Vortex

1.

There had been moments during my captivity when I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to live or die. If there was any sense or meaning in the life I had lived—from the unforgivable act that had caused me to leave Houston many years ago to the moment I woke up in the Equatorian desert—I couldn’t see it. But now the mindless urge to live came roaring back. I watched as swarms of Voxish aircraft began the systematic slaughter of the Farmer rebels, and all I wanted was to get to a safe place.

2.

From the cart on its hillside we were able to see the treeless plain surrounding Vox Core as it became the scene of a rolling apocalypse. The Farmer armies had already begun to retreat as soon as the sirens sounded. At the first sight of the approaching aircraft they dropped their makeshift pikes and broke formation, but the Voxish warplanes came on relentlessly, skimming over the ranks of their enemies like hunting birds. The weapon they used was new to me: the aircraft projected fiery wave fronts that rolled across the landscape and then vanished like summer lightning, leaving cone-shaped swathes of smoldering soil and charred bodies in their wake. The sound they made was a seismic exhalation, powerful enough that I felt it in my rib cage. The war sirens went on wailing like mournful giants.

Briefly, it seemed as if we might be safe up here on the hill. Then one of the warplanes banked nearby, as if considering us, and the wind carried up the stench of smoke and burning flesh. Our guard detail evaporated, running for the woods, with the exception of Digger Choi, who seemed immobilized. I caught his eye. He was clearly terrified. I held out my bound hands to him, hoping he could interpret the gesture: Don’t leave us tied up like hogs at a slaughter. Allison added a few pleading words in Voxish, barely audible under the general roar.

Digger Choi turned his back.

I called out, “ Cut us loose, you cowardly fuck! ” And although he surely didn’t understand English he stopped and turned back, glowering through his fear. He dropped the latch on the cart’s gate and cut us free with the knife he carried, two hasty slashes, first Allison, then me. The blade bit my wrist but I didn’t care. I was cravenly grateful.

Allison muttered a Voxish word that might have meant “Thanks.” I couldn’t translate the Farmer’s response, but the go-to-hell tone of it was unmistakeable.

Down on the plain the carnage continued. The stink of frying human flesh became nauseatingly dense. Digger Choi turned to follow his friends in their dash for the treeline, but stopped in his tracks when a shadow eclipsed the distant lights of Vox Core. It was one of the Voxish aircraft, directly overhead, flying slow and low. Suddenly there was light all around us, so bright the air itself seemed whitewashed. An amplified voice called out incomprehensible orders in Voxish. “Stay still,” Allison said, putting her hand on my arm. “Don’t move.”

It was our clothing that saved us—our greasy, bloodstained, road-worn yellow tunics.

The Network had been restored, and if Allison’s limbic implant had been intact it would have alerted the Voxish forces to our presence. But the Farmers had destroyed her node, and I had never worn one to begin with, so we should have been indistinguishable from anyone else on this killing ground.

Except for our clothes. Microscopic radio-frequency tags were embedded in the coarse weave, identifying us (or at least what we wore) as survivors of the Equatorian recovery mission. That was enough to buy us a reprieve. The aircraft bellied down to land. A door sprang open and soldiers in military gear vaulted out and formed a cordon around us, weapons aimed.

Digger Choi was caught inside the cordon. He seemed to understand that surrender was his only option. He dropped to his knees and put his hands over his head in a gesture that would have been familiar on any battlefield ten thousand (or twenty thousand) years ago. The Voxish soldiers kept their weapons trained as Allison stammered out an explanation or a demand.

After a quick consultation the soldiers gestured to their aircraft. “They’re taking us to Vox Core,” Allison said, and the relief in her voice was palpable. “They don’t know for sure that I’m telling the truth, but they know we’re not Farmers.”

They knew with equal certainty that Digger Choi was a Farmer, and one of the soldiers aimed a weapon at his head.

I said, “I’m not going anywhere until that man puts his gun down. Tell him so.”

Given the slaughter that was taking place on every side of us, maybe the summary execution of Digger Choi was a small bone to choke on. But he had risked his life to set us free, even if he had been sullen about it. I didn’t feel like watching his execution.

Allison gave me a peculiar look but she gauged my temperament correctly. She barked out a translation.

The soldier hesitated. I stepped forward, grabbed the Farmer’s forearm and pulled him upright. I could feel him trembling under my hand. “Run,” I told him.

Allison translated the single word. Digger Choi didn’t need to be told twice. He darted toward a part of the forest not yet burning. The soldiers shrugged and let him go.

He lived a little longer because of what I had done. But only a little.

The aircraft carried us over the killing fields and across the city wall to a landing bay on one of the towers of Vox Core. During the brief flight the Voxish soldiers appeared to have received confirmation of our identities: after a quiet mutual consultation they began to treat me with deference and spoke to Allison in what sounded like sympathetic voices. Even before the aircraft docked we were given fresh clothing (crisp new jumpers, this time in a shade of blue). One of the soldiers, evidently a medic, slathered a soothing balm on my wrist where Digger Choi had slashed it in the process of cutting me loose. The same soldier attempted to examine the wound where Allison’s node had been removed, but she pulled away from him and snarled. We were given water to drink: clean, cool, heavenly.

The landing dock was a windy rooftop. We left the aircraft and the soldiers escorted us to an enormous elevator housing, but Allison balked at the entrance and asked the soldier in charge a question. Her eyes widened at his answer. She spoke again, he answered curtly; the discussion began to sound like an argument, until at last the soldier gave her an exasperated nod.

“We’re almost exactly at the midpoint in the passage of the Arch,” she said to me. “The Network estimates twenty minutes or so to the transit, assuming it happens. I’m staying here until it does.”

I didn’t see the point. Vox would make the crossing to Earth or not, whether we were out here on this ledge or in some more comfortable space below.

“I don’t care.” She added in a lower voice, “I want to see it. I told them you did, too. What I want doesn’t matter, but you’re Uptaken—they have to pay attention.”

So we were escorted to an enclosed balcony a single level below the landing docks, still high above the city, and we stood there like two grimy and slightly bloodstained scarecrows, gazing out at the island of Vox and the far sea shimmering under the small Equatorian moon. Smoke rose from the fields where the Farmers were dying (or had, by this time, surely died), but it trailed abaft of us and the sky ahead was starry and clear. The warplanes were already circling back to their bases.

Allison spoke to the nearest soldier in our escort, then translated her questions and his answers for me. Did the soldier think Vox would actually achieve a transit to Earth? Yes, he was certain of it; the prophecies were being fulfilled; the Uptaken were among us. What about the Uptaken who had already been taken to Vox Core when the city was bombed? Bad luck, the soldier said. Bad luck that a missile had penetrated the Voxish defenses, bad luck that the strike had damaged Vox Core’s essential infrastructure—and very bad luck that the rescued Uptaken had been situated so close to ground zero.

It wasn’t clear to me how many “others” had been collected in the Equatorian desert, but I believed that would have included the hybrid boy Isaac Dvali, possibly his mother, maybe a few unlucky civilians who happened to be nearby. Had the missile killed them all?

“All but one,” Allison translated.

“Who’s the survivor?”

More translation.

“The youngest one.”

The boy, then. Isaac.

“But he was badly hurt,” Allison added. “He’s only barely alive.”

“And that’s enough to get the attention of the Hypotheticals? You think they’ll really open a closed Arch and carry us to Earth just because they recognize one injured boy and a confused ex-sailor?”

It was a question she didn’t have to answer. The answer came out of the sky in a blush of green light.

3.

It had been night on the Equatorian ocean. It was daylight on Earth.

The transition was as sudden and as unnervingly simple as it had been the first time I rode a rusty freighter from Sumatra to Equatoria. I felt a little heavier—Earth is a slightly more massive planet than Equatoria—but it was a sensation no more alarming than the feeling you get in a rising elevator. The other changes were less subtle.

We blinked at murky daylight. Beyond the shores of Vox, the sea was flat and oily to every horizon. The sky was a nasty-looking shade of green.

“God, no, ” Allison whispered.

The soldiers gawked.

“Poison,” she said. “It’s all poison…”

The war sirens stopped wailing. In the silence the Voxish soldiers stood with abstracted expressions, as if they were listening to voices I couldn’t hear—and probably that’s what they were doing, consulting their Network or their superiors.

Then one of them addressed Allison. She told me, “We’re ordered below, no exceptions this time. The city’s being sealed.”

Before we turned away I took a last look at the open land beyond the walls. The corpses of Farmers lay motionless in charred meadowland, bathed in sour green daylight. A few survivors moved among them, but even from this height they looked shocked and aimless. I asked Allison whether at least some of them could be brought inside as prisoners.

“No,” she said.

“But if the air’s poisonous—”

“Just be grateful we were rescued.”

“There might be hundreds of people out there. You’re talking about abandoning them to die.” She nodded blankly. I said, “Whoever’s in charge here, do they really want that on their conscience?”

She gave me a peculiar look. “Vox is a limbic democracy,” she said. “There’s only one conscience. It’s called the Coryphaeus. And it doesn’t give a shit how many Farmers die.”