by Alex Leopold
She noted the spite in his voice but chose not to react to it.
“It wants you to fulfill the promise you once made. It wants you to find the Liberty Key and save us all.”
Her answer visibly stunned him and she saw how Acadia also straightened up and stepped into the light.
“What’s the Liberty Key?” One of the girls asked breaking the silence. It was the more boyish of the two, the one with the short dark hair.
Quill ignored her.
“Everybody knows the Key was lost when the Oracle died.” He responded.
Nakano smiled and gave him a wink. “Something's that are lost can be found again.”
“What’s the Liberty Key?” The girl asked again, this time more persistently.
“Liberty! Liberty!” The bird on the houndsman’s shoulder squawked.
“It's nothing!” Quill snapped, his tone harsher than intended.
“I mean, it's nothing for us to worry about.” He added correcting himself as he regained his composure.
Then he faced Nakano and said coldly. “No more than the cryptic ramblings of a fool.”
His words caught Nakano like a slap to the face.
“How can you say that?” She asked her mouth aghast in disbelief.
“I can say it because I was there when Sancisco fell and we lost everything.” He replied. “I was there when all the Oracle’s promises went up in smoke.”
“That may be, but it doesn't change the fact that the last prophecy remains.” She argued. “And it doesn’t change the fact that you are the Pathfinder, the one chosen to save us all.”
He scoffed loudly. Like it was some practical joke to him. Then his face turned hard.
“So where is it then?”
“Where’s what?” She asked.
“The Key. The answer to all our prayers. Where is it located?”
She stammered. “I…”
“I must surmise that you came all this way to me because you saw the prophecy, right? If that’s true, then you should know where the Key is. How it works. What it can do. Am I wrong?”
His smug expression told her he already knew her answer, which made her admission all the harder.
“I have the prophecy, yes. But the visions were corrupted when we retrieved them from the void.” She stammered. “They’re in my head, but I'm having trouble understanding them.”
“Of course. But surely the visions that pulled you to me are now drawing you toward the next location?”
Nakano’s mind was so fractured now she couldn’t trust it anymore. Yet, she didn’t need to see the future to know where they had to go next.
“Hellanta.” She replied, mentioning the city where Kamran’s contact was located. “The resistance are waiting for us there. And they’ll be able to help me make sense of what’s in my head.”
Quill shook his head. “Hellanta is thousands of miles away. What makes you think I’d ever make that journey?”
“I don’t know, but I know you will. I’ve already seen you with the leader of the resistance. A man named, Malthus. I believe you know him.”
Quill responded with a deep-throated laugh.
“Any other name and I might’ve believed you.” He said still chuckling. “But Malthus leading the resistance? I’m afraid your head is playing a bad joke on you.”
Nakano exhaled loudly with exasperation.
“I don’t get to choose how your future will play out, or who you’ll meet along this journey. I can only tell you what the future requires of you in order to find the Liberty Key.”
“Okay, Enough!” The dark haired girl came to her feet. “Someone’s going to tell me what this Liberty Key is before we go any further?”
Her body language suggested she wasn’t going to be ignored anymore.
Quill opened his mouth to answer but Nakano spoke first.
“The Key is a weapon.” She spoke quickly and wouldn’t be interrupted.
“It was foreseen by a powerful anomaly, called the Oracle. Her last prophecy told of a future where the Key would make an anomaly – the Pathfinder, your father – so powerful he’d have the ability to end all wars, forever.”
She continued. “The Oracle was killed before she could tell us where the Key was, but I managed to retrieve the prophecy again.”
Nakano gestured to her coat. “In my pocket is a journal. In it, I've recorded everything I've seen. It shows us the way forward. To finding the Key. To beating the Directory and winning this war. And it all starts with your father.”
“Him?” The girl looked at her father with skepticism.
“It’s a fantasy, Cooper, an illusion.” He explained. “One I️ was caught up in for a long time. Yet, like all illusions, it cannot be sustained and when it finally unraveled a lot of people died.”
He paused to breathe a heavy sigh then returned his attention to Nakano.
“I don’t know what you think you saw but it was not some great solution for beating the Directory. No such thing exists, and I️ will not risk my family’s life, or anyone else’s, on the words of a predictor ever again.
“You can stay for the night.” He continued. “Tomorrow we leave this place, and I'm afraid where we’re going you can not come.”
He turned on his heels. “We're done here.”
Nakano shouted at him as he walked away.
“I’ve seen your future, Great Inventor. I know what you’re going to do. That’s why I risked everything to steal the last prophecy from the Archon and bring it to you. You will fulfill it, even if you don’t believe it now.”
Something she said made him stop in his tracks.
“Does the Archon know what you took?” He asked agitated.
She looked back at him with arrogant pride.
“He does, and I killed the predictor who gave it to me too. So there’s no way he can get it back.”
Nakano noticed the way the ursinian and the Great Inventor shared a nervous look, and reacted by letting out a sharp laugh.
“I know what you’re thinking. For such a prize the Archon would move heaven-and-earth to find me.” She shook her head to brush away his fears. “You needn’t worry, I️ was careful to hide my trail.”
Squeezing his eyes shut in frustration, Quill banged a clenched fist against one of the barn's posts.
“What is it?” Asked the blonde-haired girl. “What's wrong?”
“The warehouse.” Acadia whispered to them. “If the Myrmidoms were already here, their snoopers may have picked up what happened at the warehouse.”
“I promise you, Great Inventor”, Nakano continued to object. “The Directory does not know where I am.
He shook his head. “Yes, they do.”
34
The gawkers had come to stare but not for long. The scavengers paid even less interest as they’d stripped the warehouse clean days before. And since there were no survivors there was no one who could speak of what had happened. So there was nothing more to do than leave the building to burn itself through.
The houndsman came much later.
Attracted to the warehouse by the smoke on the horizon, he’d used the glow of the fires to navigate his way in and arrived sometime after midnight.
The forest was deserted. Except for himself and a swarm of crows above his head, there didn’t look to be another creature to be found for miles.
Happy to claim for his own whatever scraps remained, he began poking a stick through the ash as he slowly circled the rubble, only getting as close as the heat would allow. For the most part he found little, but when he was almost at the end of his first loop his eye caught something that glittered when his stick turned it over.
Holding it up to inspect it closer, he saw it was a ring looped around a long gold necklace.
“My lucky day.” He said with a contented whisper noticing the sign of a torch and flame had been embellished on the ring’s flat surface.
“I think not.” Said a voice on the breeze and the houndsman felt something
hot and hard ram into his chest. It launched him across the forest floor and when he landed he felt the bones in his arm break.
“Show yourselves!” He said hoarsely getting to his feet and reaching for his crossbow.
“Over here. Over here.” Several voices called to him from every direction. Then again from within his mind. “Over here. Over here.”
But he saw no one.
Terrified, he pulled the trigger and watched as the arrow sprung free and hurtled toward the tree-line. Twenty-yards in front of him it stopped and dropped to the ground as if it had simply given up mid-flight.
Stunned but reacting quickly he moved to re-load the crossbow, but the weapon was yanked from his hands.
Following the path of the arrow, it flew across the forest floor until a ghost-like hand materialized to catch it. As the weapon was tossed to the ground the rest of phantom’s body appeared along with ten others. Spread out in front of him in a wide semi-circle the ten men faced him on horseback, dressed in black cloaks with silver masks.
The houndsman had heard enough ghost stories in his time to know who he was facing and even though he knew no one would come he began crying out for help.
“We leave in thirty minutes and we're not coming back!” Their father announced after explaining to Nakano what had happened that morning.
“We have to assume the Directory would’ve discovered you escaped to Harvardtown and would’ve sent Myrmidons to hunt you down.” He told her as they raced back to the main house across the lawn.
“If there were Myrmidons in the city this morning, then they’ll have had their snoopers monitoring the Borderlands in the hopes of locating you. Which means they’ll have picked up the ripple created when the twins’ powers were released.
“They’ll come to investigate. When they do, it won’t be long till they find this place and we need to be long gone before that happens.”
Back in the main house he wasted no time issuing orders, telling everyone what to pack and what to leave behind.
“Riley, my maps!” He barked and she scurried over to the large mahogany bureau in the living room.
“Which ones do you want?” She asked as she removed the large, leather-bound case from the top drawer of the bureau.
“Bring them all.” He called back and snapped his fingers impatiently for the others to join him at the kitchen table.
From the case, he removed a thick bundle of papers, each as big as the table upon which he planned to lay them. Drawn by hand, each map was meticulously detailed and were the product of years of work. Their father usually treated them with the utmost respect. Such was the nature of his impatience that on this occasion he threw a dozen or so to the ground before he found the one he wanted.
Spreading it out on the table, he went to work tracing his fingers along the marked out routes that ran north over the mountains, all the while arguing with Acadia and Mayat over which route to take. Some were more treacherous to climb and navigate but would get them over the mountains faster. Others were more manageable but would take longer.
“Your plan to go north won't be successful.” Nakano interrupted. “You won’t get two hundred miles before the Myrmidons catch up with you.”
“You're welcome to stay behind if you think that'll improve our chances.” He replied without looking up.
“Listen to me!” She banged her fist on the table to get everyone’s attention. “The Archon has an army of anomalies, all of whom he can put to work hunting you down.
“Predictors to see where you’re going. Snoopers to peer into every mind in the Great Unknown till they have yours. And, skin-readers to comb every inch of ground till they pick up your trail. There is no place you can go where they won’t find you.”
“I’ve outwitted the Directory before, I can do it again.” He replied remaining defiant.
She shook her head. “Maybe you think you have an edge because you have a Sekhem, well they have one too. His name is Khnum and he's as cold-blooded as the men he rides with.”
Riley glanced toward Mayat to see if she recognized this man. To her surprise, she saw the felisian staring down at the table hoping to hide the shock on her face.
Trying to defuse the tension in the room Acadia pointed a clawed finger at a red trail in the center of the map.
“This is the one.” And he pounded the table to make his point.
“The toughest route.” Her father grimaced.
“But it’ll get us over the mountains the fastest.”
“If we go that way we’ll have to travel light.” Mayat reminded them. “That means limited supplies, including weapons.”
She leaned in to make her next point. “We won’t have much to defend ourselves if the Myrmidons do catch up with us.”
“A risk we’ll have to take.” Acadia shrugged.
“It will get you killed.” Nakano interjected.
“Get you killed!” Goose repeated copying Nakano’s voice. Somehow the parakeet always knew when his mimics would have the greatest impact.
“Enough!”
Her father snapped and smacked a cup from the table that someone had put down and left. Then, leaning down heavily on his elbows he began rubbing his forehead against the palms of his hands as if he were attempting to force the solution from his head.
“There must be a better way.” He groaned.
“There is, we follow the prophecy.” Nakano told him dropping her journal onto the table and opening it to the first page. “The answers you’re looking for aren’t north, they’re somewhere in here.”
Irritably, Riley’s father flipped the book closed and pushed it away from him. “I’m not following anything in that damn thing.”
“To hell with running let’s make a stand and fight!” Cooper said sharply and smacked her fist into her palm to emphasize her point.
As her sister spoke Riley picked up Nakano’s journal and began scanning its pages wanting to see for herself what was in it.
“You don't fight the Myrmidons, you run from them.” Mayat replied matter-of-factly.
“Then we'll be the first!” Cooper replied bravely standing up straight.
As they argued, Riley flipped from one page to the next.
|| The moment the resistance receives the prophecy, an order is given to the three generals to attack the city and strike a powerful blow against the Directory ||
|| The Pathfinder is in the Borderlands. He is in a black-market souk talking to a man about Harvardtown ||
On another page, Nakano had drawn a sketch of a pyramid-shaped structure with the words ‘Luxor’ and ‘the princess’ written beneath it.
Turning the page she found more lines of text.
|| Latimer, the Scientist can complete the Key ||
|| The secrets of the immortal soldier are discovered in the High Temple ||
|| Malthus waits for the Pathfinder in a carriage-house with the tall tree near the City of Outlaws. He will lead the Pathfinder to the resistance ||
Then another sketch of a warehouse on fire eerily similar to the one they’d been in yesterday. ‘Within the fire a secret will be revealed’.
Then more pages of text.
|| In the ice cave is the machine that will bring the Pathfinder back ||
|| The children in the mountain know where the weapon is hidden ||
|| Appennine, the Bear King can get them into the last city ||
The information was chaotic, unstructured. In some cases Nakano had simply stopped writing mid-sentence as if the thought had evaporated from her head. Perhaps her father had been right Riley mused. Perhaps what was in Nakano’s mind was nothing at all.
“There is another option.” Mayat interrupted the discussion. “The Irenic is the one they want. We should leave her behind for them, and leave her… damaged.”
Nakano looked at Mayat in astonishment.
“What would you do, take off one of my legs?” She asked incredulously.
“I was thinking a wound to your stoma
ch.” The Sekhem replied rationally. “It’d make it difficult for her to ride. Some of the Myrmidons would have to remain behind to care for her.”
“My God!” A stunned Nakano confronted Riley’s father. “Is this what you’ve become?”
Almost to the end of the journal, Riley was ready to reach the conclusion that there were no answers within the book. Then she turned the page and opposite a large sketch of some kind of tall machine she read something that caught her breath.
|| A boy, his face bathed in blue light, makes a promise. ‘I’ll find you, I promise. Wherever you go, that's where I’ll be’ ||
She’d almost missed it. The passage was lost among a jumble of other visions, scratched out around it like an endless stream of consciousness. Yet, it was exactly what Varick had told her in her dreams. Exactly.
Biting her lip so she wouldn’t scream in surprise, Riley shut her eyes to better remember what she’d seen. It had remained a haze in her mind up until that very moment but with Nakano’s sketch to prompt her, she instantly knew where she was when Varick had spoken to her.
Or perhaps more precisely where she’d be.
More, she also knew how she’d convince her father. Part of the machine had been circled by Nakano. ‘A mysterious source of power’, she’d written beside it, and it was clear Nakano didn’t know what it was. But, Riley did.
It was an accumulator.
The football-shaped device her father had used to absorb Cooper’s and her abilities, was there in Nakano’s vision.
At the bottom of the page, Nakano had written one sentence. It read simply: ‘it will save them all’.
“I️ need you to look at this.” Riley spoke softly to her father while the others continued to argue. Forcing the open book into his hands she pointed to the accumulator and saw how his eyes widened in surprise.
“When I gained my abilities in the warehouse, I️ had a vision.” She whispered to him, struggling to find the right words as it still felt strange to talk of things that were to come.
