11
Late that night, Glenn lay on the floor next to Kevin’s pallet, covered in a heavy quilt Decker Calloway had brought. He insisted there was a free room and a bed down the hall, but Glenn refused them.
Kevin was still unconscious. His chest rose and fell weakly. Glenn peeled back the poultice that Aamon had set over his stitching. The flesh around the wound was puckered and wan but the bleeding had stopped and there was no sign of an infection yet.
There was a rustle as, behind her, stretched out before the embers of the fire, Aamon turned over. Decker had offered him a room too — Garen Tom’s own — but Aamon had refused it. He slept at the foot of the hearth, his brutal face slack.
Glenn sat up, letting the blanket roll off and pool at her feet. The house was quiet except for the crackle from the fire and the deep vibration of Aamon’s breathing. He lay on his side with his back to her, a nearly seven-foot mass of muscle, his long tail curled behind him like a viper. Again, Glenn was overcome by the feeling that, despite the overwhelming strangeness, there was something familiar about him.
Glenn’s knees shook as she made her way across the room. To her, the fall of her bare feet on the wood floor sounded like a hammer crashing onto stone. Her heart pounded as she anticipated Aamon’s smallest twitch, the slightest movement, but none came.
Once she reached Aamon the heat from the fire washed over her, blazing hot despite its size. Sweat formed on her forehead and ran along the length of her arms.
What if he woke right now? Would the last thing I felt be those claws?
Glenn marshaled her fear and knelt down beside him. Being so close brought the sheer impossibility of him into bold relief. She searched along the fur that covered his head and the surprisingly delicate lines of his mouth, examining, cataloging like a good scientist.
But she couldn’t find the root of the familiarity she felt. He was completely alien to her. She tried to draw together a plausible theory.
Radiation was tempting, but the mutations it produced made creatures deformed and sickly. There was no way a random genetic defect could produce something so extreme. Genetic engineering? As far along as Colloquium science was, even they hadn’t achieved anything close to this level of bioengineering. And if the Magisterium was capable of such a thing, why did their people still live in walled towns and use bows and arrows for weapons? None of it made sense.
Aamon shifted again. Glenn jerked away, but he didn’t wake. He simply turned over, exposing the thick fur at his throat.
That’s when Glenn saw it.
It was as if the entire room tilted on some invisible axis and a wild, sick feeling welled up inside her. Was this what her father felt like that night in his workshop when he explained the Rift and her mother’s disappearance to her? Was this what it was like to go suddenly and irretrievably mad?
Glenn forced herself to look again and sure enough, at the base of Aamon’s throat, his gray fur stopped and formed the border around a circular patch of perfect, snowy white.
Feeling as if she was in a dream, Glenn reached out, anticipating the patch’s downy softness. The sound of her six-year-old voice rang in her ears, the sound of a princess knighting her bravest soldier.
Gerard Manley -
Aamon’s eyes snapped opened. Glenn snatched her hand back
with a gasp, but Aamon made no move toward her. She sat back, wary, and for a second their eyes were locked. Aamon’s head was tilted to the side and in the glow of the fire the warm green of his eyes bloomed.
“You know who I am,” he said.
“No, I don’t. I …”
Aamon drew himself up so he sat across from her, his clawed hands poised on his knees.
“When you were eight years old,” he said, “we sat on your bed and you whispered to me the chronicles of the great explorer Glenn Morgan and her faithful cat, Hopkins. Together they explored the red canyons of Mars. Did you ever tell anyone else that story?”
Suddenly the fire felt hot on Glenn’s face. Aamon was right. She had never told that story to anyone else. She looked again at the patch of white and then up to the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear.
“But that’s not …” She was about to say “possible” but the word fell flat in her mouth. Glenn muscled impossibility aside for a moment and forced herself to look at it all like the scientist she was, as if the events of the last two days were the scattered bones of a long-extinct animal. She couldn’t deny them. She could only try to assemble them into something recognizable.
“The thermals in Kevin’s clothes stopped working as soon as we passed the border lights,” Glenn said slowly. “And the agents’ guns didn’t work either.”
“None of your technology works on our side of the border, just as Affinity doesn’t work on your side.”
“Affinity?”
“What you’d call magic.”
“I don’t believe in magic.”
The smallest glimmer of a smile creased Aamon’s lips. “And yet, here I am.”
Glenn churned through theory after theory, trying to construct a rational framework to hang all of this on, but no matter where she went she arrived at the same place — the unthinkable, undeniable reality of Aamon Marta and the words of her father.
Reality is a set of rules … a game of cards …
Glenn ran her fingers over the gray metal on her wrist. Was it possible that he wasn’t mad? That the years her father had spent lying half buried beneath The Project had actually come to something? Had he figured out how to bend the rules? Everything around her, everything she’d seen, said that he had. And yet still the idea seemed stuck at the edge of her mind, there but not there.
“Glenn,” Aamon began. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t believe about me. Michael Sturges and his men nearly killed Kevin for that bracelet. He was ready to kill you. And I swear to you, if Garen Tom learns of it he’ll be just as willing to do the same.”
Glenn looked up from the face of the bracelet. “Why?”
Behind Aamon, the fire hit a pocket of air in one of the logs and it snapped loudly, sending a rain of coppery sparks onto the brick hearth.
“For over a hundred years, the Magisterium and the Colloquium have stayed separate and at peace. The reason that’s been possible is that each side knows that any army that tried to cross over to the other’s territory would be helpless. Your weapons don’t work here. Our Affinity doesn’t work there. But this bracelet changes that. If Sturges possessed the technology that’s inside of it he could fill the sky with drones and take the Magisterium for himself. And if Garen Tom had it, or the Magistra? Then your home would be invaded by legions far stranger and more deadly than me.”
Glenn tensed as Aamon reached out to her, but then she felt the warmth in his fingertips and the gray softness of his coat.
“Believe or don’t,” he said. “But the bracelet has to be
destroyed.”
When Aamon drew his hand away, Glenn lifted the bracelet to catch the fire’s glow. It was beautiful in a way, sleek and simple like all of her father’s work. A wave of sadness came over her as she thought of her father, locked away in some Colloquium prison, his last memory of his daughter a betrayal. How could she take his greatest triumph and wipe it away?
But Aamon was right. Given the option, the Colloquium would do anything to take back the land lost in the Rift. All their technology couldn’t fix the basic problem of overpopulation that came when almost half the world had been swept away.
If destroying it left nothing for Sturges to pursue, then maybe it could get Dad his freedom. Maybe it could get Kevin and me our lives back.
The bracelet’s metal was light for its size, a mottled gray.
Materials were one of her father’s specialties and he used to lecture about them to her at length. Glenn guessed the shell was a mix of carbon fibers woven with titanium or even beryllium.