The banner suddenly snapped on the wind and arrowed toward me, wrapping me in folds of choking blackness, waves of nothing. I felt it pulling at me, like the sucking mouth of a leech, and power poured out of me like blood from a new wound. The banner had felt colder than the wind that had brought it. I could no longer see Pearl, but I could feel her, hear her, and the smothering power of her presence was ripping at the roots that held me to the world ...
But power rose up through those roots, rich and sweet and hot, burning red holes in the darkness, shredding it into rags. It was an overwhelming force, something I neither called nor commanded, but it saved my life.
The silky darkness that remained fell away from me and sought escape in the open cold air. I fell on the rocks, my face in my hands, my hair wild as a madwoman’s. The wind had torn away my clothes. My skin was bleached and abraded, and rich red blood flooded from the cuts to puddle on the stone beneath my bruised knees.
Pearl raised her spear, and the banner flooded in a silk river across the open space between us to wrap itself around the golden shaft, shrink, and become a mere flag again. Pearl stabilized in human form, as perfect and beautiful as when I had known her in our youth, so long ago.
“You haven’t lost your touch, sister,” she said. “But you will. The Mother isn’t as we knew her in the ancient days, awake and alive. And like her, we are not the same. Corruption can’t be unseen or unfelt; it can’t be healed, only endured.”
“Pearl,” I said, and raised my head to meet her eyes. “I’ll destroy you. I don’t wish to, but I will. Stop this before we have to raise our true forms.”
“Dream on, my sister,” Pearl said. “What I do must be done, to make way for what is to come. Only out of destruction can creation be born. Life in this place was an experiment, an accident of chemicals and light. It’s time to cease the struggle, and let darkness have its time. Who knows what new forms can come from that? Because it’s beautiful, my emptiness, the emptiness where you sent me so long ago. And it hungers, as life hungers. And it will feed, very soon.”
Under my knees, the shelf of rock suddenly broke loose, and my body tumbled out into the endless gulf, falling, spinning, falling ...
... until I crashed into my flesh, breathing hard, sweating and shaking.
All was darkness.
I no longer felt it was peace.
I waited for the death blow; surely, I thought, Pearl must have detected my presence so close to her seat of power. The next morning I spent tense and alert, waiting for any hint of an attack. My distracted behavior displeased the horses I was grooming, and I soon was the recipient of shoves and whinnies to remind me of my duties. The horses, at least, seemed to have no worries at all. I was midway through the last grooming when a group of eight children, wearing those four colors I had noted before, came for a barn visit, supervised by a woman in a red bandanna. I instantly sensed the tingle of power in her presence; Weather, I thought. The air seemed to taste of ozone around me. Of a surety, she was not Earth; the horses crowded closer around me, as if for protection. She gave me a close look, dismissed me as unimportant, and began tell the children about horses—a speech they blithely ignored, to pet the huge beasts and offer them apples.
This woman was far different from the warm comrades working the farm outside. I sensed from her that she held them, and me, in mild contempt. She was a wolf, hiding among the placid sheep, and she despised us even while she needed us.
This was the enemy I had been waiting for.
“Hello,” I said, and directed it generally at her and the children. The boys and girls echoed it back. The Weather Warden did not. She gave me another long, level look. I gave it back to her, and held out my hand. “My name is Laura. I’m new.”
“Clearly,” she said, and cocked a single eyebrow. She must have decided that being overtly rude would risk questions from the children, and so she shook hands with me. “Mariah,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we’re all quite busy. Kids, we need to be moving on. We’ve got lessons this morning.”
That brought out a general groan from the children. One of the older ones, a girl, was hidden from Mariah by the bulk of the horse between them, and I saw the fear that passed over her expression before she hid her face in the horse’s thick mane for a moment. I wondered why she seemed afraid, and the others didn’t. Possibly because this girl had seen something, or knew something more than she should have.
I edged up next to her, on the pretext of currying the horse. “What’s your name?” I asked her softly. She was a pretty thing, delicate and dark, with wide black eyes and a pointed elfin face.
“Zedala,” she whispered back. “Please, miss, can you find my parents? I want to go home.”
I glanced at her and saw tears in her eyes. Mariah was, for the moment, involved in gathering up the playful younger children, and I took the chance to hug the girl for comfort before saying, “Be brave, Zedala. All will be well.”
She looked hopelessly at me, and said, “You don’t understand.” I ached to tell her more, to promise her that she’d soon be free, but the risks were too high. Even this lovely child could be a trap, set to make me betray myself.
I forced myself to smile and pat her shoulder. “We’re all friends here,” I said. “We’ll take care of you. You don’t have to be afraid.”
“Zedala!” the other woman called, and I saw the shiver that went through the girl. She quickly wiped the tears from her eyes. “Zedala, hurry up!”
“Yes, miss!” She gave me one more troubled, pleading look, and hurried off. I brushed the horse with absent strokes as I watched Mariah hustle away her eight small charges.
Zedala knew there was danger; that much was obvious. The others didn’t.
I needed to understand what she’d seen.
At lunch, I sat with Will and we split a small block of yellow cheese, some sliced ham, and fresh bread. It was delicious, and sitting so comfortably in the sun it seemed impossible to believe there was evil being done here, in the heart of this peaceful place. But the fear in Zedala had been real, and immediate, and I didn’t have the luxury of ignoring the pain of a child.
“Some of the children came to the barn this morning,” I told Will as I ate a slice of apple. We had no apple trees on the farm; I wondered if they traded for the fruit. “Why do they wear those uniforms?”
“We all wear uniforms,” he said, and reached for an apple slice as well.
“I know, but the colors ...”
“It’s just to identify what their powers are,” he said.
“Powers?”
“They’re special,” Will said, very softly. He kept his eyes focused on distant trees, but I thought there was a slight glitter there, a hardness that seemed very alien to what I knew of him. “They have gifts, not like normal kids. We have to protect them and train them for the end.”
“The end?”
“The end of civilization,” he said. “It’s coming, Laura. It’s why we’re here. We have to learn how to live without all those things so-called civilization has given us, all the toys and machines and pollution. These children are going to help us survive it, and in turn, we’re going to save them and protect them from those who want to hurt them.”
“Oh,” I said. It was what I’d expected to hear, but not from Will—not from someone I’d grown to like. “It seemed like they were a little frightened.”
He shrugged a little. “They have to learn,” he said. “Not all lessons are easy. It’s good for them to be a little frightened.”
I swallowed a piece of bread that seemed suddenly foul, and reached for the lemonade glass to wash the bad taste from my mouth. “I don’t like to scare kids,” I said. “Even if it’s for a good cause.”
“They have to be trained. Just leave it alone, Laura. Let the teachers handle them.”
“All right,” I said, and ate another apple slice. It didn’t taste as sweet as it had.
Will ate in silence as well, until the plates were empty and the
glasses drained, and then he stood up and stretched. I watched him, aware of how the sun filtered through the clothes and outlined the strong lines of his body. Aware of the gentle intensity of the stare he turned toward me, as he offered me his hand.
I took it, and he pulled me up—against his body. I didn’t move away. There was an odd inevitability to this, a feeling of recognition, as if I’d dreamed this, or lived it in another life. I looked up into his face, into those lovely eyes, and felt myself falling into a great, gaping void from which there would be no return. It should have been frightening, but instead, it felt ... reassuring. Like coming home.
Will let go and stepped away. I stood there for a moment, watching him, and then turned and picked up our plates and glasses. “I’ll take them back,” I said.
He didn’t speak, not even to thank me. I felt his gaze on me, heavy and hot, all the way back to the food hall.
When I came back out, Will was nowhere in sight. I missed him, and hated myself for it; I had no business longing for any man here, including Will, whatever odd attraction had developed between us. I was here for a reason, and that reason had just crystallized for me in a single haunting image—the desperate tears in Zedala’s eyes.
I went back to the barn and picked up the hay rake. As I did so, a pair of arms came out of the shadows behind me, grabbed me from behind, and attempted to yank me backward into the dark.
I suppose that Laura Rose might have screamed, but in that moment I was not Laura Rose. I was Cassiel, and Cassiel didn’t cry for help.
Cassiel made others cry for help.
I drove my elbow backward with as much force as I could, and felt it connect solidly with flesh, muscle, bone. I heard an explosive exhalation of breath against my hair and neck. Before he—I was sure it was a he, from the feel of his musculature against me—could recover, I spun and slammed the heel of my hand in a strike for his nose, to break it or, in the best case, drive bone into his brain.
He caught my hand barely in time, and I belatedly realized that I knew him.
Merle. I had almost forgotten about my fellow implanted agent, since he’d been put into another work cycle altogether ... but here he was, hiding in the dark.
“What do you want?” I hissed. Around us, the horses stamped nervously, catching the rush of adrenaline from our bodies. Merle looked worried. Haunted.
No, he looked hunted.
“I think they suspect,” he said. “Get a message to Rostow. Tell him I need extraction.”
“What did you learn?”
“Not a goddamn thing except how to run a plow,” he said. “I can’t find a way in, and they don’t like questions. I think I asked one too many.”
“Did they threaten you?”
“They don’t threaten anybody,” he said. “But one day, you just wake up in the cornfield, I’m guessing. Contact Rostow. Get us an exit.”
“I’m not going,” I said. Merle let go of my arm, and I stepped back. “I can’t leave. Go if you wish, but I’ll stay.”
“You stay and you’ll end up one of them,” he said. “Or worse. Something’s wrong here. I’ve been in cults before, but this one’s a whole new rainbow of wrong. It’s like it changes you inside out—not like brainwashing. I can resist brainwashing. This is something else.”
What it was, I realized, was the low-level tingle of power in the camp. Pearl’s influence, breathing around us, infiltrating our every thought, breath, heartbeat. Merle could feel it, even if he had no idea what it could be, and it had frightened him. It was eroding his sense of self, corrupting him from within ... and it was doing the same to me, only for me it had created this false link with Will.
“I can’t go,” I said, as gently as I could. “But you should. As soon as possible.” Merle, in struggling to keep his sense of identity and purpose, was making himself a target. They would know he wasn’t one of them soon, if they didn’t know that already. As good an undercover agent as Merle might have been in other circumstances, here in this place he was in grave danger.
“I’ll let you know when it’s ready,” I told him. “Go back to work. Be careful.”
He nodded, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his gray shirt, and took a deep breath. Even so, he didn’t look himself, I thought.
“Stay cool,” I said. “You’ll be out soon.”
He nodded again and walked out into the sun, head down. Even his body language seemed wrong, when compared to the alert, confident strides of the others in the camp. I could see it. So could others.
Merle was in very real trouble.
I went back to raking the straw as I sank into a light meditative state and reached out for Rostow to deliver my message—a minor enough effort, and a nearly imperceptible use of power, but it still felt more difficult now, as if the walls around the camp were psychic as well as physical blocks. Perhaps it was only that something inside me longed for this life now—the simplicity, the clean and straight lines of it. The honesty and trust.
But the trust itself was a lie, and underneath was a black lake of toxic betrayal. I knew that, I did, but even so, it was difficult to separate knowing from feeling.
I reached out for Rostow, but before I could deliver Merle’s plea, I heard shouts from outside. No one shouted here, not in that particular tone.
I looked out to see that it was the girl, Zedala. She was running across the field, stumbling on the carefully plowed rows. She looked terrified.
Mariah, her teacher, had stopped at the edge of the field, and stood watching her with a stiff, unforgiving expression. Next to her was another teacher in a green scarf, who extended her hand toward Zedala.
The next step the girl took tripped her, and she plunged flat onto the ground.
No.
Into the ground.
I dropped the rake and ran out of the barn. Around the edges of the field, the workers had all stopped what they were doing, but no one was moving to interfere.
Not even Merle, who was standing near the fertilizer cart, clenching his fists.
Zedala didn’t come up from beneath the ground.
I took in a deep breath and ran forward, shoving the two teachers out of my way. I got only a few steps into the field before it opened before me—not my doing—and I plunged down into a thick, heavy darkness of fertile tilled dirt, worms, and the sharp chips of rocks.
I could reach her, I realized. They didn’t expect me to be able to maneuver through the dirt, to use my own Earth powers to guide me to Zedala. But if I did, it would betray me utterly, not only to them but to Pearl.
The frustration made me scream silently into the darkness of my temporary grave.
I couldn’t save her. I could only hope that their goal was to punish, not to kill.
After what seemed an eternity, I felt the ground underneath me pushing upward, expelling me into the air once again. I rolled over on my back, gasping and choking, wiping the black earth from my face with trembling hands.
Zedala was lying crumpled and weeping twenty feet away. She was filthy and terrified, but she was alive.
I coughed up dirt and blinked up at the bright yellow sun, which was blotted out by one of the teachers. Not Mariah. This one was, I was sure, an Earth Warden, and a potentially quite powerful one.
He was also very, very young—no older than Zedala, but with a shimmering cloud of power surrounding him that was unmistakable to the eyes of anyone with a gift. Possibly, I thought, the most powerful Earth Warden I’d ever met, besides Lewis Orwell.
He had dark, empty eyes that held no pity, no reluctance, no doubt. The eyes of a fanatic.
“Go get her,” he said to Mariah, who ducked her head in acknowledgment and hurried over the rows to grab Zedala and pull her to her feet. “Take her to the box.”
“No!” Zedala screamed, but only once. The boy-Warden stared at her, and the next time her mouth opened, nothing came out. The panic and terror on her face spoke loudly enough, though. It was a horrible sight, but when I looked around, I saw tha
t the gray-clothed workers had all turned away, intent on their own duties.
All but Merle, who was still watching, with his fists tightly clenched.
And, standing in the shadow of the corner of the barn ... Will, whose clear gray eyes were fixed not on Zedala, but on me.
The two teachers dragged the girl away. I was left alone to stagger upright, slapping dirt from my clothes. Will strode forward, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me out of the field. Once I was on hard-packed ground, he took my shoulders and shook me, hard enough to make a rain of dirt fall from my body.
“Are you insane?” he demanded. “Don’t you understand that whatever happens, we do not interfere with the training of those children?”
“Training!” I spat, and struck his hands away from me. “I didn’t see training. I thought they were going to kill her!”
“Their methods may seem harsh, but—”
“It’s cruel, Will! And I’m not sure they wouldn’t have let her die, if we hadn’t been watching! I couldn’t—”
“Listen to me! You have to, Laura. You have to learn that they know best!”
“Or?” I lifted my chin and stared into his eyes. His pupils slowly widened in response, as if he was swallowing my image whole.
“Or you won’t have a place here,” he said very gently, and touched my cheek. “And I’d regret that. I’d regret that very much.”
So would I, I realized. Even now. Even with the panic and pain in Zedala’s face, the icy indifference in the boy-Warden’s cruelty. I didn’t want to leave this place.
I didn’t want to leave him.
I took a step away, until my knees were steady enough to hold me, and walked back to the barn, head down.
Then I picked up the rake, and went back to work. As I combed through the straw, I reached out for Rostow, to deliver Merle’s message.
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