He hurried to… whatever it was.
As he drew closer, he saw what looked like the deck of a ship. Some kind of boat? But when he climbed into it, he saw exactly what the large black shape above the deck was.
A balloon.
Like a dirigible. Something out of a Jules Verne novel.
They had no jets, but they had this.
An engine roared to life. Dr. Cadence came up to him. “Okay,” she yelled over the engine. “Boiler’s running. We’re ready. Just hold on-in case we hit any currents heading up.”
Raine noticed then that she hadn’t turned on any running lights. They’d be running dark-which was probably incredibly dangerous-but it also might let them slip away without being seen.
In a world of buggies and cars, it would be as if he had disappeared.
The thing began to rise. Raine firmly attached himself to the deck and held on tight.
The balloon ship wobbled on the way up.
A steady breeze turned into something choppy, and-like a dinghy in a rough sea-the ship rocked back and forth.
But then, when they were well above the ground, Wellspring fading in the distance, it steadied. The moon had come up, Raine again seeing the scarlike gash on it that he first saw in the Wasteland. A visual reminder that this world… had changed.
Stars glistened, though. Ancient, unchanged.
Suddenly he felt cool, chilly at the altitude. And he was aware that he was still covered with mutant blood.
After making sure the ship was running smoothly, Elizabeth came over to him.
“Let me get you some clean clothes. Some water.”
“Thanks.” He looked up at her. A dark figure, worried about him. It felt strange to hear that concerned tone.
Yes, she wanted something from him. But she was of his time. She remembered.
He told himself…
For Ark survivors that must be a special bond.
For those who had been there before it all ended.
Elizabeth nodded as if she had heard his thoughts, then disappeared into what had to be a small belowdecks area.
The ship sailed evenly. Raine drank water from a cup that she brought up, and he shed his jacket for a clean one Elizabeth had found.
He stood next to the woman as she steered the balloon ship, the engine producing a steady roar that mixed with the whistle of the wind moving over the balloon.
“Okay to ask where we are going, Dr. Cadence?”
“Tell you what. You call me Elizabeth, and I won’t call you ‘Lieutenant.’ ”
“Great. Just Raine will do.”
She pointed ahead. “Out there… there are more settlements. Some closer to Capital Prime.”
“Capital Prime?”
“The fortress city of the Authority. Those settlements really serve the Authority. They live and die… at the Authority’s whim.”
“And we’re going to one of them?” he asked skeptically.
“No. We’re not. I’m taking you to our main base. Underground, in a place called Subway Town-right under their noses. The Authority ignores it and hasn’t learned that we hide there. Least, not yet. We will have to move soon. We always have to be on the move.”
For a few seconds Raine just stood there, listening to the sound of the wind, feeling the breeze as they sailed through the night.
“Nobody down below can see us?”
“No. Just got the fire in the boiler. And it’s pretty much covered by the deck.” She looked off into the distance.
He looked at her. A woman from his own time. He couldn’t even begin to think of the questions to ask her.
She turned and looked back at him. “You had a rough couple of days, hm?”
“Hasn’t been easy.”
“Going to take us an hour or so, Raine. And I know you’ve got questions. So let me start… from the beginning.”
As she spoke, Elizabeth looked at the man she had rescued.
Already she wondered if he’d be up to what lay head. Amazing that he had survived the few days he’d been here.
But did he have the strength, the basic health, to do what had to be done in the next twelve hours?
Could one man-even with all his training, his experience, now battered by the Bash, shaken by the arena-do what she was going to ask of him?
She was not at all confident.
“My field is-was-molecular biology. I was one of the core teams working on the nanotrites project.”
“They’ve been very helpful, by the way.”
“Well, don’t get used to them.”
“I’ve heard-”
“My husband helped create them. We didn’t know… what they could do. How they could change.”
“Your husband? He didn’t come with you?”
She turned away. “I was sent in an Ark with my husband-a physicist-and our son. The three of us.”
“They let children go?”
“If they wanted us, our son had to go, too. That was our stance. And I imagine they thought the gene pool might be promising.”
“And your husband is…?”
“We were all picked up by the Authority,” she said quietly. “My husband, son-they were taken away. I was sent to the Dead City to work. The deal-”
“They like deals here.”
She smiled wanly. “The deal was, if I helped them, then we could be reunited. At first I was diligent. But there were rumors… rumors my family was dead. And the work I was doing, I didn’t understand. It seemed… sick. Using nanotrites on the mutants. Yet I only dealt with a piece of the puzzle.”
She took a breath.
“Hopefully, what you got on that hard drive… will explain what was being done. What is still being done.” She looked right at him. “Could be very important, Raine.”
“And so you left.”
“I couldn’t keep helping the Authority. I had to leave. And I didn’t believe they would ever let me see my family again. If they were still alive.”
Raine went quiet for a few minutes.
So much to take in, she thought. She’d had years. This world no longer held surprises for her.
But for him?
Raine broke his silence. “How did this all happen? The Authority, the Enforcers? What happened to the plan to rebuild humanity, to make a new world?”
This was the question she had been waiting for. “You know what they say about plans,” she said. “This one had a flaw that doomed it from the beginning. That, and a big surprise.”
She then told Raine about the asteroid, how its course had shifted, whatever was inside it reacting to the planet. And how General Martin Cross and Colonel James Casey had commandeered an Ark.
How they made sure they were the first out.
Made sure that they would run this world.
“Most of the survivors that came after them were either killed or captured. The ones that could be used were put to work. A few, like myself, escaped. But not many.” She looked at Raine again. “Now, there’s only one other like you that we know of.”
“Like me?”
“A soldier. Captain John Marshall. Leader of the Resistance.”
“I look forward to meeting him.”
She nodded.
Not yet, she told herself… she wouldn’t tell him yet. Instead, she simply said:
“Me, too…”
THIRTY-EIGHT
She turned and looked at him. She had already decided on a slight detour before they came to Subway Town.
This survivor needed to see things.
“Raine, take a look down there.”
The airship felt steady enough for Raine to walk to the edge and lean over. With the moonlight, he could make out the landscape below.
It reminded him of grainy photographs of the trenches from World War One. The devastated landscape, farmhouses burnt to the ground, the terrain turned into a series of long, desperate lines as men charged at each other, day after day, so many falling uselessly to their death.
“What is it?”
Elizabeth had to speak loudly to be heard.