Outside nothing moved. There were no birds, no squirrels or darting lizards; not even any insects save bloated wasps the size of my thumb. Iridescent green and black, with huge, evil yellow eyes, their slender wings spanned half the length of my hand. When one flew into the cab, I could see its stinger like a black thorn protruding from its abdomen. I scuttled across the floor, pulling my hood about my face; but it was already gone, buzzing like a fouga’s engines as it flashed out the window.
When I peered after it, I saw for the first time we had been driving up a steep incline. Behind us I could see where the road wound down a craggy fell, sometimes cutting back on itself when it reached a spot where rocks had fallen to block the way, or where an ancient bridge had rusted and collapsed into a wide and fast-running stream. It was like one of those living maps we had played with at HEL: the nearly barren hillside, and then the blasted plain with its crippled trees, and in the nether distance a haze like greenish smoke, obscuring where I imagined Seven Chimneys stood and, far beyond, the City of Trees.
Suddenly the van swerved around a sharp curve. I fell forward, banging against the edge of the window and cutting my chin on its metal cusp. Blood trickled between my fingers. Before I could even cry out, the caravan cleared the turn, shuddering to a stop; and the world changed.
It was as though the zealous hand of Miss Scarlet’s beloved Goddess had swiped across the earth, tossing away dust and rocks and thorns, all the detritus that remained of an earlier, grosser attempt at creating a world. We were atop a hill, higher than I had ever been in my life. On the horizon immense blue thunderheads rose in dizzying tiers. A steady wind lapped against my face, and for a moment I closed my eyes, forgetting the throbbing pain in my chin. When I opened them, I saw that Jane and Suniata had both awakened. The cacodemon stood and silently walked to the front of the cab, where it crouched beside Cadence. Jane rubbed her eyes and yawned.
“Where are we?” she asked groggily. I pointed outside.
A few feet from the caravan the red clay road ended, sheared off as cleanly as though it had been sliced away with a granite knife. Instead of that infernal plain of thorns, we gazed down into a valley dappled with birch and willows that hugged the banks of a rocky stream. For a moment I could only stare straight down, stunned, trying to figure out what had happened to the rest of the world. Then I slowly drew my head up, looking for the storm clouds brooding on the horizon.
They were gone. They had never been there at all. What I had taken to be clouds were not clouds, but mountains. Huger than anything I could have imagined, stretching in a long line from north to south, they blotted out everything except for their own ranks, until the distance swallowed them in a powder of purple and green. I had only ever glimpsed mountains in cinemafiles or on the yellowing reels of film kept by the Curators for occasional entertainments, but there was no mistaking them now.
“Mountains,” I breathed. When I tore my gaze away, I saw Cadence standing by the open door, staring out with gas-blue eyes.
“That’s right,” she said softly. Her drawl had deepened, and for the first time she looked at me and smiled. “I always stop here. Even in the middle of winter, when I never know if I can get started again.” She pointed outside, cradling the stump of her hand against her breast. “We’re in the Blue Ridge Mountains now—that’s what you see there. And somewhere out there” —she tilted her head to indicate north and east—“that’s where you’ll find your City. If you travel a few days due west, you come to the Appalachians. But I never have done that except once. If there’s anyplace on earth more beautiful than the Blue Ridge, I’m too old to see it now.”
Jane’s voice wafted from the back of the van like a ghost’s. “How old are you?”
Cadence stared at her. Then unexpectedly she laughed, tossing her head so that the hood slipped from her mane of white hair. “You’re not going to rest till I tell you, are you? Ninety-two—”
Jane’s eyes widened. Cadence cut her off before she could ask another question. “But I had a few of my father’s mushrooms to help me through the rough spots.” Abruptly she turned away and sat down. A moment later the caravan was hurtling on once more.
Jane stumbled to her feet. The cacodemon looked at her, then at me. He blinked, his tiny mouth twisting in an incomprehensible grimace—smile? frown? wonderment? He raised one hand and opened it slowly, his fingers uncurling like the long pale fronds of a lily. I stared at it, then lifted my hand and did the same. Suniata regarded me with round guileless eyes, then nodded once, as though completing some ritual, and turned away.
I turned back to gazing out the window. In front of us the nearest of the mountains seemed to kneel. Its outcroppings formed a sheltered valley girded by a river and checkered with pale green and yellow squares.
Fields! I thought in amazement. They really were growing things here; they really had escaped the viral rains and lived to reclaim the wilderness. There was a dappled mirror that might have been a lake, and above it, in the throat of the mountains, a deep emerald hollow like the shadow of a cloud. Cadence’s voice called out over the drone of the engines.
“That’s Cassandra, there—”
She pointed at the shadow, her hand stabbing repeatedly at the air as though to pin the image there for us to see. “That’s where we all live now.” She bent back over the wheel, her blue hood falling over her shoulders.
Where we all live…
For some reason my mind seized those words, as though they held some secret, a message from the country: something that had to do more with green trees and stone than with blood and memory. Something that might show me how the deaths of Justice and Trevor and all those others, how the fall of the City of Trees and even the Mad Aviator’s resurrection, could make sense. There were green places left that the Ascendants had not yet poisoned. There were demons, too; but the only one that I had met was named Peace. For the first time since we had fled the City, I felt something besides grief and despair and rage; for the first time I felt hope, like a small flame licking at my heart.
The van made another sharp turn. The red road dropped away before us, and Cadence’s voice rang out as we swept down the hillside.
“This is where it all begins again!” she cried. Beside her Suniata stood with one hand upon Cadence’s shoulder.
“ This is where it all begins, ” I echoed, flinging my head back to stare into the burning sky; but if she or Jane or Suniata heard me, I never knew.
10
The Oracle Speaks
I GOT TO KNOW Aidan Harrow very well during his three years at the NASNA Academy. We were often paired during meditations and also for the grueling sessions that were meant to prepare us as pilots—hours spent in a tiny stim chamber with another cadet, bombarded by images and sensations culled from actual ’file footage of atrocities enacted in the Archipelago and during the Three Hour War. He was not a good candidate for the Academy. He tired easily, which I always attributed to the time he spent reading or drinking at night, instead of sleeping those few hours when he had the chance. And he was a coward; he never seemed to grow accustomed to the everyday horrors that an Aviator has to face. Even with the stim chamber, and the psychoactive drugs administered by the infirmary to cadets who were having such problems; even with the threat of humiliation in front of his peers—because Aidan was proud, arrogant even—he could never endure pain, or even tedium. My offers to help him with his studies and lend him my replicant tutor were met with derision. I never fully understood why he was at the Academy in the first place. Something to do with his father, who while not an Aviator himself had served under Gerald Baskin following the last Ascension. Emma made a much better cadet. I was surprised when, after her brother’s death, she dropped out of the corps; but in light of her fascination with Luther Burdock, her choice of career seems obvious now, and her death by suicide indicates a fragility of flesh and spirit that I would hope never to see in my troops.