A protest bubbled out of her but suddenly his energy flooded through her body, dark and thick and her arcane vision flared up, overwhelming all of her senses. She saw him, the darkness inside of him burning intensely. She saw herself, full of golden fire. She saw through his eyes, though. Her own vision had never been so sharp. He saw what she did but with far greater detail.
Amazing. She wanted to study herself in the mirror of his eyes, she wanted to look at everything the way he did. There was no time for that, though. He turned her to look to the west. Her vision sped across the world until she saw what he wanted her to see.
Pure energy. It radiated from a single point well to the west, high in mountains in the middle of the continent. A broken chain of enormous rocks like an exposed spinal column. The light that flooded outward in long flickering beams from that place was colorless and perfect. Colorless, neither yellow nor purple, though she knew it had to be the energy that created both. Colorless because it wasn't light at all, but life, the very energy that made her cells divide and her hair grow.
It was awesome in its beauty. Jaw-droppingly, hypnotically beautiful. Sarah felt a powerful urge to get closer to it, to that Source. 'That's where he's headed?' she asked, though she couldn't imagine where else the Tsarevich might go.
it is go where we all go want to go,he told her.it source is the source
The Source. She understood immediately. 'We'll leave today, if we can,' she told him. The Tsarevich had a long road ahead of him still but she couldn't afford to lose a step. 'Your friends are ready?'
He nodded again. This time just a simple nod, his painted face bowing up and down. She followed him back down a ladder to the ground and then across the narrow causeway to the Island. Osman was waiting for her, a stack of cheaply printed technical manuals in his hands. He gave Ptolemy a nasty but brief look and then turned away, gesturing for Sarah to follow him.
'Marisol didn't want to give up any of them, and I must say I understand her logic,' the pilot told her as he lead them deep into the Island's interior, to where the big aircraft hangars loomed over the slack-haunted gardens. 'If something should happen to this place they'll need all the vehicles they have to get away. I had to really sweet-talk her for just the one.'
'Do you want a medal?' Sarah asked. 'I'll make sure you get a medal when this is over.'
He laughed and nodded appreciatively. 'Alright. What we have here,' he said, and grunted as he shoved open an enormous hangar door. It was counterweighted so it could be opened easily even without power but it was still huge. 'What we have here is American airpower at its finest. The HH-60 Jayhawk, which is just a United States Coast Guard version of the UH-60, I do not lie.'
The aircraft in the hangar had the stubby nose and long tail that just said 'helicopter'. There was little to distinguish its lines except its white and safety orange paint job.
'This is the workhorse of the US Army. Medium-range, medium-lift, twin engine, single prop, it stands up to any kind of duty you'd care to mention: medical evac, air cavalry, troop transport, point-to-point and my least favorite, direct air assault. It's the best helicopter ever built by human hands.'
Sarah peered into the darkness of the hangar. 'Medium-range? We're going quite a ways.' She tried to remember what she had learned of American geography. 'The Rocky Mountains, I think.'
Osman shuffled through the tech manuals in his hands and pulled out a heavily annotated military aviator's map of the country. Sarah pointed out the Source at once. With a laminated cardboard ruler Osman measured the distance, his thick fingers smoothing out the paper map as he went. 'A little under two thousand miles,' he told her. He scratched his beard. 'Fine, just fine. We'll need to stop once and refuel. There's a major air base here,' he said, pointing at a star on the map labeled Omaha. 'They'll have what we need.'
'We can just do that? The fuel won't have evaporated or gone stale in all this time?' Sarah asked.
'No problem, boss. Gasoline goes bad over time, that is true. Jet fuel, on the other hand, is just very pure kerosene. It lasts forever if it's stored properly.'