The future was there too, but it was so hard to tell from the past, like a circle turning back to itself. I was older, tall for the first time, and living in the same blue house at the end of the street, only now it was my house and it was me who sat in the garden and played guitar late into the night. James was somewhere close, but I wasn’t sure where. Living down the street maybe or in a nearby town. Bear was at my feet, ageless, sleeping, his stub of a tail pounding the grass in time to the guitar. As the night fell deeper and cooler, the back door opened and two women stepped out. It was my mother, beautiful with her gray hair, and Nat walking side by side. They came to join me, but when they did, my fingers fumbled on the guitar strings.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Why isn’t he here?”
Nat looked to Mom, and Mom reached down and scratched Bear’s sides until the dog wiggled over onto his back, his legs kicking contentedly.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Nat took my hand.
“Mom?”
But she just went on stroking Bear’s sides while Nat held my hand. I asked again, standing up at the edge of the garden, but no one answered me, no one even looked at me. It was like they were caught in some loop, immobile, out of time, and I was barely even there.
“Mom?”
“She’s not here, son.”
My eyes ached as I opened them. Someone was dabbing my forehead with a cool cloth. I was in the present again. We had stopped and the truck was empty except for me and Beacon Radcliffe, who was sitting on one of the wooden benches that lined either side. He was leaning over me, the cloth in his hand, his beacon vestments stained with dirt and bulky from the body armor he wore underneath them.
“You have to pray,” he said. “Do you know how to pray?”
I closed my eyes again and my knees were aching from kneeling for hours with the other novices in Lighthouse with Beacon Quan. He had us repeat our prayers over and over again until we could say them without thinking. Until the words weren’t words anymore, but ritual movements of air and lips and tongue held in muscle memory.
“If you pray hard enough,” Beacon Radcliffe said, “then God may allow you off this Path and onto another. Just pray. God makes the world. He can make yours.”
What would I have to do? I wondered. How hard would I have to pray for God to put me on the path home, along with James and Bear and Mom and Dad? Because if he won’t do that, then I had nothing to pray for.
I turned my head from the beacon and he finally relented and disappeared. There was a great stretch of blackness and then I was rising up into the air, free of the close stink of the truck. There were hundreds of voices all around me as well as the sounds of engines and boots and the rotors of helicopters flying low.
Had I slipped back in time again? Was I back at Cormorant, about to start my time as a novice all over again? My heart seized. How much longer then until I sat by that lake and listened to the Choice being given to all of those people who had trusted me? How much longer until I watched Grey Solomon die? Or Alec? How much longer until I abandoned Bear?
The sound dropped out again and I was somewhere cool and filled with only the softest rustling of feet. My clothes were torn away and what felt like steel wool dipped in freezing water was worked up and down my body. I was left alone, shivering and sweating at the same time, my skin livid. I tried to open my eyes, but they were so thick with tears and grime that all I saw was a fiery light filled with a black blur of distorted bodies.
What did I do to deserve this? asked part of me, but another part of me knew.
PART THREE
21
“Where am I?”
A white-robed companion was sitting at the edge of my cot. There was a bowl of water and a cloth in her lap.
“They’re calling it Kestrel.” Her voice was tentative with a light Southern accent. Her eyes were soft shadows beneath her mesh veil.
“How long have I been here?”
“About a week,” she said. “Your fever broke a few nights ago.”
“What was it?”
“Something waterborne, they think. We’ve been seeing a lot of it.”
The companion filled a cup from a water pitcher near the bed, then slipped her hand beneath my neck to lift me up so I could drink. I was lying in a large canvas tent that was packed with cots just like mine. Companions and medics glided through the room, ministering to the sick. Outside were the familiar sounds of a Path base, helicopters, Humvee engines far off near the command center, voices giving crisp orders.
I ran through the flashes of my memory — the truck, voices, sounds of engines and helicopters.
“We’re at the front,” I said.
“A few miles south of it,” she said. “Near Richmond. Everyone they take is being brought here now. Getting ready for the big fight, I guess.”
“Have they taken Philadelphia?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But Oregon and Nevada fell. Everyone says Philadelphia is next.”
The companion dipped a cloth into her bowl and mopped the sweat from my forehead. Cool water ran down the side of my face, loosening knots that seemed to run through my entire body.
“So it’s almost over,” I said, dreamy, my eyelids drooping. The companion moved on to wash my neck and my chest.
“Mara!” the shepherd called from across the room.
“Rest,” the companion said, laying a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
When she was gone, a lonely stillness fell over me. Somehow the bustle of bodies moving around me only made it worse. I reached under the sheets to my pockets but my clothes had been traded for Path-issued pajamas. The jeans I had been wearing were in a neat stack by the bed. I leaned over and rifled through them, digging one hand into my pants pocket until I felt a bit of metal. I drew out Bear’s collar and held it under the sheets, both hands pressing into the tough fabric. I felt an empty place inside me, but I imagined him in that cabin sitting by a fire, safe, and the gnaw of it eased a bit. I closed my fist around the collar and held it tight, wishing he were here, thankful that he wasn’t.
There was a gap in the tent flap across from my cot. Through it I could see a thin trail leading away from the tent and out into the camp. Bodies dressed in forest camo passed and a black helicopter streaked across the sky and disappeared. Despite the ache and the exhaustion, I could already feel a drumbeat starting up inside of me. Get up. Get dressed. Keep moving. I drew the blanket off my legs but stopped when I saw another companion standing across the aisle.
She was watching me, ignoring the rush of medics and orderlies around her. Blurred beneath the veil, her face was visible only as shadows and worried lines. I could tell she was new just by the way she stood, her body drawn in tight like she was trying to collapse in on herself and disappear.
The other companions were being led in prayer by their shepherd at the far end of the tent.
“You just got here,” I said.
The companion nodded. I waved her over and she drifted across the aisle, stopping at the foot of my cot.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “Just do what they tell you and you’ll be fine.”
“Is that what you did?”
I sat up slightly. There was something familiar in her rasp of a voice. “What do you mean?”
The companion checked the far end of the infirmary and then drew closer, coming up along the side of the cot.
“Don’t,” I whispered urgently. “If they see you they’ll—”