When Sara released him, Jefferson held out his arm, his palm upward, his hand open. Cody was at his side, the tongs in his hand, with a coal fresh from the fire gripped in its sharp teeth. Jefferson stood perfectly still as Cody lowered the sizzling stone onto his bloody palm, though Sam could see the effort it cost him not to flinch. His face was contorted in agony, but he did not cry out. The stone was removed. Sara trailed the fingers of her own cut hand down Jefferson's cheek while Cody fetched a fresh bowl of water.
As Jefferson plunged his hand into the cool liquid, he hissed gently. The buffalo horns reached a crescendo. It was only a tiny part of the volume of which they were capable, but its effect was chilling. Jefferson's legs were beginning to shake, collapsing under the immense pain he was experiencing. Creams and bandages had been laid out in readiness, and Sara reached for them now, smoothing ointment onto Jefferson's freshly cauterized skin and wrapping it carefully as the music and chanting began to wane.
By the time the sounds had died away to nothing, Sara was holding Jefferson close. She signaled the others to approach and join together in a strangely choreographed group hug, while she returned to speaking English and uttered a series of confirmations. Jefferson had supplicated himself to them in order to become an official rather than simply an initiate. He had worn and cast aside the mask of his initiation. He had joined blood to blood with the embodiment of FireStorm and had accepted fire into his blood as it sealed his wound.
Apparently from nowhere, she produced a gold mask that would mark Jefferson as an official at future ceremonies. She placed it on him, and then declared the ritual to be at an end. She stood back from the little group and admired the new official and his recently initiated wife and daughter. They were, she said, the perfect picture of the perfect family, and it would be FireStorm's pleasure to work toward their well-being and prosperity.
Sam realized that his head was still woozy from the scent of the smoke, but Nina was tapping his shoulder in a manner that suggested that she was keen to leave. She hissed at him that she was sure they were being watched and that they weren't meant to be here, observing this apparently secret ritual. He wanted to turn around, to creep back to their tent and process the things he had just seen. Perhaps he would be able to ask Jefferson about it in the morning, or perhaps in a couple of days, once he had thought about it. But he found himself barely in control of his feet, unable to stand as his spine chose not to obey him, and his vision was thrown off-kilter by the constant rippling of everything in his peripheral vision.
He turned, trying to follow here, and his legs made it clear that they had no intention of carrying him to where he needed to be. He felt the soft whump of his body collapsing on the sand; he felt his tongue flopping thick and useless in his mouth. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was a familiar, but dreaded, voice saying "Well… this is a surprise. And what might you two be up to at this time of night?"
Chapter Fourteen
"Shhh!" Nina hissed, her finger pressed to her lips. "You'll get us caught!" She took Purdue by the hand and led him back toward their tent, then remembered that Julia Rose and Hunter would still be sleeping there. "Damn it, is there anywhere we can go for a bit of privacy? I'm fucking sick of all this communal stuff."
"After only a day," Purdue smirked. "Patience really isn't one of your virtues, is it, my darling? Might I have my device back now?"
Flushing slightly, Nina handed over the folding tablet. Purdue opened it to the size of his palm and reactivated the light, spilling a pool of illumination onto the sand. "This way," he said.
Nina followed him past their tent, away from the campsite — not toward the river this time, but in the direction of a rock formation about a hundred yards from the site. On the far side of the rocks, the ground dropped away to form a little hollow, large enough for them both to sit.
"How did you know about this place?" Nina asked. "Have you been out here before?"
"No," said Purdue. "There was no need. I am perfectly capable of remotely conducting all the reconnaissance I need on a place like this."
"But how? You can't exactly look a place like this up on Google Maps. I tried, back when you told me this was where we would be going. You can only zoom in far enough to get a distant aerial view, there's nothing at this level of detail."
"I think my methods might have been a little more sophisticated than yours, Nina. Look." He opened up the tablet to its full size, a little larger than a sheet of paper and about as thin. Nina had seen him do this several times before and she had wondered exactly what the device was made of. He had explained it to her, but Purdue always struggled to talk about his work in terms that a layperson could understand, and his talk of gelatinous properties, molecular scale electronics, and catalytic homopolymerization had gone over her head. All she knew was that it was infinitely flexible, incapable of running out of battery life, and sometimes struggled to get a signal in some of the rooms in Wrichtishousis, Purdue's home near Edinburgh.
He whispered an instruction to the device, which began a slideshow of images of Parashant. They covered the entire area in high resolution, picking out the tiniest details. Looking at these, Purdue would have known the place like the back of his hand before his arrival. "I surveyed the area thoroughly," he said, with a hint of pride in his voice.
"But how? Did you get someone to come out here and take these for you?"
"Nothing of the kind. I took them myself, from my desk at Wrichtishousis. Remote photography is increasingly easy if you have access to the right technology." The tone of his voice had tipped over from pride to smugness.
"What, you mean like a drone or something?"
"Precisely."
Not for the first time, Nina stared at Purdue and wondered what it must be like to be him. To have that perfect sense of entitlement, to live in a world where, for the right price, all problems had solutions, and to have the funds to take advantage of them… Once again, the thought of it made her uncomfortable. She focused on the images on the device. The nook in which they were now sitting was depicted in detail, from one angle after another. The river was shown so clearly that she could discern every pebble on its bed. Then there was the campsite itself. Seen from above, it was clear that it had been used for these purposes before — leftover stones and stumps gave away the positions of previous connection tents and teepees, more or less where they stood now. The shape of the fire pit was visible, its thin covering of sand not quite concealing it. And close by, a line in the sand…
"Is that a door?" Nina asked, pointing to the suspicious line. "Look, just there — it looks like a trapdoor or something, doesn't it?"
Purdue repositioned his glasses and peered through them. "You know, it does… " he mused. "I am surprised that I hadn't spotted that."
"What do you think, Sam?" Nina turned to look for Sam and noticed for the first time that he had not followed them. "Shit. Where is he?"
Sam was, in fact, right where they had left him — collapsed in the sand at the entrance to the connection tent. He had rolled onto his back and was now gazing at the stars, watching them squirm and dance. He felt as if he could reach out and touch them, so he gave it a try. First he plucked a single star from the sky (which, he was surprised to learn, had the texture of velvet.) Emboldened, he swept a large handful of them into his palm, then worried about the effects of messing around with the solar system and tried to reposition them. He tried to recall the layouts of the constellations, something he had not considered since his brief time in Scouts. Nothing looked right.