City of Ruins (13 page)

“I can’t, Eli,” he said to me. “My job is to
try and fix things from this end.” While he was speaking, Thea kept
almost slipping out of my arms, like she was asleep, or about to
pass out. I kept pulling her closer, so I wouldn’t drop her. “Why
are you so red?” my dad asked. “Are you hot or something?”

“It’s nothing. Look, how come whenever you or
Mom have a chance to just fix our family, to reunite everybody, you
always say no?”

“I need to perfect time travel
now
,
Eli. So we can undo all of its effects, undo everything that’s
happening.”

“That’s what Mom said, too.”

“And when we do that — me here, and she,
wherever she is — when we do that, then it will be that much easier
to find your mother and bring her back. And then she can stay put.
And so can you.”

“What you’re doing,” Thirty added, “is you’re
buying us more…time.” She said it like she was trying, for once, to
sound a little bit glad about something, but you could tell it
didn’t come naturally. “And if you can find a cure for this strain
of slow pox —”

“Because
we
can’t,” Mr. Howe added in
a sharp voice. “Not anymore.”

“Then you’re helping your friend,” Thirty
finished. Then she and Mr. Howe stared at each other for a moment.
“And the rest of us, too.

Beep. Beep.
Her Comphone kept going
off, but she’d stopped answering it and kept talking to me.

“Come back to us, Eli. Help us get all this
straightened out. If people lose faith that things work out, that
life makes sense, or that it’s even safe to
be
alive…”
Thirty shook her head. “We thought with slow pox, that by creating
a great and terrible challenge people could see us triumph over,
prevail…that we could still control…” She looked at Thea, then back
at Mr. Howe. “But yes, we can’t even control that anymore.”

“I’m not sure we ever could, Sheila,” Mr.
Howe added.

“But people need faith in…
something
,”
she said.

My dad’s eyes were still wet, like they’d
been since he first saw me. “Just so you know, if I thought they
were forcing you to go, I wouldn’t let it happen. But this time, I
know you’re choosing it.”

I nodded. “They said Thea has a different
kind of strain…that they thought was extinct. They can’t cure it in
a lab. This is for her. She’d do it for me.”

“Is Mother back yet?” Thea asked. “She used
to call me ‘Mermaid.’”

I pulled her close, put on the cap, and
everything winked out. She and I were pulled across the Fifth
Dimension, past every color you could imagine — and some that you
can’t — stretching out, surrounding you, slowing you down, speeding
you up…

…and then, there we were, at night, in the
snow. In Jerusalem.

Dad wasn’t sure we’d follow the same “trail”
back through time that A.J. did, because were using my hat, instead
of jumping through a floating time sphere. But I remembered what
Clyne said about certain times and places acting like beacons,
because they were so disruptive. Kind of like a giant boulder or
log in a stream, drawing everything toward it.

Dad said he would use the chrono-compass he
was working on to keep the portal open as long as he could.

“But we’re not jumping through there, Dad,” I
told him. “We’re using my cap. I have to hold on to Thea. She’s in
no shape to jump anywhere. Especially a distance of two or three
thousand years.”

“I know. But think of it like keeping both
ends of a slide open.”

“I was thinking of streams.”

“Or a moving stream. You don’t have to step
into it off the same dock.” He smiled at me. “Let’s sit down and
talk about time travel when you get back.”

“Let’s sit down and just talk,” I said.

“I’d like that,” he answered.

So the stream, the slide, whatever you want
to call it, worked, and so did the Seals cap, and we all seem to
have landed in the same place. And, it seems, the same time, since
they’re taking us to the Rebuilder now.

I hope. I heard that name mentioned when they
kept talking about “strangers.”

Torches are used to guide us now, instead of
making us easier targets, though Thea is having a harder and harder
time of it, stumbling over rocks, seeing things that aren’t here.
And there are a lot of rocks — boulders, rubble, ruined walls, the
remains of smashed or burned buildings — to stumble over.

The bones of an entire city.

“Was there an earthquake?” I ask, hoping that
was the explanation. Hoping this wasn’t done on purpose, but being
pretty sure it was.

Everybody looks at each other, then back at
me. Right. The lingo-spot. I can understand them. But they can’t
understand me.

Then Thea speaks to them. In their own
tongue. Hebrew. I think they all spoke Hebrew, at least until Jesus
came along and then they spoke Christian or English or
whatever.

I know Thea speaks a bunch of languages —
when she’s well. But is she able to make any sense now, in the
condition she’s in? Because it sounds like she was asking about
—

“We weren’t aware this was your birthday
celebration, young woman.”

Okay, so she’s not making sense. But all the
people holding torches stop and look at us, and one of the men
speaks to her.

“We don’t expect anyone to be celebrating
anything in Jerusalem again for years to come,” the man goes on.
“Maybe not even in our lifetimes. Though Jeremiah has promised that
celebrations will come again. A jubilee year. Though probably not
for us. For years, he warned us that our country would fall because
we were ignoring the things God wanted us to do.”

“And what did your god desire?”

Thea’s question throws them off. The man
points into the darkness, almost dropping his torch. In the light,
I can’t see anything but more burnt timbers and broken walls. “At
one time, we thought God desired this. This was our temple. The one
God asked King Solomon to build. They say his father, King David,
could have built it, but he had too much blood on his hands.”

“It is hard to face your god when you are
covered in someone else’s blood.”

The man holds the torch closer to Thea’s
face. “Who are you, another stranger, to say such things?”

Thea doesn’t seem worried. I guess one thing
about slow pox is you’re not so concerned about being polite.

“I am not trying to make your wounds more
grievous,” she tells him. “It is just that birthday parties and
whole cities turn very angry when people pit their gods against
each other.”

“You talk in riddles,” the man says. “Perhaps
you imagine you are a prophet, too? Jerusalem has no need for more
of those.” There’s more anger in his voice. “People came here for
Passover offerings in the spring, and for the New Year festival in
the fall. What we wanted was God’s favor, some way to make it go
easier for those of us who had so little. But most of us were left
to watch and smell the meat when the rich would bring their best
animals for slaughter on the altar here.

“What did our god desire?” the man repeats,
getting even madder. “Jeremiah told us that it wasn’t the animals’
burning flesh or the flasks of fine olive oil left with the priests
— it was the way we behaved toward our fellows. We had stopped
considering our ‘fellows’ at all, and grew concerned only about
ourselves.

“But if we no longer cared enough about each
other, how could we truly care about anything else? How could we
protect our temple? So when the Babylonians came, the city was that
much easier to destroy. And so was the temple.” He waves the torch
over the ruins, and the moving shadows over all the broken, jagged
edges make it seem like there’s still an army of ghosts on the
loose. “They took everything out of it — all the gold and jewels
they could carry. They took the treasures, and they took the rest
of the people—rounded them up as slaves. Everyone and everything
but us. To the Babylonian soldiers, we seemed worthless.”

“Why?” Thea asks. She looks around when she
talks, and I wonder if she thinks this is just one big fever dream.
The man has resumed walking; I have to pull her along to keep up
with him and the group of torches.

“We are the poorest of the poor,” he says to
her, speaking into the flickering dark. “Slaves, beggars, cripples,
the very young, the very old. In their eyes, we were of no
value.”

“Then those soldiers need new eyes.” Thea
reaches out and brushes her fingers over the man’s face. Sometimes
it’s hard to tell if the slow pox is making her say crazy things,
or words that actually make a lot of sense, if you could stop and
think about them. But nobody seems to have that much time.

The man brushes Thea’s hand away. Then he
wipes his face, like maybe some snow got on it.

“Here.” He steps away from Thea and points.
We seem to have come to the mouth of a kind of staircase or tunnel.
I hear water go past us. “The Gihon Tunnel. The Healer’s down
there.”

“The Healer? But what about the Rebuilder?”
And why does everyone here have a title?

Nobody answers, of course. My English just
seems like some bizarre tongue to them.

The torch man hands me the light. “Move
carefully. The rocks are wet. But the path will take you to
her.”

“Can’t you come with us?” I really don’t want
to hold Thea and the torch at the same time. By myself. On wet
stairs. In a destroyed city. At night.

“I do not understand your words, stranger.
But all who are down there are Gehenna-marked in some way. You can
choose to be with them, like she is, if you wish.”

Thea seems to feel the warm flames near her
face. “Too hot,” she says. “No sun.”

“No sun,” I repeat to her, softly, moving the
fire away from her.

I hold Thea with one arm and a torch with the
other, and head into the dark tunnel, hoping to find a healer I
don’t even know, who may not be able to help me at all.

Chapter Eleven

Clyne: Re-enter the
Dragon

March 2020 C.E.

And so it went, skirmishes and
confrontations, through towns and over roads and even in the large
metropolis that humans have named for celestial beings called
angels. I expected, in a “City of Angels”, to perhaps find
enlightenment, or, at least, according to what I know of Earth
Orange’s angel stories, a more cosmological perspective on
events.

We did manage to perform part of a show on a
roadway named for a long vanished forest — Hollywood Boulevard —
where we were not the only costumed or performing creatures plying
our wares. Silver Eye read minds; Strong Bess bent various metals,
tore thick books, and lifted spectators up by the palm of her hand;
the Bearded Boy let other children tug on his long tendrils of body
hair, in exchange for small pieces of currency; and the Weeping Bat
flew, just like the winged Saurians back home, using her radar —
for a price — to find items that customers had recently lost, or to
bring back things they secretly desired, but never told anyone
about.

Sometimes, depending on the object, this
would cause great embarrassment among the patrons.

An older woman, a “grandmother” in earth
terms, was given a toy, a “doll,” that she’d apparently desired her
whole life. She burst into tears, and nobody was sure where the bat
had found the doll. Occasionally, the guardians and constabulary
ask uneasy questions about such things.

“Why is the bat always sad, then, if she
helps people recover lost items?” I asked Silver Eye one evening.
“Things they desire?”

Because if you ask her, she will tell you
that much more has been lost than people know.

When the municipal armed guardians came
around and started asking the performers for their identity cards
and official papers, Rocket cut the show short — our first real
performance in days — and had us moving along before we could
finish collecting revenues.

I did not even get to do my new act, which
involves the wearing of a suit called a “tuxedo,” human clothes
which are supposed to denote “class” or “elegance,” according to
Rocket. He says he’s trying out a new act called “The Debonair
Dragon,” because “that might be less frightening, and people seem
plenty scared already.”

I am supposed to sit at a table — my leg is
always discreetly in chains, though, to prevent my running away
(though this will not be truly possible until full recovery is made
from my reinjured jabberstick wound) — wearing this “tuxedo” and
conversing with anyone willing to pay to have a conversation.

Few people have been willing.

“You never used to have to follow so many
rules,” Rocket complains, as we pack up the Odd-Lots Carnival and
prepare to drive away. “Like hanging out yellow flags to prove you
are pox-free, and having to wait for an inspection in each new town
you go to.” He shakes his head. “I can’t wait until we get to
Grandfather’s. He says he was a way to make us rich.”

“‘Us?’” the Bearded Boy asked hopefully.

“Me and him,” Rocket corrected. “The rest of
you will be on your own, Whiskers.”

“I have a name.”

“All right then: Bearded Boy.”

“A real name: It’s James. James Rodney.”

This is surprising, the Bearded Boy standing
up for himself like this.

“When I found you, Whiskers, you had no name.
At least, no one around to call you anything but Whiskers.”

“Well, I’m James, and I’m eleven years old. I
think.”

“You think? Then how can you even be sure who
you are? If you really want to find out, I can always send you back
to the streets.”

The exchange sends the Weeping Bat into what
looks like a
skyyttl
dance, searching for lost things, and
for the rest of the trip, the Bearded Boy is quiet, even when
bringing dinner in for Silver Eye and me.