At last I said slowly, “I think I understand what you are telling me. But if you’re part of some—some rebellion, some resistance movement—there’s nothing I can do to help you. My usefulness as an empath has ended. My friends are as you see them: an educated geneslave who performs as an actress and a girl who’s good with animals. That’s all.”
“Ah, but your powers might come back,” Trevor said, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I know a great deal about these things—the proper stimulation, with drugs and psychotropic chemicals; even natural adrenaline could do it….”
“No!” My shout sent a lantern swinging above us. “I am not going to be used like that again, not for anything—especially not for some fucking geneslave riot —”
Trevor dipped his head so that the light from his optics swept across the floor. His mouth was tight, his voice cold.
“This is not a riot, Wendy. Nor is it some hastily planned rebellion. Some of us have been working toward this for our entire lives—a means of undoing the wrongs wrought over the centuries by the tyrants, a union of mankind and geneslaves—
“An Alliance. ”
He paused dramatically, then swept his hand up to indicate the rafters overhead, the many stories beyond. “We are part of an ancient tradition here at Seven Chimneys. We are a halfway house, a way-station for those fleeing the Ascendants. There were many places like this, once; Seven Chimneys is one of the last.
“The Underground Railway, they called it during the North American Civil War. It was the Sanctuary Movement later, and The Havens during the Long Night of the First Ascension.” Blue light streamed from his face as he threw his head back and his voice rang out. My own voice broke like a boy’s when I spoke.
“Who do you shelter?”
In a swift motion he clapped the enhancer back over his eyes. The brilliant blue rays of the optics were extinguished; now I had to squint through the shadows to see him. “Geneslaves. Fossa was one of the first. He has remained here with us, to help reassure others that they will not be betrayed. There have been many others: aardmen fleeing the City, argalæ kept as prostitutes by Ascendant troops, salamanders from the mines. And energumens, of course; and people like yourself. Oh, yes—we have taken in several escapees from HEL over the years. Not many, because not many survived long enough to reach us, but more than you might think. I was very impressed to see what Emma had done with them—her reasons were heinous, of course, but the results were very interesting. An entire cohort of adolescent psychic terrorists. They would have been very useful during wartime.”
I bit my lip, not sure whether to believe him. But there had been unexplained disappearances at HEL from time to time—the empath Sarah Jabera was one, and a young telepath named Isaac Dunstan. I had always assumed they were suicides—there were always suicides at HEL—or else that they had been captured or killed by the fougas.
“I still don’t know why you are telling me this.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose words that would not offend him, or endanger me and my friends. “I can’t help you—especially with geneslaves.”
Trevor leaned so close that I could smell the bitter scent of lemons on his breath. “Oh, but you could!—we all could, if only enough of us would side with them, rise to overthrow the Autocracy! Already there have been riots in some of the HORUS colonies. The energumens and cacodemons have attempted coups on several stations. Just a week ago we heard of aardmen at a logging camp in the United Provinces—they slayed their supervisors and escaped into the Hudson Bay Territory. And there will be others, too, now that the geneslaves have started to throw off the tyranny of their human masters.”
I tried to turn away, but Trevor clutched at my arm. “There will be war soon, Wendy: a different kind of war, a revolution from within! In some places it has already begun. There is a great purge coming, the beginning of a new age!
“But I am not alone in seeing this, Wendy—there are others, wiser and older than I am, who have seen into the future of our planet! They can read the skies as people once read books, and they have told me what is written there. A terrible secret, one that will irrevocably change our world. But some of us will be strong enough, wise enough, to learn from what is to come—and we will triumph! We will remake the world! We will bring about a true Final Ascension, one that will not thrive on slavery and barbaric despotism. One that will not be built on the bodies of slaves, human or otherwise.”
I stared at him in disbelief, thinking of the ghoulish aardmen in the City, the diseased lazars and sentient trees and other mutated creatures that had deviled me since my escape from HEL. What insane rebels would ever ally themselves with them ?
Trevor pushed me away impatiently. “You don’t believe me? But you know it’s true! You have seen them, who hasn’t? Millions of creatures—living things, sentient things, creatures that can weep when their young are torn from them and creatures that will never give birth—made by humans to serve as slaves, discarded or murdered after they have been used! We brought them into the world, but it is a world some of them can barely survive in, they have been so carefully manipulated to exist only in those cracks and dark corners where the Ascendants want them to live and die while serving them. Rendered sterile by the tyrants; given life spans a fraction of ours; seizing the young of those who are permitted to give birth…
“If the geneslaves were all freed tomorrow, it would still be a hundred years, a thousand years, before we could ever make amends for the horrors they have endured at our hands. Only if we join with them to make war upon the tyrants; only if someday, perhaps, our blood mingles with theirs: then we may begin to expiate the suffering we have brought upon the world.”
”They may have suffered, but I have never harmed one,” I cried, feeling besieged. “I flee them when I can—they are monstrous things, they are monsters….”
Trevor shook his head. “No more than you are. You are one of them, Wendy Wanders. I can see it in you: you are not as other people. Perhaps you never were. And to the Ascendants you are less than human.”
“No!” I shouted. “I never was, never —it’s over now, there is nothing left —”
My hands flew to my head, covering my ears. I could feel the scars there at my temples, the nodes that had slowly healed even as my ability to tap into the thoughts and dreams of others had faded. I wanted to scream, to lash out at him as I had done with others before; but it was true, my powers were gone now. There was nothing left.
“ You are left, Wendy.” I shuddered at how calm he sounded. “You know I speak the truth. You are not like the rest of us, not like Jane or your Paphian lover. You and Miss Scarlet have more in common than they do; you and Fossa.”
I shook my head furiously, thinking of the aardman—his gnarled face, those curved yellow teeth and the tail like a fleshy whip between his hind legs.
“No.”
“ Yes. Admit it to yourself, Wendy: you belong with us, with all of us who are fighting the tyrants. It is a war against humanity; but you know that you are not truly human. Help us, Wendy. Join us.”
“ No! ”
Trevor laughed softly. Behind him the rows of glowing corpses seemed to shiver in the ghostly light. He leaned forward, with one finger brushed the hair from my temple and probed the raised lip of skin there.
“Emma Harrow did this?” he murmured. At his touch a small fiery explosion went off inside my skull. I gasped, closing my eyes against the pain. “I would have proceeded differently—no scars, nothing to show that you had ever been touched….”