A Grave Tree (25 page)

“Sylvain, I can’t keep going,” Abbey panted, her voice a faint croak. She was starting to misstep a bit, her hand pressed hard against her left side.

Mark decided to fall back with the pursuers. He concentrated and paused, and then he was among them. There were three men and four women, all wearing fur and all carrying spears, their dirty soot-bathed faces fierce, their momentum slowed only by the fact that they had to stop occasionally to retrieve their thrown spears. If they stopped throwing the spears and simply tried to overtake Abbey and Sylvain, they would probably have no problem overpowering them. Yet something was clearly holding them back. It was like they didn’t want to get too close to the fleeing pair. Like perhaps they were afraid.

Mark returned to Abbey and Sylvain.

“We’re going to have to find a place to hide and reconstruct the screen,” Sylvain managed to gasp. “But it has to be perfect this time, and we have to do it right away. When I say hide, we drop and immediately construct the screen.”

“I don’t know,” Abbey said. “I don’t know if I can do it. I’m too out of breath to concentrate.”

Mark wondered if he could help, like the others had helped him back at the Madrona.

“How much further?” gasped Abbey. A spear whistled past her head, narrowly missing her.

Mark reached out with his mind, trying to push the air somehow like he had on the diversion. Again it felt viscous, like water. Not thick enough for him to push with any force like Sandy did, but he could move it, just a little.

Abbey turned her head as if she felt something. Mark gathered as much energy and air as he could and thrust it behind her. She burst forward, shooting up to where Sylvain was scrambling along, and almost stumbled in the process. Mark was so surprised that he lost his focus, and Abbey immediately dropped behind again. Mark concentrated. This time, instead of one big thrust, he focused on applying a steady push to the air behind Abbey.

“Something’s pushing me,” she managed to say.

Sylvain shot a look behind them directly at Mark, and Mark wondered if perhaps the man could see him.

“Stay the course,” he said. “We’re almost there. Be ready to build the screen as soon as I say.”

Mark felt himself tiring. He wouldn’t be able to keep up the pressure much longer.

“To your left! Now!” murmured Sylvain sharply. He grabbed Abbey by the elbow and pulled her into a small gully.

They rolled and then hunched down, their bodies covered in leaves and bracken. Mark could see the ripples in the air where they were pulling the energy, knitting together an invisible wall. He automatically added his efforts to theirs. His head ached. From the exertion, or perhaps from blow to his head that Sandy had administered? Was he in fact unconscious now? Was he dead?

He poured every last bit of effort he had into helping with the wall as the pursuers sailed past the small clearing where Abbey and Sylvain hid.

“It’s been terrible, absolutely terrible, trying to protect Mark.” Sandy’s voice.

His eyelids fluttered. He was lying on his side in the trees by the river bank, a fur-clad man wearing a beaver on his head staring concernedly into his eyes. Gunfire still echoed from the top of the diversion. Caleb and a few of the strangely dressed men had clustered around Sandy, who had an odd gash—which looked knife-inflicted—on her arm. She seemed to be weeping, which was also odd. Even more odd (in Mark’s mind) was the fact that Caleb was also wearing furs and leather.

“He’s coming to,” the beaver-hatted man reported.

Sandy’s voice was louder. “We’d just escaped when two of them came upon us. You must have scared them off. They’re working for Selena. I’m so glad you came when you did.” She threw her arms around Caleb.

Mark sat up rubbing his head. Caleb was asking Sandy how many men there were and about the location of the entrances to the building. Sandy was lying outright.

Caleb looked over at Mark. “Are you okay, Mark? Can you find your way back down the river with Sandy to the old dam? We have to go help the others. Then I’ll meet up with you there.”

“She hit me,” Mark declared, pointing at Sandy.

Sandy addressed him in the slow clear speech that she used with him when she was in front of others. “Oh, Mark, it all happened so fast. The man hit your head really hard. You’re just not remembering correctly.”

Caleb cocked his head at Mark. “Listen, I need to let them know we’ve found you. The whole operation was to rescue you.”

The man in the beaver hat stood up and scratched his head, looking from Caleb to Mark and then back again. “I don’t know, sir. Everyone’s been talking about how you look different… you know, younger. No offense, sir. You look good… just like you might have tripped over the fountain of youth or something. But Mark here… I’m in his squadron, and he looks way different than his usual self. I’m not even sure this
is
Mark. Maybe the real Mark is still being kept prisoner.” The man turned back to Mark. “No offense, sir, if you are Mark, but you sure don’t look like him,” he concluded.

Mark blinked at him. Was Warrior Mark actually addressed as “sir” by these men? Did that mean his future self was actually a leader in addition to being a warrior?

Caleb flicked his gaze at Mark and his lips tightened. He seemed to be trying to ask Mark something, but Mark couldn’t tell what.

Sandy fluttered her eyelashes like she always did when she was around Caleb. At first, Mark had wondered if she had something in her eyes, but now he suspected that it was some sort of tic. “Well, they’ve probably been up to visit the magic fountain of youth, of course. Don’t the rest of you know about it? It’s just up past the diversion.” Then she widened her eyes and pressed a hand against her chest. “Or, oops, was that a secret? I’m sorry.”

Caleb’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and the rest of the men’s eyes went sort of buggy as they looked both Caleb and Mark up and down.

“I thought you said you didn’t use magic, sir,” beaver-hat man whispered. “Except for just the once to move the people to the promised land.”

“I don’t,” Caleb said. “I don’t know what Sandy is talking about.”

The yells on the diversion had escalated, and when Mark looked up he could see that several of the fur-clad man had managed to climb the stairs and take down the two men with guns on the platform. The door to the building opened, and another man with a gun started shooting from behind the cover of the door.

When Mark turned his attention back to the people around him, he realized that the air felt like it had been electrified. There was a surge of energy like Mark had felt before, but this time it wasn’t directed at him, but at Caleb’s men. They were thrown backward, away from Mark and Caleb. Two of them shrieked, and the other two swung their fists and arms at the nothingness. Then all four of them turned and ran away, their faces wild and distorted. Mark swung his gaze back to Sandy, but she hadn’t moved.

“Wait!” said Caleb, calling after the men. “Wait!”

But the men only picked up their pace.

Caleb turned and shook his head at Sandy. “Why did you tell them that? What just happened?” Mark squinted his eyes at Caleb. Hadn’t he felt the surge of energy? Didn’t he know what she’d just done?

Sandy fluttered her eyelashes (again). “I’m so sorry, Caleb. I was trying to come up with a plausible explanation for why you and Mark look so young. I didn’t think you wanted to tell them about the stones and docks. I was trying to help. I don’t know what just happened. It seemed like a strange gust of wind or something.”

Mark studied this new Sandy, with her smooth skin and bouncy blond hair. This was not the Sandy who had demanded the combination to the door, imprisoned him and Jake, and nearly pushed him off the diversion. It was, however, the Sandy who had just punched him in the temple. So both Sandys were bad. But when had the Sandys changed, and how?

Sandy darted a look at the action on the dam, and Mark followed her gaze. So far the man with the gun by the door seemed to be holding his position, but more of Caleb’s people were making their way across the diversion.

Caleb lowered his eyebrows. “I have to go catch up with them. Are you two okay making your way down to the dam alone? You can wait for me there. Then we need to go find Ian, Sylvain, and Abbey.”

Mark blinked at him. Had Caleb not felt the surge of energy? Did he not understand that Sandy was dangerous?

“NO!” The word finally exploded out of Mark. “NO!” But he was so frustrated that he couldn’t seem to string any words together, and just started repeating “no, no, no,” while rocking back and forth.

“Oh dear, he’s having an episode again,” Sandy said. She extended her hand to his wrist, and an invisible bolt of charge seemed to come from it, making Mark’s teeth chatter. “I’d feel so much safer if you stayed with us,” Sandy said.

Mark tried to say something, but his lips felt immobilized from the jolt of electricity. He noticed for the first time that the injury on Sandy’s wrist from the arrow had vanished, making him doubly sure that this was a different Sandy. The younger Sandy. But where had the older Sandy gone?

Caleb looked hurriedly at Mark and then over his shoulder. “I really should go. The plan was to rescue Mark, their Mark, but if Selena was holding the two of you captive, I’m not sure if older Mark was even a prisoner. Did you see him?”

“No, it was just us,” Sandy said. “Please don’t go.”

The water pouring off the diversion had finally created a sufficient flow in the river. They could open the spillways on the dam now… and then Sandy would know that Mark had been lying, which in light of the fact that she could throw energy, give electrical charges, and punch him out, was quite terrifying.

Caleb now had his back to the conflict and was looking with concern at Mark, clearly (even to Mark’s limited sensing capacity) trying to decide what to do. Mark thought he felt another surge of energy farther away up on the diversion, and men fell off the diversion left and right like little ants, the plummeting water too thunderous for their cries to be heard.

Sandy grasped Caleb’s arm (in addition to eye fluttering, she did a lot of arm grabbing) and pressed her body close to his, speaking in a soft, almost mesmerizing tone. “I really need your help with Mark, and I didn’t want to tell you, to get your hopes up, but I think I’ve found your parents. I came here with your mother to help her, and then she disappeared. This isn’t your fight. It’s in the future, and depending on what we do now, it may not even happen. It would be better if it didn’t happen. But we can’t change it today, here, without endangering ourselves. What matters now is getting your parents back and getting home. Mark and I were on our way down to see if we could unlock the door to the second derivative point—the wormhole. We can save them. Come with us.”

Abbey trotted along through the trees, her throat like sand. She needed water, badly, but Sylvain refused to check his pace, wanting to put as much distance between them and Caleb’s people as possible. Her face felt bruised and scratched from the incessant thrash of tree branches, and her legs ached. Maybe she was coming down with Russell’s illness. Maybe her death would be an ignominious one, here in the forest as a result of dehydration.

“The chapel isn’t too much farther,” Sylvain mumbled. “Just another half mile.” He’d been offering encouragements like this for the last several minutes as if aware that Abbey’s energy was failing. They were going to retrieve the stone and some rations, which apparently were stored in the chapel, and then go and try to liberate Russell and find Jake. Sylvain assured her that he had a sixth sense like a homing beacon for finding other people with witch blood, kind of like the doorbell that rang in his head when someone used the stones.

“The future is meant to be observed and understood. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the future are bound to create new ones, and so the cascade of futures begins,” he said, almost absently, by rote, more to himself than to her.

“What?”

After doing a shoulder check, Sylvain slowed down a bit, and after a few seconds Abbey found she could breathe again. “It’s just an old saying I learned as part of the trials. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so determined to achieve a win-win when I helped Caleb, your mother never would have gone to Nowhere and rescued all those witches.”

“But shouldn’t they have been rescued?” Abbey replied. “If someone could rescue them?”

“It was against the rules of the Guild,” Sylvain said. “It was generally believed that if someone went to Nowhere, they should stay there, because they had a tendency to meddle inappropriately in the timeline. But I don’t think your mother ever believed that about Sandy. And it wasn’t Mark’s fault that he ended up in Nowhere. There were exceptions. And your mother isn’t one for rule-following generally, especially since the membership in the Guild, until the mass exodus from Nowhere, had become a little thin, so nobody had been following rules much. I’m afraid I may have been guilty of a few missteps myself, very minor of course. A few lucky investments. A few right guesses in terms of my business development—”

“Getting rid of your competition,” Abbey muttered.

Sylvain scrunched up his face and looked blank for a second. “Hmm? Oh yes, right. That. Like I said, don’t assume that was personally motivated.”

Abbey snorted. “You didn’t want to ruin Simon’s company so your own operating system had a better chance at competing against his? Is that why you hired him this time around? To prevent him from ever creating his operating system in the first place? And it sounds like it was a double win-win, because Caleb’s people said you dug up their camp after they left. Was that to get your aluminum? But it looks like you didn’t win after all since Sandy now owns the mining company and your operating system isn’t nearly as good as Simon’s because space travel doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in this new future, and it’s all under the control of Transplanetary.”

Sylvain halted and looked at her. “What? What do you mean? Simon works for me? For Salvador Systems? Transplanetary? Frank Simpson’s startup? What are you talking about?”