“Is that thing coming with us? Because if it is, I’m not going.”
Giles smiled, a tight smile that made me think of Trevor. “You have to go, Jane. There’s no place for you here now—no place for any of us. He’s part of the Alliance—”
“Well, I’m not part of your goddamned Alliance!” Jane began, but then turned at a soft tread behind us.
“You are now,” said Cadence. She stood with the cacodemon beside her, her one good hand resting on the handle of a sonic gun at her hip. “Please help us load these things into the caravan.”
Jane swallowed and gave me a hopeless look. Without another word we began carrying the monitors and telefiles from the porch and shoving them into the back of the van. The cacodemon worked with us, helping me to lift a magister. It was surprisingly strong for such a slender creature, with extraordinarily long white hands that ended in five tapering fingers with flattened, spatulate tips. Once its hand brushed mine and I jumped, thinking of Jane’s warning. Its touch was cool and dry, like the skin of a glass lizard; but there was also something disturbingly alive about it. When we had pushed the magister into the truck, it looked at me with those enormous eyes, the iris mottled brown and yellow. Its gaze was disturbingly oblique, as though like an infant it could not focus well on things. Later I learned that the cacodemons have superb night vision, but in daytime they are like owls and are easily confused by bright light. The narrow slit of its mouth flapped open and it hissed at me.
“ Suniata. ”
Its breath smelled sweetly of catmint. Before I could move away, it had taken my sweating hand between its own, rubbing it gently. It was like being stroked with a piece of soft, fine leather. Its fingers darted up and down my own, and suddenly I was flooded with a sense of calm, as though I had known and trusted this creature my entire life. “Suniata,” it repeated; and I understood that this was its name, but also a word for the way it was making me feel. Suniata: Peace.
“We’re ready.”
Cadence’s voice roused me. Shyly I drew my hand from the cacodemon’s. As I did so, the sense of well-being drained from me. I was gazing into a huge pair of eyes in a skull-like face, while all around me the noon sun gave things a lifeless cast. Suniata turned away and with a cat’s grace jumped into the van, pushing boxes from its path. Cadence clambered after it.
I looked back at the house, blinking painfully. Giles stood on the steps with his hands at his sides, coiling and uncoiling a loop of wire. He still wore the Aviator’s weapon, and his hair had been loosed, to fall in silvery waves about his face and shoulders.
“Good-bye, Wendy. Good-bye, Jane,” he called softly.
Jane stood half-in and half-out the door of the van. When she heard Giles, she made a small gasping sound, then abruptly jumped down and ran back to hug him. The drone of the caravan’s engines blotted out what they were saying, and a minute later she scrambled in beside me.
“He said they would see us again,” she said miserably, squatting on a metal box and staring out the open window to where Giles had turned and begun to slowly walk inside. “And I guess they will, if we all die soon enough.”
There was a dull roar. Smoke and dust rose in a wall and momentarily blotted out the house. In a spray of brick-colored gravel the caravan lurched forward. I leaned out the window, coughing as I struggled for a last look at Seven Chimneys. It was not until we reached the top of the little hill that the dust fell away behind us, and for an instant I glimpsed the inn as we had first seen it, perfectly drawn against the trees now in full leaf, the blinding sun bleaching the surrounding earth and grass as pale as snow. The van listed dangerously as we made the turn, and I craned my neck, waving, half-expecting to hear the explosive retort of the Aviator’s gun. But there was nothing, just the muted drone of the caravan’s engines and the hooting of doves driven from the trees by our passing.
Neither Cadence nor Suniata spoke as we traveled. Cadence I thought must be grief-stricken for her father, but in truth the harsh lines of her face made her seem utterly resigned to whatever cruelties the world might toss at her, even Trevor’s death. I didn’t know if Suniata could say anything more than his name, and I wasn’t prepared then to find out. I was too exhausted to think about what lay ahead of us; whether we were rebels now or captives. I thought of Miss Scarlet and Fossa, and tried to keep from weeping. War, Miss Scarlet had said; but it was hard to imagine war, or even people, in that lonely country. I used my fatigue to keep from focusing on anything. I was afraid I might go mad and kill myself like Giles, if I let myself think about what I had done through my recklessness.
Before we had driven more than a few miles, Cadence had pulled on a hooded blue tunic like Suniata’s, and tossed two more back to Jane and me.
“The sun,” she explained. It was the last thing she would say to us for several hours. I shrugged into mine and pulled the hood over my head. The light cotton felt like the heaviest wool in that unbearable heat, but there seemed no help for it—there were not as many trees out here to protect us from the poisonous light.
For a little while I stood by the open window, hoping the wind might cool me, but soon I gave that up and squatted on the hot metal floor. In one back corner the cacodemon had settled among the monitors and cables, its hood flung over its face, so I imagined it was sleeping. Jane crouched across from it, already asleep, her hands curled into fists upon her knees. Cadence was intent on the narrow rutted road. It was like navigating a tiny canoe through one series of rapids after another. The van bounced over rocks and places where the road had been washed away, scraped against the sides of trees, and ground down saplings as though they were tall grass. Branches tore at the solex shields, and once an entire panel was ripped away, to hang like a great black caterpillar’s tent from the limb of a withered pine. Cadence didn’t stop, or even look back. Nor would she answer my questions when I asked her where we were, or who maintained the road (such as they did). From the sun I guessed we were somewhere west and south of Seven Chimneys and the City of Trees. From a few tire tracks in the dried mud, and a single empty canister tossed in a stand of sumac—the sigil of the NASNA Aviators faded on its side beneath the word CONTAMINANT in livid orange letters—I guessed this was a road used mostly by Ascendant janissaries, and perhaps those few traders who came east from the mountains.
So we drove on, mile after mile, the mingled smells of dust and honeysuckle making my mouth dry and sweet as candy ash. Cadence drove without speaking or even seeming to move, except for the light touch of her single hand upon the wheel. Once or twice I heard the crack of a candicaine pipette being opened and inhaled; then the caravan would speed up for a little while, careening perilously over fallen trees and through shallow streambeds. When the road widened and we drove clear of the foothills for a few miles, Cadence activated a DVI program. In a flat drawl she read off a list of coordinates, waited for the blinking code that told her the caravan had registered her vocal commands. Then she leaned back, pulled the hood from her white hair, and shook her head, resting the stump of her wrist on the open window and gazing out at the heat-glazed hills in the distance.
Hundreds of years ago this had all been farmland. But because of its proximity to the nation’s ancient capital, the countryside had very early on fallen to chemical and viral rains that burned the green fields and lush stands of trees, leaving barren, poisoned soil to bake beneath a poisonous sun.
Eventually the trees returned: twisted, blackened things that clawed from the earth like so many grasping hands. Dull-green spines covered them, and waxy leaves pitted and wrinkled as a toad’s skin, their thickened surface a protection against the sun’s killing rays. When the truck scraped against them, they released pungent scents of pine or creosote, and bled a resin that hardened into rusty-looking scabs that gave the trees an even more wounded appearance. It was a vicious landscape, the worse to look upon in that glaring light. Soft brick-colored dust covered everything, settling into the folds of my coverall and getting into my mouth and nostrils, so that my tongue swelled and it choked me to swallow.