NOVEMBER 15th
Twenty-Two Days A.N.
34
SONGBIRDS WARBLED IN a leafy green canopy. A blue sky burned bright beyond. From the twisted boughs of branches overhead, white orchids spilled down, their sweet scent mixing with the fragrant wet earth. Dappled sunlight danced over the ground, and from somewhere the sound of children laughing echoed. Waves crashed against a shore.
“Where am I?” Jess’s vision went in and out of focus, the greens and blues fuzzing together, but not the sounds, not the smells. They almost overpowered her. She exhaled, then inhaled the intoxicating perfume of the flowers.
A fly buzzed past her.
Not a fly. A bird. And no, not even a bird.
The tiny machine darted through the leaves and up into the sky.
The sky.
She tried to sit up, but she was restrained. It was all she could do to angle her neck down to look at her body. Encased in a white sheet, on some kind of bed. In the middle of a forest. Or jungle.
And that sky.
Her eyes opened wide to take in the deep, beautiful blue, and the flickering, impossibly bright orb of the sun that she hadn’t seen for so long.
Was she dead?
“You’re not dead. Not this time.”
The platform she was on slowly inclined at her waist, raising her head up. A smiling face greeted her, his skin brown like caramel, his eyes soft, a knitted cap set askew on his slicked black hair and a silver earring dangling from one ear.
“Where…is this…”
“Sanctuary,” the smiling face replied.
“And you’re…” She closed her eyes. She’d seen him before. “Ufuk Erdogmus.”
“At your service.”
She tried to move again.
“I’d sit still for now. We’re still repairing you. You did quite a bit of damage to your body.” He smiled, his teeth perfectly white but gapped in the front.
The other strange thing she couldn’t put her finger on. It wasn’t something she felt. It was something she didn’t feel.
Pain.
For the first time in longer than she could remember, she didn’t have any sensation of pain. Her eyes widened and she tried to look at her right foot.
“We saved your toes,” Ufuk said, seeing the panic in her eyes. “And you’ll have a new leg in a day or two. A robotic one, even better than flesh and blood. It’s kind of my specialty.”
“What happened to, ah…” Her mind was still groggy.
“Müller? He’s in custody. He would have escaped if you hadn’t held onto him. I should tell you, there are videos of you, hanging on to his hand like a pitbull…you’ve got some fans on our intranet. And it would have been a bloody battle, if you hadn’t broadcast that message. You saved us. Me. All of us.” He held his hands wide. “Müller knew we were coming. He knew we knew. It was a trap that I had to put myself into, and thank God you got us out of it. I pulled my drones from North Africa to attack Müller’s men, but he was setting it all up to position me as part of the extremists, cooperating with you. Attacking Vivas.”
It was too much for Jess to process. She squeezed her eyes shut as sunlight flashed from above. “Is that the sun?”
“High intensity multi-spectrum LED display over the Dome.”
For a moment, a blissful sense of peace eased over Jess. She was safe.
But then like a bolt of lightning: “Giovanni and Hector. Did you…are they…”
Ufuk’s brows knitted together. “What Müller said was true. We managed to locate them, or at least, their bodies. My drones mounted a grid search based on the last radio signals and found the tent on the ice floe, but it’s too far out to recover.”
“God, no…” Her breath caught in a sob. “I wasn’t trying to do anything but save them. It was the only way, to get to someone in Sanctuary…”
“You’ve only been unconscious for six hours.” He looked away, seemed to speak into thin air. Another of the tiny flying machines flitted away into the leaves. “We’re doing all we can.”
Jess did her best to collect herself. “What did he want? What was in my father’s data that was so important?”
“It wasn’t the data.”
“Then what?”
“It was his personal information, his emails, his personal logs. Your dad had kept that laptop for six years; he kept everything on it. Müller was worried that something on there could disprove all the lies he’d been telling about your father. He’d shown information proving your father was connected to the religious extremists, that he leaked info about Nomad, that he hid its existence.”
“Why did you try and talk to him in Darmstadt?”
“Because I wanted to tell him the truth, but Müller made sure I couldn’t.”
“Where’s Massarra? Salman?”
He shook his head. “They slipped away. But Roger is here, in the hospital.”
“This isn’t a hospital.”
“No.” His warm smile returned. “This is something just for you. We owe you. And your family.”
“So the Earth won’t hit Saturn?” This was the thing she’d been worrying about ever since she ran the simulation back at the castle. The Earth was a mess, but hitting Saturn, that would be the end of everything.
“We’ll come close, maybe even pass through its rings. It will be quite the show in the sky in eighteen months. From what I see, we won’t hit any moons or apocalyptic-sized asteroids, but we will have to survive bombardment from Jovian clusters, some weird magnetics, and the sun is unstable. Our solar system has become a hostile place.”
“But why…?” Jess whispered. Seeing Ufuk’s puzzled face she added: “I mean, why did Müller do it?”
He shrugged. “Right now we can only guess. One of the stated goals of Sanctuary was to retain diversity, to try and recreate the world and culture as it was before. A vault of civilization. Müller didn’t see it that way. He complained that the problems of the world stemmed from its diversity. He argued that we should create a homogeneous human population, that we had a chance to build a race of superhumans.”
“And why did he try to pile all the blame on to my father?”
Ufuk shrugged again. “He needed a scapegoat, someone for people to focus their anger on. He had videos of your father stealing the car at Darmstadt, escaping into the night. And your father did discover Nomad, even if he didn’t know it at the time. Even if Müller hid the discovery.”
Jess let her head fall back against the pillow. “So what now?” She could hardly imagine taking another breath, she felt so tired. And there was no point anymore. Everyone she cared for was dead.
“I’m pushing to repeal the one-year moratorium. I want to open channels to help anyone left alive out there. We have a world to rebuild. I’m taking an expedition up to the Svalbard seed reposi—”
A tiny whirring drone sped in through the leaves and whispered in Ufuk’s ear.
“There was a boy, by the airfield,” Jess started to say. “He—”
But Ufuk held his hand up. “I have news.” He handed something to Jess that looked like a telephone.
She took it.
The ice tipped back and forth, back and forth, the waves gliding endlessly past and through them. Giovanni did his best to hold his grip on Hector, but the boy was gone. Where was he?
“Bevi,” whispered Hector. He held a cup to Giovanni’s lips.
But he couldn’t even take a sip.
He had no energy to lift his head. In front of his eyes, his hands curled into claws, the fingertips blue. In the blue-black light, he saw the mass of Lucca and Raffa, where he knew the faithful teenagers were, or used to be. How long had it been? Everything had been soaked, but now it was frozen solid. What would Hector do when Giovanni was dead? What kind of lonely, painful death would Hector have to endure?
But Giovanni didn’t even have tears left to cry.
He closed his eyes and blackness took him.
The boy and his dog crouched in the dark s
hadows inside the hangar. They huddled together for warmth in the nest of cardboard and old blankets. The dog licked the boy’s face. His mother and father died weeks ago, in the flood, before the cold.
“Mi dispiace, Issa,” the boy said to the dog.
He had no food, not since the flying woman left two nights ago.
And he had to hide.
A loud whirring noise grew in the sky.
At first the boy was scared, but then wondered: was it the woman returning? She reminded him of his mother, and he wished he’d gone with her, found a way to sneak himself and his dog onto the airplane.
But he’d been too scared, too weak.
The buzzing sound grew louder, and now the boy was scared. A shape loomed out of the dark sky. It was a flying machine, but not like the one the woman took off in. It had four propellers, one in each corner, and was much smaller than the other machine.
There was a box underneath it.
The machine hovered in front of him, kicking up snow and dirt. It seemed to look at the boy, but he saw no eyes. The box underneath it dropped with a thud onto the snow. The buzzing whirring noise intensified and dust and snow kicked up in a swirl. The machine gained altitude and disappeared into the gloom overhead.
The box popped open.
They would have run away, but the smell.
It drew them toward it.
Edging closer, a light was on inside, and a steaming pot of stew.
Stay there, said a note in Italian, I am coming to get you. The boy smiled and looked into the sky.
Blinding white light.
So bright that it hurt to look at.
“Hello,” echoed a voice.
Dots of brilliant gold floated in space, and a face coalesced from the bright white.
“Can you hear me?” the face said.
Giovanni opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He tried again. “Am I dead?”
The floating white dots swirled in a blizzard.
“Am I in heaven?” he asked, louder this time, hoping, fearful.
“No, mate, I’m Ballie. Ballie Booker. Remember? The Jolly Roger?” The face came into focus. It was a man with a sailor’s cap set at an angle, a tattered blue uniform. Behind him, in the sky, Giovanni saw something sweep by. A tiny helicopter.
Ballie held something out to Giovanni. “You’re not in heaven, mate.” His smile almost went from ear to ear. “But there’s an angel on the other end of this phone that wants to talk to you.”
Thanks for reading!
While this is the end of the first two-book series in the world of Nomad, we’re only just getting started! A new two-book Nomad-world series will be coming out in September of 2016, following Jess and Giovanni as a civil war breaks out in Sanctuary and the Earth falls toward Saturn. If you’d like to be alerted of its release, join my mailing list by visiting my website:
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OTHER BOOKS BY MATTHEW MATHER
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CyberStorm
Award-winning CyberStorm depicts, in realistic and sometimes terrifying detail, what a full scale cyberattack against present-day New York City might look like from the perspective of one family trying to survive it. Click here or search for CyberStorm on Amazon.
Darknet
A prophetic and frighteningly realistic novel set in present-day New York, Darknet is the story of one man’s odyssey to overcome a global menace pushing the world toward oblivion, and his incredible gamble to risk everything to save his family. Click here or search for Darknet on Amazon.
Atopia Chronicles (Series)
In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world’s elite flock to Atopia, an enormous corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind’s insatiable appetite for natural resources. Click here or search for Atopia on Amazon.
SANCTUARY
MATHER INC.
Tomorrow’s books today.
Copyright © 2015, 2016
Matthew Mather ULC
ISBN: 978-1-987942-05-7
Cover image by Damonza.com
This is a work of fiction, apart from the parts that aren’t.
Table of Contents
Other Books by Matthew Mather
NOVEMBER 1st
NOVEMBER 2nd
NOVEMBER 3rd
NOVEMBER 4th
NOVEMBER 5th
NOVEMBER 6th
NOVEMBER 7th
NOVEMBER 8th
NOVEMBER 9th
NOVEMBER 10th
NOVEMBER 11th
NOVEMBER 13th
NOVEMBER 14th
NOVEMBER 15th
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 25
