by K A Riley
“And now she’s going to help Epic?” Libra asks.
“It looks like it,” Brohn nods.
I can’t tell which one of us is more horrified or, honestly, less surprised. But now that it’s been said out loud, some of the strange things that have been happening over the past few months—the odd way I know we all sometimes felt when Sara spoke in class, the way we couldn’t help but agree with her—no matter how wrong, illogical, or flawed her arguments were—even my inexplicable urge to leave the Academy like I did—they all, as of this very second, have a proper and terrifying explanation.
“There’s got to be something we can do!” Libra moans.
“What do you suggest?” Ignacio sneers. “Do you want us to turn around and go back?”
Libra glares at him but doesn’t answer. What could she possible say? Going forward means losing Sara. Going back means losing everything else.
“I’m just going to say it,” Arlo announces with the gravity of a dying star. “If she’s a Hypnagogic like they say, then I for one don’t want her back.”
“It’s not that easy,” Rain barks. She’s five feet tall but packs a verbal wallop strong enough to make Arlo back off and sit up straight. “We’re not in the business of choosing who to help and who to turn loose. The abilities you all have make you potential forces for great healing or for great harm. The Academy isn’t there to shelter the former at the expense of the latter.”
In the stunned silence after Rain’s reprimand, Kress inspects her Desert Eagle semi-automatic before clicking it back into its holster on her thigh. “This is what we were most worried about. It’s what we most feared.”
Brohn tries to nod his agreement, but his head stops, his chin hovering above his chest in defeat. “You know that image of the little guy with horns, cloven hooves, and a forked tail sitting on your shoulder?” he asks into the floor of the Terminus, his eyes down. “The one who tempts you to satisfy your own happiness at the expense of someone else’s?”
He looks up when we don’t answer. His fists and his teeth clench at the same time. “Well,” he says through a grimace, “that’s Sara. And, without the Academy and proper training, it could be any one of you someday.”
“There was no way you could have known any of this,” Kress reminds us. “But privately, it’s why we called her ‘the Devil’s Advocate.’”
“She said we’ll meet again,” I mumble, half to myself.
“I hope so,” Kress says. “There’s still a lot we can do for her.”
“If we don’t manage to track her down,” Brohn replies. “There will be some pretty terrible things she can do to us.”
Over in his single-seat passenger chair Ignacio swivels around to face the rear of the Terminus. “Um…the Devoted…there’s no chance they’re following us, is there?”
“No,” Kress assures him. “We’re safe.”
Betrayal. Loss. Failure. Regret. Embarrassment. I feel a lot of things right now. For some reason, safe isn’t one of them.
We ride along for another several minutes in silence, and I’m just about to take my first normal breath when Kella shouts out, “Holy frack!” from the cab and slams on the brakes, grinding the huge truck to a bumpy, bone-rattling stop.
“What is it?” Brohn calls out as he and Kress launch themselves to their feet, fully prepared to fight any enemy who might try to stand between us and the safety of our hidden mountain Academy.
“You stay here,” Brohn barks as he, Kress, and Rain bolt from the cabin into the cab.
We don’t listen.
Matholook and my Asylum and I scramble after them and, ducking down, cram into the cab of the Terminus and try to get a look out the narrow front window.
“I don’t see anything,” Matholook says.
I shake my head. “Me, neither.”
“Behind us, maybe?” Ignacio says, whipping around to peer back down the length of the cabin. “See? I told you. I had a feeling we weren’t out of the woods.”
Behind the rig’s steering pegs, Kella raises a hand and directs our attention to a lumpy rock in the middle of the road.
“A rock?” Arlo asks.
“It’s not a rock,” Kella says.
“Then what is it?”
Leaping forward, his huge palms pressed flat to the interior steel panel above the narrow window, it’s War who answers. “Jeff!”
Turning and knocking through the rest of us and sending us scattering to the side like human bowling pins, War thunders out the cab, through the Terminus door, and is outside on the road before I even have a chance to regain my balance.
When he climbs back into the truck five seconds later, sure enough, he’s got one dusty, slightly dazed looking vulture tucked under his arm.
We all gather around to greet him as he ducks into the Terminus and calls out for Kella that it’s okay to keep going.
“He must’ve sensed you in the rig,” Brohn guesses, his nose wrinkled at the sight (or is it the smell?) of the patchy-feathered bird. “He must have tracked us down.”
“I don’t care how he did it,” War says through quivering lips and with happily wet and red-rimmed eyes. “I’m just happy to see this guy again!” He hugs the bird to his bulging chest, and for a second, he looks like a four-hundred-pound five-year-old with his favorite stuffie.
After a few rounds of petting and cooing over the happy reunion, we settle back into our seats in the cabin.
With our enemies behind us and with Render, Haida, and Jeff crouched in a comfortable three-bird roost, we all take the time to tell our stories.
“Start with the leader of the Unsettled,” Kress instructs, and I can sense her gearing up to take a spate of mental notes. “He calls himself Angel Fire, right? We haven’t been able to get much intel on him,” she explains. “Other than we think he must be one cruel and savage, son-of-a-bitch.”
Libra, Arlo, Ignacio, Matholook, and I exchange a silent, five-person, who-wants-to-go-first look.
And then, despite all the betrayal, loss, failure, regret, and embarrassment, the five of us break into a spontaneous, simultaneous fit of the giggles.
“Let me tell you about Angel Fire and the Unsettled,” I pant, one arm pressed to my stomach as I try to catch my breath, “and just how wrong all of us have been.”
45
Home
After making our way through the desert and up some of the old and very steep access roads, we enter one of the three main mine tunnels we use to get the Terminus into and out of the Academy.
The mountain is laced with these old tunnels. Most of them were sealed off a long time ago. The ones that remain, despite Kress and her Conspiracy’s best efforts at maintenance and repair, can still be pretty rocky and unstable.
It’s a rough ride up the old mountain roads and a tight fit through some parts of the steep, snaking tunnels, but Kella—with her off-the-charts reflexes—steers us through with pinpoint precision.
She’s great but not perfect, and every time we hear a dink or ding from the brush of the fortified sides of the Terminus against the curved stone walls, I jump a little and wonder how I’ll react if I wind up paralyzed after a horrific crash.
With only the dim cabin lights and the flickering glow from the assorted panels and holo-displays up in the cab, Kress and Brohn and my Asylum sit together in the near-dark and begin to exchange our stories.
I tell Kress and Brohn about everything that happened to us since we first set out on our mission. Chiming in as if on cue, Libra, Ignacio, Arlo, and Matholook fill in the blanks and throw in their own version (often exaggerated, in my opinion) of our experiences with Angel Fire and the Unsettled.
We all sit in a moment of heart-broken silence after Matholook and I recount what happened to Mattea. Kress assures us it’ll be okay and that we’ll all make sure Mattea didn’t die in vain. I find her voice unpleasantly matronly when she tells us about the lessons we’ve learned and about how we’ll be smarter and stronger going forward.
&
nbsp; I worship Kress to death, but nothing she says now or in the future is likely to make me feel any less guilty and crushed to my core about what happened to Mattea.
Still, I guess I’m glad she’s trying.
In London, I practically lived in a square-mile graveyard. I saw rats and ravens dining on the dead by the thousands.
But Mattea…her death hits me like all of that times a million.
(In our history seminar at the Academy, Granden once said a famous dictator pointed out that a single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic. I don’t remember who said it, but, right now, for me anyway, it couldn’t be more true.)
As we recall our tour through the Army of the Unsettled, Kress and Brohn ask a few questions. We tell them all about the trial, the challenges, and our ultimately successful appeal. We tell them about the array of vehicles, the shops, the neighborhoods, and the people—kids, adults, and quarantined carriers of the Cyst Plague—that make up the constantly moving city. I have to turn the storytelling over to Libra when I get to the part about Shostakovich and the classical music concert. (If I tell it, I’m going to start crying right here in front of everyone in the belly of the Terminus, and then I’d have to kill myself.)
And, of course, we tell them everything we can remember about Angel Fire, our captor-turned-tour guide.
“And maybe even a friend?” Libra suggests.
“If he’s alive,” Arlo reminds her.
“He’s alive,” Matholook assures us. I know he doesn’t know Angel Fire’s fate any better than we do, but the way he says it—confident and hopeful but not smug or naively optimistic—makes me inclined to believe him.
I know Kress and Brohn are absorbing all this as tactical information for future use, but for us, it’s just a bunch of kids telling tall tales of their arse-over-tit adventures in a strange and unexpectedly fascinating world.
Ignacio jumps in to tell about us being trapped high up in the glass-walled cab of the construction crane as the war swept along below.
“Branwynne had a premonition about it,” Matholook brags on my behalf.
Balking, I shake my head and tell Kress and Brohn that I didn’t have anything of the kind. “It was Haida. I think she’s seeing—”
“The future?” Kress asks.
I look up and expect to see her chuckling or making fun of me or something. But she just smiles as Brohn pats the back of her hand.
Brohn, smiling and sparkly-eyed, wags his finger back and forth between me and Matholook. “And this?”
I’m pretty sure the heat from my cheeks could melt the walls of the Terminus. Next to me, Libra giggles, and I elbow her in the side and tell her to shut it.
Matholook, his voice not much more than a mumble, tells Kress and Brohn, “We’re friends.”
Our two teachers nod, knowingly. Maybe too knowingly, and now I’m embarrassed at being so transparent about my feelings for Matholook.
Saving me from any further, flaming-cheeked embarrassment, Arlo leans forward to relate all the details of finding Jeff, winding up exposed on the front lines between the Cult of the Devoted and the Army of the Unsettled, being taken away by Epic, and us thinking that would be the end of us. “Until you all showed up,” he grins.
“And then we lost Sara,” Libra mumbles, her head low.
“And that brings us up to now,” I finish. It hurts, but I can accept talking in memorial tones about Mattea. But Sara…she’s a totally different story told by a totally different narrator. Who she was and what she may be becoming…it’s way beyond my paygrade.
Kress and Brohn compliment us on our work, and I ask Kress what happened during their recon and rescue mission in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park.
She demurs, claiming she’s not much of a storyteller, herself.
When we press her, though, she gives us the basics. “Terk and Rain set up the infiltration. We encountered resistance.”
“What kind?”
“The usual. A couple of not-so-bright guards.”
Ignacio makes a scoffing-hacking noise from the back of his throat that makes Arlo laugh. “How come the guards in those Processors are all muscles and guns and no brains?”
“I’m not sure,” Brohn tells him. “But it’s a good thing. If they had brains to go along with their muscles and guns, we might not be here right now.”
Kress slips her hand into Brohn’s and leans back in her seat. When he doesn’t elaborate on their adventure, she takes over. “After we got past the guards, we rescued four Emergents, including Apex.”
Even though we’re in the Terminus, grinding along through the old mine tunnels of the mountain, Libra still puts up her hand like we’re in class. “Who is Apex?”
“He’s sometimes called ‘the Database,’” Kress informs us. “We dropped him off at the Academy after our mission and right before we set out looking for you. You can meet him and the others when we get home.”
Home.
How could such a simple word make my heart go wonky and fill the backs of my eyes with enough tears to capsize Noah’s ark?
As casual as if we were all gathered around an evening campfire, Kress pulls her hair back into a loose ponytail. “Basically, his DNA contains the hybrid digital-binary code Epic is still out there looking for. Most important of all—way more important than what we did is what we learned.”
“And what was that?” I ask, grateful to hear my mentor willing to share more of what she knows.
“We discovered that what we thought we knew is only a fraction of the truth.”
Brohn nods his agreement. “It’s like we were asleep and believing a truth that turned out to be nothing but dreams.”
We all stare, confused.
Dreams?
Ducking under the ceiling between the cab and the cabin, Terk comes in and gives Kress a status update about one of the truck’s mag-boosters and its weapons guidance system. Well, not Terk. It’s actually the Auditor—the algorithmic techno-consciousness based on Kress’s mother living in a black disk on Terk’s back and integrated into his Modified parts—who does the talking.
(I’ll never get used to hearing her disembodied voice wafting out from around Terk’s hulking body.)
Her voice lilting and sweet, the Auditor launches into a bunch of mechanical techno-speak I’m not even close to understanding, but Libra’s eyes go wide like this is the most important and interesting thing she’s ever heard in her life.
Kress thanks her and issues a laundry list of things they’re going to have to do once we get home. And it’s a long list.
Ignacio asks if the Terminus is okay. “Are we going to be able to…”
“Make it home?” Brohn finishes for him. “We took a few hits in the National Park, but I think we’ll be okay.”
Terk grunts a laugh at this. He flicks a thumb toward Kress and Brohn and rolls his eyes before turning his attention to me and my Asylum. “Breaking into a hidden research lab with military-level security, rescuing four imprisoned Emergents, and getting out alive in a heavily damaged rig isn’t as easy as they make it sound.”
“It doesn’t sound easy at all,” Libra mumbles.
Pushing up one of the sleeves of his white compression top and massaging a nest of raised scars on his forearm, Arlo seems worried. “What did you mean before…,” he asks Brohn, “about dreams?”
Brohn blushes and tells him that’s more of Kress’s area of expertise.
“As Hypnagogics,” Kress explains after a gentle eyeroll in Brohn’s direction, “Lucid and Reverie have access to and an intimate understanding of dreams. What they know, what they can see and do…it might help us stop Epic. Hopefully before it’s too late, and before we run out of time.”
“I know what it’s like to lose a chunk of your life.” Terk pats his Modified parts. “Losing a part of myself, though, is nothing compared to losing time.”
“But we’re wide awake now,” Brohn says. “And I think we’re about ready to stand this upside-down
world right-side up again.”
Kress pats the back of his hand and serves us up a warm smile. She flicks her eyes over toward the three birds—the black raven, the white raven, and the splotchy Cape Griffon vulture—still perched with enviable serenity on the edge of a metal storage shelf toward the back of the Terminus.
I’d love to sit like that in oblivious comfort. This is one of those times I wish I were Haida instead of just connected to her. I’m so happy and relieved that she’s alive and well, and I initiate our connection just long enough to tell her so.
It was scary seeing you shot down like that.
~ Not as scary as being shot down like that.
That was a total shambles back there. What did you do to get away?
~ The same thing you’ll do someday. I flew.
I must repeat her last word out loud, because Kress asks, “You flew?”
“Oh,” I say, snapping back out of my telempathic bond. “Haida was just telling me how she flew to escape the Devoted back there.”
Nodding, Kress traces the intricate black swoops, curves, and dots of the bio-tech implants in her forearms with her fingertip. “It’s like Walt Whitman said,” she grins. ‘I will sleep no more but arise.’” She tells me she’s proud of me. “I’m proud of all of you,” she says to Libra, Ignacio. Arlo, and, yes—even Matholook. And now, it’s time for you students to go back to school.”
“And what about you?” I ask. Kress surveys my Asylum before those steely eyes of hers land on mine. “I guess it’s time for us to arise, too.”
At the rig’s controls, Kella drives the Terminus the rest of the way through the mine tunnels and, finally, into the Academy’s cavernous vehicle hangar.
She parks the enormous rig on its mag-pad where it sighs to a gentle hover like it’s as happy to be home as we are.
My Asylum and I climb down from the Terminus, all of us sagging with the weight of sorrow, loss, defeat, and the satisfaction of escaping from a no-win scenario with our lives.
(Okay, we didn’t exactly escape. We were rescued. But when you know you’re about to die but then wind up safe in a decked-out, twelve-ton military rig with some of the most impressive, powerful people in the world, you tend not to split hairs.)
