The remaining woods were nothing like the pleasant knots of beautiful trees Jessica had imagined for herself when she’d first arrived in this dreamscape; many of the trees ahead were dead, toppled over. Walking would be difficult, and the darkness encircling the woods was so thick it looked tarry. These woods might never have seen sunlight. Already, Jessica could hear dead, dry leaves rustling in the belly of the forest. In the wind.
“Wait for me here,” Jessica said. “I’m going with you, in a while.”
“I know,” Lucas said, giving her a brotherly smile. “Soon.”
And he played on.
57
Star Island
4 P.M.
The ceiling on the third floor was quivering, and the walls beneath it trembled in the barreling gusts. One by one, Dawit heard the groans of shutters tearing free and the rapid succession of glass breaking all around them. This lavish house, like many others, would not survive the storm.
The emergency generator had given up. While he and Teferi journeyed to the third floor in the elevator, the doors had opened two inches and then frozen in place as all lights suddenly vanished. The ordeal of prying the doors open had taxed what remained of Teferi’s strength, and Dawit knew his brother would not last much longer. His injury was bleeding internally, and his body, though well trained, was not immune to shock. Teferi’s blood might heal him well enough to maintain his heart and brain, but he would lose consciousness soon. Teferi was drenched with perspiration, walking unsteadily. Still, he was determined to see his son.
As soon as they stepped out of the elevator, they nearly stumbled over the bulky corpse of the last remaining guard, who had planned to wait for them with an ominous assault rifle, a Barrett. Now, the man was splayed across the bullet-riddled floor, and his rifle had spun out of his hand. Once again, the immortals’ skills and technology from below had rendered their adversary helpless before he had a chance to face them. Yes, Dawit reminded himself as he stared at the well-muscled dead man, mortals would not fare well in a war with his kind. Khaldun had been wise to separate them.
Somewhere near them, the wind slammed a door so hard that they heard it splinter. Wind howled loose in the corridor, pinning papers to the walls and sending debris flying near them. Picture frames. Pieces of ceramic. Framed paintings and planters lay broken on the carpeted floor. Behind the closed door at the end of the corridor, crashing furniture and shattering glass were a cacophony. Dawit hoped they would not need to enter that room.
“Which way, Teferi?” Dawit asked.
Struggling for air, Teferi raised his hand and pointed in the direction away from the noise, to a second closed door. “In his bedroom,” Teferi said. “He has no weapon. He is frightened.” Dawit heard the concern of a father in Teferi’s words.
“He must die for what he has done,” Dawit said, praying Teferi would not argue.
“Of course, Dawit,” Teferi said, his jaw turning rigid. Dawit had never seen such solemnity in his brother’s face, except after his rampage in Turkey, when he’d been returned to the colony in chains. He had looked like a ghost then, as he did now. “He should have died long ago. But the fault is mine, not his. I want to see him. And I want his death to be quick.”
“If it will provide any relief for you, let me—”
“No,” Teferi said, his eyes unyielding as he gazed at Dawit. “The task is mine.”
As expected, the bedroom door was locked. Dawit heaved against the door, and it gave easily. The wind tunnel nearly sucked him into the dark room.
Shannon O’Neal, clearly, had lived like a prince. It was hard to imagine the bedroom’s original opulence, given its disarray, but the room was remarkably large, and Teferi’s son had enjoyed a canopied bed, a marble fireplace, and a large rectangular television screen much like a movie theater’s screen, still somehow clinging to his wall. The glass sliding doors far across the room were protected behind shutters, although the shutters were shaking so badly that they were clearly about to lose their battle. A window on the far wall had already broken, and a corner of the ceiling had peeled away, exposing the roof’s beams and a fragment of the outdoor sky. Wind and rain assaulted the room. A collection of marble cherubs lay broken on the floor, their bodies and faces creased with lines that bespoke their age. Antiques, Dawit realized. Books, paintings, and other trinkets also lay buried in the mess, with the books’ pages flipping madly in the winds.
“An original Michelangelo sculpture!” a mournful voice said behind them, straining to be heard over the whining din. “And those books . . . first editions . . .”
The voice was not Teferi’s. Dawit turned.
Shannon O’Neal sat strapped to a motorized wheelchair, just inside the walk-in closet. Dawit sucked in a breath when he saw the small, wrinkled man; O’Neal was hideous, a creature whose appearance offended him so deeply that, for a moment, Dawit felt a visceral fright. He’d often witnessed mortals’ deformity with age, but he had never fathomed that nature could produce such a shrunken, ruined oddity as the one before him. When lightning flashed and lit the room brightly for an instant, the heightened clarity only sickened Dawit, and he stepped backward.
He was barely a man, this wizened relic. After his burning, Dawit himself had looked nearly this monstrous, he remembered. The only difference was that Shannon O’Neal was smaller and more frail, like a dead flower pressed between book pages and long forgotten. His skin, which looked dried of all moisture, seemed matted to his bones, defining every sharp line of the skeleton, which lay too close to the surface. His face, to Dawit, looked like a deeply creased walnut shell, nearly featureless. The man’s two recessed eyes were his only animated characteristic, shining, dark basins above his nose. He was breathing raggedly through oxygen tubes, each breath sounding like a death rattle.
Why would any man choose to live so long if it meant deteriorating to this? Dawit had once been shocked to see the appearance of a daughter after she was eighty years old, which had been trying enough; but he could not imagine how it would feel to see his own child this way. Teferi looked stricken, his mouth fallen. Compassionately, Dawit squeezed his brother’s hand.
“You hurt my feelings, Father. Am I such a disappointment?” the man’s voice rustled.
Teferi’s eyes became tearful, but he did not speak.
“You, of course, look as spry as always,” Shannon O’Neal said. “I am appropriately awed. I would bow down to you if I still had use of my limbs.”
“You have no reason to bow to me, Shannon,” Teferi said, bracing himself against the wall.
“I had enough blood to heal the effects of your fire, but as you can see, I have not retained my youth. Isn’t it a bit unkind of you to stand there in such revulsion? You reduced me to this, Father, through your selfishness. Apparently, not all of us deserve the status of a god.”
“How could you believe I would have denied you if I’d had a choice?” Teferi said, nearly shouting over the wind. “I have always loved you, and I love you still. I could not make you as I am.” Dawit felt a twinge, suddenly remembering the desperation on Alexis’s face when she’d asked him to perform the Ritual on the fallen scientist. He hoped she had sought safety in a closet, but somehow it seemed more likely that she was still trying to circulate the dead man’s blood, still hoping. Shannon O’Neal’s fierce desire to live forever had motivated him to treachery, but Alexis was risking her life to help the scientist, just as he had lost his to help her. Khaldun’s Covenant had been designed to prevent the creation of monsters like Shannon O’Neal—of that, Dawit was now certain. But not all mortals, clearly, were the same as this man.
“The blame is mine,” Teferi said sadly. “I loved you too much, Shannon. Too much.”
At that, Dawit thought he saw a flicker of emotion cross the old man’s face, a sign that he felt something besides contempt and anger for Teferi. “No, Father,” the old man said, his voice so unsteady and soft he could barely be heard. “You did not love me enough. No father should be co
ntent to watch his children age and die.”
“It never contented me, Shannon. That was why I gave you blood when you were ill.”
“Mere drops! I deserved more. I deserved to be like you!” To Dawit, despite the obvious signs of his age, O’Neal sounded like a spoiled young child.
“And what of your children?” Dawit said, breaking in. He loathed hypocrisy, and Shannon O’Neal was as narcissistic a man as he had ever encountered. “I see you have used your stolen blood to curry much favor and wealth, but what of your progeny? You must have very aged children, if you have shared your blood with them. And grandchildren! Where are they?”
Suddenly, Shannon O’Neal was trembling in anger. “You know I hadn’t enough blood to share. I could not save them all.”
“Nor could I, Shannon,” Teferi said. “I could not save my mortal children, and that curse lives with me daily. I mourn as you mourn. If it had been within my power, I would have exchanged your life for mine. But that was not to be. There are laws for my kind.”
“I am your son!” Shannon roared, nearly yanking the oxygen tubes from his nose as his head jerked forward. His hands drew into fists as he struggled to breathe. “What law is higher than that?”
Teferi staggered, leaning against Dawit. At first, Dawit thought his brother had been injured by Shannon O’Neal’s words, but then he realized Teferi was on the verge of losing consciousness. His weapon was unsteady in his hand, dangling at his side.
“It is time, brother,” Dawit whispered to him.
With glassy, defeated eyes, Teferi nodded.
As if in concert with Teferi’s thoughts, the wind suddenly chugged loudly, and the shutter ripped from the glass sliding door like paper. As the glass doors buckled and then shattered, the wind crashed inside, hurtling furniture across the room. Dawit heard a tremendous moaning from the structure around them, and he realized the walls would soon give, too.
Shannon O’Neal’s wheelchair lurched backward, deeper into the closet, as he fumbled with the mechanized control. O’Neal had apparently believed that this room would be his sanctuary, but he had been mistaken. Soon, the top floor of his house was going to be no more than rubble. How ironic, Dawit thought, that Shannon O’Neal had lived all these years from the blood he stole, yet would surely have died in the storm today because of his false sense of immortality.
Even now, O’Neal’s eyes twinkled weakly with hope.
“It is not too late for me, Father!” Shannon O’Neal cried.
Teferi suppressed a small sob. “Yes, my dear son, it is.”
The deafening sound of a large section of the rooftop flying free concealed Teferi’s gunshot, but the pellet opened a dime-sized spot of blood between Shannon O’Neal’s eyes. Teferi pursed his lips and fired a second time, then a third. Tears, perspiration, and rainwater coated his face.
This time, at long last, Teferi allowed for no mistakes.
58
4:13 P.M.
Jessica struggled to stand, but her legs and arms would not obey her. Even here in this world of dreams, her body had been sapped of its strength. She couldn’t blame her weakness on the winds, even though they blew so fiercely that they burned her skin; this weakness had followed her from the world of reality that lay at the edge of a distant, unseeable horizon, where she knew she must be lying unconscious on the floor of her parents’ house. Bleeding to death.
“Fana!” she tried to scream, but her voice was lost, too. She had lost it long ago.
The woods looked like the result of generations of misery, populated by dead, hollow trees with a swampy, stinking floor. The silhouettes of the ghost trees seemed to bray and celebrate over her, their craggy branches shaking with laughter. Jessica felt a vague sense that she was sinking into the muck, but she was not aware enough to be sure. All she knew was that she couldn’t go on.
So this is it, then, she thought. This is all.
She had not allowed thoughts of defeat to enter her mind before, buoyed by her faith that a God-loving mother could reach her child, no matter what. But now, like a slow infestation of ants crawling over discarded lunch meat, Jessica felt defeat smothering the last of her hopes. She had suffered, but maybe suffering wasn’t enough. Maybe her love for Fana wasn’t enough. Maybe, in the end, even God wasn’t enough. Had she been foolish to believe it?
What if she was already dead?
“Oh, my God, my God,” Jessica whispered, trying to find the last of her sanity. “This place isn’t real. I’m not dead. I’m only looking for Fana.” She gasped in a deep breath and tried, once again, to shout. This time, she was able to croak, “Fana, where are you?”
But when the only response was yet another shriek of winds, Jessica’s eyes filled with tears. Her tormentor, whatever it was, whoever it was, washed her in the terror and grief of the countless others who were also facing the winds, and Jessica’s mind nearly collapsed from their collective suffering. So many people! Thousands of them would die in this storm.
“You can’t . . . win,” Jessica said, trying to shut out the images of drowning faces and collapsing homes. “And you can’t have her. Do you hear me? You can’t.”
With the last of her strength, Jessica propped herself up on her elbows in the patch of black muck where she’d fallen, gazing out past the wretchedness around her to look for her child.
“Fana, come. Please come,” she said, not even sure if she’d spoken the words aloud. “Please.”
• • •
Fana woke up with a start. She’d been sleeping deeply in her cubbyhole since eating the butterscotch and sending The Man away, but suddenly she was certain she’d heard her mother’s voice. Not a trick, but her real voice. Calling her.
And the voice had sounded close. Maybe she had come, after all.
“Mommy?” she whispered to no one. And no one answered her. As long as she could remember, almost every time she’d woken up, the first face she’d always seen was her mommy’s. But now, her mommy wasn’t here, and suddenly Fana had never missed her mother so much. Her need to see her mommy was stronger than the anger she’d felt. Now, she couldn’t even remember why she had been mad at her mommy and The Man. Why hadn’t she asked him how she could go back home? Instead, she was still stuck here in the not-real place, just as Moses had warned her, and she was so, so tired of the sound of wind.
Fana peeked from her cubbyhole, and she could barely see anything except the outlines of ugly trees without leaves. These trees had been dead a long time, because nothing grew where the Bee Lady lived. Fana knew that for a fact.
“Mommy!” Fana yelled out toward the trees, hoping to hear the voice again.
There was a long silence. Fana counted the seconds the way her mommy and Aunt Alex had taught her—one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand—and she counted all the way up to twenty before she heard her mother’s voice again. This time, the voice was in her head.
Yes, it’s me, Fana. Please come. Please. Hurry, before it’s too late.
Fana’s face broke into a smile, but then she remembered that it might only be the Bee Lady making funny voices, trying to trick her so Giancarlo or Kaleb could catch her. But The Man had told her they weren’t real, hadn’t he? He had told her they weren’t really here.
Fana tried to remember that when she climbed out of her cubbyhole and set out on the dirt path toward the scary-looking woods. Sure enough, there in the distance, she could see two men in the path before her, trying to block her way. Their faces were hidden in shadows, but she could tell that the skinny one was Giancarlo, and the bigger one was Kaleb. They were together, waiting.
Fana’s heart raced, and she stopped. She didn’t feel the hate feeling, not anymore. The Man had said they weren’t really there. That was what he had said.
Suddenly, Fana smiled, remembering something she’d felt at the co-lo-ny, when The Man had hugged her and opened up a bright place in her mind, showing her parts of herself she had never seen. It was not a picture or a place or even a thi
ng—but it was alive, and it was inside her. And she remembered how the feeling had made her so happy that she had cried.
A little piece of that feeling came back to Fana then, a sliver of a memory, but it was enough to make her laugh. It felt so good to laugh! Fana laughed on, running toward the two shadow men while her hair flew behind her in the wind.
Giancarlo or Kaleb could never do anything to her. That was so silly! She could run right through them, and that was exactly what she planned to do. Fana closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see their faces, and she ran faster, leaning forward, ready.
She was Fana. Her name meant light. The Man had told her so. He had also told her she was stronger than anyone else who had ever lived.
And her mommy was waiting for her.
• • •
Jessica opened her eyes. Fana was standing over her, her dreadlocks draping her shoulders.
Jessica didn’t want to trust her eyes at first. Maybe this was the Fana-thing she’d met back at her parents’ house, ready to torment her with songs and insults. But as she gazed at her daughter’s bright eyes and her grinning mouth full of those familiar baby teeth, enlightenment flushed through Jessica’s veins, cleansing her. She trembled, feeling faint from joy.
“Fana . . . ?” she said, braving her stripped throat. She blinked. “Is that you, baby?”
Fana reached a tiny hand toward her. “It’s me, Mommy. Let me help you up.”
Jessica tried to sit up by herself, but the stinking muck held her fast in place, thicker than mud. She could no longer see her legs, which were buried in the tar. Muck had seeped across her torso, past her elbows, nearly across her chest. She was too weak. She was dying.
“You can’t . . . lift me by yourself, Fana,” Jessica whispered. “Don’t worry about me. You just need to worry about that wind. Stop the wind, Fana. Stop the storm.”
Maybe this was death, Jessica thought, but she no longer felt defeated or helpless. She had been able to see her child again, to reach her. Everything else, compared to that, was only a trifle. The sob that rose in her throat this time was one of profound relief. There was time to save lives. The Shadows hadn’t stolen her daughter, not this time. Not yet.