was bloodstained and I couldn’t tell from her own wounds or caring for others. Probably both.

While this was still the Earth, this land lacked a name. The Architect, now Shining Light, certainly didn’t need to call it anything and that was just one of hundreds of decisions that needed to be made. And here they were, coming to me for guidance. Some knew me as a future or past president; others just knew I had this weird super-power. In every case, they followed me, they fought for me, and they watched their newfound friends and colleagues die for me. In their eyes, I was the leader, the one with the grand ideas for what to do next.

Surely out of 1.9 billion people brought to this world, there were some who, like Osman, were used to leading. There had to be statesmen, kings, queens, premiers, prime ministers, chieftains, popes, presidents, and who knows which other titles existed across time. They were the ones to turn to for guidance and leadership. The problem, though, was that out of the few thousand people I had encountered, none had that experience. Instead, I found poets, soldiers, cowboys, seamstresses, athletes, and more. And for whatever reason, they allied themselves with me, and they looked to me now.

“Now we divide the spoils of war,” Möngke said, showing his teeth in a wolfish grin.

“What spoils would those be?” Wild Bill asked slowly, eyeing the Mongul warlord.

“These marvelous structures. There must be treasure of some sort within. And I was promised land for my people.”

“We didn’t ask you along so you can just help yourself,” Wild Bill said. “We asked for your help after we kicked your ass.”

“You did no such kicking,” Möngke said defensively.

“But there’s so much here; surely we should all get something,” an older woman said, her right arm in a makeshift sling, made from what appeared to be the remains of her homespun blue skirt.

“We can certainly bring some of this back to build up our homes,” another man, this one in not much clothing, his short, wide, black body rippled with muscles, and I suspected he’d give Bartholomew a challenge.

Other voices cried out, everyone wanting something. It was clear there were too many people, and the further back they were, the less they could understand what was being said. My abilities had their limits and we surpassed those. But I decided there were things that needed saying, and if they looked to me to lead, I better get started. There was some sizeable rubble, so I clambered up, one step at a time because I was still feeling a little woozy from a combination of my head hurting, my ears still ringing, and probably being dehydrated.

I patted the air, trying to focus everyone’s attention on me. Dozens of heads swiveled up toward me, curious expressions on their faces. The hubbub began to die down. “We need to discuss this all, yes, but calmly. Hearing each other out. There is a lot to explain to many of you and many decisions to be made, but they will be made here and now before you all return home.”

As I was speaking, suddenly, my voice was amplified, rising in volume and electronically modified. I turned over my shoulder and Silas, no, Shining Light, nodded. He was displaying human characteristics my old friend was never programmed with. This would take getting used to.

“I am Meredith Gale and I come from the west coast of North America, from California, and my time was 2018. You each have your own story, your own time and place. But here we are, an unimaginable time in the future, on a world that feels sort of familiar but is anything but home. Most of you know we all come from variations of the Earth you know. Some share realities, most do not. But we were all offered a second chance by someone we took to calling the Architect. His real name is Shining Light and he has taken up residence in this robot behind us. Many of you recognize him as my companion Silas, but the programming that made him unique was sacrificed to defeat our common enemy.”

“Hello,” Shining Light said, offering a wave. “Each collector was designed not just to absorb and channel energy from across the universe” – at this, there were some audible gasps – “but to preserve various biomes that you are all familiar with and would provide the foundation for settling your new homes. Each collector had specific lands based on the geography of their location.”

“How many of these thingies are there?” a man with a surprisingly smooth, well-oiled mustache asked.

“Two hundred and eighteen,” Shining Light said.

“All the same size as this bugger?” someone else asked.

“Yes, of course. I saw no need to vary their design, just their contents,” Shining Light explained.

“Some of you have been told of why you were saved and what this world represents. Many of you have heard bits and pieces, possibly distortions, and I promised everyone I’ve met to be honest. And it’s better to show than tell, so I’m going to ask Shining Light to give us a recap.” As I turned toward him, suddenly now eye to eye, I whispered, “Keep it short and simple.”

“Understood,” he assured me.

The sound and light show began, similar to the presentation my team had days before. There were comments and more gasps, but no one, not a single one, doubted what they were being shown. There were the parallel worlds, the False Vacuum, the need to move the Earth, the solar sail, and I have to say, the scale of the thing still astounds me, and finally, the bubble universe as our escape route. Of course there were the gasps and commentary, but no one challenged what they saw. It was hard to argue after everything they had witnessed in the last few weeks.

“We battled against the Adversary to preserve the plan and keep humanity alive,” I said. “Each one of us has unfulfilled potential, but in our reality, we never had the chance. Now we do. We were offered a chance to start over, reignite the spark of humanity and repopulate Earth.

“Bickering and squabbling won’t get the work done. This is a big place and there’s plenty of room for everyone. On my world, when I left it, there were over seven billion people here, so at under two billion, it’ll be fine.”

There were murmurs and comments, questions from one to another, and I didn’t want to lose them.

“This world is a blank slate. There’s no one here but us. We get to decide how we want it to be,” I began.

“A democracy!”

“A republic!”

“Each settlement decides!”

So it went as the voices and ideas grew louder and then there were calls for who would decide. A few pointed at me, others argued no one person should have so much power. It was a cacophony that made my headache worse.

Carolyn rose on tiptoes, catching my eye. I leaned down and let her whisper something in my ear. It was perfect.

Slowly, I rose to my feet and once again waved my arms like a lunatic to get the horde to settle down. Shining Light’s amplification helped, as did everyone crowding closer to hear me. In fact, some were moving to the sides and behind me, ensuring my translation skills wouldn’t go to waste.

“On every world I know of, there is a United States of America. In the 1770s, they were debating the notion of self-government. One of their great writers, Thomas Paine, declared, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’

“We have that chance now. Today.”

There were some nods in affirmation, some whispered comments, but no objections.

“We fought one another, swindled one another, overlooked one another for millennia, and it brought suffering and strife, war, and death. It impeded progress, turned discoveries into weapons, wasted time, money, and life.

“We each come from somewhen else. No two histories appear identical from across the multiverse. We don’t speak the same language; we don’t share the same history. Not only do we as individuals get to start over, so do we all as one people, forging a fresh destiny. We now have shared this experience; this is our Genesis.”

More nods, some thumbs-up, even someone whooped in approval. But I had a head of steam going and needed to finish, to nail the concepts clearly for everyone to take with them when we scattered once more.

“This is Earth, but it is a fresh world, with no recognizable landmarks, no race memories, and no arbitrary borders. It took everyone coming together to stop the Adversary’s disruptive plans. The ideal world, the Shangri-La or Eden Shining Light envisioned didn’t come to pass. Now this world has to be worked for. It can be done; the work has already started. Together, we put aside differences against a common foe. But it can’t crumble over petty issues.

“We came here, accepting a second chance. We can’t squander it. We can rise above it and answer our better angels.

“I am not suggesting homogenization, making every settlement identical, but we shouldn’t let arbitrary lines in the sand or multiple languages be a barrier. We need to communicate, to come to one another’s aid because Mother Nature isn’t going to sit back. There will be typhoons, earthquakes, disease, and disaster. One community will need rebuilding and we need to know about it. So our lines of communication have to be open. Somewhere out there may be a linguist or two who can help us craft a common tongue. In the meantime, build your communities, turn them into villages or cities. But accessible, welcoming ones, because there may be two billion of us, but in the end, that’s not really all that many when we’ve seen the vastness of the universe. Whenever we transit, we’ll be all that’s left of mankind, and I want it to be the best of mankind.”

I paused, catching my breath, letting the headache crescendo and then recede. Perspiration ran down my neck, down my spine. Levy would have to check me when I stopped talking but there was more to say. I took a deep breath, letting the pause make people lean in with anticipation.

“The greatest civilizations of the world began works knowing it would take generations to complete and they were content with the knowledge. It got the Acropolis, the Coliseum, and the pyramids built. We have a world to build anew and many of us came from times where impatience outraced wisdom. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us learn from one another, lean on one another, and grow together.”

That was enough. My “Win One for the Gipper” speech was over, and to show that, I unsteadily lowered myself to the ground. Chou and Emily reached out to help me, aware I was not at my best.

“Nice job,” Emily assured me, handing me a canteen, which I greedily drained.

“You’d have done better,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said with a wink, “but they came for you and fought for you. I followed you, didn’t I?”

“You wanted to kick the Adversary’s ass on your own.”

“Dismantle him was more like it,” she said, eyes welling for a moment. “Abernathy devasted New Manhattan, tore it apart. Most were killed or subsumed.”

“Rebuild it,” I told her, my hand wrapped around her arm. “It’s your home.”

“It can be your home too,” she said softly. “What now?”

What now indeed? We stopped the Adversary; we resumed the program to save mankind and the planet we called home. Shining Light could help them reclaim seeds and whatever else from the biomes, teach them the secrets of the collectors. Others could help Möngke and Epaminondas find land suitable for their people. They could decide for themselves what they did next. They weren’t part of the plan but were now a part of our future. Who knew, we might need them some day.

Michael came over to me and handed me something that looked like shoe leather. He gestured at me with it, so I grabbed it, feeling tacky to the touch. “Eat it,” he instructed and I mechanically did so, realizing someone had reinvented jerky. While not my favorite type of food, I devoured it and washed it down with water from someone’s canteen. Neither helped my headache, so I figured it would require time. And a long night’s sleep under the pixie dust.

Vihaan and Shining Light had gone back into the cathedral as many came over to fist bump, hug, or tip their hats at me, whatever their culture called for. I began to wonder which gestures would fade with disuse and others adopted by all. There would be finally be time for that. When the two emerged, they were carrying tablets; not enough for everyone, but it was a start.

“Carolyn, can you help distribute them? At least one per settlement and make sure at least one of them knows what it is.” With the collectors properly networked, each tablet could then interact with the collectors and we’d have the beginnings of a communications network. It was faster, though less romantic, than the Pony Express. We’d need that too.

“Yes, Madam President,” she said with a grin.

“Stop that!” I called after her. On this world, I would never be that. My legacy, apparently, was as mother of the next evolution of humanity. I did need somewhere to call home and figure out what to do next. Settling didn’t feel right, though. Anne Shirley didn’t settle; she wanted adventure. And Harry Potter accepted his destiny after trying to avoid it. And Westley did everything out of love for another. How could I disappoint my role models?

No, I’d help rebuild New Manhattan; I owed Emily that much. But after that, well, after that, I began to consider spending time exploring the new world. And when I was done with that, then I could settle down. While there was the nagging sense of pressure that I spawn, I also suspected I had some time on that front. But yes, at some point, I needed to be a real mother, not a sort-of-mother to Michael. He would need to stay here, with his own progeny-of-a-sort, Shining Light, since his health wouldn’t allow him to go galivanting.

Whatever came next would be the next step in a long path to the future. Earth’s final transit to the bubble universe was, I gathered, generations away. Something Shining Light avoided coming out to tell me. I was fine with that, actually. Michael and I might be dust by the time the rift opens. But, here I am, no longer the wreckage of a wasted life. No, here I am fulfilling potential I didn’t know I had. Here I am, leading a new people, hoping to unify them, and building toward a common goal of survival.

There are worse legacies, and if it was good enough for Moses not to enter the promised land, I, too, can manage.

Author’s Note

I never met Paul Antony Jones, despite the science fiction community being a small, relatively well-connected world. So, it’s weird that I am collaborating with him on his final novel.

Truth be told, Paul was ill as he was writing This Alien Earth: Children of Tomorrow and was racing the clock to complete the manuscripts while fighting for his life. Book two arrived just two months before Paul died.

And a month later, I was invited to finish the saga. Why me? The fine editors at Aethon Books were looking for someone who could absorb, chart, and annotate the first two volumes and then take Paul’s scattered notes and complete Meredith Gale’s story. I was recommended to them by one of their authors, and one of my friends, Steve Savile.

In March, I began reading the novels, captivated by the high concepts and intrigued by the collection of characters he introduced. Suddenly, like the readers, I wanted answers to the Big Questions. So I signed on.

Thankfully, Paul’s widow, Karen, fought past her grief to scour his desk and find every scrap of information Paul had put together to address the final book. While it proved inordinately helpful, it left huge gaps and unanswered questions.

This didn’t write itself. If it takes a village to raise a child, it took a city to support me in the researching and writing of this book. So, thank you to Steve Savile for thinking of me and editors Steve Beaulieu and Rhett Bruno for trusting me with Paul’s world.

Michael A. Burstein has been a close friend for a long time now, and we support one another in our various projects. He used to teach science and edits science textbooks, so his expertise and network allowed me to figure out the physics required to solve the dilemma Paul cleverly introduced. Special thanks include Michael’s science brain trust consisting of Rachel Schneewind, Cary Abend, Don Sioux, Suzanna Campbell, Ian Kaplan, Andrew Bytes, Bruce E. Berger, Shamit Lachru, Chris Somari, Linda Nussbaum, Thunder Levin, and Ellen Welch Garner. Even with their help, I found myself going down the rabbit hole of research on quantum mechanics, parallel universe theory, bubble universes, false vacuums, and more. A huge thank you to the marvelous composer and writer Steven Rosenhaus for serving as beta reader.

No project of this magnitude and required to be written at warp speed could be done without the love and fierce support from my wife, Deb. She fully supported me taking this on, as it required rearranging other commitments and brought general upheaval to life.

And finally, there’s Paul. I found some audio interviews he gave over the years, so between his novels, his notes, and his interviews, I feel I got to know him a bit. I hope this work honors his memory and satisfies his readers. If there’s anything that feels off in comparison to the first two books, blame me for failing to fulfill his dream.

Robert Greenberger

August 2020

From Karen

"The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of Heaven." John Milton

A personal note about Paul Antony Jones:

He was a joy.

He was a wonder.

He was a motivator.

He was a challenge.

He was a born adventurer.

He was a kind man with near endless compassion, especially for all animals and our planet.

A man of quiet intelligence and comedic dry wit, he possessed a natural awe of science and the universe but was frequently confounded by human behaviors.

He wrote of things he pondered.

Ever insecure about his writing, he was buoyed by his readers. All of their comments had a profound impact on him.

He was my world, my life's partner and my best friend. He referred to us as "split aparts.”

I know I was fortunate to have him in my life. I also know my life is now forever changed without him.

His final spoken words to me, the night before he died, were of the unseen silver thread we both could feel. It connected us together from before we ever met and it would continue to connect us until "my time" came. And when it was my time, he would be waiting for me "somewhere between the stars.” So every night before I go to bed, I walk outside and find the brightest star and know that as I look to him, he too is looking at me. (Chris Rea "Somewhere Between the Stars".)

—Karen

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