Tether (15 page)

What is this place?

My planet,
Selene told me.
Taiga. Or, rather, a city on Taiga called New Athens. It corresponds exactly with the Chicago of your world and the Tattered City of this one.

It’s beautiful,
I told her.
You must love living there.

It was very beautiful, yes.

Was?
I’d emerged from the thicker parts of the forest to an even wider boardwalk, which, according to a sign, was called Center Walk. It was crowded, and everyone seemed to be carrying some kind of basket or canvas satchel filled to the brim with fruit and fabric and other things. It was market day, and all along Center Walk temporary stalls were set up, shopkeepers selling their wares to the passersby.

There’s a reason why these memories are so faded,
Selene said.
They’re from a hundred years ago, when Taiga was like this all over—healthy and green, covered in woods and rain forests. It was a very wet planet, but these memories are from summer.

I caught a sliver of the sun just barely hidden by the canopy. Honey-colored rays of light slid over the faces of the people on Center Walk.
What happened?

An asteroid called Typhos,
Selene said. I blinked in surprise, catching a glimpse of her face before my eyes closed again.
When it struck, the planet became unlivable overnight.

I glanced around at the memory, which was rippling and receding.
If this was what Taiga looked like a hundred years ago, then what does it look like now?

Like this.
She pushed another memory into my head. This one was sharper, and I knew it belonged to Selene. I was standing in front of a window, hand pressed against the glass—I recognized the shape of the fingers as my own.

On the other side of the glass, which appeared to be several inches thick, was a vast wasteland of gray nothingness. The ground was covered in mounds of ash, and the few trees still left standing had withered into cracked and broken sticks pointed straight up at the sky. I could see the round ball of the sun high above me, glowing like a dying ember behind a scrim of dust. Nothing seemed to be alive or moving out there. It was just as horrifying as every postapocalyptic novel and movie I’d ever seen had said it would be.

“Now there’s almost nothing left,” Selene told me. Her sadness coated the tether like oil. I opened my eyes, and her memories fluttered away. “The sky was blackened with soot. Everything died. Everything except my people. We’re the only living things that remain.”

“Why were they spared?” I tried to imagine Earth as desolate
as Taiga—no life, no sun, no flowers or animals. The thought of it opened up a black hole inside me. I understood what it was Selene was searching for, what she would sacrifice anything to obtain: a safe, true home. Just like me. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

“At the time of the impact, my society—Apeiron—lived separately from other people on Taiga, in a glass-and-steel compound at the edge of New Athens. We call it Home. When Typhos came, we hid within its walls and waited.”

“For what?” It didn’t seem like there was any coming back from that kind of destruction.

“For the prophecy that would tell us how to bring Taiga back to life,” Selene said. “We have a sacred text called Kairos. It looks like an indecipherable jumble of numbers, but it’s really a mathematical code. If you solve the code, you find the truth. Prophecies, all of which have come to pass in one form or another. Kairos told us about Typhos. That’s how we knew to gather supplies and build Home. It kept us alive for a century, but our resources are dwindling, and Home won’t be able to support us for much longer. If we don’t rescue Taiga, my people … they’ll die, Sasha. Every last one of them.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“It’s my job to translate Kairos’s prophecies.” There was a touch of pride in her voice. “They call me Korydallos. It’s the title that we give our oracle. I have a mathematician, Leonid, who solves the code. Then I read the text and draw conclusions. That’s where listening comes in. The universe helps guide me to the proper interpretation.”

“And you’ve been doing this for how long?” She seemed too young to be a prophet. Juliana was too young to rule a country. And I was too young to be trekking through a parallel world. Perhaps it wasn’t age but what you were capable of,
the lengths to which you were willing to go to get what you wanted, that mattered most. Still, it sounded like the beginning of a very bad joke: a princess, an oracle, and a completely normal teenager walk into a bar.…

“When I was twelve, I was taken from the crèche and apprenticed to the previous Korydallos. Her name was Corinna, and she taught me everything I know. When she died, I became the new Korydallos. That’s how the position is passed down, generation to generation.”

Selene held aside a tree branch for me. The ground was padded with moss and moist dirt, and the air smelled like fresh, growing things. The forest was so calm and peaceful this early in the morning. Birds chirped at each other from their nests, and every once in a while we’d hear a little woodland creature rustling in some nearby bushes. If this was what Taiga had been like before the asteroid hit, no wonder Selene was so desperate to get it back.

“What’s the crèche?”

“I know I said I would answer all of your questions, but you have a
lot
of questions.”

I shrugged. She sighed. “We don’t have families in the traditional sense. Not like here or in your world. Women are inseminated, and children are raised in a nursery—the crèche—by people whose job it is to take care of them. Apeiron is mother, father, partner to us all, and we are brothers and sisters to each other. When you turn twelve, you are sorted into one of two Pillars of Apeiron: the Learners or the Listeners. The Listeners are people of spirit; they serve as nurses, cooks, artists, cloth makers, and priests, among other things. The Learners are people of knowledge: engineers, mathematicians, lawmakers, teachers, and so on. You belong to your Pillar and to Apeiron as a whole. That is what family means to us.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Listener.”

“You could say I’m the leader of the Listeners,” she said. “The Learners have leaders as well. We work together to ensure the safety and well-being of our people.”

“Does your position have anything to do with why you know how to do the … the thing? With your hands?” I didn’t know how to describe it. Selene nodded. Whatever that light was, that
power,
she could wield it, and so could I. I just needed her to teach me how.

“It comes from the bond,” Selene said. “Or—what did your scientist friend call it?”

“The tether.”

“The tether. It’s made of energy, as you know. When you opened that door to Juliana’s mind back on the roof of that tower, you activated our ability to release it, to use it as a tool.”

“Or wield it as a weapon.”

“All tools are weapons in the hands of the wrong people,” Selene said. “I suspected we had the ability before I came here, but it wasn’t until we were in the same universe that it became possible to actually use it. It’s part of our destiny, Sasha. The power is going to help us save Taiga. And it’s going to give you what you came here for.”

Dr. March said we had to release the energy from the tether in such a volume that the tether itself couldn’t handle it. As unsettling as this new, strange power was, knowing it existed, that we could control it, came as a relief. I was getting closer to my goal with every step. Now it was time to tackle the next problem: finding Juliana. But we were going to need the tether to do that. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

“Okay, one last question.” Selene raised her eyebrows. “One more, and I swear I’m done.”

“All right,” she said. “One last question.”

“What did the prophecy say?”

A broad smile spread across Selene’s face. She’d been waiting for me to ask. “It said, ‘And on that day, when the sparrow, the starling, and the lark fly together, it shall bring about the new world, and all that was once will be again.’ ”

“The sparrow, the starling, and the lark?”

“Now do you see?”

The sparrow was Juliana: it was her KES code name. I was the starling, from Operation Starling, the name of Thomas’s mission to fetch me from Earth. “I see how Juliana and I are the sparrow and the starling, but what makes you the lark?”

“
Korydallos
means ‘lark’ in Greek,” Selene said. She pointed to a break in the trees straight ahead of us. “What’s that?”

“It’s a road.” It was a narrow country highway, and on the opposite side a small clapboard building stood watch over a set of train tracks. My heart started to beat faster. We approached the road, careful to stay in the shadow of the trees. According to the clock on the station building, it was later than I thought: ten-thirty. There was no real platform, just a long slab of concrete. The building was unattended and locked up tight. The place looked almost haunted to me, a relic from a bygone era. There was an enormous bronze plaque affixed to the building’s left side, facing the tracks, but I was too far away to read what it said. There was nothing else around, and there were definitely no people. Was this all that remained of Almond, or all that had ever been there in the first place?

“Thomas is meeting us here. We’re getting the ten-fiftyone train to …” I’d never asked Thomas where the train was heading. I didn’t even know if it would take us in the right direction, and I realized we had no money to pay for tickets. If Thomas wasn’t there when the train arrived as planned, we were pretty much screwed.

“Money?” Selene asked. When we finally tracked Juliana
down, I was going to have to get her to teach me how to keep Selene’s mind at a distance. It was frustrating how much better my analogs were at controlling the tether than I was. Juliana had even managed to use the power without any help—by accident, but still. And she was doing an incredible job of shutting us both out, which never ceased to frustrate me. This would all be so much easier if she would just let us in.

“Pieces of paper and little bits of metal that you use to pay for stuff.”

“Oh,” she said. “You mean currency.”

“Sure. You don’t have that in Taiga?”

“No, we don’t need it. At Home we all contribute and take whatever we need. But I’ve read about currency,” Selene said. “I understand how it works.”

Maybe Selene understood the principle, but she didn’t know anything about the UCC’s money, and neither did I. I had no idea what it looked like or was called or was worth, and I could only guess where we could get some, other than stealing from people, which wasn’t really an option, not least because there
were
no people in Almond.

“Well, we don’t have any, so I figure we’ll get about one station, maybe two, before the conductor asks us for tickets and we have to tell him we don’t have them,” I said.

“What happens then?”

“Best-case scenario, they kick us off the train at the next station. Worst case, they hand us over to the KES, who will probably have caught up with us by then.” I sighed and sank down onto the grass. “I really hope Thomas shows up.”

More than anything, I just wanted to see his face again. We’d had so little time together since I came through the tandem, and I was always half-afraid, no matter how many
times I told myself
it was real,
that everything that had happened to me in the past month and a half had been a dream.

“He will,” Selene said, patting my shoulder.

“You know that for a fact?” She shook her head. “I thought you could see the future.”

“I’m an oracle,” she said, “not a psychic. There’s a difference.
But
I’ve seen the way he looks at you, and I have a feeling he would do whatever it takes to keep his promise. You have to have faith in him, Sasha. Just as you have to have faith in me.”

Ten minutes passed, and there was still no sign of Thomas. I was afraid the train would come and go without us or bypass the station altogether if there was no one on the platform.

“Maybe he’s waiting for us,” I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off the back of my thighs. “We should go over there.”

“It’s very open,” Selene said. “What if someone sees?”

“I think we’ll just have to risk it.”

Selene grabbed my arm. “This is the part where I trust you.”

I nodded. “Let’s go.”

We ventured down to the road and started to cross. It wasn’t until I reached the other side and began picking my way over the train tracks that I noticed Selene wasn’t beside me. I turned around to see her standing stock-still in the middle of the road as an enormous truck bore down on her. There was terror etched across her face; she’d never seen a moving vehicle before. Fear lanced through me—
Selene’s
fear. I shouted at her to run, but she remained frozen on the asphalt. She shut her eyes and braced herself for impact as the truck driver blew his horn in a desperate, earsplitting staccato. I rushed into the road and seized her hand, yanking her into my arms and shoving her off the road onto the grass.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. Selene’s face was a blank mask of shock. “You could’ve been killed!”

“What
was
that thing?” she asked, her voice trembling. The tether shook and swayed.

“You don’t have trucks on Taiga?”

“We don’t even have
roads.
”

I sighed. “You have to be careful. You’re lucky he didn’t hit you.”

I pulled her to her feet. The clock read ten-forty-seven: we had only four minutes until the train arrived, and there was no sign at all of Thomas.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get over to the platform. The train is almost here.”