He sat for a few minutes and tried to focus. The pillar loomed ahead of him, insurmountable now that he thought about it. He had no rope, no climbing gear. Skyler was in excellent shape, but he knew his limits. There was no way he could reach that pedestal without some equipment. He wondered if Vanessa had thought to pack any; it had been her job to provision the plane beyond basic necessities.

Reason finally won out over the desire to explore. He stood and pulled his backpack on, then walked back the way he’d come. At the edge of the dome, he paused and took a few long, measured breaths.

Exiting proved much easier. This time he lowered his shoulder and raced through the dome’s wall. He felt all the same sensations, only many orders of magnitude faster. He came out the other side confused, shivering. He slipped on muddy ground. Rain pelted him.

This storm must have come out of nowhere, he had time to think before his body hit the soggy ground in a dull splash. Cold shakes began to rattle him. Skyler came to his knees, waited for the maelstrom in his mind to evaporate, and looked for his friends.

They were gone. The sun, so bright and clear when he’d entered, now hid behind a dark gray ceiling of nasty-looking clouds. What in the hell?

Off to the side he saw a tent that hadn’t been there before. An LED lantern hung from a hook under the awning, casting light around the entrance and half a meter inside. He could see someone sitting within, reading a slate.

Baffled, Skyler began to stumble in the direction of the tent. The person inside looked up. It was Ana, though she looked different. Different clothes, Skyler realized. Hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was ashen, as if she’d become sick.

All the color left in that face drained when she saw him. She raced from the tent and threw her arms around him, sobbing.

“Jesus,” he said. “Nice to see you, too. Where’d the others go?”

Ana just sobbed. She held him so tightly he thought his arms might fall asleep.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Relax, I’m fine.”

For a long time she said nothing. She just held him and wept. At first he found it strangely warming to be missed so, but as the seconds dragged on and she didn’t let up, he began to find her reaction almost comical given that they’d only been apart for ten minutes. The grief was genuine, of that he felt sure, but wholly inappropriate.

“We thought you were dead,” she said at last.

Skyler almost laughed. The sincerity in her voice stopped him and he returned her hug.

The girl finally pulled back and held him at arm’s length, her eyes searching his. “What the … Where the hell have you been?”

“Inside, of course. Where’d this storm come from? Sun to downpour in ten minutes flat. That’s impressive even by Darwin standards.”

“Ten?”

“Good thing you brought a tent. Are the others inside? We need to—”

“Ten minutes?”

When he nodded, her lips pressed together in a tight line.

“Skyler,” she said, “you’ve been gone for over a month.”

Chapter 40

Darwin, Australia

2.SEP.2284

SAMANTHA AWOKE TO a pounding at the door to her room.

“I’m up,” she said, her voice the sound of dry brush burning. She fumbled for her canteen and knocked it to the floor. “Shit.”

Her watch put the time at one in the morning. The pounding on her door went on, and for a few seconds she wasn’t sure if it was real or just the result of a long evening at Woon’s.

She rolled onto her side and plucked the steel canteen from the pool of water it had created on the floor. A swallow later she found her voice again. “Go to hell!”

“Grillo is on the comm, Samantha. It’s urgent.”

One of the Nightcliff goons, she couldn’t guess which from the voice. She sat up and swung her feet onto the cold floor. A blistering ache formed somewhere just behind her eyes, and she rubbed her temples with two fingers, to no avail. “What does he want?”

“No idea,” the man said. “Not my place to ask.”

“Christ,” she whispered, not loud enough that he might hear it. These Jacobites were a touchy bunch. She pulled on some socks. “Be there in a sec.”

The comm terminal sat on a table in the center of the hangar, where the Melville used to rest. Without the presence of the aircraft, the space seemed excessively large, dwarfing the “office” she’d set up in the middle of the floor. A huge board made of cork had been placed next to the main desk, and she’d tacked a map of the local region to it. Colored thumbtacks marked the places scavenged or to be scavenged, a trick she’d learned from Prumble. She’d never seen his map in person, but Skyler had described it, and it beat trying to operate the map screen Skyler had always used to plan their outings.

Grillo watched her approach from his end of the connection. Sam dropped herself heavily on the folding chair in front of the screen and swept her hair back from her face.

“I’m here,” she said.

He wasn’t in the control room at Nightcliff, or his mansion in Lyons. Behind him, she saw only a concrete wall, with a rusted pipe jutting out of the ceiling and running horizontally behind the man. Grillo looked impeccable, of course. Not a hair out of place. His expression, so often unreadable, right now had a hint of concern. “Rouse as many pilots as you can,” he said, “and bring them and their aircraft to the stadium. No other crew aboard.”

“What’s going on?” Sam asked.

“There’s no time, Samantha. Be here in an hour.”

“I … okay.”

“Fly dark, fly low.” He cut the link and his image vanished.

Forty minutes later, Sam stood on the tarmac watching her birds take flight.

Nine pilots were available, but only seven planes had their caps charged enough to be useful. Given the short notice, she thought the number impressive, but Grillo had given no hint as to how many he actually needed. It wasn’t like him to be vague, or hurried. Something was wrong.

The engines of the sixth craft roared and the shoddy hauler began to climb. That left only the Ocean Cloud.

“Sammy!”

She turned at the voice, and saw Skadz standing atop the hangar. He stayed up there sometimes, in a military tent, tending the garden as payment for the rooftop to sleep on. Right now, he gestured urgently toward East Point. She glanced in that direction and saw nothing over the rooftops of the other hangars that lined the old runway. The clouds above, though, were laced with traces of orange and yellow glow.

“What is it?” she shouted back.

“Fire!”

She nodded to him, positive the flames were related to Grillo’s urgent call. Fly dark, fly low. A knot formed in her gut as she climbed into the idling plane. She thought of that strange alien growth in Old Downtown, the flayed remains of the Jacobite called Faisal, and the strange glowing cube she’d pulled from the crashed ship. She swallowed hard. All of these things she’d deliberately forgotten until now. If something new was happening there, if the thing had suddenly regrown …

Pascal looked at her from the cockpit and she made a twirling motion with her hand. Spin up.

Gear stowed, Sam moved to the cockpit door and decided to stand there so she could see over the pilot’s helmet. The aircraft once ferried wealthy Chinese tourists over the tumultuous waters between the two continents and had cargo capacity enough for two automobiles. “Did the run nonstop when the Elevator came,” Pascal had told her the first time she’d rode in the ship. “Twelve years straight, no vacations to speak of, either. Even made two trips when SUBS hit, before it got too crazy up there.”

He was a good man, a simple man. Took his orders with no complaints and spent his evenings playing mahjongg with the other veterans outside Kantro’s old hangar.

“Running lights off,” Sam said as they cleared the airport. “Keep as low as you’re comfortable with.”

“If you say so,” he said.

The fires were behind them, and Sam didn’t want to delay for a peek. There’d be time enough for that later.

Darwin passed below in silence. The dark slums of the Maze stretched out to Aura’s Edge, and a bit beyond into the no-man’s-land that ringed the city. Pascal followed a curved path that kept them just inside the aura, until the stadium came into view. The other aircraft stretched out ahead of them like birds of prey sneaking up on a target. One by one they flipped on their landing lights and descended into the bowl of the arena.

Ocean Cloud cleared the lip last, and Sam sucked in her breath at the sight on the field below. The other aircraft were spread out, and surrounded by Jacobites. The faithful were arrayed like regiments of soldiers, and already she could see them boarding the other aircraft.

A space cleared at one end, and Pascal headed toward it without being told. There was nowhere else to put down. Sam glanced west before the aircraft dropped below the top edge of the stadium’s ring. Between here and the coast lay thousands of dark buildings, dappled by the occasional pool of LED or candlelight. She couldn’t see the fires Skadz spoke of, but their glow on the cloud layer remained.

Brighter now, she thought.

Thirty Jacobite loyalists piled into Ocean’s cargo bay. Men and women alike, lightly armed and stony-faced. Many, she saw, carried coils of rope across their chests like bandoliers.

Grillo came last. He wore a business suit as usual, but to Samantha’s surprise it was white, not pin-striped gray. Even the shirt and tie were brilliant white, as if never worn before.

“No time to waste,” he said to her. “Have your pilot take the lead. Follow the aura around south to the Gardens.”

“What’s the mission?”

“I’ll explain in the air.”

She returned to her spot in the cockpit’s doorway and relayed the orders to Pascal. He reacted with calm efficiency, and soon they were over the slums again, heading back the way they came. He acknowledged responses from the other planes as they fell in line behind.

In the back, Grillo moved among the seated warriors. Somehow he managed to keep an air of composure despite the tilting, abrupt movements of the aircraft. His hand would dart to a nylon loop on the wall, or to someone’s shoulder, for support, but beyond that he acted as if they weren’t moving at all. As she watched, he went to each fighter, men and women alike. He would press his fingers against the center of their foreheads and whisper something. They’d respond with a silent word, and then he would move to the next.

He’s gone mental, she thought. The tattered shreds of her theory that it was all an act, for the benefit of their alliance, completely dissolved. They were a cult and he was a personality; a match made in heaven.

Sam almost laughed aloud at the wordplay. If anyone saw her brief smile, she didn’t notice it over their general contempt for an outsider.

His rounds finished, Grillo finally came to stand in front of her. He grasped a handhold on the wall without even looking for it, as if he’d flown aboard Ocean Cloud a hundred times. With his free hand, he reached inside his coat and pulled a slip of paper from the breast pocket. “Give this to your pilot.”

The brittle paper had a drawing on it. Sam couldn’t resist, and looked it over. Grillo, or someone under him, had scratched out in pencil a map of a Darwin neighborhood, just north of the Gardens and west of the Narrows. A number of buildings were marked with letters, ranging from A to J.

“Tell him to pick one of the lettered buildings,” Grillo added. “And assign other buildings to the remaining aircraft.”

“I can hear you,” Pascal said from the cockpit. “The paper, Sam?”

She handed it forward and turned back to Grillo. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve reached the tipping point. The last holdouts have banded together, attacked our patrols. They don’t want to join in the effort to make Darwin a prosperous, peaceful place.”

Maybe they’ve seen your true freak show nature like I have.

He’d raised his voice, and though he still looked at her she knew he spoke to the Jacobite soldiers behind him.

“For the ladder’s sake,” he went on, “by dawn this city will be united in singular purpose. Darwin could have been humanity’s deathbed, but now … now, through our work, it will be the seed from which a new world will one day grow.”

Bat. Shit. Insane. It was all Sam could think as she looked into the man’s glistening eyes. This was no act. Whatever doubts she had, they melted away as she stared into that fervent gaze.

Grillo tilted his head slightly, as if sensing her thoughts. “Once we’ve solved our basic problems, Samantha, we can turn our attentions to things like the disease, and resistance to it. God willing, people like you may hold the key to our ultimate success, and we’re glad to have you with us.”

A chill rippled down Sam’s spine. The aircraft banked sharply, the motion providing a convenient moment for her to gather her senses as Grillo steadied himself. When the craft leveled again, Samantha managed to meet his eyes. “Great,” she said with a half smile. “Um. Go, team.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Let’s get ready, everyone. The landing zone might be a bit … hot.”

Pascal’s chosen target building loomed ahead. Twenty stories of concrete grid, with some portions still covered by decorative tile made to look like sandstone. Most of that superfluous surface had been hacked away long ago, along with the windows. A random patchwork filled the spaces where windows once existed. Plastic sheets, tarps of every color, quilts, and even a few ornate Afghan carpets. At least half the window frames had extensions bolted on the outside, extending the living space out on jury-rigged balconies made from every imaginable material. Samantha saw tents on some, but most were covered with buckets to collect rainwater, or potted plants.