The Green And The Gray

36

The Warrior leaned past her and pushed open the library door, and Caroline walked inside. "You wanted to see me?" she asked.

"Yes," Sylvia said, looking up from a small stack of papers and gesturing Caroline to one of the chairs in front of the desk. "I wanted to apologize for my behavior at lunch this morning, and to offer you some explanation.

"Thank you," Caroline said evenly. It was a polite enough gesture, she supposed. It would have been even more polite if Sylvia hadn't sent her straight to her room after their return and left her there for two hours to stew in fear and uncertainty over what might have happened to her husband. "I appreciate your concern," she added as she settled into the chair.

"You're angry with me," Sylvia said, studying her. "I can't say I blame you." She leaned back in her chair. "Here's what happened. Your husband and Detective Fierenzo arrived here unannounced shortly after you and I reached the restaurant."

"Unannounced but not unexpected?" Caroline suggested.

Sylvia shrugged microscopically. "We keep track of what's happening nearby," she said. "Naturally, I couldn't afford to let them find you here."

"Naturally," Caroline said. "What did you do to them?"

Sylvia lifted her eyebrows. "We did nothing. A few of my Warriors overreacted when they drove off along the back way through the woods, but I got that straightened out and they were allowed to leave."

"Is that what you were doing in the restaurant and the truck, communicating with the Warriors?"

Caroline asked. "Right after you called Roger and Fierenzo fools?"

"Fools?" Sylvia frowned; and then her face cleared. "Oh. No, you misunderstand. I wasn't calling them fools. I was referring to my Warriors and their unauthorized action."

"Ah," Caroline said, her mouth going a little drier. Because that wasn't at all what she had thought at the time. She'd had the distinct and solid impression, in fact, that Sylvia was talking about Roger.

But why would she lie about it?

"I appreciate you telling me," she went on. "And you said Roger was all right?"

Sylvia nodded. "As I told you then—and then repeated a moment ago—they left unharmed. I presume that by now they're well on their way back to the city."

"All right," Caroline said, nodding. "What happens now?"

"You mean with them?"

"I mean with everyone."

Sylvia's lips compressed briefly. "The Grays have given us until Wednesday to return Melantha or face a possible attack," she said. "Since we don't have Melantha, we can't meet that demand. Our only option is to make sure their threatened reprisal doesn't happen."

Caroline felt her blood freeze in her heart. "In other words, you're going to launch a preemptive strike."

"I'm sorry," Sylvia said in a low voice. "I know what the city means to you, and I give you my word that we'll restrict the battle to Gray territory as much as possible. But it has to be done."

"It doesn't have to be this way," Caroline insisted, her tongue tripping over the words. "There has to be a way to stop this. There has to be."

"I'm sorry," Sylvia said again; and even through her anguish Caroline could sense the other genuinely meant it. "But with the Grays pressing in on us, and with Green society fragmented and Leaderless, we have no choice but to take whatever opportunities we can."

"I'm sorry, too," Caroline said. "What will you—I mean, how will you—?"

"How will we do it?" Sylvia picked up one of the sheets from the desk in front of her. "The plan is for our attack to take place tomorrow night," she said. "Late at night, when most Humans are asleep and off the streets. We'll gather together our handful of Warriors, and with Damian protected behind them we'll begin pushing southward from the northern tip of Manhattan. We'll try to take out the Grays using only the Shriek, which can knock them off their buildings if they're below the fifteenth floor or so." She grimaced. "But if they're higher than that, we'll have no choice but to have Damian bring down those buildings."

"Even residential ones?" Caroline asked.

"We find the concept of living shields repulsive," Sylvia said darkly. "I hope the Grays will be noble enough not to hide behind sleeping Humans. But if they do..." She shook her head. "We'll just hope they don't."

For a minute the room was silent. Caroline found herself staring out the window at the afternoon sunlight playing through the forest. She'd always loved trees and forests, and had spent hours walking in them when she was younger.

Now, all she could see out there was hidden death.

"I was also wondering," Sylvia said, "if you'd like to finish our chess game."

"Our chess game?" Caroline echoed incredulously.

Sylvia's lip twitched. "No, I didn't think so," she said. "Well. You may go, then. We'll be eating at six."

"Those Warrior field ration things?"

"I'm afraid that's all we have," Sylvia said. "Unless you'd like me to send someone to town for you.

If you're not in the mood for my company over a chessboard, I doubt you'd appreciate it over a dinner table."

"Actually, I would," Caroline said hesitantly. "Not your company itself, I admit, but I would like to go out."

"Hoping to escape?" Sylvia asked, lifting her eyebrows.

Caroline shook her head. "I've already promised I wouldn't try that." She paused, trying to put her feelings into words. "Roger and I went out to dinner with some friends on September tenth, 2001. It was a great evening—good conversation, wonderful food, everything just calm and cheerful and relaxed."

"And the next morning, the world fell apart," Sylvia said, nodding her understanding.

"And it's never been exactly the same since," Caroline said. "But I still have the memory of that evening to look back on."

She looked back at the window. "It's about to fall apart again," she said quietly. "I'd like to have another memory I can hold onto. Even if it's just a small-town diner surrounded by strangers."

Sylvia was silent another moment. "I suppose it can't do any harm," she said at last. "Your husband is well on his way home by now, and I hardly think anyone else up here would recognize you."

She lifted a finger warningly. "But if we do go, we'll have to wait until after sunset. That detective might have tried to set up something before he left, and if he did I want to have the advantage of darkness on our side. Can your stomach wait until, say, eight o'clock?"

Caroline's stomach was already feeling pretty empty. But she merely nodded. "Yes."

"Then I'll see you at seven-thirty," Sylvia said. "And if you change your mind about that chess game, let me know."

"A chess game," Fierenzo said flatly.

"Why not?" Roger persisted, gripping the wheel tightly as he guided the car down the highway.

"You saw the way the board was set up in the library. I've seen Caroline use that same opening a dozen times."

"Her, and half the chess players on the East Coast," Fierenzo pointed out. "I'm sorry, but it's not nearly enough for a search warrant."

"Then let's skip the search and move straight to an attack," Jonah said flatly from the backseat.

"Not if you want any of New York's Finest involved," Fierenzo warned. "We can't and won't do things that way."

"I was thinking more of Grays' Finest," Jonah countered. "Caroline wouldn't have written what she did about Damian unless she'd either seen him or Sylvia had specifically mentioned him. Torvald won't need much more convincing. I'll bet even Halfdan will go along."

Roger looked in his mirror. Seated in the middle of the backseat between the two Grays, Laurel was staring expressionlessly at the back of the seat in front of her. "You're awfully quiet, Laurel," he said.

"What do you expect me to say?" Laurel asked, her voice steady. "That I would willingly consent to my people being attacked? Possibly even destroyed?"

"We aren't going to destroy you," Jordan said earnestly.

"It would be a very surgical strike," Jonah agreed. "We'd take out Damian and that would be that."

"Maybe that's all you would intend," Laurel pointed out. "But you wouldn't be the ones in charge. Do you really think Torvald or even Halfdan would stop once Damian was killed?"

Roger shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "This really sounds weird to me," he said. "We're breaking our necks trying to keep Melantha from getting killed; yet here we are talking about a surgical strike on Damian."

"It's an entirely different situation," Jonah said firmly. "Melantha doesn't want to hurt anybody, Gray or Human. Damian, on the other hand, would probably enjoy slaughtering both groups. The Gray histories I've read concluded he was at least partially insane."

"Actually, so do our Pastsingers," Laurel confirmed reluctantly. "There was one incident in particular during the war where he deliberately targeted a cave in the Southcliff region where children and injured Grays had taken refuge, even though he knew full well there were no combatants anywhere nearby."

Roger grimaced. "Oh."

"In fact, I agree with Jonah that he has to be eliminated," Laurel went on. "I'm just worried that Torvald would take the opportunity to finish us off once and for all."

"Tell me about these Others you used to live with," Fierenzo said suddenly.

Roger frowned at him. "Why do we care right now?"

"Humor me," Fierenzo said. "You said they looked a lot like humans. What was their culture like?"

"The ones we lived near were mostly pastoral," Laurel said, sounding as confused by the sudden change in topic as Roger. "They farmed and kept flocks."

"Cities? Technology?" Fierenzo asked.

"Not much of either," Laurel told him. "They were supposed to have some cities, but we didn't live near any of them. Where we lived was mostly farm and pasture and small villages."

"What about you, Jonah?" Fierenzo asked, shifting in his seat to look back at their passengers. "Were your Others like that?"

"There was farming and herding, sure," Jonah said. "The ones who lived by the ocean also did a lot of fishing."

"How about marauding?" Fierenzo asked. "Did they like to raid other parts of the coastline?"

"I suppose," Jonah agreed slowly. "They were a rowdy, clan-driven bunch who did their fair share of fighting, both among themselves and with their neighbors. And with those long oceangoing sailing ships—sure, they must have done some plundering."

"I'll be damned," Fierenzo said, very quietly.

"What's the matter?" Roger demanded, throwing a quick look at him.

"The Greens and Grays," Fierenzo said. "They didn't come from some unknown planet a dozen lightyears away. They came from right here on Earth."

"What are you talking about?" Laurel asked, sounding startled. "Our world was wooded and primitive, nothing at all like this."

"What I'm talking about is the legends of our ancestors," Fierenzo said. "Specifically, the mythology of the ancient Greeks."

"The what?" Roger asked.

"The mythology of the Greeks," Fierenzo said tartly. "Come on, Whittier, your high school days aren't that far behind you. You can't have forgotten all of it already."

"I remember it just fine," Roger said. "But what do myths have to do with—?"

And suddenly, horribly, it clicked. "You're not saying... wood nymphs?"

"You've got it," Fierenzo confirmed. "One of my daughters dragged me through her mythology unit last year, and this whole thing has been bugging me ever since Jonah told me their history. I think the Greens are the real-life basis of the wood nymph legend."

"That's crazy," Roger protested. "Anyway, Velovsky told us they did come from somewhere else."

"Sure they did," Fierenzo agreed. "But their world and ours weren't separated by space. They were separated by time. A jump of four or five thousand years, I'd guess, into the future. After a gap that big, they might as well have been on another planet."

"The Greek Oracles," Laurel murmured. "They could have been Visionaries or Farseers."

"Falls right into place, doesn't it?" Fierenzo agreed. "Your Warriors might have inspired some stories, too, like the stuff about Hercules or Odysseus."

"What about us?" Jordan asked.

"What about you?" Fierenzo countered. "What direction were you heading when you hit the Great Valley?"

"South, I think," Jordan said, looking questioningly past Laurel at his brother.

"Yes, it was south," Jonah confirmed. "They traveled pretty far, too, before they met up with the Greens."

"There's your answer," Fierenzo told him. "The Greens became part of Greek myth; you Grays got worked into Norse myth."

"Norse myth?" Roger echoed, struggling to dredge up the long-neglected details from that high school mythology unit. "You mean as in Odin, Asgard, and the Frost Giants?"

"And the dwarves, the smiths of the gods, who made wondrous gadgets for them," Fierenzo said.

"Including their masterpiece, the weapon of the god of thunder."

Roger's throat suddenly tightened. "Oh, my God," he murmured. "Thor's hammer?"

"A hammer with an unusually short handle," Fierenzo said. "A hammer that could be thrown into something and then come back to his hand. A hammer that could knock the top off a mountain. Stop me when this starts to sound familiar."

"I'll be cursed," Jonah murmured.

"But we don't actually throw the hammerguns," Jordan objected.

"You call it throwing when you bring them out of the wristbands," Fierenzo pointed out. "Besides, a primitive Norseman watching from the sidelines could certainly be excused if he misread what happened. You point the thing, a rock a hundred yards away explodes into dust, and when your observer opens his eyes it's back in your hand. What other conclusion could he come to?"

"Wait a minute, this is going too fast," Roger said. "Are you suggesting one of the Grays was the basis for the Thor legend?"

"Either that or some Norse warrior finagled himself a hammergun," Fierenzo said. "He'd have made quite a name for himself before he finally hung up his cleats." He hissed a sigh. "Which makes things just that much more awkward."

"Why, were you thinking of sending them all back home?" Roger asked.

"As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I was thinking," Fierenzo said bluntly. "That was my fallback position if all else failed: throw everyone back aboard their transports and kick them the hell off Earth. A moot point now."

"A moot point anyway," Laurel said. "We needed all our Farseers and Groundshakers to make it work the first time."

"All of them except Damian," Jonah countered ominously.

Laurel sighed. "Apparently so."

The car went silent. Roger looked over at Fierenzo, found the other staring hard out the windshield.

"So what do we do now?" he asked.

Fierenzo shook his head slightly. "We'll think of something."