Without hesitation, he moved forward and encircled her in his arms, crushing her tight against him, suddenly afraid to let her go. He whispered low in her ear. "I do."
They were two irreparably flawed people. Together they almost made a whole person, and he figured that might just be enough. She leaned her head back into his chest and he held her there for a long time.
Chapter 15
… And on this momentous day, let us remember the brave sacrifice of Junior Assistant Third Engineer Harold Ernest Crozier of Southampton, who was lost after an ice collision on our maiden voyage. His natural magical gifts, combined with his great moral fortitude, enabled him to control the incoming waters before there was any other loss of life. He was a credit to the Active race. We shall now have a moment of silence for Engineer Crozier.
– Captain Edward J. Smith of the RMS Titanic, on its fifth anniversary cruise, 1917 Lick Hill, California There were four guards manning the main gatehouse. Three were playing a game of poker, while the last was watching the clock, knowing that they were due to be relieved at two o'clock in the morning, and he was dying to get out of the stinking concrete shed and back into his bed. He cursed the slow clock, lit another cigarette, and went back to being miserable.
It was a joke. The entire assignment was a big, stupid joke. Nothing ever happened at Lick Hill. After the Great War showed the absolute war-ending power of the Peace Ray, every nation that could afford it built at least one. America had three along its west coast alone. The Peace Ray was a marvel of superscience. It fired a near instantaneous beam of absolute death as far as three hundred miles in a perfectly straight line. No army could invade a country with a Peace Ray. Everyone knew that Tesla had made war obsolete.
The towers were absurdly tall, and usually put on top of the highest land available. They were a line-of-sight weapon. The higher it was, the further it could engage targets. When the war had first ended, strings of observation dirigibles had been stationed all along the coast, ready to call in a warning and firing coordinates to the huge crews of operators at a moment's notice. Hundreds of technicians were protected by thousands of soldiers. The sheer amount of electricity necessary to run the machine necessitated the building of huge power plants, but it was all necessary for national security.
The guards were well trained and issued the finest safety equipment. They had to be. A full-charge firing of the Peace Ray could actually turn the very air around the beam into poison. Only the bravest of soldiers were assigned to guard the most important weapon in the arsenal of freedom.
The Peace Ray was the key to assuring America's safety in the dangerous new world.
Or so they had said in 1920 when they'd built the damn things, but over time, thousands of soldiers had turned into hundreds, and then into two understaffed platoons. Hundreds of technicians had turned into a skeleton crew of thirty. Budget cuts had taken away all but ten of their blimps. Half of those were in the shop, and the rest were expected to watch the coast from Canada to Mexico.
Their gas masks hadn't been pulled out in years. The private wasn't even sure where his was. The Army budget had been so deeply cut over the last three years that he wasn't even sure if they had gas masks at all for the new guys. The power plants had mostly been diverted to feed the growing metropolis of San Francisco, and the last he'd heard from one of the techs, they were running at maybe fifteen percent of maximum power, but that wasn't supposed to matter, because nobody knew that, and as long as the Peace Ray rose over the coast like a deadly futuristic sentinel, it would do its job as a deterrent, or at least that's what the brass figured.
Guarding a Peace Ray was a crap job, but at least he had a job, the private thought ruefully, which was more than he could say for a lot of folks he knew. Times were tough, so three square meals and a bed in a barracks wasn't that bad of a deal if you thought about it, but one-thirty in the morning was a lousy time to be thinking about it.
There was a tinkle of breaking glass and a grunt. He turned, expecting to see that one of his buddies had dropped their coffee mug, ready to give them some grief about the mess, but he paused, realizing that the spreading stain on the floor was too red to be coffee. Somebody was moving around his friends, who had all put their heads down on the table. "Who are you?" Then the stranger dressed in funny black pajamas and a mask came across the guard shack with a flash of steel and separated the private's head cleanly from his neck. Mar Pacifica, California Something's wrong…
Faye woke up with a start. She was breathing hard, sweating, and had kicked her blankets onto the floor. The house creaked a bit, as the wind from the ocean was strong tonight, but other than that, it was quiet. Everything looked normal. The room was dark, but she'd never had a problem seeing better than most folks at night. She'd always figured it was because of her grey eyes.
Something ain't right. She knew to pay attention to her instincts. It was like when she Traveled. If she paid attention how she was supposed to, she just somehow knew when things were gonna be dangerous in the space she was about to fill. Faye got out of bed and pulled on a pair of pants under her baggy nightshirt. Some folks might think pants on a girl were scandalous, but frankly, she didn't care what people thought, and if you were going to go sneaking around because something bad was in the air, pants made more sense.
She didn't bother with shoes, as her soles were like saddle leather, but she did pick up the big.45 automatic that Mr. Browning had given her. He said that next time she needed to shoot somebody, this one would put a proper hole in them. Francis had told her that it was probably too powerful for a girl, but she'd been milking cows, and had a stronger grip than the city boy did, so what did he know?
The hallway was quiet. She padded down the thick carpet of the second floor balcony. There was nothing moving in the space below or on the stairs.
She used her Power to check her surroundings. Having had a lot of practice recently, she'd gotten even better at scouting before a jump, so good in fact, that it was like she could see everything in a big circle around her, not with her eyes, but inside her brain. The area around her had always been like a map in her head, and when she picked a spot to Travel into, she could focus more on that space, but she'd been Traveling so much lately, that she'd discovered that her head map had gotten bigger and clearer. It was almost like her thoughts could Travel on their own, and she didn't even need to send her body to see what was going on. A big book Mr. Browning had, written by a Dr. Fort, had called her Power by the name of Teleportation, but even it hadn't mentioned anything about being able to have a magic map in her head.
Faye checked her head map. It used to only stretch for about fifty feet in a circle wherever she was standing, but with practice, it now seemed to go about double that. It didn't have a lot of detail, so she didn't feel like she was invading anyone's privacy, and besides, something was fishy tonight besides the ocean. Mr. Sullivan's room was next to hers, but it was empty. Next was Delilah's room, and she was surprised to find that both of them were asleep in the same bed. That was a little shocking to her since they weren't married folk, so she kept going. She liked Delilah and just hoped Mr. Sullivan would make her happy.
Nobody was moving on the second floor, so she decided to Travel downstairs. Grandpa had always warned her not to Travel into a spot where she couldn't see with her own eyes, but she'd been breaking a bunch of his rules lately. She appeared in the fancy dining room. There was something in the shadows behind the piano, but it turned out to just be a curtain moving a little in the breeze from an open window.