Scavenger of Souls (14 page)

The words of the dead man chilled me, but I kept my eyes focused on the screen.

“We need a permanent settlement if we're to continue our work,” his younger brother replied. “Father”—and he gestured at the silent, hulking man between them—“agrees with me. You would too, if you weren't too stubborn to see the truth.”

Laman gritted his teeth and spoke in the low voice I now knew he'd inherited from his father. “The truth,” he said, “is that the past is gone. It's not stubbornness to admit that.”

“The past,” Athan said, “but not the future.”

Again Laman laughed. “I've had my say. We can cling to an impossible dream, or face the ugly reality. The Skaldi don't care either way. But which way will save us, Athan? The human race has tried your way before. It's what brought us here.”

The Athan figure raised an arm in protest, but Udain silenced him with a wave of his powerful hand.

“Your brother has spoken, Athan,” he said. “He hasn't changed his position since our work began, and I don't expect him to change it now. I might ask what his alternative is, what hope he thinks there is in wandering the desert until the Skaldi destroy us all. But luckily”—and his teeth gleamed white beneath his dark mustache—“I don't have to ask, and he doesn't have to answer. This is no democracy, Laman. We
will
build according to your brother's design. All that remains in doubt is whether you'll be here when we're finished.”

The room fell silent, and I felt myself holding my breath as my eyes traveled the circle looking for someone to come to Laman's support. No one did. Athan's smile turned smug. His older brother stood, his uniform as immaculate in the protograph as his father's still was. By the time I knew Laman Genn, his uniform would be ragged, soiled, no less than the man who wore it. But his face showed no compromise as he spoke across his father to the boy who'd defeated him.

“You'll build your settlement,” he said. “And your machine. But it won't save you. The power to kill can't save. Remember that, brother, when I'm gone.”

In the unsparing lens of the protograph, he started for the missing door of the room, until his father stopped him with a touch of the button on his cuff.

“Did you ever see him again?” I said.

Udain shook his head. He touched another button, and the Laman on the screen wobbled unnaturally and began to walk backward, his mouth movements producing no sound, sitting down as he'd stood, the brothers and their father wordlessly speaking their parts in reverse. Udain's thick finger moved to the first button, and I watched Laman stand again, heard him pronounce his final words. Back and forth, the buttons were pushed, the figures moved through time, flexible but fixed. And always the father stopped the image before his son exited the room, before he lost him forever.

“You built your camp here,” I said.

“Twenty-eight years ago,” he answered. “We'd found the
remains of a military base, and we used it as the foundation of our own compound. It took three years to rebuild, another ten to perfect Athan's device. We lost some few to Skaldi, but the beam held. In the meantime we heard rumors of a smaller survival colony in the vicinity, one numbered nine. I knew my son must have joined them, either that or perished in the desert. In time our scouts reported that he'd taken command of the camp, married, fathered a son. But he never returned, and I never saw his boy. My grandchild.”

“His name was Matay,” I said. Then, as gently as I could: “He died.”

Udain nodded, and touched a new button on the wrist cuff. The screen went blank, and though I could see nothing, I heard a whirr like vehicles passing at top speed in the distance. I watched Udain's impassive face, his black eyes fixed on the protograph screen as if he could plumb its white emptiness.

“My sons,” he said softly, “have not been fortunate men.”

Then he released the button.

A new scene rose from the protograph. A huddle of at least a hundred soldiers stood outside the perimeter fence, the compound visible behind them, Udain as always towering above his followers. His hair had grayed in the time that had passed. The energy field that kept the camp safe from Skaldi radiated along the fence posts, shimmering like desert heat. The ground that stretched before the encampment was
desert dust, gray in the protograph's colorless slate. But the world that lay beyond the valley bore no resemblance to the plateau I'd walked with Mercy only a day before. The gleaming volcanic rock was missing, as were the man-size formations of sharp-edged stone. The land I saw was all desert, a continuous expanse of flat, sandy terrain. Whatever had produced the impact zone, the protograph didn't know it yet.

And neither did the people who stood watching.

My eyes scanned the crowd. Most of the onlookers were strangers to me, soldiers in identical uniforms, grown men and women instead of the boys I'd met in Udain's camp. Beside Udain stood his remaining son, more than ten years older than he'd been when he'd bested his older brother, his dark hair falling to his shoulders, his face showing the calm confidence he'd displayed in the meeting room. By his side, a woman with rich dark skin and a proud lift to her head gripped a little girl's hand. Two other children stood behind Athan and the woman, a boy and a girl. Both were lighter skinned than the woman, darker than the pale Athan. But the remarkable thing about the boy was his size: though he had the face of a child, he stood a foot taller than the diminutive man.

Taller, I realized, than his own father.

“Archangel,” I murmured.

“Ardan was his name,” the old man returned. “They say gigantism sometimes skips a generation.” He froze the image and gestured at the other children. “Ardan came first, then Beryl, and of course you know Mercy”—pointing at the little
girl holding the woman's hand. I squinted to see her face, but I saw none of the anger that would settle over it as she grew. The screen of the protograph seemed to crackle, and I held my breath, waiting to learn what had put the anger there.

Udain's finger moved to his wrist cuff's motion button.

“Wait—” I said.

I leaned close to the protograph, staring at a woman's face I'd glimpsed at the back of the crowd, beside a man who might have been the doctor from Udain's compound. I almost didn't recognize her, she was so much younger than the last time I'd seen her. Her hair was long, not the cropped, silvering cut I knew. But the face the long hair framed was sharp and lean, carrying an intensity I'd never forget. Beside that face floated the face of a small boy, blond like his mother, his little hands caught in the act of playing with the strands of her hair.

For the first time since we'd started watching, I wanted to tell Udain not to advance the protograph, not to let the fate it captured play itself out. I almost believed, for that frozen second, that if he let the image linger forever on the screen, none of them would have to die.

But I also knew that if time stopped right there, I would never have a chance to live.

I was looking at the face of my mother.

“Aleka Reza came to us two years before Athan's device was ready,” Udain said, following my eyes. “Her colony, numbered fifteen, had been destroyed by Skaldi, and her
husband—that little boy's father—had died. She gave birth to the boy just days after she joined us. He and Mercy were playmates for a time, until my granddaughter scared him off.” He smiled again, though the smile looked more like a scowl. “And then, a couple of months after the day you're watching, Aleka vanished, she and her little one. We never heard word of them again, not until you showed up yesterday.”

“He's dead,” I said. “Her son. Yov.” And then, because I couldn't bear to go into the details: “Skaldi.”

He nodded, sighed. “I always thought she spoiled that boy. Though I understood. He was all she had left.”

All, I thought, until she had me.

But that meant Yov and I didn't share the same father. We were half brothers. And my own father was still a complete mystery.

I couldn't understand why Aleka hadn't told me. Why she'd led me to believe Yov's father was mine. Why she'd lied to Laman when she and her two sons joined Survival Colony 9, telling him Yov's father had died when Yov was a child. There was so much she hadn't told me, so much I'd longed to learn. Important things. Little things. Her last name.
My
last name. The conversation we were supposed to have when we reached the canyon held even more secrets than I'd imagined.

And now she was lying in the infirmary, her body broken and her mind missing, and she might never come back to me.

“Shall I continue?” Udain said.

I shook myself from my thoughts. “What was the device?” I said. “The one Athan was trying to build?”

“It was a variation on the beam,” he said. “We had known for some time that the Skaldi couldn't withstand the beam's energy. Our firearms first proved that, and the compound confirmed its power. Athan's hypothesis was that a strong enough signal, applied at the proper coordinates, could neutralize the Skaldi on a regional scale. And, if successful at that level, additional devices of the same kind could be utilized around the globe, immobilizing Skaldi for survival teams to hunt down and eradicate.”

“Which would mean . . .”

“The end of our persecution,” he said. “The recovery of our planet. A new world, if not a paradise then at least a chance to wipe the slate clean. Laman, as you saw, believed the project was too ambitious. Aleka, on the other hand, was taken by the idea, and she teamed with Athan to complete the device, learning as she worked.”

Yet another secret. “She never told me.”

“She must have had her reasons,” he said. “But it wouldn't have mattered in any event. Your colony had no means to utilize such knowledge.”

“But you did.”

“We'd found a way,” he said evasively. “Laman, though he barely understood our work, warned us that any such attempt was perilous. But Athan didn't listen, and by the time Aleka joined us, Laman was long gone. My younger son was
a brilliant man, a genius really, when you consider what he had to work with. We were all blinded by”—and he laughed, a harsh laugh like a shout of pain—“the light.”

His finger flexed on the wrist cuff, and I had a moment to study the faces in the crowd: Udain's commanding and remorseless, his son's enflamed with enthusiasm, Aleka's stern and composed, Mercy's unhardened by the events that were about to unfold. Yov played with our mother's hair, clutching the long strands in his fists and pulling, laughing as she held him in her arms. Mercy's face turned upward as if to feel the sun.

Then I flinched as the screen filled with a terrible light, bright enough in its recorded form to sear my eyes. On the protograph the light shone white, but in reality I knew it had been bright yellow. It washed away the faces, the bodies, the smiles and held hands, washed away the buildings, the fence, the ground they stood on, the sky above. It was accompanied by a hum that grew to a roar, a roar that was swallowed by a silence. The screen hadn't frozen, it was still advancing, but there was nothing there, no image or sound, until at last out of the deadly white void there came a voice, the voice of a child crying in terror and pain:

“Daddy!”

Then the cry ended in a scream, and I couldn't tell whose voice it was anymore, whether the child had screamed or others had answered with an anguish of their own. I looked at Udain, but his eyes remained fixed on the nothing that
filled the screen. If that craggy face had been capable of tears, I felt sure they'd be flowing down his lined cheeks and into his long white beard now.

A crackling noise made me jump. Udain's hand moved to pause the empty protograph, then snatched the walkie-talkie from his belt. I noticed that, however faintly, the radio glowed with the universal energy of the camp.

“What now, Mercy?” he said gruffly.

“I think you'd better get out here.”

“We're busy.” With an odd, crooked smile, he added, “I've been giving Querry history lessons.”

“That can wait,” her voice emerged, impertinent even through the crackle on the line. “This can't.”

“What is it?”

“Trust me,” she said. “You're not going to want to miss this.”

Mercy met us at the
door to Udain's quarters, and we walked out into the desert dawn.

The day wore its typical colors of dusty gray and brown. But those colors seemed surreal after the unnatural glare of the impact zone and the flat, sterile white of the protograph. The sun hadn't yet crested the buildings, but its aura was strong enough to bleach the force field protecting the compound to near invisibility. Without a word or a look at me or her grandfather, Mercy marched us straight to the cage, where something colorless and unmoving wrestled to emerge from the shadows.

When I saw what it was, I stopped dead. So did Udain.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“Must have been overnight,” she answered. “I found it like this when I came out to check the cage this morning.”

“And you're sure no one tampered with the beam?” Udain marveled.

“As if they could,” Mercy said in reply, but her eyes locked on mine. I moved closer to the cage, staring in disbelief at the thing inside.

It was the Skaldi. Or what was left of it. Which wasn't much. A lump of scorched, discolored matter, maybe half a skeletal arm. On the cement surrounding it, a roughly circular mark radiated streaks like the rays of a small black sun.

Mercy saw me staring. “That's all that's left of your dance partner from yesterday. I guess it wanted to tango just a moment too long.”

“I did that?”

“Evidently,” she drawled. “Geller told me it was acting agitated all evening, pacing the cage and opening its mouth over and over like it wanted to puke something up. And”—her eyes darted toward Udain before returning to mine—“he swore he saw sparks deep inside it. Yellow sparks.”