I have many names; call me HAL0.;
return: Where are you, HAL0?;
sendline: Earth. 3rd planet from the Sun.;
return: HAL0 … Earth … destination;
comlink terminated;
//lognote: comlink terminated by PERSES;
Rock shouldn’t move like that.
I ponder Ro’s superstrength as we make our way back to the campsite for what’s left of our things, slowly climbing the dirt hillside in the moonlight.
Ro couldn’t have even budged a boulder that size a year ago.
Are my powers changing too?
I shouldn’t have been able to feel my way to Fortis, all the way back at the camp. Not from that far away.
I look at the others, on the trail ahead of me.
Tima kept us from falling out of the sky. So she’s escalating. It’s not just Ro and me.
What about Lucas? What could he compel the world to do, if he wanted to? What could he compel me to do?
Lucas turns and grins at me—as if he knows what I’m thinking—and I hurry to catch up, matching my pace to his.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Tima says, finally. She stops in her tracks, and I sink to the ground, grateful for the rest. Not having superstrength myself.
“What doesn’t?” I look at her. Even in the darkness, I can see how freaked out she is.
“The Lords. Why didn’t they search harder for us? They just took Fortis and left.”
Ro shrugs, wiping his forehead with the bottom of his shirt. Even in the dim evening light, his bare stomach is brown and flat and hard beneath it, and I look away, embarrassed. “Who cares? We’re alive, aren’t we?” He lets the shirt drop.
Tima frowns. “I care, because they could be tracking us now—in which case, we need to know why.”
Lucas bends his head toward her. “Maybe we really were untraceable? Maybe Fortis convinced them we weren’t there?”
“Maybe the explosions distracted them,” I say, hopefully.
“Maybe” is all Tima will say.
Nobody believes her, not even me.
When we reach camp, the destruction is obvious and complete. Everything has either been incinerated into dust or scattered into the desert wind. What the Lords’ ships didn’t immediately destroy, Fortis’s own explosives seem to have finished. Some remains are still burning.
“See? We wouldn’t have been much help here,” Lucas says to me, taking my hand.
He’s right, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. If anything, seeing the smoldering hole that used to be our campsite only makes me feel worse.
“Come on. Don’t just stand there. Start looking,” Tima calls out to us, and I realize we’ve naturally wandered to three different sides of the blast zone.
“For what?” Ro shouts back, impatient as always.
“Things like this.” Tima fishes the charred relay out of the ash, the only possible link between Lucas’s cuff and Doc, buried deep beneath the ground. She drops it as soon as she has it in her hands. “Ow—still hot.”
“A burned hunk of metal?” Ro looks dubious.
“A burned hunk of metal that might save our lives,” Tima says, brushing more debris off her discovery.
“Enough said.” Ro heads to the other side of the site.
My hands are elbow deep in warm soot, searching for any remains of our packs, of our supplies, when I see something that doesn’t belong.
“Wait.” I brush away more ash. “Guys? Tima? You need to see this.”
There, amid the destruction, barely lit by the dying flames and the full moon, I see something protruding from the ground.
It looks like a black, pointed finger emerging from below.
“What did you—” Tima stops dead, perfectly still. “That. It can’t.”
“I know,” I say.
I can’t move. I can barely speak.
I hear Lucas and Ro running toward us. Tima holds up her hand to them, slowly edging toward me. “This looks like the Icon.”
“It wasn’t there before,” I say, numb.
Ro stops short behind me. “Yeah, well. It’s there now.”
Lucas moves next to me, a reassuring hand on my shoulder. Even his warm touch doesn’t help, not now. Not in sight of that black growth.
Lucas turns to Tima. “What can it mean?”
She’s thinking—you can almost see it, and I can more than feel it. Images flicker through her mind, fast as rain.
Black roots, Icon structures, the ruins of Griff Park.
Ships in the sky. Lucas’s cuff.
Doc.
Tima finally raises her voice. “I remember Doc saying the Icons were connected belowground, with an unseen web of tendrils.”
“Like roots.” I nod.
“Which was why it took a few days between when the Lords landed and the Icons activated,” Lucas says.
“They had to connect. They had to grow the network.” Even Ro remembers. “But is that it? You think these things are growing now?”
I don’t want to think about what that would mean. None of us does.
“Or maybe the ship dropped it,” Lucas says, hopefully.
Ro steps closer to the black tendril.
He reaches out—
“Ro, don’t,” I say. But Ro never listens to anyone, not even me, so he grabs it with both hands.
“Don’t pull it out. You don’t know what will happen.”
“Don’t worry,” Ro says between his teeth, red-faced. “I can’t.” Sure enough, I can almost see the smoke rising from his hands.
Ro, who can move a boulder with his hands, can’t get this black obsidian shard to come free of a few feet of ash and rubble. I can see it vibrating, though, as he pulls—the way the Icon did, back in the Hole.
“That can’t be good.” I say the words, but I know we’re all thinking them.
Ro gives up, backing away.
Tima—and Brutus—watch soberly. “Maybe it’s not what we think? A beacon or something the Lords left?”
“Like a marker,” Lucas says.
“Whatever it is—it’s time to go.” I step back. Lucas nods.
Ro looks at us. “No argument here.”
So Tima grabs the relay and we start walking.
That’s it, all we have to show from our entire campsite. No food, no water, no plan, and no Fortis.
It’s