Then a crack splits the air around them. Joan claps her hands over her ears and drops low to the ground, faster than an animal. Leone crouches under the table and puts her head between her knees. The sky lights up with red, green, and blue light. More magnificently than any aurora. The ground rumbles beneath them.
Leone immediately positions and fires into the surrounding terrain in short, controlled bursts. But her firepower disappears into the night.
“Fuck,” Joan yells into the sound and light. Another ear-splitting crack shatters the air around them. Even louder than the first. Her head pounds. Nausea. She feels something warm near her ear. Everywhere, a blast of sound and light.
Staggering like a drunk from the pain of the sound, Joan spots Leone gathering up as many of the maps as she can and jamming them into her backpack and waistband.
“Let’s not wait around to see who’s coming to dinner,” Leone yells, making for the boulders they hid behind earlier.
Joan grips the PG-29 in her hand. A Skyline is ripping open. Right in front of them. If she doesn’t find it and hit it, they are dead. She positions the warhead at the head of the RPG, then squats down on the ground and shoves the PG-29 down the shaft and secures it. Her brain is a bowling alley. She smells her own blood. There isn’t much time. She hoists the RPG up and squares the shoulder brace. She grips the trigger. She looks through the night sight scope. Blue and green crosshairs illuminate her vision. She aims at the sky in the direction of the light and sound, but it is like aiming at a fucking aurora. She closes her eyes. Concentrate.
Find it. Find the sound.
The blue light at her head flutters alive. A faint hum—a single low note—weaves through her skull.
She turns to face the sky and opens her eyes to adjust the trajectory on the scope, allowing it to help focus her energy. Then she closes her eyes again and hums a long steady note until it matches the tone in her skull, she keeps humming it until she feels part of the matter of things. Finally she drops the weapon gracefully to the ground. The weapon and scope merely help her to focus.
Her shoulders shoot back, as if from recoil, but she holds her ground. When the force that shoots out of her whole body hits the empty night air, an invisible Skyline produces a dazzling, fire-white line from earth to heaven, a jagged tear in the moment of things accompanied by a dizzying explosion. The air around them, as far as they can imagine, detonates with sound.
Bull’s-eye.
Joan eyes the black bruise of night. Long wretched fingers of white and blue tracers stream out from the blast line in all directions. An opera of chaos lights up the night. Joan can smell the fierce burning—the shorting-out of currents. She is momentarily deaf.
“Fuck you,” she screams at the sky and its drama. One less entrance and exit, shitheads.
As the light and sound show begin to wane, Joan breathes heavy. She looks around at the munitions site. The dead men, the artillery and RPGs, the pack of corpse girls buried in the dirt. And Leone.
Leone steps close to Joan and reaches up to wipe the blood from Joan’s ear, then sucks her own fingers. “Well, you taste alive,” she says, barely audible.
Joan smiles. Smoke dissipates. Light or sound no longer surrounds them. Finally she hears only Leone breathing. They need to get back to the caves.
Leone picks up a second RPG and rocket to take with them. Joan turns to follow, her RPG back silently on her shoulder. Leone says nothing. They walk side by side. Dirt kicks up at their feet. Joan looks over at Leone’s jaw. Somehow the square of it, the way she clenches her teeth, soothes her.
Chapter Fourteen
“Any idea what the fuck that was?”
Joan’s throat hurts from Leone’s voice. It has an edge to it, like shale—when did that happen? When they were fifteen, hiking the mountains of Vietnam, didn’t they sing songs—children’s songs, half in French, half in Vietnamese—and laugh, throwing their heads back in the torrents of rain? Who are they now, every muscle in their legs taut and extended to make the long trek back to the cave, two dead men behind them? Leone with the square shoulders and heavy stomp of Achilles. Her tattooed head. Her eyes a shape between a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Her relentlessly present jaw.
Joan holds her hand out in front of her—the scars and aches, the flicker of blue light near her temple a part of her very consciousness and physical being—are these the bodies of women?
Leone was right: energy, particularly lethal energy, didn’t used to come down Skylines. In the early years, Skylines had been visible: sophisticated tethers through which all manner of things—food, water, weapons, oil, coal, gas—could be transported between Earth’s surface and the platforms. They used to be easy to attack, an efficient way to cut off supply lines. As war raged on and unmanned drones replaced most of the CIEL’s fighting forces, further modifications were made, and now all the Skylines were invisible to the naked eye. The only way to take a Skyline out now: wait for the brain-splitting sound. The light show in the thermosphere. Act fast or be blown to bits.
Joan stares skyward. This was more like a bomb delivery. Almost as if they were targeted and attacked. If that’s true, then something is changing. Something bad.
Joan looks up. Soon dawn will turn the graying night into morning, a pale orange color, purpling at the horizons like an inverted flame. “Whoever or whatever it is, it isn’t friendly.” She keys her sight to the ground, the surrounding landscape. It will take more than the dawn of morning to get home.
“Nothing coming down those lines is friendly,” Leone says, switching her RPG to her other shoulder.