CHAPTER FOURTEEN #5
Mira absorbed this.
"All right," she said.
She turned back to the window.
"Go," she said. "Find the third one."
"Yes," ísaveth said.
She left.
Aldric was in the corridor with the vehicle keys in his hand and the jacket he wore for long distances — heavier than his standard, the particular practicality of someone who had learned to dress for the conditions of wherever he was going rather than where he was.
She looked at him.
"Ready," she said.
"Yes," he said.
They went through the main entrance.
Cade held the door.
They got in the vehicle.
Aldric pulled out of the Sanctuary's frontage onto the Median district street and turned west — toward the city's western boundary, toward the plain beyond it, toward two hundred miles of direct road and a coastal district and a door they were going to knock on and a person on the other side of it who had been carrying something active and unclassified and entirely without support for an unknown length of time.
The mountain was visible above the city as they drove — dark and permanent and enormous against the winter sky.
The bond was warm.
The earth beneath the road was steady.
The vehicle moved west.
And in the Sanctuary behind them — in the security room where Osric's frequency monitor showed three signals stable — Breth opened her notebook to a new page.
She picked up her pen.
She wrote the date at the top.
She wrote: The vessel and the grounding element departed for the coastal district at oh-eight-forty-two. The third carrier is active and unclassified. The mountain signal holds its bearing. The cycle continues.
She set the pen down.
She looked at the monitor.
At the three signals.
"Yes," she said, to no one in particular. "It does."
The road west was clear and long and straight.
Aldric drove with the focused ease of someone who had been covering distances since he was sixteen and had made his peace with the space between one place and the next.
ísaveth had the window down by two inches — the cold air coming through in the precise amount that kept her alert without being uncomfortable.
They were forty miles from Aethenvare when her communication device activated.
She looked at the screen.
Not Osric. Not Cade.
An unknown number.
Coastal district routing code.
She looked at the number for a moment.
She looked at Aldric.
He had the earth-sense running at its ambient level — she could feel it in the grounding frequency, the way the road's substrate registered to him as continuous information rather than passing scenery.
"Answer it," he said.
She answered.
A pause on the line.
Then a voice — young, controlled, carrying the specific quality of someone who had decided to make a call they were not certain was rational and had made it anyway because the alternative was continuing to not make it.
"Is this," the voice said, "the Keldenmoor Sanctuary."
ísaveth looked at the road ahead.
"Yes," she said. "How did you find this number?"
"I have been looking for six months," the voice said. "I found a frequency research paper by a practitioner named Breth. The paper referenced an Aethenvare Median district address for correspondence. I found the Sanctuary's contact number through the district's public facility register."
Six months of looking.
"What is your name," ísaveth said.*
A pause.
"Fen," the voice said. "My name is Fen."
"Fen," she said. "I am ísaveth Crane. I am currently on a road approximately one hundred and sixty miles east of the coastal district."
A longer pause.
"You are coming here," the voice said.
"Yes," she said.
"You were already coming."
"Yes," she said.
Silence on the line.
Then: "How did you know?"
ísaveth looked at the road ahead.
At the plains to either side.
In the pale winter sky.
"The mountain," she said. "It has been pointing at you for two days."
The line was very quiet.
"I have been feeling something," Fen said slowly. "For six months. Something that does not have a name. Something that—"
The voice stopped.
Restarted.
"Something that feels like it is trying to go somewhere," Fen said. "And does not know the direction."
ísaveth pressed her hand to her sternum.
The bond was warm.
"It knows the direction now," she said. "We will be there in four hours."
A pause.
"All right," Fen said.
"All right," she said.
She disconnected.
She looked at Aldric.
He was looking at the road.
"Six months of looking," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Determined," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I think so."
He looked at the road.
She looked at the road.
The vehicle moved west.
The bond was warm.
The earth beneath the road was steady.
And somewhere in the coastal district, in a place two hundred miles from the mountain that had been pointing at them for two days, Fen — whose surname she did not yet know but whose lineage thread she already recognized through the bond's warmth — stood at a window looking east.
Waiting.
As people who have been carrying something without a name always waited — for the moment when the name arrived and everything that had been unclear became, at last, simply true.