Armageddon's Children (25 page)

He laughed. “Only enough that I gave up dinner to come see you.”

“That’s all? Only dinner?”

“That’s all I had time to give up. What else do you want?”

She stared at him. “I don’t know. Everything, I guess.” She smiled self-consciously and reached into her jacket pocket. “I brought the pleneten. Six doses wrapped in cold packs. It should be enough for Persia. Keep them cold until she takes them. Have Tiger do the same while they’re stored.”

He nodded, accepting the packs and sticking them deep into his side pocket. The pleneten came in tablets that were easily transported. He would take them to Tiger tomorrow at midday, as promised.

She took his hands and led him over to the bench where they liked to sit during their visits. He wrapped one arm about her shoulders and cradled her against him. “Thanks for doing this.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

He sensed something. “It went okay, didn’t it?”

“I might have been seen.”

He felt himself grow cold inside, and for a moment he didn’t say anything in response. “Seen by whom?” he managed finally.

She sighed and lifted her head from his shoulder. “There was another girl working in the medical supply room. She caught me in the refrigeration cabinet where they store the pleneten. I made up a story about doing an inventory, but everyone knows that inventories are only done by assignment and at certain times.”

“Do you think she might tell someone?”

“She might.”

“Then you shouldn’t go back.”
Because you know what will happen if you do and they find out you’ve been stealing medical supplies,
he wanted to add, but didn’t. “You should come with me.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“I know you
think
you can’t.”

She drew back from him. “Why must we always have this argument, Hawk? Every time I see you! Why can’t we be together without talking about the future?” She squeezed his hands sharply. “Why can’t we just be in the present?”

He had thought he would be able to lead into this more gradually, but that wasn’t the way things were working out. He bent close, so that their faces were almost touching.

“Because,” he whispered. “Because of everything.” He took a deep breath. “Listen to me, Tessa. I told you last night that you had to be careful about going out of the compound, that the Weatherman had found an entire nest of dead Croaks down on the waterfront. But there’s more. We came across a Lizard two days ago that was just all ripped apart. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know anything that could have done it. Then, earlier today, we were down in a warehouse basement and Candle’s voices warned her to get out of there. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. There was something there, something big and dangerous, hiding on the other side of a collapsed wall.”

She started to speak, but he put his fingers to her lips. “Wait, there’s more. Last night, after I came back from seeing you, Candle was waiting up for me. She was shaking, she was so afraid. She’d had one of her visions, a bad one. It was of something huge coming to the city, something that was going to kill us all.”

He touched her cheek, then stroked her hair. “Candle doesn’t make these things up. The voices are real, and they have never been wrong. I don’t think they’re wrong this time. But I don’t know what to do about it. I haven’t told anyone but you. Do you know why that is? Because I can’t do
anything
without you. I have to get the Ghosts out of the city to someplace safe. But I won’t go without you. I can’t leave you. I won’t ever leave you.”

She nodded, biting her lip and reaching up with her hands to hold his head steady as she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth. There were tears in her eyes. “What am I supposed to do about my mother? You can’t ask me to leave her!”

His gaze was fierce. “You’re all grown up, Tessa; you’re not a child. We belong together—you and me. We’re ready to start our own life. To do that, you have to leave her. That’s just the way of things. She has your father; he can look after her. You would be leaving her, in any case, if we were to marry. Isn’t that what you want for us?”

She shook her head. “I’ve told you before! You could come live in the compound! You could be with me there!”

He lost control and shook her hard. “What are you talking about? That’s nonsense! When they caught us together outside the compound—what was it, six months ago—your father forbid you from ever seeing me again. He told us both that it wasn’t something that he would allow, his daughter with a street kid, the member of a tribe. He said that! Others in the compound were even worse. Some wanted you cast out on the spot. They worried you might have picked up diseases that could be transmitted to them. Some would have thrown you from the walls. Do you think that if we tell them we want to get married, it will change any of that?”

He put his hand on her mouth as she tried to speak. “Wait, don’t say anything. Let me finish. Let me get it all out. I didn’t argue about it at the time. I didn’t know what to say. I just knew I didn’t want to lose you. So we’ve been meeting like this ever since, you sneaking out at night, me sneaking down here through the ruins. But we both know how it’s going to end. Sooner or later we’re going to get caught—unless we find another way to live our lives.”

He exhaled sharply, his energy exhausted. “We’re right on the edge of something. I can feel it. Step the wrong way, and we are lost. Step the right way, and we will never lose each other. But you have to leave the compound. You have to leave and come with me to wherever it is that we have to go to be safe and together. Your parents won’t understand. Nothing you can say will make them understand. We could offer to take them with us, but you know as well as I do that they wouldn’t come. What will happen is that they will make sure you don’t leave, either.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know that.”

“I
do
know that. I know it as surely as I know how I feel about you.”

Tessa stared silently at him, then wiped the tears from her eyes. “I have to think about this. I have to give it some time.”

Time is something you don’t have,
he wanted to say, but he managed to keep himself from doing so. “I know,” he said instead. “I know.”

They sat together on the bench, holding each other and not speaking, looking off into the dark. Hawk kept wondering if there was something else he should say, something that would better persuade her. But he couldn’t think of what it would be. So he settled for keeping her close for the time they had, soaking in her warmth and her softness, giving himself some small measure of comfort before she was gone again.

“A foraging party went out early last week,” she said suddenly, not looking at him, her face buried in his shoulder. She didn’t continue right away, but then said very quickly, “There were eleven of them, all experienced, all heavily armed. They went south toward the warehouses twenty or thirty miles outside the city, looking for fresh medical supplies and packaged goods to bring back to the compound. It was a five-day expedition.” She paused, as if waiting on him, and then said, “It’s been a week, and they haven’t come back. One of them is my father.”

He could hear the fear in her voice now, could sense the deep abiding terror she was feeling. His warnings about Candle’s vision and the strange things happening in the city had done that. He wished he had saved it for another time. But it was too late to take it back.

“There are eleven of them carrying weapons,” he said, trying to reassure her. “They know what they are doing. They can protect themselves.”

He could feel her head shake in disagreement. “The Croaks and that Lizard you told me about would have known what they were doing, too. They should have been able to protect themselves, too, but look what happened.”

“It isn’t the same. Eleven armed men can stand up to anything. Your father will be all right.”

He wished he believed it. He wished he could think of something more reassuring. He knew how she felt about her father and mother and what it would do to her to lose either of them.

You’re so stupid,
he told himself angrily.

“I have to get back,” she said suddenly, breaking away. She rose and went over to the door, then looked back at him. “Will you come again soon?”

He rose. “If you promise to be careful, I will. In two nights, okay?”

She came back to him quickly and pressed herself against him. “You’re the one on the streets.”

“Sometimes the streets are safer.”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me.”

“I love you.”

“I love you more.” She kissed him hard, then broke away, her black eyes shining, her face radiant with her feelings. “I want you. I want everything from you. I want to be with you forever.”

She kissed him again, and then turned and bolted back through the tunnel door and was gone. He stood listening to the locks fasten and then to the silence. He was flushed with excitement and riven by fear. He could barely contain his feelings. Two words played themselves over and over in his mind.

Don’t go.

K
IRISIN
,”
BIAT WHISPERED
to him through the crack in the open door. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

The Elven boy looked over his shoulder at his friend and caught a glimpse of his thin, pinched face in the pale haze of the candlelight. “Just finishing,” he said.

“Do you know what time it is?”

Kirisin shook his head. “It’s not dawn, I know that.”

There was a despairing sigh as Biat’s face disappeared and the door closed. Kirisin went right back to writing.

He was sitting on the tiny veranda of the home that the six of them shared—Biat, Erisha, Raya, Jarn, Giln, and himself. Four were from the Cintra and two had traveled from other places to participate in the choosing. The greater portion of the Elven nation resided in the Cintra, but other, smaller communities were scattered around the world in similar forests. The Ellcrys could have settled on using only Elves who lived close for her Chosen. But something made it pleasing to her that they should come from all over, and so it had been for as long as anyone could remember. She was who she was, after all, so she could have what she wanted.

When Kirisin saw her for the first time, it took his breath away. There were trees of great magnificence and beauty, and then there was the Ellcrys. She was tall and willowy and had a presence that transcended majesty or grace. Silvery bark and crimson leaves formed an aura about her canopy so that the shimmer of her foliage suggested feathers and silk. She was magic, of course; what tree that looked like this could be otherwise? She was the only one of her kind, created centuries ago to maintain the Forbidding, the barrier behind which the demonkind had been shut away in the time of Faerie. So long as she lived, they could never break free. The Chosen were her servants, selected to safeguard her. It was an honor of immense proportions, but one that did not include questioning her motives or reasons. Service to the Ellcrys required a devotion and obedience that did not allow for satisfying personal curiosity.

Still, Kirisin wished he understood her better. So little was known, and most of that was what had been gleaned from years of service and passed down through generations of Chosen. The Ellcrys had been alive for thousands of years, but almost all of what had been written about her at the time of her creation was lost. Like so much of everything else that was Elven, he reminded himself. Like the magic, in particular. Once the world had been full of magic, and the Elves had commanded the greater part of it. But the Elves had lost their magic, just as they had lost their way of life. In the beginning, they had been the dominant species. Now they were little more than rumor. Humans populated the world now, and they had no understanding of magic. All they understood was how to savage the land, how to take what they wanted and not care about the harm it caused.

Humans, he thought suddenly, were destroyers.

He brushed aside his mop of blond hair and wrote it down, adding it to his other thoughts. He wrote in his journal each night before going to sleep, putting down his musings and his discoveries so that he would have a record of them when his term of service was done. Maybe if others had done the same centuries earlier, there wouldn’t be so much no one knew anything about now. Particularly where the Ellcrys was concerned.

The Chosen were the logical scribes to make those recordings, of course, but few did. Their period of service was brief. Selected during the summer solstice from among the boys and girls who had just passed into their first year of adulthood, they served for a single year and then relinquished the duty to a new group. The tree never chose more than eight or fewer than six. Just enough to perform the required duties of tending to her needs and caring for the gardens in which she was rooted.

The choosing itself was ritual. All of the candidates passed beneath the branches of the tree at dawn on the day of the solstice. Those who would become the new Chosen were touched lightly on the shoulder by one of the tree’s slender branches, the only time she would ever communicate with them. How she made her choices, how she decided who would serve her for the next twelve months, was a mystery no one had ever solved. That she was a sentient being was not open to dispute. The lore made it clear that she had been created so, and that the nature of her creation, though vague in the histories that described it, required she experience a constant human connection. Thus the presence of the Elves who looked after her daily, and the ongoing protection of the community that relied on her.