Athel (6 page)

And then
what? Bring flashlights out to the gorge and risk being caught? Even worse,
risk finding a droid and waking it up. Even though droids are solar-powered,
and to save energy they close down their exoshells at night, there have been episodes
where some have come all the way to the riverbank in the middle of the night.
Our cousin Skip lost his life because he was out on the wrong night.

A shiver
travels down my spine, raising goose bumps on my arms.

No. I’d better do this on my own
.

The Kawa
River is shallow enough that Taeh can cross it easily without using the bridge
next to the Tower, which also could potentially attract attention. So we sneak
out on the far edge of the solar fields, cross the shallow waters, and then
gallop through the silvery aspen groves all the way to the foot of the mesa.

The cliffs
loom in the distance, tall and black now that night has drained all daylight
colors. I dismount the horse and look up to the high walls of rock, feeling
miniscule and insignificant.

And for a
moment I can’t believe my eyes.

The black
silhouette of a glider crosses the deep blue of the night sky, drifting right
over me.

“What
the—”

The
silhouette loses altitude. I recognize the usual faltering that happens before
touchdown and, guessing its trajectory, run over to meet the glider as it
lands. Darn sister of mine. I swear I’m going to yell at her big time.

Except I
can’t yell because if I do, I’ll wake up the scavenger droids.

Akaela swoops
about fifteen feet above me, then flares and touches ground with her feet,
immediately collapsing her frame and rolling to the ground to reduce the
impact.

“What the
heck were you thinking?” I hiss, trying hard not to yell but not succeeding
much. The frame clangs and whirs as it folds and vanishes into the niche
between her shoulder blades.

She jumps
to her feet, dusts off her pants, and runs to hug Taeh. “What are you doing out
here in the middle of the night?” she asks.

I clench
my teeth. “What you just did is gloriously stupid. You could’ve killed yourself
jumping on a moonless night with barely any wind to sustain your glide.”

Akaela
looks at me defiantly, the one word—dangerous—completely extraneous
to her. I’m tired of looking after her because she lacks the ability to steer
away from danger.

“And what
if I did kill myself?” she challenges me.

“Don’t be
stupid. Mom doesn’t need this right now.”

Her eyes
soften and for a moment I think my sister’s back—the brave, happy sister
I used to know. The defensive shroud comes back almost immediately, tingeing
her gaze with defiance. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing out here.”

I sigh,
still scowling. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But I swear, if you ever jump like this
again—”

“Then
don’t ever sneak out in the middle of the night without telling me.”

“You’re
the one who refused to come out this morning!”

My shout
echoes in the dead of the night. I bite my lip and take a deep breath. Anger’s
not gonna do any good, especially if I end up rousing the droids.

“Fine,” I
hiss. I grab Taeh’s reins and stride toward the walls of rock, a stab of
darkness looming before us.

“Wait up!”
Akaela whispers. “Ouch.”

She trips
and scrapes her knee. I stop and wait for her.

“Stay
close and follow me,” I say. “I’m the one who can see in the dark, not you.”

She nods
and rests a hand on Taeh’s flank, letting the horse guide her through the dark.
For the next five minutes she doesn’t utter another word as we climb the
incline to the mouth of the gorge. I tie Taeh’s reins to a small juniper and
then stare into the depth of the crevasse. The darkness is deeper out here, my
vision grainier. Akaela almost trips again. I grab her arm and drag her closer
to me.

“I can see
the droids,” I whisper. They look like giant clams attached to the ground, now
that their armor is closed and folded for the night.

“Where?”

“About two
hundred feet down the gorge.”

Akaela
squints at me, at the little of my face she can see. “Why are we here?”

I ball my
fists. “Because I want to make a weapon that’s better than Metal Jaw’s.”

I slide
the backpack off my shoulder and take out a thick coil of old telephone wire.
Not as sturdy as the cable Lukas and I found at the landfill a few days ago,
but it has an added quality: flexibility.

“Have you
ever built a snare trap?” I ask Dottie as I set to work. It’s a rhetorical
question, and it has the effect I was looking for. Even in the dark, her eyes
shine with excitement.

“You’re
going to trap a droid with a snare? How do you know it’s going to work?”

“I don’t.
But somebody’s gotta try, right? We came yesterday and almost captured one. I
wrapped the cable around its legs and made it trip, but then the darn thing got
away. A snare seems like the next best thing to try.”

I examine
the contents of my backpack: two coils of phone wire, sticks I’ve carved into
forks, and a metal spoon. Akaela can’t see a thing, so I make her sit down next
to the large boulder where the cable got stuck yesterday. I put the wire in her
hands and tell her to make a noose. “Trust your hands to do the job even if
your eyes can’t help right now. And don’t move from here.”

“I can’t
see a thing. Where do you think I’d be going?”

“You can’t
see a thing and yet you jumped from a damned window.”

“That’s because
I was worried about my stupid brother,” she hisses.

I’m glad
she can’t see my face because I’m kind of touched by that. But only a little.
I’ve got other stuff on my mind. I clamber around the boulder and reach a tall
aspen sapling sprouting off the wall of rock to the left. It’s tall and
flexible, the narrow trunk easily yielding as I grab its girth and shake it.

This will do
.

I take
another piece of wire, bend the two ends into an arc, and toss it up until it
hooks around one of the top branches of the sapling. Once the tree is hooked, I
pull down, making it bend all the way to the boulder where Akaela is sitting.
She hears the rustling of the leaves and jumps to her feet, probably glimpsing
the silvery movements of the leaves moving toward her.

“Pass me
the sticks,” I say.

“The
what?”

“The two
sticks in my backpack.”

She
gropes, finds them, and hands them to me. I’m close enough that she can glimpse
my movements now.

I peg the
two sticks into the earth and fasten the wire around them so the sapling almost
touches the ground. I take the noose from my sister’s hands and slide the knot
along the long end of the wire until I get a loop about fifteen feet in
diameter. Satisfied with its width, I lay it on the ground alongside the
sapling and cover it with dirt and dry leaves.

“Scavenger
droids have highly focused vision,” I explain, still whispering. “Lukas told
me. They use pattern recognition software that peaks on the stuff they look
for: raw metals. Moving things will also catch their attention because they can
be potential enemies. As long as the sapling is hidden behind the boulder, the
droid won’t suspect a thing.”

I loop the
end of the wire around the boulder and tuck it underneath. “There. It all
blends nicely with the landscape.”

Dottie
flashes a skeptical face. “What makes you think they’ll come all the way here
and fall for it?”

I grin.
“That’s where part two of my plan comes in.” I carefully step inside the loop
and set my bait: a kinked metal spoon scavenged from the landfill. “This is where
the droid’s vision will zoom in—right on the spoon, missing everything
else.”

I peg two
more sticks into the ground and position them so the droid will knock them down
when it comes to collect the spoon. Once displaced, these last two sticks will
set the trap in motion, releasing the sapling and closing the noose around the
robot.

“All
done,” I say. “Happy now?”

She
presses her lips together and gives me a weary look.

“You’ll
see tomorrow.” I grab her arm, guide her a few steps down the slope, and then
give her a small push without letting go of her. “Watch out! You almost stepped
on it and ruined the trap.”

She elbows
me in the stomach, but the joke steals a smile from her lips.

Once we’re
back down, the yellow haze shrouding the horizon makes enough light for Akaela
to walk without me guiding her steps. She wriggles away from my grasp and asks,
“What if you come back tomorrow and the trap didn’t work?”

“I’ll make
a new one. I’m not giving up until we capture a droid.”

Taeh sees
us approaching and bobs her head impatiently. Dottie pats her nose to soothe
her while I unknot her reins. We both climb onto the saddle and start a fast
gallop back to the Tower. The solar fields appear on the other side of the
river, a grid of tilted panes that extends all the way to the forest. We wade
through tall grass, the long strands silver under the dim light of the stars. I
yawn. The gentle rocking of Taeh’s canter, combined with the boring lilt of the
crickets, is making me sleepy.

I nudge my
sister. “Ok, that’s it, Dottie. You’ve been fussing about me sneaking out
without telling you anything, but you haven’t spilled a word about what you did
yesterday. Metal Jaw has been steering away from us for the past couple of
weeks, and now, suddenly, he’s pissed off at you. What did you do?”

She stirs
and lets out a long sigh. “I already knew that Hennessy had concocted some kind
of weapon,” she says, blurting it all out as though she can’t keep it inside
any longer.

“How? Who
told you?”

 
“Cal did. He said Yuri has some new weapon
their dad installed. They go to the forest every day to practice shooting.”

“You’ve
seen them?”

She nods.

“And how
come you talk to Cal now?”

I turn,
and even in the milky light of 4 a.m. I can tell that her face is blushed. “I don’t,”
she replies firmly. “I eavesdropped on them.”

I’m about
to reply that what she’s just told me doesn’t make any sense, when a flash of
light coming from the forest catches my attention. Akaela opens her mouth but I
press a hand to her face and signal her to keep quiet.

She shoves
my hand away and whispers, “What is it?”

I pull
Taeh’s reins and point toward the edge of the forest. Two figures are moving
near the trees. Their flashlights bob in the darkness until they vanish into
the woods.

Akaela bites
her lip. “It’s them! I told you! They practice shooting with that weapon Yuri
has.”

“It’s
laser beams. Yuri reduced a big boulder to crumbs to show everyone how they
work. But it doesn’t make any sense to practice in the middle of the night.”

“It does if
you’re hiding something,” Akaela retorts. “Cal said they almost killed somebody
by accident. That’s how I know they’ve been shooting in the forest.”

I inhale.
If Akaela’s telling the truth, Hennessy and his sons have decided to win this
war on their own. I think of Uli and how he killed three men to fulfill his own
ambitions. There was a time when I thought the Mayakes were peaceful and stuck
up for one another. I was naïve. I no longer believe in that crap anymore.

“Let’s go
find out what they’re up to.”

We both
dismount and squat in the tall grass. The stable isn’t far away from the solar
field, and Taeh knows how to get herself inside the paddock. I click my tongue
and our smart mare understands immediately. She bobs her head and sprints away,
trotting quietly back home.
  

Back on
our feet, Dottie and I hike between the solar panels all the way to the forest.
It’s too dark for my sister to see underneath the thick canopy of trees, so I
take her arm and help her avoid rocks and bulging roots. We wander aimlessly
for a few minutes until I spot the bobbing flashlights again. I motion for
Akaela to keep low as we wade through the thick growth of ferns.

We reach a
clearing, where we find the two figures crouched over something I can’t see.
Their flashlights create a halo around their black silhouettes, but their faces
remain disguised. All I can see is that one holds the light while the other,
down on his knees, digs the ground with a shovel.

Akeala
snuggles closer to me. “They look too old to be Yuri and Cal, don’t they?” she
whispers.

That’s
when one of the two men turns ever so slightly, and, to my surprise, I finally
recognize his distinctive aquiline profile.

“Definitely,”
I reply. “That’s Tahari, right there.”

Tahari,
our Kiva leader.

Chapter Four

Akaela

The forest smells humid and damp,
despite our land not having seen rain for the past ten years. The river feeds
the trees from underground, and the trees return the moisture to the air
through their leaves and their long shawls of moss.
 

“And who
was the second man?” Lukas asks as Athel recounts what we saw last night.

Athel
ducks under a low tree branch and shrugs. “Neither Dottie nor I could recognize
him.”

We’ve been
walking for about twenty minutes into the forest along the same trail Athel and
I followed before dawn. The place looks so different in broad daylight. Between
the trees, yellow and purple wildflowers sprout out of the cracks of Astraca’s
old walls. Bright blue jays screech from the treetops, and spotted doves coo
from underneath the ferns.

“Might be
the same man Cal and Yuri found out here looking for something,” I chime in.

They all
stop and look at me. Wes rocks on his titanium blades and Lukas holds the data
feeder between his palms with his thumbs poised to tap.

“Can you
tell us, once and for all, what the heck you heard them say and why?” Athel
says, and this time his voice is no longer mellow.

“Fine,” I
snap. “I followed them out here in the forest and eavesdropped on them. They’ve
been coming often, which is why I thought it was the two of them last night. I
overheard them talking about this man who walked in on them as they were
shooting. He was looking for something, and Hennessy said they should be
searching too.”

“And they
never said what it was?” Lukas asks.

I shake my
head.

“Guys,”
Athel calls. “This is the place—the clearing where Tahari and the other
man were digging this morning.”

Wes runs
ahead. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

Lukas thumbs
his data feeder. “What do you mean nothing? There’s trees—oaks and
birches and—”

I give him
a push. “Oh, shut up, Lukas!”

“It was a
joke!” he protests. “You guys never laugh at my jokes.”

“That’s
because they aren’t funny.”

It’s late
morning, and the sun blinks through the treetops. A light summer breeze blows
through the branches, rustling the leaves.

I realize
I’ve never been to this part of the forest before. The trees stand farther
apart, exposing an unusual amount of ruins from the buried city of Astraca. A
tall arch looms in the middle of nowhere, covered in bearded moss and crawling
ivy. The thick roots of an oak choke a broken pillar. Up higher, old graffiti
peek through leaves and the wear of time. I crouch, brush the dirt off the
scratched stone, and examine the relief etched on its surface.

“That’s
the symbol of Astraca,” Lukas says, looking over my shoulder and pointing to
the embossing. “Five triangles joined at one vertex to form a pentagon. Each
triangle contains a key to one of the five doors of the city: Wisdom,
Foresight, Knowledge, Prudence, and Ingenuity. If you look closely, the key
heads are all different, as each door has its own symbol: the sun for wisdom,
the moon for prudence, a star for foresight, a wheel for ingenuity, and an open
book for knowledge.”

“They had
a name for each door?” Wes asks.

Lukas
nods. “They were called the five powers of Astraca, and each door was named
after one of them.”

“Why five
doors, though?” Wes wonders. “Don’t most cities have four, one for each cardinal
point?”

Athel
grins. “Astraca has always been special.”

“Exactly,”
Lukas replies. “The doors were actually distributed like the five main stars of
Cassiopeia.” He sighs. “Too bad the doors burnt down during the fire in 2065.
The keys—
chavis,
as our fathers
called them—were never found again.”

Wes spins
on his heels and stares at the clearing we’ve come to. “Wow. This place is a
relic! I mean, the whole forest is, but this spot even more.”

He takes
in the pillar lying on the ground, the big arch, and the slanted walls jutting
out of the ground like lost teeth. In some spots, past the layer of lichen and
the cracks of time, you can still see frescos and fragments of architectural
décor.

 
“Right here!” Athel shouts. He crouches
near a small grove of young saplings and brushes away leaves from the ground.
“Tahari and the other man were digging right here. You saw them too, Dottie.”

Lukas and
Wes squat next to my brother.

“There’s
fresh dirt scattered all over,” Lukas says. “They dug a hole and then covered
it back up.”

The boys
bend over and scoop out dirt. I inhale the scent of damp earth and soil, while
my eyes stray back to the ruins around us. Five doors of Astraca, five keys,
all burnt to ashes during the siege of 2065, the beginning of the end for the
Mayake people.

“Wasn’t
there a legend about the five keys of Astraca?” I ask.

“Yes,”
Lukas replies, watching over Wes’s and Athel’s shoulders as they rasp the
ground with their bare fingers. “They say the keys were saved from the fire,
but they were never found. People still look for them.”

The light
fanning from an old oak sprawls over the fallen pillar and twinkles in my eyes.
I walk around the large trunk of an oak and brush a finger along the rugged
bark, its nooks and crannies rough against my finger pads. It all seems
strangely familiar to me, a déjà vu of some sort, maybe a dream, or maybe…

Wes throws
his hands in the air, his fingertips blackened with dirt. “Guys. There’s
nothing here. It’s all gone.”

“Hard to
tell,” Lukas replies in his usual condescending tone, “since there was nothing
in there to begin with.”

Wes shakes
his head. “Whatever they were looking for, they found it and took it.”

I turn and
catch Athel staring at me, frowning. “You don’t think—” he says. “They
were looking for the keys of Astraca?”

“It’s just
a legend,” Lukas interjects.

“Whatever
they were looking for,” I say, my hand flat on the trunk of the old oak, “it
had to do with Astraca, or else they wouldn’t be looking for it here.”

Lukas
bends over the hole Wes and Athel just uncovered and takes a picture with his
data feeder. “The hole is pretty deep,” he says. “Tahari and his companion had
to dig for a while, breaking roots and removing rocks, in order to retrieve the
object.” He taps on his screen and squints. “The hole is eight inches deep.
According to the measures I’m reading here, they dug out about five hundred
cubic inches of dirt.”

“Great,”
Athel mutters. “Now all we have to do is go back to the Tower and look for
anything that fits inside a five hundred cubic inch hole.’”

Wes gets
back to his feet and starts pacing, his bendy titanium blades digging into the
bed of leaves. “Look, guys. I don’t know why you’re obsessed with this. We
don’t even know what it is we’re looking for!”

“Whatever
it is,” Athel snaps, “if both Tahari and Hennessy are after it, it must be
important.”

Lukas
pinches his chin. “That’s entirely possible, especially after what happened
yesterday. Hennessy begged people to pitch in the little technology they have
left to make weapons.”

“What if
we’ve had that technology all along,” Athel says, “buried underground inside
the ruins of Astraca?”

“Astraca
burned down to its foundations,” Wes interjects. “They say the fire lasted a
whole year. Not much was left after that, and whatever did survive it’s
probablye gone by now.”

A
dragonfly buzzes near his face and he shoos it away.

“Not a
full year, no,” Lukas replies. “Probably some hyperbole as the story got passed
from one generation to the next. But the city did burn to the ground. The fire
probably lasted a few weeks. Must have been devastating to watch. At the time,
Astraca was in full bloom. The city offered patronage to artists and musicians.
The economy flourished and the technology Dr. Prado had developed boosted a new
renaissance for our people.”

“They
didn’t have weapons, though,” Athel says bitterly. “The Mayakes have always
been peaceful people.”

“They had
better stuff than weapons,” Lukas replies. “They had AIs.”

AIs
, I think. Artificial
intelligence, the bots that caused the rise and fall of Astraca, and the very
reason why today every Mayake has a deactivation button: to prevent humanoids
from causing the same death and destruction as they did in 2065, when they
rebelled against a law that prevented them from voting. The stories of what
happened that night and in the days that followed are grisly. The streets
turned red with blood. Panic spread. Flames devoured everything, buildings and
bodies alike.

Something
twinkles at the corner of my eye, making me turn and squint. I gaze back at the
oak tree looming over me, its golden trunk caressed by fanning rays of light.

The boys
keep talking about AIs and how they could still possibly be hidden deep
underground. I get up and examine the old oak, its trunk bathed in the golden
light. I tilt my head and follow the branches as they twist and knot, and
somehow I can predict every bend, every fork, every nook.

I’ve seen you before. I don’t know where, but
I’ve seen you before
.

I walk
around its impressive girth and find myself searching for something, though I
don’t know what.

“Whatever
object Tahari removed from the ground last night…” Lukas starts saying, but I
get distracted and stop following the conversation.

Not this tree. It’s farther down
, I think,
without knowing where the thought came from or what it is that’s supposed to be
farther down. I follow the fanning light down a path studded by twisted roots.

Twenty steps after the bend. Touch the
egg-shaped rock
.

The path
bends and the egg-shaped rock appears on my left, braced by the overgrown roots
of a sequoia. The same déjà vu feeling I had before in front of the oak tree
resurfaces. The rock, the tree that grows over it, the dash of purple wild
flowers sprinkled along the trail… I’ve already seen it all.

Touch the egg-shaped rock
.

I step
forward and rest a hand on the rock, its right side stained by green and yellow
lichens. My fingers slide to the top, where the sequoia roots arch around it in
a frozen embrace. I push below the root, my nails rasping underneath. Something
clicks, and the root snaps open. I jump and pull my hand away, watching, as a
cylindrical object sprouts out of the root in small bursts, sending splinters
of wood flying into the air.

“We still
don’t know what Tahari was looking for!” Wes is saying out of frustration as I
walk back to the clearing.

“Could it
be this?” I say, extending my open palm to show them what I’ve just found.