“You must be Flora,” he said warmly. “How nice of you to come.”
“Uh, thank you for having me,” Flora said awkwardly. She was still unsure why she was here.
A spark of recognition lit a smile in his eyes. “Ah, I know you,” he said. “You’re a natural on horseback.”
Flora couldn’t help but blush. “Thank you, sir.”
“As to the reason you’re here.”
“Yes sir?”
“Scholar Samuel is sick and may leave us soon.” He shook his head sadly, but Flora didn’t believe his act. Sagerius was sick because Romulus had stuck him in prison. “He has asked for you.” Romulus must have seen the surprise on her face, for he added, “He says it is a personal matter. I’ll take you to him now.”
Romulus led her to a section of the Institute that she had never been to before. Along the way, they passed three guard checkpoints. As they passed, the guards saluted Romulus proudly and ignored her completely. After a few minutes, they entered a hallway that ran into a dead-end. There were several heavy doors on each side. Romulus walked to the last door on the right and lifted up the bar that locked it shut. “After you,” he said, gesturing for her to enter.
Flora walked into a surprisingly ordinary looking room. It was the same size as the room she shared with Aster and Kava. There were some decorative plants around the room as well as a desk, a chair and a bed where Sagerius was lying on his back, completely still. Flora rushed to his side. As she leaned over him, Sagerius opened his eyes and turned to face her.
“Ah, Flora my dear,” he whispered, his voice like gravel. “I don’t have much time left, but before I go, there are things that I must tell you.” Flora glanced behind her nervously. Romulus had sat down in the chair, just a few feet behind her. Though he looked away, she could tell he was listening.
“But we hardly know each other, sir,” she replied, hoping that Sagerius would take the hint.
“No dear, but I knew your father,” Sagerius said.
“My father?” Flora said. “How did you? I mean what was he?” she stammered.
Sagerius took a deep breath, almost as if he was about to fall asleep, but then he spoke. “Your father was a brilliant scholar, my favorite in fact. You have his eyes, his smile, and...” Sagerius spoke the next few words slowly. “You have his imagination.”
Flora held her breath, listening closely to Sagerius’ soft-spoken words. Did her father have dreams too?
“Your mother and father were the brightest of their generation,” he continued.
“Wait, my mom was a scholar?” Flora no longer had to act surprised. She was truly shocked.
“After you were born, your mother moved back to Terrene with you. She wanted you to have a normal life. The High Council allowed her to return to Terrene as long as she was able to maintain our secrets. And yes, your mother was good at keeping secrets. She had to be. But that’s her story to tell, isn’t it?” Sagerius smiled weakly.
“Back to your father...He stayed at the Institute, for we were so close to our goals. We completed the Dragonfly together, a marvelous achievement. We released the Dragonfly into the atmosphere, certain that we would witness that which we had only...imagined before.” Flora could see her real father, standing next to Sagerius. He was special, and maybe even a little bit odd, just like her.
“But then nothing happened,” Sagerius continued. “We checked and double checked the Dragonfly. It was perfect, and yet our world had not changed. The years went by, and we grew saddened by our apparent failure. We came to believe that the answer lay in the Port. We searched through the ancient texts for clues to its location, but we found nothing. Your father was convinced that the Port lay beyond the Barren Lands, beyond our vision. He wanted to take provisions and a horse to go explore.”
“Your mother thought it was too dangerous, a fool’s errand. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just be happy, why he needed so badly to search for the answers. Your mother was content to stay in Terrene, but not your father. I don’t know how much you remember, but he loved you dearly, visiting you whenever he could. He told me that leaving you would be the hardest thing he ever did. But still, he had to do it. Your mother was furious. She refused to speak to me after that. Months passed, then years. Your father never returned.”
“But he could still be out there somewhere?” she asked. Sagerius didn’t answer. His eyes were still open, but his mind seemed to have drifted. “Sagerius?” she said, giving him a slight nudge.
“What?” he said. “I’m so very tired.” Flora nudged him again. “Somewhere, out there,” he sung, an oddly familiar melody.
“Sagerius!” she repeated.
“Your mother Geena was a lovely lady,” Sagerius muttered. “Those two looked so nice together...until David never returned. Geena will never forgive me...”
Flora had so many more questions. She didn’t care what Romulus found out any more. She wanted to know more about her father, and more about her mother. But then former Grandmaster Aggasiz Sagerius, Keeper of the Faith, closed his eyes for the last time.
Chapter 13: The Rock
Jane felt twenty years younger. Of course, twenty years ago, she would never have been able to make this hike. On the few occasions when she had gone on hikes around the San Francisco bay, she had been repeatedly humiliated by the septuagenarians who rocketed past her as she huffed and puffed her way up the trail. Now, at 53, she reveled in the exhilaration of physical exertion as she looked down on the valley from her vantage point.
Feeling overheated in her ski jacket, she slid the ventilation control all the way to the right. A voltage applied to the outer fabric caused the fibers to rotate, creating miniscule gaps that allowed the jacket to breathe more easily. After she cooled down, she’d tighten up the weave again, for even in the summer, Terrene was quite chilly. The peaks were covered with snow year-round, but the valley was mild in the summer. A few degrees warmer, and it would be the perfect climate to grow most food crops that existed in the world.
Jane wiped the sweat from her brow as she rested on a small rock that jutted out from the hillside. She had spent thirty years of her life studying nature and plants from within the confines of a lab. Now she was studying nature in a visceral way, and it was so much better. She laid back on the rock and enjoyed the quiet of nature. This was her new office.
Terrene was truly a magical place, completely hidden from the rest of the world. From her vantage point, she could see their rustic headquarters in the center of the valley, a simple group of buildings made from packed dirt. The illusion of a tribal village was broken only by the three giant satellite dishes that were clustered 50 meters from the central village.
From here, she could imagine how their nation would be built. There were some streams that carried the ice melt from the ring of mountains into the valley’s edge. They would build a reservoir and a series of aqueducts to carry the water into the valley. Then they would erect their residences around their crop land in order to reduce the need for transportation, for their small secluded nation would need to live without fossil fuels. Even the use of electricity would have to be tightly controlled as the industry required to produce solar cells and wind turbines came from outside the mountain walls.
Bryce was strict about making Terrene self-sustaining. He wanted their world to be able to preserve human life indefinitely, even if the rest of civilization crumbled to pieces. But so much of what they took for granted was produced by a vast infrastructure many times larger than Terrene itself. The satellite dishes, the computers, and even the coffee machines which they now relied upon would fade away as Terrene evolved. One day they wouldn’t need all that technology.
Jane’s sunglasses emitted a delicate chime. She sighed. Even here, serenity was just an illusion...for now. She flipped the sunglasses down from their position above her forehead. The scenery around her didn’t dim at all. She looked up at the sun. Her glasses instantly adjusted to block out its light while
preserving the brightness of the scene around it, turning the sun into a pale impression of the moon. In the sky beside it, text appeared. “Route downloaded. ETA to Destination: 5:12.” A flashing white arrow pointed to the right.
Jane slowly panned to the right. A path through the brush pulsed in her vision, growing slightly brighter and then back to normal like a visual heartbeat. She pressed a button on the side of her glasses, turning them off. That was all the direction she desired. Satellites had already mapped the terrain and topology of Terrene in most of its entirety. The navigation tools had plotted an optimal course for her based on the satellite data, but following a map just didn’t seem like much fun to Jane. She wanted a little adventure, and maybe a challenge as well. She could beat 5:12. She’d aim for 4:15.
Jane rolled into the large backpack which held the hundreds of local plant and soil samples she had taken this morning and headed towards the hole in the brush that her glasses had pointed to. The samples she took would help her and the other scientists understand the local ecology and determine the types of plants they would introduce here. She was currently on her way to meet up with Tony and Mai-lin. They had left yesterday to scout out a possible site for their southern mountain base. The Phoenix project had already set up a base near the top of the northern mountain range in order to monitor the valley and give warning should anyone approach from the outside. Now Tony was looking to set up a base on the south for similar reasons.
In another life, Tony Martin had been a U.S. Marine sergeant. After a decade shuttling back and forth between Iraq and Afghanistan at the turn of the century, he suddenly called it quits. Seemingly overnight, he traded in command of his military squadron for command of a class of third graders. When Jane asked him about the transition he had replied, “The two jobs are pretty much identical, except kids are a heck of a lot harder to intimidate.” That was the extent to which he ever spoke about his time in the military.
Eventually, Tony made his way up the chain of command from teacher to principal, and then to Vice President of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education. At that time, Bryce Kandari was making headlines by claiming that his new video game was better at teaching children than the school district was. The president of the board sent Tony to talk to Bryce Kandari and get him to retract his statement. After two hours behind closed doors, Tony walked out and handed in his resignation. He had worked for Bryce ever since.
Jane really wasn’t sure what Tony did for Bryce over the last decade. She just knew that Bryce trusted him completely. Often, Tony would fly into home base on the Nimitz, meet with Bryce behind closed doors for several hours, and then immediately take off again. He flew his own plane and was reportedly even more aggressive in the air than Chris Barstow. Several months ago, Bryce sent Tony to set up security at Terrene. At first, Jane and the other scientists objected. They hadn’t signed up for a military operation. But their concerns evaporated quickly. Tony was jovial rather than stern, and he was helpful rather than demanding. In just a few weeks, he helped them set up the base on the top of the northern mountains and streamlined their operations at central headquarters. Everyone was happy, most of all Mai-lin.
Jane had never seen Mai-lin show interest in a man before. She was always strictly business. And to the casual observer, she appeared to be strictly business with Tony as well. But Jane knew Mai-lin well enough to know that something was different. She was noticeably more...inefficient around Tony. Normally, she would have let other people do the physical labor, not because she was lazy, but because she knew that she was spatially uncoordinated and that someone else would be more efficient at the task. But recently she had been helping Tony fix irrigation pipes, set up transceiver antennas, and install solar panels. And now she had volunteered to help Tony set up a base along the southern mountain ridge.
Jane smiled, thinking about their blooming relationship, but at the same time, she couldn’t help feeling a bit lonely herself. Over the last few decades, she had dated plenty of men, but nothing matched the magic of those two weeks with Paul. Maybe nothing ever could, except for the lifetime of joy she had in raising Ashton. Sure, sometimes she had wanted to strangle the kid, but he had grown into a man that she could be proud of, and they stayed remarkably close.
Jane remembered how she had stormed into Bryce’s office when she learned that he had bought Ashton’s computing company and was moving him to the Nimitz.
“This is no place for a child!” she yelled. “You already have me. Let my son live a regular life back home.”
Bryce looked at her oddly. “Ashton is twenty-nine years old and one of the best computer scientists in the world,” he replied calmly. “He was very excited to join our enterprise, and I need his expertise here, though he did have one concern.” Bryce looked up with a twinkle in his eye. “He asked me to send you back to California. He said this was no place for an old lady.” Jane’s mouth must have dropped a foot because Bryce broke out laughing and continued to laugh as she walked out the door.
Jane’s reverie was broken by an odd popping sound coming from above. She had reached the base of a black cliff-face on the side of the southern mountain range, a sheer rock wall that stretched endlessly into the heavens just thirty feet to her right. She looked up just in time to see a flash of light followed almost instantly by a loud boom. It shattered the tranquility of the valley, like a hammer splitting a glass dome. Seconds later, a deep rumbling started in the distance, vibrated down the cliff face and crept up her shoes and into her bones.
Jane saw the top of the mountain shimmer, and a sense of impending doom filled her core. Her mind flashed back to Thailand thirty years ago. She stared ahead at the giant wave of water, her mind trapped in time. As she stared, the water transformed into large blocks of ice accompanied by dark, steely granite. Giant boulders tumbled down the cliff, knocking chunks of rock from the wall which came cascading down towards her in a torrent of dirt and stone. Jane’s eye caught the fine details of the rock closest to her as it rotated slowly in the air. “Igneous,” she said to herself. “Large crystalline structure. Phaneretic. Probably Feltic. Granite.” Why was she identifying the rock? Being crushed by ten tons of phaneretic granite probably felt the same as being crushed by ten tons of anything. She had to move.
Finally her body’s flight response kicked in, and she made a beeline for the cliff wall. She pressed herself against the rock face, hoping that the larger pieces of stone would fall at least a few feet away from her. She made it just in time to feel the first boulder crash into the ground. It was a good thirty feet away, but it still frightened her beyond comprehension. She tried to force her eyes to stay open. She wasn’t about to die with her eyes closed. But the rumbling of the ground around her was overwhelming. She flinched from the tiny specks of dust that rained down on her head, unable to look up. When the noises finally stopped, she found that her eyelids were clinched shut just as tightly as her fists.
Slowly, Jane loosened her muscles and opened her eyes to survey the scene around her. A boulder twice her size and easily fifty times her weight was lodged in the ground just a few feet from her left foot. She shuddered as she picked her way through the field of stones. She turned around to see an amazing boulder leaned up against the rock face. It was easily the size of a small house. It resembled a lumpy head, with its nose pointed up into the sky. “Pompous prick,” she thought to herself. She walked up to it and placed her hand on it surface, marveling at the smoothness underneath her fingers before snapping back into the present.
“Mai-lin!” she thought. She reached up for her sunglasses. Thank God they were still there. She dropped them over her eyes and turned them on. “Get me Mai-lin Chen,” she instructed. Text popped into her vision. “Not responding.”
“Crap!” she thought. She hoped Tony and Mai-lin weren’t hit by that rock slide.
“Incoming message from Central HQ.” Jane pulled out her earbud and connected the call as soon as she read the message.
“What’s going on?” she asked immediately.
“Jane, are you okay?” It was Abdul Muid, an irrigation system expert from Dubai.
“Yeah, I’m fine. What about Tony and Mai-lin?” she asked.
“Their coms went offline right after the explosion,” Abdul said. “It seemed to have knocked out all the equipment that Tony and Mai-lin brought with them. I don’t know what to do.”
“But what happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I think the explosion that set off the rockslide came from their camp. I can’t contact anyone else. I’m blind here.” A knot formed in the pit of Jane’s stomach.
This was no time to panic. She needed to act.
Jane tried to suppress the panic in her voice. “Okay Abdul, just stay calm. Do you have their last known location on your system still?”
“Uh, sure. Um...looks like they were a little bit south of camp an hour ago.” Jane breathed a sigh of relief. She had to believe they were fine.
“Send it to me,” she said. “I’ll find them.”
************
Jane moved as fast as she safely could. Tucking her pride away, she now used the glasses to follow the path that Tony and Mai-lin had taken up to the top. According to Abdul, when the explosion occurred, Tony and Mai-lin were on that original path, about 100 feet below their camp. Jane glanced down. She had traveled at least 1000 feet up the mountain, zig-zagging back and forth on a narrow path in the cliff face. She was now above the giant stone boulder that resembled a head. Remarkably, from this angle, it still looked like the head of a pompous giant.