The Exodus Towers #2

La Gaza Ladra’s engines roared to life the instant the sun peaked above the canopy east of camp.

Skyler let Ana handle the preflight. He’d walked her through it at least fifteen times already, and on the last flight she’d handled it with only minimal supervision.

He glanced back through the open cockpit door. In the rear compartment, Vanessa and Pablo double-checked the gear. The clean, tasteful interior of the luxury passenger cabin had been abandoned long ago, in the first weeks of recovering the vessel. The cosmetic back wall had been unceremoniously removed, along with the widescreen display and wet bar attached to it, though not until after a raucous movie night. Behind the cabin was a cargo compartment equal in width and with a floor a meter lower. Removable panels within gave access to a crawl space below the passenger cabin, ostensibly for maintenance of the wiring and ventilation systems that supported the area. To Skyler’s eye, there was a clear secondary purpose for smuggling.

Two doors on either side of the aircraft’s belly provided external access to the cargo space. The design allowed for easy stowage of luggage and small items, but was next to useless for recovery of large items. Skyler felt a bond to the aircraft already, but he knew it would have to be replaced with something more practical at the earliest convenience.

“Tower, this is the Magpie. We’re heading out,” Ana said into her oversized headset. Though everyone liked the ship’s full name, the easier slang version had become more commonly used.

Of course, there were no other planes, no air traffic to manage, but Skyler had insisted the traditions of tower courtesy be maintained, even if informal.

“Magpie, this is the so-called tower. Safe travels, and keep me posted on what you find as long as you can.”

“Count on it,” Ana said. She flashed Skyler a thumbs-up, an unwitting echo of Angus’s signature gesture.

She’s older than he was, Skyler realized suddenly, further eroding his initial misgivings about her age.

“The stick is yours,” the girl said, which got a quick raise of the eyebrows at the innuendo from Skyler.

“Thanks,” he said. “If you’re good I’ll let you fiddle with it later.”

Ana scoffed and rolled her eyes, but not without throwing a small smirk his way.

“Buckle up back there!” Skyler shouted toward the rear.

A few seconds later Pablo called out, “We’re ready!”

On the central screen in front of Skyler, a flashing icon reminded him that a flight plan still hadn’t been entered. He’d fretted over this choice for months, after carefully entering in the four options now presented to him. Four paths traced out from base camp, carved by the tower groups that went haywire during the fight with Gabriel.

One group, of course, went northeast to encircle the crashed Builder ship. Protecting it, apparently, though Skyler also held the theory that they were protecting everything else from what lay within their ring. He wasn’t interested in this group, however. Their location was known, as was the danger they surrounded.

That left three other choices.

One took a path almost to the same location. North by northeast, through the rainforest and then beyond. They’d flown along its trail as far as the coast once, and lost track of it at the waterline. Either the towers had sunk into the ocean, or they’d crossed it. Some of it, anyway. At least the path ran straight, which meant they could follow it on a map.

Yet another group left the camp heading due east. A few weeks ago they’d followed the trail for a hundred kilometers or so before turning back to base. An interesting discovery had been made: The path wasn’t straight, as it had appeared from the ground. Looking at it from altitude, they could see that it had a slight curve to it.

The same was true of the last group’s route. The group had gone northwest, carving a line right through the city and leaving a path of destruction in its wake, like a tornado with no collateral damage. The curve of its path was almost too subtle to detect; it was only when he’d taken the aircraft up to three thousand meters on a clear day that the gentle arc to the line could be seen.

Curvature worried Skyler. On the surface it would still be fairly trivial to trace on a globe, but they had no evidence that the paths would always follow the same trajectory to their end. What if the curved paths changed directions, or straightened out? What if the one straight path started to curve later along its route? If they could indeed cross water, and the direction change happened out in the ocean, all bets were off.

There was no way to know except to follow one.

“Three paths diverged …,” Skyler said to himself.

Ana, he realized, had been watching him as he stared at the choices on the screen, a bemused smirk on her face. “I vote for whichever takes us the farthest away,” she said softly.

“No way to know that for sure. How about the one we know hits the ocean?”

She cracked a grin.

Skyler grimaced. He liked the idea, too, but if the path was truly straight it wouldn’t cross land again until it reached the Azores, an island group in the North Atlantic. That was near the edge of the Magpie’s range. If they couldn’t find a place to recharge the caps there, or a replacement aircraft, they could wind up marooned.

He looked at Ana and saw simple determination in her eyes. Just go for it, they said. There were worse fates, he decided, than being stuck on an island with her, Vanessa, and Pablo. None, he suspected, would mind terribly.

“It’s settled then. North by northeast.”

A path of destruction along the ground made the need for navigation pointless at first, but that didn’t stop Skyler from keeping Ana busy. He quizzed her on various parts of the instrumentation and had her supply regular updates on their capacitor status, even though the Magpie’s computers would alert him to anything that jeopardized the flight plan.

The young woman took to the tasks with some difficulty. It had become obvious to Skyler since they’d first flown the bird on a mission that she learned through example and hands-on activity, not through studying flight manuals or maps as Vanessa did. The older immune was already able to handle the craft with minimal help, and Skyler suspected with only a few more hours of flight time she’d be ready to handle the duty solo. Not so with Ana. He’d given the two women equal time in the pilot’s chair—mostly so as not to show favoritism—but Ana simply didn’t have the deftness, the patience, that Vanessa did. Still, even if she ended up being unsuitable as a co-pilot, the knowledge she absorbed wouldn’t hurt.

The straight gouge left behind by the towers ran for a hundred kilometers through rainforest, a town, a small city, and then still more rainforest. The path ran roughly parallel to the Rio Pará until the mouth of the waterway began to widen. Ahead, the Atlantic Ocean stretched from horizon to horizon, and Skyler began to gain altitude as they crossed over the body of water. According to the flight computer, they would make the Azores island group with just 2 percent charge left in the ultracaps, and Skyler wanted to be able to glide a long way if the need arose. He’d also marked backup landing locations in the system for each leg of the trip. A return to Brazil in the first third, a landing in the Cape Verde islands off Africa’s western coast in the middle leg, and beyond that the Azores were their only choice, really.

At cruising altitude, Skyler tapped the comm. “Belém, this is Magpie. We’re about to leave radio range. Following the northeastern tower group.”

“I hear you, Magpie,” Karl said. “Somehow I thought you’d pick that one.”

“I’d let you talk me out of it, but then I can see the look on Ana’s face.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Understood, my friend. Be careful out there. Hey, before we lose you—we’ve started an effort to install a more robust comm on Black Level. It might take awhile, but feel free to check in now and then and see if you can raise us. The usual channel.”

“Will do,” Skyler said. Then he nodded at Ana.

She surprised him with a sudden, serious expression, and said the words.

“Magpie, out.”
Darwin, Australia

13.JUL.2284

SAMANTHA STARED AT the slip of wrinkled yellow paper pinched between her fingers. She reread the handwritten order from Grillo in mild disbelief, and then looked up at the room of crews and pilots before her. Her gaze drifted to the far end of the hangar, the entrance, where a group of armed guards stood alert.

“I have new orders from Nightcliff,” she said. A hush fell over the gathered scavengers. Every seat was full. Some sat on the floor, or stood by the sidewalls. “Um. From now on, no more flights on Sundays. Not even spec missions.”

A hundred pairs of eyes all trying to determine if she meant it as a joke. Nightcliff hadn’t sent over any flight orders on Sundays in a long time, and the day had become everyone’s chance to go out and search on their own. The fact that Sunday had been Nightcliff’s day to be silent didn’t need explanation, and no one talked about it. Most of the scavengers called it “get shit done day” and took full advantage.

One day of freedom per week had been enough to keep the crews from grumbling too much. Now, though …

Woon stood perfectly still behind his improvised bar. He’d been wiping a mug with a stained cloth, and stopped. Even his expression was blank, as if waiting for a punch line.

“I’m serious,” Sam said. “ ‘No flights on Sundays,’ that’s what it says. Speculative missions included.”

“That’s bollocks,” a voice near her said. A stocky pilot named Cal. “We get in food and basics these days. None of the barter perks like from before, and now those a*sholes want to take away our spec jobs?”

“Just find something else to do,” Sam said. “It’s only Sundays, guys.”

Someone off to the side shouted out. “What the f*ck are we supposed to do then?”

Sam grimaced. The note offered no advice on that point, but she had a pretty good idea of what Grillo expected, and a very good idea of what would happen to anyone who disobeyed him. “I think we’re supposed to use it as a day of reflection, or some shit—”

A grunt stood and grabbed his crotch. “Maybe we’re supposed to march up to Temple Sulam and say our ascend-ye-f*cking-faithfuls.”

That got some laughs.

“Brilliant,” another added, a woman Sam couldn’t see. “Let’s confess our sins. Who wants to start?”

More laughter. Not good, Sam thought. They didn’t know Grillo, not like her. They had no real fear of him yet.

“To hell with that! Let’s get rotten!” someone else yelled. A cheer went up.

Half the room was out of their chairs and headed for the bar before she could whistle loud enough to get their attention. “Hang on, for f*ck’s sake! I wasn’t done reading.”

Some returned to their chairs; others froze midstride. Sam waited until a few side conversations died out.

She cleared her throat. Her eyes darted to the armed guards by the door. They’d become so much scenery around the airport over the last year, but rarely did they gather in one place like this. If any of the other pilots had noticed, they weren’t showing it. That was likely to change in ten seconds.

“There’s to be no alcohol served on Sundays, from this point forward. Sorry, Woon.”

In the silence that followed, Sam could hear the old cuckoo clock ticking away from the wall behind Woon.

“In here,” someone asked, “or anywhere in Darwin?”

Sam shrugged. “Doesn’t say.”

“Can we drink from our own supplies?”

“Beats me,” Sam said. “I guess. It doesn’t say.”

“Go ask, then, lapdog!” a mechanic shouted. “Or maybe the blokes by the door can shed some light.”

In unison, the gathered crowd turned in their seats.

The guards at the door did a pretty good job of hiding whatever intimidation they felt under that collective gaze. One shifted on his feet. Another flexed her fingers on the grip of her weapon. Should it come to blows, the Nightcliff squad was armed but hopelessly outnumbered. It would be ugly. The crackdown that followed would be a bloodbath. She had to do something. Something more than just appearing to be Grillo’s goddamn lapdog. She’d heard the nickname whispered when people thought she wasn’t listening, or grumbled at her back after orders were dished. This was the first time someone had the balls to say it to her face. And who could blame him?

She looked around for Skadz, hoping he’d stick up for her. The crews f*cking loved him, of course. Maybe she should abandon everyone for a year and see if it helped her standing.

At least, she thought, I could pretend to challenge Grillo on this.

“You know what,” she said, then paused. Most of the crowd refocused on her. She waited until she had their attention and wadded up the paper. “F*ck it, you’re right. I will go ask. Everyone relax. Get your maintenance done, or line up to tap Woon’s thor. Take a day off, if you want. Just stay on the ground until I’m back. Okay?”

She took the grumbles that followed as tacit agreement and headed for the door. The guards filed out with her, as if she were one of them, and she hated them for it. The word lapdog rang in her head so loud it might as well have been branded on her cheek.

“I’ll get Grillo on the comm for you,” one of the guards said.

“No,” Sam said. “I’ll visit him in person. Get the truck.”

“Truck’s in use. And you don’t tell us what to do.”

Sam balled her fists and turned around. The urge to throw a punch boiled just beneath her small reservoir of self-control. Keeping rage like that bottled inside had been almost alien to her in the past, but she’d screwed the cork on tight since that cursed foray into Lyons. Time, and snarky comments from a*sholes like this, were on the verge of letting some of her anger out, and she found that she liked it. On a whim she shouldered past them and marched toward the airport gate.

“Where are you going?” one asked.

“I’ll walk, f*ck you very much.”

The squad argued behind her, and she felt glad they couldn’t see the smile that crept onto her lips. When she ducked under the airport gate, she glanced behind her. Two of the guards had apparently been assigned to follow her and were jogging to catch up.

She announced herself at Nightcliff’s gate and the side door swung open. They would have seen her approach across Ryland Square, of course, and since two of their own escorted her, no questions were asked.

Sam recalled Skyler’s story, of coming in through the old sewer with a little help from high explosives. Escape may have been a bitch, she thought, but if I ever need to break in, this is the way to do it.

Kelly’s face sprang to mind. If only the woman was still being held here and hadn’t foiled Sam’s bid to win her some freedom. She wondered if the hard woman was still in that hospital, and what the hell she had going on there that was so important that she’d take the robes, feign a change of heart.

The buzz of activity in Nightcliff’s yard stopped her cold. One of the men who’d shadowed her bumped into her and muttered an apology.

“Forget it,” Sam said. She started to ask them to explain the view in front of her, then thought better of it and forced herself to walk on.

In Nightcliff’s yard, hundreds of Darwin citizens sat on the ground in loose rows facing a wooden stage that had been built near the Elevator tower, just in front of the climber port. As she watched, the row of people closest to the stage stood in unison, at some command she hadn’t heard, and began to file up to the lectern at the middle of the platform.

Grillo stood there, flanked by men and women in white robes emblazoned with the Jacobite holy symbol on the chest. The emblem also graced a huge length of cloth behind Grillo. The white sheet had been mounted to a frame made from steel pipes. The cross had been painted in a red so bright it practically glowed, and the ladder that formed the vertical portion of the quasi-Christian symbol had its rungs drawn in black.

The slumlord, if he could still be called that, dressed as always in a neat gray business suit, was not facing the crowd. His attention instead fell on the line of Darwinites who filed up onto the stage. One by one they would kneel in front of Grillo, and he’d trace a few lines on their forehead. She could see his lips moving, but the words were far too quiet to reach her.

“Want to get in line?” one of the guards asked her.

The voice jarred her from a deep trance of morbid fascination, as if she’d been walking past the aftermath of a violent street brawl. “No,” she said. “Thanks. Not today.”

Her path meandered around the edge of the crowd. She recognized the mess hall and thought of her brief reign as Nightcliff’s boxing champ, and her equally brief fling with the guard Vaughn. The thought of asking about him crossed her mind, and then dissolved. She’d used him. He wouldn’t be very happy to hear from her.

Past the crowd and the makeshift pulpit, the far side of Nightcliff’s vast yard came into view. This side was crowded, too, but not with row after row of ragged citizens.

Sam saw clusters of uniformed soldiers. She knew at a glance they were recruits. The sloppy way they formed their marching lines, the lack of synchronicity in their steps. A shirt untucked here, a hat on backward there. All things that would have been overlooked under Blackfield, but not Grillo.

These fighters were Jacobite, of that she had no doubt. The red emblems stitched or drawn on their cobbled-together uniforms were an unnecessary reinforcement.

She counted at least ten squads, each forty strong by her guess. Four hundred holy warriors each in possession of one of the small, compact weapons Sam had helped recover from Malaysia.



Her escort took her to Grillo’s office and left her to sit there, staring at a new Jacobite painting on the wall behind his desk. This shit is well and truly out of hand, she was thinking as the door clicked open behind her.

“I give you the day off and you come here,” Grillo said from behind her. He walked around and eschewed his chair. Instead he simply leaned on the side of his desk and folded his arms. The confidence in his posture unnerved and deflated her. “I thought you might take the hint and enjoy some well-deserved rest. Which reminds me, I never had the chance to properly thank you for fetching Sister Haley’s original work. You’ve done us all a great service.”

She shrugged. “Enjoyable read, was it?”

“I’ve no idea. Authenticity was verified and now the tome sits in secure storage far below us.” He frowned, a sudden contemplative look crossing his face. “Someday, perhaps, things will settle down enough here that the manuscript can be displayed for all to see. In Temple Sulam, perhaps. But not now, not while there’s so much work to be done.”

Sam withered under his intense gaze and stared at her hands. A feeling of weakness, of the stupidity in coming here with a fire in her belly, coursed through her. “The thing is,” she said finally, “none of us want to rest. You never give us missions on Sundays, and that’s something the crews have come to rely on. It’s their one day to go out and scavenge for themselves. Find parts. Goods they can trade.”

“Contraband,” Grillo said, one eyebrow ever so slightly arched.

Samantha sighed. “A bit, probably. Nothing compared to the old days. Contraband wasn’t even in Blackfield’s vocabulary. Unless you were dumb enough to bring something in that might harm the Elevator, no one batted an eye. They got their cut and sent us on our merry way.”

“My people are not ‘on the take.’ ”

“Yeah, no, I know,” she said lamely. For a second she thought it best to get up and leave, agreeing to implement his orders simply to get out of his presence. But in a strange way she found a bit of strength in knowing that Grillo’s people generally behaved well not so much because of high moral caliber as from a strong desire to not be stabbed in the face. “How’s Kelly?” she asked, stalling.

“Sister Josephine is very well. A rising star, you might say. I’m sorry, but she seems uninterested in visiting with you again. Now get to the point, Samantha. I have a busy day ahead.”

“That is the point. My crews don’t have a busy day ahead,” she said. “And worse, you’re trying to tell them how to conduct themselves. No alcohol? You’ll have a riot on your hands.”

“Riots I can deal with,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice, and yet it had all the authority of a Neil Platz political tirade. “Still, perhaps you’re right; perhaps we can make some allowances for services rendered.”

“Okay … so booze is back on the menu?”

He flashed a sympathetic grin. “Consumed indoors, not at that rank fire hazard you call a tavern. As for speculative missions”—he paused and thought for a moment—“set up a lottery. Any crew that wants to fly puts in their name, and let as many as a quarter of them fly on any given Sunday. Tell them it’s less about their freedom and more about taxing Nightcliff’s skeleton crew on the holy day.”

She knew a final offer when she heard it and considered the allowances good enough for a day’s work. “Deal,” she said, and that was the end of it. Grillo ushered her from the room, simultaneously inviting a handful of Chinese gangster types in from the small lobby outside his office. He spoke to them in Cantonese with a flawless accent.

They bowed to him as they entered.
The Azores

14.JUL.2284

“THERE!” VANESSA SAID.

Skyler brought the aircraft to a hover. He leaned forward in his seat, straining against the belts, to see where she pointed.

Below, the ocean met a thin line of rocky shore. Cliffs separated the vast sea from a wall of foliage that ran inland to the mountains.

“I see it, too!” Ana called from the rear cabin. She’d traded places with the older woman four hours earlier, and slept most of the time since. Skyler hadn’t the heart to wake her when the Azores first came into view. She needed the rest, and with the cap level dwindling he found he wanted Vanessa as his co-pilot, just in case. Ana didn’t need to know that part.

He’d been flying parallel to the shore for hours at low speed while the others all looked for signs of where the aura towers might have made landfall. With each passing minute, and the corresponding drop in the Magpie’s already limited cap level, he’d been close to giving up hope. The aircraft had not been configured for international trips.

After the long flight over a seemingly endless sea he couldn’t imagine how the towers could have made it this far, and he had resigned himself to picturing them resting on the seafloor, surrounded by bioluminescent creatures as alien as the towers themselves.

Yet Vanessa had it right. The path was difficult to see at first. This part of the island had been used for agriculture, and the straight edges of the old fields were still obvious even in the current overgrown state. Trees and plants almost completely obscured the towers’ line now, too, after so much time. But it was there. Wider than the roads or the edges of cropland, a laser-straight swath of clear land ran inland until it crested a hill and disappeared over the other side.

“Mark it,” Skyler said as he turned the craft to face land. He glanced at the cap level. “Zero-point-five percent. We need to find a place to charge up; this hovering will burn through that in ten minutes. Somewhere other than Lagoa.”

The screens in front of Vanessa were configured with maps and the associated tools to manipulate them. She’d become pretty adept at working those views since the aircraft had come into their possession.

Lagoa had been Skyler’s first destination when they’d reached the island. The small town was only a short distance from their estimated place of landfall.

From the air, though, it appeared to be dead. Not a single light graced a window or beacon tower there. He had little hope a mini-thor existed in the glorified village, but with dusk rapidly approaching he’d decided to look for the towers’ path first. Lights would be easier to spot after dark, anyway.

“Ponta Delgada is the largest nearby,” Vanessa said. She tapped a location to the west, just a few kilometers down the beach. Her fingers danced as she zoomed and panned the map. “We could fly along the tower path, to the north side of the island. Ribeira Grande is there. Not as large, but larger than Lagoa.”

Skyler could see the first city she mentioned out his window. Or rather, the dark silhouette of it against a rapidly dimming sky. “I don’t see any lights in Ponta Delgada.” He didn’t see any purple glow or mysterious clouds, either. The others had probably noticed this, too, and he knew they’d be thinking the same thing he was: The journey might be far from over.

He felt Vanessa staring at him, waiting for his decision. “North,” he said after a few seconds.

When the aircraft crested the island’s spine, his heart sank.

The island was utterly, completely dark.

And the tower group’s path carved a perfect line through forest and city alike, straight to the north shore until it disappeared over a cliff edge beside the ocean.

“Our trip is just beginning,” Skyler muttered.

A scratching sound woke him.

He turned and propped himself on an elbow. The others still slept, and only the barest hint of light filtered in through the window on the cabin door on La Gaza Ladra’s starboard side.

His back ached from sleeping on the floor, despite the cushion of a sleeping bag beneath him. Pablo snored softly from his place on the floor at the back of the cabin, while Ana and Vanessa were two unmoving forms in the reclined passenger chairs.

The scratching noise again. Like dead tree branches scraping against a window on a breezy night. It seemed to be coming from the same door where morning light crept in through the porthole window. He staggered to his feet, stifling a yawn and grinding a fist into the small of his back to chase away the pain there.

His view out the small round window was southerly, over the same rise they’d flown across the night before. From this low angle, the tower group’s path was easy to spot through the island’s dense foliage. Easier still where it reached the edge of the city, carving an avenue-wide line straight through houses and buildings alike.

He’d landed on the rooftop pad at a luxury resort in the hope such a high-end place would have paid the extra cost for a mini-thor, or a stake in one at least. But the place was dead, just like the rest of the island, apparently. He’d kept his fears to himself, that they were stuck here, but Skyler had no doubt that by breakfast time this morning one of the others would voice the concern.

A face appeared outside the window.

Skyler fell back in surprise, stumbled, and landed on his back.

The gaunt face in the round window snarled and Skyler saw thin, ragged fingers clawing at the glass, leaving dirty smears behind. The subhuman had wild beady eyes and rotten teeth. Its brown hair hung in matted clumps around a beard full of unidentifiable bits of dirt and food.

Vanessa stepped between him and the door. In the back of the cabin, Pablo stirred and got to his feet. Ana slept.

“Stay back,” Vanessa said, her hand on the cabin door’s rotating handle. She gripped it and coiled herself.

“Wait,” Skyler said. “There might be more.”

“Get your gun, then.”

Pablo stepped between them, looking over Vanessa’s shoulder at the anguished face outside the window. He had a pistol in his hand and nodded to the woman. “Open it. Cover your ears,” he said, his voice a dry rasp from sleep.

Vanessa dug in her feet. “On three. One. Two.” She pulled the handle on the third beat until it was upright and threw her shoulder into the loosened door.

Skyler watched through Pablo’s legs as the subhuman fell when the door struck it, a motion mirroring Skyler’s own stumble. The animal tried to remain upright by running backward in a kind of controlled fall. Pablo gave Vanessa a half second to crouch and cover her ears before he squeezed off two shots into the creature’s chest. Little eruptions of blood sprang from each side of the sternum, and then the sub toppled over the edge of the roof, gone as quickly as it had appeared.

The tiny cabin rang in a high-pitched scream. Skyler hadn’t thought to cup his own ears. “Close the door!” he shouted, his own voice sounding a kilometer away.

Vanessa reached for the handle, then paused. She said something to Pablo and he replied, but Skyler couldn’t hear them. It was like listening to a conversation in an adjacent room through the wall.

The woman stepped out onto the landing pad and stood very still.

Pablo moved to the open doorway and waited, frozen in place.

“What’s wrong with you?” Skyler asked.

The tall man turned and pressed a finger to his lips. Skyler climbed to his feet. He glanced back at Ana, half-expecting to find her upright with her hands clasped to stinging ears. The girl had turned over and was still sleeping like a babe.

The bright hum in Skyler’s head began to fade. He listened at the door with Pablo while Vanessa stepped farther from the craft. “What is it?” Skyler asked, careful to keep his voice low. “I can’t hear anything.”

“That’s just it,” she replied. “Nothing. If the gunshots riled others, they sure are quiet about it. And this one is the first we’ve seen.”

“Weird,” Pablo said.

“The population collapsed, maybe,” Vanessa said. “It’s been almost seven years.”

“We shouldn’t let our guard down, in any case,” Skyler said. The tranquil, dark island had a way of lulling the senses. Until Skyler had seen that twisted face on the other side of the glass, he’d all but forgotten about subhumans.

I’m getting rusty, he thought.

Ana stretched and woke only when there was the smell of food. Preservall bacon and imitation eggs, scrambled over a camp stove on the rooftop by Pablo. Vanessa handled coffee while Skyler stood on top of La Gaza Ladra’s fuselage and scanned the city around them with binoculars.

“Good morning,” Ana said from below him.

He smiled and waved to her.

“See anything interesting?” she asked a minute later, a steaming mug in her hand.

“I do. Can you look up an address on the terminal for me?”

He rattled off the information as he read it from the side of a long-abandoned utility truck. A logo on the door indicated the local municipal power company, and an address was stenciled below it.

While she searched for the place, he studied the path of the tower group. A perfect line of collapsed buildings and crushed automobiles ran straight through the beach town. He followed it to the water, adjusting his zoom along the way.

The path vanished at the edge of a cliff, at a point where it jutted out from the rest of the shore. In the bright morning, Skyler had to squint as dazzling flashes reflected off the dark blue water. At the base of the cliff, a narrow beach made entirely of rock took the brunt of the ocean’s wrath.

There were shapes on the beach, lying in the surf or draped across the larger rocks. Piles of trash, or maybe sea lions? Skyler zoomed farther and focused.

His gut clenched. “Guys,” he said, “I found our missing subhumans.”

Bodies littered that patch of gravel. Drowned and bloated things once, the subhumans were now so many piles of rancid meat, not even fit for seagulls to pick at. Skyler figured they had tried to congregate around the towers as the group crossed the island, or followed in their wake, blind to the cliff’s edge and the vast ocean the towers plowed into. The beings usually had a good sense for self-preservation—Skyler had even seen them swim on a few occasions—but these must have been so enthralled by the activated towers that they simply fell to the rocks below like lemmings, or perhaps the tide was in and they drowned. Hours or days later they washed up onshore by the dozens. In a weird way Skyler admired the efficiency with which the towers had killed the beings.

The address he’d spied turned out to be an office complex, full of dead terminals, decaying bodies, and more mold than he’d ever seen. The windows had been left open to the humid air for six years, and lizards scattered when he stepped inside. Nothing useful would be found there, and more to the point there was no power.

A day passed, then a week, without any more encounters with subhumans. No one spoke of it aloud, but Skyler could see the fear on all their faces of being stuck here. Or rather the acceptance of that possibility. The fear, he thought, might well be his alone. Pablo certainly wouldn’t mind spending the rest of his life on a quiet island. Vanessa probably wouldn’t, either. Ana, Skyler thought, would just take whatever cards were dealt her, and in her youth probably would think it would be a good life. He knew she was too restless to be happy somewhere like this, though.

Each morning Skyler woke two hours before sunrise and set out to search the surrounding neighborhood for a building with power. Three times he found lights, only to discover the source to be isolated, cap-powered installations. Security floods, a child’s night-light, that sort of thing.

Pablo found a few solar panels on a nearby roof and managed to rig them up to charge La Gaza Ladra. A well-intentioned project he’d undertaken while everyone else had been out searching, and Skyler took care to praise the effort before letting the man know it would take roughly four years to get a full charge from the source. Still, he didn’t disconnect them. If they found nothing else, at least they might get enough of a charge in a few months to be able to fly to one of the other islands in the Azores chain.

One day Vanessa returned from scouting with a slate computer in hand. “Still has a charge,” she said as she handed it to Skyler.

“We can’t siphon it into the Magpie,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick. Read it.”

Intrigued, Skyler glanced at the screen. The island’s daily newspaper was on the display. The article in the center of the page caught his eye. “Council upholds policy against thorium reactors,” read the headline. His heart sank. He scanned the paragraphs below. Talk of mitigating risk to the island’s fragile ecosystem. Sensational and unfounded rants against the possibility of nuclear meltdown.

“We’re not going to find any power here, are we?” Vanessa asked.

He sighed, and against his better judgment tapped the option to continue reading. The reporter listed quotes from various islanders about their mistrust of nuclear energy. A holdover, he knew, from fears that began with the earliest forms of the technology, when reactors would fail every few decades, usually due to some act of nature. Once a particularly disgruntled French worker had sabotaged the planet deliberately, leaving an uninhabitable zone in Western Europe that made earlier accidents look like child’s play.

“We’re going to be here awhile,” Vanessa said. “Aren’t we?”

Frustration boiled within Skyler. Granted, that old tech was dangerous and irresponsible. But the backlash, if the history books had it right, was beyond ridiculous. A century and a half of willful ignorance toward the best energy source imaginable. The West shot itself in the foot, allowing China to pioneer pebble-bed technology first, then thorium. And finally miniature thorium reactors that could run unsupervised for a thousand years, and power a few modern skyscrapers. While Europe and America struggled to attach a solar panel to every roof and burned every last drop of oil, China and the developing world suddenly had no energy problem to speak of. Then came ultracapacitors, and the ability to store all that power.

By the time the Darwin Elevator touched down, Europe was still in catch-up mode. America was a distant memory. “North Mexico,” Skyler’s schoolteacher had jokingly called the former superpower. At least Australia hadn’t been so closed-minded.

Even here in the Azores, just six short years ago, the local population still mistrusted the technology. A good thing Belém hadn’t been so stubborn, he thought as he skimmed the rest of the article. And they had the bloody Amazon to protect. All this place has is a few scraggly hills and a dormant volcano.

The thought of the volcano brought an image to his mind of the island as viewed from satellite. Gears turned in his head, squeaky things in need of lubrication. He grinned. “Ana?”

She looked up from the dismantled weapon she’d been cleaning.

“Can you pull up the nav maps again?”

Ana frowned. “What are we looking for? We’ve studied the whole island.”

“Not the island,” Skyler said. “The ocean. We’re looking for giant white propellers. Or …” He racked his mind to recall the methods used to harness such energies. “Long tubes floating in the surf. Wind and wave power collectors.”

By noon he set out with Ana to the target location, all the way across the island on the western shore. A forty-kilometer hike, one way.

Wave-power generators had been easy to spot, once they knew to look. Long, dark disjointed lines a kilometer offshore. Tracing a simple, straight path to shore revealed the collection station that transmitted the energy out to the rest of the island.

At first they’d all planned to go, until Skyler changed his mind. “This plane is our ticket off this island. Leaving her alone makes me nervous.”

They’d seen no other immunes, but the possibility remained that someone might be out there, watching them, waiting for a chance to escape.

“Let’s just take the plane over there,” Pablo suggested.

“Can’t do it,” Skyler said with a frown. “We’ve got enough juice to move her once, if we’re lucky. I’d rather save that for when we’re sure.”

Skyler offered to stay, but the group collectively decided he was the best person to scout the site. This was no time to fool around, and since the handhelds only had a six- or seven-klick range, there’d be no consultation with the others.

Naturally, Ana came along.

She’d been unusually silent after seeing the base of that cliff through his binoculars. She’d seen dead bodies before, they all had, but something about the mass suicide chilled her. Chilled all of them. Maybe it was the manner of death, or the apparent way the towers seemed to power through the crowd with callous indifference. It was easy, Skyler thought, to imagine the subhumans as somehow on the Builders’ side, their creations, after what had happened in the rainforest near the Belém Elevator. But this threw that notion back into the fog of confusion that surrounded everything related to the aliens.

Skyler fought to keep the image out of his mind, but like a catchy, horrible song, those corpses seemed to reappear every time he tried to forget them.

“Hey, look,” Ana said. She’d stopped in the street. They weren’t even at the edge of town yet, still a full day’s hike ahead of them.

From the excitement in her voice, he expected to turn and see a light on somewhere. A power source. All he saw, though, was the dark windows of abandoned stores. Ana moved closer to one window, picked up a chunk of broken asphalt from the road, and threw it into the glass pane.

The sound of it shattering echoed along the narrow street.

“What are you—” Skyler started. Then, “Oh …”

She’d found a bicycle shop. Touristy things, many with signs hanging from their handlebars indicating daily rental prices. She crawled inside and, after a minute or so, came out the front door with a rugged mountain bike. She laid it against the outside wall and went back in. A moment later, she emerged with a second bike, larger than the first. A man’s bike. Expensive looking with huge spring shocks and knobby black tires.

Skyler remained still, listening for any sounds of subhuman presence after the cacophony of breaking glass. He heard nothing, though. After a week he didn’t really expect to. It was as if that one pathetic sub scratching at the door of the ship was the poor, lone survivor. When Skyler looked down the empty street he found it easy to imagine that he and his crew were the last souls on the planet.

Ana went inside a third time, and when she came out she carried a kit of some kind as well as a tire pump. She tore it open and produced a small white tube, discarding the rest. Kneeling by the bikes, she began to oil their chains.

They rode in silence. The bikes made the trip much easier, but Skyler insisted they keep a slow pace in case they needed to ditch the transportation in a hurry. Once out of the city, though, that fear diminished. They cruised along an ocean-front road, swerving around derelict cars and the occasional skeleton. Seagulls drifted overhead, calling to one another as they flew in lazy arcs. A perfect, post-apocalyptic day in paradise.

After an hour riding on the bumpy road, Ana called for a break. A small strip of sand on their right marked a break in the otherwise rocky shoreline, and it had caught her attention.

They left their bikes on the roadside and she led the way down steep, weed-choked steps to the beach. Without a word she stripped and trod carefully out into the surf, diving under the first wave that threatened to drench her. When she came up she wrung the water from her hair and motioned for Skyler to join her.

He was one of four people on the entire island, yet still he looked up and down the beach before pulling his clothes off.

They swam together in frigid water under a blazing sun, and made love in that soft place where dwindling waves just managed to kiss their toes and soft sand cradled them like pillows. Then they just lay there, holding hands, staring up at the endless blue sky until the sun and wind dried them.

From when they’d left the road to when they returned, Ana had said nothing. Back on the bikes, she rode a few meters ahead and shot him one quick, simple, wicked grin.

Skyler knew in that moment two things: He loved her. That, and she’d probably be the death of him.

When Skyler saw the red beacon light just above the tree line he almost fell off his bike.

The power station was a squat building tucked back into a thin forest on the inland side of the road, on the edge of a town called Mosteiros.

Ana thrust her arms into the air and shouted something in Spanish. Her bike swerved, forcing her to cut the celebration short and focus on remaining upright.

The coastline on this side of the island consisted of sheer cliffs that rose twenty meters from the turgid water below, only to then level off into a long, gentle grade up to the rim of the old volcano. The fertile land showed all the signs of human agriculture long reclaimed by the wild, with snakelike forests of cryptomeria trees winding their way down the slope. Copses of smaller mahogany dotted the fields of tall grass.

Skyler dismounted a safe distance from the nearly hidden building. Ana followed his example. He followed all the usual precautions of entering a structure that might be a heat source. Subhumans often dwelled within such places, like a cave with a built-in fire to warm their ragged bodies. He kicked in the door and went in with his rifle at the ready. Ana came in at his shoulder, a position and tactic now routine for her. The recklessness she’d exhibited in the past had faded, perhaps for good. More and more Skyler viewed her as a study in contrasts to Samantha. Where Sam had swagger and strength, Ana displayed cunning and speed.

The windowless building proved devoid of life, save for a few field mice that scurried into the shadows in the presence of two humans. Skyler tried the light switch and laughed aloud when the LEDs mounted on the ceiling beams came to life.

“We did it!” Ana said, giving him a little pat on the behind.

“Let’s be doubly sure.”

In a basement room they found what they’d come for. A massive cable emerged from the floor of the vast room. There was even a ceremonial red rope around it, with signs in Portuguese that Skyler guessed said something about the wave-generation project’s success, and how this cable stretched well out into the ocean. None of that mattered. The lights were on, and in the quiet of that room he could hear the strong hum of electric power flowing through the banks of equipment in the adjoining rooms. High-voltage signs warned against entering, advice he heeded happily.

Skyler inspected the room like some visiting dignitary. Ana mimicked his steps, her eyes boring into him, waiting.

“Let’s go back and get the Magpie,” he announced.

Three days later La Gaza Ladra’s ultracapacitors hit full charge, and Skyler told the team to buckle in. On each of their faces he saw relief, but something else, too: wistfulness, like the final day of a grand if exhausting vacation. He felt it, too. A small part of him wished to stay, to spend the rest of his life riding a bike around the beautiful island with Ana alongside and grinning mischievously.

“Next stop,” he said as the aircraft lifted off the ground, “Ireland.”
Cappagh, Ireland

25.JUL.2284

SKYLER HELD AT three hundred meters, vertical thrusters wailing to keep the aircraft aloft and stable. He swallowed, his mouth dry as cotton cloth. A light rain dappled the cockpit window, threatening to obscure the view ahead.

No one had spoken since the object came into view. Ana was frozen in her seat next to him. He could feel the presence of Pablo and Vanessa over his shoulder as they crowded the small cockpit to see forward.

Several kilometers in front of them, nestled between two picturesque rolling hills, was a perfect dome. The half sphere was purple in color, opaque, and had a milky pearlescent sheen that rippled and swam across its surface like some shifting reflection of the cloudy sky, banded in ephemeral rainbow hues. It looked like a giant blob of purple liquid held inside a soap bubble shell.

“Land here,” Pablo said. The sound of his voice, even with the constant roar of the engines, made Skyler jump.

Ana cleared her throat. “Good idea.”

Skyler sat motionless. An answer formed and died on his lips. He couldn’t bring himself to look away from the massive purple globe. It had to be at least three hundred meters high, he thought, as the top of it seemed level with La Gaza Ladra’s nose. From this distance he couldn’t decide if it was solid like steel, or as thin as glass.

“What … God, what is that thing?” Vanessa asked.

The scar left by the towers’ passage across the landscape led straight into the center of the sphere. On instinct he raised the aircraft another hundred meters, revealing more of the dome’s base. Soon the tips of black towers became visible. The objects were spaced evenly at the edge of the dome where it met the ground, their bases half-submerged inside the purple orb.

“No idea,” Skyler said, his voice hoarse. He swallowed again and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Whatever it is, at least we’ve found the towers.”

“One group, anyway,” Ana said.

“What now?” Vanessa asked.

Skyler flexed his fingers on the throttle. “Tania and Karl would want us to turn back, report what we’ve found.” He felt his three crew mates, his friends, staring at him. “I think I want to take a look around.”

Ana sighed in relief, and he heard murmured agreement from Pablo and Vanessa.

The sound of engines under strain finally tugged him back to the business at hand. He dipped the nose and turned in a slow circle. The landscape below consisted of rolling golden fields of overgrown weeds, laced with dense forests of impossibly green trees. It reminded him of the Azores, except there was no coastline nearby. The hills seemed to stretch out forever. Here and there he saw signs of small towns and villages peeking above the hills and forests.

Nearby he spotted a wide field more flat than most, with a barn and small house on one corner and a dirt road that led off into the nearby trees. With no better option in sight, Skyler descended and set the aircraft down in tall grass that bent over in rippling circles as the plane neared the ground. He aimed the nose of the plane uphill, took a breath, and killed the engines. The screen before him indicated a capacitor level of 80 percent.

“It’s almost dusk,” he said to the others. Pablo and Vanessa had not bothered to return to the cabin for landing. “Let’s clear that house and barn, and use it for shelter while we’re here. Nothing against the Magpie, but I’m getting sick of sleeping in here.”

They mumbled agreement, their disappointment clear. As bizarre and terrifying as the alien dome was, they wanted to explore it now.

“We’ll hike out to that bubble first thing in the morning,” he added. “If there’s any of those armored bastards lurking out there, I’d rather face them after some solid sleep and a good meal.”

“I could find us some fresh meat,” Pablo offered.

“Good, do it. Stay nearby if you don’t mind, until we’ve got a sense of this place. Vanessa? I’d like you to prep our gear for the morning, and make sure the Magpie is locked up tight. Ireland’s a big place compared to San Miguel, and I don’t want anyone or anything sneaking in here while we’re asleep.”

“I’ll just stay in here,” she offered. “I don’t mind. Those chairs are as comfortable as any bed when reclined.”

“Okay,” Skyler said. “Ana, let’s check out that cottage.”

With dawn came a brief summer shower, before brilliant sunlight banished the clouds.

Skyler woke, stretched, and stood. He and Ana had slept on the floor of the small home’s common room. A quaint space with wooden wainscoting and antique furniture.

A pair of corpses lay in an infinite embrace in the one bedroom. Two skeletons under a blanket, their arms about each other and their foreheads touching. Ana had wept at the sight and broke into quiet sobs a few more times throughout the evening. He’d tried to hold her in the darkness that night, but she’d turned away, said it didn’t seem right. Skyler had not argued, but after her breathing became deep and even, he reached out and held her hand. The elderly couple in that room affected him only a little. He’d come across similar situations hundreds of times. Well after midnight he realized the scene might have reminded her of the first time they’d seen each other. The courtyard in Belém, where she’d danced with total abandon for the world around her, in front of an audience of two skeletons locked in an embrace, with Skyler hiding in the shadows.

She’d tried to shoot him for that. In the dark Skyler took his earlobe between two fingers and rubbed it where the bullet’s wake had tickled the skin. A few more centimeters over and everything would be different now.

When Skyler stepped outside he saw the flicker of firelight coming from the barn. Pablo waved at him when he entered and handed him a plate of roast hen and some potatoes grilled with a heavy dust of garlic powder. Before Skyler could say thanks, a mug of coffee was shoved into his hand and he raised it in cheers. Pablo nodded and returned to the portable stove.

Vanessa emerged from La Gaza Ladra a little later, and without being asked she went into the house and woke Ana. Skyler had been caught between his desire to let the girl sleep and his burning interest in the alien dome. Waking Ana was not something he ever looked forward to doing, and when the two women entered the barn he gave Vanessa a quick wink.

As if some pact had been made, no one spoke all morning. Fed and caffeinated, Skyler stood first and went to the aircraft. The others trailed in behind him and began to strap on their gear. Skyler opted for a light, comfortable load: his compact rifle with grenade launcher, a Sonton pistol, and a light backpack stocked with a medical kit and one day’s water and food.

The others took their cues from him and equipped similarly.

Ana powered up the cockpit and tried the comm before departing. It had become one of her daily tasks to try to raise the colony as Karl had requested. As of yet, they’d heard nothing, and assumed their transmissions fell on deaf ears in turn. Still, she rattled off a message giving the location of their landing, the presence of the purple bubble, and the fact that the crew was setting off to investigate it now.

“If we run into any of those armored subs,” Skyler said as the team set out, “we retreat. Understood? We come back here and bring the big guns with us next time. Today is just a scouting mission, nothing more.”

No one debated him. They were all staring at the purple hemisphere on the horizon.



Up close, the presence of the object made Skyler’s breath catch in his throat.

It defied description. He’d look at part of it and imagined it as a diamond-hard mass, as if some alien moon had suddenly winked into existence on this field in Ireland. Then he’d glance at another portion and imagine that he could reach out and pop the thing with his fingernail.

The four immunes stood side by side on the path carved by the purple-lit aura towers, perhaps a hundred meters from the dome.

“What now?” Vanessa asked.

“Let’s just,” Skyler said, “watch, for a bit.”

Pablo took a long draw from his canteen. The pleasant warmth of the day had worn out its welcome after an hour of marching in combat gear. Skyler took a swig of his own and poured a little on his head.

“That thing,” Ana said, with a nod toward the dome, as if anyone might doubt what she was looking at, “it’s so simple. Beautiful. It terrifies me. I think I’d rather face that fog in Belém, and the dark ones.”

Vanessa nodded agreement.

No one spoke for a time. Skyler began to notice flecks of slightly darker areas in the dome’s coloration. He leaned to one side and then the other, and decided it wasn’t an illusion. The small dark patches were inside the dome, not on its surface.

“Someone else has been here,” Pablo said suddenly, in his deadpan way.

Everyone looked at him. Pablo crouched down, focused on the ground in front of him. He pointed. “Campfire.”

Skyler crouched next to it and studied the charred wood. The blackened remnants were waterlogged, and crumbled into an ash mulch in his fingers. “It’s old,” he said. “But not that old. Months old, a year maybe. An immune, then.” He felt a tingle along his arms, and felt the queer sensation of being watched.

“Okay,” Skyler said. “Let’s walk around the perimeter. Maybe there’s a … door or something.”

A bird called overhead. Skyler looked up in time to see the small black creature fly overhead, straight into the side of the dome. He winced, expecting it to crumple and fall down the curved side as if it had hit a plate-glass window. Instead the purple surface dented inward like a balloon. The pearlescent sheen formed a rainbow swirl around the indent.

The indent warped and, with a sudden pop, returned to its original shape. Skyler caught a faint ripple of rainbow light along the surface of the dome, fading as it radiated outward.

The bird vanished inside.

The whole thing had lasted a fraction of a second. Skyler glanced at his companions, only to find them all still focused on the campfire. “Did you see that?” he asked them.

Ana looked up first, a puzzled expression on her face.

“A bird,” Skyler said. He chuckled. “It was a magpie, I think. It just flew in. It pushed through and went inside.”

“Magpie?” Ana asked. “A good omen.”

Skyler walked closer, until he stood five meters from the dome.

The others hadn’t moved. “Not too close, Sky!” Ana called out.

He leaned, picked up a rock, and tossed it underhand at the milky purple wall in front of him.

The rock clapped against the side as if it had hit solid marble, and fell to the ground with a soft thud.

“What the hell?” Skyler walked closer and reached out his hand.

“Be careful …,” Ana said from behind him.

When his fingertips brushed the surface, Skyler felt a tingle of cold rush up his arm, followed instantly by the sensation of heat. The pattern repeated like some resonating frequency, and when taken as a whole felt pleasant. He watched in fascination as the dome’s surface bent inward. A growing ring of rainbow refraction stretched outward along the purple face. He tried to pause his hand but couldn’t. The current of cold and warm pulses filled his entire body, and his mind seemed to turn to mush. Thoughts mixed, until one was indiscernible from the other. The ring of rainbow light continued to grow as if his finger had touched a star and sent it into a supernova explosion.

I should stop. I should stop. I should stop.

He must have been repeating that thought because it seemed to crop up among all the thousand others that swam through his mind, as milky as the surface of the dome. His brain told him the dome was enveloping him. That he’d already entered the place. That he was still outside. All seemed valid and without contradiction.

Some thoughts began to stretch on and on, played back in some ultra-slow motion. Shapes before his eyes began to hover in place. He tried to look down at his feet and found his head would only move a millimeter at a time.

The slow thoughts began to multiply. They pushed against his mind as if fighting a war against the parts of his mind that wanted to work correctly. The slow thoughts became the norm, the tables turned. Suddenly he found there were corners of his mind working in overdrive, unleashing a dizzying avalanche of ideas, memories, and desires. They raced and raced until they blurred into infinity.

Then all at once everything rushed back into normalcy.

He was inside, and felt as if someone had been spinning him in circles for a week straight, and then rolled him through a pasta press. A wave of nausea drove him to his knees. Cold sweat erupted from every pore on his body. All Skyler could do was stare at the purple-tinged dirt and shiver while the reaction passed.

A minute later he rose to his feet, stumbled, and righted himself. He found it hard to breathe. The air smelled of ozone and felt humid and still around him, like Darwin on the worst of days. He turned and glanced back the way he’d come. Or, the way he thought he’d come. Everything behind him looked the same. A dark, purple wall that ended a few meters away from him, evenly colored. No milky rainbow sheen. No bands of light and dark shades. He could see where it met the soil a few meters away, and yet when he looked straight ahead the purple barrier seemed as far away as the horizon. There was no hint of the outside, no way to see his friends, to see Ana. He waved anyway, in case they could detect some hint of him within the dome.

Skyler looked up. A sensation of vertigo crossed over him as he followed the soaring dome to its zenith. Taking in the entire “sky,” he saw that it seemed to pulse. A slow shift from light to dark and back, less than ten seconds for each perfectly rhythmic cycle.

Above him a magpie darted and wheeled. It chittered, as if saying, “We both made it through!” The harsh sound echoed queerly off the interior of the otherwise silent space.

Finally, Skyler looked toward the center of the dome.

He’d expected to find another shell ship on the ground, but if such a thing existed here he couldn’t see it. The ground within the dome had been altered. From the edge toward the center, the earth curled upward. Imperceptibly where Skyler stood, the curved floor grew ever steeper until forming a circular pillar in the very center. The pinnacle rose a full hundred meters or more from the floor where Skyler stood, so tall it even began to curve back outward before an abrupt end at a flat surface.

A giant pedestal, he mused, exactly half the height of the dome. The top appeared to be a disk just a few meters in diameter. If something sat atop it, he couldn’t see. Certainly the spot was too small to hold a shell ship, but he felt sure something must be there.

The earth that formed the curved floor was uneven and fractured. Large jagged mounds of varying size made a straight path to the center impossible. The mounds were complemented by cavities where chunks of the earth seemed to have just vanished, leaving steep-sided miniature craters of a depth he couldn’t discern from his position. He thought they were ponds at first, filled in with rainwater perhaps, but when he looked closer he realized that the surface did not ripple. No, what filled these craters was just like that of the dome itself, as viewed from outside: that same milky, almost oily sheen, although their colors varied from red all the way to a brilliant topaz blue within one small hole near him.

“Bizarre,” he whispered aloud. The magpie chirped as if in agreement.

With an effort Skyler shifted his focus away from the multihued “ponds” and tried to take in the entire scene again, hoping to spot an easy path to the center. Laced through all the mounds and depressions were cracks of indeterminate depth, akin to earthquake damage. As if in defiance of this tortured landscape, clumps of grass still held on here and there. Wild-flowers dotted the mounds and poked up from the crater edges. None, Skyler noted, broke through from below the domelike surfaces within the craters. A squirrel darted across the ground nearby, from one patch of scrub grass to another before disappearing again.

All the while the dome gently pulsed. Light to dark to light, every ten seconds. The pattern lulled him. He shook his head and walked forward.

A strange sound rippled through the domed space. It sounded like an earthquake, except lighter, and came from everywhere at once. The ground did not shake, and as quickly as the crackling sound emerged it receded. Skyler waited until it disappeared completely before he moved on.

The first canyon proved only a meter deep and half that across. He stepped over it and continued. Every few steps he glanced up at that disk at the top of the earthen pillar. Fogged as his mind was, he had no doubt that he must reach that pinnacle and see what the Builders had placed there. The shape could not be an accident.

Part of him wondered why the others had not followed him inside. Another part felt grateful they had not. Crossing through the dome’s surface had been the strangest, least pleasant experience in his life. Even worse, he thought, than his fall into that glowing iris so deep below Nightcliff. That had felt like his mind had been laid bare, every neuron exposed. This felt like his memories had been thrown into a blender and run at maximum speed for an hour. His head felt like scrambled eggs.

Another canyon appeared before him. He couldn’t remember walking to it, but he felt sure it hadn’t just formed in front of him. Indeed, when he took in his surroundings he realized he had indeed moved farther toward the center. As if sensing his confusion, the memory of walking forward emerged.

Again he heard a rattling sound from above, across the entire domed surface. It lasted a few seconds this time and then abruptly ended.

There were other noises, too, he realized. Noises coming from outside. Muffled, scratchy sounds all high-pitched and brief as a drumbeat, at once familiar and alien.

“I need a stiff drink,” he said aloud. “No. Coffee.”

He had neither on hand, but he did have water. Skyler sat in the dirt and opened his backpack. Normally he carried a canteen at his hip, but today he’d thrown everything in the pack so that he’d be able to shrug it off at a moment’s notice. He’d wanted to be able to run away.

Still the sky pulsed, as if a child stood at a sliding dimmer switch, dragging it up and down in even intervals, fascinated by the effect. It was starting to annoy the hell out of him. Sensing a headache coming on, Skyler popped two pills between swigs of cool water.

His aviator’s watch showed the wrong time, the wrong date. Every few seconds the numbers would jump ahead by almost an hour, as if the self-correction mechanism couldn’t get a fix on one of the satellite time beacons. Crossing through that barrier scrambled the electronics, he decided, and he made a mental note to scavenge a new one. At least the compass on it still worked.

He sat for a few minutes and tried to focus. The pillar loomed ahead of him, insurmountable now that he thought about it. He had no rope, no climbing gear. Skyler was in excellent shape, but he knew his limits. There was no way he could reach that pedestal without some equipment. He wondered if Vanessa had thought to pack any; it had been her job to provision the plane beyond basic necessities.

Reason finally won out over the desire to explore. He stood and pulled his backpack on, then walked back the way he’d come. At the edge of the dome, he paused and took a few long, measured breaths.

Exiting proved much easier. This time he lowered his shoulder and raced through the dome’s wall. He felt all the same sensations, only many orders of magnitude faster. He came out the other side confused, shivering. He slipped on muddy ground. Rain pelted him.

This storm must have come out of nowhere, he had time to think before his body hit the soggy ground in a dull splash. Cold shakes began to rattle him. Skyler came to his knees, waited for the maelstrom in his mind to evaporate, and looked for his friends.

They were gone. The sun, so bright and clear when he’d entered, now hid behind a dark gray ceiling of nasty-looking clouds. What in the hell?

Off to the side he saw a tent that hadn’t been there before. An LED lantern hung from a hook under the awning, casting light around the entrance and half a meter inside. He could see someone sitting within, reading a slate.

Baffled, Skyler began to stumble in the direction of the tent. The person inside looked up. It was Ana, though she looked different. Different clothes, Skyler realized. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was ashen, as if she’d become sick.

All the color left in that face drained when she saw him. She raced from the tent and threw her arms around him, sobbing.

“Jesus,” he said. “Nice to see you, too. Where’d the others go?”

Ana just sobbed. She held him so tightly he thought his arms might fall asleep.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Relax, I’m fine.”

For a long time she said nothing. She just held him and wept. At first he found it strangely warming to be missed so, but as the seconds dragged on and she didn’t let up, he began to find her reaction almost comical given that they’d only been apart for ten minutes. The grief was genuine, of that he felt sure, but wholly inappropriate.

“We thought you were dead,” she said at last.

Skyler almost laughed. The sincerity in her voice stopped him and he returned her hug.

The girl finally pulled back and held him at arm’s length, her eyes searching his. “What the … Where the hell have you been?”

“Inside, of course. Where’d this storm come from? Sun to downpour in ten minutes flat. That’s impressive even by Darwin standards.”

“Ten?”

“Good thing you brought a tent. Are the others inside? We need to—”

“Ten minutes?”

When he nodded, her lips pressed together in a tight line.

“Skyler,” she said, “you’ve been gone for over a month.”
Darwin, Australia

2.SEP.2284

SAMANTHA AWOKE TO a pounding at the door to her room.

“I’m up,” she said, her voice the sound of dry brush burning. She fumbled for her canteen and knocked it to the floor. “Shit.”

Her watch put the time at one in the morning. The pounding on her door went on, and for a few seconds she wasn’t sure if it was real or just the result of a long evening at Woon’s.

She rolled onto her side and plucked the steel canteen from the pool of water it had created on the floor. A swallow later she found her voice again. “Go to hell!”

“Grillo is on the comm, Samantha. It’s urgent.”

One of the Nightcliff goons, she couldn’t guess which from the voice. She sat up and swung her feet onto the cold floor. A blistering ache formed somewhere just behind her eyes, and she rubbed her temples with two fingers, to no avail. “What does he want?”

“No idea,” the man said. “Not my place to ask.”

“Christ,” she whispered, not loud enough that he might hear it. These Jacobites were a touchy bunch. She pulled on some socks. “Be there in a sec.”

The comm terminal sat on a table in the center of the hangar, where the Melville used to rest. Without the presence of the aircraft, the space seemed excessively large, dwarfing the “office” she’d set up in the middle of the floor. A huge board made of cork had been placed next to the main desk, and she’d tacked a map of the local region to it. Colored thumbtacks marked the places scavenged or to be scavenged, a trick she’d learned from Prumble. She’d never seen his map in person, but Skyler had described it, and it beat trying to operate the map screen Skyler had always used to plan their outings.

Grillo watched her approach from his end of the connection. Sam dropped herself heavily on the folding chair in front of the screen and swept her hair back from her face.

“I’m here,” she said.

He wasn’t in the control room at Nightcliff, or his mansion in Lyons. Behind him, she saw only a concrete wall, with a rusted pipe jutting out of the ceiling and running horizontally behind the man. Grillo looked impeccable, of course. Not a hair out of place. His expression, so often unreadable, right now had a hint of concern. “Rouse as many pilots as you can,” he said, “and bring them and their aircraft to the stadium. No other crew aboard.”

“What’s going on?” Sam asked.

“There’s no time, Samantha. Be here in an hour.”

“I … okay.”

“Fly dark, fly low.” He cut the link and his image vanished.

Forty minutes later, Sam stood on the tarmac watching her birds take flight.

Nine pilots were available, but only seven planes had their caps charged enough to be useful. Given the short notice, she thought the number impressive, but Grillo had given no hint as to how many he actually needed. It wasn’t like him to be vague, or hurried. Something was wrong.

The engines of the sixth craft roared and the shoddy hauler began to climb. That left only the Ocean Cloud.

“Sammy!”

She turned at the voice, and saw Skadz standing atop the hangar. He stayed up there sometimes, in a military tent, tending the garden as payment for the rooftop to sleep on. Right now, he gestured urgently toward East Point. She glanced in that direction and saw nothing over the rooftops of the other hangars that lined the old runway. The clouds above, though, were laced with traces of orange and yellow glow.

“What is it?” she shouted back.

“Fire!”

She nodded to him, positive the flames were related to Grillo’s urgent call. Fly dark, fly low. A knot formed in her gut as she climbed into the idling plane. She thought of that strange alien growth in Old Downtown, the flayed remains of the Jacobite called Faisal, and the strange glowing cube she’d pulled from the crashed ship. She swallowed hard. All of these things she’d deliberately forgotten until now. If something new was happening there, if the thing had suddenly regrown …

Pascal looked at her from the cockpit and she made a twirling motion with her hand. Spin up.

Gear stowed, Sam moved to the cockpit door and decided to stand there so she could see over the pilot’s helmet. The aircraft once ferried wealthy Chinese tourists over the tumultuous waters between the two continents and had cargo capacity enough for two automobiles. “Did the run nonstop when the Elevator came,” Pascal had told her the first time she’d rode in the ship. “Twelve years straight, no vacations to speak of, either. Even made two trips when SUBS hit, before it got too crazy up there.”

He was a good man, a simple man. Took his orders with no complaints and spent his evenings playing mahjongg with the other veterans outside Kantro’s old hangar.

“Running lights off,” Sam said as they cleared the airport. “Keep as low as you’re comfortable with.”

“If you say so,” he said.

The fires were behind them, and Sam didn’t want to delay for a peek. There’d be time enough for that later.

Darwin passed below in silence. The dark slums of the Maze stretched out to Aura’s Edge, and a bit beyond into the no-man’s-land that ringed the city. Pascal followed a curved path that kept them just inside the aura, until the stadium came into view. The other aircraft stretched out ahead of them like birds of prey sneaking up on a target. One by one they flipped on their landing lights and descended into the bowl of the arena.

Ocean Cloud cleared the lip last, and Sam sucked in her breath at the sight on the field below. The other aircraft were spread out, and surrounded by Jacobites. The faithful were arrayed like regiments of soldiers, and already she could see them boarding the other aircraft.

A space cleared at one end, and Pascal headed toward it without being told. There was nowhere else to put down. Sam glanced west before the aircraft dropped below the top edge of the stadium’s ring. Between here and the coast lay thousands of dark buildings, dappled by the occasional pool of LED or candlelight. She couldn’t see the fires Skadz spoke of, but their glow on the cloud layer remained.

Brighter now, she thought.

Thirty Jacobite loyalists piled into Ocean’s cargo bay. Men and women alike, lightly armed and stony-faced. Many, she saw, carried coils of rope across their chests like bandoliers.

Grillo came last. He wore a business suit as usual, but to Samantha’s surprise it was white, not pin-striped gray. Even the shirt and tie were brilliant white, as if never worn before.

“No time to waste,” he said to her. “Have your pilot take the lead. Follow the aura around south to the Gardens.”

“What’s the mission?”

“I’ll explain in the air.”

She returned to her spot in the cockpit’s doorway and relayed the orders to Pascal. He reacted with calm efficiency, and soon they were over the slums again, heading back the way they came. He acknowledged responses from the other planes as they fell in line behind.

In the back, Grillo moved among the seated warriors. Somehow he managed to keep an air of composure despite the tilting, abrupt movements of the aircraft. His hand would dart to a nylon loop on the wall, or to someone’s shoulder, for support, but beyond that he acted as if they weren’t moving at all. As she watched, he went to each fighter, men and women alike. He would press his fingers against the center of their foreheads and whisper something. They’d respond with a silent word, and then he would move to the next.

He’s gone mental, she thought. The tattered shreds of her theory that it was all an act, for the benefit of their alliance, completely dissolved. They were a cult and he was a personality; a match made in heaven.

Sam almost laughed aloud at the wordplay. If anyone saw her brief smile, she didn’t notice it over their general contempt for an outsider.

His rounds finished, Grillo finally came to stand in front of her. He grasped a handhold on the wall without even looking for it, as if he’d flown aboard Ocean Cloud a hundred times. With his free hand, he reached inside his coat and pulled a slip of paper from the breast pocket. “Give this to your pilot.”

The brittle paper had a drawing on it. Sam couldn’t resist, and looked it over. Grillo, or someone under him, had scratched out in pencil a map of a Darwin neighborhood, just north of the Gardens and west of the Narrows. A number of buildings were marked with letters, ranging from A to J.

“Tell him to pick one of the lettered buildings,” Grillo added. “And assign other buildings to the remaining aircraft.”

“I can hear you,” Pascal said from the cockpit. “The paper, Sam?”

She handed it forward and turned back to Grillo. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve reached the tipping point. The last holdouts have banded together, attacked our patrols. They don’t want to join in the effort to make Darwin a prosperous, peaceful place.”

Maybe they’ve seen your true freak show nature like I have.

He’d raised his voice, and though he still looked at her she knew he spoke to the Jacobite soldiers behind him.

“For the ladder’s sake,” he went on, “by dawn this city will be united in singular purpose. Darwin could have been humanity’s deathbed, but now … now, through our work, it will be the seed from which a new world will one day grow.”

Bat. Shit. Insane. It was all Sam could think as she looked into the man’s glistening eyes. This was no act. Whatever doubts she had, they melted away as she stared into that fervent gaze.

Grillo tilted his head slightly, as if sensing her thoughts. “Once we’ve solved our basic problems, Samantha, we can turn our attentions to things like the disease, and resistance to it. God willing, people like you may hold the key to our ultimate success, and we’re glad to have you with us.”

A chill rippled down Sam’s spine. The aircraft banked sharply, the motion providing a convenient moment for her to gather her senses as Grillo steadied himself. When the craft leveled again, Samantha managed to meet his eyes. “Great,” she said with a half smile. “Um. Go, team.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Let’s get ready, everyone. The landing zone might be a bit … hot.”

Pascal’s chosen target building loomed ahead. Twenty stories of concrete grid, with some portions still covered by decorative tile made to look like sandstone. Most of that superfluous surface had been hacked away long ago, along with the windows. A random patchwork filled the spaces where windows once existed. Plastic sheets, tarps of every color, quilts, and even a few ornate Afghan carpets. At least half the window frames had extensions bolted on the outside, extending the living space out on jury-rigged balconies made from every imaginable material. Samantha saw tents on some, but most were covered with buckets to collect rainwater, or potted plants.

The roof was hidden under a dense garden.

A typical Darwin tombstone, in other words. A vertical enclave, with the powerful living at the top.

Only two or three window holes were lit. The flicker of candlelight, or the soft blue-white glow of an LED lantern.

Ocean Cloud approached her target from the south. The fires Skadz had so anxiously pointed out earlier were all north of them, a few blocks away at least. The buildings in this area were so quiet Sam wondered if they’d been abandoned in the face of the attack.

More likely, she thought, their targets represented the enemy’s fallback position. A sandwich attack. She leaned forward, squeezing her head into the space between Pascal’s seat and the curved glass of the canopy. To the right of their craft, she saw the dark shapes of four other scavenger vehicles as they closed in on other target buildings. Pascal spoke quiet commands into his headset, too soft for her to hear, but the synchronicity of the other planes told the story. If they’d planned the operation for days she doubted they could have achieved any more coordination.

Sam leaned back and turned toward the crowded rear compartment. “Thirty seconds,” she said. “What’s the plan? Torch and run?”

“Their fighters will be to the north,” Grillo said. “Where our ground assault started. Our aim here is to take and hold these buildings, then move on to others as we can. You will take off immediately and return to the stadium for another run, until our faithful have been delivered to all the buildings on the map.”

“Copy that,” she said, feeling suddenly a thousand kilometers away. This is war, she thought. And by morning, Grillo will own all of Darwin.

All of it that mattered anyway.

They had made three more trips by the time the sun crested the eastern horizon in a thin red line.

The third trip proved unnecessary, though. Other than a few sporadic gunfights, the war appeared to be over, and for once in her life Samantha did not mind being left out of the action. The dead and wounded loaded into Ocean Cloud’s bay for the return flight were proof enough that the operation had been a sloppy, fierce affair. Cries of anguish and muffled grunts of raw pain filled the otherwise quiet cabin as Pascal guided the craft back to Grillo’s stadium.

Back in the safety of that concrete bowl, the mood was quite different. Sam sat with Pascal in the open cabin door, their legs hanging over the side. Pascal had brought a zippered bag full of small overripe apples and shared one with her. He ate in silence, which suited Sam just fine.

Across the field Jacobite soldiers celebrated in groups of ten or twenty. Even in the old stands, where shacks and small tents covered every flat space, the fighters mingled with others, laughing and talking in animated fashion. Battle stories, she knew. The favorite pastime of the newly bloodied.

At least as many groups were huddled in prayer. They knelt in circles, as few as four in number. One such group consisted of at least fifty men and women, and Sam recognized a certain air about them. The hard looks on their faces, the crowd of supporters around them. These were the leaders, she thought, or perhaps the elite fighters. Grillo stood in the center of their ring, speaking quietly with his hands outstretched in piety.

Eventually Grillo made his way back to the aircraft. Pascal saw him coming. “I’ll be in the cockpit,” he said as he rose from their perch. “Let me know if we’re clear to leave.”

“Okay,” Sam said.

Grillo strode up, a hair slower than he usually walked. He wiped his face with a clean white handkerchief, folded it, and returned it to his breast pocket before speaking. “Thank you for your help tonight,” he said.

Sam shrugged. “I hardly did anything.”

“You’ve held up your end of the bargain, Samantha. I may have been too harsh with you before, and I’m sorry if Sister Jo no longer wishes to join you at the airport.”

“She can make her own decisions,” Sam said. She hoped Kelly wanted her to stay away. Listen to the ghost.

“Quite.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Her choice could have eroded your loyalty, however, and I just wanted you to know that I’m grateful you’ve remained on our little team.”

“Not so little anymore,” Sam said, casting a glance around the busy arena. Anything to get the focus off herself.

A flash of pride crossed his face. “I’m going to make a small speech soon, and lead a prayer. Would you stay? Stand at my side?”

“At your side? Are you f*cking kidding me—I’m sorry. It’s late, I … at your side? Surely there are others who deserve that kind of honor.”

“None more than you. And, truth be told, it might help your … status.”

“No offense, Grillo, but prayer really isn’t my thing. Besides, I’m exhausted, and our planes need to be recharged and, um … cleaned.”

He sighed, his mouth curling in an almost imperceptible frown. “Suit yourself,” he said.

“Um. What’s wrong with my status, anyway? You mean because I’m a—”

“Immune?”

“I was going to say heathen.”

“Ah.” Grillo took a step to one side and gestured toward the space elevator. The thread was invisible in the hazy morning, but a few climber cars marked it. “We don’t care much if one believes in the ladder or not; the proof is right there. It’s just a matter of seeing it … differently.”

Sam pretended to study the length of the alien cable for a moment. “Why’d you think I was going to say ‘immune’?” she asked.

He shifted. A brief expression of discomfort passed across his face. She’d seen it once before, and enjoyed it just as much this time. “We don’t know what to make of your unique attribute. Some, like me, think you may be the key to our salvation. Others, many, think the opposite.”

“Is that why you keep me so close?”

“Partly. You are useful, obviously.” He regarded the hull of Ocean Cloud. “And if I coddled you, or kept you from harm’s way, I would incur not only your wrath but that of the faction skeptical of your nature. If I let you go, or ignored you, I’d go against my own instincts, and the faction that looks at you with awe.”

In an instant she went from feeling like a prisoner to feeling like some cherished possession. A tiny voice in Samantha’s head, one she usually scoffed at, told her to tread with care. Grillo was all but admitting that she had a lot more power, a lot more leverage, than she’d previously known. “I’m not the only immune,” she said.

“I’m afraid all of your old crew are gone now, Samantha. There may be others like you, people who live happily in Darwin without any knowledge of the trait. Unfortunately there’s no known test.”

He doesn’t know about Skadz, then. She hadn’t thought to keep his immunity secret before. Certainly everyone at the airport knew he’d returned. That no one had mentioned his condition in the presence of Grillo’s overseers was sheer luck, though, and she resolved to put the word out that the topic should be avoided.

“You might be thinking right now,” Grillo went on, “that some pendulum of favor has swung to your side. It’s true. You’ve proven yourself to me, Samantha. Despite confiding with Sister Josephine against my explicit instructions, you’ve continued to follow my orders without hesitation.”

Sam spoke before her fear of him could stop the words. “They have a word for what you did; it’s called entrapment. Anyway, I keep hoping Kelly will change her mind.”

“She may. Who can say? In the meantime, consider yourself a part of this … this …” He couldn’t seem to find the right word for the scene around them. He waved a hand at it. Hundreds of Jacobites, many still in combat gear, many more moving about. And beyond, Darwin’s skyline.

Grillo’s skyline, she corrected herself.

Then she glanced up, following the invisible thread of the Elevator marked by three climber cars below the cloud layer, all the way to the zenith. Somewhere up there were a series of space stations, and Russell Blackfield with all his grunt mercenaries. She wondered what he thought of the transformation Darwin had experienced since he’d left, or if he was even aware.

She didn’t think he’d be too happy about it.
Cappagh, Ireland

6.SEP.2284

THEY WAITED OUT the storm in Ana’s vigil tent.

She’d thought he’d died, and only stubbornness and love kept her camped out at the edge of the dome, waiting. She’d tried to follow him in, of course. They all had. But once Skyler had stepped through, she’d explained, the field became hard as marble. An hour passed, then a day. Weeks. Every day Ana would come sit in front of the dome and try to push her way into it as he had. She’d tried to dig under it. She’d kicked it, punched it, even fired a grenade at it. Nothing helped. At one point she’d seen a bird fly up to the thing and smack against it. The poor creature had fallen to the ground in a lifeless heap, and Ana had cried then. The death of the bird had nearly snuffed out the candle of hope she’d nurtured.

He held her while she wept, a process she needed to work through on her own. He knew that from experience. While she sobbed quietly and buried herself in his arms, his mind grappled with the implications of what had happened.

From his perspective, he’d walked inside that dome, spent ten minutes fumbling about, and then exited. Outside, six weeks had passed. How that could be seemed hardly worth pondering, in Skyler’s opinion. The Builders were clearly more technologically advanced than aura towers, interstellar flight, and space elevators. They could mess with time, or at least how the mind experienced it. The body, too, he corrected himself. He hadn’t walked out of there thirsty or hungry, so the effect couldn’t have been just mental.

The part that unnerved him was that it had happened at all. That such a thing was possible. Six weeks gone in ten minutes. That meant a journey taken back in to see what sat atop that pinnacle, even if they worked fast, would last months on the outside. Any delays and he’d come out well past the predicted date of the next Builder event. Whatever that event would entail, Skyler felt damn sure it would be in his best interests to be outside and well clear of the alien bubble at the time.

“Have you heard anything from home?” he asked her after her sobs faded.

She shifted slightly against him. Her hands gripped his shirt just below the collar. “No,” she said, her voice muffled by her proximity to his chest. “Well, yes.”

“Which?”