THE EMERALD TOWERS had carved an unceremonious hole in the Great Border Wall before vanishing into the New Mexico desert. The path, now almost two years old, had succumbed to the dry, sandy expanse and disappeared.
“We’ll keep searching until the caps are at sixty percent,” Vanessa said, a hint of defeat in her voice. “If we haven’t spotted a place to spool up by then, we’ll have to backtrack.”
Tania had all but given up on her tiny porthole. It only gave her a partial view of the western horizon, and anyway all she could see when she looked through it was the ghost of an insane man. Her thoughts often drifted back to that moment, which seemed like such an incomprehensible waste to her. That man had survived for years, and traveled thousands of kilometers to follow the towers, only to try to force his way into the aircraft and, perhaps, the woman within.
Instead she turned to her slate and asked Pablo to slide a video feed to her from the Helios’s landing camera. The resolution wasn’t great, but at least it was a straight-down view from two klicks up. Channeling a bit of her old friend Natalie, Tania put together a program to pull frames from the video every quarter of a second and stitch the resulting stills onto a map. She even had the images rotated based on the compass heading at the moment of capture, and then resized slightly based on any shifts in altitude. Finally she configured a cycling sequence of filters that ran all the images through various color enhancement algorithms that should, she hoped, accentuate subtle differences in the ground below that might otherwise be missed. That last feature seemed to come from Natalie’s voice in her head, and Tania, though delighted at the result, wondered if she was starting to go stir crazy alone in the cabin. She dismissed the concern by recalling all the long nights she’d spent on Anchor Station, poring over telescope images searching for tiny luminosity shifts. This was really no different. In fact, the nostalgia alone made the effort worthwhile. At the very least it took her mind off the tainted air that rushed past just outside.
“Vanessa, do me a favor?”
The pilot replied an instant later. “Sure.”
Tania explained her improvised visualization and asked the immune to fly in a zigzag pattern—northwest, tight turn, southwest—with each leg of the pattern one hundred kilometers long. Until then Vanessa had been flying about somewhat randomly. “I’d rather do this in a structured way, if you don’t mind.”
“It’s a great idea,” Vanessa replied. Within seconds the aircraft banked sharply and began the pattern near where the path had disappeared.
Two hours later, when Tania had several rows of zigzag-pattern images laid out on her slate’s map, she spotted something. They’d had two false alarms before that, both turning out to be portions of the same irrigation channel. This time, though, the width was just right and the depression quite shallow.
“Take a look,” she said into her headset, feeding the images back to Pablo in the cockpit. She circled the places in question—the line went across two legs of the V flight pattern.
“Best one yet,” Vanessa replied. “We’re near our turn-back point anyway, so we might as well check it out.”
“Agreed,” Tania said.
The Helios banked hard and Tania felt her weight change as the aircraft started to descend. On her screen, the program continued to run, laying out images that marked the route of the aircraft perfectly. The pictures shrank as the plane lost altitude, so Tania zoomed her view in.
Her image filter pass cycled to negative mode, and there, with obvious clarity, was the path.
Vanessa’s voice came over the headset before Tania could speak. “We see it!”
“Me, too!” Tania said, a wide grin on her face despite the solitude. “Are we okay to follow?”
“I wouldn’t advise it. Pretty desolate out here, and we burned a lot of energy flying that pattern. If we turn back now we can make our previous landing site and pick this up again tomorrow.”
Tania frowned. It would mean losing a precious day. She switched to her slate’s map and mentally projected out a cone along this leg of the tower path. “What about Tucson, in Arizona? It’s only a few hundred klicks and in the right direction.”
“It’s a risk,” Vanessa replied. “This country was in bad shape well before the disease came, remember. I’d feel more comfortable returning to a known functional charging port. Trust me, Tania, for your sake—the last thing you want is to be stranded out here.”
“Everything we’re doing out here is a risk,” she replied. “Skyler told me that. We have to press on.”
The path turned north again forty kilometers outside Tucson, so Vanessa marked it and flew on to the city. She said nothing about the range left in the capacitors, and little about anything else. Tania began to wonder if she’d made a mistake in overruling her, not to mention throwing one of Skyler’s lines at her to seal the directive.
Under the blazing noonday Sun, the fringes of the city shimmered at the horizon. Tania craned her neck to look below, but it was a fruitless exercise. She saw nothing but an ocean of cloned tract houses, shockingly wide expressways crammed with abandoned vehicles, and bleak patches of sand where the desert had reclaimed some of its former domain. Vast swaths of homes had burned at some point, leaving nothing behind but charred skeletons and blackened ground.
Even from this height she could see the grit and sand that blew through the dry, cooked city on stiff winds. Bits of trash and dry weeds drifted through the streets. A huge pack of feral dogs rested in the shade of plastic playground equipment, until the booming aircraft engines stirred them into a frenzy.
All of it blended together as the Helios stormed by. Tania’s stomach began to sink at what she saw. This was a miserable, forgotten place.
She hadn’t studied America much in her youth, other than what her coursework required. She knew the nation had once been the world’s dominant economic engine, only to spiral downward over the course of the twenty-first century, finally settling somewhere in the middle of the pack. The city she saw out the window could just as easily be Mumbai.
“Tania,” Vanessa said through her headset. “We’ve spotted something.”
“What is it? The towers?”
“No. Going to bank so you can see this for yourself.”
The aircraft banked hard, so hard, in fact, she had to grasp the handle by the door. She had a view of blue sky at first as Vanessa turned the craft to fly perpendicular to whatever it was they’d spotted. Then it leveled off before banking slightly in the opposite direction. Tania saw the ground come back into view, and her breath caught in her throat.
Aircraft, as far as the eye could see, covered the ground below. They were arranged in orderly rows, grouped by size and type in meticulous fashion. She saw everything from ancient jet planes and helicopters to more modern cap-powered aircraft with vertical flight capability. There were hundreds—no, thousands—of vehicles, all clearly military in nature. Excitement rippled through her at the find. This place could provide parts, even entire aircraft, to the colony for decades to come. Perhaps even weaponry.
Her enthusiasm dwindled as Vanessa took them lower and circled the sprawling grounds. The planes were all in various states of dismantlement and decay. Tania began to realize this was not a storage facility, but a graveyard.
“Do you think there’s anything we can use here?” Tania asked.
Vanessa brought the Helios to a hover over a row of warehouses near the center of the field. “None of the aircraft look fit to fly, at least to me. These buildings might have parts we can use, but nothing we can’t find in Brazil.”
“What a shame.”
“However,” Vanessa said with a hint of the dramatic. She spun the plane a bit farther until Tania could see a low administrative building, circular in shape. Around the base of it, four landing pads were arrayed, and each had landing lights that happily blinked away.
By the time the caps were spooled again, Tania had begun to feel the side effects of being trapped in a box for twenty hours. It wasn’t the lack of fresh air, or not seeing the blue sky above—she’d lived most of her life on space stations, after all. No, what Tania began to realize she missed most was real human contact. Her early morning chats with Zane and her afternoon inspection walks with Tim. Tim’s plain, youthful face came to mind frequently during the long flight. His goofy grin and nervous laugh, which she’d found so quaintly awkward at first, and now so endearing.
Between the idle thoughts and the lull of the Helios’s engines, Tania drifted off for a time. She woke to a weak light coming in through the porthole window, and glanced at her watch. Five P.M., unless they’d crossed a time zone. She sipped water from her thermos and ate dried mango while studying the line of overlapping images her slate displayed.
The tower path had continued to swoop and curve in apparent randomness, including a stretch that ran through the heart of the Las Vegas metropolis. Tania frowned at that. She’d seen pictures of how it looked before, and dreamt of visiting just to experience the place. To her it always seemed like an unintentional monument to the American collapse. Her images were too low-resolution to make anything out other than a vast sea of crumbling hotel and casino skyscrapers.
From there the path turned back east, cutting a barely discernible swath through eastern Utah before finally reaching the foothills and then mountains of Colorado, where flattened trees made the path obvious. From the flight pattern, Tania could tell her pilot had not lost it once all the way to their present location, a few hundred kilometers southwest of Denver.
Tania set the slate aside and stretched. She needed to get her blood pumping if she was going to stay awake for the landing they’d need to do at sunset. So she did what exercises she could in the cramped cabin: a set of sit-ups and push-ups, shadow boxing, and a little yoga. Then she used the restroom and washed her face with cold water.
The routine helped, and when Vanessa finally called over the headset, Tania felt ready to face another landing.
“Lost the path,” Vanessa said suddenly.
“Oh, no.”
A few seconds later. “Hang on, belay that. Tania, you might want to get suited up.”
Nothing Tania had done, not the exercise or the cold-water splash, set her heart racing like those words. She hopped to the window immediately. “What? What do you see?”
Once again Vanessa turned the aircraft to give her a better view. A small city filled her view—Boulder, if she recalled correctly from the map—and Tania swallowed. For some reason she hadn’t expected the towers to stop in an urban environment. There didn’t seem any point to such a long trek when they’d started in the much larger Belém.
But the Helios kept turning until the city lay behind them. A mountain range came into view, one so stunningly beautiful that Tania found herself speechless.
“What is this place?” she mumbled.
“Our nav calls it the Flatirons.”
From deep green forests came massive sheets of flat rock that jutted upward at almost perfect forty-five-degree slopes. The sheer faces receded in a line toward the south, and almost glowed orange in the reflected light of the setting sun. Huge clouds, burning with the same color on their west-facing fringes, drifted lazily overhead. It looked like a painting, Tania thought. Perfect in every way.
Except for the aura towers.
They stood like sentinels in a circle at the base of the closest rock face. Half were on the ground in a clearing they’d made among the trees. The other half rested on the slanted rocky mass, each having carved a chunk of rock out at their chosen resting place so they could stand upright.
Somehow the towers were even more ominous than the red-glowing group she’d seen in the rainforest east of Belém. Those almost seemed like they wanted to hide, surrounded by their mists and the tall trees. This group, with their shimmering emerald-colored lines of light, were right out in the open for anyone to see. It was as if they were begging explorers to come and look around.
“No dome here,” Vanessa said.
“Not one we can see at least,” Tania corrected. “Can you get a little closer?”
“Sure.”
The aircraft banked and Tania lost her view for a few minutes. She felt her weight decrease as they descended to just a hundred meters or so above the dark green canopy. Then Vanessa turned the craft again so Tania could study the site.
Her eyes went straight to the center of the circle. She’d hoped to spot a crashed shell ship there, exposed and waiting, another prize nestled inside.
Instead all she saw was a hole in the slanted rock. “Perhaps it’s another tunnel,” she said. “Like the one Skyler explored in Belém.”
“Only one way to find out,” Vanessa said. “But it’s getting dark, and we need to find a place to land. I suggest we wait until dawn to scout it out.”
Reluctantly, Tania agreed. “I’ll suit up an hour before that, and then you two can come back here and get your gear ready.”
Tania didn’t sleep that night. Vanessa had landed the Helios on a plateau with a view of the towers. The fine traces of green light that rippled and shimmered along their surfaces cast the surrounding rock face in a ghostly hue, augmented by moonlight that grew and faded as the great clouds drifted by overhead.
A full three hours before dawn she left the window and began to prepare for vehicle exit. Tania took her time. She broke down her rifle, cleaned it, and oiled the few moving parts. She laid out her EVA suit and inspected it for any signs of wear, despite the fact that the outfit’s own diagnostic system would alert her to any problem. Then she topped off the air and water tank built into the backpack. Satisfied, she stripped and used a dry-shower cloth to clean up a bit. It was no substitute for a nice hot shower, but it was all she had. She put on some clean undergarments and then a skintight leotard so the suit wouldn’t chafe against her skin.
Finally, Tania slipped into the suit. She’d practiced putting it on without an assistant, but even so she had to squirm and strain multiple times just to squeeze into the outfit. The semi-rigid pressure webbing that snaked through the material would be useless here on the ground, but even at its most relaxed setting the veinlike substrate still made the suit almost impossibly tight. Tania had watched sensories set in Victorian times, and it seemed a staple of such programs for the heroine to have to squeeze painfully into a corset before invariably meeting the hero. She felt the same pain now, only over her entire body. And, she mused, there was no hero waiting outside to meet her.
Of course, the last time she’d worn the suit, Skyler had been there. This made her chuckle. Arguably she’d been the hero on that excursion. Then another darkly humorous thought came to her. Somewhere, right now, Russell Blackfield was probably wearing the suit Skyler had worn. She shook her head, still unable to fathom why he’d taken the man along. There must be a good reason. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.
She didn’t have her headset on, so Vanessa’s voice came through the cabin intercom. “Good morning, Tania. Are you ready?”
Out the porthole she could just see the first hints of daylight on the eastern horizon. “Putting my helmet on now. Give me five minutes, then wait at the porthole for an a-okay.”
The helmet weighed more than she remembered. Tania sat on the edge of her seat and studied it, fighting a flood of memories from her trip into the Builders’ ship. As much as she tried to force the thought away, holding the helmet now seemed to crystallize, to amplify, the basic truth: She’d died in this helmet once before.
Once is enough, she thought, and filled her mind with one vibrant picture until it blotted out the rest. The circle of green-glowing towers, standing vigil at the base of that wall of rock. The Flatirons. She’d had to look up the term to understand the reference, and though she did agree the strange rock formation resembled a row of clothing irons jutting up from the ground, to her they looked like the walls of some natural fortress in the process of being pulled back into the earth.
Tania focused on that picture in her mind, and pulled the helmet over her head.
She walked between her two companions, Vanessa on point and Pablo trailing behind. Once they were within the trees all sign of the alien towers vanished, and Tania shifted her focus to where she stepped. The ground was a patchwork blanket of melting snow and long-fallen pine needles. Both crunched pleasantly under her boots but also presented problems. The snow was slick here. One false step and she’d fall, which under any other circumstances would be cause to laugh. But out here one tiny puncture of her suit carried terrifying consequences.
The pine needles were another matter. It surprised her to find they provided even less traction than the ice. Worse, they were centimeters deep in some places, concealing chunks of rock or small depressions, all of which could easily send her sprawling if she wasn’t careful.
It made the hike a slow and tedious process, and it was only after ten minutes of walking that Tania suddenly realized she’d never seen snow before. Not in person, anyway.
“Hold up a sec,” she said.
Vanessa immediately knelt in a defensive posture. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “That’s the problem. I’m so focused on my feet I haven’t even looked up. I just need a second to … center myself.”
The woman nodded and made a gesture to Pablo that Tania assumed meant “stay alert.”
Though her suit told her the temperature was a cool 7 degrees Celsius, she felt perfectly comfortable. Even when she knelt and touched some of the snow, the suit’s construction allowed none of the cold to seep beyond its outer layer. Tania frowned. It might as well have been a sensory. Even the forest sounds were piped into her helmet via external microphones, giving them a manufactured taint.
At least when we get to the towers I can open the mask and breathe this air. She’d never been able to breathe the air in Hawaii but imagined it would have been hot, sticky, and rank with decaying vegetation. In comparison, this place seemed crisp and pure, like a drink of cold water.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“One moment,” Pablo said.
She turned to look at him. The tall, thin man was crouched beside a tree, his hands cupped over his mouth. It took Tania a second to realize he was breathing onto his fingers to warm them. “Forget your gloves?”
He shook his head. Then he pointed at a patch of ice by the tree. “Tracks here. Human.”
“Sub?”
“Yes. Unless some immune is going barefoot in this cold.”
Tania backtracked to his position and looked at the footprints. They were fading in the melting snow, but unmistakable.
“Looks like it was standing by this tree,” the man said, “facing our plane. See these two deep ones? Then it turned and went toward the towers.”
Tania felt a chill then, the kind her suit couldn’t compensate for. “It didn’t just attack. I thought they always attacked.”
“No,” he said. He stood up and glanced around, sniffing the air. “The ones you see are the ones that attack, so it can feel that way. Almost as many just run.”
“Remember,” Vanessa said, joining them. “Subs are gripped by primal emotions and responses. Some are blinded with the desire to fight, others to flee.”
“Fight or flight,” Tania said, nodding. Her experiences had been so clouded by the battles around the colony that she’d forgotten the fundamental symptoms of the disease.
“Exactly. There used to be others, too. Those who wanted to play, or even love. As you can imagine, few like that survived more than a few days. This one looks to be the flight type. It probably became curious at the noise of our engines but ran when it saw us emerge.”
Tania nodded. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling the creature was baiting them. She held her rifle at the ready when they continued.
The farther into the foothills they went, the more snow they encountered, and by the time Vanessa glimpsed the top of an aura tower through the trees, white patches blanketed most of the ground.
They crept the last hundred meters to the edge of the clearing the towers had created. Vanessa took up a position next to a tree, and Tania placed herself directly across from her at the trunk of another. Pablo crouched in the snow between them, visibly shivering. He rubbed his upper arms as they studied the scene.
Just like in Belém and Ireland, the towers were arranged in an almost perfect circle roughly half a kilometer in diameter. In Ireland there’d been a purple dome that somehow manipulated the flow of time, something Tania still found hard to believe. In Belém, the towers were cloaked in a humid mist that reduced visibility to almost nothing.
Here the entire circle of towers rested in plain sight, which somehow made the place more unsettling. Nearly half of the towers were positioned on the ground amid fallen trees and flattened foliage. The other half extended up onto the rocky face of one of the five Flatirons. Each had carved a small flat space upon which to rest, and hints of the violence used to do this were there in the form of rocks and debris that trailed down the rock face like tears.
In the very center of all this was a hole in the base of the rock. From the plane it had looked small, but Tania saw now this had been a deception. The opening in the mountain’s face was ten meters wide and twenty tall. All jagged-teeth edges, too, as if the mountain had formed a mouth and screamed. If she’d seen it without the towers surrounding it, she might have thought it to be a cave, but somehow with the presence of the towers it seemed obvious to her this opening had not been here before the ship crashed. Perhaps it had been blasted open rather than carved, or perhaps the ship had somehow cracked into an open pocket in the mountain that previously had no exit here.
“We should test the air,” Pablo said in a flat voice.
Tania swallowed and thought of Karl, who’d done the same in Belém more than two years ago. He’d been infected then but returned to the aura so quickly, the disease went into stasis before it had done any serious damage. And yet even that had resulted in a constant battle with raging headaches, and an addiction to painkillers. Over and over Tania had told herself she could live with the same if she had to, but standing here she found herself wavering. Only after remembering the urgency of their mission did she release the latches on her helmet, twist, and lift the glass away.
Her first shock came from the brisk air. The cold made her nose tingle, her earlobes throb. She inhaled and got her second shock. The air smelled of pine and something else she couldn’t quite place—rock or snow, perhaps both in concert. It was the smell of purity, of cleanliness, and in all her life she’d never experienced anything like it. The frigid thin air caused a slight ache in her chest, her lungs unused to both the temperature and the low oxygen level. When she exhaled, she was delighted to see her breath rendered like a puff of smoke where hot air met cold.
“Well?” Vanessa asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. She was either immune, a statistical improbability, or the towers were generating aura.
Her companions wanted to wait a bit, just to be safe. After two minutes with no symptoms, Tania attached her helmet to her belt and looked at the two immunes. “Let’s go see what’s in that cave,” she said.