The spines are growing.
“Te anTent knows how a fight,” Teal says. But the look on her face tells me she dinna know what this is, what it means, only that we should not come near, should not touch. She keeps us back, but DJ is already in the forefront and he stoops to look at the growing spines, then turns, rises again.
“Fuck!” he cries. “You gotta see this. This is important.”
Cautiously, Joe and I push around Teal’s blocking arms. We cross the bridge, extra cautious around the spines, around the dark, spiky growth, clinking and spreading through the clear, gelatinous lake. Where the spikes intrude the lake itself and the kobolds within are also turning dark, hardening.
“It’s like silicon,” Joe says, wondering despite the danger, the strangeness. Maybe the dust is slipping deep into his thoughts. Maybe we’re all touched by the strong tea.
We’re all turning first gen.
And then comes a soft, girlish voice, half hidden behind the extrusion, calling to us.
Asking for help.
Another few steps.
It’s Captain Daniella Coyle. She must have hauled fresh detonators and another satchel of charges to this side of the pillar. She must have slipped and brushed up against the spines, or maybe they reached out…
She lies across one side of a wide arch of ancient stone, partly covering the satchel, hand grasping the straps to keep charges from falling into the squirming ooze. Her lower body, clothing, flesh, bone, even her sidearm, has gone dark. Shiny. She’s turning into whatever this hard, shiny shit is. The silicon darkness is moving rapidly up her torso, freezing her one remaining arm, stilling her grasping fingers around the straps of the satchel, holding them in mid-twitch. Only her chest and head are left and she’s having difficulty catching a breath. Her eyes are filled with fear but she doesn’t seem to be in pain. Even so, she can barely speak.
Coyle murmurs, “Get me out. Help me up. Get me out.”
The satchel and the charges have themselves become dark. God knows what happens to high explosives when touched this way.
DJ kneels close. He tries to take hold of her shoulder, but the spikes crawl up the fabric of her skintight, bristling toward him, aiming for his reaching hand, or warning him away—and he shakes his head violently. He’s crying, by God.
“No can do, Captain,” he says, but then his voice falls into soft reverence, and his next few words shape a kind of prayer. A soldier’s prayer for a fatally wounded comrade. I would never have expected this of DJ but here he is, ministering, caring, coaching Coyle across the unknown border in a way that Joe and I could never manage: instinctive, inappropriate in any sort of polite company—divinely foolish.
“It’s out of our hands,” DJ says, eyes fixed on hers, and now she’s watching him intently, like a newborn watching a mysterious father; his is the last human face she will see and know. “You’re a very brave sister, Captain Coyle. Sorry I can’t join you, not yet anyway. Soon though. We all know we’re short. Just ease into it, Captain. Don’t fight it, go with it. There. There it is. Tell all of them hello for us.”
Then, gentlest of all, “Semper fi.”
Where Coyle has been touched and turned, little reddish lights move in the depths of the dark material, terrifyingly pretty, growing into beauty, like thousands of fireflies in an endless night.
Captain Coyle’s last words rise through the Church, high, soft, even girlish, “Momma! Momma! I’m not ready, Momma, hold me, please wait… Momma!”
All Skyrines are children, before, during, and even inside the end.
Her lips freeze in polished translucency. The fireflies move up inside her neck, gather behind her eyes. Her eyes become greenish torches in the perfect sculpture of her face. Then the lights spread out, flow from her transformed body, back into the greater mass, the extrusion.
Coyle’s eyes go dark.
There’s quiet between us for the longest time, silence but for the gentle, slippery noise of wavelets within the clear, thick lake, and the light, wind-chime tinkle of the dark spikes as they strike and grow.
DJ rises and lets out a shuddering breath, then brushes past us, wiping his face, leaving green streaks across his cheeks, and stands with the others back beyond the maze of bridges.
Stands and waits, arms at his side like a chastened little kid in this old, old Church.
Far above, a hideous, shuddering slam drops onto our world like the stomp of a giant boot. The high pillar vibrates, making the supports flex and squeak; bits of crystal shatter away and strike the upper galleries, plash into the lake, scatter in bright pieces across the maze of stone bridges.
“Right,” Joe says. “We’re done here.”
And that’s it, we’re off.
LARGER ISSUES
Out on the Red, surrounded by Antags, in a dust storm and in your pajamas,” Alice says. “And yet… here you are. Un-fucking-believable.”
“Yeah,” I say, still not back from the last of Captain Coyle.
We’re driving north on 5, ten lanes, crossing wide new bridges, between wide farm fields and lumber yards and casinos and outlet malls, stuff that’s been here for decades, not looking very futuristic, looking damned old and traditional in fact.
Alice adds, “I believe almost anything nowadays. Like, I can almost believe you and Teal will get together and she’ll pup out a litter of lobsters.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say.
“Really?” She watches me.
“Not the way it works.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re gone. They’re dead… billions of years gone. They aren’t coming back, not like that.”
“What do you feel now?” Alice asks. “Still having visions?”
I wonder whether all this talk has done either of us any good. And why she’s indulged me. I could not possibly explain most of it to her.
“No,” I say. “Not strong ones, anyway. It just messes with me in general. I don’t know where I am, so I don’t know who I am.”
“What was their plan, then? For third gen?”
“Knowledge. Wisdom. I don’t know.”
“What if somebody does know but doesn’t want it to happen? Doesn’t want us to know the bigger picture—to get smart that way?”
I watch her closely. “We’re not going to meet Joe, are we?”
“We are,” she insists.
“But we’re going to Canada. Why not just stop this thing and let me off,” I say. Cold, calm. I’ve known, I’ve felt, I’ve suspected, but I’m still not decided, I’m still stuck between more than two worlds.
“He’s in Canada,” Alice says.
“Canada isn’t signatory.”
“True enough.”
The driver, up front behind his plastic partition, looks back, checking up on us, making sure we’re still okay. That I’m still keeping my shit together.
I am. God knows how.
“What’s Joe doing in Canada?”
“Getting away from the bullshit,” she says. “Must have been interesting coming back in Cosmoline. Sleeping one place… then another. I can’t imagine what that was like. Thinking you were an ugly, shelly thing, out under the ice of an old moon. Wow. What happens when you get away from the green dust? Does it all fade?”
I’m feeling less and less at liberty to go on. I’m thinking of Captain Coyle and our sisters, those who were part of her special ops team, and how only two of them returned with us, with me, but not on the same space frames.
Joe and DJ and Tak and Kazak and Vee-Def, also on another frame.