“You sound cold. Can I take the watch for you?”
She stared. “You’re an angel, aren’t you?”
I had the feeling that we weren’t quite as popular as we used to be, but I told the truth. “I am. Doloriel.” I stuck out my hand. “But back on Earth I’m called Bobby.”
She nodded, clearly quite used to the phrase, “back on Earth,” but she didn’t look particularly thrilled to meet me. “An angel. Are you friends with Sammariel?”
“Years and years.”
She nodded again. “He’s from San Judas, same as I am. A lot of us early ones were, like Ed.” Behind the very red tip of her nose was a young, intelligent face—everybody was fairly young here, at least in appearance—and a pair of dark eyes that looked like they’d seen things their owner wished they hadn’t. “You know Ed?”
Now it was my turn to nod. “Only now, in the flesh, but yes.”
“Yeah, everybody knows Ed. He’s kind of the mayor. Well, not really—that’s Nathalie Weng, but only because Ed said if we elected him he wouldn’t do it.”
I had become a little uncomfortable about Edward Walker. It was hard to reconcile the quiet, angry man I’d met with the well-known and apparently popular scientist and businessman whose life I’d studied. Still, there wasn’t really any precedent for what he and the others had been through. “And you are?”
“Oh, sorry.” She stuck her spear into the ground, butt-first, and extended a hand in a fingerless glove of the burlap cloth I already thought of as “Kainos cotton.” “Lyra Garza—Lyra, like the star. My father was an amateur astronomer.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little at the coincidence. My Counterstrike unit had been the Lyrae, nicknamed “the Harps.” “Where in Jude are you from? Because I’m from there, too.”
“Small world,” she said, then looked around. “Almost literally, at least the human population.” She shook her head. “A few hundred of us, max, with a whole world to explore and build in. Then this shit happens. Sorry. I was at Stanford. I lived in Barron Park, over by the university.”
“Downtown, me, usually somewhere within walking distance of Beeger Square. I’ve been meaning to ask you—what’s that thing you’re holding?”
She looked quickly from her spear to the weird, bulbous object. “Oh, this? It’s a rattle. Dried oak gall, a big one, full of rocks. In case I have to wake everybody up. It’s pretty loud.” She squinted at me as she pushed a wisp of hair from her face. “You offered to take my watch, didn’t you? That was nice, but no. I want to do my part, and I’m not going to be much of a fighter if it comes to it.”
“I hope it won’t come to it,” I said. “At least not for you and the rest of the . . .” I trailed off. “I forgot to ask Sam—what do you call yourselves?”
She smiled, and for the first time I saw her as something other than a poor soul shivering on a cold hillside. “We argued about that a lot at first. We spoke lots of different languages at home, and now we’re all speaking . . . well, whatever it is we’re speaking here, and the words have different meanings.” She laughed. “I’d love to study it, actually, this angelic language thing, and how it translates to all of us. That’s a career study and more, right there. I was an etymologist—was, who am I kidding? Always will be. Anyway, you can imagine, lots of smart, freaked-out people. In the beginning we were much happier arguing than exploring or building, most of us. I think it was the . . . well, to be honest, the religious nature of what had happened to us that made us settle on ‘pilgrims’.”
“Pilgrims, huh? But you wound up being more the Plymouth Rock kind than the going-to-Canterbury kind.”
“A little of both of those, I think. But we’re also the going-to-Lourdes kind.”
“Hoping for a miracle?”
“Well, we sure are now.”
• • •
I took a long walk, thinking about what Lyra said and a million other things. I wandered until I would have worried about finding my way back if I was a normal human, but my sense of smell and direction were both pretty good, so I located the camp again without trouble. Dawn was still a short time away, but most of the pilgrims were up and getting ready to move. Getting ready to walk toward danger and maybe even destruction. Talking to Lyra Garza had made it even clearer to me that even if I hadn’t been involved in bringing them all here, as Sam had, I still wanted badly to keep these people safe. And if that unlikely circumstance actually came to pass, it would be interesting to see what happened with this little colony of pilgrim souls starting over again on what was, for all purposes, Earth Two—The Reboot.
In the cold, windy dark, Sam explained to the pilgrims what he thought should be done to ensure their chance at survival. There were questions, of course, lots of them, but I was surprised and pleased by how practical most of them were. A few were adamant about wanting to keep running, that they didn’t want to take the kind of risks Sam and I were talking about. We told them they could go, but only a couple of dozen actually left. That surprised me, too.
Shortly after sunrise we started out. At least we hadn’t needed to feed everyone. They say Earth armies march on their stomachs, but ours could survive on heavenly righteousness alone. At least until the serious shit started happening. Then all the righteousness in the world wasn’t going to save us.
Clarence was way too chatty for this early, especially in a world where I couldn’t get any coffee, so I sent him off to talk to various folk Sam had picked out to handle different parts of our plan. Besides, I wanted to chat with Sam in private, and privacy was already pretty damn hard to come by, surrounded as we were by nervous pilgrims.
The private talk didn’t happen right away. First Sam and I had to have a long meeting with Nathalie Weng, an Anglo-Chinese woman from Shanghai with the self-confident air of a tiny General Douglas MacArthur. I liked her, and I liked her deputy as well, a thin, thoughtful young man named Farber, who had lived in Freiburg while he was alive. I say young, but he mentioned how a bomb had flattened his house “during the war,” and I don’t think he meant the Gulf War since, as far as I know, that conflict never reached southern Germany. That was the thing about the Kainos people—they looked like the student-age counselors at a summer camp, but most of them had probably reached seventy or eighty before they died, some of them more.
Ed Walker stayed close to us but didn’t actively participate. Still, he was a constant presence even when he was a dozen yards away, and it was clear that Walker had clout no one else did. Several times I saw Mayor Weng look over at him as if to make sure he agreed.
“Our people here are all hard workers,” Weng told Sam and me. “All achievers, and they’ve got young, healthy bodies, but we’re a little short on engineers and military folk.”
“I’m hoping we don’t need those things,” I said. “Other than the special volunteers, we’re not planning anything that requires real expertise, just labor. In fact, after we get set up there, I want all your people who aren’t actually involved to move as far away as possible.”
“You won’t have much trouble convincing them,” she said. “We’re all pretty shocked by what happened to the others. None of us wants to die again so soon.”
At last, all our mental lists cross-checked, Weng and Farber went off to do their own organizing and, I suspect, deliver a few pep talks. I finally had a chance to talk to Sam without an audience.