Weavers (The Frost Chronicles) (23 page)

“Call him off,” Borde shouted. “He’ll kill her.”

“Let me leave,” Gordon responded smugly. “Or the girl dies.”

Borde swung around to stare at me. Something flashed across his face, an emotion I couldn’t name. The Watcher reached the bottom of the shelves and looked up at me. This one was limber, much more limber than the ones I’d seen in the Frost. Was it a young Watcher?

Gordon’s words ran through my mind again, but I didn’t have time to think about them. Not right now. I wriggled forward on the shelf, trying to gain enough of a foothold to climb to the next one. Below me, the Watcher paced. The long tail flicked. The eyes glowed.

“Gordon,” Borde shouted again. “Stop it. Stop it now. This is murder!”

“Your move,” the other man said. “Your decision. Throw me that communicator and let me leave, or I’ll let it kill her.”

The shelf shuddered behind me.

I turned in panic. The Watcher had leaped. It was right behind me. I felt the hot steam of its breath against my cheeks. The reds of its eyes burned into mine.

“Lia!” Borde called, ignoring Gordon. “Cut yourself! Make yourself bleed!”

The Watcher flashed its teeth at me.

I didn’t hesitate. I dragged my finger across the broken edge of the shelf. Pain shot through my hand. Blood beaded on my skin.

Below, Borde watched intently, every line in his body strained. His hands clenched into fists, and his mouth worked as he muttered silent words.

“It won’t work,” Gordon said behind him, like the voice of a devil whispering to us. “Only members of your family can—”

The blood dripped down my fingers. Cold air rushed over my skin. The Watcher growled, and the sound rumbled in my bones. My legs shook. My lungs squeezed. My skin was hot, cold, slick with sweat and blood. I stood my ground and reached out.

The Watcher stopped.

It
stopped
.

“Oh,” Borde gasped.

The head turned. The jaws closed. The eyes dimmed.

I sagged against the shelf supports in relief as the creature turned away and leaped down. It padded away into the darkness like a cat and was gone.

“Now,” Borde said, his voice firm and full of triumph. “Give it to me.”

He took a step toward Gordon. The other man flinched.

“Wait,” he said. “You can’t do this. I—”

“Give it to me, Gordon.”

The dark-haired scientist hesitated a moment, then he turned and ran straight for the vehicles at the far wall.

Borde took off after him immediately, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough to catch the younger man alone. “Lia,” he shouted. “You’ve got to do something!”

I looked around wildly for something—anything—and my eyes fell on a large metal disc at the end of the shelf. A long shot, but worth trying. I grabbed it and scrambled down. My feet hit the floor and I was already sprinting down a side aisle, heading around to cut him off. I turned the corner and saw Gordon pass by. I darted after him. He left the maze of shelves and began to cross the vast expanse of open space that lay like a field between us and the doors at the other end of the room.

My lungs were fire and my blood ice as I closed the distance between us. To my right, Borde was running as fast as he could.

I hurled the metal disc at the back of Gordon’s head. He howled in pain and fell, rolling as he clutched at the injury.

Borde reached him seconds after I did. I grabbed his hands as the older man wrestled him to the floor and yanked off the coat. He handed me the PLD case, and I tugged it open and almost fainted with relief when I saw the device nestled safely inside.

Gordon groaned from his place on the floor.

“Is it safe?” Borde panted, eyeing the device. His eyes burned with fascination, and I realized this was the first he’d seen of it.

“It’s fine,” I said. I ran my fingers over the gleaming metal as a surge of exhaustion flowed through me. “It’s here and in one piece.”

Borde reached out a hand as if he wanted to touch it. Gordon struggled, and he bent back over him, pinning him down. “Good throw,” he muttered. “He’s lucky you didn’t kill him.”

“What are we going to do about him? He knows too much.”

Borde considered the problem. “We can...keep him out of the way until you are gone. I’ll handle the rest.”

I thought of Jacob. He could help us—if I dared to trust him. I wasn’t sure that I did.

“We should get out of here,” Borde said. He reached down and yanked the sliver of metal from Gordon’s fingers, the one that had turned away the Watcher. “I need to call the rest of the Mechs off before they terrorize the whole compound. This idiot released them all so he could escape. Unlucky for him, I have a genetic override. They won’t attack me.”

“Mechs?”

“The creature,” he explained.

The Watchers?

Now that I was not about to be eviscerated by a snarling monster, I remembered the things they’d said. Curiosity surged over me.

“Please—you must tell me everything.”

Borde’s mouth twisted in a smile. “Not here. Come on.”

~

We returned to his private laboratory. Borde found a length of rope and bound Gordon’s hands, and he tended to the cut on the back of his head before locking the scientist in the closet. He ordered me to sit and rest in one of the chairs while he made a few calls to the security team to explain how to deal with the other Watchers. Then he made tea. I balanced the PLD on my lap, waiting anxiously as thoughts ran circles in my head. Mechs, he’d called them.

The Watcher had turned away from Borde’s blood.

It had turned away from mine, too.

When he returned, Borde also carried the journal. He set it on the table between us. An offer. Slowly, I did the same with the PLD. Perhaps it was time for a little trust on my part.

I watched as he lifted the device and cradled it like a baby. “It’s magnificent,” he said, his voice hushed with quiet wonder. “I...I made this, you see.”

“What?”

“Yes. It is my design.” He turned it over, deftly running his fingers over the buttons, the wires. “Incredible. So that’s what I am missing...”

“If you made it...” I was confused. “How do you not know everything about it now?”

“I haven’t made it yet,” he explained. “But sometime in the future, I will.” He paused. “I’m sure you have questions for me.”

My mind was so full of thoughts and questions that I thought I would burst. “First, tell me about the creatures.”

“What do you want to know about them?” he asked.

“Everything.”

He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Where should I start?”

“You called them...Mechs?”

He nodded. “They are a new invention of mine. One of my finest.”

“Invention? I don’t understand. They are the ancient beasts that roam the Frost.”

“The Frost?” Curiosity lit his eyes.

“This place is all covered in ice and snow in my time,” I explained. “The Labs are a ruin called Echlos, and the creatures—we call them Watchers—guard it.”

He exhaled. “So they still exist? They still perform their functions?”

I nodded. “But I don’t understand. You...you made them?”

“They are machines,” he said.

When I finally found my voice, I stuttered out my disbelief. “What? How is that possible? They are animals. They are intelligent, they are—”

“They are the most sophisticated artificial intelligence available,” he explained. “Designed to learn and adapt. Nearly indestructible. They even...they can even make improvements to themselves. Grow, if you will. They are nearly self-sustaining, and they power themselves by sunlight. They prowl the night to protect the Compound.”

“Why?” I asked.

He shook his head and rubbed his chin. “We’ve had too many threats since we began studying the Sickness, and the transport of animals has been restricted since the Sickness’s spread. We needed higher security measures, and we had been working on a similar project for a client in the south. So, we built the creatures, a prototype. The Mechs. And they have exceeded my wildest expectations.”

“In my world, we call them Watchers,” I said. “We ward them off with snow blossoms.”

“Ah,” he said. “Real blossoms, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Incredible. They must have learned to extrapolate from the symbol we use to repel them to the actual blossoms themselves,” he breathed. “What magnificence. What brilliance...”

I didn’t find the monsters who roamed my world killing and maiming quite as magnificent as he did, but I kept my opinions about his terrifying creations to myself.

Borde paused from his gushing about the Watchers’ abilities and looked at me. “I want to know all about your world,” he said, and eagerness shimmered in his voice.

“Wait. There’s something else I must know. Something Gordon said.” My chest tightened. “He said only you and your family could turn away the creatures with their blood.”

Borde ran the tip of his finger across the journal. “It was a gamble. I have suspected, but I didn’t know if I would be right. So when I told you to cut your finger, and the Watcher stopped at the scent of your blood...”

I held my breath.

He raised his head and looked me in the eyes. “It confirmed that you are my descendent.”

The revelation went through me like a cold rush of sweet spring water. It was right, and yet it was strange, and yet...it was right. I nodded, taking it in with a lungful of air. Here, sitting across from me on a dusty chair, was my ancestor. The thought filled me with wonder, amazement. I reached out one hand, wanting to touch him, to make sure he was real, but I let my arm drop to the table instead. My eyes fell on the notebook sitting between us. I reached out and ran my fingers over the worn leather cover.

“And the journal? How did you get it? Where did it come from?”

“I found it years ago, as I said before. I saw it in a trash barrel and the design of the leather intrigued me. I quickly realized that whoever had written it had knowledge of the gate, of secrets that no one should know except me. But I don’t know who wrote it, or why,” he confessed. “But it quickly became apparent that whoever penned the journal knew of things I had not yet completed work on. And...” He hesitated. “It appeared to contain a sketch of my daughter, at least that’s what I thought before I saw you.” He thumbed the pages until he found the right one, and then he pushed the journal across the table to me. I stared. Shock shivered through me.

The sketch looked exactly like me.

That was why he’d stared, then. I remembered the intensity of it, the way his eyes had bored into me as if he was seeking to know every secret I hid.

“How...?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that me?”

He shrugged. “When I saw you, I thought you might be connected to it somehow, but I could not be sure until I’d learned more. But when you knew the riddle written inside...” He broke off and stared at me, wide-eyed at the wonder of it.

“And you believe I am your descendent?”

“I’m sure of it. When I saw you, I had little doubt. You look so much like my wife, my daughter...it’s remarkable. And then the incident with that Mech confirmed it.”

“So my blood...the Watchers—Mechs, I mean—will not attack me if they can smell it?”

“They have sensors that read the information contained in it,” he said with a nod. “You are forever safe to walk the forests of your world, Lia.”

Wonder filled me. How long had my family harbored this secret in our veins? How long had we not known the power we possessed? And what would this mean for me once we returned? For Jonn and Ivy?

It meant we could walk the Frost unafraid. It meant we had something the Farthers did not. A smile stretched across my lips.

“Tell me about your world,” Borde urged.

I hesitated as visions of the hushed forests of white filled my head. I saw the sky, so blue and lonely, ringed by mountains and punctuated by storm clouds. I saw the path lined with snow blossoms, the color of hope and fear. I smelled the scent of pine and melting ice and tasted the chill of the wind.

“It is so beautiful and so deadly,” I said. “All of this is gone, almost. The town remains and it is my village. We have none of your technology anymore. The Watchers are drawn to it. They attack.”

He lowered his head a little. “They are your enemies now?”

“We are afraid of them,” I said. “But also they keep us safe. It is a precarious balance. A dance of life and death.”

“And the Sickness? Have you found a cure in the future?” he asked.

I shook my head. “We have no Sickness in the Frost.” I thought about Adam and my heart twisted painfully. “It still exists in the coastal regions. Some have fled to our lands to escape it.”

“Fascinating,” Borde murmured. “And you say you have renounced technology completely?”

“We live very primitively compared to you,” I said, gesturing at the lights that glowed in his ceiling, and at the door that hissed open and shut at the touch of a button. “We have horses, wagons, lanterns.”

“Such a change from the way things are now,” he mused.

“Yes.”

We sat in silence a moment, and then he pushed the journal toward me.

“I think perhaps you should finally see this.”

I lifted the book carefully, my blood humming in anticipation. I turned to the first page and gasped at the image scrawled there.

A broken Y.

The sign of the Thorns.

“DO YOU KNOW what this symbol means?” I demanded, showing the drawing of the Thorns emblem to him. Shock and surprise pulsed through me. My skin prickled and my hair rose as I looked from his face to the sketch on the page in front of me.

But Borde shook his head, his expression blank, his eyebrows pinched together in curiosity. “No. Does it mean something to you?”

“Yes.” I left it at that and turned the page, my head swimming with astonishment. An almost unintelligible scrawl filled the pages, mostly strings of words that made no sense to me. Numbers. Colors.

“Much of the book is utter nonsense to me,” Borde said. “I don’t know what it means. What else do you recognize?”