Prometheus Road (19 page)

Rising from the waves as they ran toward the beach by the rain forest, Tempest began to think they had a chance of escaping. Then she saw the four knights in silver armor running toward them.

“I was hoping we wouldn’t have to use this,” Magnus said, reaching down to crank open the hatch on a gently bobbing tube that led straight down into the murky waters of the bay. His dark robes dripped water on the floating wooden dock, and his wet hair lay plastered against his head. “But it should still work.”

The hatch creaked as Magnus used both hands to pry it open. A musty smell of damp, oily metal made Tom wrinkle his nose in disgust. “What is it?”

“Minisub,” Magnus grunted. “They used a lot of them when they built the northern transbay tube to Sausalito, and this one still works. I hope.” He glanced over his shoulder at the black smoke boiling from the wreckage of the battleship about two miles away. “Dead Man’s a better submarine driver than I am—he had one of the BART construction jobs—but I’ll get us to our destination. We aren’t going far, and we’ll stay just under the surface. No deep dives for this old tub.” He patted the hatch like it was an old friend.

Tom glanced at the battleship, wondering if Dead Man had been able to draw attention away from their escape. The gaping hole in the lower part of the hull allowed more water inside the ship than usual, but it hadn’t sunk any farther because it was already resting on the bottom of the shallow bay.

Tom’s memory of recent events was fragmented, starting with his sudden descent from the battleship when Dead Man threw him over the railing. He remembered the bubbling roar of battleship parts splashing into the bay around his semiconscious body, Magnus hauling him onto the mud, Helix barking in his ear, and a stumbling run through water weeds and muck in the predawn light. Just before Magnus had dragged Tom back into the water, Tom had glimpsed Dead Man throwing rocks at an enforcer that had started to chase them. Tom had seen one of the enforcer tanks only once before, patrolling the shoreline near the mountain of the gods while Tom drifted quietly past on one of his early-morning “floats.” At first, he’d thought someone was driving an old truck, then he saw the metal tracks ripping up the dark soil, and the man-shaped torso that sprouted from the top of the tank’s turret. Supposedly, the enforcers were failed nanoborgs whose bodies had not survived the training or the cybernetic implants—their minds trapped inside the steel hulks of enforcer units—but Tom wasn’t sure if the rumors were true, and he didn’t want to ask Magnus.

“Are we going to wait for Dead Man?” Tom already missed the wiry old corpse and hoped he’d be okay.

Magnus shined a flashlight beam down through the hatch and squinted at the ladder. “He’ll meet us at the train station, assuming we get there in one piece.” He gestured toward the hatch. “You first. It’s a tight fit, so haul yourself all the way forward into the observation blister, then I can climb down into the driver’s seat.”

Tom eyed the hatch dubiously. “You’re sure this is safe?”

“I checked the sub last month, and it was still floating. Let me know if you step off the ladder and drown.”

Tom smirked at him. “You’re a funny guy.”

“Who’s kidding?”

Helix growled at the smell wafting out of the sub. Although Tom had watched Helix carefully, the little dog had not said a single word since the previous night. Tom had already begun to think that his conversation with Helix was part of the same dream where he’d imagined floating around in a fog with Dead Man before being roused by the angry Magnus. Tom knew the guardian had been summoned to destroy the battleship because he’d been stupid enough to sleep out on the deck in full view of the orbiting surveillance satellites, and the knowledge bothered him. Everywhere he went, his presence seemed to bring death to his friends and family. Yet Magnus, whom Tom still couldn’t think of as his uncle, was risking his own life, and Dead Man’s earthly existence, to rescue Tom, train him, and send him off on some mysterious quest that was sure to get him killed when he confronted the gods, or the nanoborgs, or whatever other automated defense chose to place itself in Tom’s path. Sandoval was another casualty of having come in contact with Tom. He felt the responsibility of so many deaths as a crushing weight on his back, and he didn’t know if he had the strength to bear it much longer.

Tom shook his head. Tempest had been right to send him away. She was safer without him, and his offer to bring her with him into the wasteland was nothing more than a moment of selfish insanity. Her loss was another result of his many misdeeds, and the death of her brother, Humboldt, must have sealed an enduring hatred of Tom into her heart, for she must have known that Humboldt had been killed while tracking Tom. He took a deep breath to clear his head, pushing thoughts of Tempest to the back of his mind. He had enough to worry about already.

Magnus held Helix in his arms while Tom awkwardly stepped off the dock, steadied himself with one hand on the hatch, and inserted his legs into the open tube. He wrinkled his nose again. “Phew. This isn’t just some big sewage pipe that runs down into the bay?”

Magnus frowned. “I hope not. If it is, we’ll have to hoof it down to the train station.”

The rungs of the ladder were cold and damp. The dark metal surface was pitted with corrosion that scraped against Tom’s fingers. Each footstep on the ladder prompted a hollow echo from below. His shoulders scraped against the hatchway walls as he wriggled his way down the shaft. He felt as if he were descending into a metal tomb.

At the base of the ladder, the first thing Tom did was to bang his head against a metal strut. His boots made a hollow sound as they clumped against the steel deck. In the dim illumination from the flashlight Magnus was holding, he crouched to keep his head below the rest of the struts on the low ceiling. The walls were lined with pipes, valves, instrument panels, and the occasional porthole. Ahead of him, murky light filtered through the thick glass of the observation bubble on the nose of the sub. A small fish bounced against the glass, then darted away. Tom dropped to his hands and knees. A thin layer of water burbled along the deck, and it would have soaked the legs of his pants if they weren’t already waterlogged.

“Comfy?” Magnus asked. His voice echoed briefly as Tom heard the creaking complaint of the hatch being pulled shut.

Tom settled down on his stomach, with his head and shoulders inside the observation blister. Helix climbed onto Tom’s back and lay down for a nap. Tom felt Magnus brush against his feet as he moved to the sub controls, which Tom couldn’t clearly see without making a great effort to turn around. When his bones began to vibrate, he knew that Magnus had powered up the fuel cell.

“We’ve got power to the main prop,” Magnus said, although Tom could barely hear him over the noise that thrummed through the hull. Bubbles began to stream past the observation blister when they gently eased forward, and he heard a variety of gurgling noises to accompany the continuous vibration flowing through his body. The water on the deck swirled around to Tom’s right side as the sub banked to make a turn. After all of his recent exertions, Tom began to doze off despite the strange environment.

“Good. Get some rest,” Magnus said. It was kind of eerie how the old man knew what he was doing without seeing his face. “Breathe deeply and review what Dead Man showed you last night. We don’t have much time left, and I need to prepare you for the rest of your journey. You’ve experienced many things since your training began, but you still need to learn how to create your own path through the world and how to reach the Road. You must learn this now, because we don’t know what will be waiting for us at the train station.”

Tom was too tired to argue, but he noticed that Magnus knew about his “dream” experience with Dead Man. He closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths, exhaling slowly and evenly. The hum and vibration of the sub relaxed him further, taking him deeper.

“The mixture of the vision vine is still in your system, gradually working on your body, speeding the process of change that will help you on your way. As you gain more experience, you’ll be able to control this process, and that’s the secret to protecting yourself from the poison in your system. You have no choice.”

Tom blinked, then glowered at Magnus as he was reminded of the poison slowly taking his life away. “What if I don’t learn how to stop this poison? Is there another antidote?”

“No. But you’ll learn. You’re most of the way there already, and, when the time comes, I’ll be there to help you. Now, close your eyes again and breathe.”

Knowing that Magnus would be around to help him made Tom feel better about the poison, and he had already resigned himself to the knowledge that he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. If Magnus and Dead Man had both been exposed to the same poison and survived to talk about it, then there was a good chance that Tom would also live through the experience.

Relaxing once more, Tom watched as the sub worked its way through a maze of dark outlines of broken hulls, open hatchways to nowhere, the dead eyes of portholes, and other unidentifiable pieces of the many shipwrecks resting on the muddy bottom of the bay. Helix began to snore softly on Tom’s back, and Tom shut his eyes.

Magnus spoke softly. “There is something I should warn you about, Tom. You will gain great power by becoming a master of the Road. You can do amazing things there, and as you learn to operate in that environment you will be drawn back again and again. The Road will call you, and that call is a great responsibility because it can turn into an addiction to power. The more time you spend on the Road, the greater its hold on you will become. That’s fine up to a point, and you won’t need to worry about reaching your limits for a while, but the Road should not be used for frivolous purposes because it will eventually exact a price on you. The things that live along the Road will become too familiar with your presence, and they will attempt to keep you there. If you had mastered the fog, you would have been able to use it along the Road, just as I do, to help hide your presence. But the fog is not your ally.”

Magnus paused for a moment, driving the point home before he continued. “You must also learn how to handle yourself in the Dead Lands, just as you have learned how to function in Stronghold, but there is a difference among the shadows. The Dead Lands are far more dangerous, and the dead can claim you if they find any weakness in your spirit, or if you spend too much time in their domain. We all want to make contact with the loved ones that we’ve lost, but there is a proper time for joining them, and you must restrict your visits to the Dead Lands until then. You don’t need to fear the shadows—they maintain the balance between light and dark, and you will learn to move between the two. A master of the Road can go anywhere, but remember the price. There is always a price.”

Tom kept his eyes closed, but the prospect of seeing his family again almost made him sit up. Was it really possible? Were they waiting for him in the Dead Lands? He’d have to learn how to reach them as soon as possible.

“This is the hard part,” Magnus said, banking the sub in another turn. “To reach the Road, you must develop the ability to release your physical body at will, as if you were going to sleep. When you have the strongest need to reach the Road, you may be in a situation where it’s dangerous to leave the physical world behind, but this is the only way. And that’s why the ability to relax quickly is so important. Time runs at a different speed when you’re on the Road, and it will often be a simple matter to accomplish your business there and return to your physical body before anything harms it, but that also means you can’t wait to fall asleep like an untrained dreamer. Meditation will eventually teach you to reach the Road without losing total contact with your physical form. For now, when time is short, it’s quicker for you to relax and go to sleep, then you can learn to be aware of your environment in the dream state. Once you have control of your dreams, you can move on to the Road through your energy body.”

Magnus’s droning voice was almost hypnotic. Tom understood what he was saying, and he knew he’d remember it, but he also felt himself slipping further into the darkness, using a different sort of effort to send himself deeper within.

“There is nothing more important that you have ever done in your life,” Magnus continued. “Your body and spirit are ready to demonstrate your new abilities if your mind will get out of the way. You must let go to gain control. When you learn this lesson, you will have power, and you will be able to do things that no other man has been able to do. Your genes make you special, just as your parents were both special in unique ways, and the Dominion has remained vigilant for decades to prevent one such as you from being born to challenge them. That’s why your parents were so careful to hide your special qualities. You had to fit in. But now, the butterfly must emerge from the cocoon. This may not make sense to you now, but you will experience the truth when you reach the Road.”

The hollow sound of Magnus’s voice disappeared into an eerie silence. Focusing inside his head, Tom opened his “other” eyes and saw his own sleeping form resting peacefully beneath him. He began to panic, then remembered to look at his hands, and he did so without effort. He looked around in the glowing white fog, but he seemed to be alone this time until he heard a soft bark. Turning his head to the right, he saw Helix spiraling toward him through the fog with a happy expression on his furry face.

“Follow me,” Helix said, his tongue hanging out as he spiraled on past Tom’s head.

“Where?” Tom asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer because he feared losing the little dog. He jogged in the direction of the dog’s flight, then realized it wasn’t necessary to move his legs. Still in a standing position, he began to fly along behind Helix, easily keeping the spinning body in sight through the silent white clouds.

After what seemed a long time, something moved in his mind, flexing like a rediscovered muscle, and the white mist was gradually infused with the brilliant glow of a golden sunset. He sensed the mists flowing around him, thinning and shifting to the color of a blue summer sky high in the mountains. He still had no sense of direction, and could only intuit up or down from his current orientation. Without reference points he was lost, and he doubted he could find his way back to his sleeping body, but the presence of Helix calmed him so that he didn’t worry. More colors and shapes appeared: soft blocks of lemon yellow amber, spires of jade green, a smooth surface of translucent gray moonstone moving by beneath his feet, walls of faceted blue topaz. The colored objects remained fuzzy and indistinct, as if his eyes refused to focus on them as he shot past.