She led. They were tired and she was exhausted, her feet already damaged beyond repair, but never thought about stopping. When voices were raised in fear and anger, as the switchbacks on the line grew stronger and her people began to talk of stopping this mad trek and leaving, she only asked them the simplest question.
"Where will you go? There's nowhere else now. There's nowhere to hide from what's coming."
She wanted to hide too, to take her children and flee, but she'd spent too much of her life hiding already; from the beginning when she'd hidden in her dead parents' home to the years she'd let Amo dictate their every step. She'd ducked her head as much as she could while he committed his atrocities, pretending things could still be just as they'd always been, trying to hold onto a civilized past when the past was already so far gone.
Now she'd committed her own atrocities. She'd burnt Witzgenstein alive. She'd drowned Frances in mud. She'd dominated and ridden eighty-three people into the dust of I-80 before finally the two parts of herself, the old and the new, found a way to co-exist.
She ran forward on that understanding. She ran to share it with Amo. It would change things for him, if only he could see it; it might finally soothe his anguish on the line.
When Anna died the line rang with the force, and she ran into the ripples, like she was back in Las Vegas and racing to find Amo for the first time, sprawled on the blacktop, bleeding from savage shotgun wounds in his calves. He needed her, needed her right now, and she ran as fast as she could.
Then the whole of the line lifted, the earth moved, and she fell into a pit as the body hills came to life; a shoulder smacked off her elbow, a head slammed against her belly. She cracked her shins off a rock-hard hip, her neck jammed into a flailing arm and her forehead struck off a foot kicking for purchase, sending stars swirling across her vision. Daylight chopped away as newly moving bodies climbed on top of her, grinding her like a person trapped in a set of gears.
She screamed, drowning again in the waters off New LA, but the weight of the bodies soon stopped that. Everything became dark and her bones squealed beneath the pressure, and there was nothing she could do except what she'd learned from Witzgenstein. The sense of them was different from real people, but the same pressure points were there.
The bridle arced out, and the crush ended. At her command, floaters reached down to pull her out. Floaters lifted her into position on the massive red back of a demon, as she tightened the bridle to release her people too.
Then the demon ran. Great bounds ate up the distance, and together they flew.
Bodies parted before the bridle like waves. Her people raced in her wake. Now she could feel the war waging up ahead; brittle lights flaring on the line, souls shearing and breaking. Black and diamond missiles raked the sky above like shooting stars, and all around she felt the ocean changing, infected by some alien sense. Lights were winking out on the line every second, killed by Amo, killed by the dark presence in the ocean's minds.
The demon crested a rise and ahead the full scale of the war spread in a terrible tableau. Shimmering warriors buzzed through the air on diamond wings, wielding crackling electric cannons that shot arcs of force down into the morass of thousands, starting the changes that remade their minds. Bodies churned in the mountains like a boiling stew, drawn to the pummeling pulse at the center.
The demon ran and she whipped it faster.
There was a tiny distant orb of darkness in the distance, sparking with deflected diamond missiles. She reached ahead with the bridle and tried to tell Amo she was coming, then a stony hand suddenly slapped her in the shoulder, throwing her off the demon and reeling into the opposite wall of bodies, where more hands seized hold and dragged her in.
She screamed, stunned and disbelieving as an infected floater reared over her and opened its pale purple mouth, stony teeth sharp as clamshells. Nothing she worked on the bridle now could stop it from biting into her neck.
There was pain and horror, the terrible realization that she was about to die, then its head came away, swiped clear by a single blow with a machete. She saw Alan standing above her with a look of disbelief in his eyes.
"I didn't," he began, but she pushed herself up, ignoring the blood pouring down her chest. Her demon was down and savaged by the ocean, so she ran on foot. Every step was agony but she buttressed the bridle upon herself, working her will to command her body.
More of the infected snatched at her but now she snapped the bridle at them like a lash. A leper flashed into existence and she leapt over it, feet sizzling off its boiling surface. A demon plunged out of the press to block her path and she flung the bridle into its face, stunning it long enough for her to slide painfully between its legs on a patch of grainy ice, rising back to her feet to -
Something crushed her flat to the ground.
Everything fell.
It was like being stamped by the whole of the sky, an impossible weight that ground her cheek into a puddle of gristly ice, her hips flush to a serrated mound. She tried to scream but couldn't get her empty lungs to suck a single gasp of air. The pressure made her ribs creak, buried her body and mind beneath the mass of the -
Line.
Abruptly the pressure relented, and the line changed, and she was already up and running into it, feeling some terrible end drawing near. Around her the world was a graveyard; bodies fallen and silent where they'd fought, none of them rising again. Each one met the touch of her bridle like a dead end, no more alive than a piece of furniture, so now the last man alive in their midst shone like a lighthouse on the line; the only living thing in miles.
Amo.
He was perhaps half a mile ahead surrounded by a low wall of bodies, on his knees and bleeding and panting, looking up at the sky. She shouted but he didn't hear. She started toward him at an ankle-snapping sprint over the morass of tumbled bodies, and he lifted his fist to the side of his head.
She screamed but he didn't hear. She knew what that meant on the line. The dead wouldn't part for her bridle anymore, their ranks were too disrupted to run, and now he was lowering his fist to his throat, and -
"Stop!" she cried, but he didn't stop.
He triggered the blade like a spike out of his forearm. It rushed into his neck and shot the few inches toward his spine, where it snagged.
Lara was yanked off her feet, but heaved against him. She'd never flung the bridle so far, so fast, but she'd caught it. Amo looked at his fist and drove the blade harder, but Lara pulled harder still, forcing the black diamond blade back into its invisible sheath in his arm, leaving him puzzled and pale.
Then he collapsed. The blade had still savaged his throat and the wound now bled profusely. His chest convulsed as blood aspirated into his lungs, and it would all be for nothing, but she didn't panic. She reached out with no time for tears or fear and worked the bridle instinctively, moving in ways she'd never imagined, just like she'd worked the needle so long ago to save his legs. She plunged the bridle so deep that the T4 itself listened, and followed her orders to save his life.
Long teetering moments passed as he coughed blood and leaked blood, and she picked an uneven path over the rutted bodies toward him. Then the wheezing stopped. The convulsions ended.
Lara slipped the bridle out and looked up.
On his side, splattered with blood and barely breathing, he was looking back at her.
* * *
She comes to me like a vision. She can't be real, an angel in the flesh, though she does stumble on all the bodies a lot, not quite like an angel. No wings. I try to get up to meet her, but I'm pretty far from that.
Then she's here, holding my head in her lap, and for sure that's not the worst way to die.
"Amo, Jesus," she mutters, stroking my face like I'm not real.
She's not real.
"It's good to see you," I say, a whisper through my ruptured neck, and that sets her off sobbing.
"You're a sight," she says, laughing through her tears, "Good God, Amo, I just-"
She doesn't know what she just. I smile, because this is how we began; in LA in the hospital, me laid up and her saving the day. It's a good way to close things out, looking into the face of my beautiful wife and seeing love and understanding.
Does she understand? I think she does.
I start to cry too, because it's the understanding that breaks me. She sees me, I think. She sees all the things I've done, and there's shame with that, and happiness with that, and a kind of resounding peace. I'm in the Rien restroom again and the weight is coming off, setting me free from the twinges, sharing the load, splitting it at least by two.
She presses her face against mine, and it's hot. She's so real. I start to think for a minute that maybe this is really her. My Lara. Wouldn't that be good?
"You idiot," she whispers, her forehead tight now against mine, her tears turning to ice on my cheeks. "You don't die from this."
I laugh. It's not much. "I missed you," I say.
She laughs, and I'm feeling something different than I felt in all the other visions, through all my months alone and going mad. I feel her here on the line. It's strange, a ticklish warmth that spreads to encompass other signals that are familiar too, but seems to come from another life.
Vie. Talia. My people?
They're all here? They've come for me?
I hold Lara away and look into her eyes. Could it be? I barely dare say the words because they're loaded with too much impossible hope. There's no way…
"Are you really here?"
Her eyes fill with tears that spill. She kisses me on my battered lips, and in that moment her heat breaks through the ice, and that feels like something real.
"Always," she says.
27. EXODUS PROTOCOL 3
They carry me to the Redoubt. I'm in bad shape, can hardly breathe for spiking broken ribs against my poor lungs and other internal organs, and no one seems able to work any healing magic on the line anymore to help.
I don't remember what I did to unbreak my limbs and seal up my wounds earlier. Lara doesn't remember either. It's all fading now, just as these white bodies sink in amongst each other underfoot, slotting in to make a road that leads to the center of the world.
Lara gets carried at my side, holding my good hand, barely daring to break eye contact. George, Marjorie, Cynthia, Alan, and some of Drake's people carry us. I ask their names; Fedvedy, Jan, Abubakr. I thank them. From such small things are new possibilities built.
My children run up on either side. When I see them first I feel I might explode. The pressure in my head wells like a twinge before blaring out in joy. I struggle to even say their names.
"Vie. Talia."
They grab at me, not really noticing that I'm so injured, yanking at broken bits because they just want to touch me. I want to touch them. My troop set me down and we hug a little, haphazardly, my broken wrist screaming, my knee crackling, my ribs squeezing.
Every bit of pain is good.
"Mommy said you were far away," Talia says, always so smart, "but you're here."
I nod sagely. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
More hugs. I'm so grateful. In their minds, now, there's nothing to forgive. Whether I deserve this love or not doesn't seem to matter at all. It's real.
It gets cold so we pick up the pace. The Redoubt isn't too far, watched over by spiky autocannons on every perch like watchful crows, and thank God Olan never triggered them. I couldn't use the black eye to do a thing, now. It feels like the line is changing, perhaps healing, and all the fantastical deeds I just did are myths from another age, fading already.
Did I really stand on a platform in the sky, shelled with onyx, deflecting diamond missiles? Did Anna really lift up the world, and did I really pull it down again?
At some point we must pass the remains of her body, but I don't notice. I don't know if we'll ever find her, buried within the churning of so many floaters, now locked into their stone embrace. But of course that's only her second body. Where's the first?
So many have died.
For the last part of the journey, up a camouflaged valley and into the Redoubt's entrance, the polished steel and glass façade looking obscene after so much death, we go in silence, each reflecting on all the costs it took to reach this point.
A billion dead. Seven hundred angels. Anna.
It's a lot. Now I have to make it worth it.
* * *
Peters saw the change first.
It began at night, while he sat in the back of the Brezno escape convoy in a Lance 2295 recreational vehicle, at the rattling table in the long dining room while people slept on the couches and floor, working on his designs for a perpetual motion machine.
He would have counted ammunition if he could. There was no shortage of it, but putting the bullets in neat domino lines wasn't possible with the vehicle constantly rocking from side to side, as the convoy worked a path up into the Slovak Ore mountains. The bullets clanked and toppled too easily.
So he worked on reducing friction for his machine. He sketched out crazy ideas, like what would happen if he built it under water or in space. Space was promising, a vacuum, largely frictionless, but also lacking gravity. Hmm. If he started a centrifuge spinning was there some way to harvest energy without slowing it down? Lucas would know.
Lucas had called throughout that day, starting with the first revelation early in the morning. He'd asked to speak to Peters, apparently, and one of these nameless Brezno people had brought him the message, then led Peters back to their lab trailer hitched behind a semi truck. Everything had felt muted, even with all those scientists staring back at him.
Once they got on the phone together, after a few brief pleasantries, the things that Lucas said ended up meaning very little. It was all wavelengths and T4 technobabble, far beyond his realm of understanding.
"I will put you on with the scientists," Peters said, after a time of doing his best to take notes.
"What?" said Lucas, "I thought you already had."
It was confusing. The scientists fiddled with making an uplink. Peters registered the rising mood of these people, so different but infectious. There was a lot of faith in there, after what Anna had done, and some of it bled into him.
He'd felt somewhat useless in the days after she'd gone. The ruptures on the line that followed hadn't felt good, keeping him constantly off-balance with a worry that he couldn't help. Things were changing, and he'd come to love her like a kind of surrogate daughter, and if she died…
He tinkered with his sketch. If she died, then she died. Probably she already was dead.
Strangely that thought didn't make him too sad. He didn't know for certain, but some of those explosions on the line, the size of them, surely one of them had been her fading away…
Perhaps it had felt like goodbye when she left him at Brezno. When he couldn't go any further with her, that was already the end for them. He wished he'd been a bit more sane back then, a bit more able to say the right words, and give a hug with a bit more truth, but that was OK.
She knew. That was the best thing about their relationship. She'd never needed him. It had made him happy, that the best he could ever do was make her just a little bit happier, a little bit more secure. She was fully formed before he'd ever met her, and had found everything she'd needed without his help.
Probably he'd always needed her more. He smiled at the thought. He'd been a shell after Abigail died. He'd kept everyone at one remove, protecting himself, just trying not to think about the humiliations and horrors of Julio's pit. Then there'd been this girl, vivacious and arrogant, confident and competent, who listened to him, who thought what he said had some value.
It had made him feel seen. He was grateful for that. And even if she was dead, nothing was really over; if he'd learned one thing from Abigail's death, it was that.
The scientists had spoken to Lucas at length while Peters stood and watched, forgotten. With their satellite data link they downloaded information, a
nd the long, narrow lab became a flurry of activity. A deadline was projected on the wall and began ticking down: eleven hours and twenty minutes. He watched the digits scrolling by. He understood they were working on a cure. He didn't have any real doubts. If Anna was behind this, it would happen.
It took a while for someone, an under-secretary or some sort, to come back with the satellite phone.
"He wants to talk to you again."
Peters took the phone numbly. "Lucas?" he said.
"Jake died," said Lucas abruptly. He sounded different than earlier, more worn down, but also strangely stronger, like there were reserves he was drawing on that he hadn't even known he had. "Anna came here and tried to bring him back. From being dead. I think she could have done it."
Peters thought that yes, she probably could. He'd always liked Jake. But then with the Lyell's as advanced as it was, had he ever had a chance?
"I am sorry. He was a brave man. You were lucky."
Lucas strangled the emotion. "Thank you. We also believe Anna is dead."
The words came like the church bell tolling in his hometown of Ystad. He'd known this was coming. She'd always burned so brightly; how could she live through this and not blaze as the brightest firework of them all? It only felt right, like the clock ticking down to zero. Somebody had to die.
Lucas was talking.
"…know she meant a lot to you. There'll be a place for you here in Istanbul, when all this is over."
Peters tried to think of something to say. He wasn't distraught. Only temporarily empty. "We have both lost someone very dear to us."
Another strangled sob. "I have to work, now. I hope we can talk more. But let me tell you this. Anna and I didn't always see eye to eye. I'm sorry for that. But the thing she's given us? It's phenomenal, Peters. I think I'm looking at the cure. We're all building it, the whole world is carrying forward what she started."
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 22
