Chapter 23
“My name is Miri,” the girl said. We stood before the open door of the bunker as I tried to get my bearings.
“Daughter of Lily of Clear Sight, daughter of Mark the Inventor, son of Jennifer, warrior daughter of Xavier the Unbeliever, son of Lyle.” She peered at me with those green eyes.
“Son of Scott.” She had a strange accent, a mixture of flat Midwestern English and quick Mexican Spanish filtered through West Texas.
I let out a breath. The gritty air left a layer of film on my tongue. “Miri. Miriam. Of course.”
“I am of the Word. I am meant to help you. But I am needing your help instead.” She cast her eyes downward, and her cheeks reddened.
“You need my help? For what?” I wasn’t someone I would want to ask for help, what with my bloodshot and puffy eyes and the trails of tears running down my cheeks. I felt more like a toddler who’d finished having a tantrum than a hero.
“My … our … family. They have been … waylaid. We were coming to you, as our Oaths to the Word decreed. But we did not know the city was still—what is correct term?”
“Dangerous?”
“Sí. Not exactly word I wanted. But same. Dangerous.”
“The city?”
“The city.”
“And your family?”
“Trapped. Waylaid. I alone escaped. With Cerberus.”
“Cerberus?”
“Cerberus.” She raised her hand and brought two fingers to her lips. The whistle was quick and sharp.
There was a shimmer in the air to my right.
As I turned, the shimmer resolved itself into a monstrous mechanical dog, all hard metal lines, angles, and claws.
It stepped up next to Miri, eyes glowing red.
Its head came to Miri’s chest. It sniffed the air, regarding me above a muzzle filled with exposed, razor-like teeth.
I took a step back.
“It is fine,” Miri said. She placed her hand on the huge metal dog’s head, and indeed the dog seemed to relax under her touch, as though deciding I was not a threat. “Cerberus is keyed to my family. To our family. He will not harm you.”
I licked my lips and took one step forward. A small victory. I looked closer. The dog was old. Its metal frame and body had been damaged and patched dozens of times in dozens of places. The entire front left leg was made of different and, it seemed, lesser material than the rest of its body.
“Mark, son of Jennifer, built Cerberus to protect family,” Miri said. She watched me closely, as though gauging my reactions. “To protect and safeguard the Word, and the Traveler.”
“Oh,” I said. I raised my right hand and gave the mechanical dog a little wave. “Hey, there, Cerberus. Good—ah. Good dog.”
The robot dog was still.
“What do you need my help for?” I asked Miri.
She gestured at me. After a moment I realized she was not gesturing at me but rather at Iron Maiden and the pistols strapped to my hips. “Cerberus is Old Tech.” Her voice lowered on the last two words. “Like your weapons, your armor. Powerful. You can use to save my—our family.”
She spoke, at times searching for words, as we jogged across the barren California landscape. Cerberus ran ahead, a glittering spot of movement across the bushes and sand, its chameleon mode on.
“We left as promised,” she said. “As was decreed, by Lyle, son of Scott, and by Jennifer, warrior daughter of Xavier the Unbeliever.”
I wanted to stop and ask what that meant—the Unbeliever—but I was too busy trying to keep up with Miri without falling on my face in the sand.
The exoskeleton helped me keep pace without my lungs exploding, but it didn’t help me avoid putting my foot in the wrong spot.
I’d already fallen twice, ignominiously cratering the desert.
Both times conscious of Miri’s gaze as I picked myself up.
“The road is long and hard,” Miri said. “Rest is—what is word? Scared?”
“Scarce?”
“Scarce. Rare. Difficult. The machinery of the Last War is still among us. They fight one another, endless and terrible, but if we are seen they fight us instead.” I wasn’t a linguist, but I didn’t get the sense she was speaking English as a second language.
Rather, English and Spanish had folded together into a single combined tongue over the last two centuries—at least here in what had been south central California.
Miri knew I spoke an antiquated version of English, and she was doing her best to translate on the fly any words I wouldn’t know.
“Go on.” We crested a hill and I crouch-ran with Miri, mimicking her, until we were back in the little valley, and she straightened again. We put on a fresh burst of speed down a dry riverbed spotted with cacti and weeds.
“The Last War,” Miri said. “The Machine War, it was known then. But now those of us who remain, we know more truth. It is the Last War. For what could come next that is worse? All will have learned: war, terrible war, must never happen again. All must know by now. We taught war to our machines, but they taught us the real meaning of war. Sí?”
Not “si,” but I didn’t have the breath to ask questions.
“Now they remain in endless combat.” Miri jumped over a piece of what looked like driftwood, ancient and gray, and I followed her.
“The broken city lay in our path to you, on our travel. It was known to be abandoned. What worth is it, a broken city, to the machines? To go around was great add to our journey. So, we went through. But the machines remain, in contrary to what is known. We woke them. They fight again now. This is all.”
“Is that … where … your family…?”
“In the city. Cerberus protected me, allowed me to flee. But my mother, Lily of Clear Sight, daughter of Mark, and my brother, Case, son of Lily, fell into a—what is word? Crevasse?”
I shook my head.
“A hole in building,” Miri said. “The machines, now woken, fight above them. They cannot escape.”
I drew to a halt.
After a moment, Miri realized I’d stopped. She jogged back to me. “Traveler?”
“Scott. Please.”
“Scott. What is wrong?”
“Miri, I—I’m not a warrior. I don’t know anything about this time, this war. I’ve hardly ever fired a gun in my life. The last time I was in combat I barely survived, and that was only because of your—your great-grandmother. And I threw up all over the place afterward.”
“I understand this. We were to help you. I know. It is to my shame we cannot. But I must ask of you this thing. It is our family. Not only my family but ours. Your family. Cerberus will aid you. I will aid you. And you have Old Tech.” She paused. “And if not for this, why are you Traveler?”
That stopped me short. I opened my mouth and shut it again.
Briefly, I thought about telling her she could have Iron Maiden and the guns if she wanted them.
That she and her mechanical dog could go into a war zone without me.
But what would that make me? “Coward” would be too kind a word.
It might not matter what anyone else thought of me anymore, not if I kept jumping forward in time.
They’d all be dead to me in a few hours.
But it still mattered what I thought of me.
And what if she was right? This woman who reminded me so strongly of Hayward. My distant progeny. What if I was meant to travel forward for this very purpose?
“All right.” I gestured for us to keep jogging, for me to keep following her. “Tell me more. What will I be heading into?”
Miri’s eyes lit up, and I could tell she was smiling under the cloth covering her mouth. “Come.” She set off again at a fast lope, long legs powering her across the sand.
I took a breath and followed.
We belly-crawled to the top of a sand dune, and together we peered over the crest. Cerberus was somewhere nearby, a shadow in the darkness.
We’d jogged all day, and my thighs and calves burned, despite the mechanical assistance of the exoskeleton.
The sky in the west was a deep purplish red.
The sky to the east was nearly black, stars already visible.
The broken city stretched before us, the buildings dark lumps of concrete and twisted steel.
Gunfire, tracer rounds, and missiles arced back and forth over the flattened expanse of ruined buildings.
Dark shapes—tanks, perhaps—moved up and down streets and alleys and through the ruins of shattered skyscrapers.
Dark, delta-winged shapes flitted through the air above the ruins.
My stomach ached. Miri had given me dry, tough jerky for food, and it wasn’t sitting well. I’d had to stop and visit the bushes a few times. Miri remained solemn throughout the run, talking, telling me what she knew.
“Iron Maiden,” I murmured.
Miri, lying next to me on the sand and watching the battle in the city below, didn’t stir, so I guessed the suit hadn’t relayed my voice.
“Yes, Scott?”
“Where are we?”
“Unable to determine precise coordinates. There has been a temporal discrepancy—”
“Uh, yeah, no shit.”
“—and there are no operable uplinks to functional CMC satellites. Extrapolating from previous known coordinates prior to the temporal discrepancy, based on distance and approximate direction traveled, you are likely near the city of Fresno, plus-minus five to fifteen degrees of uncertainty.”
“Fresno.”
The city below lit up as a fresh barrage of ground-to-air missiles lanced into the sky, arcing into a broad curve and chasing after some unseen target. An explosion blossomed to our left. The crumpling thump rumbled over us seconds later like distant thunder.
“It was bad, early in this war,” Miri whispered.
“The beginning of the Last War, it was bad, but it did not become terrible, did not become the Last War until they build the machines. Drones. Drones had been used forever. But these were most advanced and most terrible. Worse than had ever been built. It was known, by all: they are terrible, these new machines. They may destroy the world. They say this before they even build them. But they build them anyway. Why? To win. But the first side to build them did not win fast enough, and soon every side has them. Machines to fight, to fight other machines, and machines to build more machines to fight and build. Circle. The war goes on. Soon people do no fighting anymore. It is machines, the machines of each side, battling, tearing up cities and farmlands—”
“Nukes?” I asked, and Iron Maiden let the sound out so Miri would hear me.
“Sí, yes. Nuclear bombs. The largest explosions. They are used, especially early. But the leaders, they sign papers, after cities are brushed from the Earth. After this, they, those leaders who go on to build the machines, they say the paper tells them not to destroy entire planet with nuclear bombs, and this is seen as a great thing, by them, by those leaders. Was it, so, if it led to the machines? I don’t know.
Maybe if people still fight, they would use nuclear bombs?
But people do not fight. Only machines. The machines fight as they were built.
They continue the war, on and on, every day. ”
“And these, here? You said you woke them up?”
“They were sleeping. When we travel through the broken city, they wake, and now they fight again, fight one another.”
I nodded toward the city. “Where is your family?”
“Cerberus and I will take you.”
“No.” I reached out a gloved hand to stop her as she started to rise. “Not you. Just me and your scary metal dog.”
“I must accompany—”
“No. You must survive. That’s the deal. You stay here. I go down there with, ah, Cerberus, and get your—our family out safely.”
She gazed at me, my hand pushing her back to the sand with the added strength of the exoskeleton. “You are not hero, Traveler.”
“Well, thank you for that. I wouldn’t put that in your next motivational speech, though.” When she stared at me, I sighed. “Look. I lost my son. I just…” I stopped. Let out a breath. What was I trying to say? “Look. Miri. Daughter of Lily, daughter of…”
“Mark.”
“Daughter of Mark, son of Jennifer, daughter of Xavier, son of Lyle. Son of me. My son. You’re it, aren’t you?
If I can’t get your mom and brother out of there, then you at least need to survive.
You need to go on. That’s what it’s all about, right?
What Lyle told me? Continuing.” I felt myself starting to ramble and clamped my mouth shut.
But Miri seemed to understand. “Family.”
“Family. And, Miri. One more thing.”
“Sí?”
“Whatever happens down there, you survive. And when you survive, and you keep going, you promise me that you and all your descendants will forget the Word.”
“What?” she almost shouted, choking down the word to a harsh whisper at the last second. “What?”
“I’m not a messiah, Miri. I’m not special. Lyle was wrong to put me on a pedestal, and he was wrong to devote his life to trying to save me. He was even more wrong to make all of you devote yours to it, too. His children, our descendants … it was wrong.”
“Xavier the Unbeliever said as you say.” Her eyes darted to my helmet and away, back toward the city. “But you are wrong, Traveler. You are special. For no one else has traveled as you.”
“Maybe not. But being some cosmic accident or God’s practical joke doesn’t make you special.”
“What does?”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. Damn.
She kept catching me in those verbal traps.
It reminded me of talking to Lyle. I shook my head.
“Look, you just have to promise me. No more Word. No more Traveler. You and your children and your children’s children live your lives without worrying about me. Okay?”
She looked back at me. I imagined her biting her lower lip, the way Amy had. So much like Amy it hurt. “All right. If this is as you desire.”
“It is. It is as I desire. Now. Can you get Cerberus to show me the way?”
“He will guide you to them. Action with care, Traveler.” She whistled and the mechanical dog appeared out of thin air on her opposite side.
She whispered something into its metal ear.
The dog shimmered back into refractive darkness and took off, bounding down the slope toward the city.
I gave Miri one last look, then I pushed myself up and ran down the hill after it.