She was still there, sitting on the porch steps, her head bent forward to rest upon her knees. I sat beside her and we waited in silence, while the trees seemed to melt into shimmering puddles and the paint on the porch railings blistered. Once Giles brought out a cracked pitcher of water and stood by to make sure we drank it. After that I must have dozed off, because suddenly Jane was nudging me.
“Look.” Her voice cracked as she pointed to the west, where the road crept up a little hill in a thin red line. “This must be them.”
I heard a faint drumming sound. A plume of ruddy dust rose from the hilltop, and a plume of white smoke. It took a moment for me to see anything else within the haze. But then I could just make out a battered vehicle, rust-colored and with tattered solex awnings extending from either side. It careened down the road, weaving to avoid holes and boulders, the solex shields flapping like the wings of a great drunken heron.
“At least we’ll travel in style,” Jane said drily. She stood, shielding her eyes with her hands.
The vehicle rattled toward us, a big old caravan of the type used during the Fourth Ascension to relocate civilians from the broken lands. Holes gaped in its rusted sides beneath a long window that extended nearly its entire length. There were such long tears in the solex shields, it was a marvel it could still run at all. It must have had some trouble doing so, since it belched foul smoke from what I presumed was a backup engine before finally coming to rest in front of Seven Chimneys.
“Well,” I said, and moved next to Jane. I shivered despite the oppressive heat, and she put her arm around me. “I guess this is what happens next.”
Behind us Giles stepped onto the porch. “They’re here,” he said softly.
The caravan shuddered as the engines shut down. Figures moved inside, and I drew closer to Jane as I waited to see who would come out.
First was a woman who must be Trevor’s daughter, Cadence. Tall and white-haired, she moved languidly yet with purpose as she swung down from the caravan, a puff of dust rising around her feet as though she were about to burst into flame. She flapped the ends of her long skirt and squinted up at the porch.
“Giles,” she called, in Trevor’s low, drawling voice, and walked toward us. Behind her another figure appeared in the door of the caravan.
Jane gasped. “Jesus! What is that? ” I blanched and looked away.
“Hush,” whispered Giles. He stepped forward and put an arm around each of us, hugging us close. “It’s one of their people. A cacodemon. You’ve never seen one?’
“Christ, no,” Jane began, shuddering, but then Cadence was on the porch greeting us.
“Giles,” she said. They embraced, and for the moment I forgot the cacodemon. Because Cadence Mallory looked ancient—far older than her father; older than anyone I had ever seen in my life. Somehow I had expected her to have Trevor’s same bizarrely youthful look; but she did not.
You must understand, in the City of Trees youth and beauty were virtues above all else, and the rigors of life without trained surgeons meant that few people lived beyond their forty-odd years, even among the Curators. And at HEL I never saw an old person—the empaths were all as young as myself, and valued researchers were regenerated long before age could claim their minds or bodies.
But Cadence was not merely old by these standards. She seemed truly ancient, older even than her caravan, though that of course must be impossible. A thin, bony woman, tall as her father, with thick white hair circling her face in a silver nimbus. Her skin was pale but thumbed with dark blotches, as though she had spent much of her life unprotected beneath the sun, and lined and cracked as an old canvas. But it was a fine-boned face for all that: high, rounded cheekbones, strong chin, broad forehead, a sharp, high-bridged nose. Only her mouth and eyes didn’t seem to fit—the mouth too wide, with thin dry lips stretched over those white, white teeth. And her eyes! I suddenly thought how much Trevor had given up for his grasp at immortality, to have lost his eyes for all those years. Hers were round and the richest deepest blue, like wild irises, and clear as well water. She blinked in the sunlight, and I could see at the outer corner of each eye several small straight lines: tiny white scars where she had had cataracts removed, more than once, probably—another tithe given to age and the sun. Over her skirt she wore a simple loose blouse of pale green, patterned with yellow leaves, and ugly black rubber sandals. It wasn’t until she turned from hugging Giles that I saw she had only one hand. The other was gone at the wrist, the stump knotted and badly scarred. That shocked me nearly as much as her age. I had thought the town of Cassandra must be more sophisticated than that, and have access to skilled surgeons and prosthetics. What kind of rebellion could they be planning, if their work was as crude as this?
“Which one’s the empath?”
Her gaze flicked from myself to Jane and then to me again. Before I could answer, she pursed her lips shrewdly. “Ah: this one. I can see it in your eyes. So you caused all that trouble back in the City. You’re older than I thought you’d be.”
“So are you,” Jane said, then blushed. But Cadence only gave a sharp barking laugh.
“Well! This one speaks her mind, and the other one reads them.” She turned to Giles. “Where is my father?” she asked in a softer voice.
Without a word, Giles put his arm over her shoulder and led her inside.
“Damn,” Jane muttered, and quickly turned back to look at the caravan. “What are we supposed to do with that? ”
The other figure still leaned against the side of the vehicle, staring at us impassively with its arms crossed and hands tucked inside its sleeves. It might have been a woman, uncommonly slender and clad in a hooded blue tunic that hung to its ankles, except for the face. A ghoul’s face, skeletally thin, its nose two tiny depressions above a slit of a mouth, with several long white fleshy tendrils growing from its lips like the whiskers of a catfish. It had enormous sunken eyes that took up nearly the entire upper half of its skull, and no hair that I could see.
“What’s the—what happened? Why does he look like that?” I whispered.
“Cacodemon,” Jane said beneath her breath. “I’ve read about them—they breed them for war with the Emirate. Those tubes by its mouth—it feeds and drinks through those, so it doesn’t choke on sand or dust in the desert.”
“Is it—can it talk?”
Jane rubbed her arms. “Not like us. Like this—” She ran her fingers across my wrist. “By touching. They spit poison, too.”
I tipped my head, squinting in the brilliant sunlight and trying vainly to seem as though I weren’t staring at it. A moment later I heard footsteps behind us, and turned to see Giles and Cadence in the hallway. Giles was pointing to the things gathered there, the heaps of monitors and ’filing equipment.
“—all of it,” he said, and Cadence replied, “Thank you. You’re sure you can manage the rest by yourself?”
“Of course.”
For another few minutes they stood beside the equipment, talking in hushed tones. Giles looked worried, almost frightened, and I tried to hear what they were saying.
“…says there will be room for all of us. For you, certainly.”
“It is coming, then?” Giles’s voice sounded anguished.
“Oh, yes,” replied Cadence, and she lay her one good hand upon his shoulder and squeezed it. “My dearest Giles: it is practically here.”
Then they turned and walked outside. Giles stopped beside me, but Cadence continued on to the truck, where she bowed her head to speak to the blue-clad figure there. Jane stared at them with slitted eyes. Finally she turned to Giles.