“Could we send another message now?” asked Kyle.
“No! Not without draining you children of all the life you have. You would end up like me, and I’ll not have that, no matter what happens.”
A deep sadness filled Lottie’s ancient voice, but underneath it was an iron backbone that reminded Jack of Grandma X, and convinced him that this really was his great-aunt.
He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but his vision was blurry and it was all he could do to raise his head.
“Ah, Jack is awake,” Lottie said. “Help him up and give him some food.”
Kyle and Tara appeared at Jack’s side, and eased him up by the armpits. He blinked and his eyes cleared. He was still in Lottie’s cabin, and had been lying on an ancient rug that smelled of dust. He let himself be led to a wooden chair and collapsed gratefully into it. Tara gave him a fruit that looked like an orange banana. Kyle pressed a gourd full of liquid into his other hand. Jack stared at them blankly for a moment. It had been so long since he had eaten or drunk anything that he had almost forgotten how to do it.
“What happened to me?” he asked.
“You overused your Gift,” said Lottie from where she lay tucked up in her bed. It looked as though she never moved. Boughs reached over her, all of them laden with produce. All she had to do was reach up and take what she needed. Cornelia sat on one of those boughs, gazing lovingly down at the old woman.
Jack remembered Custer warning him and Jaide about the dangers of using their Gifts too much without eating.
“I didn’t mean to make things so dark,” he said.
“Our Gifts are much stronger here,” Lottie explained. “But the effort of using them still costs you. I’m glad you didn’t work that out earlier, or else you might have drained yourself dry. Three of our number did exactly that. They’re buried out on the port side.”
One thin hand moved slightly, as though to point.
“Are we really in a ship?” asked Jack. He had so many questions, but that was the first one to trip across his lips.
“Yes. We found Omega right where it is. Ships go missing sometimes, when The Evil is trying to break through. This could be one of those. Or else it’s the remains of a previous expedition. There were no logs for us to check. They had been taken or destroyed long ago, along with the crew. We needed somewhere to live, so we just moved in.”
“Try the banana thing,” said Tara. “Seriously. It’ll make you feel a lot better.”
Jack did so, biting numbly until the taste hit him. It tingled like sherbet all along his tongue. Without stopping for breath, he gulped the whole thing down in three bites. Then he sipped from the gourd, which made his parched flesh sing.
“Take it slowly,” Lottie warned him with a tiny but warm smile. “Rest, and I’ll tell you everything. You’re safe here, and that’s the first thing you need to know.”
The oasis, she explained, was as invisible to The Evil as it had been to Jack. Only when Lottie broke her telepathic silence did The Evil have anything to home in on, so she had tried to call them only twice, once at the dead tree and then a second time when they were right on her doorstep. The Evil had followed her first call to the general area of the oasis, which is how it had known where to lay its trap.
“Does that mean it definitely knows where we are now?” asked Kyle, glancing out one of the cabin windows.
“It has a much better idea now, yes,” said Lottie. “But it was worth it. If I had said nothing, you would have died.”
“How did Cornelia know?” asked Jack.
The old woman raised her head and smiled at the bird. “David Smeaton used to take me on day-trips to Rourke Castle. I would bring treats for us to eat, but Cornelia always fished them out. It became quite a competition. I soon learned that I could never hide anything from my old friend here, no matter what charms I employed. Her eyes see the world much more clearly than ours — and her ears and nose, too, I suspect. She could always tell when we were coming, even from miles away.”
Cornelia bobbed her head and seemed to grin through her beak. “Got you!” she cackled.
“What about those creatures back there?” asked Tara. “Some looked like people, but most of them were … weird.”
“Everything and everyone The Evil has absorbed is stored in its vast mind,” Lottie explained. “We’re not the first civilization it has attacked, and we’re not likely to be the last.”
“Project Thunderclap —” Jack started to say.
“Yes, your friends told me something about that,” Lottie said with a roll of her rheumy eyes. “Aleksandr hasn’t changed a bit, has he? Only ever thinking of himself, never seeking a permanent solution. His plan might make humanity safe, but what about other people elsewhere, who live on other worlds? Isn’t it our responsibility to protect them, too? And what about The Evil itself? Doesn’t it have any rights of its own? It’s a living thing. We can’t blame it for being what it is.”
“But what it is,” said Tara, “is evil.”
“Tosh.” With a small gesture, Lottie dismissed the remark. “We have to see beyond our version of reality. The Evil is trying to survive, just like we’re trying to survive. Just like a lion is trying to survive when it eats an antelope. Is the lion wrong? Is The Evil? Maybe from its point of view, we’re the ones who are wrong. That’s hard to imagine, I know, but you’ve got to open your minds. You can’t defeat your enemy unless you understand your enemy, and maybe when you understand your enemy you won’t want to defeat your enemy anymore.”
Jack’s still-woozy brain struggled with this. “Do you mean we should just give up?”
“Of course not! But there are other ways. The Evil is an intelligent being — we know this because it’s so hard to fight. It can reason and plan and communicate. Why can’t we learn to coexist? We owe it to ourselves to try, or else we are no better than monsters ourselves.”
The old woman sighed. “Of course, that’s what brought me here. Trying. I’ve had so many years to wish I’d done things differently, and so many reasons to feel regret, but I remain certain I did the right thing. No one else has studied The Evil as I have. No one else has the knowledge I have of its nature. I must get home to share what I have learned with everyone.”
“We want to take you home,” said Kyle firmly.
“We just don’t know how,” Tara added.
“With your youth and my knowledge,” the old woman said, “I’m sure we can find a way. But first, I must ask you something about the world I left behind. I have heard nothing for so long. I want to know more about my family. Jack, you say you’re my great-nephew, and you have the look of the Shields about you. You’re definitely Giles’s grandson. Tell me about your twin. I want to know all about your parents, my nieces or nephews. And my sister! Oh, she was so against me opening the Bridge. We argued something fierce the night before; she actually threatened to tell Father on me. I don’t suppose he is still alive. Did he ever forgive me? Did he ever live down the shame of a disobedient daughter like me?”
Jack’s stomach clenched around his food. Of course: She wouldn’t know that her father had died the night of the Catastrophe. How was he going to tell her that? She looked so small and frail. He was afraid it might kill her.
But it didn’t. She took the news quietly and silently, offering no more than a nod to confirm that she had heard. Her shining gaze never left Jack’s as he stumbled through the words, and when he was done she reached out, with no small amount of effort, and took his hand. Her fingers felt as dry and light as autumn leaves.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Father was a good man, and a very good Warden. You have something of him in you, I think. Gifts pass down the generations by other means than genes, you know.”
Jack nodded, thinking of his secondary Gift.
“And what of Lara Mae?” she asked. “Did she ever forgive me?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Lara Mae. My sister, your grandmother. Don’t tell me she died as
well?”
“No, she’s very much alive. We call her Grandma X. I don’t know why. Is Lara Mae her real name? Jaide will have a fit we found out first.”
Lottie’s grip tightened, then abruptly let go. Her hand flew to her mouth, and pressed there, as though to keep something terrible inside.
“There is only one circumstance under which a Warden will surrender her name,” Lottie said. “And that is to become the Warden of Last Resort.”
“What does that mean?” asked Jack, leaning forward. Lottie was proving to be a veritable fire hose of information. “Why won’t anyone talk about it?”
“Only the Examiner knows,” Lottie said. “And the Warden herself. People say it is supposed to be horrible, a fate worse than death, and I believe they may be right…. Oh, Lara Mae, what have you done?”
“If it’s so bad, why would she do it?” asked Tara. She had been sitting contentedly by while Jack and his great-aunt caught up on family and Warden business, but this new mystery had her hooked.
Instead of answering, Lottie held up one wrinkled finger. The tip flashed with a bright, silver light. Jack was immediately drawn to it, and so were Tara and Kyle. The silver light was cool and at the same time oddly penetrating. It seemed to drill through the back of their eyes, right into their brains.
“You will not remember,” Lottie said in a soft voice. “I conceal this information from you, until such time as you have need of it. Until then, it is forgotten.”
Her finger curled into her fist and the light went out. The children stayed as they were for a moment, eyes blank as their minds rearranged themselves to tuck away the preceding minutes.
Then Jack blinked. What had they been talking about? His mind had wandered off for a moment. He was clearly more tired than he thought. Lottie was feeling the toll of the excitement, too. She seemed to have aged another ten years.
“We’re going to take you home,” he said firmly.
“With your youth and my knowledge, I’m sure we’ll find a way,” the old woman said with a determination that belied her frailty. “Let’s gather our strength as we make our plans. We will need both if we hope to succeed.”
The sound of a storm-warning siren curled eerily over Portland’s tiled roofs and along its deserted streets. It was dawn on Thursday morning, and the Hawks were making their move. The tent was a whirlwind of people coming and going, many of them via lightning. Above the town, thick clouds were gathering, piling higher and higher into the stratosphere. The strange weather had ordinary meteorologists scratching their heads and ordinary citizens boarding up their windows.
But Aleksandr and his Hawks weren’t the only conspirators on the move that morning. In the passenger seat of a flame-daubed Austin 1600, with her knees up to her chest, Jaide Shield stared sleepily at the townsfolk passing by. The streets were as packed as she had ever seen them. Traffic on the roads to Scarborough and Dogton was down to a crawl. From above came the steady whocka-whocka of her mother’s helicopter. Susan’s paramedic team was there to lend credence to the fake state of emergency that the mayor had declared overnight. Depending on who heard the news, the warnings were either of a storm front or a chemical spill, or whatever theory sounded most credible to them. Jaide wondered if Kyle’s father and his fellow Portland Peregrinators were imagining UFOs, or perhaps a Sasquatch uprising.
School was canceled. The hospital was being evacuated. A pall seemed to fall across Portland as the bruise-colored sky deepened even further to greenish black. Even the cats were evacuating, urged by Kleo and Ari to prowl elsewhere for the day. By midday, the town was expected to be completely empty.
In the meantime, Jaide and Grandma X were parked on the corner of River Road and Station Street. They had been there for an hour.
“What are we waiting for, exactly?” Jaide asked her grandmother. “How big is this thing?”
“Look for a removal truck or something similar,” Grandma X said. She was peering through a pair of binoculars at the traffic inching by, lowering the glasses occasionally to wipe the mist off the windshield. “You’ll know it when you see it. There’s only one lodestone big enough to hold the energy Aleksandr will need. It has to be the one from Avak.”
Jaide was a little fuzzy on what the Avak Lodestone was, or how it was going to be used in their plan. It was an ancient meteorite, she gathered, or a large chunk of one, secretly unearthed by Wardens a long time ago. It could store huge amounts of lightning energy, and then release it all at once, at its controller’s command. There had been talk about tapping into that power, but that was where Jaide had gotten lost. They had been making plans well into the night, and she had started the night tired after the third Examination. Her father was involved. That was all she was sure of.
Grandma X had made her go to sleep for a few hours, but she didn’t think anyone else had stopped to rest. On being woken before dawn, she had found the blue room cleared and the cross-continuum conduit constructor sitting at its center. There was no sign of the professor: Someone had stolen back into the tent and put him where he was supposed to be, so Aleksandr wouldn’t know that he had ever gone missing. Grandma X had been a whirlwind of activity … but now here they were sitting in the car, waiting for Portland to empty and a big rock to drive by. Stefano got to hang out with Hector.
Jaide wondered what Jack was doing. She had tried teeping him several times as she lay tossing and turning, haunted by the empty bed in her room. He hadn’t replied once. She had even tried texting his phone, but the messages had all bounced back, undeliverable. Mentally, and sometimes physically, too, she crossed her fingers and hoped with all her heart that he was safe.
Her wandering gaze caught sight of a familiar face driving by.
“Hey, isn’t that Doctor Witworth?” she said, pointing.
“Indeed it is.” Grandma X seemed unfazed by the reappearance of the woman who had drugged her and then stolen the professor, six months ago. “The Evil’s minions are everywhere. It is not surprising they suspect something. There has never been a gathering of lightning wielders like this, not in all of Warden history.”
“Do you think she’ll try to stop us?”
“Undoubtedly, if she learns what we’re planning.” Grandma X sat up higher in her seat. “Ah, here it is, just as I expected.”
Jaide saw a big white truck lumbering toward them down the road. It sat low on its rear tires, as though carrying something very heavy. Jaide watched it go by Station Street and signal to turn at Gabriel’s Auto Sales. It was definitely heading for the tent.
“Now what?” asked Jaide.
“One moment.” Grandma X’s eyes were closed. “I am just speaking with Hector.”
Jaide waited, with only mild impatience. Ever since she had been inducted into the conspiracy no secrets had been kept from her for long. The answer would come eventually.
Grandma X’s eyes opened. She started the car.
“Now we go join your father,” she said. “It’s time for the lightning wielders to present yourselves at Project Thunderclap.”
* * *
Hector was waiting for Jaide with Stefano when the Austin 1600 pulled up by the oval. He had something hidden under his pullover — either that, thought Jaide, or he had eaten an astonishingly large breakfast.
“All’s ready?” he asked Grandma X. Something passed between them through her open window. It looked like a large, flat black stone, rough on one side, smooth on the other, and Hector’s stomach had returned to normal.
“It is now,” she said. Glancing behind her to make sure Jaide and Stefano were away from the car, she pulled away from the curb and drove home.
“What was that?” Stefano asked as they headed for the tent.
“A piece of the lodestone,” said Hector. “Magnetic meteorites have special properties. We have this small piece here and the large piece in the tent, but for a while it’ll be as though they were never separated. What happens to one will happen to the other. And what goes into one we can take out of
the other.”
It was like an extension cord, Jaide thought. Aleksandr was charging up a giant battery in the tent, and Grandma X could draw from that battery in Watchward Lane. Professor Olafsson had been clear that it would take more than three lightning wielders, two of them troubletwisters, to ensure the safe operation of the Bridge to the realm of The Evil. If they were going to do it safely, they would need to steal from Aleksandr.
At the entrance to the tent, they were greeted by two Warden guards who waved them through. The interior of the tent seemed even bigger than it had been the previous night. Many of the canvas partitions had come down to form a wide central space at the center of which loomed a tall obelisk-like object. The Avak Lodestone, Jaide presumed. Mr. Carver would have approved. It was attached by thick wires to a single metal pole that stuck vertically out of the ground and poked right up through the highest point of the tent. Next to the lodestone was a cross-continuum conduit constructor that Jaide recognized as the one they had found in Rourke Castle, now repaired and shining as new. A crowd of Wardens was assembling around the lodestone and the bass cylinder, some of whom Jaide recognized from the Grand Gathering. Some were in statue form, or paintings, presumably the relics Grandma X had referred to. There was even a tree with a human face carved into the wrinkles and knots of its ancient bark.
Jaide, Hector, and Stefano joined the throng, and moments later Aleksandr stepped up onto a podium to call everyone to order.
“This is a historic day.” His deep voice embraced the crowd and drew everyone in it to his bosom. “Today, our long labor, and the labor of our forebears, will end. Today we usher in a new era of peace and security for all of humanity. Today we defeat The Evil once and for all!”
The crowd cheered.
“Famous last words,” Stefano whispered in Jaide’s ear. “At least, they will be if he’s wrong.”