“And they saw you?”
“Yeah. They spoke to me. I asked them to call the cops.”
“Really? Oh James, that’s excellent news! Why didn’t you tell me, instead of making me worry?”
“Well, because I’m not so sure they’re going to follow through. I mean, they’re just little kids, and they might be afraid of getting into trouble. You see, they weren’t supposed to be down there.”
“Tell me what else do you remember? Anything. Were there bells? Church bells?”
“Actually, no. Not really close anyway. I might have heard some in the distance, but this church doesn’t ring any bells.”
“What kind of stone makes the walls?”
“Um, it’s just grey with flecks of this shiny stuff. Mica, I think it’s called?”
Karla sighed. “That describes half the stone in Scotland. We could rule out Edinburgh, I suppose. That place is mostly sandstone.”
I glanced down at her hands. Patches of her skin had gone blank and dark. I took a deep breath and draped my arms around her.
We glided over the scrub land, crushing and shrubs and saplings in our way. The green beams shined into a broad hollow at the mouth of a canyon, protected by cliffs on three sides. It reminded me a little of the spot Bern and Lille had chosen to built that first cabin that was destroyed by Dusters.
The searchlight glinted off a pond, backed by a grove of trees. A waterfall tumbled from a hanging valley at the far end. The place looked very inviting.
“See that? Look out there, Karla. Burn this place into your memory. When you go and come back, I’ll be waiting for you there.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
She buried her face in my chest. I held her tight, and kept watch over ever part of her that I could see. I didn’t want her to go. I couldn’t believe that I was losing her already. Part of me understood that this could be the last time. This could be it. Forever.
“Hang on everybody,” said the man at the rear harpoon. “We’re fixing to climb.”
The Reapers’ legs lengthened as we pass over rougher ground where floods had carried rocks and boulders down from the heights. Urszula grunted as she swung and collided with the deck. I winced with every collision. I wished they had let her sit with us instead of treating her like a sack of meat.
The deck tilted up as we started up a wide path angling up the butte flanking the canyon, but the angle was less severe than the terrain. As the beam washed down, I saw why. The Reaper had retracted some of its myriad legs in front, and had extended them in back, lifting its rear and reducing the slope of the deck.
I latched onto one of the handholds built into the benches. Karla clasped her hands around me. She was sobbing.
I held her closer, and rubbed her back, but she could not be consoled. Dimples formed in her flesh and then filled back in. She was resisting the transition, but it was as futile as a sand castle defying the tide.
She oscillated in my grip. Gaps formed in her flesh, filled and emptied yet again. And then she shuddered and her legs disappeared for good. And the fading spread to her arms and up to her shoulders. She was slipping away. Steadily, I had less and less to hold onto.
“Listen,” she said. “You do anything you can to delay Papa. String him along. Cooperate a little. Tell him I’m in Wales if you have to. Stay alive! I will come for you. I will find you. It just might take some time.”
I saw in her eyes a tiny life raft of hope bobbing amidst a sea of desperation. I tried to kiss her one last time before she went, but my lips met only air. Her clothes, vacated, went slack over my lap.
Chapter 20: Between the Gates
I stared at the dark space that Karla had occupied only moments before, as the wind obliterated the last traces of her breath. I wadded up her skirt and blouse and clutched them to my chest.
“She gone?” said Jeffrey. “Aw man, I’m so sorry. Don’t it suck, never knowing whether the person you’re talking to is gonna vaporize right in front of you? I mean, you could be next. Right? Or me? Or both of us. Neither of us might ever get to Frelsi.”
He babbled on, but I was already gone as well, not physically but mentally, withdrawn into my head, unable to process any of his words.
I relived our last few hours, going over every image and sensation, etching them into my memory, fearing I might forget how she looked and smelled and sounded and felt, the way I had after a month in Brynmawr.
As we crept steadily up that hillside, I fought the urge to leap off the heaving deck and make my way back to that hollow, the one with the pond and the grove and the hanging valley where Karla had promised to meet me. I didn’t have much desire to get to Frelsi anymore. What was the point now?
But it could be weeks before she returned, if the past was any guide. What would I do in that hollow but dodge Dusters all day?
I supposed I might as well bide my time and reconnoiter. See if Frelsi was where we wanted to be or not. I could always make my way back to the hollow later. It seemed pretty easy to find.
Knowing Karla planned to come looking for me on the other side scared the crap out of me. However vicious Edmund and his lot had been with me, with her, there would be no holding back. It was that sort of family. I wished I could have convinced her to stay the hell out of Scotland.
The beams illuminated a wide but rugged path, crossed by ledges and littered with boulders and crevices. I couldn’t imagine any four by four getting up this way. Only the Reapers’ adaptive legs made it passable.
Hours passed. Jeffrey had finally given up trying to chat and now just stared out into the darkness, drumming his fingers on a post. Bern somehow managed to fall asleep on the bench, despite the constant jostling.
We switched back and forth up the side of the mountain until we finally leveled out and joined a more civilized road, this one wide enough for both Reapers to walk abreast.
The stars began to blink out. The sky softened to a steely gray and the first rays of dawn burnished the flat-topped hills across a large valley. With shouted commands, strained and anxious, Master Felix urged his Reapers to pick up the pace.
A river, braided into a dozen, mostly dry channels, passed through the valley below. On the other side, a vast tableland of mesas and pinnacles stretched off into infinity. But these weren’t mesas like the ones you see in pictures of Arizona and New Mexico. These were bushy, green-fringed things, more like those Venezuelan tepuis. Although I had yet to experience it in this place, somewhere, sometime, it rained.
A huge flock took to the air from the nearest mesa, diving over the edge before leveling out and gaining lift. From another mesa, another flock dove and recovered. These were mantids, all of them ridden and all of them heading out to the plains.
But there was something else out there, an entirely different sort of creature soaring high above them. They had pairs of wings perpendicular to long bodies. The way they hovered and changed direction, tacking to and fro, they could only be giant dragonflies.
The crew huddled with Master Felix on the narrow strip of decking that bridged the Reaper’s midsection, between the two elevated harpoon mounts. I leaned back to listen to their deliberations.
“We’ve been spotted for sure,” said the short man. “Against this pale rock, we must stick out like blood on snow.”
“Nothing to worry about,” said Master Felix. “We’re too close to the gates. They wouldn’t dare mount a raid.”
Jeffrey tapped my shoulder. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, they’re worried about the bug riders. But I think the Dusters are probably just sending out search parties.”
“For who?”
“Urszula.”
“Who?”
“The Duster girl.”
“You feeling better, guy?” said Jeffrey. “You were kind of out of it for a while. I’d say stuff and you would just be all gaga, staring at me with your mouth open.”
“I’m good,” I said. “As good as I’m gonna get.?
??
“Sucks that she blinked out when she did. But that’s how it goes in this place. One time, after being lost in the tunnels for days, I caught a whiff of that fresh air that tells you you’re coming to a pit. And that was that, I was back on the floor of my friend’s garage. Next time back, I was down deep in the tunnels again.”
“Yeah, that’s about par for the course around here.”
My attention strayed back to the mesas. While most of the dragonflies skirted the edge of the foothills, one had diverged and was coming across the valley at a very high altitude.
Master Felix spotted it the same time as me, and I could tell that it made him nervous. “Ripley, Kumar, man your harpoons. Keep your eyes on that Odonate overhead.”
We came over a rise and began to descend into a col. I caught a glimpse of some snow-capped peaks farther up-slope, and below them something even more startling—a cityscape of spiky, bristly towers, with bracts and spokes, some green with new growth, some gone taupe and grey, bleached by the sun like old cedar shingles.
The place was a bizarre mélange of sequoia-sized palms, towering stalagmites and stacked barrels. It looked like something Gaudi—that crazy-ass architect from Spain—might design.
“Holy Crap!” said Jeffrey. “Do you see that? That’s gotta be Frelsi.”
A glimpse was all we got before we descended below the sight lines. The mountains disappeared as well, although they made their presence known by the milky torrent dashing through the bottom of the col. Glacier milk—powdered rock mixed with runoff, a sign of the big ice grinding away at these valleys.
My eyes flitted back to that dragonfly. It was quite close now. The dang thing was almost as big as a Cessna. I could see two lumps on its back. Riders.
It fell into a steep dive, coming straight at us.
“Ripley, Kumar. Overhead at nine o’clock. Set your charges.”
The harpoons swiveled and angled upwards. The men adjusted the elevation and heading of their launchers with a set of cranks and knobs.
“Sit tight you all. We’ll try to deter it.”
The dragonfly screamed in like a falcon. Just before it leveled off its dive, a harpoon blasted off like a cold-fired missile from the Reaper beside us. A translucent line trailed out behind it. It narrowly missed, passing between the legs of the insect, seizing at the end of its line and falling back to the ground.
A second harpoon fired. The dragonfly veered hard left and soared upward out of range but swooped back around and dived at us again. The rider in back pointed his rod and ejected a hurtling mass of plasma at us.
“Everyone down!” Master Felix shouted.
The blob blasted into the forward decking and into the Reaper’s side. The harpoon mount toppled over the side. A cloud of dust boiled upward. The Reaper bellowed and reared. A sticky spray splashed from the gaping wound in its side. Crew members spilled off what was left of the forward deck.
Two more harpoons went zooming after the insect. Both reached the end of their tethers and fell harmlessly down to the ground. The dragonfly and its riders soared back out to the valley.
“Halt! Haaalt!” shouted Master Felix. He leapt off the decking onto the stony ground and rushed forward to calm the injured Reaper.
***
We stopped and waited in a wind-swept meadow while the crew unstrapped the decking from the injured Reaper. The creature writhed like a tortured caterpillar as one of the crew swabbed its wound with a paste delivered with a mop-like implement.
A gaggle of people came rushing down the road from the city to help us, some in uniform, some in plain clothes.
Master Felix came over, accompanied by the short guy.
“Alright everyone, on your feet. We’ll be walking the rest of the way. But no worries, it’s less than a mile to the gates.”
I looked around for Urszula, but couldn’t see what they had done with her.
“Come along, you,” said the short man, tapping me with his staff.
“Where’s my sword? Can I have my sword back?”
“Uh, nah. Don’t think so. We’ll hang onto it for you.”
“What about my cane?” said Bern. “I’m having some trouble with my knee.”
“You’re doing fine gramps. Just keep walking.”
And so we trudged up the back side of the col, the way ahead obscured by the steepness of the immediate slope. The second Reaper, harpoons at the ready, stayed behind to provide cover for any possible follow-up attacks.
“I am so sorry you all had to experience this,” said Master Felix. “Normally, we return before dawn, but … events … did not allow that. Daylight or not, it was unusually brazen of the Dusters to stage a raid in our own front yard.”
“Is that poor beast going to be alright?” asked a woman in a crudely woven toga.
“Our morphs are bred tough,” said Master Felix. “It will need only a day or so to heal. In the mean time, we’ll repair the decking and get it ready for re-installation. That one will be back on escort duty before you know it.”
We came to the top of the rise and the city came back into view, its spires even more stunning than before. It was like an entire city’s worth of exotic space needles.
I could see now that it was ringed by two walls—a low, rough outer bastion of stone blocks and a taller, sleeker inner rampart that was smooth and curved like the spillway of the Hoover Dam.
The road led straight through a gap in the outer wall to a wide space in between that appeared to be crowded with huts and shanties.
“As you can see,” said Master Felix. “The gates of Frelsi are always open. Every soul is free to come and go as they please. We take pride in that.”
“Because a locked gate’s no barrier to a Duster,” said the short guy to me in a gruff whisper. “They only attack from above.”
“Why do you need walls at all?” I said.
“The outer wall was already here. It is from the ancients. Frelsi was abandoned until the first colonists reclaimed it.”
“The inner walls keep you riff-raff where you belong,” said the short man.
Master Felix overheard. “Red. Please. Let me handle the orientation, please.”
“Sorry sir. Got carried away.”
Master Felix continued. “Despite what you witnessed this morning, the city proper has never been attacked. We are quite well defended. The Dusters don’t dare come near.”
“Now, all of you have been vetted and marked as Hemisouls, you are a special group. According to the latest figures, you spend at least twenty percent of your hours in the Liminality. Thirty-six hours is the average residence time and more ninety percent of Hemis who leave will return at least once. At least ten percent of you will go on to become Freesouls like Red and me.
“How is it done?” asked a man. “Becoming free?”
“That’s a matter for each of you and your mentors to decide. It depends greatly on your situation on the other side. Giving up one’s ties to life, while finding a way to take the responsibility for it out of your hands, can be tricky. That’s why the yield is so low. But in the meantime, you will get to enjoy the mountain air, and the haven that is Frelsi. You will only be asked to contribute your labors to our cause.”
We came to the outer wall. Its crude stone blocks looked indescribably crusty and ancient. Trees perched atop some of the bulwarks, snaking their roots through the crevices.
There were no actual gates in the outer wall, just a gap. As Master Felix had promised, it was completely unguarded. The inner wall, on the contrary, was lined with balconies bearing sentry posts and harpoon mounts. The soldiers posted there rarely looked down, their attentions focused on the sky.
“Red, you can bring the vetted ones on to the indoctrination yard,” said Master Felix. “I’ll deal with the mavericks.”
“Are we not going to be vetted?” said Bern.
“Not by me. And not until we have a chat with the debriefers.”
“Hey guys! Catch you later?” Jeffrey s
houted as he walked away with the rest of the group.
“Follow me,” said Master Felix. He led us down an alley to a foul-smelling courtyard heaped with the excrement of Reapers. He stopped briefly to speak with a pair of soldiers supervising a work gang. One of them headed off down an alley while the other joined us.
“This way now. We’re almost there.”
We passed through a thick cluster of huts and emerged in an open area surrounding a series of deep rectangular recesses dug into the ground, crowded with Reapers of all sizes, slumbering like walruses. They kind of reminded me of built-in swimming pools with gated ramps. It brought back memories of those trapped alligators in Ft. Pierce.
There was a circular table and some stools beside one of the trenches. The table was made of a material much like that woody fungus that grows on dead trees, only much more massive.
“Please take a seat. We’ll wait for the debriefers here. They are been summoned.”
The soldier touched his staff to my ankle. Roots shot up and wrapped and knotted themselves around my feet and shins.”
“What the fuck? What are you doing?”
He did the same to Bern. The roots seized his bad leg and twisted. Bern howled. “Please. No! Not that leg. Please! Give me double on the other if you have to, but leave the right one alone.”
“Come on!” I said. “His leg is hurt.”
Master Felix reversed the knotting on Bern’s leg with a tap of his own staff.
“Sorry. It’s just a precaution. I realize you two might only be mavericks, but we can’t always be certain everyone is as independent as they proclaim. Some, we find, receive a little assistance from time to time. It’s not always a coincidence that one is found in the presence of a Duster.”
“What we told you was true! She attacked us.”
“I believe you. Understand, this is only a precaution. We can’t let you roam about until you’ve been debriefed. And then it’s a simple of vetting to determine if you will be allowed to stay.”
He sat down with us and shared a skin filled with something that tasted like a very dry, honey-flavored wine.
“Sorry it has to be like this, but it’s just a formality. The debriefer we’re fetching is a sheltered fellow. He doesn’t like coming between the gates. He requested these restraints because, frankly, mavericks make him nervous. There have been a few unfortunate incidents.”