Unmarked Journey

dozen miles away.

  'I'm beginning to feel slightly useless compared to your girls,' Kai joked.

  'You shouldn't,' Morwen said. 'Body Knowledge has its place.'

  He raised his eyebrows. 'Well, it's a very small place, compared to lasers and rifts.'

  'It won't be useless when it comes to hunting.'

  'Hunting?' he frowned.

  'We'll need to eat somehow. The Founders and the other people we meet will have a hard enough time feeding themselves, let alone us. We can't afford to carry all our food: it'll slow us down. We'll have to catch it ourselves.'

  'Can't you just zap the animals with your laser?' he said, defensively.

  'That will bleed them out. They'll be in agony.'

  He looked blank.

  Elra realized where this was going. 'She means you can stun them first. With your electromagnetism.'

  'Ah, I see,' he said. 'But the distance involved - '

  Morwen interrupted him by aiming a beam at a nearby tree and holding it there, burning a small, smoky hole in its bark. 'Combine your sparks with my beam. Come on.'

  Looking slightly confused, he stood alongside Morwen and tentatively raised his hand.

  'Go on, then,' she egged.

  He loosed a test spark. It snapped onto the light beam, as if magnetized, and shot down its length in an instant. 'Nice,' he said, eyebrows raised.

  'Give us a show, Kai. Is that all you’re made of?' Morwen said suggestively.

  He stood back and extended his arm, grinning. He released a chain of lightning from his hand which turned Morwen's light beam into a vortex of electricity and light. The tree exploded in flames.

  'WHOA!' he and Elra cried.

  Morwen grinned darkly. 'Maybe tone it down a bit when it comes to hunting. We don't want to cook our food as we kill it.'

  Forty-eight

  For the rest of the day Kai was in a good mood. They spent their time rifting between places, getting used to the savannah environment and generally bonding as a group.

  Elra felt a distinction between the rifts she created with the help of Morwen’s anchor marks and the free-standing ones she made herself. The first felt “locked” somehow, since she had no control over the destination: when she created them it was if she was opening an existing weakness in space-time, exploiting an already-forged connection. The ones she created herself were much more nebulous. She could only open them to places she knew or could see; and even then a lot depended on her memory and conception of the place.

  They caught some guineafowl for lunch: Kai and Morwen's combined powers worked perfectly, stunning and killing the bird instantly.

  Morwen's opaqueness gradually faded. She was a woman of few words, most of which were slightly 'off' by most people's standards, but Elra found that under her mysterious surface led a discreet friendliness and a (somewhat dark) sense of humor. She got on especially well with Kai, in a one-upping, older-brother kind of way, despite her age. Then again, neither of them had any idea just how old she really was. Regardless, Elra saw a lot of herself in her: more than in Olympia, strangely.

  Now night was falling and the air was getting cold. They'd been watching a spectacular African sunset from an overhanging crag in the high hills, the huge sun dipping in the sky as if into water, but now it had passed beyond the horizon and the heavens were getting dark. Far above, the half-Moon took over the sun's shift and shone brighter and brighter as the moments wore on. It reminded Elra of something.

  'That night you saved us...'

  'Enabled you to save yourselves,' Morwen retorted, without even listening to her question.

  'Anyway, that night, your beam of light seemed to be coming from - '

  'The moon,' Kai finished. 'Yeah, weird. I'm glad you asked, Elra. That's been puzzling me.'

  Morwen grinned. Without saying another word she stood up and aimed a beam at the Moon. It seemed to fade out of sight far up in the air above them, as the distance made its thin line too difficult to distinguish. About three seconds later another one appeared in the distant sky, one of its ends pointing Moon-wards and the other disappearing behind the hills.

  'You're...'

  'Reflecting it off the Moon?' Kai gasped.

  'I am,' Morwen confirmed. 'Or, should I say, off a reflective part of the lunar surface.'

  'Does... Does it reach that far?' he asked in wonder.

  'Well, clearly it does.’

  'How?'

  'Light travels in a straight line and just keeps on going,' Morwen smiled.

  'So that's how you made the mark on the wall in London,' he finished, finally. 'Because the Earth is curved, you would need a big reflector in the sky to bounce your beam off. And you've got one, right there...'

  'Now you're getting it,' she grinned.

  Elra wasn't satisfied, though. 'But how do you know where to aim on the Moon? And how do you know where the beam is going to land? Over those distances, it just seems so exact.'

  Morwen paused for effect for a moment. Kai and Elra looked at her expectantly. She let the beam disappear and brought her hand back down. She looked at them mysteriously.

  'Magic!’

  Kai laughed. His explosive guffaws startled some nearby birds.

  Elra grinned. 'Alright then, Ms. Magic: scribe a mark on the other side of the world and let's have a five-minute holiday.'

  Morwen looked at Elra, dead serious. 'Now you're thinking big. I've been waiting for you to ask me to do something like this. You're starting to understand your potential. Our potential.' She turned and gave the Moon a narrow-eyed stare for a moment, as if sussing something out. Then, quick as a shot, her hand was back in the air with its intensely white beam pointed heavenwards. About ten seconds later she dropped it back down and scribed the second mark on another nearby rock. 'Shall we?' she said, gesturing to her creation.

  Elra rifted. And then, on top of that hill in the middle of the Tanzanian savannah, stood a doorway to a sandy, tree-less island surrounded by crystal waters. The three of them stepped through, immediately feeling heat hit them. It was day here, and the sun was fierce.

  'Where is this?' Kai asked.

  'A lonely island somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. About fifty miles from the Azores.'

  They sat down on the sand and basked in the warmth and light. Surrounding them with absolute totality was a calm sea, flat and vast; their island felt like a tiny platform suspended between sea and sky, or a tiny rocky planet in infinite space. Elra was overcome with a strange feeling, hard to pin down and to put into words, but for a moment she could almost feel how Cali must feel, a sense of near-total isolation.

  'Out here it feels like we're the last people on the Earth,' she said idly.

  Morwen grinned. 'Maybe we will be, if tomorrow goes wrong.'

  'Thanks for the encouraging thoughts, guys,' Kai grimaced. 'Having said that, I can imagine worse people to share the world with. Re-populating it would be an interesting experience...'

  Elra gave him a funny look. Morwen just smiled.

  They spent a few more minutes sitting in silence, listening to the ocean's quiet song. Elra took off her shoes and let the sea wash over her feet, her toes curled at the cooling sensation.

  After a while, Morwen stood up. 'I think I will go now,' she announced, 'we must rest before tomorrow. Elra, would you mind?'

  Elra duly created a rift to the brothers' village, to the courtyard near the baobab tree. 'I might stick around for a while. It's nice here,' she said.

  'Same,' Kai added.

  'Well, I'll leave you lovers to it,' Morwen chuckled before stepping back to Africa, leaving the two of them alone in the middle of the Atlantic.

  Kai was blushing fiercely. He came and joined Elra by the water’s edge, removing his shoes and following suit with his feet. He edged towards her awkwardly, as if he didn't know where to put himself, until they were side by side, arms brushing.

  'So if tomorrow doesn't work out...,' he began, eyes focused on some faraway nothingness.


  'What do you mean?' Elra countered. 'Tomorrow will be a walk in the park.' She didn't believe it, but it felt good to say it anyway.

  'But say it isn’t. I just want you to know... ' he continued, breaking off mid-sentence, eyes still locked in front.

  'Know what?' Elra said tenderly, with a slight suspicion where this might be going.

  'I dunno,' he finished, looking down. 'I really like you, Elra.

  There was a positive tension welling in Elra's chest, calling for catharsis. She thought how oddly handsome he looked with his lean features and leather jacket, his discreet tattoos and slightly goofy smile. And then she thought about his egocentric mother, his absent father, a childhood raised among people who never really loved him, a crush who was never really present, who worked on an entirely different mental level. Had anyone ever held him in their arms and told him they cared? And all the while he maintained his jovial attitude like a shield, as if all his manic energy and quick jokes could cover up the hurt. ‘I really like you too,’ she finally replied, feeling dumb as soon as the words left her mouth.

  He looked up and smiled, giving her a quick peck on the cheek before getting to his feet. 'Better head back too, I guess. Big day tomorrow.'

  Elra was left feeling slightly empty as she stood up and turned to face him. 'Big day indeed,' she smiled wanly, before tearing the rift that would take them home.

  Forty-nine

  Massur sat in a corner of the Tricula thinking about what he was about to do. All his life he'd been used to obeying orders, carrying out the commands of those above him in the Pillar of Faith's strict hierarchy. He knew some people in his position who