The glade seemed to catch the midday sunlight and intensify it; the grass, clinging to its summer verdure, waved slightly in the breeze. The place was at once familiar and alien: birds sang in the treetops and wildflowers grew in the verge, but she didn't recognize the birds and the flowers were pretty but strange, little three-pointed stars in purple and blue that seemed to pop up everywhere.
She had asked to be alone. Sephine had pointed out the trailhead to her and told her it led to this place. A good spot for contemplation, she had explained. That was over an hour ago. She had thought to come here and sort through everything logically, but her mind kept drifting: to the brilliant colors of the autumn foliage around her, to the ever-present rush of upland streams, and more than anything else to the mountain before her. Its tripartite peak loomed above the glade, and even in the open space she felt hemmed in by it. It seemed to fill her vision and her mind, reminding her of the dream she had before leaving Bountiful.
Is this that mountain? Somehow, she didn't think that it was; it didn't seem right. The mountain from her dream had seemed farther away, in both place and time—that peak was still in her future. This was something unexpected, something her vision—if that's what it was—hadn't prepared her for.
When she forced herself to think through the problem that lay before her, reasons to be suspicious accumulated quickly. She didn't know these people, not really. She had no idea whether they spoke the truth, or if they had some ulterior motive they hadn't yet shared. More importantly, none of this was why she was out here. The mission she, Acel, Rolan—poor Chy—and now Jared had set out to accomplish was simple: find a new home for their people.
The fact that Azariah Thayne and his minions, human and inhuman alike, had driven them off course didn't change the fact that Ever had no business wasting time in a strange valley, not to mention sticking around long enough to fulfill some questionable prophecy.
She didn't even know what had happened to her family, to the people of Bountiful. Jared had brought news that they likely escaped the Marmack attack, but almost anything could have happened in the weeks since. They should already have been inside the Maine by now, well on their way to search for the abandoned facilities that Elder Haglund believed still existed there.
It didn't make any sense that she was even considering doing this, but she was. The voice inside of her, the one she'd listened to since she was a child, the one she associated with the Spirit, was talking again. Despite the various reasons not to walk into something she didn't fully understand, Ever was tempted to do just that. And if Greta was telling the truth, if this mountain did indeed offer some ancient salvation prepared by the Old People, then didn't she have an obligation to seek it out? Their mandate was to find a new home for the Blessed at all costs, even if it turned out to be somewhere unexpected.
She turned back toward the trail leading out of the woods and found herself face to face with Jared.
"You have a habit of sneaking up on me," said Ever.
"I'm sneaky," said Jared. Joking aside, he was making the squinting face that he and every other man Ever knew tended to make when they were worried about something.
"You're the making the concerned face," she said.
"You're making decisive face," he countered. "You've decided to go through with it." She nodded once, face serious, and he sighed.
"You don't have to do this, you know," he said.
"I know."
"It's probably a really bad idea."
"Probably."
"It's not our problem."
"I'm hoping it might be what we're looking for," said Ever. "Where are the others?"
"Waiting. I convinced them to let me come talk to you," Jared said, crossing his arms. "Now tell me why."
"Why, what?" said Ever, knowing perfectly well what he meant.
"Why are you doing this?"
"I—I don't know," she began, and then the thin veneer of determination she had summed up cracked. She hadn't realized, until that moment, just how fragile she felt. She felt her hand shaking, and she started breathing quickly, and all of a sudden her eyes were hot and then Jared was holding her. They came together hard, the embrace almost jarring, and Ever cried quietly into his shoulder for several long moments before pulling back and looking up at him.
"I'm sorry," she said, meaning it. "I don't know...I feel like I don't really know anything anymore. Nothing makes any sense. It's like the world's turned upside down."
He nodded.
"You're scared," he said. "I am too." Ever felt surprisingly safe in Jared's arms; looking up at him now, she began to see him differently. He seemed older, less the immature boy and more a confident young man—
Thought fled as he kissed her. His lips were warm and soft, but also urgent; he pressed her body into his with one hand at the small of her back, and then she felt the other sliding into her hair at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were open in surprise, at first, and she stiffened slightly, instinct screaming at her to pull away. Then she closed them, and her brief, confused resistance shattered, and she melted into him with a passion that matched his own.
She was never able to describe precisely what she felt during that first, brief embrace. Afterward she could only think of the romances the young women of Bountiful used to share at their weekly meetings—fanciful tales of love at first sight, and chaste passion first consummated with a kiss that set lovers' hearts afire, tales that were half fantasy and half infatuation on the part of the tellers. She remembered the stories the older girls told, of how a good kiss could make seconds seem like hours. She remembered disbelieving them, thinking to herself that such fanciful exaggeration was the natural result of insufficiently stimulated female minds. Invariably she would privately roll her eyes and return to the infirmary to roll bandages and prepare tinctures.
It was clear to her that time passed, but when at last she opened her eyes, taking his face in her hands and pulling back gently, she could not have reliably stated the season of the year, let alone the hour of the day.
"I'm s—" Jared began, but Ever laid her fingers over his lips, shushing him.
"Don't. Don't apologize." She kissed him again briefly for good measure, then broke their embrace, stepping back and fixing her hair, which had come loose from the simple ponytail she had tied it in that morning.
The moment was over, however long it had lasted, and part of her was glad. Whatever it had been, it was a distraction, and another distraction was the last thing she needed. Let it be what it was. Hopefully Jared could understand.
"I can't explain it," she said, continuing their conversation where they'd left off, as if nothing else had happened. Jared walked beside her as she made for the trail leading back into the open part of the Valley. "It just seems...right, somehow. Or maybe right's the wrong word: it fits. It just fits. Something drew us here, Jared. It's worth an extra day to see what that something might be."
"That's one way to put it," Jared responded. "Another way to put it would be to say that we were driven here. By Thayne."
Ever stopped, turning towards him in the middle of the trail. As selfish and inexplicable as she knew it was, she didn't want to have this conversation right now. She wanted him to trust her. She wanted him to know—to believe, as she believed, that she was acting as her conscience directed her. She opened her mouth to say—what? Just that? Believe me, because I told you to?
Jared spoke first.
"I don't mean to argue," he said. "Acel and Rolan and I talked about it. We're behind you, whatever your decision is. We're here, in large part, because of you. We trust you.
"But you know," he continued, his smile a small quirk of his lips, "you don't have to do it on their terms."
Jared continued talking as they walked through the well-lit wood together. Ever smiled after a moment, and slipped her hand through the crook of his elbow.
* * *
Mother Greta's eyes narrowed slightly as Ever spoke, and Jared imagined that he could see a mischievous glint in them as well. The old woman was craftier than she let on, he thought; the set to her face as she listened to Ever's terms revealed that she was not only unsurprised by their negotiating, but prepared to respond in turn. Like Acel and Rolan—or Acel, at least; Rolan had grown increasingly silent the more time they spent in the Valley—Jared didn't trust the Valley dwellers, Mother Greta least of all. But at the same time, he sensed no evil in her. Though why I imagine I could sense it, I don't know.
"I will go up the mountain," Ever was saying, "and I'll find what is to be found there. But I won't do it for free. And afterward, our part will be complete, and we'll go where we please. We won't be beholden to you beyond this one task."
"And what payment could we possibly offer you, child?" asked Greta, tapping one wizened finger on the railing of the gazebo. The others had roamed freely in the grassy field surrounding the gazebo as Ever, and then Jared, went off into the woods. Seeing he and Ever emerge from the little trailhead, Acel and Rolan had drifted toward them, all of them eventually ending up back at the gazebo. Mother Greta stepped down from it, and now they stood on the grass to have their little negotiation.
"Nothing too dear," Ever said. "Weapons and provisions for our journey into the Maine—or wherever we go from here. And an armed escort by Sephine's rangers, to the old border or a like distance." According to Rolan's maps, it was 20 miles as the crow flies to the ancient border of the Maine, and at least 30 on foot. They had worried that asking for a further escort would be both excessive and, perhaps, unnecessarily restrictive on their own movements.
"I've never said that you were not free to go, Ever," said Greta, her eyes considering. "Do you think that I would hold you against your will?" There was a tense pause, and after a beat Ever answered.
"I don't know," Ever said. "I don't know you, Greta, or your people. All I know about you is what I can see, and what I can see is a trained military force, obviously used to getting its way. I'm not a fool. We're at your mercy here. Should you choose to try and stop us, you could do it."
"Do you think I would do that?"
"I don't think so. But as I said, I really don't know you. In any case, those are our terms."
"You're forgetting one thing," said Mother Greta. "I would be lying if I told you that I knew exactly what you'd find atop that mountain, but what I do know is that the treasure it guards is a beginning, not an end. If my people are to survive, we may need you with us."
"We have our own people to consider," said Acel. His arms were folded across his chest and his face was stern and set. "Yours have shelter—an underground fortress—and technology and resources we've only heard about in stories of the Old People. Ours are on the run from a dangerous enemy who seems to want nothing more than to wipe them out."
"In short," Jared said, cutting in smoothly before Acel went from assertive to belligerent, "we've got our own problems. And the Blessed—our own people—need our help a lot more than yours do."
Greta wrapped her arms in her shawl and looked at them, one at time. They had explained the purpose of their journey to her before, in describing their flight from Thayne's wolves and the plan to head east into the Maine. While Ever thought, Greta, Acel, and Jared had continued to talk.
"It strikes me, Ever," said Greta, coming forward to put a hand on her shoulder, "that we have a common purpose. We're both looking for salvation, each in her own way." Her light blue eyes shifted, finding Sephine, who had come up to join them as well. "Perhaps instead of being adversaries, we should be partners.
"See what the mountain has to tell you. When you return, I will send Sephine and her best men to return to your home with you and find your people. They know how to maneuver in enemy territory—you might say it's their purpose, really. If—when you find them, bring them here. We will offer them shelter, a home, for as long as we are able. And then, if you succeed where the others have failed, perhaps a better place will be waiting for all of us."
Greta looked sincere; Sephine seemed, if anything, excited. Ever looked at her friends. Jared knew the answer that lay in his eyes. There was no guarantee of finding safety in the North. The quest to the Maine had always been uncertain at best. What Greta was offering them was security, safety, and more hope than they'd had for weeks. Ever didn't question their good fortune further. After a long moment, she clasped the old woman's hand in agreement. Jared felt an unexpected smile on his face, an expression at odds with the worry that still gnawed at his heart.
* * *
The path to the summit of Tripyramid, as it turned out, was fairly straightforward: there was a trail. The summit was known as North Peak, reached after climbing the Middle Peak and on up a vast slide of bare rock; Sephine said it was several hours' hike to the top. It wasn't a particularly dangerous or difficult climb in the summer, she had explained, but it was wise to start early and take it slow.
Despite this caution, under the circumstances both Sephine and Ever had wanted to make the climb immediately after she and Greta had reached their agreement, but the old woman had insisted that they wait until the following morning. The boys had mostly looked to Ever for guidance, though she wished that they would be more opinionated.
At some point she had apparently become something of a leader to their little company, much to her own dismay. She couldn't quite tell what had precipitated the change. As they approached the trailhead, she filed the subject away for future investigation and considered the mountain before her.
They had eaten a quiet dinner in their quarters—Sephine had seemed to think they would want to be alone, though Ever would have been just as happy to learn more about the Valley people. She had found herself shaking Mother Greta's hand happily, despite her fears, because of the convenient solution it offered: a place for the Blessed to go, where they would be safe, at least temporarily. Better than wandering blind into the Maine, especially when she didn't even know where the Bountiful residents had gone.
The four of them had discussed the matter in depth over a dinner of venison, sweet bread, fresh honey, and a curious cheese Sandrine, who had again appeared to wait on them, had explained was made by one of the farming families that lived above.
Acel had brought up the hasty discussion they'd had just outside of Bountiful, when they decided to go on despite the seriousness of the Marmack attack, and admitted that he had questioned that decision ever since he made it. He, too, saw Greta's offer as a welcome opportunity to forego traveling into the Maine wilderness and instead seek out their families and friends. What use was a new home, after all, if there was no one left alive to enjoy it?
The mood at the table was somewhat subdued; Acel was troubled by thoughts of home, Jared kept looking at her with that same concerned face she had seen in the forest clearing, and Rolan maintained the same sullen silence he had been lost in since they arrived in the Valley two days before. Under normal circumstances Ever would have tried to reach out to him and find out what was on his mind, but she was having enough trouble dealing with her own thoughts to help anyone else at the moment.
She slept fitfully for hours before subsiding into a dreamless unconsciousness. She woke up exhausted. For the first time, she was grateful for the pitcher of hot coffee Sandrine brought with breakfast, which, aside from its obvious properties as a stimulant, turned out to be quite tasty with the right combination of milk and sugar.
The sky was overcast when they first climbed out of the bunker, with a darker mass of storm clouds moving up from the south. By the time their group had reached the base of Three Peaks the sky was as dark as dusk.
"I was afraid of this," said Sephine. "Those clouds look ready to open. Are you sure you want to do this today? We can always try again tomorrow." Ever could tell that Sephine was suppressing her own enthusiasm out of concern for Ever's comfort, but she had no intention of wasting any more time. She shook her head.
"A little rain never hurt anyone," she said, favoring Sephine with a small smile. The trail was wide and gently sloping for the first mile, at which point it began climbing more steeply up the mountainside. Acel, Jared, and a predictably sullen Rolan were accompanying Ever, and Sephine had brought a small contingent of her rangers—four of them, Ever thought, though they stayed masked and faded in and out of the surrounding forest, moving silently and, for the most part, staying out of sight.
The climb was easy at first, a gently sloping trail mounting grassy foothills crowned with pines. Within an hour the path had steepened significantly; Ever often found herself grabbing onto saplings bordering the trail for purchase.
They stopped to rest at midday at a comparatively flat area near a stream that cascaded down the mountainside in a loud rush. Sephine handed out bread and cold meats wrapped in oiled paper and they sat on a massive, flat boulder that jutted out into the torrent, watching the whitewater churn beneath them as they ate. Even in the dark weather, the sight was a beautiful one. When Ever had finished eating, Sephine got something out of her pack and sat down on the stone beside her.
"I...have something for you," she said. She fidgeted with the item in her hands nervously for a moment and then thrust it at Ever abruptly. "I thought you'd like it."
The object was a small book, hand-bound and not dissimilar from the blank ledgers and journals Bountiful's bookbinders made to record important events. She accepted it reverently—paper was a scarce luxury, difficult to produce, and even the most banal book was a rich gift—running a hand over the scarred leather cover.
"What's this?" she asked. Rolan, sitting near by, leaned forward with grudging interest, the first positive sign she'd seen out of him in days.
"Open it," said Sephine. Ever did so, turning the first few, blank leaves over, and read the first lines written in neat script on creamy, thick paper. Three words in, she gasped, almost dropping the book over the edge into the water. Sephine reached out and caught it before it could tumble off, smiling crookedly.
"It's...how did you...?" Ever couldn't find the words. "I thought almost all copies were lost...?"
"Not all," explained Sephine. "And we have other resources, in the Valley. It's not complete—I don't think anyone could boast to having a complete copy—but much of it is there."
Jared, Acel, and Rolan gathered around, Acel still chewing his lunch, as Ever read the first few lines out loud.
" 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters....' " Acel, who apparently still hadn't realized what exactly was going on, began to choke on his food. Jared pounded him on the back until he could breathe again, and the boys moved in closer.
"How...where...?" murmured Jared. Ever was glad she wasn't the only one feeling flummoxed.
"We pieced it together," Sephine continued. "Bits and pieces, recovered over the centuries, both from the rotten remnants of hard copies and electronically stored data."
"Electronically stored?" repeated Ever, turning the phrase over in her mind. How did one store data with electricity?
"Computers," said Rolan suddenly. "You're talking about computers." Sephine nodded.
"The Valley compound still has working computers. The Valley founders stored a remarkable amount of information in their databanks before the Fall wiped everything else out."
"This is...incredible," said Ever. "Thank you, Sephine. I...really don't know what to say. This will mean so much to my people. To all people, I should hope. We keep the Word orally...there's always been resistance to writing it down, officially anyway, for fear of preserving an imperfect copy. We don't how accurate what we remember is."
Some of the more progressive of the Blessed had taken to copying down parts of the Scriptures, but conservatives like Elder Cardon considered it sacrilege.
"We're not your enemies, Ever," Sephine said, before squeezing her shoulder and getting up from the rock.
Ever passed the precious book around to the boys.
"Will you keep it for me, Rolan?" she asked, noting how he lingered over it. Maybe such a little act could help whatever he was going through, even if really helping him get through it would have to wait. "I don't want anything to happen to it."
He nodded slowly, but didn't speak, and after a moment went to sit by himself to pore over it.
Jared shook his head.
"I never thought I'd see a real copy of Scripture," he said.
"When did any of us think we'd see any of this?" she responded, her eyes on the rushing water.
They had packed their lunch away and gotten another quarter of a mile up the trail when the first rumbling of thunder rolled through the darkened sky. It was then, as the trail before them grew steeper and more wooded, that Ever began to see milky blue eyes opening in the distant darkness between the trees.
* * *
Greta could feel the long fingers of his influence reaching out toward her Valley as the first peals of thunder tore the sky. Part of her wanted to despair—the fool girl part that had hoped it wouldn't come to this, the part that had wished up to the last moment that she wouldn't be asked to go through with it—but she wrapped that weeping inner child in the folds of her long years as the Valley's Mother and focused on preparing her mind for the fight to come.
There was still time, yet—a calm before the storm, literally and figuratively. She smiled to herself. Her rooms belowground were comfortable, but she longed for the freedom of the open air, rain or no rain. Sephine had made her agree to stay inside before departing, of course, and she saw the wisdom in it even if she didn't like it.
As she ran her mind through the exercises that had become almost unconscious over the long years, Greta wandered through her apartments, eventually ending up precisely where she knew she would, where she always did: standing before the vestibule carved out of the back of her bedroom. Its screens were dark, as they almost always were these days; what engineers they had were almost as unfamiliar with the ancient technology as she was, but they could tell when a machine was on the verge of failing. The whole Valley was on the verge of it: the water wheels were warping on their axes, the wiring, designed to last even as it was, was steadily corroding in its sealed conduits beneath the ground, and the advanced weaponry that made their rangers a force to be reckoned with was largely beyond their abilities to repair when components failed.
The girl had come just in time, if she was, in fact, the one. Greta replayed her own Seeings in her mind, both those she had shared with Ever Oaks and those she had kept to herself, as well as the precisely memorized, recorded accounts of the visions of earlier seers. All the signs were right; the time was now. And though she had long ago learned to trust the strange precognition that was her birthright, the random genetic mutation caused by the Fall that they had so carefully preserved with selective breeding over the centuries, Greta couldn't help but feel afraid.
As she had many times before when this feeling settled in on her, she entered the vestibule and sat in the comfortable chair before the monitors, bringing them to life with the tap of a finger on the polished surface.
The familiar image flickered out of nothingness before her eyes, rising from the metal console before her: a woman's face, rendered in pale light, albeit incompletely, as if someone had taken an eraser to it. It alternately shuddered and froze and ran for moments of undisturbed, smooth play before finally regulating itself. It became understandable a few seconds in, the woman's voice surprisingly soft and distant, in stark contrast to the pale reality of her unfinished face. Greta had listened to the recording more times than she could count, but she always found herself coming back to it, always wanted more from it. She wanted to reach out to the ghostly image and pull this woman into her reality, her now, and ask her questions, so many questions. But she waited, and watched, as she had grown accustomed to doing.
"The guardian," said the woman, whom Greta had come to think of over the years as a distant relation, a great-great-great-great grandmother, perhaps, "is an utterly independent being. Such was the cost of its creation. The blocks and limitations we—" Here the recording cut off, the woman's pretty face freezing silently again for a long count of seconds.
"—must not think of it as a person," she said when she shuddered to life again. "Its will, methods, perhaps even its desires, are its own. In the time we had, we were forced to choose daring over caution. I only hope we haven't made a devil's bargain." The image froze again, the woman's face stuck for a moment in an expression of deep anxiety.
"—who will come will test it as much as it tests her," she continued. "But that is as far as we dare speculate, given the limitations of our projections." A garbled flicker, and then: "—are not certain about anything. We suspect—" More noise, along with a stuttered interference that slithered through the image. Then, "—the female line, due to a higher probability of—"
"—beneficial mutation will of course be subject to chaotic—"
Finally she came to the longest stretch of silence, a frozen, lost section of the recording that lasted almost a minute. When the woman's face animated again, it spoke finally, as if concluding.
"The optimists among us think that we are building an ark," she said, her mouth a grim line. "The pessimists say we're constructing a life raft, and a shoddy one at best. But I can't help but think that maybe we are only making things worse. That maybe this is a mistake. That our pride is still intruding on our judgment, and that it will be as dangerous to those who survive us as the Armageddon is to ourselves. We wanted to give them the stars. What if we're only giving them more death?"
The recording ended, the woman's face dissolving into the nothing from which it came, and Greta stepped back. She was unsettled, as she always was after watching it. But it was important, she had decided long ago, important to keep the truth alive, even if only in her mind.
The thunder cracked again, loud enough to penetrate eventhrough the thick walls of the bunker—or maybe she was listening with her otherears. And after the thunder came thelightning, and riding on it was the blue-eyed man.
Thank you as always for reading!