Scavenger of Souls (25 page)

I turned and saw Mercy walking at the back of the crowd,
her rifle slung over her shoulder and her head lowered so all I could see were her dark curls. I had to squeeze past everyone else to reach her, but Nessa moved out of the way, giving me a look that was almost a smile as I passed. Then she tossed her missing hair again and took my place beside Aleka, the two of them exchanging words too quiet for me to hear.

Mercy didn't look up when I joined her, but she slipped a hand through my arm. “You okay?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Tyris is really good with people. She might . . .”

Mercy looked at me, smiling through tears. “Grandpa's one tough hombre,” she said. “But I think he's fought his last war.”

I put my hand on hers, tried to communicate sympathy through my skin. For years, she'd dreamed of escaping her father and grandfather. But now that her dream had come true, it had to hurt.

“What happened?” I asked her. “Out there?”

Her eyes grew distant. “The Skaldi swarmed you. Bucketloads of them. But somehow you fought them off. I don't even think you were conscious, but your body kept doing its thing, and they kept falling back. Still, it looked to me like you were going to go under. And I said to myself, it figures. I seem to have a talent for losing the people I love.”

My heart double-stepped at her final word. “I thought you were going to die too,” I confessed.

“I'm not sure I know what death means anymore,” she said.
“When Grandpa finally showed up, we were in bad shape. The Skaldi had pretty much given up on you and started to climb the stairs. But you'd stunned or burned enough that he could clear a path to us. And then Geller . . .”

“Geller?”

“That's right,” she said with a small smile. “He helped me bring Ardan and Baldilocks down. The little ones too. They didn't want to leave at first, but we wrestled them away and came back to base. With Geller chugging along in the moon buggy, of all things.” She laughed. “Glory hound that he is.”

Up ahead, the back of Geller's pimpled neck reddened, so I knew he was listening in.

“And here's the crazy thing,” Mercy continued. “Once we got the kids patched up, it was like they were back to normal. Blondie and Aleka, too, when she finally woke up from surgery.” She gestured toward my mother's missing arm. “You said the staff is like an electric shock. But I guess the shock wears off. That must be why he had to keep touching people with it. Otherwise they'd have come back, remembered who they are.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “remembering who you are is the worst part.”

She squeezed my arm, and we walked on in silence. Our steps echoed along the corridor, covering up the small hitch of sorrow I thought I heard in her breath.

The tunnel continued for a half mile or more, zigzagging as it went. Finally we came to a door that was much larger—and,
with its rivets and steel plating, better reinforced—than the others. The muzzles of what seemed to be energy rifles jutted from its corners, positioned so that anything that came down the tunnel would be unable to avoid the blast. For the first time in what felt like years, I relaxed, realizing that Aleka's words were true: the bunker had been designed—and, thanks to the genius of Athan Genn, enhanced—to stop Skaldi from getting in. It was just a pity the people who'd engineered this fortress hadn't put as much thought into not waking up the monsters in the first place.

The door groaned open when Aleka placed the index finger of her left hand on a plate so well disguised I couldn't tell it from the rest of the door. Behind that door stood another, just as impregnable, and then one more. She moved so efficiently through the bunker's various safeguards, it was easy to forget she'd fled this place more than fifteen years ago.

“Welcome to the war room,” she said as the final door creaked open.

I stepped into a space that seemed as large as the cavern of
Grava Bracha
, lit by a flat white light from fluorescents high overhead. The light revealed a sterile expanse of cement walls and polished metal furniture, including a long, gleaming rectangle surrounded by chairs in the room's center. One of the chairs, at the midpoint of the table, rose slightly higher than the rest, and it occurred to me that the bunker
was
the model for Asunder's canyon kingdom: the labyrinthine tunnels, the cavern, the throne. Suspended above the table
and running its entire length was a five-foot-high, flat white screen I recognized as a protograph, though much longer than the one in Udain's headquarters. A few people milled around the table, including Ardan with his hand on his tottering grandfather's arm. But only a single figure sat there: Doctor Siva in his spotless white uniform, his hands flowing across the tabletop as they operated some kind of controls embedded in its surface. As he manipulated the controls, the protograph flickered with choppy, black-and-white images, and I realized that unlike the one I'd watched aboveground, this one was double-sided, providing a view to anyone seated on either side of the table. The images flashed by too fast for me to see what he was viewing, but I noticed that Udain watched the screen intently, as if he could find in the flow of frozen memories an answer to the confusion that had settled over his mind.

He didn't watch long, though. Doctor Siva switched off the screen and rose from the table, and with Ardan keeping careful guard, the old man was led to the back of the war room, where Tyris and Adem and Nekane tended to teen soldiers lying on a row of cots.

“They'll see to Udain,” Aleka said. “There's not much we can do for him, but a sedative should calm him down. Perhaps, in that condition, he'll be more receptive to questioning.” Mercy was about to pull me away when Aleka continued. “Mercy, can you and Nessa check on the condition of the weapons? I want to show Querry something.”

Mercy looked less than thrilled, but she did as Aleka asked. I couldn't tell if she was more annoyed to have our private conference interrupted or to be paired with Nessa.

Aleka placed her only hand behind my back and guided me to the table. We sat side by side next to the commander's chair, staring up at the empty protograph. Aleka touched one of the buttons in the table and the screen hummed to life.

“Did you know that people who've lost limbs can feel their presence years afterward?” she said. “Or at least, so I've heard. I'm too recent an amputee to attest to that.”

I'd tried to avoid thinking about her missing arm, but now I asked, “Does it hurt?”

“It's not so much pain,” she said. “When I woke from the touch of Athan's staff to find the arm gone, it was like waking from a dream. Though my mind told me my body was changed, my body refused to believe. It clung to a vision of itself that was no longer true. To some extent, I imagine it always will.”

She touched the buttons deftly with her single hand, and I heard the sound of the protograph searching. Then she paused the recording, and though the screen was still blank, I could tell she'd reached the spot she was looking for.

“I know you want the answers to what lies in your past,” she said. “But I need to ask you, Querry: Are you absolutely sure? What I'm about to show you will change you. And once you've seen it, you'll never be able to go back to the way you were.”

I stared at the empty screen hanging over my head. What
could be hidden there that would change me so much? “I need to know, Mom. I feel like I've been walking around without a part of me for—well, all my life. I need to get it back.”

She smiled and raised her hand from the table to touch my cheek. “I can give you that,” she said. “Are you ready?”

That seemed too big a question to answer, so I simply nodded.

“I'll leave you here, then,” she said. “I think it should be just the two of you.”

“The two of who?”

But she didn't say another word. She touched the play button with a slim finger, then stood to join the others at the back of the room.

I turned my attention to the screen.

The blank white rectangle filled with light, and an image sprang to life from its depths. What appeared there was the face of a boy, years younger than me, with long dark curls and dark eyes ringed by thick eyelashes. He sat alone in a canvas chair, with nothing behind him but darkness. I was about to turn to get Aleka's attention when I noticed the boy's hands tinkering with something offscreen, and I realized what I was seeing: the protograph recording the finishing touches of its own creator.

Athan Genn.

The boy spoke, his voice soft but focused. “Is it working?” He looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Hey, Dad! I think it's working!”

A deep voice from beyond the screen rumbled in response.

“Wow,” the boy said, returning his attention to the screen. “Um, okay, this is really awesome. I can't believe it's working!” His face broke into a huge grin, showing a couple gaps where teeth were missing. “This is Athan Genn, and what you're watching is my first . . . What?” He looked back over his shoulder, then addressed the protograph again. “My dad says I should time-stamp it. So okay, this is, um, September twenty-third, the year two thousand sixty-two, and the time is . . .” His eyes left the screen, then returned. “Five o'clock in the morning. Oh. Duh. Military time. Oh-five-hundred hours. This is so cool!”

A blur moved behind him, and a massive hand, much larger in proportion to the boy than you'd expect even from an adult, appeared on Athan's shoulder. The child looked up at his father's face, hidden beyond range of the protograph screen. “Should I keep going?”

Udain rumbled an indistinct response, and his huge body moved off.

“Okay,” Athan said, turning back to the screen. “Like I said, my name is Athan Genn, and this is my first recording on the machine I built to keep records for the colony. So we won't ever forget. The recordings are backed up on an off-site server, and they can be remote-accessed from here. . . .” His hand fumbled for something, then held it up in front of the screen: a metal cuff, identical to the one Aleka now wore except much smaller. “I'm going to work on some other
cool stuff, like fast-forward and freeze-frame, but this is only a bare-bones prototype. So you'll just have to sit and watch me talk!”

He laughed giddily.

“Anyway,” he said. “Status update. Our scouts report that the Skaldi population seems to have stabilized, though of course it's hard to tell. The human population is at a historic low. We count fourteen survival colonies containing a total of just over nine hundred people within a seventy mile radius of our location, which is . . .” Again the offscreen voice sounded, and Athan turned to listen, swiveling back when it was done. “Okay, my dad says not to disclose our location. I think he's been listening to Laman too much. Because this is top-secret stuff!” He made a face and went on. “But the point is, Skaldi numbers aren't growing, but human numbers keep on declining. Which supports our theory that the Skaldi can't survive autonomously. The surge of energy they get from their victims doesn't last. It's like they're sending it somewhere else. Back to their home world, probably, by some means of electrical conduction. Shooting it back through the wormhole. What Dad calls the interdimensional anomaly.”

He grinned again, as if delighted to be using such big words.

“Dad says a parasite that consumes its host without the possibility of reproduction is an evolutionary dead end. So the Skaldi don't make sense as an invading army acting on their own behalf. He figures they must be someone else's
tools, biological manufactures sent to absorb energy for a dying planet.” Again the gap-toothed grin. “I like to call the ones who sent them here the Creators. And their home world Skaldi City.”

His hands tinkered with the offscreen recording device for a moment, and the image of his face centered and narrowed. Then he returned his eyes to the screen and continued.

“Drone trials have reached a critical phase, and it's becoming clear we need a permanent settlement to continue the work without interruption,” he said. “We've discovered why human ribosomal DNA rejects the Kenos master sequence, but we're not sure exactly how to fix that. And Melan says we still haven't cracked the code to the mitochondrial DNA. We lost a ton of research in the wars, according to Dad. Which is why I'm feeding all our data into the remote server. Using encryption, of course.” He smiled, and I could see his pleasure at being someone his dad trusted with such important work. “I'm thinking we should take another stab at embryonic stem cells, and Melan agrees. We just have to convince Dad it's worth the effort after what happened to the last batch.”

The way he said that, as if he and Melan were stirring a pot of soup instead of culturing human cells, sent a cold wave across my scalp.

“But I think we can make it work,” Athan went on. “We have some info on the basic drones Dad and his team created in the early years of the war. The ones that enabled the
Skaldi to flood the interdimensional anomaly.” He smiled as the words rolled off his tongue, and I realized he was using that expression as much as possible, showing off in front of his new toy. “But I'm thinking if we can find a safe place to continue our research, we should be able to get into the mitochondrial DNA, which will give us a shot at boosting the energy level to where it'd shut the Skaldi down for good. I know I can convince Dad to stop listening to Laman and being such a chicken if I can just show him the results of our last—” He stopped, eyes widening guiltily, a kid remembering that his every word was being recorded in a format his father could watch anywhere and anytime he pleased.

“But like I said,” he continued, his voice lowered as if that could keep his recording from being overheard, “I think we're just about ready for the next phase. And I'm positive Dad will be really pleased with the results.” He smiled, and then he stared intently at the screen and slowly pronounced words I never thought I'd hear from his child's mouth:
“Aya tivah bis, shashi tivah bracha.”