Epilogue
“ Dammit, Quiggs, stop pushing! What the fuck was I thinking to agree to this?”
“Just take a deep breath and do it.” Quiggs rubbed Max’s ass. “C’mon, my husband. We’re on a deadline.”
“I hate this,” Max gritted out.
“Too late for regrets.” Quiggs angled himself and shoved hard.
Max climbed the last step of the ladder and dropped into the wickerwork gondola, tethered to heavy stone blocks twenty feet below. He immediately crawled to a corner and fitted his boots into foot holds spaced around the sides. Solid footholds secured, he stood and grasped the rail, fixing his gaze on his whitened knuckles instead of down at the crowd in the plaza.
Families watched from the balconies, and men lined the city’s balustrade. The ousted Ruling Mothers prayed for disaster, but there wasn’t a chance they could regain control. The Assembly ran smoothly the last three months under the newly elected chairperson—Dean Cagney’s sister, a mother of four young aspiring farmers.
Quiggs climbed aboard and rechecked their supplies. Four days of food and water. Fuel for ten hours. Grid slates for mapping. Plenty of smoke flares for the trackers to locate them after landing. Precious milk-spray canisters. He tested the furnace valve and the vents in the fireproofed panels. The gored panels strained against the tethers with no signs of tearing.
Painted across the panels of the eighty-foot inflated balloon was Beau IV . The first three Beaus had met sad fates. The Beau IV had the kinks ironed out. So far expeditions tracing the irrigation pipelines to the breeding den had failed. From an aerial view, Quiggs hoped to detect differences in shades and patterns where the canopy covered the stone dome of the bunker.
Though there were no reports of feral activity, and the breeding season had ended, Max was as protective as he was possessive, insisting on accompanying him. The greatest danger was the capricious air currents, which could lift the balloon and carry it for miles before Quiggs could deflate and land.
Quiggs snapped goggles around his leather-padded black helmet and slid his hands into a pair of gloves, fireproofed against the heat of the furnace. He and Max wore sturdy boots for a hard landing.
“Ready?” Quiggs grinned at Max.
“No.” Max gripped harder, his eyes squeezed shut.
Quiggs signaled for Witters and Meeks to loosen the tethers. He pitched the first soft fuel cube into the furnace, tossed in lit tender, and closed the slot. Seconds later he heard the puff as the fuel ignited and sent a shooting flame up a pipe into the balloon.
Flushed with excitement, Quiggs fed the furnace another cube, glad his hands were gloved as sparks shot out. When the basket bucked and strained the tethers, his team released the handling ropes. Up, up, up the balloon shot until the eastward breeze off the canal grabbed it.
So far, so good. Except Max looked green.
“You okay?” Quiggs shouted above the rushing wind and the crackling furnace.
“Stop bouncing around!” Max tightened his grip.
Quiggs walked to him and gave a playful stomp, startling a curse from Max as the basket tilted a bit. He slid an arm around Max’s waist.
Last night, in case of a catastrophe, Max had yielded his ass a second time since their wedding four months ago.
Max had chosen to lay on his back stone sober, knees to his chest, explaining he wanted to watch Quiggs’s expression as he sank balls deep. Quiggs had lasted two minutes, barely finishing before Max flipped him over and fucked him with deep, slow strokes as he kissed him like a starving beast. Quiggs had admitted to himself he rather enjoyed the kissing, especially when sprinkled with lovely feely words from his husband.
No one but Quiggs knew his husband had a romantic streak.
“Pay attention!” Max’s yell snapped Quiggs out of his fog.
The balloon soared higher, the air current lulled, and they drifted slowly into the outland, passing over lush farms and orchards before the endless stretch of vines began. The thick canopy was humbling. Months of spraying barely dented the expanse.
They were airborne an hour when Max, with his keener eyesight, noticed the beam first. “Quiggs… see it?”
Quiggs removed his goggles and made out a dark green beam rising from the vines to the sky. The beam was straight-edged, its width fixed instead of diffusing. It contained varied lengths and intervals of flat white circles and dashes, as sharply defined as if written with a marker.
The military and herders used lanterns to send simple signals for danger, all clear, injury, help. But their signals were rough off-on sequences of glaring yellow or soft bluish light. The steady green beam, with its repeated pattern of white circles and dashes, belonged to ancient technology.
“Have you ever heard reports of a strange green beam?” Quiggs asked.
“Never. Odd how it appeared shortly after we were in the air.”
“I think we’ve triggered an alarm to the watchers. ”
Max didn’t snort at the mention of watchers. “Is it a warning or an invitation?”
“I see a simple repeated sequence. But it doesn’t translate into an ancient word.”
Max’s face flattened. “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this—I’ve figured it out.” He stared at Quiggs. “That’s not an ancient word to translate. The message within the green beam is our military’s code for help.”
While Max sent smoke flares for a fully equipped rescue expedition to track them, Quiggs opened the vents. As they descended, drifting closer, the beam disappeared. Quiggs saw a strip of gleaming white stone with an entryway—and a robed figure hopping foot to foot waving up at them.
Beau sent the signal. Beau was alive .
The End