The Burning Skies

zone. Only there’s no detonation. Just lightning racing out onto the zone—and Spencer’s riding that lightning, getting hauled up along a new path, up through the mountains and into one of the hidden wireless aerials that the Coalition has secreted in the peaks. The signal churns out into space. Out toward a point just behind the Moon.

But the answer comes back long before it arrives.

It’s the Manilishi. There’s no doubt. It’s her face, her touch. And Spencer gets it now—sees that he’s been prepping the ground this whole time. He and Sarmax are the inside guys. Though he wonders why the Manilishi wasn’t in on this from the start; why it wasn’t just her and Sarmax. Perhaps the Throne figured he’d hedge his bets with a razor physically on the scene. But then why wasn’t she running cover from the beginning? Or was she? Spencer wonders what he’s missing. He wonders if the answer’s bound up in the thing he’s seeking.

Or whether it has something to do with the Manilishi. Because there’s something strange about her. Maybe it’s just the pressure she’s causing in his head. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate her. But there’s something almost… tentative about her movements. Not that that makes her any less hell-on-wheels. She starts using the bomb like a missile homing in on its target: straight into the heart of this complex, straight out to its edges. Coordinates flash into place. A new grid locks in to replace the old. The presence fades.

Spencer is breathing heavily. His heart feels like it’s about to explode. He’s covered with sweat. He’s almost shaking.

“You okay?” says Sarmax.

“I think so,” he replies.

He’s lying. He’s more than okay. He’s never felt anything like this. For one moment he was the most powerful creature in existence. And he can still feel her somehow lingering back there within his mind. Though according to his screens there’s no live connection. Which makes no sense.

And the map of the place he’s in makes even less. Because it seems to have shifted. He’s trying to put his finger on precisely how. He can’t see anything tangible. It’s just more of the same: endless corridors and chambers and munitions posts and barracks and fuel-dumps and guns and soldiers and trains.

Trains.

Suddenly he’s scanning the handler’s book with new insight. Suddenly it’s all starting to make sense. Some of the tables in the first section—numbers packed into as-yet-undeciphered column headers—he’d thought those numbers were disguised coordinates. But now that he’s ablaze with fresh insight, it’s all too clear: he realizes that factoring those figures in certain ways means they line up a little too neatly with some of the historical data in the logistics mainframes of this base. Because they’re really inventories. That contain schedules.

Of trains.

Like the one he’s in now … no. Larger than the one he’s in now. Much larger. Like the one he and Sarmax came in on. Those trains are everywhere. They’re the main conduit for supplies coming in. They come from underground and above-ground railways that stretch for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers, all the way to the Ural and Altai mountain ranges. They’re all accounted for.

Except they’re not.

“What the hell are you talking about?” says Sarmax.

“There are way more freight cars coming into this place than there are leaving.”

“So they’re doing a mega buildup.” Sarmax looks unimpressed. “That surprises you?”

“You don’t fucking get it.”

“Get what?”

“Those trains aren’t accumulating anywhere. They’re disappearing.”

“To where?”

That’s what he’s trying to figure out. Some of the excess is getting piled up in plain sight. The entrances to the base are getting pretty jammed. But not all of the rolling stock is accounted for. There are a lot of locomotives that are just vanishing. Which ought to be impossible. But now Spencer’s seeing how it’s been done. Because the Manilishi’s hack is wiping away the false camera feeds and showing Spencer the real views into this base’s chambers. Focusing him in on a series of rail yards on the western extremity of the complex where several trains are waiting.

Only problem is that those rail yards are empty.

Spencer double-takes. Double-checks: these trains are there on the screens. They’re there in the base’s databases. They’re crystal clear on zone.

Just not in real life. That yard’s empty. Spencer’s checking out the last forty-eight hours of actual footage and it’s showing him that the trains have gone west from there, into tunnels where there aren’t any cameras. Tunnels that supposedly dead-end almost immediately. Tunnels not wired for maglev, either. He mentions this to Sarmax.

“That makes no sense.”

“It makes way too much sense,” replies Spencer.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning let me show you something I’ve just realized about the schematics for these trains.” Spencer beams Sarmax the data. But even as he does so, the Eurasian captain suddenly turns toward them:

“Sir. I just got the Moscow data—”

“Thanks,” says Sarmax. He fires at the captain and the driver in quick succession, strikes each man in the head. Bodies sprawl in their chairs.

“Can’t trust anyone these days,” says Sarmax.

“Tell me about it,” says Spencer.

Light transfixes her. Faces surround her. She’s shaking, coming apart amidst the maelstrom of impressions. Marlowe and Morat and Lilith and Hagen and Indigo and all the others these last few days, all the years before that into which so much has been crammed and all of it could just be—

“False memory I’m triggering right now,” says Carson. “That’s all it was. It all stats now. You’ve been sitting in this room the whole fucking time dreaming of being something you’re not.”

“Not?” Her voice is weak. She can barely hear it.

“You’re not Manilishi, Claire. You’re just human.” He says this last word like it’s a curse.

“That’s not true,” she says.

“It’s true to you,” he says. “Because it’s your fantasy. That’s all it is.”

“Then why are you devoting so much attention to me?”

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m not even here. You’ve gone insane.”

“Bullshit,” she snarls.

“So fucking prove it.”

Specific words, couched in a specific tone, heard in a specific emotional state. The moment she hears the trigger phrase she turns the lock within herself, opens the door in her mind—the one that leads to the lost country of the true past. Though at first it seems so familiar. She steps past the missions on which she’s riding shotgun behind the Moon and beneath the Himalayas, moves through all the events she already knows. The last week stretches out before her in all its fucked-up glory, the Europa Platform, the Rain’s base beneath HK, the spaceplane, Morat, Sinclair, Jason. Jason.

Jason.

She remembers him as the years streak by—remembers being with him so long ago. She misses him so much. She sees the members of the Rain once more: sees herself as a child at play with them. She