Cole went full-circle, twirling like a child’s top. He raised his blade as he went. For a brief moment, he was blind to his own attack, facing away from Joshua and his men, watching his hand as it steered the invisible blade through the air in a great circle.
When he completed the pirouette, expecting to slice Joshua in half, Cole felt with disbelief as his buckblade rebounded off Joshua’s sword once again—blocked.
But the rebound was milder the second time.
As the spinning world fell back into focus, Cole saw why: His sword had passed through Joshua’s waist to meet the man’s still-frozen attack on the other side of his body, bounced off, then slid back through the man’s chest once more.
Cole threw both arms out and regained his balance as Joshua fell in pieces.
The wide arc of fur-clad warriors lit up with furious shouts, screams of disbelief and outrage. Cole took a step toward the platform, counting. Several of the men ran forward, their full-throated fury befitting their animalistic garb, their arms high with attacks meant to kill.
When Cole got to “three,” he took a last step back, activating the platform with his weight and dropping a small metal pin before he went.
He left the howling men with a gentle pop of air.
Followed by a very loud bang.
••••
Cole fell out of the air and slammed into the metal decking of the Bern ship. A scattering of snowflakes—caught up in the platform’s energistic bubble—drifted down around him. An alien rushed to his side and began probing for wounds. Beyond, a cacophony of shouts and worried conversations merged into a nervous, indecipherable patter.
The Underground member tending to him said something in a foreign tongue. Cole shook his head. He looked around for Penny and Mortimor as the leg of his combat suit was cut back to expose his injured ankle. In a cluster of confused, trembling bodies to one side, Cole saw Penny’s bright, red mane. She was in the same pose in which he’d first seen her: Leaning over a patient, splattered with blood, a mask of rigid worry on her face.
“Penny!”
She looked up, and Cole read the news in her set jaw. One of Mortimor’s hands clutched the folds of her combat suit just below her shoulder. Cole tried to swallow the lump in his throat; he attempted to stand, but the alien medic forced him back down. The figure held Cole in place while a needle went into his ankle, deep as the bone. Cole clenched his teeth at the pinch and metallic sting. A surge of icy numbness spread through his foot. The alien stood back, still chattering in a foreign tongue.
Cole rose and hobbled over to Penny and Mortimor, practically hopping on one foot. A corner of the hijacked Bern ship’s cargo bay had been transformed into a disorganized operating room. A Pheron knelt on the other side of Mortimor and was just finishing sewing up a wound on his exposed abdomen. The skin all around it was smeared pink from being wiped free of blood.
Cole collapsed by Penny. “What’re we waiting on?” he asked. He glanced toward the cockpit. “We need to get him help. We need to get back to HQ—”
“There’s nothing there,” Penny said, shaking her head. “These are the last of the technicians. Everyone’s out.”
“We need to get through the rift, then.”
Penny nodded toward one of the crewmen. “They say we’ve got about a day of waiting.”
Cole looked around. Most of the gathered figures were peering back. They were looking to Mortimor, who lay perfectly still, his head in Penny’s lap.
One more glance at the man’s wounds, and Cole saw quite clearly that they might have a day of waiting ahead of them, but Mortimor’s body didn’t have a day of life left in it. The old man’s eyes fluttered. He looked up at Penny as she stroked his brown hair, streaked with gray.
Mortimor coughed. A shaking hand came up to cover his mouth much too late. Cole reached for a pad of gauze in the medical kit and dabbed at the fresh blood on Mortimor’s beard, unable to stand the sight of it there.
Mortimor closed his eyes.
“I need you to stay with us,” Cole demanded.
“A little rest,” Mortimor whispered, his voice a quiet rasp. “A little rest, and I’ll be just fine.”
“No,” Penny said, gently shaking his shoulders. “You need to stay awake. I need you to keep talking.”
Mortimor shook his head, just barely. He started to say something, then another coughing fit seized him. Flecks of foamy red flew past his shaking fist. Some of it spotted his beard.
“Can’t,” he croaked. His lids fell shut slowly, then reopened. “Hurts to talk,” he whispered.
Cole rested a hand on the old man’s chest and tried to think of what to say to keep him engaged. Mortimor turned to him, his eyes half shut.
“Talk to me,” he said, as if sensing Cole’s thoughts.
“Everything’s gonna be okay,” Cole told him feebly. “We’re queued up for the rift. Once we get through, we’re gonna get you some better help.”
Mortimor closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t wanna be lied to,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.
What he said next was even closer to silence—his lips moved, but Cole couldn’t understand a word.
“What?”
Cole leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“Tell me—”
Mortimor grimaced, his hand moving to his pink-stained stomach. “I want to know about her,” he whispered, “before I go.”
“Who?” Cole asked. “And you’re not going anywhere. You just hang in there.”
Mortimor coughed, sending up another crimson shower. He shook his head feebly. “No more lies,” he whispered. “I don’t have time for them.”
“What do you want me to say?” Cole asked. He looked to Penny for help, but her attention was fixed on Mortimor. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Mollie,” Mortimor croaked. He said her name again: “Mollie. Tell me about my daughter. Talk to me about what she’s like while I rest my eyes just a little—”
Part XVIII - Cole“To those who make them, everything’s conspiracy.”
~The Bern Seer~
6 · Portugal, Earth · Six Years Earlier
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Gods?”
The words startled Cole, that last one especially. He glanced from the bailiff to the judge sitting in the elevated dais to his side. The judge nodded at him, urging Cole along.
Cole looked down at his hand, which felt heavy on the black Bible. He could feel the bumps and ridges on the book’s cover, like the skin of something that might bite him. He was suddenly aware of the hundreds of gazes and cameras aimed his way, all the judgment pouring out of them. It was the book, he realized. It all came back to that scaly book.
“Do you swear to tell the whole truth?” the bailiff asked again.
A lawyer turned to the judge and let out an exasperated sigh.
It was a simple question, Cole knew. Probably the simplest anyone would ask of him. If he couldn’t answer this one, how was he going to survive the rest? He swept his gaze out over the sea of faces in all those rows of benches and up to the packed balcony. Spectators were even pressed tight along the back wall, jostling with one another to see. The double doors at the end of the center aisle opened, and Cole watched a uniformed officer wave off whoever was attempting to enter.
“Do you swear to tell the truth?” the bailiff demanded, his impatience laced with venom.
Cole nodded.
“We need to hear you say it, son,” the judge told him.
“I swear,” Cole said. He lifted his hand from the Bible and rubbed the pads of his fingers together. They were warm, or maybe he was just imagining it.
“Please be seated.”
Cole sat. There was something comforting in being told to sit or stand, and when. He looked down at his feet, wondering if there was a place to kneel as well.
“I’d like to start with the . . . event,” the lawyer said. He stressed the last word, his voice regaining its honeyed quality as it was projected out more for the audience than for Cole. “Can you tell us where you were on the day the research institute was destroyed?”
Cole swallowed. He ran the question back in his mind a few times, wary of making any mistakes.
“I was in the barrio,” he finally said.
Laughter rolled through the crowd, perhaps at the outlandish idea that a slum rat such as himself would be anywhere else.
“Where were you exactly?” the lawyer demanded. He crossed his arms and turned to the benches, which Cole suddenly realized were arranged very much like church pews. Everyone was facing him, rapt and expectant, with wide grins still pinned to the faces of those who had been laughing. He was practically on an altar, Cole realized. One of the altars of old, where defenseless things were sacrificed to higher powers. That’s where he was—not in a courtroom.
“Answer the question,” the judge intoned.
I was in the barrio, Cole repeated to himself. He wasn’t sure what to say, but the people in the pews had laughed because they knew he couldn’t have been anywhere else. They had laughed because in the barrio meant nothing to them. It was an imprecise sprawl, and yet it was Cole’s entire universe. He thought the question over again, wondering what the lawyer wanted, wondering how not to give it to him. He looked out over the congregation, their eyes and mocking smiles wide.
“I was up on the water tower,” he blurted out, the truth spilling from him before he could contain it.
•• Two Weeks Earlier ••
Cole gripped rungs still wet with the morning’s dew and began his long and routine climb up the metal ladder. Chipping paint uncoiled from the old steel beneath his hands, revealing muddy gold rust beneath. He climbed quickly, and the water tower above rang with his movement, almost as if sensing his arrival.
When he finally reached the grated platform high above, Cole saw that the sun had not yet risen to light up his small patch of Portugal. Its first rays barely leaked over the horizon to give the swollen belly of the water tower a pale glow. He ran his hands along the curved and riveted panels as he circled the giant container. There was no need to rap it with his knuckles; his footfalls made the entire structure rattle with an obvious, tinny emptiness.
When Cole reached the East side, he plopped down on the metal grating, the cold and wet steel pressing up through the seat of his blue shorts. He dangled his thin legs out over the edge, wiped the moisture from the rail ahead of him, and leaned forward to gaze out over his unlucky home.
The barrio.
Land of filth and muck and muddy sorrow. A slum crowded with people bustling and jostling to be anywhere else.
Cole’s eyes wandered up twisted alleys barely visible in the pre-dawn darkness. The tight streets appeared as black cracks among the dull gray of wooden and metal shacks, all of it a maze of winding anarchy. Twinkling everywhere above this maze was a wet web of electrical and telephone lines entangling the rooftops in a confused snare. It was like a net cast from the heavens to trap any of the floundering, flapping, filthy poor who happened to worm their way out of the labyrinth below.
Cole looked further up Angústia Hill where the sides of leaning shacks caught some of the looming day’s light. Twisted planes of steel glowed as if still molten. They brought into clear relief the jumbled nature of the ad-hoc town: the shared walls and overlapping corrugated roofs; the rebar bones poking up through abandoned second-story dreams; the wisps of smoke from cooking fires that cascaded from under eaves instead of travelling up proper stovepipes. For as far as his twelve-year-old eyes could see, the surface of his cursed Portugal was covered with slip-shod shanties. It was a landscape of jumbled cubes, like a sack of individual little dice poured into the mud by gods playing some crooked game, a game where all the pips came up craps every time.
Cole rested his arms on the railing and swung his feet out over it all.
“This world doesn’t suck—it’s just stuck.”
He chanted the sing-song phrase to himself, trying to sound as convincing as the Sisters.
“All that’s due is a miracle or two—”
The rest of the rhyme’s hopeless optimism was interrupted by the soft clang of hands and feet slapping steel rungs far below. The tower swayed slightly as someone else reached the platform and came to take away his solitude and depressing vista. Cole turned and gazed down the curving walkway as light footsteps rang his way.
“Holá Brother,” someone out of sight called too loudly. “It’s just me.”
Cole’s heart practically pounded straight through his ribcage when Joanna, his sister in name only, came into view. She rounded the belly of the water tower, squeezing her way along the narrow walkway just as the sun broached the horizon with the sudden intensity only a valley could know.
A warm glow bathed Joanna’s walnut skin and gave her straight black hair an obsidian sheen. The timing of the day’s dawn and her arrival were spectacular. It was a combination nearly as potent as it was torturous. Cole’s new awareness of the opposite sex had coincided perfectly with his adoption into the religious order of Miracle Makers. For obvious hormonal reasons, joining a sect that promoted abstinence had seemed a painless no-brainer just six months ago. Now, it was excruciating.
“Holá, Sister Joanna,” Cole said, stressing her name more than the cursed honorific. “What are you doing here?”
The smile on Joanna’s face melted, and Cole swore the sun itself dimmed. He felt like an ass for the way his question sounded, even to his own ears.
“Am I not welcome?” Joanna asked.