Before dawn, when Miriam was finally asleep, the boy crept out of the camper into the chill air.
A fingernail moon rode low in the sky. His breath made plumes of frost, and there was frost on the tarry surface of the parking lot, sparkling in the fragile light.
The Artifact had left orbit hours ago, resuming its long itinerary through the unexplored spiral arms of the galaxy. Its physical presence wasn’t necessary any longer. The collective knowledge of the Travellers had been duplicated and stored in the human Home, and Home would begin its own journey soon—once certain controversies had been resolved.
William’s bicycle was roped to the back of Miriam’s camper. Silently, he untied it and examined it.
The trip from Idaho had coated the bicycle with dust. The action of the chain and the derailleurs sounded thick and gritty. But he didn’t have far to go. He climbed on the bike and pedalled down I-80, a young boy, legs pumping in the moonlight, the banner of his breath streaming behind him in the chilly air.
He turned left past an open gate, down a private road to the Connor farmhouse.
Rosa, hurry, he thought. They’re coming in the morning. Hurry now.
Chapter 32
Release
William was with her as the sun rose.
Rosa lay on the farmhouse bed. The winter’s cold and wind had given the bedroom a dishevelled look. The oaken dresser had faded and its mirror had dulled; the curtains had tangled on the rod. The single large window looked southeast, where Home occupied a portion of the sky. Sunrise was a faint vermilion on those distant slopes.
The gray cocoon on the bed had cracked on its long axis and the two pieces had begun to separate. William gazed without visible emotion at the pulsating mass inside.
Rosa—they’ll be coming soon.
Help me, then, Rosa said.
William moved to the bedside, considered the problem, then grasped the two chunks of dense, porous material and began to pry them apart. Hurts, Rosa said.
William broadcast a voiceless apology. No. It has to be done.
The boy agreed, and grasped the cocoon again and strained his thin arms until he heard the material split along its back seam—a dry, fibrous sound like the crack of a walnut shell.
He felt her relief.
William stood away as Rosa began to unfold.
The sun was well above the horizon when she stood at last beside the bed, her enormous wings trembling in the cool air from the window.
Rosa Perry Connor, in her present incarnation, weighed less than fifteen pounds. Her new body was a hollow shell of what had once been human bone and tissue, transformed by the action of the neocytes into something more brittle and much less dense. Her features were diminished and compressed but still recognizable. She had an attractive face, William thought. Her eyes were large and bright.
She blinked at him, still mute. Her lungs were a fragile bellows, her vocal cords a memory. Her pupils, unaccustomed to the light, were black pinpoints. Her wings were a double ellipse around the axis of her body, and sunlight through the moist tissue made bright moires of blue and purple.
William felt her exhilaration. Curious, he thought, the way some of us manufactured these destinies for ourselves—these last, brief incarnations on the surface of the Earth. She didn’t seem strange at all. Only a stubborn dream given fleeting substance.
The membranes of the wings needed to dry before Rosa could use them. William didn’t hurry her—there was nothing she could do to speed the process.
He tore the drapes away from the window, the only practical exit. It was an old-fashioned window, one fixed pane and one counterweighted pane to slide up in front of it. Rosa’s body was tiny now and her wings were flexible, but she would need more space than this.
He shattered both panes and carefully, meticulously, plucked away the splinters of glass and tossed them to the dry earth below. Then, with surprising strength for a boy of his size, he grasped the obstructing arm of the wooden frame and pulled until it cracked and came away.
Some splinters remained in the wood despite his effort. The palm of his right hand was scratched; the blood that oozed out was dark and viscous, almost black.
Tyler looked up as he crossed the truckstop parking lot with Joey Commoner beside him. “Joseph? Did you hear that?”
“Sir? Uh—no.”
“A sound like breaking glass?”
“No, sir.”
Sound carries a distance in this still air, Tyler thought, across this dry prairie. He took a shallow breath, listening, but there was only silence.
“Hurry everybody along,” he said. “Breakfast is over. We have business to attend to.”
“Sir,” Joey said.
William heard the engines come to life one by one, though he couldn’t see the truckstop from this window.
I know, Rosa assured him. Soon now.
There was not much margin, the boy thought, on this brink of time.
The caravan of RVs made its way up the private road and parked in a ponderous line outside the Connor farmhouse.
Abby Cushman liked the look of the house. It was a fancy two-story frame house, a comforting contrast to the range land all around it. It occupied its space with a doughty colonial dignity.
The front door was unlocked. Abby filed in behind Colonel Tyler and his lieutenants. The inside of the house was nice, too, she thought—though a broken window in the living room had let in the wind and tumbled some of the contents.
This big, central room was decorated in a southwest/Hopi style that had been fashionable some years ago and seemed curiously misplaced on a northern prairie. Pattern rugs, beige walls, a long sand-colored sofa, and Kachina dolls on a sideboard; squat porcelain lamps. She wondered who had lived here. Someone dislocated, Abby thought. Someone out of place.
Colonel Tyler had gone off to investigate the kitchen and the cellar for supplies. Abby said, “I’ll check upstairs,” to Matt Wheeler, who was helping a breathless Miriam Flett into a chair.
It was odd that William wasn’t with her. The old woman and the boy were almost inseparable these days. Come to think of it, Miriam had been acting strangely for days.
She thought of asking, thought better of it. Mind your own business, Abby. There had been much discontent in camp lately, and none of it was mysterious. This journey had demonstrated all too graphically the emptiness of the world and the inadequacy of the human temperament. America is as empty as an old cup, Abby thought, and the best we can do by way of survivors is a cowardly old man like Tom Kindle.
Unpleasant thought.
She hurried upstairs to a carpeted hallway, cool and dim, and three closed doors—the bedrooms, Abby supposed.
William heard the rattle of the doorknob behind him. Rosa—
I know, she said. She took a step—a delicately balanced pirouette—toward the window. He felt her unsteadiness. Thank you, she said. Whatever happens.
So accustomed had Abby grown to the vacancy of the world that she was astonished, above all else, to find the second bedroom occupied. “William!” she said.
Then she looked at the window… at the thing in front of the window.
It was a delicate silhouette in the morning light. She thought at first it must be a kind of decoration—some eccentric assemblage of cellophane panels meant to break the morning light into these fractions of purple and blue. But then it moved. It was alive, somehow organic… she discovered eyes, a sort of face.