chambers of Carlsbad Caverns (though not the King’s Palace; this was Ignacio’s alone) they awaited, a dozing storehouse of biological stalactites, a somnolent army of glowing icicles excited to consciousness by the bomb’s detonation. Like any species, they perceived this adjustment to their surroundings as a mortal threat; like virals, they instantly snapped to the scent of human blood in their midst.
Peter and Alicia began to run.
Alicia, had she been alone, might have stood her ground. Though she would have been swallowed by the horde, it was so embedded in her nature to turn and fight that this impossible task would have felt oddly satisfying: a thing of fate, and an honorable exit from the world. But Peter was with her; it was his blood, not hers, that the virals wanted. The creatures were funneling toward them, filling the underground channels of the cavern like the undammed waters of a flood. The distance to the elevator, roughly a hundred yards, possessed a feeling of miles. The virals roared behind them. Peter and Alicia hit the elevator at a sprint. There was no time to set the charge; their initial strategy was now moot. Alicia scooped the package from the floor of the elevator, seized Peter by the wrist, kneed him through the hatch, and launched herself behind him, touching down with a clang.
“Grab a cable!” she yelled.
A moment of incomprehension.
“Do it and hold on!”
Did he understand what she had in mind? It didn’t matter; Peter obeyed. Alicia dropped the package to the roof of the elevator, pointed her rifle downward at the cable plate, and pulled the trigger.
Freed from the mass of the elevator car, the counterbalancing weights plunged downward. A hard yank and then a massively accelerating force rocketed them skyward: Peter experienced their ascent in a blur, a sense of pure motion that focused on his hands, his only link to life. He would have lost his grip entirely if not for Alicia, who, below him, her grasp unassailable, acted as backstop, preventing him from slithering down the cable and plunging into the maw. In a confusion of arms and legs, they spun wildly, overwhelmed by a bombardment of physical data beyond Peter’s ability to compute; he did not see the virals leaping up the shaft behind them, ricocheting from wall to wall, each jolt of movement propelling them upward, narrowing the gap.
But Alicia did. Unlike Peter, whose senses were merely human, she possessed the same internal gyroscopes as their pursuers; her awareness of time and space and motion was capable of constant recalculation, enabling her not only to maintain her grip but also to point her rifle downward. It was the grenade launcher she intended; her target was the package on the elevator’s roof.
She fired.
26
Major Lucius Greer, late of the Second Expeditionary, now known only as prisoner no. 62 of the Federal Stockade of the Texas Republic—Lucius the Faithful, the One Who Believed—was waiting for someone to come.
The cell where he lived was twelve feet square, just a cot and a toilet and sink and a small table with a chair. The room’s only illumination came from a small window of reinforced glass set high on the wall. This was the room where Lucius Greer had spent the last four years, nine months, and eleven days of his life. The charge was desertion—not completely fair, in Lucius’s estimation. It could be said that by abandoning his command to follow Amy up the mountain to face Babcock, he had simply followed orders of a deeper, different kind. But Lucius was a soldier, with a soldier’s sense of duty; he had accepted his sentence without question.
He passed his days in contemplation—a necessity, though Lucius knew there were men who never managed it, the ones whose howls of loneliness he could hear at night. The prison had a small courtyard; once a week the inmates were allowed outside, but only one at a time, and only for an hour. Lucius himself had spent the first six months of his incarceration convinced he would go mad. There were only so many push-ups a man could do, only so much sleep to be had, and barely a month of his imprisonment had passed before Lucius had begun to talk to himself: rambling monologues about everything and nothing, the weather and the meals, his thoughts and memories, the world beyond the walls of the stockade and what was happening out there now. Was it summer? Had it rained? Would there be biscuits with dinner tonight? As the months had passed, these conversations had focused increasingly on his jailers: he was convinced that they were spying on him, and then, as his paranoia deepened, that they intended to kill him. He stopped sleeping, then eating; he refused to exercise, even to leave his cell at all. All night long he crouched on the edge of his cot, staring at the door, the portal of his murderers.
After some period of time in this tortured condition, Lucius decided he could endure it no longer. Only the thinnest vestige of his rational self remained; soon it would be lost to him completely. To die without a mind, its patterns of experience, memory, personality—the prospect was unendurable. Killing yourself in the cell wasn’t easy, but it could be accomplished. Standing on the table, a determined suicide could tuck his head to his chest, tip forward, and break his neck in the fall.
Three times in a row Lucius attempted this; three times he failed. He began to pray—a simple, one-sentence prayer seeking God’s cooperation.
He returned to consciousness after some unknown interval. He was lying on his back on the cold cement. Again the universe had refused him. Death was a door he could not open. Despair gripped him utterly, tears rising to his eyes.
They were not words he heard. Nothing so simple, so commonplace, as that. It was the
It was as if his mind had opened like the covers of a book, revealing a hidden reality. He was lying on the floor, his body occupying a fixed point in space and time, and yet he felt his consciousness expanding, joining with a vastness he could not express. It was everywhere and nowhere; it existed on an invisible plane the mind could see but the eyes could not, distracted as they were by ordinary things—this cot, that toilet, these walls. He plunged into a peacefulness that flowed through his being on waves of light.
And, just like that, his incarceration was over. The walls of his cell were the thinnest tissue, a ruse of matter. Day by day his contemplations deepened, his mind fusing with the force of peace and forgiveness and wisdom he had discovered. This was God, of course, or could be called God. But even that term seemed too small, a word made by men for that which had no name. The world was not the world; it was an expression of a deeper reality, as the paint on the canvas was an expression of the artist’s thoughts. And with this awareness came the knowledge that the journey of his life was not complete, that his true purpose had yet to be unveiled.
Another thing: God seemed to be a woman.
He had been raised in the orphanage, among the sisters; he had no memories of his parents, of any other life. At sixteen he had enlisted in the DS, as nearly all the boys in the orphanage did in those days; when the call had gone out for volunteers to join the Second Expeditionary, Lucius had been among the first. This was right after the event known as the Massacre of the Field—eleven families ambushed on a picnic, twenty-eight people killed or taken—and many of the men who had survived that day had joined up as well. But Lucius’s motives were less decisive. Even as a boy he had never been swayed by the stories of the great Niles Coffee, whose heroics seemed transparently impossible. Who in his right mind would actually
