It had been five days on the road and she had slept only three hours per day. Speed was critical, because they had to travel a great distance, and as panic gripped the nation and rumors of new attacks spread, roadblocks went up in unpredictable locations.
Police were everywhere. Police, and the military. In Missouri, a militia group had taken control of a national forest campground, and a standoff with the FBI was building. In Kentucky, seven were killed in an attack on an army base. In New Hampshire, a husband and wife drove a van loaded with explosives into the statehouse and blew themselves up, wounding a dozen. For every incident there were a hundred threats; for every threat, a thousand rumors. Worldwide, terrorism alerts were raised to their highest levels, and police presence increased around the globe. More than twenty groups had claimed a role in the attack on the American electrical grid; a dozen more had been accused.
The fear virus was flowering, and if Eli had been alive to see it, he’d have reveled in the moment.
She avoided the interstates, sticking to back roads and using her map of the electrical grid as much as her GPS, because she knew the areas where they would be hearing the worst of the rumors. She was disappointed in the lack of action but held out hope. The seeds of fear had been planted and carefully tended and soon they would flourish.
In occasional breaks, she sent e-mails and posted on forums and social networks and then destroyed the devices, leaving a trail of shattered iPads and cell phones from west to east.
It was important that people heard from Eli. Important that they understood all the news they were being offered was a lie.
The only truth ever spoken had been between Eli and Janell.
Approach from the south. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave.…Together.
And so they had.
While she drove, she talked, and took comfort in his presence. The smell of charred flesh, so repellent when she had gathered him into her arms in the sparking blue flashes and orange flames, had become tolerable by the time she reached the Mississippi, and it was almost comforting when she drove through New Hampshire.
On the morning of the sixth day she sat alone on the rocks, the mountains at her back, and watched the sun rise over the North Atlantic. Somewhere out across that water, over some three thousand miles of open sea, the harbor town of Rotterdam was already awake, the day well under way.
That was where she had met him. So long ago.
The memory brought tears to her eyes for the first time since she’d understood that the corpse at her feet was his, and she allowed them to flow. She cried into the rocks as the sea crashed and threw foam at her feet, and when the sun was fully risen and there was a golden glow across the water, she was done and she knew that she would not cry again.
Ever.
She looked at that shimmering golden line between sun and land, splashed over the sea like the careless paintbrush stroke of the gods, and she thought that it must lead back to the place where all of this had begun, to that crowded, sweaty pub with the cloying smell of fish, to a man whose eyes held all the secrets of the world.
Dead now. Burned alive.
This is Markus Novak.…We are long overdue.
She supposed the man named Jay Baldwin was to blame, but by now she’d learned enough from the radio to tell her that Sabrina Baldwin had escaped before Jay found his courage, and while the media was giving Sabrina and the agent named Lynn Deschaine credit for their survival, Janell could not be so gracious. What she remembered was that first message on the radio, the first slip on what soon revealed itself as pure black ice.
Each time she tried to accept that this was the way of the world and not her responsibility, she remembered Novak standing above her behind his harsh beam of light, her knives just out of reach, and then she heard his voice over the radio.
We are long overdue.
Yes. Already, she could agree with that sentiment. Already, it had been too long for them.
And his mother. The news reported her death, and it was probably true, which meant only that Janell had lost another chance, because Violet Novak deserved to die at her hand. She had lost Eli because of a woman who could not be trusted. He’d stayed in the West with her because she could not be trusted, and he had died because of that.
The sun had warmed the rock beneath her by the time the tide was high enough to put the small boat in. She carried what was left of the greatest man she’d ever known, what was left of the only true love she would ever have in this life, as delicately as possible. He was wrapped in a blanket, but the smell was still heavy, even against the ocean wind.
She wanted to go slowly, to linger with him, but she knew the risks. If his body was found, the questioning of the truth would cease.
That could not be allowed.
She motored out into the sea, enjoying the strength of the slapping waves, knowing how he had always loved listening to the immensity of the sea, a sound that told of its astonishing depths and promised its unfathomable power. Dormant power now, but it would rise again. It always did. And the fools who didn’t listen to its promises would perish, and then they would settle back into their ways, only to be shocked when it rose once more. Year after year, civilization after civilization.
Always surprised by the power of the world.
She followed the golden light out, out, out. As far toward Rotterdam as was possible in such a small craft and with so much work yet to do.
She killed the engine and took a moment alone with the sounds of the sea.
Then she spoke.
“Your energy lives,” she said. “You know that, right? You can feel it? In all of this?”
The waves crested and fell, crested and fell.
“They can’t kill your energy,” she said. “Can’t trap it, can’t guide it. They’ve merely released it from its latest form. So it takes a new form, resurrected and refocused, but still in motion. Onward it goes. You know this.”
Spray soaked her, and the taste of the salt on her lips was perfect.
“And so I follow it still,” she said. “Lead on. Always.”
She gathered his blanketed remains gently, lifted him above the bow, and eased him into the water. The sea accepted him gratefully, and why not? Power understood power.
She watched as he sank slowly, watched until the blue-gray water had hidden any trace of him, and then she started the motor, turned the boat, and piloted it west, toward the rocky Maine coast, with the sun of the new day warming her back.