by Ted Dekker
Thomas sat up. “What do you mean, nothing? That’s not—”
“I mean, no sign of anything unusual.”
“Was Svensson there?”
“No. But we spoke to his employees at some length. He’s due back in two days for an interview with the Swiss Intelligence, which we will also attend. He’s been at a meeting with suppliers in South America. We confirmed the meeting. There’s no evidence that he’s had anything to do with a kidnapping or any massive conspiracy to release a virus.”
Silence engulfed them.
“Well, that’s good news, I would say,” Gains said.
“That’s not news at all,” Thomas said. “So he’s not at his main lab. He could be anywhere. Wherever he is, he has both Monique and the Raison Strain. I’m telling you, you have to find him now!”
Gains put his hand out. “We will, Thomas. One step at a time. This is encouraging; let’s not pour water over it just yet.”
With those words Thomas knew that he had lost them all. Except Kara. Merton Gains was as much of an advocate as he could expect. If Gains was expressing caution, the game was over.
Thomas stood. “I really don’t think you need me to discuss contingencies. I’ve told you what I know. I’ll repeat it one more time for those of you who are slow tonight. History is about to take a plunge down a nasty course. You’ll all know that soon, when unthinkable demands come from a man named Valborg Svensson, although I doubt he’s working alone. For all I know, one of you works for him.”
That kept them in a state of mild shock.
“Good night. If for some inexplicable reason you need me, I’ll be in my room, 913, hopefully sleeping. Heaven knows someone has to do something.”
Kara stood and lifted her chin evenly. They walked out side by side, brother and sister.
Exhaustion swamped Thomas the moment the conference room door thumped shut behind him. He stopped and gazed down the empty hall, dazed. He’d been running through this madness for over a week without a break, and his body was starting to feel like it was filled with lead.
“Well, I guess you told them,” Kara said quietly.
“I have to get some rest. I feel like I’m going to drop.”
She slipped her arm through his and guided him down the hall. “I’m putting you to bed, and I’m not letting anyone wake you until you’ve caught up on your sleep. That’s final.”
He didn’t argue. There was nothing he could do at the moment anyway. There might not be anything more he could do. Ever.
“Don’t worry, Thomas. I think you said what needed saying. They’ll have a change of attitude soon enough. Right?”
“Maybe. I hope not.”
She understood. The only thing that would change their attitudes would be an actual outbreak of the Raison Strain, and nobody could hope for that.
“I’m proud of you,” she said.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
“For what? I’m not doing anything! You’re the hero here.”
“Hero?” He scoffed. “Without you I would probably be in some fighting ring downtown trying to prove myself.”
“You have a point,” she said.
They entered the elevator and rode up alone.
“Since you seem agreeable to my suggestions, do you mind if I make another one?” Kara asked.
“Sure. I’m not sure if my tired mind is up to understanding anything more at the moment.”
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about.” She paused. “If the virus is released, I don’t see how anyone can physically stop it. At least not in twenty-one days.”
He nodded. “And?”
“Especially if it’s already a matter of history, as you’ve learned in the green forest, which is where all this is coming from, right?”
“Right.”
“But why you? Why did this information just happen to be dumped in your lap? Why are you flipping between these realities?”
“Because I’m connected somehow.”
“Because you’re the only one who can ultimately make a difference. You started it. The virus exists because of you. Maybe only you can stop it.”
The elevator stopped on the ninth floor and they headed for their suite.
“If that’s true,” he said, “then God help us all because, believe me, I don’t have a clue what to do. Except sleep. Even then, we’ve been abandoned. Three days ago my entire understanding of God was flipped on its end, at least in my dreams. Now it’s been flipped again.”
“Then sleep.”
“Sleep. Dream.”
“Dream,” she said. “But not just dream. I mean really dream.”
He led her into the room. “You’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“The green forest is gone. The world’s changed.” He sighed and plopped into a chair by the table. “I’m in a desert, half-dead. No water, no fruit, no Roush. I get shot now, and I really do die. If anything, the information will have to flow the other way to keep me alive there.” He cocked his head. “Now there’s an idea.”
“You don’t know that. I’m not saying you should go out and get shot and see what happens, mind you. But there’s a reason why you’re there. In that world. And there’s a reason you’re here.”
“So what exactly are you suggesting?”
She dropped her purse on the bed and faced him. “That you go on an all-out search for something in that reality that will help us here. Take your time. There’s no correlation between time there and time here, right?”
“As soon as I fall asleep there, I’m here.”
“Then find a way not to be here every time you sleep. Spend a few days in that reality, a week, a month, however much time you need. Find something. Learn new skills. Whoever you become there, you will be here, right? So become somebody.”
“I am somebody.”
“You are, and I love you the way you are. But for the sake of this world, become someone more. Someone who can save this world. Go to sleep, dream, and come back a new man.”
He looked at his sister. So full of optimism. But she didn’t understand the extent of the devastation in the other reality.
“I have to get some sleep,” he said, walking toward his room.
“Dream, Thomas. Dream long. Dream big.”
“I will.”
36
THOMAS’S MIND flooded with images of a young boy standing innocently at the center of a brightly colored room, chin raised to the ceiling, eyes wide, mouth gaping.
Johan. And his skin was as smooth as a pool of chocolate milk. His deep-throated song suddenly thundered in the room, startling Thomas.
He rolled over in his sleep.
For a moment the night lay quiet. Then the boy began to sing again. Quietly this time, with closed eyes and raised hands. The sweet refrains drifted to the heavens like birdsong. They ascended the scale and began to distort.
Distort? No. Johan always spun a flawless song to the last note. But the sound climbed the scale and grew to more of a wail than a song. Johan was wailing.
Thomas’s eyes sprang open. The morning’s soft light flooded his vision. His ears filled with the sound of a child singing in broken tones.
He pushed himself to an elbow, gazed about, and rested his eyes on the boulder twenty paces from where he and Rachelle lay. There, facing the forest they had left behind, sitting cross-legged on the boulder with his back turned to them, Johan lifted his chin in song. A weak, halting song to be sure. Strained and off key. But a song nonetheless.
Rachelle raised to a sitting position next to him and stared at her brother. Her skin was dry and flaking. As was his own. Thomas swallowed and turned back to Johan, who wailed with his arms spread wide.
“Elyon, help us,” he sang. “Elyon, help us.”
Thomas stood up. Johan’s whole body trembled as he struggled for notes. The boy sounded as though he might be crying. Crying under the waning power of his own notes, or perhaps because he could not sing as
he once did.
Beside Thomas, Rachelle rose slowly to her feet without removing her eyes from the scene. Tears wet her parched cheeks. Thomas felt his chest constrict. Johan raised his small fists in the air and wailed with greater intensity—a heartbreaking rendering of sorrow and yearning and anger and pleading for love.
For long minutes they stood facing Johan, who lamented for all who would hear. Grieving for all who would take the time to listen to the cries of an abandoned, tortured child slowly dying far from home. But who could possibly hear such a song in this desert?
If only Michal or Gabil would come and tell them what to do. If only he could speak one more time, just one last time, to the boy from the upper lake.
If only he could close his eyes and open them again to the sight of a boy standing on the rise of sand to their left. Like the boy standing there now. Like—
Thomas froze.
The boy stood there, on the rise beside the boulders, staring directly at Johan. The boy from the upper lake!
As though conducted by an unseen hand, both Johan and Rachelle ceased their sobbing. The boy took three small steps toward the boulder and stopped. His arms hung limply by his sides. His eyes were wide and green. Brilliant, breathtaking green.
The boy’s delicate lips parted slightly, as if he were about to speak, but he just stood, staring. A loose curl of hair hung between the boy’s eyes, lifting gently in the morning breeze.
The two boys gazed directly at each other, as if held by an invisible bond. Johan’s eyes were as round as saucers, and his face was wet from tears. To Thomas’s right, Rachelle took a single step toward Johan and stopped.
And then the little boy opened his mouth.
A pure, sweet tone, crystal-clear in the morning stillness, pierced Thomas’s ears and stabbed at his heart like a razor-tipped arrow. He caught his breath at the very first note. Images of a world far removed flooded his mind. Memories of an emerald resin floor, of a thundering waterfall, of a lake. The notes tumbled into a melody.
Thomas dropped to his knees and began to cry again.
The child took a step toward Johan, closed his eyes, and lifted his chin. His song drifted through the air, dancing on their heads like a teasing angel. Rachelle sat hard.
The boy opened his arms, expanded his chest, and let loose a deep, rumbling tone that shook the ground. Then the boy formed his first lyrics, encased in notes rumbling gently over the dunes.
I love you.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
Thomas closed his eyes and let his body shake under the power of the words. The tune rose through the octave, piercing the still air with full-bodied chords.
I made you,
and I love the way I made you.
The song reached into Thomas’s heart and amplified the resonance of each chord a thousandfold so that he thought his heart might explode.
And then, with an earsplitting tone, like a concert of a hundred thousand pipe organs blowing the same chord, the air shattered with one final note and fell silent.
Thomas lifted his head slowly. The boy still gazed at Johan, who had slipped down from the boulder and stood with both arms stretched out toward the boy.
Their first steps seemed tentative, taken almost simultaneously toward each other. The two boys suddenly broke free from the ground and raced toward each other with wide arms.
They collided there on the desert floor, two small boys about the same height, like two long-lost twins reunited. They all heard the slap of bare chest against bare flesh followed by grunts as the boys tumbled to the sand, giggling hysterically.
Rachelle began to laugh out loud. She clapped excitedly, and although Thomas assumed she’d never met the young boy, she knew his name. “Elyon!” She said the name like an ecstatic child. “Elyon!” She wept and laughed as she clapped.
The boys sprang to their feet and chased each other around the boulder, tagging each other in play, still giggling like schoolchildren passing a secret.
And then the boy turned toward Thomas.
Still kneeling, Thomas saw the boy run directly for him. His eyes flashed like emeralds, a twisted grin lifted his cheeks. The boy sprinted right up to Thomas, slid to a stop, put an arm around his neck, and placed his soft, warm cheek against Thomas’s. His hot breath brushed Thomas’s ear. “I love you,” the boy whispered.
A roaring tornado rushed through his mind. Forceful winds blasted against his heart with pure, raw, unrefined love. He heard a feeble grunt fall from his mouth.
Then the boy was on to Rachelle. He repeated the embrace and Rachelle shook with sobs. The boy turned and sprinted from the camp. He stopped a dozen paces to the east and twirled around, eyes sparkling mischievously.
“Follow me,” he said, then turned back to the dune and ran up its slope.
Johan raced past Thomas and Rachelle, panting.
Thomas struggled to his feet, eyes fixed on the boy now cresting the dune. He tugged Rachelle to her feet. They followed the boy like that— Johan leading, Thomas and Rachelle running behind.
No one spoke as they ran through the barren desert. Thomas’s mind was still numb from the boy’s touch. Sweat soon drenched Thomas’s clothes. His breathing came in gasps as he clambered up the sandy dunes, following this little boy who ran as though he owned this sandbox. But I’d follow him anywhere. I’d follow him over a cliff, believing that after leaping I’d be able to fly. I’d follow him into the sea, knowing I could breathe underwater. It was the boy’s song. It was his song, his eyes, his tender feet, the way his breath had rushed through Thomas’s ears.
They ran on in silence, keeping their eyes fixed on the boy’s naked back, glistening with sweat. He loped steadily into the desert—slowing up the face of sandy slopes and then bounding down the other side. Not fast enough to lose them, not slow enough to allow them any rest.
The sun stood high when Thomas staggered over a crest marked by the boy’s footprints. He pulled himself up not ten feet from where Johan had stopped. The boy stood just ahead of Johan. Thomas followed their gaze.
What he saw took his breath away.
Below them, in the middle of this desolate white desert, lay a huge valley. And in this valley grew a vast green forest.
Thomas stared, mouth hanging open dumbly. It had to be several miles across, maybe more. Maybe twenty miles. But in the far distance where the trees ended, the valley floor rose in a mountain of sand. The desert continued. The forest wasn’t colored. Green. Only green. Like the forests in his dreams of Bangkok.
“Look!” Rachelle extended her arm. Her pointing finger quivered. Then Thomas saw it.
A lake.
To the east, several miles inside the forest, the sun glinted off a small lake.
The boy whooped, thrust his fists into the air, and tore down the sandy slope. He tumbled once and came to his feet, flying fast.
Johan ran after him, whooping in kind. Then Thomas and Rachelle, together. Whooping.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the edge of the forest, where they slid to a stop. The trees stood tall, like sentinels intent on keeping the sand from encroaching. Brown bark. Large, leafy branches. A flock of red-and-blue parrots took flight and squawked overhead.
“Birds!” Johan cried.
The boy looked back at them from the forest’s edge. Then, without a word, he stepped between two trees and ran in.
Thomas ran after him. “Come on!”
They came, running behind.
The canopy rose overhead, shading the sun. They passed between the same two trees the boy had slipped through.
“Come on, hurry!”
The sound of their feet brushing through sand changed to a soft crunch when they hit the first undergrowth.
Thomas strained for glimpses of the boy’s back between the trees. There, and there. He raced on, hardly aware of the forest now. Behind him, Rachelle and Johan had the easier task of following him.
Thomas glanced up at the canopy. It all looked vaguely
familiar. For a moment it seemed as if he were rushing into the jungles of Thailand. To rescue Monique.
The boy never ran out of sight for more than a few seconds. Deeper into the jungle they ran. Straight for the lake. There were birds on almost every tree it seemed. Monkeys and possums. They passed through a meadow with a grove of smaller trees heavy with a red fruit. Not the same kind of fruit they’d eaten in the colored forest, but very similar.
Thomas snatched up a fallen apple and tasted it on the run. Sweet. Delicious. But no power. He grabbed another and tossed it back to Rachelle. “It’s good!”
A pack of dogs barked from the other end of the meadow. Wolves? Thomas picked up his pace. “Hurry!”
They hurried. Through tall trees squawking with birds, past large bushes bursting with berries, over a small creek sparkling with water, through another brightly flowered meadow and past a startled stampede of horses.
Rachelle and Johan were as frightened as the horses. Thomas was not.
And then, as suddenly as they had entered the forest, they were out. On the lip of a small valley.
A gentle slope descended to the shores of a glistening green lake. A thin blanket of haze drifted lazily above sections of the glassy surface. Trees, heavy with fruit, lined its shore. Colors of every imaginable hue splattered the trees.
Wild horses grazed on the high green grass of the valley floor. A bubbling creek meandered into the lake from the base of the cliff to their right, and then back out, down the valley.
The boy walked back to them, grinning. He wasn’t breathing hard like they were. Only a light sweat broke his brow.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
They were too stunned to respond.
“I thought you would,” he said. “I want you to take care of this forest for me.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked. “Are you going?”
The boy tilted his head slightly. “Don’t worry, Thomas. I’ll come back. Just don’t forget about me.”
