City of Ruins (8 page)

“It’s a biohazard alarm, isn’t it?”

“Is that what they told you?” Mr. Howe
asks.

I nod. “They moved me to a more secure
area.”

“Not because of slow pox,” Mr. Howe says.
“That’s not what that alarm is for.”

“Then what is it?”

Clyne, meanwhile, starts to hum. It sounds
like…music. Sort of.
Screechy
music. I’ve never heard Clyne
hum or whistle before, or anything.

The humming gets louder. His eyes roll back
in his head. Then a large
SCREECH
rips from his throat, like
the hunting cry of a fierce giant bird, and all of us—Mr. Howe,
A.J., and me— involuntarily cover our heads and duck.

Clyne leaps through the air, right at the
door, and I notice, for maybe the first time since I’ve known him,
how thick and sharp the claws on his feet are.

“
TKAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
”

The door pops off its hinges like a
tiddlywink flipping through the air, and Clyne lands inside the
dark tunnel beyond it.

After rising back to his feet, Mr. Howe turns
to me. His face is doing that sweating thing again. “No wonder he’s
always been so hard to catch.” Then he leans in closer to me. “They
didn’t move you because of slow pox. They moved you because of
intruders. They moved you because this base is no longer secure.
Let’s go.”

He heads through the mangled doorway that
Clyne opened for us.

“But why? What’s happening?”

“
We’re
the intruders,” Mr. Howe says.
“We broke in.”

“But you work for them.”

“Not anymore. Like I told you, I have begun
to see.”

“He’s had that epiphany, son.”

“But
what
epiphany?”

Mr. Howe turns and shines the light on his
own face, so that it looks like kids sharing a flashlight telling
ghost stories during a sleepover. “What if I told you there was no
such thing as a slow pox epidemic?”

For a moment, there’s only quiet in the
tunnel. We can’t even hear the distant alarms.

“No such thing?” I ask, wondering what he
means. “But ever since you started this whole Danger Boy business,
you’ve told me —”

“We told you what you needed to hear. But it
wasn’t the real truth about slow pox. We’ve kept the truth from
everyone. And A.J. helped me realize how tired I was of lying all
the time for a job. A.J. — and all that accidental time
travel.”

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth
now?” Sometimes, you just can’t tell with grownups.

“I realized…when I fell back in time, and saw
my…relative, Mr. Howard, that I didn’t want to wind up like that. I
didn’t want to history to judge me that way, to be part of any lies
that could keep messing thing up…for years and years after I’m
gone.”

“And that, son,” A.J. tells me, watching my
face, “is an epiphany.”

“Friends…new information,” Clyne says
slowly.

The tunnel isn’t quiet anymore. Coming from
the other direction, where we’ve just been, we see lights — lots of
them — just before we hear the shouting.

DARPA troops. Coming for us.

They’ve found Mr. Howe’s shortcut.

“And the fact we’ve been discovered” Mr. Howe
adds, “just might be another.”

“Did I mention,” A.J. adds, “that not every
epiphany is a welcome one?”

Chapter Six

Clyne: Wolves at Wolf House

February 2020 C.E.

And this was where you made the sacrifice for your
friends?

“Yes.” My outlaw status is undergoing another
metamorphosis here on Earth Orange. Which is to say, I have once
again been “on the lam,” as they say in their filmed
entertainments, and yet I have been taken prisoner again as well.
But this time, not by DARPA or any of its minions.

I am trying to explain the circumstances of
my arrival to a fellow detainee.

“We were still in the tunnels, when the
whit! whit! whit!
of the alarms was still sounding. Mr. Howe
—”

The official from the human government?

“Yes, originally. Though he appears to have
gone in and out of what we call a ‘re-egging,’ on my home planet,
meaning a profound change, like a new or second birth, later in
life. So Mr. Howe found himself agreeing with A.J —”

The spiritualist, you mentioned, who you
suspect of re-perceiving time, as you do?

“Yes! He’d had an epiphany — a moment where
Earth mammals suddenly veer in a different, and hopefully better —
or at least, less
gerk-skizzy
— direction.”

Re-eggings?

“Of a type, yes. But my friend Eli —”

The human cub, the fledgling, whom you care
for?

“Correct! Eli was focused on his own
revelations,
shunt-crkked
at realizing there was no slow
pox.”

Shunt-crkked?

“It’s a Saurian term for the sort of shock
you experience when everything you have known or thought you knew
changes all at once. Sometimes, it is applied to sudden reversals
at the end of long Cacklaw matches. Meanwhile, the others were
trying to quiet him, as numerous guardians were headed our way, and
we wished to remain undetected for as long as possible.

“But Eli wouldn’t be calmed, and kept yelling
that slow pox had ‘ruined his life’, and was even the excuse used
to turn him into Danger Boy.”

Danger Boy?

“One of the humans’ many secret government
projects, as it happens. Apparently, from my study of Earth Orange
history, mammals are unable to govern themselves without using
fear, secrecy, and deception.”

Some mammals.

“I remain open to new data. A.J. is an
optimistic mammal, like you are. He told Eli not to use the word
ruined
when he thought of his life, because in becoming
Danger Boy, he’d taken amazing voyages through the universe that
other humans could only imagine. He wanted my friend to consider
there might be unseen cosmic reasons for his abilities.”

What the humans call “religion”?

“Yes. As our own Melonokus says, ‘The
universe is always trying to heal itself,’ something that remains
an enigmatic comment for our scientists. Does the universe, as a
whole, know itself to be alive?

“Meanwhile, I chirped in that I thought slow
pox did, in fact, exist, saying I had found it was infecting
plasmechanical material, from my home planet of Saurius Prime. It
was causing Saurian material to grow extra nervous-system
connections, changing the Saurian material into something different
here on Earth Orange. Something new and unpredictable. Like mammals
themselves.”

You mean the material from your home world —
which you said was a kind of blend between something built and
something living — managed to show the human mammals that they are
bound together in the way of all living things? Feeling themselves
parts of a single unity? Perhaps connecting them to each other in
the way of bees, with unseen signals?

“Plants, too!”

But are there creatures who do not already
know this? When I ran free, and took down an elk, I understood I
was part of the elk’s life, and he, mine.

“What kind of Earth mammal are you? I can’t
see you with your cage behind mine.”

I am of a type that humans have hunted and
feared for ages.

“Why is that?”

They imagine we possess the very traits that
frighten them about themselves. You, Saurian, remain a mystery to
me as well, even though I can glimpse your tail, flicking through
the bars. Continue with your telling.

“So the guardians kept shining light beams on
us from their end of the tunnel. And Mr. Howe wondered who had told
them about his shortcut. A.J. was still talking about
re-eggings.”

Epiphanies.

“Yes. After epiphany, he said transformation
follows. And with transformation, with profound change, comes
action. Meanwhile, as we ran into the dark, away from our pursuers,
Mr. Howe panted out additional explications to my friend Eli, about
the human contagion slow pox. He noted that while the disease was
indeed real, the outbreaks were something controlled by human
security forces.”

Governments?

“Whoever wields true power among them.
Apparently, their grand experiment was to make everyone
believe
there was a disease outbreak, in order to practice a
kind of herding, or crowd control.

The humans’ leaders deliberately controlled
one of their own sicknesses? Toward what end?

“Eli queried similarly, feeling not only
shunt-crkked
, but angry too. Mr. Howe had dissembled,
shll-pkkt
, lied to him, Eli was saying, when sending him
away from his nest. Mr. Howe tried to reason that Eli’s family was
already broken apart — his nest-ma’am, his mother, having
disappeared before he ever became a time voyager. And then my
friend did something very un-Eli-like: he jumped at Mr. Howe and
tried to choke him.

“This had the effect of knocking the light
stick out of Mr. Howe’s hand, causing it to skitter away, leaving
my friends in the dark.

“‘No!’ I chirped loudly. I believe it was the
first time I had ever reprimanded my friend, a privilege normally
reserved for elders, teachers, and nest-parents back on Saurius
Prime. But we were being pursued. And this was hardly the time for
him to wage a private Bloody Tendon war of his own.

“Mr. Howe was insisting that everyone,
including him, had been
shll-pkkt
, lied to, by somebody
else, usually someone above them in the human chain of command.
Lying fascinates me — it’s so rare on Saurius Prime that
shll-pkkt
is considered an archaic, seldom-used word. Yet
here it seems a common mammal propensity to make things up that
aren’t true, deliberately altering facts for one’s own benefit or
gain.”

Some mammals…

“I repeat that I am open to all new data,
once I am free to make additional studies. Though my experiences in
the field indicate you may be right. But on Saurius Prime, facts
are
kd-fmn
, solid as the ground. You don’t change them for
your own good. You can’t. Despite the ultimate unknowability, the
opaque
srz-bnt
of things — that single great mystery where
facts and science often lead — you just cannot. Because there is a
common place, a common knowledge, between us, that cannot be
unilaterally altered for individual gain.

“Meanwhile, I hop-trekked down the tunnel,
where Mr. Howe had dropped his portable beam after my mammal
companions had raised their limbs, after hearing the words
Don’t
move!

“Though our pursuers had many small lights of
their own, I knew they could not see well in the dark. Not as well
as a Saurian.”

Or other types of animal folk.

“You make me thirst for new research. There
is still so much to learn about Earth Orange. However, in the dark,
I knew I could use humans’ limited seeing to a quick advantage, and
turned Mr. Howe’s light on myself. ‘Slaversaur!’ I trebled, to keep
their interest high in chasing me. I turned and ran into the
darkness. And ran some more. I could hear my pursuers yelling,
using
frk
words — forbidden language — every time they
tripped and stumbled. Which was often, due to their limited night
vision.

“But I was limited too, since I didn’t know
where I was. I decided to trust my sense of smell.”

That’s a good sense to trust.

“Yes. I went deeper into the tunnels,
following the old rail line, toward the smell and sound of
water.

“I eventually came to the tunnel’s end: a
mass of debris, and rock, and tangled rail. That’s why these
passageways had been abandoned — some earlier calamity left them
unused, and thus free to be colonized by the government of Eli’s
time, converting them to a locus with a secret purpose.

“The Guardians who pursued me were yelling at
me to ‘
Stop! Halt!’
and generally desist in my running. They
were tired of the chase and were even firing their weapons at me. I
was still able to move fast enough, despite my old jabberstick
wound, to avoid exploding into many tiny pieces. Yet why go to all
that trouble to catch me, if they only wanted to blow me up?”

You look for logic where there is fear and
passion.

“There may have been fear and passion, but
soon enough, there was water. Much, much water. The explosive
projectiles were dislodging the rock barrier behind me, which had
been fashioned into a sealed wall, a barrier against the bay
outside the DARPA tunnels. The excitable mammals pursuing me
suddenly realized the same thing and screamed the command
‘Hold
your fire!’
at each other. But it was too late.

“Soon a trickle, then a torrent, of liquid
came through the tunnel, pouring over the tracks, causing sparks
and confusion, but eventually allowing me to stop running and start
swimming.

“I squeezed my way through a small opening
into a vast body of water.”

Like the fish tribes.

“Yes! Like the Saurians on their water
planet.

Are you a fish?

“I don’t have the
sshezz-flmm
, the
breath capacity, for it. Behind me the DARPA tunnel walls continued
to give way. But once again, my good intentions may have caused
even more confusion for my friends, and this time, of a liquid
nature.

“Being separated from them by the roaring
water pouring in, I made my way to the surface, gulping down much
sshezz
, much air, and finally found myself under the very
bridge Thea and I had flown by before, in the Saurian time-vessel.
The same bridge we had returned to when we time-ported back from
the days of Clark, Lewis, and North Wind Comes.”

Human names I recognize. From the time of my
first grandmother, Silver Throat.

“Yes! I knew Silver Throat!”

You are like the Fish Man in her
stories.

“I am the same Fish Man! She was my friend!
Who are you?”