A mature adult with more discerning senses sometimes broke the squabble for them, a task usually seen to by the two mothers. While it was known to happen, it was never spoken of, as such things were considered embarrassing behavior for all involved.
Burns the Flame had been mother to many before Dams the Gate, she had broken these quarrels.
Yet, it was the squabbling of the young that Burns the Flame was reminded of when she recalled the prophet’s decree that her offspring be forbidden to enter the gates. Ends the Storm would never have done such a thing. He’d have known this would ostracize her. To any male returning from the Arena this was a math so intrinsic to their nature it hardly required conscious consideration. If her offspring was forbidden access to the gates, then they were dead weight to the species in these times.
Yet, when the prophet made his decree, she had sensed something of that juvenile behavior behind it all. As though the prophet—the conduit of their gods, squabbled over portions. Except, what he wished to keep for himself was her womb.
Whatever it was—it wasn’t the behavior of an Alpha, and by extension, even less that of a god. She had not gone against the prophet’s decree lightly.
‘I know it was you,’ the prophet had said.
‘That was the intention,’ she had replied.
The words had been the sole consequence after she’d given Dams the Gate the means to enter the Arena—in direct rebellion of the gods themselves. The prophet must have known she would only be capable of such defiance if she no longer believed. Yet, life had gone on, and no punishment had come for her.
The opposite it seemed.
The prophet had gone through the gates and shared the consonance with her once more. He had even gone so far as to decree that her actions and all the events that followed were preordained. That, through him, the Borealis had set the stage for the prophecies to play out.
The prophecies, the signs of which the prophet had decreed he had now born witness.
Dams the Gate’s birth was the first sign—for he bore the name of the Harbinger.
His sacrifice was the second sign, as the Harbinger would name their gods’ ultimate enemy—the abomination Brings the Rain.
Bleeds the Stone was the third sign—he was The Test. His fall to this Brings the Rain would confirm the Harbinger had named the enemy of their gods.
Finally, when her tribe discovered a man upon the gateway, the prophet deemed him the fourth sign—The Betrayer.
All these signs meant it was the time of the Pilgrimage.
She alone was troubled by the fact that none of these events, these things the prophet called signs and gave names, were mentioned in his original prophecy. When he first ascended, he’d proclaimed that the Borealis had returned. That the Ferox would be given a second chance. That, if this time they pleased the gods, they would be delivered to the Promised Land.
There had been no mention of signs.
She kept her thoughts to herself and held no contempt for her people. The prophet had not failed them since he revealed himself, only her. They couldn’t know what she knew. For that matter, she couldn’t very well explain.
But now, the prophet had called for her. So, she lingered on that crest—stared at the pit that used to be her home a bit longer—before descending the slope.
The prophet awaited her at the end of a tunnel that had once led to more caverns below the rock. The digging had cut through it, and now the same tunnel ended at a cliff face. The light of the red sky poured in, and he stood at the edge overseeing the work below.
He sent his lieutenants away when she arrived, commanding that they were to be left alone until he called for them. For this she was grateful. She wished to speak freely but would have restrained herself in the presence of others.
His back was still to her when he began to speak. “The tribes, our people, they are united behind me. They wish to show their obedience to the will of the Borealis.”
He took a long breath. “Only you rebel now. My son is dead for your defiance. Why?”
‘My son’. He spoke so strangely at times and didn’t even seem to notice. A male Ferox did not think of a tribe’s child as theirs.
“You have power, but you do not speak for the gods,” Burns the Flame said. “I do not obey, because I was the one punished when you failed to live by your own decrees...”
She paused, putting all her certainty into the words that followed. “Gods do not fail.”
Malkier’s back slowly straightened as he gazed out on the quarry. His silence feeling as though it would never end.
“How shall I be punished for your failures now?” Burns the Flame asked. “I carry children again. Will my offspring be labeled abominations as well?”
He turned his head slowly, only fixing one eye on her as she stood behind him. “Do not speak of my son as an abomination.”
The seriousness of his voice stilled her. She had blasphemed—openly called him a fraud. Yet the notion she might speak ill of Dams the Gate brought his anger.
“I’ve not summoned you here to speak of punishments,” Malkier said.
“Then why am I here?”
“I love our people, Burns the Flame, but you are like me, unique amongst them,” Malkier said. “You and I have far more in common than you know.”
“I’m not like you. You deceive our people. I’m no liar,” she said.
“Oh, but you are. You claim to know me for a false prophet, and yet you tell no one of this detail. Your one true act of rebellion amounted to sending our son through the gates against my decree. See, I’ve spoken to those who helped you. Your act of disobedience was achieved without sowing any seeds of rebellion against the faith. You did so with all the secrecy that was possible. Some of the young I’ve questioned even seemed convinced that you were carrying out my orders in secret.”
She hesitated—he knew far more than she’d imagined, and this was nothing like the conversation she’d been preparing for.
“Tell me the truth. Do you know why you did this?” Malkier asked.
“I will suffer what I know for the sake of our people,” she said. “But I could endure what you had done to my son no longer.”
Malkier nodded. “So, your one act of defiance was born out of the belief that you were doing the right thing for our son. You were in no position to understand that I denied him entry to the gates for the very same reasons . . .”
Those words again, ‘our son’.
“But, Burns the Flame, that is not the question I asked, and you know it.”
She flinched, surprised at how quickly he’d seen through her.
“Whatever you truly are . . .”
She trailed off a moment. Swallowing down bile before she went on. “There is no denying that before your ascension, our people were dying. The Borealis chose to abandon us to that fate as punishment. I believe they still have. That means that whatever you are, if you abandon us now the result will be the same. I would do my people no favors casting doubt upon you.”
Malkier nodded. “This is why I summoned you here, Burns the Flame. Every Ferox can be trusted to do what they believe best for the species, but few possess the foresight to see the bigger picture—to see the necessity of restraint.”
Finally, he turned away from the ledge to look at her. “You would never betray our people with the truth.”
She held his eyes as long as she could, but the instinct to submit was powerful. Whoever—whatever—the prophet truly was, he possessed Ends the Storm’s dominance, and none could hold his eyes in defiance for long. Finally, Burns the Flame diverted her eyes to the floor.
He stepped closer. “To be alone with such knowledge—is a lonely existence.”
She felt his hand on her jaw, gently tilting her eyes up and making her meet his gaze. “Let me spare you that—know the truth of what I am and take your rightful place at my side. Together we will deliver salvation to our people.”
She was unable to hide her wariness of what the p
rophet offered. “Why? You need nothing from me. Our people will follow you.”
He let go of her chin, turning away for a moment before he spoke. “There is another . . . one, like myself, and he has aligned himself with the abominations.”
“Another?” she asked. “There are more like yourself?”
He nodded. “Only one. But, he knows of my strengths and . . . weaknesses. I have taken steps to protect myself, but there is one weakness I cannot safeguard by simply taking precautions.”
“You wish for me to protect something?”
The prophet nodded. “You already do—Burns the Flame, you carry my young. Of all my weaknesses you are my greatest.”
She studied him for a long while. “You’re asking me to do that which I already would.”
He let go of her chin and walked back to the overlook.
“Now that another of my kind is involved, I cannot go into this war without taking additional precautions,” Malkier said. “I must accept the possibility that my vessel could be harmed. Even killed.”
“Vessel?” she asked.
“After all you’ve said, you know I am not Ends the Storm. His body was given for the ascension,” Malkier said. “Should this body fail, arrangements must be in place for another to take the mantle of prophet.”
“Join me, Burns the Flame. You will rule the Promised Land at my side. And should the day come, tomorrow or years from now, that the prophet requires a new vessel, you will choose who amongst the Ferox ascends.”
Burns the Flame was quiet for a long while. He’d given her a great deal to consider and did not disturb her thoughts. Eventually she joined him at the ledge and looked down on their people.
“How?” she asked.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
NOV 23, 2005 | 4 PM | HANGMAN’S TREE
TEN MINUTES HAD passed since Mr. Clean had skipped a beat. Actually become distracted midsentence like a—well—like a human. Not much made the AI hesitate except the sudden processing of a huge amount of data. As such, Jonathan knew what the AI would say before he said it.
“The conduit has begun opening on the Feroxian Plane,” Mr. Clean said.
Within five minutes Jonathan was speaking to Olivia.
“It’s begun,” he said. “Attack is coming in six to eight days. We need to be ready in five.”
“Understood,” Olivia said.
“I know, I’m asking you to move heaven and earth—”
“. . . And I told you I would move it,” Olivia said. “Focus on your own problems.”
“Thank you, Olivia” he said.
“We will be in touch soon, Mr. Tibbs,” Olivia said.
Olivia was now the unofficial go-between of the US Government and The Never Army. She didn’t have to fight for the position; Jonathan had said, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her as their liaison. The moment their call ended she’d begin sending orders down the chain, and those in charge of the various branches of the armed services would begin implementation of stage one.
Evacuation. A single word that encompassed a logistical nightmare.
Later tonight, government agencies would wait until the majority of Seattle’s populace was home for the evening before declaring a state of emergency. Broadcasts calling for the mandatory evacuation of downtown and its surrounding suburbs would be all over the TV and radio.
Having been mobilized and running ‘practice drills’ for weeks in advance, The National Guard would begin assisting local law enforcement in the necessary efforts. The evacuation would begin with setting up roadblocks to all traffic entering the city. Not all traffic would be stopped immediately—that would only cause the panic that would inevitably occur to escalate sooner. Parents returning from work would not be told they needed to collect their children or loved ones. However, they would know it was time to get their affairs in order, retrieve their family, and leave the city as soon as possible.
Those with somewhere to go outside the perimeter would be asked to go there as soon as possible. But, of course, this would affect everyone differently. While those with means would be able to make arrangements, there would be a far greater number left completely at a loss for where to turn. Those that had nowhere to go or no means to get out would be routed toward temporary camps that FEMA and other government support services had begun setting up for weeks now. The erection of these camps having begun a few days after Olivia returned from DC. Having met with the President and the Joint Chiefs to convince them their fate was to be put in the hands of a college dropout who, until a few hours earlier, had been considered an enemy of the state.
While Jonathan had no desire to be in direct contact with the President—he kind of wished he could have been a fly on the wall of the oval office when Olivia and General Delacy made that pitch.
Whatever they called them—camps, temporary settlements, emergency housing—Americans with any interest in history would exercise a great deal of resistance.
Most of the city of Seattle would be plunged into a surreal state of disbelief or shock as they learned that: no this is not a hoax, not a false alarm, and there are no exceptions. If Bill and Melinda Gates or the Governor tried to stay within the boundaries, they would be escorted out by the National Guard.
Most, but not all.
By design, the population throughout the entire state would have had to have been living in a cave in the weeks leading up to the evacuation before the official order came down to not have suspected something. Olivia had decided early on that there would be no point attempting to hide an undertaking of such magnitude. The reports of shelters being erected, land being temporarily seized, and forces being mobilized throughout the entire state could not be accomplished without notice.
Soon the news would spread.
Politicians’ approval ratings would drop overnight. The stock market would take a dive, and a thousand lawyers would start drawing up plans to sue local and federal agencies.
While it would look as though the authorities did all they could to contain a panic, an unidentified, but trustworthy, source would leak a conspiracy theory just credible enough that news networks would run with it. While the theory would be as vague as such things generally go, viewers would take away from it a story that went something like this:
Five nuclear war heads had been transferred from a high security military facility and never reached their intended destination. Government intelligence agencies had been frantically tracking the weapons’ whereabouts and now believed with great certainty that they had fallen into the hands of a terrorist organization so obscure that no one in the media had previously heard of them.
Mr. Clean had taken point on leaving the necessary digital breadcrumbs that would lead those searching for information on this group to believe them very real. Details would of course be scarce, but one fact would seem certain. At least one of the missing warheads was believed to be within the city limits.
No one from the government would substantiate these claims, but they wouldn’t exactly deny them either. To be fair, 99.99% of the folks the media reached for comment would be entirely in the dark.
As far as Seattle’s residents went, those who kept a level head would conclude that if the reports were true or not, the safest bet was for them and their loved ones to evacuate—though the method through which they accomplished this would likely grow increasingly less level-headed as the hours drew on and the news spun itself into a frenzy of speculation.
Unfortunately, many—hopefully less than Olivia estimated—would resist, causing her operation to remove them from the city by force.
This would only be the beginning—and frankly a best-case scenario. The fact was that evacuating a city with over half a million residents would require an effort just short of an act of God. People forced out of their homes needed food, clothes, water, sanitation, shelter, and medical care.
Loved ones needed to be kept together. Hospital patients needed to be safely moved to new facilities. Prisons and juvenile det
ention centers had to have their prisoners moved. Flights had to be allowed out, while those coming in were grounded or redirected. Public Transport had to be re-purposed to take people without access to a vehicle out of the city.
In addition, removing civilians created issues within the perimeter as well. Olivia eventually had teams assembled for details of an increasingly granular nature—like dealing with animals at the zoos and aquariums that would be abandoned by their caretakers during the evacuation.
All this was before they met with resistance—protests, looting, riots.
There would inevitably be deaths. All of it would need to be handled. But, it didn’t end with getting the civilians to safety.
For Jonathan’s plan to work, everything that could be done to keep eyes off that city in the days following the evacuation needed to be done. This meant disabling wireless towers and redirecting satellites—a thing that could only be accomplished to a limited degree with the cooperation of allied governments. Security and surveillance cameras within the city itself had to be disabled—a detail that could be mostly accomplished by cutting off power to the necessary portions of the grid. However—there would be those that ran on backup batteries, solar panels, and generators.
The bulk of the evacuation process would take place over days, but in the end there was just no way they could get everyone out. Long after Olivia’s forces evacuated the city they would be finding people hiding in basements and bomb shelters. Homeless who had managed to avoid initial sweeps.
While this was unavoidable, large portions of The Never Army’s stage two preparations needed to begin in concert with the evacuation.
Battle Preparation.
Well, at least that was what Jonathan referred to it with Olivia. From the beginning, his roommate’s shadows had deemed this the Dutch-McAllister phase.
Jonathan’s understanding being that the name derived from Hayden’s stance that the phase was analogous to a city scale version of what Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Dutch, endeavored to do when preparing to fight an alien in the movie Predator. Collin, however, felt Macaulay Culkin’s character, Kevin McAllister, preparing to defend his home from the Wet Bandits in Home Alone, while less than a perfect parallel, made him laugh.
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