“Do you imagine that I don’t know what I am, Dad? After what I’ve been through? What I’ve done for you?”
He looked at his son, he thought, as if for the first time. “What you are?”
“What we are, as a family. We’re not the same, Dad, we’re in communication with other worlds, we have powers and I know it and you can’t say otherwise. That’s why they tried to kill us, and why they failed. I defended us, too, dad, and I’m owed.”
“Owed what?”
“You have to take me into your confidence, and you will never go into a gateway again like that without me to help you!”
A memory flashed, of a cottage in the woods. Funny memory, like a dream. Less than a dream, just a daytime imagining, the stuff of a story, no more.
“I, uh—”
“The solstice is coming and Martin and Trevor need us, Dad. But you’re, like, lost in your own mind all of a sudden, and right now is the worst possible time for you to lose the thread.” He paused. “Actually, I’ve written a lot. I’ve written the entire story of what you and Mom just did on Abaddon and who you are, and you can read that later, because right now we have a huge emergency and Dad, there is no time!”
He went into the office.
From downstairs, Brooke called, “What’s going on?”
“Nick just wrote his first short story.” He sat down at the laptop. “Talia,” he said, “it’s a beautiful name. But who’s this Aktriel? You’ve got to find a better name than that.”
“Dad, you’ll read that later. Right now, it’s time to write, because when you do write, something new is gonna happen.”
“Nothing’s there. I can’t write.”
Nick grabbed his hands, thrust them onto the keyboard. “Do it!”
After a moment, there was a whisper in his mind. He typed a few words.
“Trevor, Dad, you need to write about Trevor.”
It was as if lightning had blasted him and shattered him, and he had a vivid image of a vast room lit by a curiously affecting, even disturbing, glow, a light that was blue and very alive, and communicated more clearly than any scream that it was in terrible trouble.
His fingers moved on the keys, then sped.
“At last,” Nick said. “Trevor, buddy, listen up.”
Wylie was at his desk, but at the same time in another place deep underground, and there was heard as another voice. “And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ‘It is done.’”
But it was not done, not for the seven people who were struggling in that dark underground hell for their lives and the life of an entire world.
“There’s a gateway down there and they don’t see it, Dad.”
“I know.”
“Then write it! Say where it is if you know!”
“But they can’t come here, they can’t read this!”
“Just do it!”
Silently, in the dark of the great cavern where Martin and his little band struggled to break the soul traps, the hidden gateway to Abaddon slid slowly into focus, and began to open.
TWENTY-FOUR
SOLSTICE 2012 ON THE TWO EARTHS
A TALE OF SEVEN SOLDIERS
AS MIDNIGHT APPROACHED, THE FOURTEEN great lenses ranged around two-moon earth shimmered darkly. There was nobody to see, though, but for a scattering of seraph soldiers, and gangs of wanderers lined up, waiting to conduct their new masters into the cities that still stood, and out into the flats of the new lands, where enormous shantytowns were still under feverish construction, amid heaps of dead sea creatures and dead wanderers.
“Dad!”
He stopped. Came back to the world of his office. Turned to Nick, tried not to shout at him, which was what he wanted to do, to tell him to just shut up!
“Dad, you need to focus on Martin and Trevor.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just do it!”
His fingers shot back to the keys, began flying.
Downstairs, little Kelsey also ranged across the night of the other world, looking for Winnie. Lindy, Brooke had found. She was on a truck that was running down to Denver, which was intended to become a major resettlement area for the Corporation’s starving billions. There her destiny would be simple: like all wanderers, she was to be worked to death.
On the sunlit side of the earth, the gigantic flats that had replaced much of the mid-Pacific were covered by an impenetrable fog, as trillions of tons of gasses boiled up out of the drying soil. Where India and China had been was a new ocean, stormy and unsettled, floating with what appeared to be islands that were actually made of furniture and ice chests and logs and carpeting and toys and siding and plastic doors, flowerpots, Styrofoam cups, shipping beads, any container that was closed and would float, and on these islands were rolling hills of the corpses of cattle and dogs and monkeys and all manner of beast, and human corpses with pale-glazed eyes, and swarming masses of gulls and crows, and hordes of pelicans flying from place to place, their craws bulging.
They all saw this, the Dale family, in their new free minds, and as she watched, Kelsey sang softly to Bearish, whom she cradled as if he was the whole world. She sang the ancient lullaby her mother had taught her, “Dereen Day,” that had come up from the quiet hearths of the Union and into the quiet hearths of Ireland a very long time ago, a song shared between angels and men. Her voice came up the stairs from the lonely pool of light where she sat carrying in her arms not only Bearish but all the dead of a whole world. She hummed to them and sang in her little voice. “Dereen Day, the nightjar calls upon the heath…”
Outside, night swept on and the evening star shone on the peaceful horizon.
She had been sending her mind down the roads of the other earth for a long time, had this very private child called Kelsey, for she shared with Winnie the same bond that her brother did with Trevor. So she sang not only to her Bearish but to Winnie’s, whom she had found in a cradle of snow, the night flakes whispering along his fur, as they whispered across all the little corner of Nebraska where Winnie had given everything she had to give, and laid down.
Now, as Kelsey sang to Bearish and Winnie’s Bearish, she sang also to Winnie, to the silver of the ice that crusted her cheeks, and her red car coat that was being worried by the winter wind, and to all the little lumps in the ocean of little lumps that were left everywhere on earth that wanderers had passed, each one somebody whose strength had not been enough to meet the Corporation’s cruel test. Survival of the fittest—the Corporation’s way— was not the way of the true of heart, human or not.
In the office, Nick and now Brooke along with him, struggled to get Wylie to concentrate on the place that counted, the soul prison where Martin and Trevor and their few struggled for the life of their world.
“The souls,” Brooke whispered, “can you see?”
Wylie sighed like a weaver does working on a difficult knot. The only sound in the house was Kelsey’s singing coming up from below.
“Okay,” he said. He began to type again.
But he saw the lens that stood in the ruin of the Giza plateau. It glowed angry red now, and red light leaped out of it, a huge column that reflected off the shattered city and the desert, making it appear as if the whole landscape was on Mars.
