The Ophelia Prophecy (22 page)

“There will be greater triumphs, my lady,” Micah replied in a voice soft with deference. “And we’ll run
them
out of it soon enough.”

Cleo gave him her hand. He pressed it to his lips. When he released it she moved away, and he turned to Asha.

“The others will take you the rest of the way. There’s some scrambling overground, and a few more underground passages. Take it slow and you’ll be fine. It’s dark now, and the cloaks will hide you from Scarab patrols.”

She wasn’t worried about scrambling over rocks and dirt in the dark. She’d been doing it since she was a child sneaking out to explore the desert in the moonlight. She
was
worried about losing her only friend among her new companions.

“Will I see you again?”

“Not for a while. I’m more useful to Cleo working for DAB-lab security than I am hiding in Al Campo. And if I went missing it would draw attention to what I’ve been doing.”

He reached out his hand, and she grasped it. He bent to kiss her cheek and said in a low voice, “Remember what I said about Cleo. Take care of yourself, Asha.”

A shiver ran through her and she nodded. “Thank you for the information you’ve shared with me. It’ll make figuring out my next steps much easier.”

He released her hand and turned to go, but stopped and turned back. “What’s your father’s name?”

She stared at him, still preoccupied with anxiety over his departure. “My father?”

“Maybe my contact inside can help you find him.”

“Oh of course, thank you. His name is Harker. Harker St. John.”

Something flashed in Micah’s eyes.

“What is it?”

“The man I’ve been working with inside…” He shook his head. “I thought it was just a hacker handle.”

Her heart jumped. “What do you mean?”

“He goes by the name ‘Hark.’”

REUNIONS

Asha and the others emerged from the cavern onto open ground—rocky, treeless, and sloped. She hit the ground hard within the first five minutes of their trek. The stars were mostly obscured by clouds and the terrain was uneven, but it had more to do with her head than either her eyes or her feet.

As much as she wanted to believe, she was driven clumsy and half mad by uncertainty. Because it was so unlike him. She adored her father to the point of worship, but part of the reason for that was that he was softer than her mother. Less driven. He’d had more time for Asha, and more of a parent’s empathy. To say that he was bright was an understatement, and he was honest and hardworking. But a hacker? One talented enough to have helped Micah defeat Al Campo’s security system? It was more like something her mother would do.

After a few kilometers of walking, they entered a tunnel that had been bored through a steep hillside. The canal that passed through it ran back toward the city.

None of the others had spoken to her, and she heard only the occasional murmur of them speaking to each other. But as she fell for the second time, one of them showed her a strip of colored dots that were reactive to the heat in the tip of her finger. She could use them to adjust the cloak so it emitted a soft green glow on the underside.

This saved her in the tunnel, which had been made wide enough for the canal to pass through and not much else. In places they were less walking than horizontally scaling the tunnel wall. The slippers she’d been given were slick on the bottom, and finally she removed them and clung to the rocky surface with bare feet.

As they neared the end of the tunnel, she scraped her injured wrist across a jagged surface, and her cast crumbled away into the canal. She muttered an oath at her carelessness, but soon discovered her wrist felt whole and healthy again.

“They come off when it’s time.” She glanced up to find the attendant who’d helped her with her bath smiling at her. Then she turned and continued after the others.

When they reached the tunnel’s end they paused for a rest, dimming their cloaks now that a crisp half-moon threw an anemic light over the ground outside. As the two disciples in the lead stepped out of the tunnel, someone heard a Scarab approaching, and they sank back into the shadows until it glided past.

Cresting the next hill, Asha could see the lights of Granada to the southwest, and a walled village that blanketed the valley to the northeast. Directly north there was a facility of some kind—a sprawling structure, the least remarkable of any she’d seen since her arrival, well-lit and surrounded by what looked like greenhouses, plantings, silos, and pens for animals. Smaller buildings dotted the grounds, connected by a road.

The village to the northeast had to be Al Campo. The construction material was odd—from where she stood it looked like rock smoothed by wind and water, reminding her of formations near her home. Along the edges of the village ran a neat row of long, inward-curving posts, like the ribs of some enormous animal.

Bone Town.

“I’ve fulfilled my part of our agreement,” Cleo said, startling her. Asha hadn’t noticed her moving close. The Manti woman’s antennae protruded under the hood of her cloak, giving her an even more threatening appearance.

“We’re not inside yet,” Asha replied coolly.

“We will be within the hour.”

Still she had time. Pax would first have to unravel the mystery of their disappearance. And it was possible he wouldn’t. Cleo couldn’t justly hold her to their bargain in that case. Though Asha had a feeling that wouldn’t stop her.

Eventually she would have to face this. If her father
was
behind this alliance, she couldn’t cope with her uncertainty by running again. He was the whole reason she’d come.

She groaned inwardly. Nothing made sense anymore. She felt fractured, like her personality had broken in two, each pulling the opposite direction. She could only hope that seeing her father would help to reground her.

*   *   *

Inside the tunnels it was easy enough to follow Asha’s trail, but the dead man slowed them down considerably. There’d been no quick means of separating the disciple from his arm, and even if there had been, Pax wasn’t sure he’d have the stomach for it. Those dark years before Granada had seen such horrors and far worse, but Pax had grown up in palaces, and the war was over by the time he was four. He hadn’t clawed to the top of a pile of dead enemies to survive, like the former generation. He’d fought for his life a couple times, but killing a man in a berserker rage because he’d tried to kill you was a far cry from coolly sawing off a limb.

The ingenuity of Rebelión Sagrada in preparing for the amir’s eventual invasion of the temple was staggering. Cleo was clever, but this? This had required a level of technical expertise he would not have thought available to them. But then he’d been staggered by the temple as well. Everyone had been. It was time to stop underestimating these people.

He had never felt comfortable thinking of the group as his enemy. It was his father’s view, and his sister’s. And he doubted he could ever forgive Cleo for what she’d tried to do to his family. To him
personally
. But though he’d never understood their worship of the maniacal (and egomaniacal) genius who’d created them all, he felt some empathy with their views on DAB-lab’s manipulation of Manti genetics. So why these sudden feelings of enmity?

It was more than the attack in the alley, he knew. It was because they’d spirited away Asha, forcing him to undertake a recovery mission his father would never approve of. Risking his ability to protect her. Making him ask himself hard questions in the process.

“Bloody hell!” Pax exclaimed as he lost his grip on the body and it slumped to the ground.

Carrick groaned, and he could only imagine what the priest must be going through, forced to help carry the corpse of the man he’d killed so they could use the mark on his wrist.

“Come on,” urged Pax. “It can’t be far now.”

But he had no way of knowing whether this was true or not. He’d been aware there were tunnels under the city—they’d been used centuries ago for secret worship and even hiding and fleeing by the Muslims and Jews living under Catholic rule. But his father had declared them off-limits for safety reasons, and he’d had no idea they were so intact, or where they might lead.

Carrick bent and lifted the dead man’s feet. “You’re sure we’re not walking into some kind of trap?”

Pax gripped under the man’s arms, hoisting him again. “No, I’m not.”

*   *   *

Asha brought up the rear as they scrambled down a loose hillside and then traversed along the base of the slope toward Bone Town. Cleo hadn’t instructed anyone to keep an eye on her, probably feeling secure in the fact they were so close to her object she wasn’t likely to slip away.

When they reached the farther end of the village, they cut across the valley to the hill at its back. As they approached, she saw that while less ornate than the structures within the city, Al Campo had a similar, organic feel. No hard lines or corners. The buildings seemed to flow together like water or sand. She also noticed small towers and lines of columns made of the same blanched material as the fence, their shapes also resembling bones or tusks. And as they drew closer still, the light washing over the structure revealed small, brightly colored spheres, seemingly placed at random atop posts or towers, or set in the middle of walls or sloping roofs. It was like the architect had been unable to completely restrain whimsical impulses.

They crouched beside the fence where it joined with the base of the steep hillside, and one of the party used a navigator to locate a section that had been replaced with the smart resin.

As the others dropped down and crawled through the opening, Asha studied the fence. The ribs were easily three meters tall, but at about two meters they narrowed, creating openings.

“This is all that keeps them in?” she asked.

The disciple with the navigator glanced at her. “There’s an electrical field. But Micah has access to that in security. This section is collapsed.”

As she ducked into the opening Asha wondered if the humans inside knew this—that all that stood between them and freedom was a three-meter fence.

Adjusting their cloaks so they could see, they regrouped in the narrow alley formed by the hillside and the back row of buildings. The disciple she’d spoken with reminded them to stay close together.

“The flies that patrol the camp transmit dummy video for this quarter,” he explained. “But if we don’t stay within the boundaries we’ll be discovered. If you see a mark like this, go back the way you came.”

He turned the navigator so everyone could see—an upside-down triangle with smaller circles at the top of the lines that formed the wide portion. It looked a lot like the head of a praying mantis.

The speaker took the lead with Cleo close behind. As Asha and the others moved to follow, something buzzed past her ear. Ducking to the side, she glanced back in time to see an egg-sized, black capsule zooming out of sight, wings vibrating like a hummingbird’s, too fast to see.

“Nobody touch it,” warned the disciple. But the thing had already disappeared around a corner. “Listen for those and stay out of their way. They can’t see you, but if they bump into something that shouldn’t be there it’s going to draw attention.”

They continued along the outer boundary of the village, and after a few minutes they began to cross paths with others. It was clear their arrival had been anticipated. A man and woman Asha recognized as attendants from Cleo’s chamber soon joined them.

After a few moments’ conversation with them, Cleo turned her attention back to the group, choosing two additional attendants to remain with her and releasing the others to find their quarters.

To Asha she said, “Follow me.”

Guided by starlight reflecting off white surfaces, they moved deeper into the village, flowing along curving walkways, stairways, and rooflines. They never passed any large buildings or open spaces—Al Campo was a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets and dwelling-sized two-story buildings. It gave her the same closed-in feeling she got navigating the Fiery Furnace back home.

Sanctuary, too, lacked larger structures, with the exception of the Council House. The physical infrastructure of the Archive was spread out over half a dozen buildings. It occurred to her that perhaps this had been planned—perhaps the Manti, and the governing council, had wanted to discourage meetings of large groups.

Cleo stopped outside a house with a façade that merged mask and skull-like lines—two large eye-socket-shaped windows with a narrow door at the nasal opening.

Inside they found a large and open room, with pallets along the walls, low tables, and cushions strewn around a fire pit filled with coals that glowed without smoking.

The attendant glanced at Cleo, questioning, and she nodded. “We’ll need another bed for our guest.”

As Asha wondered whether the priestess’s physiology allowed her to recline for sleeping, one of the pallets moved, startling her. A form rolled toward them, and in the light from the fire pit she recognized the man from the temple—Cleo’s mate. White teeth glinted in his dark face as he smiled at the priestess.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he murmured. “Come to bed.”

“Not now, my love. I need to have a word with our host.”

“Your host is here.”

Asha spun at the sound of the familiar voice, afraid to trust her ears.

He froze in the doorway, eyes fixing on her, wide and shocked. Thinner than before, with more gray in his beard. But there was no longer any question about the identity of “Hark.”

He took a tentative step. “Asha?”

She rushed at him, throwing her arms around his neck.

“Dad!”

“I can’t believe this,” he murmured into her hair. “I thought I’d never … How are you
here
?”

“I came to find you,” she said, drawing back. He rubbed her cheeks with warm fingers and pressed his forehead against hers. “I couldn’t stop wondering what happened to you. Wondering whether or not you were alive.”

“Oh, Ash,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. This is no place for you, honey. But I’m so happy to see you. You have no idea.” Moisture glinted in his eyes as they moved over her. “What happened to your hair?”