There was a window. There was a rock. There was Laurel inside. There was Agamemnon outside the door, hip cocked in rest, just waiting. Every Seer knew what to do, and Laurel did it: She activated the emergency lines. She got through to Collie. Her first words, however, were not about the kids. Her first words were simple: “Uncle Collie! They’re coming!”
He listened to it all. He didn’t say much. “Just get those kids to me, ” he answered. “We’ll take it from there. We’ll get ‘em home safe. We’ll secure OLaM Station. We’ll secure the mountain. We’ll have every gathering in The Barrens backing us. We’ll see it’s done right this time.”
And then Agamemnon was off like a crossbow quarrel, back the way he’d come, retracing his steps back up through the foothills to find the Runners and intercept Asach somewhere along the trail.
Bonneville, New Utah
There wasn’t a city clerk alive in Bonneville who thought it the least bit odd that Zia Azhad would request access to titles and claims recorded at the public records office. Nor was it odd that she’d be at the door, awaiting morning opening. They’d known her from birth. She’d worked in the business since maturity. She’d spent the last decade in OLaM procurements. They did find it odd that she asked for Founder’s–era land tax rolls, but public records were public records.
The basement was close and stuffy. Zia cursed under her breath. It was Barthes that was wanted here, not her—she had no idea how to access these archaic files. She fiddled with the clunky machine, trying to follow the pictogram instructions. She tried and failed to change the sort order and sort criteria. She struggled to figure out how to open a search. The interface was incomprehensible. Nobody there could help her.
Finally, she resorted to thumbing down, page-by-page, eyelids drooping, eyes gravel-raw as she scanned for Orcutt, Courter, Swenson; Ocotillo Wells; Butterfield Station; Swenson’s Mountain; Swenson’s Valley; and a bunch of survey coordinates, moving backward through time on the reverse-order ledgers. Scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, in ever-increasing frustration, until near tears, she backhanded the screen, hitting—something—that made the file jump to its end.
And there it was, on the oldest cadastral survey recorded in Bonneville. She froze, not quite believing what she was seeing. She moved the image up and down a bit. In that funny old syntax, laid out plain as day, was an original Imperial deed, complete with surveyor’s map and description. It showed a geologic fault line on the eastern border of The Barrens, running at the base of the foothills. Everything to the east of that was not only ceded, but entailed in perpetuity to “John David Swenson’s heirs female.” The True Church couldn’t lay claim to it, because it was land that couldn’t be bought, sold, mortgaged, pledged, or given away. It could only move down Swenson’s line. If abandoned, it would revert to the Crown. Anyone who tried to poach it from Swenson’s heirs—heiresses— was, from a legal standpoint, poaching from—the Emperor himself. He’d even personally sealed it, “in gratitude.”
Zia sat for a moment, tingling with that odd sort of numbness that follows a shot of adrenaline. Then she moved over to a conventional terminal to work on the easy part. It wasn’t even complicated, once you bothered to look. There it was: OLaM’s new owner-of-record: some blabbity-named consortium, majority shareholder: Van Zandt Mining.
Zia pulled up the plat books for The Barrens. She’d never really had any reason to look at the old Orcutt landholdings: she’d only been concerned with getting things into and out of active mines. Once she did, the pattern was clear: over four generations the Orcutts had assembled a patchwork of parcels that added up to most of the land just west of that geological fault line, plus two big panhandles extending to Orcutt Station and along the OLaM SunRail line. Collie had held onto the family station itself, but everything else had been OLaM, not personal, property—first swallowed up by the TCM, and thence to Van Zandt.
Zia switched next to the True Church genealogy index—and suddenly all of it made sense. The next-to last in Swenson’s female line was Serena McClellan Orcutt. Collie Orcutt’s youngest sister. Laurel Courter’s mother. The Orcutt men had been consolidating access to Swenson’s Mountain for four generations—ever since they’d arrived from New Ireland as outcast Himmists in 2964. By maternal line, Orcutt’s mother had been a Swenson.
Collie Orcutt had had a vision, but he’d gambled wrong in his vain attempt to secure a promised land. Now Lillith Van Zandt had murdered and kidnapped and cheated and bribed and poached her way through to the other side with a very different vision of her own.
Zia’s lips were white. It all went back to the warehouses. Warehouses in Saint George, where her own children were seized to paralyze Ollie; warehouses here, where Michael was scammed, presumably so that he’d shut down and slink away somewhere to hide. Warehouses full to the brim with the nasty detritus of Lillith Van Zandt’s scheming mind. Zia pictured it all again. This time, instead of Michael’s twenty-two kilos of opaline glitter, she saw the packing boxes, full of sand, like geological calling cards. She pictured her boys, and green-eyed Deela, and thanked Him for holding them in his Eye. And finally, leaving to tell all to Ollie, Zia began to cry.
Orcutt Station, The Barrens, New Utah
To the untutored eye, they were a posse of broken old men. They slouched in trucks wearing battered hats. They sat their horses like sacks of potatoes. Their faces were burned to leather; their movements a study in conservation of effort. They ringed Collie Orcutt’s house, waiting for news of those kids.
The signal lights twinkled first—a head’s up none of them missed. They’d used the method themselves, more than once, organizing; practicing; marshalling all those years. Then the lights were obscured by haze, as a dust cloud boiled ever-nearer. Then its edges shimmered with half-seen movement. Then a shrill chatter reached their ears.
Trucks didn’t react, but horses did: blowing and snorting and sending mules shying, riders sliding along with them like an outer hull of their own skin.
And then there she was: Agamemnon’s head hanging, bobbing as he walked, catching his feet on every tick in the ground, neck curly-haired with dried sweat, flanks and belly tucked in, but ears still pricked.
And then there they were behind her: wide-eyed and towering above the dust: a girl and two boys, bobbing along, hands in a death grip on their Porters’ ears, one great, hairy arm securing each pair of legs, the other swinging in the marching time of the pace.
And behind that, Asach, on a braying mule, its compatriots in tow.
And behind that, a Legion of Angels.
“Well?” said Collie.
The old men nodded. “Yep,” said one, “we see ‘em.”
Then they called every gathering, instructed every Seer, and within the hour were passing Laurel reports of every movement on or along the SunFreight line; to or from or through OLaM Station; into or out of the OLaM hopper field.
And Agamemnon got a long-deserved drink, and a rubdown, and hay, and even treats.
Near Butterfield Station, The Barrens, New Utah
The armor plowed southward like ships through whitecaps, each vehicle’s progress demarcated by a bow-wave froth of sheer skin wings edged and veined with aquamarine, the fat little bodies sparkling in the sun like splashing water. Hundreds; thousands; millions of the creatures emerged to molt, and fly, and mate, and die during the brief promise of desert bloom that followed the first winter rains. The tracks plowed through and over squat cycad trunks already fat with water, a-fuzz with the first emergent green of bud stalks, and bejeweled with umbrellas of the creatures extending and testing new wings. Startled to flight by the whining engines, they answered with their own sharp buzzing, boiling into the sky like silvery clouds of fish schooling off an ocean reef. The roar was both piercing and deafening.