A hole yawned in my gut at the thought of Keely, and Nessa, and Aleka. But they were fine, I told myself. Or if not fine, at least undamaged by me. Or if not that, at least undamaged by anything my body had done.
“What happened?” I asked her. “The day your dad’s device malfunctioned?”
Her face flinched at the memory, or at the word dad. But she answered. “The pulse was too strong. Either that or it wasn’t properly contained. Something about the binding energy. Grandpa’s the nuclear physicist.” It was the first time, I realized, I’d heard her call Udain that. “It fused the desert sand, turned it to a substance like glass or stone. It probably would’ve destroyed the whole compound if something hadn’t absorbed its force.”
“Something?”
“Or someone.” Her eyes flicked toward the wall of rock that corralled the impact zone. “The guards’ bodies were trapped in the fused glass and stone. Or parts of them became stone, it’s hard to say which. The ones who weren’t affected tried to free them, but the rock was too strong.” She shrugged, the motion somehow savage. “In the end they begged the others to shoot them.”
“You remember this?”
She stared off into the distance, over the impact zone. “Sometimes it’s all I can remember.”
“And your family?”
Her eyes snapped back to mine, as hard and jagged as the stone. “Beryl got scared by the light and ran. By the time my mother caught up to her it was too late. All she could do was cover Beryl’s body with her own. When it was over my father—Athan—tried to pull them free. Their hands came away in”—her teeth clenched—“pieces.”
I started to say something, but the look on her face stopped me.
“He left the next day,” she said. “We found Mom and Beryl dead, what was left of them. The rest was pulverized to shards of glass. The last thing he did must have been to take a sledgehammer to them. Which was also the last unselfish thing he did, because by nightfall their skin had started to blacken and bubble where it wasn’t turned to stone.” She drew a deep breath before continuing. “Grandpa took me and Ardan to live with him. I wasn’t even three years old, but something told me I’d never see my father again. And I was right.”
Abruptly she pulled away from the fence and stalked toward one of the smaller buildings, a new one I’d never visited. Without a word, I followed. I didn’t need her grandfather’s advice to know this was one of those times it was best to keep quiet.
She stabbed the code to enter the building and then the back room, not slowing for a second to find out if anyone was there. Overhead lights flickered on automatically, and I saw that we stood in a tiny, plain room with a single metal bed and chair. A protograph screen, half the size of the one in Udain’s quarters, hung from one of the walls. It hummed to life without her touching a button. I guessed it was calibrated to her eyes or movements, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d thought it on. As if the lifeless machine was trying to make up for what its creator had done to her.
“Grab some popcorn,” Mercy said. “And enjoy the show.”
We sat in front of the screen. It showed nothing for a minute, but I heard the sound of it searching. Then Mercy nodded ever so slightly, and the flat screen filled with the oversize face of a man.
I recognized Athan from the earlier images in Udain’s protograph: lean cheeks, long hair, dark eyes. But now scars ran down his cheeks, over his brow, into the flesh at the corner of his lips. And every feature had become exaggerated, the cheeks not just lean but emaciated, the hair not just long but unruly, the eyes not just intense but insane. They rolled and spun in his gaunt face, colorless like everything else in the protograph but radiating a kaleidoscopic pattern. They seemed to be seeking something only he could find.
“I thought you never saw him again,” I said to Mercy.
“I didn’t,” she said. “That’s not my father.”
“We believed you had died,” a voice spoke from the protograph screen.
“I did not die,” the mouth of her father said. His words came out cold and unshakable. “I was reborn.”
“Yet you returned.”
“Aya tivah bis,” Asunder spoke. “Shashi tivah bracha.”
There was a pause while the invisible interrogator took in these strange words.
“You have come to stand trial for your crimes?”
“I have come with a message for the unbelievers,” Asunder said. “I have given my flesh to the all-powerful one, that I might warn the infidels of the fate that is prepared for them.”
“Do you deny what you have done?”
“I deny nothing,” he said. “I have been reborn.”
Without transition, the image widened to reveal Asunder’s whole body, seated rigidly in a metal chair.
But his body wasn’t whole.
He wore only a loincloth, one that seemed to be cut from his camouflage uniform, so there was nothing to hide the terrible gashes that ran across his chest, his arms, his legs. The flesh was ragged as a Skaldi’s scar, the wounds unhealed, dark with dried blood. But something about the way his eyes leaped eagerly to the ruin of his own body made me question whether these were Skaldi bites or whether he had done this to himself. I looked for the bone-white staff, but it wasn’t there.
“You will be tried by our courts,” the interrogator said, and I realized the voice belonged to Udain. “That is the only power you need fear. But they may be merciful.”
At that Asunder smiled, a cold smile that did nothing to chase the deadly calm from his face. “There is no mercy among men,” he said. “There is only judgment.”
“Athan—”
“All will bow before the Scavenger of Souls on the day of his coming,” the son’s voice spoke. “The men of metal and machines as well as the purified ones. Else they will meet their doom.”
The figure of the interrogator moved into the frame, and I saw that it was Udain, his body towering over the ruined shape of his younger son. But before I could watch his response to Asunder’s latest threat, Mercy blinked twice, and the screen went blank.
“Mercy—”
“There is no mercy among men,” she said. “There is only judgment.”
“When did he come back?”
She shrugged. “A week, two maybe. I was only three years old.”
“Did you see him?”
She nodded.
“Did you talk to him?”
“He scared me,” she said softly. “He had the face of my father, but his body . . .” She shivered. “Before Beryl and my mom died, I went out to—to be with them. To touch them. They were broken too. Their bodies had turned partly to stone, and those parts had crumbled away when he tried to free them. But they still held me. In the embrace of the stone. I felt their warmth, their hearts beating. They were still alive.” She nodded at the empty screen. “Not him. He was dead. His body still moved, his mouth still spoke, but he was dead.”
“But he came back,” I said. “Why?”
“How the hell do I know?” she said. “To convert everyone to his loony cult, apparently. He was sentenced to banishment, but he kept coming back. For years. Only now he had that staff, and he started holding meetings out in the impact zone, and the people who went to them came back acting crazy. They babbled about the evil they’d done, and how they’d been purified with fire, and how all our sins would be washed away if we joined their lord Asunder. Half the time they didn’t even talk in a real language. Eventually they tried to blow up the whole camp. They were sentenced to death, but right before they were executed Athan showed up with a bunch of warriors and stole them away. And when Udain tracked them to the canyon to put an end to it, they killed almost everyone, and captured the ones who didn’t die.”
“And Archangel?” I said. “Ardan? What happened to him?”
“You ask a lot of questions, Beam Boy,” she said. “Maybe it’s none of your goddamn business.”
“You don’t believe that,” I said. “You know I’m part o
f this. You knew right away, and that’s why you took me to see Udain. You knew I could help you get at Asunder.”
She regarded me warily. “You seem to have it all figured out. So how exactly are you going to help us tiptoe past his defenses?”
“Because I know something about him you don’t,” I said. “Something about him even he doesn’t.”
“Which is . . . ?”
I took a deep breath before answering. I wasn’t sure why it was so hard to utter the words, whether I was worried about giving away my advantage or didn’t want to admit it to myself. But it was the truth. Knowing it now, seeing it in the protograph, it seemed I’d known it from the moment I’d met him in the black rock desert. I’d just never realized what it meant.
“He’s an amnesiac,” I said. “His past was stolen from him by Skaldi. Like mine. He doesn’t remember who he is.”
9
I told Mercy everything.
Or everything I could. I told her about the Skaldi attack, now seven months ago, that had robbed me of my memory and destroyed Survival Colony 27, the colony I’d shared with Aleka and my half brother. I told her about my short time in Survival Colony 9, my life with her uncle Laman and her childhood playmate Yov, the details of their deaths. I finished that part of the story by telling her about the Skaldi nest, the monsters’ inability to kill me. Next I told her about Aleka’s attempt to reach the canyon, our capture by Asunder’s colony, our abortive escape, the murder of the guard. I told her how her father had attacked Aleka and Wali and me with his staff, and her eyes simmered. When I told her the part her brother Ardan—Archangel—had played in our imprisonment, the simmer turned to a boil.
“So Athan touched you with the staff too?” she said.
I nodded.
“And yet you’re still basically compos mentis,” she mused. “So it seems that’s another thing you’re immune to.”
“He uses it on his own people,” I said, remembering the ritual in Grava Bracha. “But all it seems to do is make them forget. It’s more powerful when he wants to kill someone. Like a”—and Tyris’s words returned to me—“like an electric shock to the system.”
“But he never touched Ardan with it?” she said anxiously.
“Not that I saw.”
She mulled that over. “Ardan saw me,” she said. “At the altar. He must have known who I was. But he wouldn’t talk to me.” Her mouth turned down. “If he’s not under the staff’s power, why’s he agreeing to do everything Pops says?”
I had no answer for her.
She told me about the early years of Asunder’s reign. How the raids had been intense at first, with many of Udain’s colonists lost to the prophet and his growing army of disciples. Some people, she said, went willingly, people who felt responsible for what had happened that day. Parents who’d lost their kids, kids who’d lost their parents. Ardan was less than ten years old when he followed his father into the desert. Other people Athan targeted for kidnapping: women and children especially, as well as members of Udain’s team with specialized expertise in things like horticulture and toxicology. His prize recruit was a geneticist named Melan, who’d been Athan’s right-hand man in the trials that produced the device. He’d joined Asunder voluntarily, leaving behind the bodies of a son and daughter frozen in the rock.
“Melampus,” I said.
Mercy told me that her father had tried to abduct her, too, but her grandfather had kept her hidden. And Asunder had stolen lots of tech as well, though from what she understood he’d taken most of it only to destroy it. It was obvious to me, though, that some of it—the living tech, like the toxin-resistant seeds she told me Melan had invented—had been used to build their civilization and bioengineer their canyon home. Within a few years of the attack at rock city, Mercy said, Udain’s scouts counted hundreds of warriors in the southern end of the canyon. And they reported seeing little kids trailing after the older members of Asunder’s colony, all of them with the long brown hair and dark eyes of their leader.
“So you think . . .” I began.
“That Daddy got busy, yeah. And I think that’s why he wanted that bimbo of yours.”
“Nessa,” I said, but she was no longer listening.
She told me that after Asunder’s victory over his father’s forces, his tactics had changed: rather than appearing at the compound himself, he started sending emissaries to stir up trouble. A few of Udain’s people were convinced by these preachers to join Asunder—though those were the ones, Udain later discovered, who ended up sacrificed as warnings to the rest. But in some ways the missionary runs were worse than the full-scale assaults, because the people who showed up at camp sometimes posed as refugees from Athan, and that made it hard for Udain to keep them at bay. Finally he got the idea to use his son’s technology to cage the Skaldi, and he decreed that anyone from outside would be fed to it. For years there’d been no more attacks, and Udain thought his son might finally have called a truce. Then, a half year ago, the missionary runs started again.
“It was right around the time you keep talking about. The time”—she nodded at me—“you had your first date with the Skaldi.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“The timing fits,” she said. “Just when you join Laman’s colony, Athan starts recruiting again. Maybe he learned his big brother was a daddy too, and was getting ready to pluck some fruit from him.”
“Laman’s son died,” I said. “His name was Matay. He would have been your cousin.”
“Most of my life is would-have-been,” she sighed. “But I guess I’m not alone.”
“No,” I said.
And then, finally, I told her about my mother. Aleka. Who, if my numbers were right, had been pregnant with me the day Athan’s device devoured the desert, killing Mercy’s mother and sister, driving its creator insane.
We sat silent for a long time. Mercy stared at nothing, her lips moving occasionally without making a sound. In the buzzing quiet I tried to total my own list of would-have-beens. I quickly lost count.
“And so you think—what?” she said at last. “That the explosion turned you into some kind of mutant killing machine?”
“I think its power went into me, yes,” I said. “It’s the only thing that explains why the Skaldi can’t touch me. When they try, it calls out the power of the beam. Except the reaction’s so strong it doesn’t just paralyze them—it burns. I think the one in the cage must have pulled even more power than usual, and that’s why it ignited.”
She stared at me intently, as if she could spot mutation in my eyes. Then she laughed, but her laugh carried a manic edge. “Oh, man, this is too much. Here I am, plotting revenge with the original human glow stick. But it doesn’t really help us get into that canyon, does it? Your remarkable powers only work against Skaldi.”
“But Asunder is Skaldi,” I said. “Or at least, the product of Skaldi. Don’t you see, Mercy? The memory loss is the key. Right before he used the staff on me, he said something about fleeing into the desert and wrestling with a demon. He must have meant the Skaldi. Somehow, the creature that stole his memory fifteen years ago must still be living off his body. Using him to make others forget too. Through the power of his staff.”
“The staff,” she said, and I could see in her eyes that she was trying to believe me but not really succeeding.
“The staff,” I repeated. “It’s a bone, right? Could it be from someone the Skaldi killed?”
“Skaldi don’t leave bones.”
“I know.” I struggled to think what it could be. When the staff touched me, I saw a child’s arms being torn from its body. But I couldn’t tell who it was, or how it had happened. What could have given a dead piece of bone that kind of power?
“It doesn’t matter,” I said finally, only half convinced by my own words. “All that matters is that I can help you fight him. On his home turf. He won’t—he shouldn’t be able to kill me. If I can focus the energy against him, he’ll be powerless. And then yo
u and Udain—”
She shook her head forcefully. “I’m not dragging Grandpa into this. He’d never believe me in the first place. If we go, we go alone.”
“Two of us. Against his whole colony.”
“I thought you were the one who was so confident,” she said. “Look, it’s not like Udain has a bunch of commandoes at his disposal. You think Geller’s going to take a spear for you? And a small force stands a better chance of sneaking into the canyon anyway. The only thing we were lacking before was firepower. Which we now have, thanks to you.” When I still hesitated, she went on. “You want that floozy and those kids back, right? And I want my father—”
“Dead.”
“My father is dead,” she hissed. “He took everything from me. Not only Beryl and my mom, but Ardan, too. The least I can do is try to save the only brother I have left.”
I weighed her offer. I didn’t like our chances. Mercy was good at what she did, I knew that. Give her the right opportunity, and she’d be the one who turned into some kind of killing machine. But she was also unstable, someone I couldn’t trust not to go rogue at the wrong moment. I didn’t like the idea of leaving Aleka and the others behind. I didn’t know enough about Asunder’s powers to be sure we could overcome them. And I didn’t know enough about my own power to be sure I could call on it when I needed it. Everything seemed to fit, but I’d been wrong before. If I was wrong this time . . .
I didn’t know what would happen. I only knew what would happen if I did nothing. The thought of Nessa giving birth to one of Asunder’s carbon-copy children clinched it. I held out my hand, and this time Mercy gripped it and shook firmly.
“That’s that, then,” she said. “Better go recharge your blood-beam. Tonight, we blow this popsicle stand.”
Blowing this popsicle stand, I discovered, was easier said than done. And not only because I had no clue what a popsicle stand was.
I’d been right that Udain’s camp was a prison. But I hadn’t realized how right I was. Not only was the front—and only—gate locked and guarded around the clock, but everyone in the compound, with the possible exception of its commander, had a tracking device implanted under the skin of their upper arm. Mercy rolled up her left sleeve and showed me the place on her biceps, a bump and a scar. “Another of Athan’s brilliant inventions,” she said. “It itches.” The tracking device, like everything else in the compound, connected to the control cuff around Udain’s wrist, and it sent a distress signal after it passed beyond a certain range. Mercy wasn’t sure what the range was—apparently her grandfather could adjust it depending on whim or circumstances—but it was certainly less than the distance it would take us to cross the impact zone and enter Asunder’s canyon. The signals of those he’d stolen away had beeped frantically at first but long since fallen dead.
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