Unascended

Chapter Two

Ronon jogged along the upper catwalks of the city, John following doggedly at his heels. He could still outdistance John easily, maybe even a fraction more easily than he’d been able to four years before, but he preferred the company. He appreciated it, too, as a sign that he hadn’t burned too many bridges with John in the last few months.

He’d screwed up, he knew, letting himself be tempted to use Hyperion’s weapon, and even worse in keeping it hidden when half the city had been looking for it. He’d gotten people killed in the process, not on purpose, but he still wasn’t proud of it. And he had to admit now that while it would have been worth a lot to get rid of all the Wraith, it wouldn’t have been worth killing everyone with the Gift. Not worth killing Teyla and Torren, who were as much his family as if she’d been born his sister.

And his duty had been to turn the damned thing over to his commanding officer. If he’d started to doubt some of the decisions his commanding officers made, now that they were making treaties with the Wraith and working with them as allies, disobeying orders still wasn’t the way to handle that. He still wasn’t sure how he was going to handle that, but he was trying not to think about it very hard.

Apparently that wasn’t working. He picked up the pace, grinning fiercely over his shoulder at John. “You got soft while you were in charge of the city.”

“A few weeks in a desk job isn’t enough to get soft.”

“So prove it,” Ronon said, and listened for the sound of running footsteps speeding up.

They sprinted to the end of the catwalk, and Ronon slowed his pace to let John catch his breath.

“See? Woolsey’s back in charge, and everything’s back to normal,” John said between gasping breaths.

“Yeah. I’m beating you.”

“Like I said, back to normal. Probably to everyone’s relief.”

“You weren’t so bad,” Ronon said. “At least having you in charge means having someone who isn’t completely stupid.”

“Thanks,” John said dryly. “You mean unlike Woolsey when he got here.”

“He wasn’t stupid,” Ronon said, considering more carefully. “But he didn’t know anything about how things work here.”

“He’s learned. We’ve all learned.” John looked at him sideways. “I thought you didn’t like some of my decisions very much when I was running the city.”

Ronon shrugged. “Do you like everything Woolsey decides?”

“I’m not Woolsey.”

“Carter, then.”

“Not everything. I didn’t like everything Elizabeth decided, for that matter. But I liked enough of their decisions that I didn’t mind following their orders.” John shook out his damp hair, and then added in an apparent effort at scrupulous honesty, “Most days.”

“I don’t mind following yours.”

“Most days?”

Ronon shrugged. “Ready to go again?”

“Bring it on,” John said, and Ronon started running again.

The outside seating at the mess hall was deserted in all but the finest weather Atlantis’s new home world had to offer. Daniel took advantage of the quiet, making his way to the rail and leaning against it to look up at the city, his hands in his pockets against the chill wind. The spires stretched for the sky, deliberately impractical, the exuberant creation of people who wanted to impress. Or maybe who just liked beautiful views.

After so many failed attempts to arrive in a position where he could see this particular beautiful view, it was hard to believe that he was actually standing in the city of the Ancients without any immediate disaster ensuing. The last time he’d been here, he’d barely managed to scratch the surface of the city’s mysteries before exploring the wrong laboratory had resulted in triggering a poorly designed Ancient weapon, leading to a disastrous encounter with the Pegasus galaxy Asgard.

He was sure that he’d have better luck this time. It would be hard to have worse luck, anyway.

Teyla came out onto the balcony and came to join him, turning to look up at the city herself.

“Do you ever get used to it?”

She tilted her head to one side curiously. “To what?”

He shrugged. “Living in the city of the Ancients.”

She shook her head, smiling a little. “I do not expect I will ever take living in Atlantis for granted. But after so many years, it has become my home.”

“That sounds nice,” Daniel said.

“It is for many people. But many others eventually wish to return to their own homes. The city is not for everyone,” Teyla said. “I have seen Earth, and it is a beautiful world. And a safer one.”

“I think safer depends on who you are.”

“If you choose to be on a gate team, you will not have a safe life, certainly,” Teyla said, sounding a little amused.

“No. But I wouldn’t rather sit around wondering if the Goa’uld or the Ori or whoever shows up next is going to take over Earth and enslave everybody or blow out all life in the galaxy like blowing out birthday candles. They’re candles, that—”

“I have seen many birthday celebrations for members of the expedition,” Teyla said, now decidedly amused.

“You probably have. Sorry, I tend to over-explain. My point is that I don’t think I’d feel better knowing that there were huge threats to Earth and not being able to do anything about them.”

“I agree,” Teyla said. “I too would rather act than stand by helplessly and wait for whatever comes. But it seems that many on your world are not aware of their dangers and would prefer not to be.”

“That’s not… ever really been a possibility for me. I keep asking questions until I find out the answers. Even if they’re unpleasant answers. Especially if they’re unpleasant answers. I’d always rather know the truth.”

“Even if it takes you far from home.”

“I’m not really sure I have a home. I have an apartment in Colorado Springs. I have friends there, and I like my job — all right, most days I like my job, although not the days when we get tortured by unpleasant people or have to deal with the IOA — but I’m not sure it’s really the same as having roots somewhere.”

Abydos had been his home, for a brief precious time. He wasn’t sure what it would take for him to feel the same sense of belonging anywhere, or the same sense of optimism and purpose. It was possible that he’d just gotten old enough to know better. But if he was going to feel it anywhere, Atlantis might be the place.

“I hope you find what you are looking for,” Teyla said.

He nodded. “So do I.”

Lorne stretched out his knee for Carson’s medical scanner to examine its internal workings. “How does it look, doc?”

“Better than it has any right to, given what you did to it,” Carson said.

“Hey, I got hit by a jumper. Being piloted by Dr. McKay, who was out of his mind at the time. I hardly think that counts as my fault.”

“All right, maybe not. But try to dodge next time.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lorne said. “Maybe we need those warning beepers for the jumpers that they put on garbage trucks so you can hear them when they’re backing up. Except that it wasn’t backing up.”

“A warning beeper might not be a bad idea,” Carson said. “It would also help warn everyone about those of us who aren’t the best drivers.” Carson was a perfectly competent jumper pilot at this point — good, even — but he’d resisted learning with all his might in the early days of the expedition.

“Hey, it’s the hot-shot pilots you have to watch out for. They’re the ones trying to set the speed records.” Lorne sobered, swinging his leg off the table. “Seriously, though… ”

“The fracture healed beautifully. You shouldn’t have any long-term problems, although I want you to keep doing the stretches Dr. Keller prescribed.”

“That’s a relief.” He was acutely aware that getting killed and getting promoted weren’t the only ways to wind up sent back to Earth. For all its frustrations, he enjoyed his current job far too much to want to wind up stuck behind a desk back home.

“For someone who essentially got hit by a truck, you got off very lightly.”

“Don’t I know it,” Lorne said. “Have you heard anything from Dr. Keller?”

“She checked in a few weeks ago and sent me some of the results from her first round of tests of the new retrovirus,” Carson said. “Frankly she didn’t have many results yet to report. I think she just wanted to reassure everyone that she wasn’t dead.”

“Well, when you’re hanging out with the Wraith, people do worry.”

“I worry,” Carson said. “But not as much as Rodney does.”

“Are the two of them… I heard they split up. And also that they were on a break. And also that he asked her to marry him.”

“The Atlantis rumor mill never changes,” Carson said. “It’s like living in a small town full of elderly grannies gossiping over the back fence.”

“It’s probably none of my business.”

Carson shrugged. “It’s not as if either of them told me anything about it as their doctor. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. But she’s going to be gone from Atlantis for some considerable time, and maybe that will give them both time to think about what they want.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

“Or presents enough distractions that you stop pining after the one you love. One or the other.”

“Distractions we’ve got.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Carson said.

John sat in front of his laptop, trying to figure out how to frame the email he was thinking of sending.

Hi Sam, he began mentally. How’s it going? I was just wondering if you think there’s any chance that Elizabeth Weir is an Ascended being, rather than being dead in space because we couldn’t do anything to save her.

That sounded crazy. If he got that kind of email from someone, he’d think there was something wrong with them. Like they were having some kind of guilt complex about not being able to save people they cared about. So, screw that.

Hi Sam, he tried mentally composing again. Hope you’re having a good time on the Hammond. I was just wondering if there’s any chance that McKay is actually onto something rather than just being a little unhinged by having been turned into a Wraith.

He could just imagine Sam’s bemused expression reading that one. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Sheppard,” she would say, with that alarmed look she usually got when she had to deal with problems that involved people’s feelings. It was one of the things they understood really well about each other.

He made himself actually start typing this time. Hi Sam. Hope that you’re having as much fun getting shot at in the Milky Way as you did getting shot at here in Pegasus. A weird thing — McKay has started saying he thinks that Elizabeth Weir may have Ascended and showed up to talk to him in his dreams.

He took a deep breath. Believe me, I know how that sounds. Still, you’ve had some experience with this kind of thing, so I thought I’d ask you if that sounded like something that could possibly actually happen. McKay has this idea that she may have gotten in trouble for helping him and wound up getting kicked out of her higher plane. He keeps saying we ought to look for her, and you can imagine how that goes over with Woolsey. Dr. Jackson probably knows the most about it, but he just says “maybe,” only in a lot more words than that. And I trust your judgment. It’s always been good before. So any advice would be appreciated.

Say hi to the Milky Way galaxy for me,

John

He clicked to send the email before he could think better of it. He regretted it anyway the moment after it was sent, but by then it was too late; he shut his email and resolved not to think about the question any more until he got a reply.

“So what are we supposed to go look for?” Sheppard asked as Daniel came into the conference room, trying to keep his coffee cup from toppling off the top of his stack of books. Sheppard’s team had already staked out one side of the table, with Woolsey at its head. Daniel set down his tablet on the other side of the table, pushing his books to one side, although it made him feel a little like the unpopular new kid in the junior high school classroom.

He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m hoping we can find out more about the early history of Ancient settlement here in the Pegasus galaxy,” he said. “We know they came here after a plague wiped out most of the Ancients in the Milky Way galaxy. At that point, there wasn’t any intelligent life in the Pegasus galaxy. So, the Ancients started seeding planets with humans.”

“And built the Rings,” Ronon said. “We know.”

“Right, because the Ancients left a lot more traces of their presence here than they did on Earth, where we’ve just figured out they existed in the last decade. Okay, decade and a half.” It never ceased to startle him to be reminded that it had been more than ten years since he’d first walked through the Stargate. “Anyway. Various human civilizations developed over time, eventually there was the war with the Wraith, and the Ancients returned to Earth. We know a little bit about that period, but we know almost nothing about what happened when the Ancients first arrived in this galaxy.”

“We know they settled on Lantea,” McKay said. “Which we pretty thoroughly explored for any signs of Ancient installations other than Atlantis itself, and found zip.”

“I know that,” Daniel said.

“I know you know, I’m just reminding everyone.”

“Assume we’re all up to speed,” Sheppard said. “What are we doing?”

“Searching possible sites of very early Ancient settlement in Pegasus,” Daniel said. “In the Milky Way, they settled primarily on Earth and Dakara, but they had outposts throughout the galaxy. It seems likely that when they were seeding planets here with life, they actually spent some time on some of those planets, and may have left enough behind that we can get some idea of what they were doing.”

“Anything in particular we’re looking for?” Sheppard asked. “If they didn’t abandon these outposts in any particular hurry, I’m assuming they wouldn’t have left all their stuff behind.”

“I don’t expect we’re going to find a new super-weapon or a stash of ZPMs, if that’s what you mean. It’s very likely that any very early Ancient sites have been at least partially stripped, either by the Ancients themselves or by the local inhabitants. But even the layout of the buildings can tell us something about how the sites were used. And it’s possible that they left things behind that they considered unimportant, considered to be trash, even that will help us understand who they were and how they lived.”

He spread his hands in frustration. “That’s how actual archaeology works. As opposed to treasure-hunting, which, granted, is what we do around here a lot of the time. At best, I’m hoping we may find some surviving records from that era. We’re not likely to find anything you can use to shoot people.”

“I was actually just asking if there was anything in particular we were looking for,” Sheppard said after a moment.

It took Daniel a moment to shift gears. “Umm. Not really. Anything we find is going to increase our knowledge of Ancient settlement in the Pegasus galaxy from nothing to something.”

“I assume, Dr. Jackson, that you have some idea of where to start,” Woolsey said. He didn’t look particularly enthusiastic, but given his history with SG-1, it was saying something that he’d been willing in the first place to lend him Sheppard’s team.

“I actually have a couple of different ideas. First, I’ve been going through Janus’s records. He seems to have taken an interest in abandoned Ancient settlements here in Pegasus, possibly because he wanted to do his unauthorized experiments in places where no one was going to stumble across them by accident.”

“I’m getting a little tired of Janus and his experiments,” Sheppard said, although McKay brightened a bit.

“Janus doesn’t seem to have used any of these sites,” Daniel said. “Maybe he put this list together toward the end and then ran out of time before the Ancients went back to Earth, I don’t know. But it gives us a set of gate addresses to start checking out.”

Woolsey nodded. “You said you had two ideas.”

“I’d like to take a look at planets that show evidence of having been occupied by humans for a particularly long time. The original Athos, for example, we know that technological civilization developed there over and over again, with the Wraith knocking them back every time. But even before that, I think it’s clear that human settlement on Athos considerably predates the war with the Wraith.”

He sketched archaeological strata with his hands. “The problem there is that any kind of Ancient site is probably going to be buried under layer after layer of later cities built on top of it. But I’d still like to take a look around one of the Athosian cities and see if there’s any evidence that would support a larger-scale excavation effort. I was hoping that Teyla could get us permission from the Athosians to go take a look around.”

“I have spoken about this to Halling and Kanaan,” Teyla said. “I see the value myself of finding out more about our own past, as well as about the Ancestors. But my people are still debating whether to agree.”

“What’s the main issue?” Daniel asked.

“It is complicated. My people did not enter the ruined cities, for fear of attracting the attention of the Wraith. Things may be different now that we have a treaty with the Wraith, but that is very new. Some people are still not comfortable with the idea. And there is the larger issue of what will become of our original world if the treaty holds.”

“Do your people want to go back?” Ronon asked.

“Some do,” she said, and smiled at him. “Hearing that some Satedans have returned to their homeworld has inspired them. Others are worried that whether or not we return, Athos will be overrun by settlers from some other world interested in mining the old cities for their resources.”

“You mean the Genii,” Sheppard said.

“It would not be a surprise. And we must attract people to join us, whether or not we return to Athos. We are too few now to be a viable population alone. And we have always taken in refugees and travelers who wished to become Athosian. But they have always come a few at a time, and some of us worry about what will be lost if many people come who have no interest in becoming Athosian. My people do not want to become Genii.”

“I do see the problem,” Daniel said.

“There are others who are tired of moving from world to world and would prefer to stay where we have made a home, and still others who believe that because the Ancestors sent us to New Athos when they returned, it is where we ought to stay.” She shook her head. “It will take time for everyone to talk and come to a decision. In the meantime, I am afraid that any kind of mission to Athos would be perceived as the Lanteans staking a claim.”

“We aren’t going to jeopardize our relationship with the Athosians,” Woolsey said. “Dr. Jackson, I think you had better stick to the sites on Janus’s list.”

“We’ll do that,” he said. “I want to concentrate first on the sites that Janus has listed as being on currently uninhabited worlds, on the grounds that those are the sites least likely to have been stripped. First up is M4G-877. According to Janus’s notes, both the Ancients and the resident humans abandoned the planet because of hostile wildlife.”

McKay looked up with a frown. “How hostile are we talking about here?”

“If the Ancients couldn’t deal with it, I’m guessing that it’s pretty hostile,” Sheppard said. “Come on, Rodney, you know the drill. Planets with Stargates that are uninhabited are uninhabited for a reason.”

“Great. I’ll be sure to bring my dinosaur repellent.”

“It probably won’t be dinosaurs,” Woolsey said. The glances exchanged around the table suggested that no one else agreed.

On the third day they came to a town, earth houses with roofs of sod, long grasses growing on the roof, their roots holding everything in place, so that from a distance all one saw was a group of rounded hills, thin streams of smoke rising from chimneys.

“We will ask if anyone knows you,” the grandmother said, though she sounded as though she thought that was unlikely. “You must have come from somewhere.”

“Maybe the Wraith left her,” the boy, Kyan, piped up.

“The Wraith don’t leave their prey,” his father said.

“The Wraith?” The name meant menace, though she did not know who they were.

The father and grandmother exchanged a glance. “They come through the Ring sometimes,” the old woman said. “But our Ring is in orbit. They cull now and again, but we are a lot of work for a very small harvest. Mazatla has no cities.”

“This world is Mazatla.” Elizabeth frowned. The name ought to mean something. The name of the world she was on ought to be important, but it wasn’t.

“Yes.” The old woman nodded. “But Wraith or not, something bad has happened to you. Rest and heal, and perhaps it will all come back.”

“I shouldn’t be on Mazatla,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not my world.” A ring, a ring turning in a flash of blue fire… And then it was gone.

“Rest and try to remember,” the man said. “We’ll ask at the Gathering if anyone knows you or knows your people. We’ll stop here tonight and then go on to the Gathering at the Place of Two Rivers.”

“The Place of Two Rivers.”

Two rivers wreathed in mist, gray as steel beneath a winter sky, flowing together at a green point… There were bridges over the rivers, struts of iron against the sky woven like baskets of steel. One long span crossed on brick arches, iron rails dark with coal cars… Down the river, smoke rose from high smokestacks…

“Two rivers,” she whispered. “A city where two rivers came together.”

“Your home?” the grandmother asked.

Summer, and a green park full of people, boats on the river while above the sky lit with flowers of fire, green and gold and purple and blue, while she sat on a blanket.

“A festival,” Elizabeth said. “At the end of summer. To celebrate the working man?” The words came back slowly. “There was a boat race on the river between steamboats. We watched from the park where the fort had been. There were people on the bridges watching and cheering. I had a red balloon because it was my favorite color. We ate ice cream when it got dark and waited for the fireworks.” Her parents were there. She was older, old enough to go to school. “The City of Three Rivers.”

“Do you remember why you were there?” the man asked.

Elizabeth nodded slowly. She remembered, or at least the child she had been did. “My father, he had work there. We had come back after Kenya and we were going to stay. There was a building.” The pictures slipped away, and she grabbed at them. “A very tall building with classrooms in it. Very tall. Twenty, thirty, forty stories. A cathedral to learning? I don’t know.” And then it was gone again, the memories slipping just out of reach, words she had almost found. But she knew one thing. “I am from the City of Three Rivers.”

The grandmother looked at the father. “Sateda,” she said.

Elizabeth looked up. “Sateda?” The name was familiar, but…

“It sounds like the things they had on Sateda,” she said. She put her hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Sateda was destroyed by the Wraith years ago. A few people escaped but they wander. They have no homes. Maybe you are Satedan.”

Satedan. The word was familiar. “Maybe so.”

“If so, you’ve been wandering a long time,” the father said. “I don’t know how you got here.”

“I have to get back there,” Elizabeth said. That was one thing she was certain of. “I need to go home.”

“There’s nothing left of Sateda,” the old woman said gently. “The Wraith destroyed everything. They killed everyone they could find. It’s gone.”

“I have to get there,” Elizabeth said. If the City of Three Rivers was there… “I have to find out what happened.” What happened to someone. Who? Who was she worried about?

“We could ask the Travelers,” the grandmother said. “Sometimes they come to the Gathering. They might know other Satedans. Sometimes they’ve had Satedans working on their ships.” She looked at Elizabeth. “You know machines?”

Elizabeth nodded. “Machines. Yes. Radios and computers and guns.”

“Sateda,” the man nodded. “You’re Satedan. Well, let’s see if the Travelers come and if there are Satedans with them.”

“I need to go there.”

The old woman patted her hand. “Sateda is gone. But perhaps we can find your people. Or you will find a place with the Travelers as other Satedans have.”

The word spread around the Gathering about the woman with no memories, and lots of people came to see her. They camped in the flood plain of two sleepy brown rivers, five thousand people or more, with bright tents in all the colors of the rainbow. The Mazatla did not live in cities, but in the summer there were these gatherings at various traditional locations, part fair, part sports meet, part courtship opportunity. Goods and animals were traded and sold, and there were matches of a game that involved throwing balls back and forth between three teams on an enormous staked out triangular field that went on all day until sunset ended the game. Then the victors paraded by torchlight, beginning a dance that went until dawn.

Elizabeth shared the tent of the family that had found her. When people came to see the woman with no memories she greeted them eagerly. Perhaps they would know where she had come from! But no one did. Each curious person at last went away shaking their heads. The woman with no memories had come from nowhere.

“The Travelers may know you,” the grandmother said confidently. “If anyone here does, they will.”

The Travelers arrived on the third day. Elizabeth heard shouts and went outside. A spaceship was descending from the blue sky streaked with a few high clouds, its white contrail bright. She raised her hand to shade her eyes, everyone else shouting and pointing too. It was bigger than…

Bigger than what? The comparison she’d meant to make slipped away. Bigger than a small ship meant to carry six to ten people. And smaller than…

Elizabeth frowned. A man in an olive green jumpsuit, bald headed, severe. He had a ship, a ship that was bigger than this one, and yet his name and the name of the ship ran away, lost somewhere among other things forgotten.

‘It’s the Travelers!” the boy Kyan said. He pulled on her arm. “They’ll help you get home.”

His father looked worried. “Only one ship this year. Something can’t be right.”

“Maybe it’s because of the Wraith,” Kyan said.

“Let’s hope not,” his father replied, and they walked together to the part of the field where the ship had landed.

Close up, the ship looked battered. It wasn’t all the same color, and parts of it looked as though they’d originally belonged to another ship, including a pair of long, organic looking weapons emitters. There was something disturbing about them, something inhuman.

The man coming down the ramp to cheers and greetings was entirely human. He was white haired and burly, wearing a bright red jacket over a jumpsuit. “Hello everybody! We’re glad to be here. Give us a few minutes to unload, folks. Then we’ll be glad to trade with everybody.”

“Lesko!” A man was pushing through the crowd, which parted when they recognized him as Elizabeth did, one of the Mazatla Leading Men, elected to govern this year. “Any news of the Wraith?”

Lesko held up his hands as everyone quieted. “Queen Death is dead.”

“I know,” Elizabeth murmured, and the grandmother turned to look at her.

No one else had heard, and there were shouted questions.

Lesko held up his hands again. “An alliance of other Wraith and the Lanteans and the Genii killed her.”

“The Genii?”

“What did the Lanteans…”

“How could…”

“The Genii have a warship belonging to the Ancestors,” Lesko shouted over the din. “It was flown into battle by the Leader Ladon Radim with the assistance of a Lantean pilot, Lorne. It defeated Queen Death’s ship and then the Genii boarded it. They killed Queen Death.”

Shouts, cheers, people slapping each other on the back…

Elizabeth felt strangely isolated, wrapped in private quiet. Lorne. Ladon Radim. Should she know those names? Why couldn’t she find faces to go with those names?

She missed the question, someone shouting how Lesko knew.

“I heard it from the Genii myself,” he called back. “They showed me the video of Radim’s speech. They showed me the video the Genii took inside the hive ship.”

“But there are other Wraith,” someone said.

Lesko nodded. “The Genii and the Lanteans are making a treaty with them. Some of the other Wraith attacked Queen Death too.”

“A treaty with the Wraith?” the grandmother said incredulously. “You can’t make a treaty with the Wraith.”

“You can make a treaty with anyone,” Elizabeth said. “With the right leverage.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” someone behind her in the crowd said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Elizabeth.” She was sitting at a desk in a room full of people, looking up at a green board covered in words. A man was leaning over her, dark rims to his glasses, dark hair. “You can’t negotiate with people bent on global domination.”

“I don’t see how you can fail to,” she responded. Her hands were young and thin and she wore a white sweater with blue floral trim around the wrists. “What other choice do we have? To simply say that we acquiesce? Or that we consider global thermonuclear destruction a viable alternative? Chernenko is a rational man…”

“It is not rational.” Mr. Henry’s mouth pursed. That was his name, Mr. Henry. He was her teacher. She was fifteen years old. “The Soviet Union does not pursue rational foreign policies, but rather ideological ones. Even when faced with Mutual Assured Destruction…”

“Surely there are rational voices.”

“The rational voices are powerless.” Mr. Henry shook his head. “As are those elements in the Eastern Bloc who oppose him. I’m sorry to tell you, Miss Weir, but Solidarity is just as doomed as the Prague Spring or the rebels in Budapest in 1955. The moment tanks roll into Gdansk…”

Elizabeth blinked. Kyan was shaking her arm. “Are you ok?”

“Yes,” she said. The crowd was still yelling questions, though Lesko held up his hands.

“All in good time!” he said. “Come on now. Let my people unload. We’ll have plenty of time for news.”

“Did you remember something?” Kyan asked cheerfully.

“Yes. I think.” Elizabeth shook her head. There was no more of it, just that moment, that frustration, those words that were so freighted with meaning that no one here would know.

Elizabeth put her hands at her side, watching the Travelers. Who am I? she thought. Who am I to feel that I should carry such responsibility?

“This is Atelia Zel,” the grandmother said. “Atelia, I’d like you to meet Elizabeth. She is the woman with no memories I told you about.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.

They stood in the shade of the Travelers’ ship, its bulk casting deep cool shadows. A striped awning had been rigged and their wares were laid out on the tops of boxes and shipping crates, bulky things in front and the most valuable things displayed on cloths back near the open hatch where the sellers could keep their eyes on them. Lesko and a number of others haggled with the Mazatla, trading food for cloth, hides for medicines. Some few of them, the most valuable, were kept in a strong box, bottles neatly labeled and swathed in cloth. She only saw them for a moment, but some of them… There was something wrong, something familiar about them. Ramipril 10 mg… Erythromycin…

“Atelia is Satedan,” the grandmother said, calling her attention back, and Elizabeth turned to look at her.

Atelia Zel was of average height and young, with lighter skin than the Mazatla but not as pale as Elizabeth’s. Her black hair was braided tightly to the scalp, each braid worked with a single strand of gold thread. A little boy perhaps a year old peered curiously over her shoulder from a harness worn on her back over her spacer’s coveralls. He looked at Elizabeth curiously, then gave her a four-toothed smile.

She smiled back. “What a beautiful baby!”

At that Atelia smiled too. “Thank you. He’s a handful, and I have to watch him every minute so he doesn’t get into things.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face as if looking for something familiar. “They said you might be Satedan?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t remember much before I found myself on this world. Everyone here has been very kind to me, but nobody knows me or where I came from. The few things I do remember cities, technology, suggest to these people that I’m Satedan.” Even as she said it, it felt wrong. And yet this young woman’s face was like so many she’d known, her clothes, the casual way she handled the electronics…

“What do you remember?” Atelia asked.

“Cities. Buildings with many stories. Vehicles.” Elizabeth shook her head. “Steel bridges over rivers.” Her eyes fell on the bottles carefully swaddled in the compartmented box. “Bottles like that. A hospital where sick people went for operations…” Corridors with nurses in white, a kind dark haired man with an instrument around his neck who stood outside her father’s room, talking to her in a low voice…

“We had hospitals and high rises,” Atelia said. “Medicines like these.”

“Are those from Sateda?” She didn’t quite pick them up. Not quite.

Atelia shook her head. “Not these. All our cites were destroyed and all our industries too. These came from the Genii who traded with the Lanteans for them.” She touched the one labeled Erythromycin gently. “These pills are for people who have a sickness in their lungs, a cold that has gone to the chest and their lungs are filling with fluid. When nothing else will save them, these pills will.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face. “It’s a wide spectrum antibiotic for respiratory infections. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. “For pneumonia.” And it was a good thing, somehow, that these pills were here. A cheap drug, worth almost nothing per dose, rendered nearly priceless to these people, just as she’d seen it in clinics, where? She looked at Atelia. “Are you a doctor?”

Atelia laughed. “I’m a scholar. Or I was going to be. But all that ended a long time ago.”

“How did you escape when your world was destroyed?”

“I wasn’t there.” Atelia looked up at the awning above, put her head back against the baby’s cheek. “I was in my last year of studies. I was going to be a scholar who studied other peoples, finding the common threads of culture that help us understand who we are and where we all came from. I was doing field work when Sateda was attacked.” Her mouth pursed. “Everyone I knew was killed.”

Elizabeth put her hand on her arm. “I am so sorry. And so sorry to have asked.”

“It was a long time ago.” Atelia forced a smile. “And I’ve found a place with the Travelers. The technology that everyone understood on Sateda is rare and complicated everywhere else. I have skills that are valuable. I understand what these do.” She touched the bottle. “I learned.”

“And you have a family,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh yes.” She nodded, glancing back over her shoulder at the little face behind hers. “I have a son and a husband, though he’s not with us now because he’s a Hunter.”

“What does he hunt?” Elizabeth asked.

Atelia’s smile wasn’t nice at all. “He hunts Wraith.”