“Tadeo risked too much! Now everyone knows about Arghail’s bones!” exclaimed Alala, worried.
Gill was startled by her words, surprised and hurt to hear her referring to the bones of the bracelets’ bearers like that.
“Why do you think it’s Arghail? Arghail is but a legend! Maybe Baila is holding something else in his hands. What if they’re Zhan’s sons? What if one of their fire chariots fell on Antyra II?”
“Gill, look outside,” she whispered, turning his face to the window, to the tarjis swarming in the streets. “For our sake, don’t tell anyone about this ‘theory.’ Forget the blasphemy! I don’t like being ripped to pieces. Tadeo never cared about consequences, and look where his tail is now!”
The Shindam’s holofluxes were streaming the dawn of madness. Tens of thousands of tarjis flooded the surroundings of the Holograms Tower, heading toward the transmission domes, breaking the locked doors. Others jumped on the chameleons parked at the crossroads and quickly seized them.
“Antyrans, the tarjis have jumped the fences! They’re breaking everything! Please help us!” cried a panicked female.
“Arghail, in Tadeo’s hands? On Zhan’s eye, does anyone know about this?” they heard one of the archivists exclaim through the open door.
“I saw Alala earlier in Tadeo’s archive,” said Antumar.
“We have to go now!” whispered Gill, taking her hand again.
They ran down the corridor and reached the secondary stairs before the other archivists could see them.
Outside the Archivists Tower, all hell had broken loose. Loud screams and shouts followed the rivers of tarjis running amok on the streets. Most of them were running toward the central and western districts to take over the Shindam’s Towers and the subterranean base.
Gill steered his magneto-jet carefully to avoid the chaos, limping toward his dome.
“Why aren’t we going to the mountains?” asked Alala, surprised by the direction.
“I have to get something from my home,” he said. He was worried about the bracelet hidden in the fluff of his nest.
“Millions of Antyrans are leaving the city! If we get out now, we might have a chance!”
Gill didn’t make the slightest move to change their direction.
“Come on! I have a couple of things there,” she insisted. “I’ll lend you one of my tunics.”
“Sorry, but I have to reach my home by all means!”
“Is it more important than our lives?”
“Yes!”
Once inside his dome, he snatched the bracelet from the fluff, took a deep breath, and pulled it on his forearm, under the sleeve. He grabbed a few cans of food before rushing back to the jet where Alala waited.
Barely moments into their journey out, they came upon a huge column of magneto-jets stretching on for miles. The traffic was already strangled by the newly made refugees, and soon it stopped altogether. In a storm of hysterical screams, the Antyrans were leaving their jets in the middle of the road. Weighed down with bags of all sizes and colors, they began to trickle, then flood, out of the city on foot.
“Too late! What do we do now?” asked Alala, panicked.
Gill had no intention of remaining trapped at Baila’s mercy. However, it would be nearly impossible to reach the recreation dome on foot because they had no tents to survive the cold nights in the mountains until they arrived at their destination. Apparently, they had run out of options—but as the great aromary Laixan22 used to say, “That’s how the reality always looks when glanced through the lenses of desperation.”
Gill felt an eerie calm growing around him, shielding him from the madness, and this time the process smelled so pungent that he almost instantly found the stalker’s path. He shut down the magneto-jet’s annoying artificial intelligence and the main safety sensors. Then, he turned the jet toward the ditch bordering the magneto-highway while pushing the throttle to the limit.
“What are you doing?” Alala screamed, terrified.
The jet jumped over the ditch, landing in the middle of a rugged field. The earth was covered by a purple carpet of primitive, jagged grass, each blade riding the others like the fur of a monstrous creature. Here and there, some tall, green23 bushes had lodged their deep roots through the grassy mattress.
Unsurprisingly, the magnetic cushion ceased to work outside of the road. Their vehicle fell to the ground like a rock, jerking to a stop. Ignoring the scared look on Alala’s face, Gill reduced the width of the fusion nozzles—well beyond the point where any sane Antyran would consider it to be pure madness—and again pushed the throttle stick to the limit. The roaring jet sprang forward and caught speed, raising a burning cloud of debris in its wake. He found, relieved, that he could still steer it from the nozzle and the four gas blowers placed around the front mask. Even though they were running directly on the ground, the titan-alloy shield protected them well. His only annoyance was that in some places the herbs and shrubs were growing nearly as tall as the magneto-jet, obstructing his view.
After a while, they left the weeds and reached one of the acajaa farms at the city’s outskirts. The acajaa crops were thankfully smaller than the bushes, so it was like sailing on a sea. An orange stream of juice trailed in their wake, exploded from the purple stems crushed under their jet. With his hand firmly on the stick, he glanced at Alala and saw her smiling, seduced by the adventure’s aroma.
They kept shadowing the magneto-highway full of panicked Antyrans walking among the stuck vehicles. He was hoping to get back on the magnetic field, but the traffic jam went on for miles and miles, spreading its coils as far as he could see. After a while, it became obvious they wouldn’t be able to return to the road anytime soon: for the next few miles, the magneto-highway was raised on pylons, and when it went back to the ground level, it was fully covered. The vardannes suddenly strengthened their force, and he had to keep the stick steady to drive in a straight line.
“I hope all the siclides have passed for today,” said Alala.
She had barely finished when a purple wall at least fifteen feet tall appeared behind the magneto-road. In a twitch of a tail, it crossed the highway’s transparent ceiling and rolled toward them.
Before they could do anything, the tide reached them and covered their jet, which jerked to a stop, unable to force its way through. They were stuck in complete darkness, covered by a huge mountain of thorny shrubs.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I still have a couple of settings to disable,” Gill grinned. He canceled all the basic safety features of the fusion reactor.
“You’re mad!” she exclaimed, laughing. “You’re going to get us blown into pieces!”
Without a word, he again pushed the throttle stick to the limit. Howling in protest, the vehicle burst forward, digging a tunnel through the siclides. Behind them, the huge, bluish flames of the reactor set the plants on fire, lighting the gallery opened in their wake.
With the reactor’s magnetic trap close to the melting point, and the alarms screaming maddeningly, they burst out of the siclides trap. A wide river stretched in front of them. Luckily, the banks were gentle, so he steered the jet onto the water, careful to reduce the power in the overloaded reactor.
They crossed the river, raising a hissing cloud of steam in their wake. Shortly after climbing the opposite shore, his hearts started to bounce back to life. The magneto-highway in front of them was uncovered and, even better, completely deserted. He jumped over the ditch and landed in the middle of the lane. Immediately, the jet lifted on the magnetic cushion and caught speed.