9

Selah hurried to Treva’s side as the others ran up the walkway. “What’s the matter? We have to go. They’ll be coming after us any minute.”

Treva shook her head. “No, I told you I can’t leave. I won’t abandon Cleon—”

“Cleon is gone!” Selah bit her lip to quiet her outburst. She closed her eyes at the fresh pain of losing her stepbrother. “I love you.” She hugged Treva tight and felt the shiver in her friend’s shoulders.

Treva’s eyes glistened with tears. “I love you like a sister and I’ll miss our friendship terribly.”

“Yours was the first friendship that felt like a sisterhood.” Selah could barely talk around the lump forming in her throat.

Treva tried to smile. “See, I got you ready for the real thing with Mari. I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to leave. Be safe, and make me proud,” Treva said with a hitch in her voice.

Selah decided to try one more time. “Are you sure?”

Treva nodded. “Your mom has a package for you.” With a smile, she handed Selah the pulse rifle and took off across the lot at a jog.

Selah’s heart clenched as she watched until her friend disappeared among the trees. Her shoulders slumped and she pressed her lips together. No. Don’t try calling her back. Her heart would never find peace anywhere else. She turned and hurried up the walkway. Mojica closed the ramp behind her.

The transport lifted off. A feeling of floating hit Selah. Was it from the elevation or simply relief? Either way she would remember this day. The twenty-fifth day of September, her family was finally together and free.

A violent percussion rocked the transport, shaking them from side to side.

Selah smashed her shoulder into the outer wall. The next jolt whacked her head into the hull. She grimaced and regained her footing. Could TicCity have gotten reinforcements that fast?

“Mother, keep the kids down here.” Selah and Mojica dashed for the command deck, leaving Brejian, Mari, and Pasha with two startled children. They burst onto the deck as Bodhi and Taraji traded commands.

“Swing wide and give me a starburst,” Bodhi shouted as he swung a VR screen into place and lined up his sights.

Another jolt and a large vibrating boom echoed through the chambers. Selah grabbed for a wall handle. Bodhi and Taraji clicked on their seat restraints, but Mojica armed the tactical console and stayed on her feet, balanced perfectly for riding the jolts as Selah once road the waves of the sea on a board.

Another jarring percussion.

Selah’s heart thudded hard against her ribs, making her arm pulse. She worked her way to the navigator chair.

“Fire your aft cannons on my mark,” Taraji barked. “Five, four, three . . .”

Port-side thrusters discharged, swinging the rear of the transport to the right.

“Fire!”

Bodhi released a barrage of pulse cannon fire in the direction of the hovering TicCity security transports. They were smaller and more maneuverable, but no match for this super transport. Selah’s fear subsided as the enemy transports dropped their pursuit one by one. They tried spreading out, but Taraji set the transport to sweep the general area and Bodhi laid down several tracks of fire.

Selah watched the crosshairs on Bodhi’s VR screen following every minute move by the targets, and in some cases he led their movements by laying down a trail of fire that they eventually ran through. He also eliminated two units that had evaded the first firing cadence. The remaining three in that group broke off pursuit and turned back to TicCity.

“They’re leaving now, but will they come back?” Selah peered out at empty airspace.

“Doesn’t matter. We can outrun them. They’d have to turn back sooner or later because of low power cells,” Taraji said.

“Is there any damage from their pulse charges?” Selah tried to spot damage out her portal.

“That’s not possible either. We have magnetic shielding that creates an impenetrable field around us, especially since we’re now calibrated for the frequency they’re emitting from their Mountain technology,” Bodhi said as he lifted a VR screen from his vision. “Those jolts were just the shield absorbing the charges.”

Mojica leaned over to the command chair and slapped Bodhi on the back. “Well done.”

“Outstanding!” Taraji increased their altitude and speed until they were cruising at about fifty miles an hour.

Bodhi accepted the praise but looked a little embarrassed and bewildered. Selah knew he didn’t remember enough of his past to decide whether having these abilities was a good or bad thing, and that uncertainty sometimes bothered him.

“I knew he had to be former military from the way he slung on gear in the Mountain. But now we can definitely say it’s aeronautics,” Mojica said.

“Not necessarily. The hand-eye coordination could be ground combat,” Taraji added.

“Not true. They wouldn’t learn leading edge—”

“Hello! You two are acting like he’s not in the room.” Selah planted her hands on her hips.

Mojica and Taraji stared at her as though she had spoken an unknown language.

Bodhi shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I don’t remember anything about an occupation, just flashes of my temperament.”

“Along with Glade, we as the Kinship planned this day for many decades,” Mojica said. “Our functions in the plan were designed with Taraji as pilot, myself as tactical, and Brejian as navigation. But we were never supplied with a stationary armaments specialist, which in itself was daunting because these systems are far more advanced than what even I’m used to.” She shook her head. “I must confess. For many years I considered that a major oversight, but Glade proved true. He did indeed provide for this through Bodhi.”

“What is a stationary armaments specialist?” Selah asked.

Mojica and Taraji both shrugged and said in tandem, “The shooter.”

“Even if that was true, how could Bodhi know how to use systems so technical that TicCity doesn’t have anything even close in comparison?” Bodhi? A shooter? Selah didn’t want to believe that had been part of Glade’s plan all along. The whole idea made her feel like a long-stringed puppet, which caused doubt about her own decision-making abilities to creep in.

“The technology is actually very old. The government was experimenting with it before the Sorrows. We’ve just built up enough infrastructures to be able to use and duplicate it again.”

Selah frowned. “There’s got to be some other explanation. Glade didn’t know anything about Bodhi before we rescued him in—”

“May I enter the command deck?” Pasha stood in the doorway.

Taraji remained focused on the console but motioned her in.

Pasha moved to stand beside Selah. “I’ve been trying to tell you what I’ve read in Glade’s documents. I think he knew Bodhi was the one coming to transition you.”

Selah’s eyes widened. “Well, there’s apparently a few other things you haven’t told me either.”

Pasha’s smile always disarmed Selah, and this time was no exception.

Selah suddenly remembered the bag of documents in her quarters. “Oh no! We left Glade’s papers behind.”

“No we didn’t,” Bodhi said. “I picked up the gear at your quarters before we took the transport out for a shakedown run. I figured it would save time later.”

Selah sighed with relief. “You’re wonderful!” She threw her arms around Bodhi’s neck and kissed him. Then her eyes flew open and she dropped her arms. She glanced in her mom’s direction as her face warmed. She’d never kissed a guy in front of her mother before.

She lowered her eyes and stepped back. “I—I’m sorry . . . I was just so happy that . . .”

She snuck a glance at Bodhi. He looked rather pleased—flushed but pleased.

Pasha moved between Selah and Bodhi and wrapped an arm around each of them. “Glade made it very clear in his writings that he gave his blessing to you two.”

“If we survive!” Selah said. “Then why did he give us such a hard time? He only seemed to relent at the end.”

Pasha gave a slight smile and hugged Selah. “He was a father reluctant to give up his daughter to another man. After all, he had just found you. I think he was a little jealous of not being able to command all of your attention. He did believe Bodhi loved you.”

“How did he know?” Bodhi said.

“He knew your character before the Sorrows,” Pasha said. “You were a hotshot Air Force pilot for the newest configuration fighter transport. Glade said that your passion for Selah was more obvious than your love for your former job.”

Selah lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder. “How do you know that?”

Pasha raised a hand. “I saw Glade’s notes about Bodhi in reference to piloting this craft. But that’s not our problem right now. We’ve calculated this vehicle’s specifications and mass, and we can’t go fast enough or high enough with the present weight to make our destination in time.”

Taraji turned to the group. “I’ve worked that through already. This vehicle was originally made to carry forty troops, but there are only nine of us. That’s why it took me slightly longer than expected to get here. We modulated sleeping quarters for ten and created larger open work areas and left all the extra panels behind. The power units will last for three years at the new weight, and I was also working on several innovations for security that might come in handy.”

“That helps me to understand more of what was written.” Pasha turned to Selah. “You have to see the mountain of pearls I discovered—”

“Well, I’ve helped her fight bad—”

“I don’t care. She’s my sister—”

The arguing children poured onto the command deck. Selah stepped between. “Whoa, you two need to step into opposite corners for this duel.”

Rylla wrinkled her nose. “What kind of duel are we going to have? You won’t let me play with real swords anymore.”

“Because the last time you swung a long blade, you sliced one of Glade’s maps clean in half. I was the one who heard the rant every time Glade thought about it,” Selah said. “Besides, I only used the word as a figure of speech.”

Dane narrowed his eyes to slits. “She played with a real sword? Why haven’t you ever let me play with a long blade?”

Selah’s mind flashed with thoughts of things a twelve-year-old mischievous girl could teach a nine-year-old curious boy. She squeezed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “Mother, please help.” Selah knew her limits, and managing two children definitely fell beyond her outer edge.

Pasha herded the children from the command deck.

Tension released from Selah’s neck. “How’s Mari?”

Pasha pressed her thumb to the nearby panel for identification, then called the lift to send the children below. “She’s fine. She may have a concussion, so we’ll have to watch her through the night. But the way she dove into helping us decipher the data, we may wind up needing to force her to take a rest.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but have Brejian’s records helped?” Selah didn’t want to pin her hopes on a hunch, but that was exactly what she was doing. Glade had spent an inordinate amount of time in the Repository, and she was convinced that would lead to the West.

Pasha turned back. “So far, she’s directed me to several areas of Glade’s files that were enhanced by the data cubes she brought from the Repository. She and Mari are scampering about like mice evading a broom. Do you want a report from her? I know the value of her data should be at least equal to you getting her out of there and to someplace safe.”

Selah stood slightly behind Bodhi’s command chair with her hand resting on his shoulder. His touch supplied her with strength while fear robbed her of it. “No, but I want to talk to you, so I’ll be coming down to see what you figured out.”

“We found the tactical room and began laying out the records. There is a surprising order to the way things fit together. It’s starting to look like a 3-D map.” Pasha called the lift back up and followed the children below.

Selah looked at Taraji and Mojica. “Can we land to have a meal and discuss all this?”

Mojica leaned over and extended a fist between the two command chairs. Bodhi put his fist on top of hers, and Taraji put hers on his. They gave a three-second count and broke apart. “How about we three keep this mammoth transport in the air and moving forward while you work with Brejian on where we’re going?” Mojica said.

“How soon do you need a course correction?” Selah headed toward the door. Pasha had piqued her curiosity about Glade. It stirred a new measure of excitement in her.

“It will take four hours of straight flying for us to get back to the Mountain, then we divert to the open pass. So about that time we’ll need a direction or we’re traveling blind,” Taraji said.

After setting a time marker on her communicator, Selah turned to follow her mother.

Selah grabbed up a slice of Mari’s summer sausage and a hunk of crusty bread from the feast Pasha had laid out for a late afternoon meal. She wandered into the tactical area looking for her mother.

She strolled to Pasha’s side. “So what are these pearls of wisdom you have to share with me?” She savored the spicy meat as she looked at stacks of old papers.

Pasha tipped her head. “What are you talking about?”

Selah frowned. “You wanted to share some pearls of something?”

Pasha’s expression brightened and she chuckled. “I wanted to share the mountain of pearls we discovered.” She turned and pointed to the tactical layout table in the center of the room.

The back of Selah’s neck prickled with excitement as she moved toward the 3-D wonder spread out on the table, showing mountains and trees, lakes and rolling hills. The flat areas were laced with little mounds that looked like drops of dew resting on blades of grass—like the dome of Petrol City, but without the metal latticework shell supporting the exterior.

Brejian worked at setting up a series of data cube halo-projectors on the topographical map they’d created of the old West. At the lower edge of the Great Lakes and extending to the West Coast lay a single line of circular domes resembling a string of pearls draped across the mountains.

“This is wonderful, but how do we know it’s accurate?” Selah slowly worked her way around the table. The most she had ever seen of the rest of the country was a colorful wall map of the United States that was preserved in the Borough building back home in Dominion. It had been published in the ancient year of 1995, and the flat map hadn’t done justice to the mountain ranges she could see here.

“Pasha started the discovery by reading Glade’s journals,” Mari said. “He left instructions for building this model from his data glass. We’ve been working with a small model since we left the Mountain, but once we got here all these appliances were adaptable to this huge model.” She used a digital distance meter to test a mountain height according to the written data on that location.

“So you didn’t think it was important enough to tell me this?” Selah noticed that places labeled “Cleveland, Ohio” and “Chicago, Illinois” had huge, glistening pearly domes. “What are those domes made from?”

“As far as we can tell it’s magnetic energy.” Pasha raised a hand. “And excuse me, young lady. I tried to tell you about this several times, but you were always too busy with other things.”

“Well, you tried to tell me some stories about a woman and a bear, and birds with red wings and such,” Selah said.

“I was asking you why they put such a premium on a collection of children’s stories,” Pasha said.

“Mother, I still don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“The Stone Braide Chronicles. The book with the symbol on it. It’s a collection of fairy tales,” Pasha said. “A beautifully bound book of such quality, and they’ve protected it for so many years, but it’s only children’s stories. Well, at least Rylla and Dane are enjoying them. But with every new discovery we find, I’ve come to you. You are just too busy.”

Selah wanted to protest, but some of those moments flashed in her mind, showing just how she had dismissed her mother. She frowned. “I’m sorry. I was rude.”

“You weren’t rude, my darling.” Pasha wrapped her arms around Selah’s shoulders. “You’re just trying to respond to all the situations thrust upon you. Some of them have carried you beyond your youthful innocence, so an outburst once in a while is understandable as long as you are truly sorry about it afterward.”

Selah lowered her voice and turned her face toward Pasha’s ear. “I’m truly sorry that I was rude to you.” Selah kissed her on the cheek.

Pasha smiled and patted Selah’s hand. “We’ll have plenty of travel time to talk, but right now we need our destination plotted as accurately as possible. It will mean the difference between you living or dying.” She moved back to the table and worked on setting up two more data cubes.

Her mother had now become the next version of her father. Selah knew that tone. “Are you avoiding me?”

“Yes.” Pasha slowly shook her head. “You remind me so much of your father, even down to the way you tip your head when you’re perturbed. It’s distracting, and my mind wanders back to our younger days. At the moment all I see when I look at you is Glade telling me to complete this project and save our daughter. So we can discuss my mistakes at another time.”

Selah felt a rush of love for her mother that overwhelmed any anger she had for being kept in the dark about her additional Lander heritage. “Okay, but I’m counting on us getting to talk.”

“I promise. Now come and look at this. We plugged in Glade’s data, but wound up with huge holes in the landscape in these spots.” Pasha pointed out slightly different-colored areas. Selah surmised it was because the data cubes filling in those areas were much older and getting low in their energy charge.

“The Repository had hidden records of the First Protocol recorded way back at the beginning, including the original plans for the novarium.” Brejian worked on filling in details to the map. “So that supplied us with the lay of the land and major domes.”

“In the package from Treva was the Keeper of the Stone journals from her parents. Those helped fill in some of the minor gaps and two good connections. Oh, and here, Treva left this for you.” Pasha handed Selah a small folded parcel tied with a leather lace.

Selah accepted the package with both hands and held it to her heart. They were too far away now. She couldn’t feel Treva anymore. She said a silent goodbye.

“But we got the greatest break from the Mountain documents that Pasha said came from a Keeper in a cave,” Brejian said. “He chronicled the building of the trail from Chicago to the West Coast. They lost three novarium before it was completed, and he never recorded what happened afterward.”

“Obviously it never worked or we wouldn’t be here,” Selah said. “What are all the domes for?”

Mari walked in carrying a disorganized stack of curling yellowed pages. “As far as I can tell the domes were the only way they had breathable air at the time. It took many years for the dust to leave the atmosphere from the super volcano.”

“The domes are big enough for whole cities?” Selah’s insides fluttered. “Are they original cities from before the Sorrows?” She stared at the clear drops. First wonder, then fear. Why was she feeling this way?

“Yes and yes,” Mari said as she deposited the sheets on a long table covered with other stacks of yellowed papers. “The fact that they are original cities and part of our trail west led me to search until I uncovered this.” She leafed through a stack of the pages.

Selah moved from the table to give Mari her full attention as she stopped flipping pages and held one out. Selah’s jaw dropped. She ran her eyes over every detail. Her knees weakened as her fingertips turned cold. The clan crest for the dome at Cleveland was the exotic bird of the Kinship, but the crest for the dome at Chicago was the sword and lightning bolt of the Blood Hunters. There was no getting away from them.

Mari dropped the paper back on the stack. “These two camps have been at this battle since way before the Sorrows. They built competing dome communities to highlight their developments in the company.”

“So why didn’t they contact our side of the country? I’ve never known anyone who thought others were alive in the West.” The markings concerned her, but there was much more she needed to know about this situation. Staring at the map increased her agitation.

“That was the way it was supposed to be. Apparently these were the people that caused the Sorrows, and the bio-domes were part of the preparations.” Mari pulled over a chair on rollers and sat in front of her latest pile of papers.

Selah fingered a couple of the piles. Yellowed pages of words that could fit together to save her life. But at the moment, her existence felt as fragile as the curled and cracked pages. “These people created the Sorrows? What kind of insane purpose was that supposed to accomplish?”

“Greed,” Mari said. “The Repository files are very old and very enlightening. Volume one of the First Protocol says the Kinship are the primary owners of and research team for a company that had a contract with the United States government. They found out that the government wanted to use their research for some dictatorial purpose, while the Kinship wanted to use it to create a disease-free world.”

“What was the government’s purpose?” Selah glanced over a section of pages about magnetic variances.

“We don’t know. It was redacted from the documents,” Brejian said without looking up.

Selah lay the pages down. She didn’t understand anything about magnetics. “Who was the company?”

“That was redacted too,” Brejian said. She got another cube working and it filled in an empty area. “Why do you care?”

“I wanted to know the name of the company that ruined the world we’re living in while they had these bio-domes and a cozy future.” Selah stared at the shiny bubbles and could almost make out buildings, but that had to be her imagination playing tricks.

“With the way to the East blocked, do you think there is anyone left who cares about it 150 years later? Like back in TicCity, no one really cared, and they even knew about novarium,” Mari said with a shrug.

Selah looked back and forth between them. “I don’t know why I asked.” She put her hand to her head. She could hear sounds that seemed like voices. Her head cleared.

“That’s all right. We’ve been able to figure out that the Blood Hunters were the equally powerful other half of the company. They were on board with the government contract, but they also wanted to become wealthy selling their product to any country that wanted it,” Mari said. “A captured memo says they planned for a small suitcase nuclear device to explode in Washington, DC, so they could swoop in with their technology. With one pill they would relieve everyone of the harmful effects of the radiation and restore people to perfect health.”

“Only another, smaller group felt the country was too corrupt and didn’t deserve the technology, and they were in the process of hacking the company servers. They inadvertently rerouted the activation message about setting off the nuke, and it went to three operatives instead of one. With none of them having prior knowledge of the other, and each having a valid activation code . . .” Pasha shrugged. “All three nukes exploded, and the resulting harmonics caused the dramatic plate shifts.”

Selah held up a hand. “So these domes weren’t built to create new atmospheres. They were made to resist nuclear fallout.”

Mari nodded. “Exactly! I think this was an end plan for a very long time. No biochemical company would have nuclear devices lying around on a whim, especially three of them. So these explosions were to be planned events. The domes were basically a force field, but the rest of the things that happened just cascaded, and there were no options to stop any of it once it started.”

“Wait! You just said ‘biochemical company.’” Selah swung to face Mari. “Where did you find that information?” Her personal search for help with Bodhi’s lost abilities would have to involve something chemical in nature.

“I didn’t see it in any one place, but it was just the overall talk about compounds and chemicals I’ve worked with in the past. Most chemical talk was redacted, with huge spaces of file corruption,” Brejian said.

“I’m glad we’ve learned a little about this strange world, but what information do we have that’s new? We reach the Mountain pass in very short order, and we need a direction to travel.”

“Folks, I think we have a problem.” Pasha’s face went ashen.