Chapter Twenty-Two · The Threnody

Harrow's Reach — Present Day

They came back at a speed the skimmer hadn't been built for.

Vash sat in the rear seat with her jaw clenched and watched the wheat go past in a long golden blur. The sun was down. The sky was a bruise. Somewhere to the south, behind them, the front was rolling north at twelve meters a second, and the whole land ahead of it lay breathless and bright, dusted with the last of the light.

"Enterprise," Tobin said into the comm. "We're twelve minutes out. What's the status at the Reach?"

"Four hundred and eleven people still on the ground." Riker's voice was clipped. "Transporter rate's down to sixty an hour. The ore in the soil's scattering the lock more than we expected. The last shuttle leaves in forty minutes."

"We don't have forty minutes."

"I know."

"What about the hospital patients?"

"Out. All thirty. The last of them went up an hour ago." A pause. "Captain Picard is on the ground with Administrator Marsh. He asks you to hurry."

Vash caught Data's eye across the cabin. The android's face was quite still. She knew what he was doing. He was watching the front on the skimmer's sensors, reading its speed, its shape, its rate of change. She had learned to read his silence over the last five days. It was the silence of a man adding a number he didn't like to a column that already had too many.

"It has accelerated again," he said. "Fifteen meters per second."

"Data."

"The revised arrival time at Harrow's Reach is twenty-six minutes."

Dara had said nothing since the Kettle. She sat in the corner with her knees drawn up to her chest, her padd lit and untouched on top of them, and her face turned to the glass, and the whole long way north she didn't once look away from the horizon behind them.

Overhead, as the skimmer came in low over the town, the survey transport lifted off the commons.

Vash recognized it at once, though it had changed. The little tin-colored boat that had carried her team across a dozen worlds was riding so low on its struts that its belly nearly scraped the gravel, and every hatch and gunport and cargo door was open and crammed with people. They sat in the doorways with their legs hanging out. They clung to the landing struts. A child had been wedged into the nose cone between two crates, with a dog on her lap. The engines screamed in a pitch she had never heard from them.

"That's an eight-passenger vessel," Tobin said, in a strangled voice.

"I count eighty-one."

"Priya."

"Priya!" Vash thumbed the comm. "Priya, what are you doing?"

"Evacuating." The pilot's voice came back tight and quick and entirely cheerful. "The transporters are down to sixty an hour, and the front's moving, and there's a lot of people and not enough ride. I figured, how bad can it be?"

"You're overloaded by a factor of ten!"

"Eleven. I did the math." A pause, and a strained whoop of laughter. "She lifts. I'm not saying she lifts well. But she lifts. I've made three runs already. The Enterprise shuttlebay's got a bay door the size of a barn and I've been landing in it like a sack of potatoes. Nobody's complained."

"The Captain'll want to know."

"Tell the Captain I'm going to need that double pay." The transport lurched, righted, and slid north across the sky with a long falling howl of engines. "And a medal. A small one."

"A small one," Vash said, and found that she was laughing. It was a high, helpless, breathless sound, and it hurt. She watched the little ship shrink to a dot against the bruised sky and thought that nothing she had ever done in her life had made her as proud as hiring a twenty-six-year-old pilot with no respect for the structural limits of her aircraft.

"Ms. Vash," Data said, behind her. "I note that the front is now moving at eighteen meters per second."

The laughter went out of her like water out of a cracked vessel.

"I know," she said.

The town was almost empty.

She had expected chaos. She found silence. The street was a river of abandoned carts, each one loaded with crates and bedding and birdcages and boxes of photographs, left where its owner had last been told to stop. Dogs wandered between them. Somewhere a door slapped in the wind. The church bell had stopped.

To the south, where the last houses ended and the wheat began, the sky had turned pale.

It wasn't light. It was the absence of color. A long, low band, a hundred meters high, stretching from horizon to horizon across the whole southern sky, where the evening's red and purple simply stopped. Below it, in the fields, the gold was going out. She watched it go. It didn't fade. It advanced, a clean pale line moving north across the wheat at the pace of a brisk walk, and in its wake every stalk was white, and every head was open, and every field rang.

The sound came up the street to meet her. A vast soft chord. A chorus of small bells.

"Vash!"

Picard was at the bottom of the street, with a knot of people in the lee of the chapel. He had his uniform jacket off and his sleeves pushed up. He looked like a man who had been carrying other people for hours. Beside him stood Administrator Marsh, gray-faced, with a padd in each hand.

"How many?" Vash said, running up.

"Sixty-three in the square. Another forty in the long hall, the east side, being brought out now. Our transports are loading at the school." Picard's eyes were very sharp. "Where is Commander Data?"

"Behind me. Where's Renata?"

Marsh looked at her. "She went back for the Amundsens."

"The what?"

"Old man Amundsen. Stubborn as a post. He wouldn't leave his wife's grave." Marsh's voice cracked. "Renata said she'd talk to him. She took a skimmer. She's been gone twenty minutes."

Vash didn't wait to hear the rest.

She found them at the edge of the field.

It was a small graveyard on a low rise above the river, ringed by a stone wall and three old oaks, with thirty or forty simple markers standing in the long grass. At the far end, beside the wall, a single fresh-turned plot with a wooden cross. Beyond it the wheat began. Beyond the wheat, perhaps two hundred meters away, the white line was coming.

Renata stood at the wall with her hand on an old man's sleeve. He was big, bent, in a flannel shirt and work boots, with a white beard and a shotgun slung from one shoulder. He was staring across the field at the approaching light. He wore an expression of perfect, weary calm.

"Mr. Amundsen," Vash said. "You have to come with us."

"No, miss."

"Please."

"Ingrid's here." He didn't turn his head. "Forty-one years. I put her in that ground myself. I'm not leaving her to be taken by something I don't understand."

"It won't hurt her."

"I know." He smiled, faintly. "It'll hurt me."

"Then come away."

"Vash." Renata's voice was very low and steady. "I've been trying for twenty minutes. He's made up his mind."

Vash watched her. Renata's white hair was wild in the wind. Her eyes were red-rimmed and absolutely clear. She had the face of a woman who had seen the end of an argument some time ago and had been unwilling to admit it.

"Mr. Amundsen," Vash said.

"Go on, girl." He patted Renata's hand gently and lifted it off his sleeve. "You've done your best. All of you. Take your friend and go."

Pinned to the wooden cross, a small gold badge caught the light. He had brought it with him, Vash realized, and he had not touched it.

He stepped over the wall.

"No!"

She lunged. Renata caught her by the arm, hard, and held on. "Let him."

"Renata, he'll—"

"I know." The voice was iron. "Let him."

Amundsen walked down through the long grass toward the wheat. He didn't hurry. He didn't look back. The white line reached the edge of the field, and the gold and white met, and he stepped into it without a pause.

She would remember it all her life, in a calm, exact, unmerciful detail. The way the wheat went pale around his boots. The way the white crept up his legs. He didn't cry out. He didn't seem afraid. He stopped, a few meters in, and knelt, slowly, like a man in a church, and laid one broad hand flat on the ground.

A line of light ran up his arm.

It was not fire. It wasn't any kind of violence. It was as if something very patient had been waiting for him, and had opened its hand. His outline softened. Then it resolved. The lines of him drew in and in, folding, nesting, turning to fine pale loops, one within the next, until where an old man had knelt there stood a slender spire of translucent rings, taller than a man, turning slowly in the wind and ringing very softly, in perfect tune with all the others.

Renata made a sound Vash had never heard a human being make.

The white line reached the wall.

"Run!"

They ran for the town, Vash with one arm around Renata's waist. The line followed, steady, unhurried, as a tide follows a beach. It took the graveyard. It took the oaks, which did not fall but simply went white and glassy and stood there ringing. It took the wall. She heard it behind her, the vast soft bell, growing.

They burst into the square a hundred meters ahead of it.

There was no one left. The last of the transports had gone. The tents were empty. A single skimmer stood on the commons, its engines idling, with Data at the controls and Dara beside him.

"Come!" Data shouted. "Forty seconds!"

"The hall!" Picard's voice, somewhere to the left, hoarse and far. "There are people in the hall!"

She stopped.

The long hall sat at the eastern edge of the town, a low wide building of pale timber with a dozen windows, lit from inside. The front was sweeping toward it across the yard. She could see shapes behind the glass. Six, seven. A woman with a child. Two men. A boy of sixteen with a crutch.

"They said it was clear!" Tobin was screaming. "They said it was clear!"

"They had the wrong list." Picard had come up beside her. His face was gray. "Marsh's roster had them at the school. They went back for the harvest books."

The white line touched the hall's eastern wall.

Vash did not decide. There was no moment of it. She simply found she was running, across the square, across the gravel, with Renata's shout behind her and the sound of the bells rising all around her like the roar of an ocean, and the white light came across the yard toward the hall, and she got there first.

She kicked in the door.

Inside, the air was warm and thick, and the light had gone strange. It fell through the windows in slanting bars, and everything it touched was starting to change. The floorboards had gone pale. The long tables were turning translucent, their legs thinning to rings. A woman stood frozen by the nearest window with a child in her arms, both of them staring down at their own hands. Where the woman's fingers touched the sill, the skin had begun to go clear.

"Come on!" Vash seized the woman's arm. "Come on, move!"

The woman didn't move. Her eyes were wide and glassy and very calm. Her lips were moving very slightly, shaping a rhythm Vash knew.

Seven notes.

"No," Vash said. "No, no, no—"

"Vash." A hand closed on her shoulder. Dara. Breathless, hatless, wide-eyed, pale as chalk. She had come across the square at a dead run. "Take the child. I'll take her."

"She won't move—"

"She will." Dara put her face close to the woman's. She said something very low and very fast in the language of the Makers, three or four soft syllables, and the woman blinked. Her eyes cleared. She drew in a huge, shuddering breath, and looked down at the child in her arms, and began to scream.

Dara swung her around and pushed. The woman stumbled for the door. Vash grabbed the boy with the crutch, who was sobbing, and two men who had dropped to their knees, and drove them after her. Seven of them. Eight. She counted twice. She knew it was not enough.

The floor under her boots had gone to glass. She felt it ring. The cell at her hip was screaming. Its display read four.

It was a long time afterward before she learned the count. Fourteen had been in the hall. Eight had come out.

She was on the threshold, with the boy on her arm and the white light coming in through every window, when she heard Renata's voice. Renata had followed her. Renata, seventy-one, in her chalk-smeared trousers, in the center of the long hall with its floor going to glass, had gone back in for the last person in the room. She wore no harness.

"Renata!"

The old woman didn't turn. She was crouched beside a small figure on the floor, a girl of perhaps nine, on her knees in a patch of light with her eyes closed and her lips moving and her small hands held out before her, palms up, like a child receiving a gift. The fingers of both hands were clear as glass. Rings of light were forming in them.

Renata picked her up. She wrapped both arms around the child. She turned and ran.

She was three strides from the door when the light reached her left hand.

Vash saw it. She would always see it. The glow ran along the old woman's knuckles, and her fingers went clear. Renata looked down at them, and didn't scream. She looked at Vash across the last ten meters of pale floor, and Vash saw a thing in her eyes that she had seen only twice in her life, once in a tomb, once in a mirror. It was the pure clear understanding of a person who knew exactly what she was about to lose and had decided, in the last instant, to do one thing more.

She threw the child.

It wasn't a graceful throw. It was a soft hard arc across the threshold, and the girl landed in Vash's arms with a gasp, alive, unchanged, sobbing. Vash staggered. She dropped to her knees on the gravel with the child clutched to her chest.

"Renata!"

Dara went past her like a thrown spear.

She dived through the door. Vash saw her take Renata by the wrist, and heave. She saw the pale light crawl up Dara's own sleeve, and saw Dara's face, a foot from Renata's, white as bone, and heard her say, in a cracked small voice, "Not like this. Not like this." And then she hauled with everything she had, and the two of them came out through the door and fell in a heap on the gravel, and the hall behind them turned to light.

It didn't burn. It didn't fall. It simply stood there, glowing, a great pale tower of rings, every board and beam and rafter resolved into the same soft perfect lattice, ringing with a thousand small clear bells.

Vash stared at it.

Somewhere behind her, Picard was shouting. Data was dragging her to her feet. The skimmer was screaming at her from the commons. The white tide was in the street. She couldn't hear any of it. She looked at Renata, lying in the gravel, with her left arm held up before her face and her fingers clear as glass. She looked at Dara, on her knees beside her, hands pressed to her mouth.

Dara was looking at the hall. She was looking at the tower of rings where six people had stood, and the look on her face was a thing that Vash couldn't bear.

It was not triumph. It wasn't faith. It was the naked, unguarded face of a person who has spent her whole life preparing for a miracle, and has just seen it arrive.

"Oh, God," Dara whispered. "Oh, God. It's real."

The transporter took them all.