“But with the bracelet on — ”
“I’ll have to rely on Aamon and the others,” she said, and then, quietly, “I have a lifetime to make up for, Glenn. I have to try.”
Glenn could feel her mother’s grief, even through the bubble of the bracelet. It was a hard and cold thing, sunk deep inside her.
Aamon and Kevin stood waiting. Her mother was right. No
matter what had happened, she and Kevin weren’t soldiers. They weren’t rulers. They were never even meant to be here.
“Are you ready?” her mother asked.
Glenn turned to the border forest and thought of her home: the arcing run of the trains, the classrooms that were her second home, nights spent lying in bed and listening to the clank and hiss floating out from her father’s workshop.
Dad …
Glenn looked down at the bracelet on her mother’s wrist.
“No,” she said. “There’s one more thing we have to do.”
Glenn glided far over the treetops through the chilly night air. A train passed by below, winding on its magnetic track through a landscape dotted with the lights of shops and towering stacks, toward the city center of Colloquy that glowed a harsh white, miles away.
Glenn wanted to pause and take it all in; she had never seen her home like this before, but she knew that even now, Colloquium forces would have detected her and were closing in.
Luckily, once Authority had destroyed Dad’s workshop, they had left, unaware of his basement lab. It had taken Glenn hours to break into the heavily encrypted files Dad kept there, but once she did, she found detailed schematics for the bracelet, and notes theorizing a way to reverse the bracelet’s field and use it to keep the reality of the Magisterium with her. Sitting there at his workbench, the guts of the thing laid out before her, Glenn appreciated for the first time how brilliant her father really was. That simple band of metal contained not only microcircuits and power generators but small gems and
rune-covered bits of metal. It was a perfect melding together of Affinity and technology. Magisterium and Colloquium. It should have been impossible, but there it was. Glenn had it rebuilt and back on her wrist in a matter of hours. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.
Now Glenn focused her attention outward, hunting for one person amidst the millions huddled all around her in the hivelike stacks and office buildings. Her mind moved through building after building until she came to a place of darkness, a kind of hole in a large tower at the north end of the city. The tower was teeming with people except for one floor that was almost entirely empty. Empty, save one person. Even as far away as Glenn was, she could feel the despair coming from that floor’s single inhabitant.
Trees below bent in her wake as Glenn shot out over the
landscape. She swung around the edges of the city, careful to avoid that gravity well of people below her, the combined force of which threatened to pull her down.
The tower stood on its own, knifing into the sky from the center of a concrete sea, surrounded by gates and alarms and security systems.
All of it would have been forbidding to the Glenn of weeks ago, but they were toys to the Glenn of today. She flew to the top of the tower and then let herself slowly drop down along its windowless face until she found the floor she wanted. Once she did, Glenn drifted away from the wall and hovered there, staring at the sleek gray of it.
To anyone else, the expanse of steel and concrete and insulation would have seemed like an impenetrable wall, but Glenn opened herself up to it. She moved into the pores of the concrete and steel, ingratiating herself with them until they were grudging allies, then slowly drawing them aside. The outer wall of concrete was the first to part. A band of it, ten feet high and two feet thick, simply peeled back from the rest of the building like arms opening to embrace her, exposing the rib cage of steel beams that lay inside. Those too opened up at Glenn’s urging, soundlessly floating out of the building and into the air. Next came the layers of insulation and the interior walls, all of them gently parting from their brothers, opening up the deep insides of the tower, down to its heart.
Glenn’s father stood at the edge of a small cot in an empty, harshly lit room. He was in a pair of dingy white pajamas that hung off his emaciated frame. His eyes were hollow and darkly ringed. She could feel the people who had done this to him. His guards sat unaware on the other side of an interior wall — a fat man and a woman who went about their business like machines, bored and remorseless. She saw their interrogations, their petty torments. Glenn could kill them as easily as tearing the petals from a flower, pull them through the wall and toss them screaming out into the night. It’s what they deserved.
“Glenn?”
Her father had come to the edge of the hole in the building, his clothes whipping in the wind. Glenn’s heart twisted to see him, as skinny and frail-looking as ever. Glenn tamped down her anger at the guards and glided through the opening in the tower to hover inches from him. Her father backed away from her, skittish, as she came.
“It’s all right,” Glenn said. “I’ll explain everything later, but we have to go now.”
Glenn reached out her hand, and after a pause her dad stepped forward and took it, his own hand trembling. She drew him to her, lifting him and moving them out of his prison. She paused, closed the building back up, then slipped into the sky.
Minutes later, Glenn set down in their own front yard. Dad
stumbled out of her arms and stared at the workshop that still lay in blackened ruins. He slowly turned from it, looking across the yard, reaching the house just as the front door swung open. He froze in place.
Mom had found one of her old dresses, bright yellow and gauzy, and had done up her hair while they were away. She looked beautiful, better every minute she was away from the Magisterium. Stronger. Her hair had returned to its almost gleaming black, with only a few streaks of ivory.
He turned to Glenn, tears streaking his face.
“It’s real,” Glenn said.
And then he was running and Mom was running too, crossing the yard and diving into each other’s arms. They tangled together, both of them crying. Joy and pain welded together. Ten years apart. He thought he’d never see her again and now here she was. Glenn could feel their amazement bloom.
She turned away from them to look out beyond the wreck of the workshop. As soon as Authority realized her father was gone, they’d know exactly where to come. Glenn tensed. They had a few hours at most. Unless …
She had changed the bracelet to rescue her father, but there was more she could do, wasn’t there? She could lift off right now and find them. Sturges. Authority. They’d never expect it. Could never prepare for it. She could crush them and put this to rest once and for all. Glenn could see the path in front of her so clearly. It had a pull as strong as gravity.
“Glenn!”
Mom and Dad were at the door, waving her forward, but Glenn stepped away from the house. The engine was turning in her and it wouldn’t stop. She had to go. She had to get back on track. She had to …
Glenn stopped. Her father was beaming and so was her mother.
Contentment shimmered in the air around them both. All they were missing was her.
The engine in Glenn slowed and went still. There will be time for you, Sturges, she thought, and then ran across the yard and threw herself into her parents’ outstretched arms. The second she touched them, it was as if a circuit was completed, and their joy at being whole again moved through her in a rush.
Glenn didn’t know how long they stayed that way, floating
together on the front porch, but it was Mom who finally pulled away.