“Like
that’s
supposed to make me want to go?”
Meg grinned. “You can wear the dress I gave you for Christmas.”
The Christmas dress, bought with Meg’s weekly discretionary spending credits, had triggered a huge fight. Meg had given it to her so Callie would “have something for the New Year’s party.” Callie had interpreted the gesture as another matchmaking attempt. It took them weeks to forgive each other.
Now Callie frowned suspiciously. “You’ll be going with Brody. I’d just be a third wheel.”
“Whit’s going. And Teish. And John and Evvi. And Wendell.”
They were forced together as three people squeezed by.
“You’re setting me up with Wendell now?”
Meg rolled her eyes. “I’m not setting you up. Why do you always accuse me of that? Even if I was, it wouldn’t be with Wendell.”
“Well, anyway, I hate crowds. And I don’t know how to dance.”
Meg frowned at her.
“Really, I’d rather paint.”
“Okay, okay.” Meg’s gaze slid to something behind Callie. “Um, would you excuse me a minute?” And she was gone, slithering through the crowd toward the dark-haired hunk coming through the door. Brody Jaramillo had arrived last month, and Meg had fallen hard for him. Callie had disliked him from day one and was unhappily aware they were already sleeping together. She wasn’t certain what bothered her most. Perhaps it was Meg’s abandonment of common sense in the face of unbridled emotion, or that Callie had believed her when she promised to save her virginity for marriage. Perhaps it was because their relationship reminded her of how close she’d come to doing the same thing with Garth. Or perhaps—
Perhaps somewhere deep inside she was jealous.
She spied Whit down the aisle, head and shoulders above the crowd. He was talking with Morgan, John, and Rowena. Clean and clad in regulation white, they appeared considerably more respectable than when Callie had first met them. Whit had shaved his beard, leaving a drooping mustache. John had clipped his own beard close to his face and cut his hair to collar length. In the uniformlike jumpsuit, he looked quite militarily proper, except for his gold earring.
Rowena was gorgeous as always. She wore her jumpsuit skintight, the front zipper pulled so low her cleavage looked as if it might burst free at any moment. Cosmetics highlighted her perfect features, and silver starbursts dangled from her ears, sparkling with every movement. She made Callie feel like a potato. It did not help matters that she was also the best athlete and markswoman in the compound.
The only thing that made the situation tolerable was that Rowena’s antagonism toward her continued unabated. If the woman had been friendly and pleasant, the guilt would’ve been unbearable.
“ . . . showed him the whole migration pattern,” Morgan was saying, waving a vellum flimsy in one hand as Callie joined the group. “It’s right there in red, blue, and green. If we don’t leave within two days, we’ll run into a horde of Trogs—or have to wait till fall. And then we’ll have problems with the harries swarming. And the weather. And who knows what wars will have erupted among the Nine Cities by then.”
“Was he convinced?” Whit asked.
Morgan shrugged. “You know Pierce. But I told him flat-out—if we don’t leave now, we’ll have to wait another year.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants,” Rowena suggested.
“Why would he want that?” Morgan asked.
She studied one of her long pink nails. “Maybe he doesn’t want to leave. Maybe he likes it here.”
A chill tickled Callie’s spine.
“That’s ridiculous,” Morgan said, frowning. “He’s talked of nothing else for months.”
Rowena tilted her head, earrings shimmering. “Then why is he stalling? It’s been two weeks since the snow cleared out of the passes.” She glanced toward the still-empty dais and lowered her voice. “What if he has no intention of leaving? How long are you willing to wait for him?”
John and Whit stared at the floor. Morgan’s frown deepened. He didn’t seem to know what to make of Rowena’s talk, but then, he was the only one in the circle who didn’t know about Pierce’s humiliating terror of the Trogs. Callie wondered how long it would be before Rowena enlightened him—and everyone else as well.
Thankfully, Tucker stepped onto the dais just then. “Looks like we’re about to get started,” Callie said, stepping through the circle toward her seat. The others glanced toward the front, and the moment was lost. As she pressed past Rowena, Callie felt the other woman staring at her, but she only looked back when she had settled beside La-Teisha, ten seats down the row of folding blue theater chairs. By then, Rowena had left.
“Well?” LaTeisha asked as Callie struggled out of her jacket. “Did Morgan present his big plan?” Her notebook lay open on her lap, today’s date already recorded in her precise handwriting.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
Callie shrugged and twisted around to hang her jacket over the back of her chair.
LaTeisha flicked her pen back and forth. “Okay, what’s wrong?”
“Rowena.”
“She on Pierce’s case again?”
“Yeah.” Callie sank back into the chair and picked up her braid, studying its end. “I know she’s disappointed that he’s the Guide. But it’s so obvious the Aggillon chose him, why does she fight it?”
“He’s gonna have to prove himself.”
Before Callie could reply they were interrupted.
“Great job on the range today, Cal.” Evelyn Albion collapsed into the seat beside her, dropping pens and scraps of paper as she did. “Now if you can just hold on against that windbag Morgan. It’s eating him alive that a woman’s beating him, you know.”
She struggled out of her coat, almost hitting Callie in the face and dropping her notebook in an explosion of fluttering papers. Pens rolled everywhere, sending Callie and LaTeisha scrambling to retrieve them. The coat off, Evvi hung it carelessly over the back of her chair, where it fell into the aisle behind as soon as she faced front.
She scrunched her papers together and spoke around the pen in her mouth. “Have you heard about his window for departure theory?”
“Who hasn’t?” Callie asked dryly. Sometimes she wondered if Evvi took little trips into outer space, she seemd so out of touch.
“Something about Trog migrations. I haven’t paid much attention, ’cause what difference does it make? Pierce is the Guide, after all. When he says go, we’ll go.”
It was not easy to reconcile Evvi’s spaciness with her unflagging support for Pierce’s leadership. She hung on his every word, believing everything he said without question. Callie
wanted
to like her but had never quite overcome her almost reflexive aversion. Lately, with Meg focused on Brody, Evvi was following Callie around like an adoring puppy, and there seemed no way of discouraging her short of playing dead.
“You know what?” Evvi said. “I bet he
doesn’t
announce a departure date tonight, precisely because everyone is demanding he do so.”
“He’s waiting for Elhanu’s go-ahead,” Callie reminded her. Elhanu, they had learned early on, was the Aggillon leader—the mysterious man they had walked into when they passed through the Gate.
“That’s what I mean,” Evvi said. “If I were Elhanu, I wouldn’t do it.”
Thank heaven you’re not
, Callie thought, eyeing the woman’s long disheveled hair and smudged jumpsuit. Evvi bent to grope for another pen, and her notes and vid-discs crashed to the floor. Callie glanced at LaTeisha, who rolled her eyes.
During the commotion of Evvi’s arrival, Pierce and Mr. Chapman had joined Tuck on the dais. The trio was deep in conversation beside the podium.
Like John, Pierce had changed greatly. He’d shaved off his beard months ago, revealing a strong jawline and a face of wonderfully angular planes that set the artist in Callie afire. The jumpsuit showed off his lean form, accentuating narrow hips and broad shoulders, and she didn’t need Evelyn Albion to tell her he was an attractive man. Even Meg thought so. And they weren’t the only ones.
But it hadn’t always been so, especially at the beginning. If not for the fact that Pierce had “unlocked the hidden places of the installation,” as their instructions said the Guide would do—and that his jumpsuits alone bore the triple-circle, three-barred device of his authority—few would have given him the time of day. The first night he’d addressed them as a group had been a disaster. Pale and nervous, he’d rubbed his fingers distractingly along the podium’s rim, stared fixedly at his notes and stumbled over his words, punctuating them with long uncomfortable pauses. Too often his voice had trembled or dribbled away to a barely audible murmur, and by the time he had finished, some in the audience were openly mocking him. The second session went no better, and Callie had ached for him, knowing how much he loathed his position of responsibility. Why the Aggillon had chosen him, no one could guess.
“Someone’s idea of a joke,”
Pierce had suggested in one of his darker moments.
It didn’t help that what he was teaching sounded like science fiction. As Meg had suggested, the Tohvani had indeed been Aggillon, part of a peaceful, galaxy-spanning empire ruled by Elhanu. Based on a universal reverence for truth, Aggillon culture knew no war, no crime, no poverty, no suffering of any kind. Without need of working to live, they lived to work, their work centering around trade and discourse, science and math, art and sport—all of it translating into great reverence and appreciation for their emperor, Elhanu, who had brought it all to pass. It was a time of stimulation, challenge, and wonder.
Nevertheless, dissatisfaction sprouted. Prince Cephelus was the brilliant, talented, and respected head of the noblest of Aggillon families. Though he had everything, including the ear and heart of Elhanu himself, it was not enough. Nourished by self-absorption and watered by jealousy, the seedling of his arrogance grew. Why should he have to submit to Elhanu? He was just as intelligent, as learned, as capable. Why should one Aggillon lord over the rest, with all the approbation going to him, when others were just as worthy?
Blossoms of pride gave forth seeds of contention and deceit, which, sown into the hearts of his fellows, yielded a harvest of rebellion. War swept the universe. Brother battled brother in a conflict of light-based weaponry that loosed lethal curtains of energy—blasting star systems to rubble and hurling their remnants light-years in all directions to destroy, deface, or destabilize whatever they encountered.
The manual didn’t say how long it lasted, just that in the end, the usurpers lost—Cephelus and his followers were found guilty of treason and sentenced to be eternally imprisoned in a magnetically sealed plasma well, their bodies caught in an unending—and agonizing—cycle of forming, unforming, and forming again.
They protested immediately. The sentence was cruel and unfair, one Elhanu could not possibly impose and still keep his vaunted integrity. Had he not claimed for time unmeasured to be a ruler who knew and loved deeply every one of his subjects? Who wanted only the very best for them? Who was incapable of committing a wrong against even the least of them? Had not his subjects trusted him in this, reveled in it, and worshiped him for it? How then, could he now consign some of those same subjects to an eternity of torment?
In an expression of the very love to which his enemies appealed, Elhanu offered to pay for their disobedience with his own suffering, thereby absolving them of their crimes. But to accept that offer, Cephelus and his followers would have to admit their inferiority, their failure, and their need—a humbling they refused to consider. They appealed the sentence, certain Elhanu could not mean it.
And so a new phase of the trial began. The Arena was constructed as a representative universe, with Homo sapiens—lesser beings in all regards—brought in to serve as witnesses. Allowed the freedom to obey or disobey the instructions they were given, the humans would, by their own decisions and actions, provide opportunity for Elhanu to demonstrate to his watching Aggillon the fact that, while he was loving, he was also good and just, and not one of those characteristics could ever be exercised at the expense of the other two.
He himself oversaw the selection, preparation, and insertion of individual participants to ensure it was done in accordance with the rules and that those who took part should suffer no loss, save that which their own volition incurred. All they needed to do was walk through the Arena to its exit. So long as they stayed on the white road Elhanu provided, they would be returned—with great reward for their trouble—to their lives on Earth.
Cephelus and his cronies, now styling themselves as Tohvani, or “Enlightened Ones,” mocked such an easily thwarted plan. Did Elhanu think them fools? Indeed, Tohvani cleverness lured the first witnesses off the road in no time, enticing them with the seductive, mutative fire curtain. Once exposed to the energies of that device, the participants’ bodies were corrupted. When, later, they tried to pass through the exit, they were flung back, burned to ash and bone. Worse, the portal itself was corrupted by their contact and rendered impassable. Not only was the remainder of the original party trapped, but all who came after, as well.
Where was Elhanu’s love in that? Cephelus had mocked. Bringing in people who had nothing to do with the conflict and causing them, by his own ineptitude, to lose their lives? That was no fairer than the sentence he had pronounced upon the Tohvani!
Elhanu answered with his Gates of Change, liberally placing them around the Arena to provide maximum availability and ease of access. When willing participants passed through any one of the fourteen gates, he took them into himself and rearranged the molecular structure of their bodies so they could pass through the damaged exit. At the same time he made them immune to the Tohvani-manufactured poisons that would soon saturate the air and ground around the exit. Most important of all, he forged a link between their minds and his—a channel through which flowed not only his insights and understanding, but also his power. It was an act that astonished his followers and antagonists alike, done at great pain and cost to him. Merely touching men’s dark minds and bloody flesh was bad enough—merging with them was unthinkable.