Letting him sweep her away.
CHAPTER 2: THE WAR MACHINE
Rows of glossy-black Skull Boy suits of armor lined the floor of the large hangar. Bianca walked slowly with Nani on a catwalk overlooking the assembly, about twenty or so feet up, observing the progress of preparations. Spanning the far end of the hangar were a set of long doors, opened wide on a beautiful day—an outdoor scene filled with even more Skull Boys. It was a lineup much like the one in the hangar times about ten. Rows of the dark armored units on the tarmac, shining in the sun, ordered columns of completed units, hundreds and hundreds of them. Below on the floor of the hangar each was being worked on, each in some stage of completion, Icon devices being inserted, finished ones walking off the end to join the rest outside, new ones being brought in to begin the process.
It wasn’t really Icons being installed, per se. As Bianca understood it they were versions of the original devices, crafted by Nani, each able to be programmed with a single-use set of coordinates. Different than the shiny chrome dumbbells Bianca knew. By the Icon’s original design they’d been meant for use in some sort of transport vest worn by the user, snapped in like batteries and used for travel. Bianca’s experience so far with the Icons had been grip it, twist it and hold on for dear life. Jess and Zac disappeared that way from the playhouse back when they first found him, then Jess did the same thing to bring her over to Anitra. Nani’s application of the technology would be much smoother, as originally intended. And, if Bianca understood it right, they could be re-set on the other side, once they reached Earth, with a new set of coordinates they would gather when they arrived.
Jump points to board the Kel starships.
She took a deep breath.
Jessica.
As strong as Bianca had tried to be for Zac, as much confidence as she tried to give him, that Jess was fine and would be ok, she herself had tons of doubt. By now so much time, so many unknowns and such huge distance had intervened since the last time they saw her …
Jess could, literally, be anywhere.
The one thing Bianca was convinced of was that Jess was alive. Somehow, some way, her friend lived. She knew it, deep in her bones. Zac felt it too. He’d gone with Willet and, even now, would be back on Earth—she hoped they made it to her parents okay, but Bianca tried not to worry about that any more than she dared—and Zac might even have tracked down the Bok and, possibly, found out what they knew of where Jess went and, maybe, just maybe, found his way to her. Maybe Zac and Jess were together already. Maybe they would return soon.
She let hope carry her.
A crash amid the noise and a fresh round of arc welding drew her attention to the activity on the floor below. Nani’s creations were being “snapped” into each suit.
The scientific genius stopped to observe the progress from their elevated position and Bianca held, standing close at the railing. Nani studied a particular bit of activity going on below while Bianca, in turn, studied her. The things Nani had done, in such a short time, were truly incredible. The things she’d gotten others to do … nearly impossible to believe.
She started walking again and Bianca followed.
Nani had completely transformed. They all had but especially her, bending her amazing brain toward a solution to the Kel. Not only was Nani incredibly smart, she was turning out to be an incredible leader. In witness of that Bianca had developed her own sense of the epic, lending moral support as Nani continued her battle with the mountains of old people and their old ways, fighting to make this amazing thing happen. In the process her friend had risen to stunning heights within their ranks. Circumstances had a lot to do with it, no doubt, but with Nani’s superior intelligence they were getting it done; making a way to go to Earth and, if it worked, rescue it. In the bargain they would save everyone from the threat of the Kel.
Around Anitra other hangars like this one were working on the same project. The whole planet was engaged. Across the sea the Dominion was doing the same with their Astake armor. In fact she and Nani would be going there next.
When the battle came Bianca hoped she would be prepared. Scared as she was she nevertheless had a feeling she would be. After working so well with Nani back on Earth, piloting the Reaver in combat against the Kel, surviving against impossible odds, she’d demonstrated to herself that she could rise above. When the chips were down and her back was against the wall, she’d become something she never thought she could.
Nani glanced over her shoulder and Bianca smiled. In response the corners of Nani’s mouth turned up, the weight of her deep concentration subtly lifting. Lately that had been Bianca’s biggest contribution. Being there for Nani. It was a key role, she imagined, being the rock for the girl that was changing the world.
She relished it.
**
Now that she and Zac were reunited everything else could wait. At least a little longer. So much was screaming to be addressed yet ruthlessly being ignored, and for that moment in time Jess managed to find peace, scarcely believing how thoroughly Zac filled her. Mind, body, soul—her every sense, leaving nothing to be desired. Nothing to want, nothing more to wish for. Though it was hardly news—she’d spent an afternoon with him before—it still managed to blow her away. All aches, soothed, all troubles, gone, all longing cast to the wind and she was whole, to the core, to her deepest center. An indescribable freedom, pure and simple, and there was no doubt that no one else, absolutely no one could do for her what Zac did. Despite being such a rookie she was certain of it.
At the contemplation of that she had a moment. Laying there in his arms … it felt weird to consider herself that way. A rookie, knowing what she now knew, having done what she’d done, the fantastic—the impossible. But the truth was Jessica—not she, not who she really was but who she was right now, Jessica Paquin …
Jess was a rookie.
And she loved it.
It felt incredible to be that fresh, to have an outlook that pure. To grasp the perspective of having known and done and experienced fantastic things and yet to experience all things anew, as if for the first time. To be so awake to the vastness of the infinite stretched out behind her, simultaneously in the now with a keen eye on the infinite possibilities ahead. A full awareness of her own personal continuum. To be so capable of so much while at the same time, incredibly, feeling the raw tingle of young love.
She reveled in it.
The entire world was in danger, their whole way of life in jeopardy—Earth as she knew it was very likely near an end—yet in that moment she savored the thrill of that youth. The future held huge unknowns, many of them potentially quite bad, but she knew she would make things right. She would make them better. And with that fresh conviction buzzing in her mind, and little in that moment to stand against it, she held time steady as she had before. Back on the farm, just her and Zac. Two people, possessing of the deepest love. The deepest bond imaginable.
Zac must surely feel as she did. He had to, deep down. For she knew something he didn’t. Not yet. An astonishing truth that must soon be revealed. For what she knew was this: Though this union was quite fresh for Jess and Zac, though in a sense the two of them were rookies, it wasn’t really new for either.
They’d been in love before.
“You’re so brown,” his voice broke what had been a long, serene silence. “Everywhere.” She turned her head and he was looking her over, studying her butt in particular. Idly he ran a finger around a bare cheek, up and across her hip. Places where there should’ve been tan lines but weren’t. “Where were you?”
She rolled and propped herself on an elbow to face him. They’d just taken a shower and their skin was taut, that warm tackiness right before it was completely dry, bodies smelling clean. Neither wanted to get out of the luxurious spray and they’d stayed in there a long time. She reached and stroked his short beard, so perfectly even, not a stray hair sticking out. Soft after the shower.
“Time for me to tell my side of the story.” She pause
d and he, too, raised himself to an elbow, face just a few inches from her own. As the bed shifted under his weight, as the length of him and his perfect body captured her vision, she had another flash of reality. Not that much time had passed since they met, out back in the woods when he fell from the sky, but so very much had changed. There she was, in her room, on her bed, surrounding by childhood posters, trophies, all her stuff—a room she’d had so few boys in—none for anything more than a board game or a quick stop-in to pick something up—and now … now here was a Greek god of a boy, laying right beside her, on her bed in her room. They were naked and they’d just spent the afternoon doing things that used to make her blush even looking at on the internet. Things that made her glance furtively at the door even when no one was home, ready to snap off the screen at a moment’s notice. And here she was, laying in her room after having been doing those things …
It was unbelievable.
She shifted and cleared her mind.
“It was another world,” she said. “The clothes I wore just let the sun in somehow.” Looking at the perfect, even color of her own skin she again had the idea that the place she just came from would make a great vacation spot. People would kill for the invigorating effects of such a resort destination.
“I was on a journey,” she said. “We were on horseback. Some of the time we walked on foot. It was a lot of time outside, and after all the time in the sun I got a tan.” She looked herself over; held out an arm.
“You rode horses?” That was apparently his number one question.
She looked up.
He amended: “Actually,” mentally he took a step back, “never mind that. How did you get here?”
At that she hesitated. “A gate,” she said, getting uncomfortably close to the things she was not yet sure how to reveal. Reveal them she must, but ... “There’s a gate, buried back in the hills. Past the woods.” She lifted a foot and pointed her big toe toward the window. He looked down the length of her leg. “It’s been there a thousand years.” Her voice fell and she spoke quickly to cover the lapse. “There’s a connecting gate on the other world. Where I was. Passes through to this one. In all this time there’s been a gate out there behind my house. Buried. Somehow civilization has grown up around it and …” The sheer good fortune of that simple fact hit her and she wavered. The gate and the Icon both went to that spot near her house, where her family had conveniently moved—fate is what you make it—and now she was back in that same spot and the significance was overwhelming. How much of a hand did I have in all this? Steering events, doing things on impulse. “Anyway, I had no idea this is where I was coming. When I stepped through on the other side I thought I could be going anywhere.”
“So there’s a gate out in the woods, right back there, that connects to another world?”
Her mind drifted with the scope of their current reality. Zac, too, was temporarily numb, and she could see the questions he hadn’t yet asked swimming behind his eyes.
Here was an opportunity to skip past some of the things she might say, for now; the things she did not yet know how to divulge. It clawed at her, for it was the perfect interlude in which to spill the truth. The moment was ripe only …
She couldn’t. Not yet.
“Definitely another world,” she said. “An ancient world. No technology. The Icon from the Bok castle let out there. After I arrived, the Bok who grabbed me shot the Icon and it popped back, then he shot himself.” The memory of the older Bok’s suicide drew her expression tight.
“Where did you go from there?”
Such a simple question, so much to it. Whereas Zac’s recap of events were framed within things they both had a reference for, the events on that other world …
There was no mutual frame of reference. It was mind-bending—quite literally, in some respects—and for a long moment she struggled with where to begin.
“A small village,” she decided to start by hitting the main beats. “An old man found me. He and his son took me to a place where there were a band of warriors guarding a secret. It turns out they were guarding something connected to the Prophecy.” Zac’s eyes widened at that. “Yes,” she nodded, “the same. That world, wherever it is, has the same legends of the priestess, of the coming of a herald, which they, like the Conclave, believed was me. They were guarding that suit of armor,” she glanced across her body at the Kel armor laying on the floor. “The old man, Galfar was his name, knew something about it. The armor was left by the priestess a thousand years ago,” she gave an involuntary swallow as she said this, “and the sword, which was part of it, was a key to unlock the gate. That became the focus of our journey.”
Even though she was trying to keep it simple she realized it was far too fantastic. There was no easy way to relate, and Zac was clearly enthralled imagining the things she described.
“We stole the armor,” she went on. “Galfar took me to an ancient city where I found the gate.”
Zac looked across her to the armor. “How did it fit you?” This was suddenly a curiosity. “It was waiting for you? That’s weird.”
Of course it was weird. And of course she’d wondered that herself. It seemed so cosmically unlikely, yet so did everything else.
“I’m sure it wasn’t planned that way,” she spoke the truth. “It couldn’t have been. It just … fit, so I put it on.
“The sword was the real item. In the abandoned city I met the guardians of the gate. They’ve apparently been keeping the Prophecy all this time, expecting someone like me to come use it. The gate, like the armor, was left by the priestess.”
Left by me. And again she felt the weight of the continuum, drawing her apart, as if her entire existence was but a vast, tenuous vapor and she might never connect the pieces into a whole. Forcibly she went on. Informed Zac how she arrived in the hills in the woods behind her house, where the gate was buried, how she dug her way out and ran here. She told him of the Codes, how supposedly monumental they were in what they promised, and this fascinated him greatly, and as she discussed what little she knew, and answered what little she could, her own draw toward the promise of the mysterious Codes was amplified. She told him how little anyone she’d talked to on that other world knew of their real nature, though the Codes apparently meant everything to the priestess a thousand years ago. She’d found them then and was at first trying to understand their secret knowledge so she could make them known, and the feeling coursing through her only got stranger as she continued to speak of the priestess, Aesha, her, in the third person, knowing it was her—wondering, even as she did, what else she might remember.
She told Zac the priestess ended up having to protect the Codes and, eventually, hide them. The Codex Amkradus, or at least the promise of it—or the threat of it, depending on which side you were on—started the Great Wars.
Beyond that she knew little, though Zac asked questions, and all she could add was that the Codes were supposed to lie somewhere on the other side of the gate, and that was why she came. She had no idea she was gating through to Earth. What that meant was that the Codes were here. Somewhere on this world. Which could mean right there, in Boise, somewhere in the surrounding hills, in the city, in the state, in the country or, truly, anywhere on the planet. According to the legend on Galfar’s world the priestess simply “hid them on this end”.
Which, as with the gate and the armor, meant she hid them. The Codex Amkradus. Which, again—and this vicious circle kept hurting her head—meant she should, in theory, know where they were. Her mind was spinning. It made her dizzy. She was the one that set the gate in the first place, though after all this time could not recall any of the particulars of those events. Snatches of images flitted at the edges of memory and she nurtured them, hoping that, with the right stimulus and the right concentration, she could figure it out.
Of course the more she thought along those lines the more she became consumed with the most immediate dilemma facing her.
How to reveal the most important t
ruth? How to tell Zac these other things? How to tell him she’d learned to manifest amazing powers and—more freakish than that—as it turned out, she was no herald. Part of the Prophecy, yes. But she was no player. No sir. Get this, she imagined herself saying, I’m not the herald. I’m not someone the priestess said would come. I am the priestess.
Yep.
That’s right.
I’m Aesha.
Turns out I made this mess and now here I am living my own predictions. Living out the Prophecy I made a thousand years ago.
Can you believe it? Wild, huh?
As crazy as everything else was about their lives, as bizarre, for some reason the revelation of that became impossible. Opportunities to say something came as they talked, openings where she could’ve slipped in the right comment; could’ve got it out there, at least, so the process of acceptance could occur. But she couldn’t. As ridiculously “out there” as everything else was, that particular bit of info fought her. Each time she had a chance she chickened out. It was too big. Too much. And right then things were so perfect, everything with Zac was going so well …
How would he take it?
Instead she told him more of what the Codes promised. What little she knew. Talk of that got them closer to the idea of a continuum of existence and all else, but still she couldn’t say it. He told her more of the state of affairs with the Kel and how Nani was working on a way to bring an army back there, to Earth, to fight. An Anitran army. Skull Boys and Astake. How the Venatres and Dominion of Anitra had formed a truce and were working together on the effort—an amazing bit of news in its own right; yet more examples of the cascading, world-changing effects of what she’d done—of how Nani thought the Anitrans could make an impact as a united front, bringing their combined might to the so-called Battlefield Earth, the remaining forces of Earth and the armies of Anitra united in one cause. Zac told her more of he and Willet’s plans, smack in the middle of this greater picture, of their wild ideas to rescue Satori.
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 3
