Chapter Seven

There was no roof on top of the ventilation tower, just a lattice of metal bars designed to keep birds out. Greasy lint matted the lattice, black with soot spewed from generations of cars going by in the tunnel beneath. Sarah kept slipping but Ptolemy was right there to grab her, his hands dry and very, very strong.

His painted face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

In the sunlight, standing upright in the breeze and the blue sky, she studied him as she never really had before. She saw how his bandages gathered in his armpits and how they had been woven across his back. There must have been dozens of layers of cloth wrapped around him. She saw flashes of gold from the small of his back, from his kneecaps, and knew he must have amulets buried in all that swaddling. She smelled her hands where he had grasped her and smelled the spice, the cinnamon and ground nutmeg smell of the resins that preserved his body. She smelled the millennia he had outlived and the strange worlds he had inhabited. To die at the height of the Roman empire, to be reborn at the end of history. She wondered what that could do to you, what it might do to your mind, your sanity.

“What did you want to show me?” she asked. He said nothing. Then he grabbed her hand. Hard. He grabbed her hand very hard. It started to hurt.

A protest bubbled out of her but suddenly his energy flooded through her body, dark and thick and her arcane vision flared up, overwhelming all of her senses. She saw him, the darkness inside of him burning intensely. She saw herself, full of golden fire. She saw through his eyes, though. Her own vision had never been so sharp. He saw what she did but with far greater detail.

Amazing. She wanted to study herself in the mirror of his eyes, she wanted to look at everything the way he did. There was no time for that, though. He turned her to look to the west. Her vision sped across the world until she saw what he wanted her to see.

Pure energy. It radiated from a single point well to the west, high in mountains in the middle of the continent. A broken chain of enormous rocks like an exposed spinal column. The light that flooded outward in long flickering beams from that place was colorless and perfect. Colorless, neither yellow nor purple, though she knew it had to be the energy that created both. Colorless because it wasn't light at all, but life, the very energy that made her cells divide and her hair grow.

It was awesome in its beauty. Jaw-droppingly, hypnotically beautiful. Sarah felt a powerful urge to get closer to it, to that Source. “That’s where he’s headed?” she asked, though she couldn’t imagine where else the Tsarevich might go.

it is go where we all go want to go, he told her. it source is the source

The Source. She understood immediately. “We’ll leave today, if we can,” she told him. The Tsarevich had a long road ahead of him still but she couldn’t afford to lose a step. “Your friends are ready?”

He nodded again. This time just a simple nod, his painted face bowing up and down. She followed him back down a ladder to the ground and then across the narrow causeway to the Island. Osman was waiting for her, a stack of cheaply printed technical manuals in his hands. He gave Ptolemy a nasty but brief look and then turned away, gesturing for Sarah to follow him.

“Marisol didn’t want to give up any of them, and I must say I understand her logic,” the pilot told her as he lead them deep into the Island’s interior, to where the big aircraft hangars loomed over the slack-haunted gardens. “If something should happen to this place they’ll need all the vehicles they have to get away. I had to really sweet-talk her for just the one.”

“Do you want a medal?” Sarah asked. “I’ll make sure you get a medal when this is over.”

He laughed and nodded appreciatively. “Alright. What we have here,” he said, and grunted as he shoved open an enormous hangar door. It was counterweighted so it could be opened easily even without power but it was still huge. “What we have here is American airpower at its finest. The HH-60 Jayhawk, which is just a United States Coast Guard version of the UH-60, I do not lie.”

The aircraft in the hangar had the stubby nose and long tail that just said “helicopter”. There was little to distinguish its lines except its white and safety orange paint job.

“This is the workhorse of the US Army. Medium-range, medium-lift, twin engine, single prop, it stands up to any kind of duty you’d care to mention: medical evac, air cavalry, troop transport, point-to-point and my least favorite, direct air assault. It’s the best helicopter ever built by human hands.”

Sarah peered into the darkness of the hangar. “Medium-range? We’re going quite a ways.” She tried to remember what she had learned of American geography. “The Rocky Mountains, I think.”

Osman shuffled through the tech manuals in his hands and pulled out a heavily annotated military aviator’s map of the country. Sarah pointed out the Source at once. With a laminated cardboard ruler Osman measured the distance, his thick fingers smoothing out the paper map as he went. “A little under two thousand miles,” he told her. He scratched his beard. “Fine, just fine. We’ll need to stop once and refuel. There’s a major air base here,” he said, pointing at a star on the map labeled Omaha. “They’ll have what we need.”

“We can just do that? The fuel won’t have evaporated or gone stale in all this time?” Sarah asked.

“No problem, boss. Gasoline goes bad over time, that is true. Jet fuel, on the other hand, is just very pure kerosene. It lasts forever if it’s stored properly.”

Sarah nodded and looked up at the helicopter. “Okay, I’ll take it.”

“Wonderful,” Osman said, and gestured broadly with his arms. “Once again I get to fly to my certain death. It had better be a very large medal, with many ribbons.”

Sarah smiled and took some of the tech manuals from him. She was about to start looking for the fuel hoses when a shadow passed across the mouth of the hangar.

“Hi, Dad,” she said. Dekalb didn’t look happy.

“Sarah. I thought we discussed this.” On his shoulder Gary looked like he’d gone to sleep, though Sarah knew better. “I don’t want you in harm’s way. So please, just. Just step away from that helicopter.”

“I won’t let Ayaan down,” she told him. Maybe if she could just talk him into going back to the house. Maybe if she just lied to him then he wouldn’t notice when she left. “Not when I’ve come this far already.”

“Fine,” he said, and stepped inside the hangar. “Then I’ll do it.”

It took her a second to realize he was serious. “Dad, this isn’t the time,” she insisted, but he was already climbing inside the helicopter.

Osman dropped what he was doing and came over to stand next to her. Slowly the pilot folded his arms across his chest. “I know you from old times, dead man,” he said to Dekalb. “I respect you for what I’ve seen you do. So I’ll ask you nicely to get out of my vehicle.”

“Osman.” Dekalb looked at the pilot as if trying to place him. “It’s been so long. Please, take me to where Ayaan is. I have to dispatch her.”

Heat filled Sarah’s throat. Was she about to cry? Somebody had to teach her father a lesson about reality. Somebody needed to point out his folly.

Why did it have to be her?

“Dad,” she said, very, very carefully. “It’s not up to you. This isn’t your responsibility. It’s mine.”

“I’m your only surviving parent, Sarah.” He wasn’t even looking at her. “You are my responsibility. Your safety.”

Sarah glanced back at Osman but the pilot had nothing for her. He had taught her before to finish off her own liches.

Her father wasn’t going to give in without a fight. Clearly he’d decided that this was when he would make his big stand. “I’ve lost too much already,” he told her. He glanced at Gary on his shoulder. The skullbug didn’t so much as twitch. “I forbid this. I mean it.”

“Stop this, Dad,” she tried.

“I died for you. I died so you could have some kind of life in Africa. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what I gave up for you?”

“Please stop,” she whispered.

“I died and then I locked myself away with this freak of nature,” he told her, gesturing at Gary, “to make the world safer for you. Don’t you dare make me throw all that away by getting yourself killed now. Not for some pointless idea of camaraderie with a dead woman. Not after all I’ve suffered to protect you.”

“Stop,” Sarah said. And surprisingly enough he did. He’d said his piece.

Her turn.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember how she’d felt earlier when she’d looked at him and seen nothing but decay. It gave her a little strength. “To protect me?” she asked. “You came here to protect me? How did you protect me, when did you protect me when I was eleven years old and hungry and the Somali government collapsed and we had to run and the ghouls were after us and most of us didn’t make it, huh? How were you protecting me when we finally ran out of food, when for three weeks we had nothing whatsoever to eat? We made little cakes out of clay, Dad. We ate clay because it expanded in your stomach and made you feel full. Clay, Dad, I ate dirt I was so hungry.”

He winced visibly but she refused to stop there.

“Where were you, where was your protection, when the women came for me and said it was time I got circumcised? They wanted to infibulate me, do you know what that means? No, probably not, because you weren’t there. You were too busy over here, trying to protect me. If Ayaan hadn’t been there I would have been sewn up, they would have sewn up my vagina with yarn, leaving me just a little hole to pee and bleed out of. So I would be pure for my future fucking husband. You weren’t there!”

“Sarah,” he said, his voice completely altered.

She refused to let him speak. Instead she screamed at him. “Listen, you maggoty old wound, I guess you can come along for the ride if you want to protect me now. It’ll be handy to have somebody who can heal bullet wounds. But I’m in charge. I’m in fucking charge! If you can’t accept that I’ll pick you up and carry you out of here myself.”

“You have no idea what my existence is like. Don’t you dare say that to me!” he howled.

“I already did.” She turned around and started walking away.

“Wait a moment,” Osman said. “I did not say dead things could come!”

“Yeah, well, you’re not in charge either,” she told the pilot. She wondered how he was going to feel about the soldiers she’d recruited. She walked back out into the sunlight to wait for Ptolemy.