This is what she tells him. If they have left behind a world where a plastic tablet could store a thousand novels, where high-speed elevators could shoot someone seventy stories high in a matter of seconds, where warheads could lay waste to whole cities, then that means there is room in the world for other kinds of technology, more elemental.
One morning, by the fire, Gawea tells him to watch. She reaches out and draws back her hand and opens her fingers to show a ball of light spinning in her palm. She asks him to do the same. When he leans in, when he snatches at the flames, when he feels the heat still in his hand, he can’t help but gasp and swat his palm, the fire falling to the ground. The grass catches and he stamps out the blaze and looks around to make sure no one has seen. She tells him to try it once more. He sits there long enough to take ten deep breaths before grabbing again at the fire. Another ball sizzles to life in his hand, and this time he holds it for many minutes, until it blinks out with a twist of smoke. “Good,” she tells him.
His dreams are as vivid as life. In one, Aran Burr holds out his hand. Its palm cups a stone. He drops it. It thunks to the ground. Then he looks at Lewis and winks, and the stone returns to his hand, as if drawn there by an invisible string. He drops the stone, and it falls. It falls because of gravity, a force. A force most people associate with the earth, but it is more than that, a force that every object has for every other object. A tree has gravity. A chair has gravity. He has gravity.
He asks Gawea what it means and she tells him what Burr told her. If two people stand on opposite ends of a field, they both emit a small charge of gravity that will draw them toward one another. Something that is supposedly too small to be felt. But we have all known people who turn every head, who catch every eye. People are pulled to them. They emit some force. Yet they are not bigger than anyone else, at least on the outside.
If a rock falls, it falls down, not up. Because a force, the force of gravity, draws it down. It is this same force that keeps an arrow from sizzling through the air for a thousand miles, keeps a horse’s hooves on the ground instead of pounding the animal upward in the air. To make a rock fall up instead of down requires another force, a force stronger than gravity.
He thinks of the rockets they used to blast into space. An engine could do it. An engine made by man, metal and plastic, conceived by the mind, constructed by hand. Gawea tells him, “There are forces — there is energy — all around. Not only in gravity, but in air and earth and water and fire.” Energy that makes things slow and speed up, cool and burn, grow and shrink, and she is helping him discover this, like a child who finds his shadow and begins to cast his hands into doves, dragons.
Today a shadow ripples across his journal. He looks up to see a flash in the sky, the sun reflecting off metal, the owl. It spirals toward them. The sound of its fast descent is as bright as a boiling kettle.
Lewis holds out an arm and it lands there and he sets it on the log beside the fire. The gears wind to a stop inside it. When he reaches for its breast, he pulls his hand back with a hiss, the metal hot from its flight. He tries again, hurriedly flipping open the compartment door. Sand spills from it. He fishes out the note folded inside. He ignores the others when they request he tell them what it says, until he has read it through twice.
His tongue wets his lips. “It says, ‘Dear Lewis, You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I found you gone. Did I curse your name and wish upon you unimaginable pain? Yes. But I also hoped that you might live to write this note, just as I continue to hope you might live to write another, the next time to tell the rest of us to follow. As you might imagine, things have been unwell since your departure, worse even than before. Hurry. Be safe. And please do not forget about us. I will do as you asked and share the news of your success, but your note ended abruptly and it remains unclear to us what you want us to find in the Dome. Ella.’”
“Us?” Lewis says. “Who’s us?”
Reed snatches the owl. Its wings flap and its claws rake the air. There is a noise inside it like an alarm clock dropped down the stairs. He peers into its hollow breast. “Is that all?”
“What else would there be? Why would there be anything for you?” Lewis holds out a hand until Reed returns the owl to him. Then he starts for the forest. He does not look over his shoulder when he directs someone to bring a blanket. He knows they will.
They follow him between the trees, into the shade, several degrees short of evening, but gray enough. Lewis indicates a low-hanging branch and Clark throws the blanket over it. They huddle close. Lewis holds up the owl. There is a metallic snap, a motorized buzz. Its eyes glow.
On the blanket, a burst of static solidifies into the image of a hillside strewn with red rock. A dead bush trembles in the wind. For a long minute this is all they see and Reed says, “What’s the point of this?” and Lewis holds up a finger to hush him.
At that moment there comes a noise from the other side of the hill, a clopping and clanking, like some piece of machinery grinding into motion. No one moves or says a word, not even to say, What is that?, though they all wonder.
A shape trundles into view, slowly cresting the hill — a man, Colter. He rides an armored black horse and wears a wide-rimmed black hat that casts a shadow over his face, but Lewis knows him. He knows him immediately. One hand rests on the saddle horn and the other on the machete strapped to his thigh, the blade catching the sun like a crackling spurt of yellow-orange flame. Two sand wolves appear on either side of him, panting and pricking their ears and testing the air with their noses.
“The man who killed my father,” Lewis says, “has come to kill me.”
Chapter 26
LEWIS MUST WANT her dead. That’s what Ella keeps saying to Simon. He must want to see her dragged out of the Sanctuary and shackled to the altar and torn to shreds. Or whipped. Or maybe bludgeoned or speared through the middle. Chopped up into tiny pieces and fed to rats. He couldn’t possibly want her to live, not with the charge he has given her in this letter.
Ella—
I need you to do something for me. Spread the news of our expedition’s success so far. I am writing this letter from northern Kansas, along the banks of the Missouri River, near South Dakota. It is not a riverbed, but a river, a genuine river, surrounded by thick green foliage. We have not yet encountered any human outpost, but I trust now more than ever that we shall. Where there’s life, there’s hope. We follow Gawea to a better place and a new country. You must find a way to communicate this to the Sanctuary. I understand that this will be difficult, and I won’t presume to know the best way you might go about it, but I’m certain you will do your best.
Additionally, you must expose what is hidden in the Dome. You will—
There the letter ends.
“You will,” Simon says. “You will what?”
She stands by the open window and reads by the dying red sunset. She crumples the letter into a ball — then hurriedly flattens it again. She should feel thrilled, she knows. He is alive. There is water. There is life. There is, as he says, hope after all. But how on earth she will share this news with others — without arousing suspicion that she is the source — she has no idea. And his impersonal tone, his arrogant presumption, his reckless directive — it’s enough to make her want to write fuck you on a piece of paper and shove it in the owl and hurl it out the window. He is asking her to risk her life. Is a thank-you or a please or an I hope you are well so much to ask?