Scavenger of Souls (13 page)

I was no longer
I
. I was it.

I was lost.

A voice. “Querry!”

A bright light.

The thing tugged. Pulled. Tore. Won.

A blurred shape moved against the brightness.

Then the light and the sound and the feeling died, and black night replaced them all.

I came to in a pure white room, staring up at banks of buzzing lights. My head throbbed, my throat ached like I'd been screaming for hours. I felt emptied. I knew my name, and that was about all I knew. But that was something, that and the sound of my heart beating again in my ears.

“What a damn fool thing to do,” a voice rumbled above me, and I lifted my head to see the old man. For a moment I blanked, but then I remembered his name.

Udain.

He sat in a chair by my bed—I was lying in a bed, its sheets stiff and clean—and seeing him there brought back other pieces of the past. The Skaldi. The cage. The interrogation room. Mercy. The altar.

Wali. Nessa. Aleka. Soon.

Everything.

The past seven months were still there, intact. The time before, though, remained gone.

I tried to rise, but he laid a hand on my chest, and I found I didn't have the strength to resist.

“Steady,” he said. “That little performance nearly got you killed.”

“What happened?”

“Mercy brought you out. Against my orders, I might add.”

“Is she okay?”

“It never laid a hand on her. Which is more than I can promise, if I ever catch her pulling a stunt like that again.” His mustache lifted in what might have been a smile. “I will say this for her, though. She's almost managed to convince me you are what you claim to be. Or at least, that you're not one of Athan's infernal raiders.”

“I guess I owe her for that, too,” I said. “Where is she?”

“On duty. Or serving time, as she might put it. She seems to favor those old-world expressions, for some reason.”

I watched his eyes, intense and black yet lit with affection for the girl who did nothing but torment him. I remembered her eyes, black as his. With the stark difference in their skin—hers brown, his pale—I hadn't noticed the resemblance before, but I saw it now.

“She's your granddaughter.”

He nodded. “The only one left.”

“And Laman?”

“My son,” he said. “Mercy's uncle. Born three years before the wars of destruction. His brother Athan came after, with no memory of the time before. It may explain why they saw the future so differently. Why they followed such different paths.”

I sat, the room spinning for a moment until his hand gripped my arm. I saw that they'd had the decency to clothe
me in a new uniform, spotless and as crisp as the sheets. A few deep breaths restored my balance, and he let me go.

“My field is engineering,” he said. “Nuclear engineering. I worked for the government, taught at the university level. That might not mean much to you. It meant nothing to Laman.”

“He didn't think much of engineers,” I said delicately.

“What you mean is that he blamed us for the world's destruction,” Udain said. “Saw us as the enemy.
We
had built the bombs.
We
had poisoned the land.
We
had hidden the truth from the people until it was too late. And then, after it happened,
we
were the ones who profited from the wreckage of the old world.”

He spoke with bitterness, but I couldn't tell if it was directed at his lost son or himself.

“What he could never stomach was that we were also the ones who organized the survival colonies. We were the ones who perceived the seriousness of the Skaldi threat and who saw the need for new, more flexible forms of organization to meet it. Not the politicians, who were too busy scrambling for the few scraps of power that remained. Not the so-called common man, who was too terrified to crawl out of whatever bombed-out hole he was hiding in. Not the preachers, screaming of doomsday and urging the race to give in to despair. It was
us
. We were the ones who saved humanity. And our thanks for it . . .”

His voice had grown angry as he talked, but now it trailed
off, and he shook his head. I got the feeling he'd delivered the same speech many times before. And that Laman had tuned him out more and more each time he delivered it.

“I was at the forefront of the movement to gather the ones who remained,” he continued after a pause. “The experts, the leaders in their fields. Everyone from geneticists to metallurgists to astrophysicists, I wanted them. There were so few of us left, and we were scattered and unable to communicate. But mobile companies of a hundred or fewer, I believed, could best scour the ruins while evading the Skaldi. The survival colonies arose out of that.”

“As search-and-rescue teams.”

“We called them RUs,” he said. “Recovery Units. Eventually they became somewhat more, living communities, a new system of social order. As much as you can call this
living
. Or
order
.” He laughed, a deeper version of his granddaughter's humorless sniff. “But from the start my objective was to defeat the Skaldi, not elude them. To use our collective willpower to reclaim this planet from the ones who stole it from us.”

“You sound like,” I began, but changed my mind in mid-sentence. He might not want to hear me tell him how much he sounded like his older son. “You make it sound like the Skaldi aren't from this planet.”

He stared at me as if
I
wasn't from this planet. But he answered.

“It began in the years before the wars of destruction,” he said.
“Military scientists working in the desert found the remains of the creatures that would come to be known as Skaldi. With the advantage of hindsight, we believe they arrived through a rift in space-time opened by the weapons of that era. The first specimens were thought to be dead, until the scientists discovered—to their ruin—the creatures' ability to reawaken when life-energy was near.”

“So they're not really alive?”

“Nor are they truly dead,” he said. “The Skaldi are parasites—vampires, the superstitious used to call them. I prefer the clinical term
biophages
. Life eaters. They feed off energy—in our case, organic energy. Similar to bacteria we've discovered, such as
Shewanella
and
Geobacter
, that consume electrons directly, without the intervening medium of sugars. In another respect they resemble conventional viruses, in that their structures are metabolically inert. They mimic life only by appropriating the metabolic activity of their victims.”

I tried not to look as lost as I felt. “So when they attack someone . . .”

“They use his own cellular energy to overwhelm his body,” he clarified. “They drain their victim, then deploy that stolen power to colonize the host's cells. It happens, as you know, with incredible speed. In essence, they convert human cells to Skaldi cells within seconds. Absorb our life force and turn it against us, making our bodies do their bidding.”

“What about our minds?” I said. “When they take over, do they turn our minds to—I guess—Skaldi minds?”

He looked at me strangely, but nodded. “One would assume so.”

I mulled that over. It made sense, fit with what I'd already begun to figure out on my own. It explained not only how they mimicked us so perfectly but how the one that had attacked me seven months ago had stolen my memory. “How much did Laman know about this?”

“He preferred not to know,” Udain said, the bitterness returning to his voice.

“So he wouldn't have known why the Skaldi fail when they attack me.”

“It's doubtful,” he said. “We know that a significant enough ‘burst' of energy—from fire, say, or an atomic blast—can overwhelm them, outstripping their capacity to absorb it. The human body doesn't generate that kind of concentrated power, so there's nothing to stop them from feeding on us. What makes the beam that powers this compound unique is that, rather than destroying them outright, it holds them in a sort of stasis. Returns their bodies to an inert state, incapable of further energy absorption. You may have noticed they resist fire far longer than a human being would.”

I wasn't sure I'd noticed, but I nodded anyway.

“That's because of their innate ability to absorb energy,” he said. “In the case of the beam, to render it effective against Skaldi we had to set it at a high enough intensity that it burns human beings on contact. Were we to ratchet the signal down to make it less hazardous to our own kind, the Skaldi
would be free to feed. Were we to turn it up,” he concluded darkly, “they'd burn too.”

I searched his eyes, looking for the thing he wasn't willing to say. “So you think I'm . . . You think I have the power to . . .”

He returned my inspection with a piercing gaze I hadn't seen since my last conversation with his older son. But then the deep, mirthless chuckle issued from his chest, and he laid a hand on my shoulder.

“One thing at a time,” he said. “I always have to remind Mercy of that. One thing at a time.”

He walked to the room's single window, which covered nearly half an entire wall. It surprised me to see the light of day pouring through, turning the window a solid gray white. How long had I been out? Then he beckoned for me, and I slipped from the bed, testing my legs in my sturdy new boots to make sure they'd hold me before joining him.

I peered outside, only to discover there was no outside.

The rectangle wasn't a window. Instead, it was an opaque screen of some shiny off-white material. I couldn't see my reflection, only the play of wavy colors across its ten-foot length. To the side of the screen sat another keypad, this one containing not only numbers but buttons imprinted with arrows, boxes, dots, and other symbols.

“This is a
protograph
,” Udain said. “One of my son Athan's inventions. Loosely translated, it means ‘past recording.' He felt that ‘video screen' or ‘television' were too mundane. He
wanted something with flair. Something for the new world we were building.”

He touched the cuff on his wrist, and the surface of the protograph swam like an image blurred by a rainstorm. From its depths emerged light, motion, and sound, but no color: everything was a grainy white or gray, giving the figures that formed there the appearance of faded charcoal sketches. But the figures moved as if they were alive, and when their mouths opened I heard their voices. I leaned close to hear, when unexpectedly the scene froze, the people stopping in the midst of an action, their words ending as abruptly as if they'd been cut off by a slammed door. Udain smiled again and removed his finger from the cuff, and the figures jumped to life once more.

“The past,” he said. “Preserved like a specimen in a jar, like dry bones stirred and risen from the grave.”

“This really happened?”

“Exactly as you see it.”

“How many times have you watched?”

“More than I can count,” he said. “But I can't seem to get it to change.”

I turned my attention to the monitor. It revealed a room that was little more than a bombed-out shell, skeletal frame visible beneath crumbling walls. I shivered, remembering the compound where Survival Colony 9 had hidden from the Skaldi, only to lose Korah and five others in a single night, Laman's leadership the next day. On the screen, a group of
people sat in a ring of canvas chairs, all of them wearing the spotless uniforms of Udain's camp. Udain himself presided in the center, his size and long braids unmistakable though his hair and beard were dark. To each side of him sat a much smaller man, one of them looking like a child beside his huge commander. This one's hair was long and wavy, and though his face was free of scars I had no trouble recognizing him as a younger version of the man they called Athan, the man who called himself Asunder.

The man on the other side of Udain was small too, though not as small as his younger brother. His dark hair was cropped short, and no trace of the tangled beard that would sprout in later life hid his cheeks. But his gaunt face, hooked nose, and brooding eyes, set deep beneath a prominent brow, hadn't changed. When he spoke, it was like hearing the voice of a ghost, one we'd buried little more than a week ago, who'd hurried back into the past to reappear in a body not yet ravaged by time and loss.

Laman Genn.

“It's foolishness,” this younger Laman said. “And pride. We don't have anywhere near the resources we'd need to build your device. Much less the time to ensure its safety.”

“The beam will keep the Skaldi at bay,” Athan responded. “And construction will be completed in six months at most.”

“Six months!” Laman scoffed. “Is that another of your miracle gadgets, brother? A time machine? If you've got one of those, why not send us all back to the time before?”