Luminary: Book Two In the Anomaly Trilogy

by Krista McGee

  I am thrown off, my helmet falls off as I tumble several feet away from where we landed. My mouth and eyes are full of dirt. I am coughing and crying, trying to see the others but unable to make anything out.

  “Thalli.” Rhen sounds so far away. “Call out if you can hear me.”

  I try to speak, but I can only cough. The dust feels like it has taken up residence in my throat.

  “It’s okay,” Rhen calls out. “I see you. Berk?”

  I rub my eyes harder. Where is he? “On the transport.” Berk wrapped himself around the column. Smart. He is safe.

  “John?”

  I sit up, look around. John is not near me. He is not on the transport with Berk.

  “John.” Fear creeps into Rhen’s voice. I feel it too. John is not answering. I stand. My vision is blurry. But not so blurry I don’t see the body of an old man lying motionless in the dust.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rhen is running to John. I follow, tripping over some larger pieces of earth. I right myself and keep going. John cannot be dead.

  Rhen falls to the ground next to him and lays her head on his chest. I stand above them, frozen. It seems as if hours pass. Rhen doesn’t move. John’s face reminds me of another face—Dr. Spires. I saw him dead on the ground outside Pod C, so many months ago. The slack jaw, the pale skin. The horrible sensation in the recesses of my stomach. It all feels exactly the same.

  “I hear a heartbeat.” Rhen sits up. “But it is faint.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  “John, can you hear me?” Rhen shakes the old man, but he doesn’t stir. His head falls to the side. The dust around his mouth barely moves. “We need to get him inside the chamber.”

  Berk stands and tries to limp toward the chamber’s container, but by the look on his face, he is in pain. “Stay there, Berk. I can do it.”

  Berk starts to speak, but Rhen interrupts. “We need you completely healed, Berk. You can’t do that if you don’t rest. Thalli can set up the chamber.”

  He sits back down, like an obedient child given a command by a Monitor. I walk toward the chamber. It must have been the first to fall off the transport because it is several feet behind us. I have to pull hard to lift it—the speed at which it fell caused it to be partially buried in the ground.

  I hope the chamber hasn’t been damaged. I cannot tell from the outside. If we lose this, there is nothing to keep us safe from the wolves or any other creatures that might be lurking. I press the blue panel, and the chamber unpacks itself. It is dirty but unharmed.

  I wish I could say the same about John.

  “Will he be all right?” I look at Rhen, who is assessing John’s condition.

  “I believe he has suffered a concussion.” Rhen motions for me to lift his feet. She is by his shoulders. Together, we carry him to the chamber and gently lay him on a sleeping platform.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “I am not sure,” Rhen says after a lengthy pause. “He is very old. Nothing I studied prepared me to understand the way a body works at this age.”

  “We should help Berk.”

  “I will help him. You stay here with John. If he regains consciousness, we need to make sure he stays awake.”

  Rhen assumes responsibility for Berk. She assumes that he needs her, not me. And this time it isn’t for medical reasons. If it were that, then Rhen would stay behind here with John. But she chose Berk. She wants to be the one who helps him walk back. She wants to make sure he’s all right. To touch him and talk to him and care for him.

  I swallow past a lump in my throat and try to calm myself. To relax my emotions the way I relaxed my muscles on the transport. I need to focus on John and not think about Rhen and Berk.

  John’s eyelids move, but they don’t open. I bend down close to him and place my hands on the sides of his face, his white beard poking up between my fingers. “John. Wake up. Please wake up.”

  His eyelids move again, and I will him to open them, to be all right. A moan escapes John’s mouth.

  “You’re okay, John.” I pull away, giving him space but keeping my eyes on his. “The transport fell. You were thrown off.”

  I can’t think of anything else to say. He won’t open his eyes, and I can’t let him go back to sleep. The only other thing I can think of right now is Rhen and Berk, and I don’t want to talk to him about that.

  “John.” His eyelids stop moving. I have to speak, to keep him awake. “Rhen is with Berk. I think she has feelings for him. But I don’t want her to have feelings. It makes me . . . I don’t know. Angry. Sad.”

  “Jealous.” John’s voice sounds like a muted saxophone.

  “You’re awake.” I am so relieved, I barely register what he has said. John opens his eyes. I can tell just that takes great effort.

  “You’re jealous.” He lifts his bushy eyebrows.

  “What?”

  “That feeling is jealousy.”

  We don’t have time to discuss it because Berk limps in—aided by Rhen. Her arm is around his shoulders, his arm is looped around her waist. This . . . jealousy is strong. I fight it and try to focus on John. “He’s awake.”

  “Excellent.” Rhen helps Berk to his sleeping platform and then walks over to assess John. She looks into his eyes, takes his pulse, asks him questions.

  I barely hear any of them. I am trying to look at Berk without him noticing. He seems to be looking at John. But maybe he’s also looking at Rhen. And why wouldn’t he? Blond hair, blue eyes, always in control of her emotions, always knowing what to do. Unlike me—an anomaly who is only alive because these two saved me from the death I deserved because I couldn’t keep my emotions in check.

  Rhen completes her examination. “I think he will make a full recovery. But we need to keep him awake for the next few hours.”

  “That’s fine.” Berk rises, limps over to us, then sits on the edge of John’s sleeping platform. “We have plenty to talk about.”

  For the first time, the reality of what just happened hit me—we have no transport. We are still forty miles away from our destination with half our party unable to travel without assistance. We were on schedule to arrive tomorrow, but that was on the transport. Forty miles on foot with John and Berk could take weeks. We don’t have enough food for weeks.

  Have we survived a crash, only to die of starvation? Or worse?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The transport is not receiving enough energy.” Berk insisted that we bring the transport inside the chamber so he could investigate the cause of yesterday’s crash. It is dirty and damaged, causing the inside of the chamber to look more like the outside. Nothing is clean aboveground. “It is equipped to run using solar power, but the sun has been hidden behind clouds since we left.”

  “But the whole State runs on solar power.” There must have been clouds over the State for as many days as there have been clouds over us. “The transport hardly needs anything compared to the State.”

  “We had power outages,” Berk reminds me.

  I think of the times he took advantage of those outages to see me, and I am sad. Times when he held me and talked to me, when he could not wait to be alone with me. Are those days lost forever?

  Berk looks at me. He is focused on the task, not lost in memories of the past. “But we also had artificial light that helped power the State.”

  “There are seasons of sunlight and seasons of cloudiness.” Rhen looks at her learning pad. “We left during a cloudy season.”

  “When will that change?”

  Rhen doesn’t look up from her pad. “I can’t determine. It could be weeks.”

  We don’t have weeks. We all know that, but no one wants to say it.

  “We should pray.”

  John needs to stay awake, so I don’t argue with him. But the transport crashed, and I doubt if it will work even if the sun does come out.

  Berk and Rhen close their eyes when John does. I cannot. I watch them, doubt filling my heart.
Why would the Designer allow us to crash? Why let us escape and then leave us to die here? Why have me fall in love with Berk only to have Berk fall in love with Rhen? Or maybe John is wrong and the Designer really isn’t in control of everything. Maybe his power is limited.

  John finishes his prayer, and Rhen leans closer to him. “You really believe your God will help us?”

  “I am certain of it, my dear.”

  “Why?”

  “I have known him for many years.” John speaks softly but we all listen. As upset as I am, I still want to hear his answer, to glean some of his confidence. “I hear his voice in the words I have memorized. His words. They are true. They have always been true. I also hear him when he speaks to my heart. And he is speaking now. We will arrive at our destination. Our promised land.”

  I have heard God speak to my heart. Through music. I heard him when I played “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” He showed me who he was, even though I did not know it at first. I heard him when I played the music I wrote in the performance pod. I want to hear him again. I wonder if I can, without an instrument. Is it only through music that I can talk to him, that I can hear him? But out here, in this desolate space, there is no music. I feel as dry as the earth.

  We begin to plan how we will travel. Rhen plans how we will travel. Rhen will help Berk and I will help John. I want to argue, to shout that I want to be with Berk. I want Berk to say he wants me. But neither of us says anything, and my heart aches even more than it did before.

  We will walk only as long as the two men can go. They must tell us when they are too tired or hurt to continue. Then we will set up the chamber and rest. I will carry the chamber on my back—wrapped around me with a bed covering. Rhen will carry the transport in the same way, watching the skies to see if the sun will come out and we can recharge it. If it still works.

  By the end of our eighth day walking, every muscle in my body hurts. John is still weak, and he leans heavily on me. The chamber isn’t heavy, but it is large and balancing it and John is hard. I have to stop often to readjust the pack. We are being careful with what little food and water we have remaining, and I am constantly hungry, my mouth dry. No wolves have approached us yet, but the elements will surely kill us, even if the wolves are gone.

  Rhen and Berk walk ahead of us, always deep in conversation. They rarely look back at us. I purposefully lag behind. I don’t want to walk beside them listening in on what I am sure are private conversations.

  “Did I ever tell you about Chris?” John pushes his shoulder into mine.

  “Chris?”

  “He was a boy who attended the same college as Amy and me.” John’s voice always gets tender when he speaks of his wife. Like a saxophone playing a slow melody. “He was good looking, popular, ended up being a preacher. A pretty famous one, at that. We all knew he was something special. And he had his eye on my Amy.”

  When John speaks about the past, he uses so many words I do not know, and I sometimes have to ask him to translate. But while I may not know all the words, I understand what he is saying. “He loved her?”

  John laughs and runs his hand down my hair. “I don’t think Chris loved Amy, but he liked her. And who could blame him? She was the prettiest girl who ever was, and her inside—her character—was even more beautiful than her outside.”

  My gaze drifts to Rhen. The same could be said of her. She is calm, intelligent, and she always knows the right thing to do.

  “I couldn’t stand it when I saw Amy and Chris talking.” John sighs. “One time I saw them outside the student center, sitting at a picnic table just laughing away. I got so mad, I wanted to hit him.”

  I cannot imagine John angry. “Why?”

  “I was jealous.” John stops and forces me to look into his eyes. “I loved Amy so much that it made me mad to think of any other guy stealing her attention away from me. The thought that she might choose another guy over me . . . well, that just about killed me.”

  “I understand.” I do not want to hit Rhen, but I am jealous. And angry. But more than anything, I am sad. I want Berk’s attention. I want to talk with him. I want things to be the way they were before, when we were in the State. When he wanted to be with me.

  “God had a lesson for me in that, though,” John says. “A lesson I think he is trying to teach you too.”

  “A lesson?”

  “Romantic love is a beautiful thing, but not when it replaces divine love.”

  I turn away from John and start walking again.

  John steps beside me, quiet for a minute, then continues. “I remember standing on the grass, looking at Chris and Amy, and thinking, ‘I have made her an idol.’ I allowed what was meant to be beautiful to be changed into something ugly.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I walked back to the dorm room, got on my knees, and repented. I thanked God for allowing me to see my sin for what it was, and I surrendered to his will for my life. No matter what that was.”

  “And you got Amy back.”

  “That wasn’t the point of the story.” John takes my hand in his age-worn hand. “You need a change in perspective, Thalli, not a change in circumstance. Joy comes from the Designer alone. Humans, even the best humans, are flawed. We cannot meet each other’s needs completely. We were not designed to do that. We were created to be in relationship with the Designer. In him, we find true joy and peace. We find freedom in loving him and being loved by him. When we look to others to fill that hole, we find ourselves empty.”

  I do feel empty. Not just empty, but used and discarded. I wish again that I had my violin, that I could communicate with the Designer so he felt nearer. I do not feel his love. I do not feel Berk’s love. I feel fear and jealousy and hopelessness. I gaze up into the sky. Still covered with clouds, the ground still gray. It would have been better to have stayed in the State. I was closer to God when I faced annihilation than I am out here.

  I look at John and see his face change. I assume he is thinking of Amy again, preparing to tell me the rest of the story. But his eyes are focused on something in the distance. Something that brings him joy. I follow his gaze and see a huge animal lumbering toward us. I cannot even make out what type of animal it is, it moves so fast. But John knows. He is laughing. He releases my hand and moves faster than I have seen him move in days.

  I cannot look at the animal anymore. I am chasing John. Surely, the last of his sanity just departed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Good boy.” John allows the animal’s mouth to cover his face. He is delirious. I try to pull the animal off the old man, but I cannot. John’s arms are actually around it. He is holding on to it. “Oh, how I have missed the affection of a dog.”

  “A dog?” I recall learning about dogs. They were revered by the ancients, allowed to live in homes, and called “pets.” John sits up, rubbing the dog’s face with his hands, scratching behind the animal’s ears. The huge tail waves back and forth. Its saliva-filled tongue hangs out. The animal actually looks happy.

  “I had one just like this.” John rubs the dog’s back with his palm. “A black Lab. Beautiful creature. And this one is obviously well taken care of.”

  Berk’s eyes brighten. “Well taken care of? So there are people here?”

  “Yes.” John smiles. “And if my friend is any indication, they are good people.”

  “What makes you think that?” Rhen joins us, her arm still through Berk’s.

  “Look at his coat.” John smooths down the fur on the dog’s back. Shiny. “He is brushed often and fed well. And he is friendly—not mistreated or frightened. Labs are kind dogs anyway. But this one—” John laughs as the dog licks his face. “He is especially friendly.”

  “We’re almost there?” Hope fills my heart, pushing aside all other feelings.

  “Most certainly.” John begins to ease to his feet. “Our friend here will show us the way. Won’t you, boy?”

  I look at Rhen. She is frozen in place. “What if the people aren’t fr
iendly to us?”

  “What?” John places a hand on my shoulder to steady himself as he stands.

  “We don’t know anything about them.” Rhen looks to Berk. “We could be walking into a trap.”

  That same thought entered my mind. We know nothing about this settlement. We know nothing about whether or not they have been affected by the radiation, nothing about how they view foreigners. Nothing about their technology or their way of life or their values.

  John gives a slow nod. “This is where we simply have to trust the Designer.”

  “Shouldn’t we plan for an attack, just in case?” The thought of just walking up to a settlement of people we know nothing about makes my heart race.

  “If they plan to harm us, there is no way for us to stop them.” Berk’s voice is soft but sure. “We need to go on. We will run out of food soon, and both John and I need to rest.”

  Berk is still so pale. He is right. But that fact doesn’t make the possibilities any less frightening.

  The dog is now running back in the direction he came from. We watch him run off. John lets out an earsplitting whistle and the dog returns, his tongue out, that happy look on his face.

  “Slow down, boy.” John’s laugh makes him sound years younger. The way I imagine he sounded before the War stripped him of everything. “We don’t move as quickly as you do.”

  We walk along, though John is moving faster, and he and I lead the way. Actually, the dog is leading the way. John tells me about his dog, and how Duke would sleep at the foot of Amy’s and his bed. How John would find Duke’s long black hairs on his clothes. He speaks of going to the beach with Duke and throwing something called a Frisbee that the dog would catch and bring back to him. A game called “fetch” that would go on for hours, until John was tired and needed to rest. He speaks of his son, Dr. Turner, and how Duke was a puppy when his son left home for college. The dog kept John and Amy company when their house was no longer filled with the sounds of children.