by Forbes West
You talk about how they had on ski masks and those black coats—just like outside the temple.
“But, why didn’t they just wipe us out like they wanted to?” Treena asks. “I mean, they wanted to kill us. They killed Winniefreddie, right?” She starts to cry. “Oh God.”
You don’t correct her on this.
“Why wouldn’t they just do it here?” Guy asks, pulling out another cigar.
“Why don’t you put that away for once?” you snap. He ignores you and lights up.
“I don’t know why! I don’t…they…they’re maniacs!” you bluster out. “Who knows what’s in their heads?”
Guy takes a long puff of his cigar and blows out a ring of smoke. “I know what’s going to be next in their heads. Doctor and Botha’s heads, anyways.” He takes out a small pistol and racks back the slide. “It sort of makes sense, Network people working with Mathias. I mean, how else can they knock down people and know where they are in such wide open spaces? The weaponry that Mathias carries...”
“You, Treena, and me, on the roof. The Crue is still fueled up right now when it comes to the ori, so we can at least fly it on over and take off again in a hurry. We can jump down onto the roof. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone up there in the lounge...This is ugly, isn’t it?”
You nod. “We need a plan. We need to really think about this.”
Guy nods. “Well, we need a plan, but we’re doing it tonight, okay guys? It's a regular storm out there, meaning they can’t scramble Spitfires out to burn us out of the sky. And we don’t know if they know we know about them. We gotta move tonight.”
“What if we tell your uncle?” you ask Guy.
Guy licks his lips, thinking. “Who can we trust? I haven’t seen him in years, Sarah. I don’t know. I mean, I thought Dee was just this corporate twit, Botha this racist, and the doctor, as well, just this, nothing. But if they’re in it together, who can we trust? Besides, the Network will just place them under arrest and they could just get out again. Them dying is safer for all of us. We need to make some people dead tonight. Poor Saki’s family. Murdering bastards, goddamn...” He bites his lip. “After I say goodbye to Saki in the clinic, we’ll get together. After I say goodbye.” He looks at you. Despite how bad you feel for Saki, you do not like that Guy will say anything to her again.
* * *
You and Treena leap onto the rooftop of the Mission, your ori-batons out. Guy hovers above in the S.B. Crue, but it’s blowing this way and that through the winds of the strengthening storm. You help Treena tie a cable from the S.B. Crue to a pillar so the ship won’t just blow away in the wind.
Guy says good luck as the three of you get into the half-working elevator car. You hit the button for each floor that your targets are on—seventeen and nineteen. With your full nighthawk gear on, you’re ready for battle. Ski masks cover your faces, the S.B. Crue label on your flight suit removed.
Treena puts away her glasses and mutters a small prayer as you descend in the elevator. Guy blinks rapidly. Each of you switches on an old school walkie-talkie that looks like it came from the Second World War and hook it onto your belt. “Signal when you get to the apartment. They should be asleep so just blast through the door, like we talked about. Just keep blasting.”
You and Treena nod. “What about Cartwright’s wife?” you ask, thinking about your target and remembering his wife from the bonfire ceremony that seems centuries ago. The other target, Botha, lives alone.
“Guilty,” Guy says, just with one word. “You know what I mean?”
Treena nods. “I’ll be there, too.” She squeezes your hand.
You shake your head. “We don’t know that.”
Guy and Treena look at you with eyes that are dead, dead for just a moment. “Oh, we know.”
You sweat profusely, almost soaking your Network flight suit. “Christ,” you moan.
“You okay, Sarah? Shit. She’s not up for this,” Guy says, holding you for a second.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine,” you mutter.
The elevator doors open onto nineteen. Guy steps out, snapping his ori- baton. “See you on the roof.” He walks down the hall, looking at apartment numbers.
The doors close and you lower to seventeen with Treena. When they open again, you and Treena step out and immediately spot the Cartwrights’ apartment at the end of the hall—1719. A little choo choo train with their name written on it is nailed to the door.
You check your synchronized Casio watches. It’s 2:58 in the morning. When 3:00 hits, that's when you’ll burst through. You wait outside the door, ready to destroy whatever is inside that apartment.
You squeeze each other’s hands. Your watch turns to 3:00. Treena blows the door off its hinges with one snap of her ori-baton’s telekinesis power and throws it clear across the apartment. It explodes through a plate glass window.
You walk into the apartment, shooting everywhere you can, spraying shots left and right. Treena sprays out a jet of flame that torches pictures, couches, and chairs. She even snaps off a lightning blast that destroys the bedroom door and throws it, blackened and charred, against the other side of the room.
Loud bangs and an explosion from a couple of floors up rattle the walls—the loud thump of a grenade blowing. Glass shatters and you can see through the window a little bit of flaming debris that must have ejected out of the apartment on nineteen where Guy is. Fiery fragments float down.
You search everywhere, using your own baton to throw the Cartwrights’ bed against the wall. You scream something primal and then talk into that large walkie-talkie. “Nothing,” you say.
As you and Treena leave, absolutely disappointed, the fire alarm goes off. People are shouting and a couple of apartment doors open randomly. Tim spots you with a look of absolute wonderment on his face. Residents look at you in shock as you climb back into the elevator—which now won’t work because of the fire alarms going off. You sprint awkwardly past the residents again without saying a word.
Sprinklers turn on as well, dousing everyone. You and Treena charge into a stairwell and rush up the stairs as fast you can. You meet Guy on nineteen, who looks as confused as you are, and continue running upstairs to the observation lounge, where the wind is still blowing and the rain is coming down more and more. Guy climbs the cable in a second and then uses the ori-baton to telekinetically lift both you of you on-board. Treena runs into the wheelhouse, and the S.B. Crue with the screwed-up rudder takes off into the storm.
“God, we almost had them,” Guy says, disappointed. You rub your chest for a moment, trying to calm your breathing. The wind and the rain hit you across the face in a stinging tide. “But we’ll have them one day.”
Treena sets off towards the Quadling region to the far south as Guy takes you inside the wheelhouse.. No one says anything for a long time before switching on The Old Man at Midnight, who’s playing an Alex Clare song, Too Close.
You feel shaky and ask if there is a bathroom on-board. Guy starts to tell you but you fall over in a heap, your chest burning. You pass out again.
Chapter Seventeen:
The Magician’s Highway
You think you can hear waves crashing somewhere far off. It is quiet except for the steady beat of footsteps coming down the hall and then away again. You are in a small bedroom with white walls, wooden floors, and a window without glass that looks out over a deep blue sea.
There is a strange feeling inside you—no calm, no sense of peace, but a sense of numbness, of unfeeling, of emotions being checked into a corner. You feel as if every bit of you has been dipped into Novocain. You can almost feel terror, almost feel unhappiness, almost feel angry—but these are oddly distant feelings, feelings that can be heard coming from one room over, like terrible music being heard through a thick wall.
You look over and see that there is a small radio, something that looks like it is from the forties, next to your bed. With your right hand you turn it on, and the same cultured and feminine voice that ha
d narrated the beginning of Morgan Freeman’s monologue on the Queen Mary speaks: “...to Quadling region. Here at this southern-most part of The Oberon off-world settlements, you may visit the outskirts of the ancient Antediluvian city, Quadling-1, witness the annual gathering of the Baleen dragons in the Quadling Sea, and explore the mystery of the Arc Waters and the beauty of the Baths of Urncalles, a two thousand-year-old bath palace thirteen stories high containing a collection of a thousand rooms, ten thousand shrines, and two hundred thousand statues, all carved into a natural land bridge extending a mile and a half across the Quadling Sea. This is situated above the Telaknives Chimes, the largest wind chimes in the universe. All provided to you by the Network and the Bureau of Off-World Affairs.”
Then an excited male voice delivers an advertisement for Brettie Pies. You turn the knob until you hear some old rock ‘n‘ roll. Radio Oberon.
You turn over in the bed, wearing oversized pajamas. “Mom?” you say to the room, coming out of a slight daze. The door opens and Guy walks in, drying off a cool bottle of that Soviet insignia beer, and singing as he sees you. “My love is in league with the freeway, its passion will ride, as the cities fly by...”
“What am I doing here?” you say.
Guy hands you a water, which you immediately put down. “And the tail-lights dissolve, in the coming of night, and the questions in thousands take flight...”
You blink twice.
“Welcome to the Quadling,” he says. “Sorry, I am three beers deep already.”
* * *
You come out of the bedroom wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, a couple of sizes too big for you, grabbed out of one of Guy’s wooden dressers. It is morning still, a bright sunny morning with a couple of moons hanging ghost-like in the sky.
The house is small and stands on a little rock of an island, along with an obsidian Nemo Gate. It’s a small Gate, big enough for only one person to step through. The entire house is composed of white walls with a thatched roof set upon it, and sits under the shade of two large palm trees.
The house itself is three large rooms, all open to the elements most of the time. There are heavy metal storm shutters that can be dragged down and heavy bamboo blinds, outside and inside the windows respectively. There is a large porch section with a swing bench covered in leather cushions, set up to give a perfect view of the Quadling. In front of you is the wide, great, deep blue Quadling Sea, marked by a couple of gray rocks the size of skyscrapers, along with a smattering of others.
On the small platform with the personal Nemo Gate is a winding and crooked wooden staircase that descends right into the clear sea. A steady wind blows from the beach far ahead of you. A crude, hand-painted sign on the platform reads:.
Off to the south you see the beaches of the Quadling and what you guess is Stonetown, by the rock walls outlining the city. It has a mixture of rundown towers made of rough gray and orange stone, thatched wooden houses, and other, noticeably human-style, constructions.
Part of Stonetown extends into the sea. Its wooden boardwalk and dock are filled with normal fishing boats and abnormal wooden ships with red triangle sails. The other half of the city retreats farther inland to allow for a large area of white sand beaches. A red stone land bridge stretches from the far western edge of the beach into the dark, cobalt waters of the sea. It’s half a mile long. One section of the land bridge has to be the Urncalles, the red and white stone baths, thirteen stories high, a thousand rooms, according to the radio. The mass of the much-talked-about Arc Waters hangs suspended above it like a permanent watery rainbow. Airships dart about in the sky above.
You blink rapidly. “Oh. Wow. All the homes like this?”
Guy smiles. “No, just mine. Just mine.”
You watch the waves roll in. “Where’s the Crue?” you ask.
“Treena has it down at the docks. She’s holed up at the baths and will stay nights over there,” Guy says. “We might be wanted for questioning back in the Sargasso region. Our names haven’t been on the radio but everything else—all the other info—has. Your name came up as a person of interest.”
You sigh. “Should we be worried? Should I?”
Guy laughs. “They aren’t good about tracking down criminals, not out of their regional jurisdiction. I mean, The Oberon is twice the size of Australia, so I don’t blame ‘em. It’s a lot of ground to cover. Still, though, I wouldn’t be talking about our identity to the Counters openly. If there’s a Network Liberty Marshal around, now, that could be an issue. We ripped off the logo on the S.B. Crue before we landed.”
Guy rubs his eyes as if they are itchy. “Right, then,” he says, stepping inside his house. He comes back with a cigar, cuts the tip and lights it. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get back to Earth any time soon.”
Guy wanders back inside to sit on a brown Chesterfield sofa; you follow. A picture of him and Saki hangs on the wall—fishing together somewhere back on Earth.
“So you know nothing more about what’s happened, where those…”
Guy’s mouth moves as if to say something, but nothing comes out at first. “No.”
“You know nothing, is that right?” you say, desperate for information.
“No, I don’t, Sarah. I wish I did.”
“So you know nothing.”
He puts his cigar onto an ashtray, his face giving away not a single emotion. “I know nothing. You know, it sure is sounding like a Hogan’s Heroes episode in here.”
You walk down to the platform with the Nemo Gate. You can feel Guy’s eyes on the back of your head as you sit down on the platform and stick your bare feet into the warm water. It helps you relax.
Guy gets up and you can hear his footsteps come behind you on the wooden planks. He sits down next to you, not saying anything.
“What are you thinking?” you ask, staring out at the sea.
He chews on his bottom lip. “Nothing, I guess.” He laughs a little. You lean back and close your eyes, listening to the chain of the swing as it rocks back and forth in the wind.
“I’m losing my mind,” you whisper. “I killed myself out there in the Sargasso, did you know that? A clone or something. I have a witness though. Maybe it was me. I saw my dead sister out by the coast.” Your eyes flick to his face and to the floor, unsure of what he will say. “Maybe it was really me that died.”
Guy is good enough not to say anything.
“What should I do now? What should we do now?” you ask. “What will we do tomorrow? What I will do tomorrow?” you continue to ask, your anxiety coming through loud and clear. You don’t bother to look over to where he is; you could be speaking to the sea.
He rubs his nose as if he had allergies that are bothering him. “The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock on the door...”
You look at him, confused.
“Just quoting the only poem I like,” he says with a sad smile. “And Saki liked. I hope my girl’s okay. I’ve paid off the guards there to look out for Saki. Back at the Mission. I’ll know if anything comes up.” You stare at the sea, not saying a word.
* * *
You walk out into the street to reveal yourself. It had been literally a four-hour-long process at the salon in Stonetown’s human quarter. Guy smokes a cigar and reads TIME Magazine while sipping on a Coke from a plastic cup at this little outside cafe. It will soon be dusk. He looks at you very strangely; he puts down the magazine that discusses the rise of orichalcum attacks in the USA.
“See! Ta-da!” you say, accidentally bumping the table and knocking the Coke onto the magazine. A Ni-Perchta shop owner nearby laughs.
Guy ignores it as he looks you over. “Interesting look, there,” he says. “So you bleached the shit out of your hair to make it blonde and cut it short. And straightened it.” He stands up. “And you got heavy black eye shadow, whore lashes, fake eyebrows, pink lipstick.”
You catch a glimpse of you
rself in the mirror hanging on the food stall; you look radically different in a tight black blouse and tight blue jeans.
“I look like a stripper,” you say, and almost start to cry. You really don’t know what you were thinking. “You said we might be fugitives and I thought…”
“Well, it’s not a bad idea, honey,” he says. “I mean, I should do something like that, too. Probably. I think you overreacted a little, but I don’t think you look like a stripper. Slack-jawed swamp donkey was my first choice. You look like a lot of fun now.”
You stroll through the Cydonia Quarter, the mostly human part of Stonetown. Most of the buildings on both sides are rough stone towers, some painted white, some painted blue, and most look like they are about to collapse, with years of weathering and water stains covering their sides. Wooden balconies strapped to the sides of these buildings, along with ironwork galleries, break the monotony of the stone, along with the colorful tiled rooftops. There are a few normal-looking houses like those row houses in San Francisco. American, Greek, and green and white flags that you find out are Rhodesian, hang from every spare balcony. You’ve never even heard of Rhodesia. Guy tells you it is the old name for a white supremacist country in Africa that got liberated later and became modern Zimbabwe. Rhodesia was the old name of the white government and whites from Zimbabwe, and some of them still call themselves Rhodesians. After Zimbabwe’s big economic crisis, most of the remaining whites fled and came to The Oberon over the years. Most are legitimate, law-abiding people, but the Rhodesian Mafia, the guys who run the smuggling operations, are definitely not. It’s also the source of the large amount of cash you and Guy have on hand.
Humans stroll about among the potted plants and palm trees that are next to every building. Street vendors, human only in this part of town, are everywhere, selling Greek food like gyro sandwiches, Souvlaki shish-kabobs, moussaka, calamari, and even those trilobite things that definitely are not a Greek delicacy. You are getting very hungry and Guy, who is now acting like a bonafide boyfriend, is picking things up for you to eat.
