Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) (54 page)

Even after everything they’d been through, after how much they’d changed, this feeling, the feeling of being with the other, of holding on, felt … perfectly the same.

The explosions and the shaking of the platform reminded her how little time they had. The Raptors that had helped her roared away and back into the chaos.

Zoey let Holt and Mira go. She could feel all they had been through, all they had experienced, and she absorbed it, letting herself feel it too, and it was painful. Zoey’s eyes began to well with tears, she couldn’t help it. All they had gone through … and all of it had been for
her.

“I’m … so sorry…” she managed to say.

Mira shook her head, wiped her own tears away. “We would do it all again and more. Do you understand?”

Zoey could feel something new forming in Holt, and it wasn’t surprising. Denial. He was trying to find a way around defeat, just like he always did.

“Just have to figure out how to get her down to the bottom, now.” His voice held dim hope.

“Holt,” Zoey said weakly, but he wouldn’t listen.

“She can control the platform. It looks like it goes down.”

“Holt
…”

“We can use the abandoned walkers for cover, if we need to I can pull away any—”

“
Listen
to her,” a voice said sharply from behind. It was Rose, Zoey could tell, and the memory of how she’d rushed to help her in that room came back. “She won’t survive a trip down to the bottom, much less outside. She’s
dying.
The ones who were inside her … used her up.” Rose’s eyes teared along with Mira’s, and Zoey could feel her tremendous guilt.

“That’s … that’s not true,” stammered Mira. “You
said
the Nexus could save her!”

“I said she needed to get there. Not that it would save her.”

Zoey looked at the Nexus behind them, the giant, beautiful fountain rising serenely upward. It bent toward her again, eagerly, and the sight gave her strength. She was so close …

“Zoey, you have to listen to us,” Holt said, turning her to face him. “There has to be something we can do.”

“You already have, Holt.” Zoey’s voice was hoarse. “You’ve made it all possible: saving you … and saving
them
from themselves.” She watched the chaos around them, Mantis fighting Mantis, Spider fighting Spider, the Citadel burning, falling.

Holt shook his head in scorn. “They don’t deserve to live. They don’t deserve
you.
”

“Mira knows that isn’t true,” Zoey answered. “She knows they’re more than they seem. They’re … beautiful in their own way. Just as you are.”

Mira touched the little girl, and she felt new emotions from her now. Resolution. Dreadful resolution. “Zoey, what do you need us to do?”

“The hardest thing I can ask,” Zoey said. “Let me go.”

She felt Holt’s own dread join Mira’s, and he looked past them all to the Nexus. “You’re going in there, aren’t you? Inside it.”

Mira was horrified. “That’s pure energy! You’ll die!”

“I told you I made a deal with the Tower,” Zoey reminded her. “I only put it off a little while.”

“Zoey…”

“If I fade away out here, it was all for nothing. In there … it means something. What’s left of the Tower’s energy will release. The Nexus will grow. Together, we can draw the others to us, and …
you
will make it permanent, make all the Assembly one, as the Nexus always wanted.”

“How?” Holt asked in confusion.

Zoey touched their minds, and filled it with all the imagery she had absorbed and retained over the last several months, and the extent of it, the beauty of it, surprised even her. “By showing them
you.
”

She heard Mira gasp, felt an ache in Holt’s heart. The moments played for her just as they did for them. One after the other, each as vibrant as the original experience, each with the same emotion.

“When you found me, I was blank,” Zoey spoke in their minds. “I could have been shaped in hundreds of different ways … but I was found by
you.
”

Holt pulled Zoey free from a crashed podship in a forest, long ago, carrying her through the smoke and out into the night.

“I am who I am …
because
of you.”

Mira made a magnet, a copper wire, and two pennies spin into the air while Zoey applauded in an old hotel room.

Holt carried Zoey on his shoulders, pushing desperately through a crowd of kids, protecting her while they tried to rip her loose, to make her help them like she had just helped someone else.

Zoey rode on top of Max, shrieking gleefully as he dashed down a hill toward a landscape full of darkness and colored lightning.

“The Assembly are … so frightened of being who they are. They were born in the Nexus, but it scares them, so they push everything it is away, which means they can’t feel these things … because the Nexus is
love.
”

Mira took a bite of a Hostess CupCake, smiling at Holt.

Holt kissed Mira for the first time, inside an old dam, her eyes perfectly clear, her mind her own again.

“I can share with them the one thing they’ve never let themselves feel … and I can do it because of you.”

Holt shuddered and looked away as Ben lifted Mira up and kissed her.

Mira floated in Holt’s arms in Bismarck, after the Tower, toward a bed where they touched and slid and were everything they were supposed to be.

Holt pulled Mira to him in Currency, at the end, as the Landships set sail around them, forcing them apart.

“Your love will tie them together. They will abandon their search. They will be one, as the Nexus always wanted. Don’t you see? Without you,
none
of this could happen. I wouldn’t be who I am.”

Through it all, laced in between each individual moment and feeling, Holt danced with Mira around a campfire, long ago, as the stars filtered down through the trees.

Holt and Mira opened their eyes and slowly looked at one another. The past, everything they had been through, everything they had meant to each other, shown to them in the space of a few seconds. Zoey knew how much they’d changed, but she knew, more than anything, that they could find each other again.

“What do we do?” Mira asked, her voice barely audible. She believed now, understood. It made Zoey love her all the more.

“I have to … feel it,” she told them. “What you feel for each other. So
they
can feel it. The rest … takes care of itself.”

Explosions flared again, the platform shook. The three shared their looks. None of them could imagine how they got here, but knowing, somewhere deep down, it was the only true resolution there could be.

Holt was the first to move. Zoey couldn’t see his eyes now, but knew, if she could, they would be red and sad. He pulled her close, hugged her tight, and whispered into her ear. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

She touched his face and smiled. “Look inside yourself more often.”

Mira was next, her arms wrapping around her, and she held on, as if committing the feel of Zoey in her arms to her memory, locking it in forever. “I just … want more time.”

“We had our time,” Zoey told her. “Now it’s their turn.”

Mira fought tears and nodded, pulled away, stepped back with Holt. Max whined, not understanding, but sensing something monumental was happening.

Zoey reached one last time for Max, grabbed one of his ears, ran it through her fingers, scratched him. “Do this, when you can. He loves it the best.”

“We have to hurry,” Rose urged Zoey.

She let Max go, and Holt called the dog to him, held him in place by the collar. Together, the three of them—Holt, Mira, and Max—stepped off the platform that held Zoey and Rose. They all watched one another a moment more … and then Zoey felt Rose reach out, find the platform with her mind, and power it.

It shook as the rail system lifted it back and away from the dais, leaving Holt and Mira there, staring up at her. Zoey stared back as long as she could, until they became distorted blurs in her fractured vision and she couldn’t see them anymore.

Rose ran her fingers through Zoey’s hair as the platform moved toward the Nexus. She could feel its energy and warmth, could feel it growing.

“You will live on for them,” Rose stated, lying down next to Zoey, waiting for the inevitable. “Wherever they go, whoever they become.”

“I know,” Zoey replied, and the knowledge gave her comfort. The heat from the Nexus was growing. She could feel its eagerness. It had waited a long time after all. In spite of that, Zoey felt a tremor of unease. “I’m scared.”

Rose nodded and pulled her close. “I am too.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Only a little,” Rose told her. “Only a little.”

Zoey concentrated on the feelings of being in Rose’s arms again, the memories the sensations brought. She would add it to the rest, she decided, share it as well. Maybe in that way, even more of both of them would live on.

The world began to lighten, growing brighter and brighter, until there was nothing left but warmth and feeling and memory.

Scion,
the Nexus welcomed her.
You are home.

The world burned away …

*   *   *

THE PLATFORM FLASHED AND
buckled, seemed to warp somehow as it passed into the Nexus. When it did … it was gone. And so was Zoey.

Mira fell to the ground in grief as the world disintegrated. Explosions flared, the Citadel shook, Mantises and Spiders slammed into one another. All around them, the Citadel was falling apart. The giant structure was doomed, and they were at the very top, thousands of feet from the bottom. There was nowhere to go.

Mira felt Holt’s hands on her. She fell into his arms, sobbing. Zoey was gone, truly, forever gone now, and the tension and anguish that had built to this moment over the last months was finally free. They’d run out of road, and if she were honest, she didn’t really understand what the point had been.

“It’s not doing anything,” Holt said into her ear. He was staring at the Nexus in the distance, where Zoey’s platform had been enveloped. “Why isn’t it doing anything?”

“She said we had to feel it.” Mira moaned into his chest. “So that
they
could feel it.” Holt pulled her free, stared down into her eyes, and Mira voiced the unspoken fear they were both feeling. “What if we can’t? What if we lost it?”

A violent explosion flared out from the wall across from them, spraying flaming debris through the air. Streams of new gunships poured in, thousands of them, all painted in shades of brown. The fighting intensified in the air.

“We didn’t,” Holt told her, trying to ignore the chaos.

“How do you know?”

Holt wiped the tears from her eyes, then his hands circled her face. “Because … I know.”

He kissed her, gently at first, then with more passion as their stifled emotions, ones that had almost died, were reignited: by each other, by what Zoey had shown them, and by everything they had been through. Adversity and change didn’t have to destroy feelings, Mira realized, sometimes it morphed them into something new, something more powerful … something better.

More explosions flared, gunships roared past, but none of it mattered now, except that they had made it, to this place, to each other, all over again.

Nearby, the Nexus flashed brilliantly … and began to
grow,
spreading outward, full of new light.

49.
ASCENSION

“HOLD ON!”
Casper shouted.

Olive did just that, as the Landship in front of them careened into a building and disintegrated. Casper pulled the
Wind Rift
hard right, and the wheels on the port side lifted off the ground, threatening to tip over.

“Jesus, Casper!” Olive shouted.

“Would you rather I hit it?”

The
Wind Rift
flew past the destroyed ship and the wheels slammed back down.

Two Menagerie dune buggies burst apart one street over. The radio chatter was frantic. They’d lost five Landships so far, which meant five batches of people Olive used to know. They were all gone.

The Barriers on the stern flared as the brown gunships rained down plasma. She felt slight satisfaction as her ship’s cannons took one out, but there were far too many. The clock was ticking, and there wasn’t much time. She hit the button on her radio. “Dresden?”

The ship shook, Casper barely managed to keep it on course. Any jarring impact at this speed threatened to knock the Landship off angle, and in tight streets like this, that meant you went bow-first into a concrete building.

“Yeah?” Dresden answered.

“Since this is pretty much it, there’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you.” She smiled as plasma flared by. “Your boots are stupid.”

Olive heard him chuckle. “Says the girl with the pink hair.”

She looked to starboard, past the buildings, and saw the
Wind Shear
dodging plasma bolts a block away, barely staying on course.

“You’re a real pain in the ass,” she told him, gripping the railing, “and the best Captain I ever saw.”

“Don’t get all mushy on me, Olive. This isn’t the finale.”

Olive frowned, looking at all the chaos. “Sure seems like one to me.”

The air was rent with the sound of a massive thunderclap, and everything flashed bright. Olive flinched and peered behind them. It had come from the Citadel, a bright burst of light and energy directly above it, as something began to mass there. Golden, glowing energy swirled like some kind of mercurial pool of light.

Olive’s eyes widened. “What. The. He—”

An explosion just above and to port rocked the ship. Two more behind them, another to starboard, fire and concrete sprayed everywhere. It seemed like an artillery barrage, but it wasn’t.

The gunships themselves were
crashing,
falling out of the sky, exploding into the streets and buildings, and Olive could see why.

The Ephemera, the entities inside, were abandoning the ships, rising up and out of them. Hundreds of them filled the air, and they were all floating toward the energy field that was building above the Citadel.