Scavenger of Souls (33 page)

“The Scavenger of Souls is merciful,” he said. “May he come for us all at last.”

When he touched the staff to the drone's forehead, it erupted with power.

The pulse of energy flashed in my eyes, giving me a quick glimpse of Geller's smile—a softer smile, like the winning, gap-toothed grin of the young Athan on the protograph screen. Then the pulse consumed him, tearing the smile from his damaged face, sweeping the fragments of his body into the void. All that was left of him was the staff, which clattered to the ground at the drone's feet. The warriors who'd tied me to the altar were next to shatter into dust, their wide-eyed expressions reminding me for an instant of the children of Survival Colony 27. But before the crackling energy field could extend any farther, I tore myself free of my singed bonds and wrapped myself around the creature, hugging it to my chest. It screamed in senseless agony as power poured from it, but unlike the other times I'd been assaulted by the Skaldi, I didn't try to strike back. Instead, I opened myself to
the energy streaming from it, welcomed that energy into my own body. Athan Genn had designed me to drain energy from other living beings, to store it in my cells forever. He'd made me stronger than the Skaldi, resistant to the beam that crippled them. If Aleka was right, the accident that had destroyed him had made me even stronger than he anticipated. What my limits were I didn't know.

But I was about to find out.

The drone glowed with power, a furnace of light. Warmth at first, then unbearable heat spread through me as its life-energy flooded my system. It was like holding on to the sun. I knew the only way to gain relief was to let go, to allow some of the energy to bleed back out. But I also knew that without me to contain it, the drone's full power would be released, and the Skaldi colony beneath us would be freed. So I bore down, clutching the creature to my chest, pulling its power into my blood and bones. Bright lights exploded in front of my eyes, shaping themselves into images in my mind. I remembered carrying Keely the night we found the Skaldi nest. I remembered clasping my mother's body just before she died. And I remembered holding Mercy, and knew I never would again.

Because as I gripped the burning drone to me, I felt my own body begin to burn.

A look of dim awareness dawned on the creature's inhuman face. It struggled in my arms, mindless panic emanating from it, limbs flailing as helplessly as an infant's. I gripped its
hands gently and held on, melting with it, letting its energy fuse us into one. My senses were failing me, but still I didn't stop. I had passed into a realm beyond pain, beyond feeling, and all I knew was that I was going to die. A memory darted through my thoughts, something Laman used to say to us in Survival Colony 9.
Never leave anything behind.
But he knew, didn't he, that in the end you have to leave everything, and there's no going back to retrieve it?

A rumble shook the stone beneath us, and with a deafening screech, the summit of the altar split between the horns. A minute passed before a clawed hand emerged from the yawning depths, then the entire creature clambered onto the platform. Its scar shivered, opening at the scent of fresh prey—Mercy—on the altar's peak. But before it had a chance to attack, its body collapsed, shaking as if with palsy. It made a final attempt to rise, but its arms trembled with the effort, and finally it disintegrated, cracking along the seam of its scar and sliding to the black stone. Within seconds, all that remained of it was a pile of dust, picked over by the wind.

Another creature ventured above, and another. Like the first, these new arrivals emerged into the sunlight only to collapse helplessly onto the rock, unable to get their quivering arms under them to push their bodies upward. When they tried, their arms folded, then shattered into dust as if a gale had struck them. It wasn't long before I was surrounded by their dusty remains, wasn't much
longer before the wind blew all that was left of them over the glassy stone and out into the distance. No more emerged, and the only movement was that of the drone twitching beneath me.

Even that stopped soon. It lay there with its mouth and eyes fixed open, its body limp in my embrace. It sparked a final time, then its light blinked out like a fistful of candles and its spent form joined the dust at the altar's peak. The crackling noise died from the air, and all that was left was a slight scent of ozone. The split summit settled back into place, sealing the scar as if it had never been. I lay beneath the horns, unable to feel the sun on my face, the jagged stone at my back. On the final verge of thought I reached out to the Skaldi slumbering deep beneath me, to see if any more had responded to the drone's call. But everything was quiet. The Scavenger of Souls had come and gone. It was over.

A dark shape moved at the corner of my vision, and I saw Mercy hanging over me, her hands reaching to cup my face.

“Mercy,” I said.

She put a finger to my lips. “The feeling is mutual. Let's not spoil it with a bunch of words.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For . . .”
Leaving you
, I thought.

“Hey.” She smiled. “It's been a hell of a ride. No complaints from this girl.”

She leaned forward, and through the blur of my own tears I saw the silvery trails on her cheeks. Then she moved so close her face was all I could see.

I couldn't feel her lips on mine, but I knew she was beside me as I closed my eyes and sailed into darkness.

I stood in a city.

It wasn't any city I knew. Certainly not one of the cities Laman used to talk about, with their massive white towers flickering with lights and long, sleek trains speeding past on elevated tracks. Nothing like the twin compounds I'd passed through either, the shelled community where Laman had settled and then lost Survival Colony 9, the military base where my creator and his father had done their deadly work. This was a different kind of city, with tall rounded towers the color of red sand and curved lanes that glittered in the sun as if they were spattered with crushed diamonds. A city that rose out of the desert like a living thing, stretching languorously in the midday sun.

Mercy was with me. She had her arm wrapped around my back, and when we walked, I leaned on her, moving with a stiff and clumsy gait. When I glanced down I saw why: my
right foot was nothing but a curled stump, the shape you'd get when one of the little kids molded a human figure from river clay. I felt no pain, though. There wasn't enough of the foot left to feel anything.

We walked toward the center of the city. Shaded archways beckoned to us, while leafy plants trailed from circular windows and lined the paths with ribbons of green. When we looked up, we saw long garlands strung between the towers, twisting and curling in a way that made me think they were fluttering in the breeze. It wasn't cool, exactly—the desert sun was always there, a reminder we couldn't escape—but it was tolerable, heat you could grow used to if you let yourself forget about the waste beyond.

And there was something else about this place, something I couldn't put a finger on. Something familiar. As if I'd seen it before, or heard someone talk about it a long time ago. Someone who'd spoken of a place just like this, a place whose curved lanes and secret alcoves promised discoveries but not terrors, a chance to find something new instead of only more chances to lose.

Mercy looked around as we walked. “Nice,” she said. “Don't you think?”

“Really nice.”

“Not the kind of thing a survival colony would have built,” she continued. “Something left over from the time before?”

“Could be.”

“No sign of Skaldi, either,” she said. “Come to think of it, no sign of anyone. Where in the world do you think they are?”

“I don't know.” But even as I said it, I felt that I
did
know, that we were on our way to meet the ones who lived here, and that I was the only one who knew the way to find them.

We kept walking. I realized others had joined us, people from our combined colonies. Tyris, Nekane, Adem. Zataias and the rest of the little ones, including the children of Asunder. Ramos at the head of a force of Udain's soldiers and Asunder's warriors. Nessa too, her hair still short and her eyes still green, though her face seemed harder and sadder than it had before. Others, though—my mother, and Wali, and Soon, and Udain, and all the people we'd lost from the survival colonies I'd known—were gone for good. I knew I wouldn't find them here.

We rounded the last of the towers and came upon a huge concrete structure rearing out of the heart of the city, a curved shape as if a giant ball had been half buried then sliced open to reveal its hollow inside. A circular platform jutted from the base of the raised semicircle, easily a hundred feet across and fifty deep, while cement canals snaked from the stage into the surrounding city. No water flowed through them, though. Cautiously, we advanced onto the stage, our steps echoing against the soaring roof, amplified so much it reminded me of the tramp our colony had made when it was whole. Looking out over the city from this spot, I realized it
lay within the canyon, but not a part of it I'd traveled, the walls vague and misty with distance.

Mercy stood beside me, her eyes sweeping the city. “No electricity. No running water. Nobody home. This place is dead.”

“I'm not so sure.” The same inkling tugged at me as before, the sense that there was something here yet to be discovered. “It feels . . . dormant. Waiting.”

“For what?”

I shrugged. “For the right time, I think.”

Mercy laughed. The sound pealed high and clear against the vaulted ceiling, carried across the city. I felt like I hadn't heard that laugh in years. “Well, I think it's time it stopped waiting,” she said playfully. “Time for it to wake up.”

I turned to her. “What did you say?”

“I said it's time,” she repeated. “To wake up.”

I tried to grasp her words, but for some reason they eluded me. She took my hands, peered at me with her intense black eyes.

“It's time, Querry,” she said, the laugh gone from her voice. “It's time to wake up.”

Her face hovered over me. A bleariness around her eyes made me think she'd been crying. But then I focused—or she did—and the look was gone, replaced by a tender expression I had thought I'd never see again.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Hey.”

“You're getting to be quite a project,” she said, her lips curving into a smile. “Not a lot of girls would've stuck around this long.”

I tried to smile back, but a wince sliced through the smile. My body was a wilderness of pain. “Mercy?”

She laughed, just as she had in my dream. Its details had grown slippery, but the laugh I remembered. “That's the name.”

“Where are we?”

“I'm thinking you're not in shape for a bunch of coordinates. So I'll just say we're by the river. And a good long way from where we were.”

I tried to sit. Mercy looked doubtful, but she helped me up. That's when I saw that my hands, my arms, my legs were coated in bandages. The wrapping around my right foot was lumpy, misshapen, not like the contours of my foot at all. I reached down to undo the covering, but Mercy gripped my hand.

“Let it heal,” she said.

“What happened?”

Her face hesitated, but she answered. “Whatever you did back at the altar burned you pretty bad. So bad the control cuff melted and fused with bone. Tyris had to take most of the foot off.”

“Tyris is here?”

“They're all here,” she said. “Come on, let's get you up.”

Balancing against her, I stood and took a look around. I recognized the place instantly. It was the site where we'd laid Laman Genn to rest, back when I was a member of Survival Colony 9 and Aleka its new commander. His tombstone protruded from the soil, maybe tilted a little from what it had been. The inscription remained unchanged. We'd left this place in search of the mountains . . . how long ago? Days, weeks, months flowed into each other like dunes in the dusty ground.

“How did we get here?” I asked.

“Slowly. But surely.”

“But—” I knew this was a stupid thing to say, but my mind was too tangled to say it any other way. “Did I die?”

“That's a matter of opinion,” she said. “Your heart stopped for a brief time, so I guess that counts.”

“But now I'm . . .”

“Alive.” She smiled. “Thanks to the staff, which seems to have given you the jump start you needed. And no one could be happier than me.”

I looked away from her smile, so brilliant it almost hurt. I remembered something she'd said to me in the tunnels.
I'm not sure I know what death means anymore
. But I was pretty sure I did know. Aleka was dead, and Laman, and Korah, and Wali, and the little kids from Survival Colony 27, and so many people in my life. They were all gone. They were never coming back.