City of Ruins (12 page)

“We decided it’d be all right for him to give
you a Christmas present,” Thirty says glumly.

“Is it Christmas?” I ask.

“Eventually,” she says. She doesn’t seem
happy at all.

“Eli,” my dad continues, “in all this
disruption, this was the first chance I had to go down the hallway
by myself
. I wasn’t sure where they were keeping you. But I
didn’t want anything to go wrong while you were here.”

“So you were a prisoner, too?”

“That’s enough, Sandusky.” Thirty is rubbing
her forehead, like she has the world’s most terrible headache.
“After all, we let you see him, from time to time.”

“They let me watch you,” my dad says.
“Through the monitors. It looked like you were getting better!” he
adds, trying to brighten up the whole weird, painful situation.

“How could you still work for them, after all
they’ve done to our family?” I ask him. “You? Of all people.”

He’s not trying to make the best of anything
now. His eyes are wet. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a
soggy, crumpled piece of paper. It’s a crayon-and-marker drawing I
made, back when I was little. Barnstormer Robot Man. It seems to be
covered in…plasmechanical goo.

My dad lowers his voice. “I took this from
storage. They retrieved it with the wreckage of your friend’s ship.
I kept it in my shirt. Here.” He taps his chest. By his heart.

That’s so corny.

So how come my eyes are wet, too?

“I found it when they let me use —”

“That’s classified, Sands!” Thirty shouts,
coming over to us. She grabs the paper out of my dad’s hands. “So
is that.”

“I was using the alien technology,” my dad
says to me.

“That’s enough!”

“Saurian technology?” I ask, starting to
figure out why this secret base feels even more secret, even more
like a prison, than it did before.

“To perfect it.”

“Stop, Sands. Right now.”

“Perfect what?”

“Time travel, Eli. I didn’t know you were
coming back! I didn’t know if I would
see
you again! I came
here because I thought it was my only chance to —”

Beep. Beep.

“Chance to what?”

Mr. Howe, meanwhile, has been looking through
A.J.’s Bible, going carefully through the pages that were the most
bent and wrinkled. Then he stops, and his face goes white.

Beep.

Thirty takes a small Comphone out of her
pocket. She forgets to put it on “shield” because the face of the
man she’s talking to pops out and hovers in front of her.

Sszzzt.

The time sphere is still crackling, and she
turns away from it.

“Yes, sir?” she asks.

There’s yelling from the little holographic
man, but it’s the kind of yelling people do when they’re scared,
and I hear things like “emergency,” “shut down,” “direct orders,”
“panic,” “control,” and even the word
fear
, and when it’s
over Thirty just looks more tired than anything else.

“That was headquarters,” she says, after a
moment. “History, as we know it, seems to be falling apart. To a
degree we may not be able to control. Apparently, something has
even happened to the Bible.”

She looks toward Mr. Howe, who is still
holding the book, and not moving, except when he manages to get the
word
look
out of his mouth.

He’s not even sure who to pass the book
to.

I take it before Thirty can. It has
old-fashioned color plates in it, the kind that don’t move, to
illustrate all the Bible stories. One page is titled “Jeremiah and
the Rebuilder, Standing in the Ruins.”

There’s a picture of this Jeremiah, who I
know was one of those old Bible guys, though I’m not exactly sure
which one. I remember that Noah had the ark, and David had the
slingshot. But which one was Jeremiah?

Next to him, in the picture, is the one
called “The Rebuilder.”

In the illustration, it looks like A.J. A.J.
as someone imagined him dressed in old-time clothes. Real old-time
clothes — like way before Thea’s time.

My dad takes the book from me, and then
eventually Thirty looks at it, but it’s Mr. Howe who actually
starts reading out loud the text that goes with the picture.

“The Rebuilder came when

everything was broken.

‘I am a small man,’ he said

‘but who will start setting stones

with me

one upon the other?”

“That’s not in the Bible,” he says to
himself. He looks up at the rest of us. “That’s not supposed to be
in here.” He seems to be shaking a little bit.

Thirty thumbs through the book now. “Second
Jeremiah?” she says. “There is no book of Second Jeremiah. Only
one. And Jeremiah disappears at the end of it.” She shakes her
head. “Nobody will believe anything,” she adds, “if this keeps
up.”

“Nobody will believe us anymore anyway,” Mr.
Howe says, “after they find out everything we’ve done in
secret.”

“You believed us,” she says to him.

“And then, Sheila, I woke up.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The Comphone again.

“Yes, sir?”

Whoever her boss is, he’s yelling at her some
more. She sighs, then finally hangs up without saying goodbye.

“He just received a report from an
archaeological dig in Israel. In Jerusalem. They found a piece of
mirror, with the word
FAMILY
written on
it. In English. That wasn’t the only thing: a crumpled page of
Bible text, also in English. A scrap of paper, like a piece from
one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Except this was from a book.”

“Is he sure?” my dad asks. “It’s probably
recent. Tourists still go there, even after the war.”

“It was found hundreds of feet down. Meaning
the mirror and the book are each nearly three thousand years old.
From a time when there was no English, when there weren’t any
mirrors, when they weren’t printing any books. Let alone a Bible
they were still busy living out.”

“It could be a hoax.”

“The page even has a number. 278.”

Mr. Howe flips through the pages in A.J.’s
Bible. “Page 278,” he announces, almost like he’s won a contest or
something, “is missing from this book!”

Dad lets out a big sigh. “We were trying to
control the time sphere, the parameters, how far back the fold in
spacetime went,” he says slowly. “Running simple experiments with
what your friend Clyne calls a ‘chrono-compass,’ to see if we could
control, or pinpoint —”

“I mean it, Dr. Sands.”

“Mean what, Sheila?” my dad asks. “I’m
talking to my son. That’s the only thing that means anything right
now.”

Thirty doesn’t say anything, but sits down
instead. Except there isn’t a chair, and she plops down on the
floor.

“As far as we could tell,” Dad tells me, “the
dimensional rift we were working with stretched back about
twenty-five hundred years — back to the time of the Bible.”

“You mean, A.J. just jumped through? And
landed there?” I ask.

Thirty doesn’t seem to mind being on the
ground. She puts her hand on her knees, and rests her chin. Like a
kid. Before this moment, I could never imagine her doing anything
“like a kid.”

The two Twenty-Fives run over to her.

“No, no, no,” she says, waving them away.
“Just leave me where I am. And bring me something.”

“What do you need?” one of them asks.

She nods toward me. “His hat. Bring the young
man his hat. Suddenly, we have another job for him.”

Chapter Ten

Eli: Gehenna-spawn

583 B.C.E.

“This feels a little like Alexandria,” Thea
tells me.

And if she means a place with stone
buildings, rock-lined streets, and no lights, she’s right. I can’t
see where we are. But it’s cold here. A lot colder than
Alexandria.

Though my face suddenly feels warm…

Quickly, I’m on the ground, upchucking. Even
the fancy cleaning and repair that the DARPA folks gave to my cap,
and the new automatic Thickskin apparatus which allows me to keep
wearing it on my head without direct skin-to-wool contact, can’t
change any of that.

Time travel still makes me nauseous.

But I don’t have time to think about that.
When I double over, I’m surprised that my hands land in snow. Not a
lot of it, not like what you’d get at Fort Mandan or someplace. But
still, it’s snow.

I never heard of snow in any of these hot,
dry Bible places. Maybe all this prime-nexus business didn’t work
out like they thought, and I’m somewhere cold, like, I don’t know,
ancient Norway or Sweden.

I guess we’ll know if the Vikings show
up.

“Is this Yerushalayim?” Thea asks. She says
it differently, even through the lingo-spot.

I get back to my feet in time to steady her.
“I hope so.”

And now the Vikings — or somebody — are
showing up. A bunch of somebodies, moving in the dark. They’re
groups of shadows and light, holding the only shiny things —
besides the moon and the stars — glinting in the night dark right
now: spear tips, catching the reflection of torches.

Torches held by people who are heading right
at us.

Whoever they are, Thea’s right — this part
really is like Alexandria.

They’re yelling at us, though they’re still
too far for me understand what they’re saying. Calling us names,
maybe. Strange names, like “Philadelphians.” What’s wrong with
Philadelphia? The A’s came from there, and even the Phillies have
had a couple of good years.

Wait, no. The word is
Philistines
.

And…
Hitters
? No —
Hittites
. And
Babylonians
.

Bible names. I’ve heard A.J. use them. Groups
of people who lived a long time ago, and then died out, which is
exactly what I hope Thea and I are not about to do.

The spear-holders and the torch-carriers
close in on us, and in the firelight, I’m seeing that maybe this
isn’t like Alexandria, after all.

These aren’t professional soldiers. These
aren’t Vikings, either. This doesn’t even seem like the kind of mob
Tiberius had following him when he came after Thea and her
mother.

In fact, the spears aren’t really all even
spears. In the torchlight, I can see people’s ragged clothes, and
how their weapons look like they were put together with rocks and
splintered wood and strips of leather, like something out of an old
caveman cartoon or something, except those shows were funny, and
this isn’t.

These people are scared. Not
cartoon-pretend-getting-up-again-after-being-knocked-down scared,
but the real thing.

Whoever these people are, they’re as afraid
of us as we are of them.

“She’s Gehenna-marked,” someone whispers.
They’re looking at Thea.

The place where they dug up A.J.’s missing
Bible page was originally for “The Gehenna-marked,” according to
the words scratched into nearby stones. A translation of the
symptoms described the “slowly-unfolding fever that consumes the
afflicted in the permanent fire of their visions.”

Symptoms that made it sound a lot like slow
pox.

That’s what Thirty told me, right before I
left: “ ‘Behold, I will bring healing and cure, and I will cure
them.’ ”

It was one of the lines from Jeremiah,
circled on A.J.’s missing, three-thousand-year-old page, which was
found near the scratching in the stones. Was he talking about slow
pox?

“Get her,” another voice hisses now. “No more
Gehenna-spawn. No more strangers. We’ve suffered enough.”

With their torches and their homemade spears
and their underfed faces, the crowd starts to move toward us.
They’re still scared of us, but the fear has shifted, and now we’re
just something they want to stamp out, to destroy, the way grownups
do when they think destroying something will make them feel
better.

And behind them are even more people, faces I
can’t make out in the flames.

This could be bad. And frankly, things have
already been hard enough.

But I guess sometimes you don’t get a choice.
Maybe that’s what my dad was trying to tell me.

“No,” a voice says. “No.”

There’s a figure moving on the hill behind
the crowd. A shadow.

Some of the heads turn.

“Not her,” the voice says again.

The fear doesn’t go out of the crowd, but
their words are mixed with a kind of excitement when they recognize
the speaker: “It’s Jeremiah! Jeremiah’s here! He came back!”

Jeremiah was the one in the picture with A.J.
The prophet. He steps even closer to the torchlight, and now I can
see his face. He doesn’t look like the painting in the Bible. In
those pictures, they make it look like everyone has time to see a
barber and keep their clothes washed.

Instead, Jeremiah’s hair looks stringy, like
he’s been camping out for, I don’t know, two years or so, and from
what I can see of his eyes in this light, they look like someone
keeps waking him out of a good’s night sleep, over and over.

He’s wrapped up in a really big shawl or cape
or something. Robes maybe, that have also been out camping for two
years. And because it’s cold, everyone has their clothes pulled
around them tight.

“Take this one to the Rebuilder.”

The Rebuilder! A.J.! Great. Unbelievable! We
can see A.J., find out what he’s been doing here, and whether he’s
learned anything about curing slow pox. Then we can bring him back
with us. The easiest time-travel job ever.

Before we left to come here, I’d already told
them I wasn’t going to go to ancient Jerusalem without Thea.
Because trying to help her slow pox is the only reason I’d still
have for going anywhere.

Well, that and trying to find my mom.

Other guys who have both mom and girlfriend
problems at least have everybody living in the same century.

But of course Thea’s not my girlfriend. But
it’s kinda my fault she’s unstuck in time, so I’m responsible for
her. That’s what I told my dad, right before I left again. I also
told him he could come with us, too.