The Book of Joan

Chapter Twelve

Night. Every time the dull gouache of day gives way to the ebony of night, Joan feels like an alien. Fucking lunar landscape. Nearly impossible to believe this is Earth; even she has to remind herself she is not belly-down on the moon. That the dirt in her mouth holds no nutrients, that it has become more like chalk. She knows all through her bones and her flesh that her body against the ground is closer to reptile than human, for—like that of a reptile stalking the vast desert wastelands—her existence has been reduced to the slender impulse of survival. Salvage missions. There’s no life left but them. Or what is left of Earth. That’s what she’s coming to believe. Earth is, now, a spotted apocalyptic terrain: muted sepia sun during the day, moon so faint it looks like a bruise at night. A lifeless ball of dirt. At least at the surface.

They wait. She and Leone. For the right moment.

Joan rolls onto her back, looks over to another boulder, where Leone crouches. Then she closes her eyes and feels her own face. It is calming to feel her face. When she closes her eyes and tracks the burns on her skin, her neck, shoulders, it is as if she enters another dimension, one in which her body becomes an undiscovered land and not the grotesque burned thing that she knows it is. Under her hands, she can reinvent things on the surface of her skin. She can imagine that her face is a terrain. The burns stretching and diving like microravines and mountains, or pinching and puckering like the foothills of a country. She used to have a country. Everyone did.

Once there was a girl from France. She heard a song and became a warrior for her country, but her country lost its shape and aim in the Wars, as all countries did, and then there were just combatants and civilians, and then just civilians gone brutal against one another, endless violence. Then the girl made a choice.

Once there was a girl.

She does this at night, when she can’t sleep. She closes her eyes and ritually runs her fingertips over the geography of her face. Years of childhood and family recede and depress, replaced by the valleys and mountains of scar tissue and aging. Under her right eye and where her cheekbone begins, the war years. Her gone adolescence. At her nose bridge the burned skin turns, almost spiral, and in her mind’s eye she can feel how near rage and love are in us all. We try to pretend they are opposites or at far poles from one another, but really they meet and bridge at the center of a face. They make a nexus. She feels the fiction of faith at the bridge of her nose. If she presses down on the waxen scar she can feel her skeleton underneath. How easily she could bore her finger like a drill into her own gray matter.

Near her jaw, against the edge of her mouth, she feels the people she once loved. Her mother. Her father. Her brother. And then those she learned to love through labor and resistance. Brothers and sisters in arms. Love is a word with ever-exploding definitions forged at the corners of her mouth, her mouth now set like a jagged slit against any expression or feeling.

Her face is a new world. Her skin carries the trace of her primary wound. She lives in the killer’s body; she lives in the body of one who might make life. She thought the killing was justified. In the wasteland that is left of her desires and righteous aims, she can see now that there is no just violence. Violence merely is. It murders us the moment we bring it to consciousness. Under her fingertips her burned chin sits like a guilty, poreless butte, a stubborn reminder that she was put to flame. Burned after she blotted out the sun.

If she travels the territory back up to the left side of her face carefully with her fingertips, where the burns left their most brutal mark, that place where her eye is misshapen—the lid pulling down too far, farther than a sleeper’s—that place is Leone.

My eye is you, Leone.

My eye was always you.

A clicking sound. Leone signaling. Joan opens her eyes, scans the scene before them, and nods back to Leone.

Joan elbows her way less than an inch at a time along the ground, through low-lying thistles and the skeletal remains of shrub brush. The dirt smells of dried and dead things and grinds into her clothing. She pauses and clutches a handful of dirt that has a small bit of nearly petrified twig in it. She smiles. Reaches for her rifle. The rifle’s infrared light traces a path along the ground in front of her. When she reaches a boulder twice human in size, she pushes herself up into a crouched position. It’s roughly three hours till what passes for daylight. She props her rifle up onto her thigh, turns, and sits down with her back against the rock.

She takes a deep but soundless breath. Holds it. Closes her eyes. When she opens them, the vertical line of her rifle in front of her splits her vision.

What moves her is the gas-piston operating system of her weapon, the quick-change barrel, the firing pin block, and ambidextrous charging handle. She knows the Magpul Masada better than any human. Whatever conversations, whatever potential human relationships passed earlier in her life are moot. Her weapon is now her brutal kindred spirit.

On the other side of the boulder, one hundred yards across rock and dead brush and dirt in an area that was once populated by a small stand of fir trees, is a camouflaged technological arsenal, guarded by what looks like two CIEL human sentries. Their skin too white. Grafted and puckered. Leone discovered the site nearly by accident in a routine radar sweep, literally suspended over their heads at a crap station in Tunnel 27. Joan can make out the rise of a Russian-made machine gun turret alongside a row of explosive warheads—probably American, or perhaps French—from the blue sheen of their shells. It’s difficult to tell if the small mound is meant strictly for munitions or if it holds some deeper useful secret. Kill the guards, raid the arsenal, blow it to shit. There is always a chance of finding something useful. Joan pulls down her night goggles and inhales. Her bicep twitches. She swallows. Dirt and the memory of sage. Night sniping always calms her nerves.

Low to the ground again, she peers through her scope; the sentries’ alabaster skin glints in the dulled moonlight. One guard stands up like an idiot—stretching? He scratches the place where his balls used to be. His head gleams in the muted moonlight. The other guard sits at some kind of makeshift outdoor terminal. The flaps of the camouflage are up. Probably they’ve had no action for some time. She aims the infrared laser at the ear of the standing guard.

That’s when she sees it. It’s not just an ammo station. It’s a holding station. Slightly to the left, barely camouflaged under some kind of pile of refuse, two pairs of deadened eyes.

Two animals in a cage.

No. Inside the crude wooden cage are two children, if you can call them that. Feral. Matted hair and filthy skin, bones nearly visible, eyes as wild as a jaguar’s. Where on Earth had they come from?

She closes her eyes. Her first thought: she reminded herself again of the fact of things, the traces of human left. We are not, after all, alone. She and Leone had already come across a child or two. Her second: What is the point of saving half-dead children? It’s the kind of question she asks now. A hopeless question. A question without heart. Whatever life is left on Earth and whatever lives are squirming out their worthless worm existence above, she has no part in the drama.

Joan opens her eyes with her rifle sight poised at the standing guard’s ear. She lifts her head nearly imperceptibly, and signals to Leone where to shoot. For years they have done this odd dance, Joan setting up kills, Leone executing the shots.

Leone pulls the trigger. Always Leone.

One guard’s head squirts open like a grape. The headless body wavers and then drops to the earth, thudding and kicking up dirt.

Joan opens her eyes and draws up on one knee, taking aim at the second guard, who is busy flailing around trying to get at his own rifle as he scrambles for cover beneath the table. Leone follows her gaze. Fixes the target. Fires. His chest spills onto the table, spraying it with blood and fragments of rib.

Then the night goes quiet again. If there were trees, wind would be whistling through their branches. Joan stands, slings her brutal intimate over her shoulder, and walks the distance to the dead men. With each step she struggles to decide what to do with whatever they find inside that cage.

In the dark, the blood is black and blue.

Chapter Thirteen

At the munitions site, Joan stares first at the dead guards, then briefly up into the godless night sky, then over at the cage. Girls. They didn’t make a fucking sound. That guts her. Though the moon merely smudges a spot in the sky, and the brilliance of stars has faded to a dull salt-and-peppering, the night sky still feels familiar to her. In the dark, a person’s shadow is nothing. Like the past losing its light.

She doesn’t need to think much about what to do with the pile of girls. There are only two. And one doesn’t have long, from the looks of it. You can see in a person’s eyes when life is leaving. Something going slack and empty. Joan’s heart folds and darkens.

Leone walks closer and drops her head so profoundly her jaw clacks.

“Motherfuckers.”

Then Leone bends down as gentle as a mother, unlatches the cage, and lifts the most lifelike into her arms. “Can you speak?” she whispers to the thing.

“Can’t feel… insides,” the creature rasps.

Leone clutches the girl so close, Joan fears she’ll break one of the girl’s arms.

“Leone,” Joan says gently, touching her shoulder.

Her fellow captive dies the moment they touch her, her mouth open in the shape of an O, her eyes lost to matter.

Joan looks into the alive girl’s eyes, vacant foggy pools of gray. Did they injure you? Did they starve you? Did they even remember the difference between human and animal? Was there a difference? The girl takes what seems to be a breath larger than she is, stares intensely into Leone’s eyes, and never breathes again.

They bury the girls in the ground because there is nothing else to do about anything. Joan’s mind carries what everyone’s does: memories, ideas, random bits of knowledge, desires, wounds, synaptic firings. But it carries more than that. Sometimes she wishes it didn’t. How old had those girls been? She was so young when she heard the song that drove the rest of her life. And the first time she was very much afraid. More afraid than she’d ever been about death. Had they been afraid? Of death? Or something else?

She met Leone when they were both girls. Leone with long black hair, Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back. Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle her. They swam naked in clear pools deep in the mountain ranges of the various countries where they were fighting. How they curled into each other’s bodies alone next to night fires away from their garrisons. How Joan rose in ranks with the speed of a miracle when she proved she could win battles by engulfing the enemy in elements, how Leone was never away from her side, Leone’s eyes shining blue-green like Earth from space, Leone laughing in the most dire of circumstances, the girl that Leone was slipping into—warrior—before she even had a chance to grow breasts.

If only Joan could give Leone back her childhood—any childhood—with dogs and kites and long swims in azure pools and endless forts they could build together by firelight, a fort for everywhere they had been, and dancing shadows and wolves and night creatures their fellowship…

But there is no such power.

War pervaded and imploded their childhoods, then became a monolithic violence and power so displaced that it lifted up off the ground to distinguish itself. Like a god would. CIEL.

And more bloodshed than all wars in human time added together.

She looks sideways at Leone, standing over the graves of the girls, long enough to see that Leone is not crying. Rather, her face looks like a stone relief: scored by grief, edged with anger.

She walks over to the second guard Leone shot and nudges him with her boot. His chest is a gristled blood-heap; his face wears the unmistakable slack skin of the dead. The first guard barely has a head. She can smell the metallic mix of blood and spent bullets.

“You think there’s a Skyline near?” Leone’s voice a compass.

Skylines. The thousands of invisible tethers reaching from the surface of Earth to CIEL’s geostationary orbits, urban platforms, and to CIEL’s web of stations.

“Look at this grunt,” Joan says without turning, gesturing toward the dead faceless guard. “He’s got earbuds on. Remember earbuds? Wonder what he was listening to way out here, in the middle of Desert Asshole.” Joan leans down and tugs the earbuds, one of them blackened with blood and dirt, from what is left of his head. She shoves them in her ears. Still warm. She bends down, grabs a black palm-size gadget from his front jacket pocket, and plugs in. She hears something faint and looks over at Leone.

“What is it? They look Russian. Is it Russian pop music? They all played it back during the sieges. Fucking Russians,” Leone hisses. “I hate old Russian pop music. It all sounds like some drunk Communist with rocks jammed in his mouth.” Leone spits on the ground.

Hard. They are both hardened.

True enough, thinks Joan as she fiddles with the device. But in terms of weaponry, military technology, much of what the Russians had during the wars did deserve respect.

The volume kicks in, and through the earbuds, so recently planted in the ears of her enemy, comes a song. Her throat pangs and her eyes sting until she bites the inside of her cheek to stop it.

A child’s song.

A French child’s song.

One she knows by heart:

“Joan?” Leone touches her shoulder.

Joan wipes at her eyes for perhaps the ten-thousandth time. Fatherless and motherless children. Husbands and wives and lovers. Sisters. Brothers. Friends. All human relationships atomized. She looks at Leone. She wrenches the bloody earbuds from her ears. What is a human alone? A near-corpse dotting an endless landscape.

Every so often Joan and Leone had run across one stumbling toward death in the open terrain: a feral child. More often than not they’d die on the spot, or live for a while and then sputter toward death. Once, they managed to nurse one back to life for an entire year; then, one day, a day that haunts Joan still, the boy simply walked off the edge of a cliff before she could stop him. He turned back once to look at her, maybe smiled, or perhaps just lined his mouth with resolution, and he was gone. Forever she wondered what that look meant. Maybe that there are more things to want than life?

The last child they’d encountered alone was a different boy, so malnourished and exhausted his skin looked gray-blue, his eyes sinking into their skeletal holes. Month by month, he gained strength and muscle and heart. Finally, he was strong enough to talk about the tribes he’d seen “out there.” They thought he was delirious, or that somewhere along his journey he must have lost his wits. They nodded and smiled and gave him simple chores of survival. They taught him how to hunt and what to eat and how to make electricity and light and how to filter water and grow food.

The boy couldn’t remember his name—or didn’t care—so they’d renamed him Miles, as he’d come an enormous distance. One night, after Leone went night hunting for snakes, Joan and Miles sat near the fire, Joan staring so deeply into it she was barely present, Miles drawing in the dirt floor with a stick.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said, jamming the stick into the earth. “About the tribes, I mean?”

Joan’s fire trance broken, she looked over at him, the flames dancing across his face, making him look animated. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she hedged. “It’s just that I’ve never seen it myself. Just… just children, wandering alone or in very small groups, usually captured or killed by CIELs. They’d never allow tribes of adults to exist.”

He stared at her. He smiled. It really was a smile. But it didn’t indicate happiness, as it might have in some past. What he said next was stark and solemn: “If you don’t let me go back and tell them you are alive, I’m going to walk off of the edge of a cliff. Like the other boy.”

Joan stood up. Looked down at him. Miles did not flinch. He looked up at her, crossed his arms over his knees. “I will,” he said.

“You are not a captive here,” she said to him.

“Your caring for me is the only thing holding me here.” He returned his gaze to the fire.

For weeks, she and Leone took turns guarding him day and night. If she could just help carry him through this delusion, Joan thought, he might come back to his senses and… live. Whatever that meant. But each day he became more withdrawn, sometimes standing and staring at her with a bundle of kindling in his arms, or emerging from an aqua cave pool naked and gleaming and wearing the last traces of corporeal boyhood.

For weeks she and Leone argued.

“For Christ’s sake, let him go. He’s not a pet. He doesn’t belong to us. If he wants to walk away chasing some idiotic notion of wandering tribes, let him.” Leone cleaned her knife on the shin of her pants.

“He’ll die.”

“He didn’t die getting here, did he? And anyway, if he dies, it will be exactly as if he never came. Everyone”—Leone gestured in the air with her knife—“everyone out here dies. Someday, even us.” She put the blade briefly to her lips.

That night, again at the fire, Miles spoke again. “There are people waiting for you out there, you know. There are other boys and girls and men and women and others who are waiting for your help.” This time Miles stood.

“I’m no help to anyone,” Joan said, her voice filled with low storm. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m going to tell you a story. You’ll like it. It’s about a girl who turns into a song.”

Joan’s head snapped up. Song?

“Once there was a child warrior girl,” he began. And when he was finished, Joan was crying.

In the end, Joan extended her hand and made Leone cut off her pinkie finger, as well as a lock of her hair. She wrapped the severed finger with the hair, then wrote a letter on paper she’d learned to make from hemp over the years. She still didn’t believe the boy, but she let him walk away; in his shoulders and scapula, she could see the man he would become, if he made it to manhood. She didn’t believe him, but she did believe in letting him have his story. To have a story was to have a self.

Joan squats down and runs her hands along a row of PG-29 rockets, lifting one with both hands.

Leone eyes the rocket. “Christ, isn’t that what we used in Orléans? Back in the day?”

But Joan is falling into memory, and guilt again.

And who did you think you were when they called your name?

Did you think you were who they said, the sound of your name lifting up off of your body in a great crescendo, the sound turning always to fever and ritual and chant, the sound of your name driving masses of men, women, and children, their teeth gnashing, their bodies falling forward in their own brutal and quickening deaths? The mother kissing her son good night the night before the battle, the son still dreaming of talking animals, his sister’s soft breathing through her small nose in the bed near him, the father locking the doors—as if everyone were part of a story that would make history, and not a story that would engender slaughter.

Did the white of your war banner give you the right to make murder a beautiful story? Who were you at sixteen, your chest yet unformed, your shoulders and biceps balling up like a boy’s, your voice not low in your throat, but high, just under your jawline, a girl’s voice, a cheekbone beneath the blue light flickering like some alien insect at the surface of your skin? When they mindlessly followed you into the fire of battle, when they shed their despair and aimed their hope straight at your face, when they turned their eyes to yours and surrendered, smiling, when you sent them into siege and seizure and bloodletting—in the moments before their deaths, did your valiancy outweigh your heart? Did you even have a heart? When you walked them into hell, was your heart open?

Did the song in your head give you the right to kill them?

Her vision blurs. Sometimes she sees things that are not there. She is used to it and at the same time not. Her head light; she can’t feel her feet or hands. She looks up. When she looks back to her physicality she is in a floating room with slate-colored walls and floors. The windows black as space. It’s a room she’s never inhabited. A room made of pure imagination. Or of dread.

“Joan?”

Who calls out to her in such a room? But there is no room. It is Leone, and the ground under her feet, and the smell of their rifles and of bodies recently made dead. She snaps to.

“Same firepower. From the past. Yes.”

Joan watches Leone run her hand along the length of a single PG-29 rocket. Her eyes linger on the small bone at Leone’s wrist.

Ironic. A replica of the very munitions she herself used in Orléans. Years ago. A nine-day battle at the height of her command. Those old dead wars leaving artifacts everywhere.

So the CIEL bastards are using old Earth firepower. She turns the tubular metal object over in her hands. She holds the blue black metal cylinder upright. She smells it. Dirt and death and alloy. She strokes the length of it, its shaft a tandem warhead and rocket booster. She fingers the folding stabilizer fins at its tail, spits on its metal side.

Fuckers.

The only place someone needs weapons of war is down here. Not up there. Did that mean there were large numbers of humans left? How many? Where? Or just random individuals? Untethered civilian armies? Random feral children?

Wind skates the valley. In the distance, foothills climb up toward a low mountain range. A rain forest once rimmed the rocky face of these mountains; she can’t remember its name.

Joan gazes once more at the dead men, then pockets the recorder and earbuds and looks up again at the night. There’s probably a Skyline near. Wherever there is a munitions station, a Skyline isn’t far away. The dark and thickened sky may obscure it from view, but she knows what is up there: invisible technological tethers dangling down to Earth like umbilical cords. The planet’s population of Earth’s elite above, now living an ascended existence away from a dying environment.

Joan walks over to a field table under the camouflage canopy and rummages around. The table is littered with topographical maps, rendered in plastic. She spreads her palm on one flat of the table and leans over it. “What’s this?”

Leone comes close beside her and shines infrared light from the barrel of her rifle onto the map. “Looks like… what the fuck are those weird markings?” Leone laughs under her breath. “They look like fucking lightning bolts. Were these idiots just sitting here doodling?”

Nothing but night answers.

Joan looks out into the dark desert in front of them, then over to the foothills and mountains. The topography no longer means anything. There are deserts and mountains and water. Sometimes. Maps are useless. Life is underground.

How many salvage missions had they traveled together around the world, abandoned tanks and military vehicles they’d located and hidden like vertebrae on a spine? Collecting food and ammunitions and supplies for survival—at first with the assumption that they’d have to stockpile large quantities for their comrades, survivors, former rebels and civilians, maybe even enemies. But through all their travels and elaborate missions a bald truth emerged: the people they found came to them, now and then, in the form of a single feral child, or as enemy combatants stationed sparsely along their path, guarding resource arsenals headed Skyward.

Where had all the people gone? they had wondered. Was it possible that entire armies, populations, had truly been atomized by geocatastrophic waves? Or had they gone forever subterranean, like Joan and Leone?

When the fuel began to deteriorate and run out, it became absurd to try to replenish it. It became absurd to maintain the old travel routes.

Finally it became absurd even to believe these rumors of roving bands of survivors. It was as if humans had devolved, like the earth’s erosion, crumbling and sliding and disappearing back into soil and rock and dry riverbed. Or maybe back to their breathable blue past… into ocean and salt and molecules.

Joan shakes her head and focuses on the map in her hands.

Find and obliterate the Skyline.

Confiscate munitions.

Blow what’s left.

Get out.

Joan looks up. If supplies are coming and going down this Skyline, it is imperative to destroy it. If anything else—an attack—comes down, we are nowhere near prepared.

Joan starts collecting what she can of the ammunition. Leone matches her every move. As they work, the child’s song weaves through her skull. Moon, are you nothing more than a ball?

Then a crack splits the air around them. Joan claps her hands over her ears and drops low to the ground, faster than an animal. Leone crouches under the table and puts her head between her knees. The sky lights up with red, green, and blue light. More magnificently than any aurora. The ground rumbles beneath them.

Leone immediately positions and fires into the surrounding terrain in short, controlled bursts. But her firepower disappears into the night.

“Fuck,” Joan yells into the sound and light. Another ear-splitting crack shatters the air around them. Even louder than the first. Her head pounds. Nausea. She feels something warm near her ear. Everywhere, a blast of sound and light.

Staggering like a drunk from the pain of the sound, Joan spots Leone gathering up as many of the maps as she can and jamming them into her backpack and waistband.

“Let’s not wait around to see who’s coming to dinner,” Leone yells, making for the boulders they hid behind earlier.

Joan grips the PG-29 in her hand. A Skyline is ripping open. Right in front of them. If she doesn’t find it and hit it, they are dead. She positions the warhead at the head of the RPG, then squats down on the ground and shoves the PG-29 down the shaft and secures it. Her brain is a bowling alley. She smells her own blood. There isn’t much time. She hoists the RPG up and squares the shoulder brace. She grips the trigger. She looks through the night sight scope. Blue and green crosshairs illuminate her vision. She aims at the sky in the direction of the light and sound, but it is like aiming at a fucking aurora. She closes her eyes. Concentrate.

Find it. Find the sound.

The blue light at her head flutters alive. A faint hum—a single low note—weaves through her skull.

She turns to face the sky and opens her eyes to adjust the trajectory on the scope, allowing it to help focus her energy. Then she closes her eyes again and hums a long steady note until it matches the tone in her skull, she keeps humming it until she feels part of the matter of things. Finally she drops the weapon gracefully to the ground. The weapon and scope merely help her to focus.

Her shoulders shoot back, as if from recoil, but she holds her ground. When the force that shoots out of her whole body hits the empty night air, an invisible Skyline produces a dazzling, fire-white line from earth to heaven, a jagged tear in the moment of things accompanied by a dizzying explosion. The air around them, as far as they can imagine, detonates with sound.

Bull’s-eye.

Joan eyes the black bruise of night. Long wretched fingers of white and blue tracers stream out from the blast line in all directions. An opera of chaos lights up the night. Joan can smell the fierce burning—the shorting-out of currents. She is momentarily deaf.

“Fuck you,” she screams at the sky and its drama. One less entrance and exit, shitheads.

As the light and sound show begin to wane, Joan breathes heavy. She looks around at the munitions site. The dead men, the artillery and RPGs, the pack of corpse girls buried in the dirt. And Leone.

Leone steps close to Joan and reaches up to wipe the blood from Joan’s ear, then sucks her own fingers. “Well, you taste alive,” she says, barely audible.

Joan smiles. Smoke dissipates. Light or sound no longer surrounds them. Finally she hears only Leone breathing. They need to get back to the caves.

Leone picks up a second RPG and rocket to take with them. Joan turns to follow, her RPG back silently on her shoulder. Leone says nothing. They walk side by side. Dirt kicks up at their feet. Joan looks over at Leone’s jaw. Somehow the square of it, the way she clenches her teeth, soothes her.

Chapter Fourteen

“Any idea what the fuck that was?”

Joan’s throat hurts from Leone’s voice. It has an edge to it, like shale—when did that happen? When they were fifteen, hiking the mountains of Vietnam, didn’t they sing songs—children’s songs, half in French, half in Vietnamese—and laugh, throwing their heads back in the torrents of rain? Who are they now, every muscle in their legs taut and extended to make the long trek back to the cave, two dead men behind them? Leone with the square shoulders and heavy stomp of Achilles. Her tattooed head. Her eyes a shape between a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Her relentlessly present jaw.

Joan holds her hand out in front of her—the scars and aches, the flicker of blue light near her temple a part of her very consciousness and physical being—are these the bodies of women?

Leone was right: energy, particularly lethal energy, didn’t used to come down Skylines. In the early years, Skylines had been visible: sophisticated tethers through which all manner of things—food, water, weapons, oil, coal, gas—could be transported between Earth’s surface and the platforms. They used to be easy to attack, an efficient way to cut off supply lines. As war raged on and unmanned drones replaced most of the CIEL’s fighting forces, further modifications were made, and now all the Skylines were invisible to the naked eye. The only way to take a Skyline out now: wait for the brain-splitting sound. The light show in the thermosphere. Act fast or be blown to bits.

Joan stares skyward. This was more like a bomb delivery. Almost as if they were targeted and attacked. If that’s true, then something is changing. Something bad.

Joan looks up. Soon dawn will turn the graying night into morning, a pale orange color, purpling at the horizons like an inverted flame. “Whoever or whatever it is, it isn’t friendly.” She keys her sight to the ground, the surrounding landscape. It will take more than the dawn of morning to get home.

“Nothing coming down those lines is friendly,” Leone says, switching her RPG to her other shoulder.

As child warriors, Joan and Leone hiked this terrain with half a garrison, in the years when war was the worst thing that could happen to people. Until the belly of the earth herself had screamed.

In her mind’s eye, Joan remembers what an astonishing jungle trek it used to be to get to the Son Doong Cave. Starting at the headquarters of a coca factory, you would climb the mountains steadily in a northeastern direction, winding around hillfaces until you reached a virgin forest. From there, the floor of the forest grew up and over you, its vines and roots and sharp stones growing in size. Next you macheted your way through thick green tangle just to find the barely-there trail.

She remembers the green, so green you could smell it, could feel the trees’ humidity all over your skin.

Joan stares at her feet, trudging the distance. Puffs of dust kick up. She coughs. The ground is cracked and lunar now. Chalky and dirt white. The climbs still took you up and down, but the missing forests, vines, great prehistoric plants and roots and rocks—barely anything remained of that world.

Joan rubs the place at her head where the blue light lives. At eleven, her mother took her to several neurological specialists; each had advised surgery and removal of whatever was causing the blue light. A tumor? Shrapnel? None had any idea of the origin of the light, or what it was, or how it had entered the head of a girl. Joan herself had told no one about touching the tree—and had revealed only the sparest of details about how song and a thunderous bolt of energy had thrown her head back and her arms out; how there had been no pain, but something far beyond pain, some ecstatic state in intimate resolve with the forest around her. How a song of the earth’s death and resurrection filled her head. Something about humanity returning to matter.

One doctor suggested psychiatric experts, recommended a Swedish clinic specializing in child trauma and delusional states—for mustn’t it be true that she’d done this thing to herself? Or let someone do it to her, some psychopathic adult who had brainwashed the poor child and injected something unknown into her skull?

As they near the cave, Joan smells the wet. Wet life that exists only underground. The light between her ear and eye flicker. She sees an azure blue in her periphery when the light is active. And hears the low humming.

When they reach the cave’s mouth, Joan holds her hand up to signal that she will enter first. As always. The cave opens up from the earth in a yawn. Joan toes her feet into footholds carefully etched into the walls of the shaft. She lodges her foot into the first recess and plants her hand against the wall, feeling around with her thumb until she finds a small hole. She sticks her thumb in the hole and disables a thousand tiny poisoned darts ready to pierce anything coming unannounced down the shaft, sixty-five meters deep. She looks briefly up at Leone.

“You’re so retro,” Leone jokes. “All black leather and metal. Still badass after all these years.”

Joan hadn’t considered clothing in a long time. Clothing: a melding of metal and neoprene, fatigues patched together with combat scraps, layers of woven or laminated fibers from old dead wars.

“No one’s visited who isn’t friendly,” Joan says, smiling up at Leone, blood—perhaps hers, perhaps that of a dead soldier, perhaps both—paints her skin near her ear. Itching.

“I told you, nothing Skyward is good,” Leone answers, following her down like a savvy animal.

Briefly, Joan eyes Leone’s body. They’ve grown so close to the land and what is left of it, so accustomed to subterranean life, that she sometimes wonders if they are evolving into a new species, like the thousands they come across underground all over the world. But the shape of Leone’s ass, the slimness of her waist, her breasts and biceps and shoulders and hands as strong as starfish, still say woman in ways Joan refuses to feel all the way through.

Midway down the shaft, water and mud and lichen slicken the walls. Working her way through each foothold and thumb-hole, Joan carves a clear path for them both. At the bottom, she leaps with a thud to the ground. Leone follows. The air immediately takes on its own environment. Cool air trade winds with hot and humid air in pockets and swells. The smell of dirt and rock and shit pungent as peat.

The entryway to home: 5.6 kilometers of passages and a chamber measuring 100 by 240 meters. Joan runs her fingers through her coarse black hair, her hand getting stuck just behind her neck in the thick, forested tangle. Christ. She’ll have to do something about that. But then, why? Even the word—hair—she hasn’t thought of it in years.

This cave is a mouth, a throat, a gullet—and Joan alone knows the perfect passage down, tuning in to the earth’s pulse and rhythm. The floor of the cave falls downward and is everywhere covered with large blocks of stone formations piled in odd order. Joan puts her hand on a stalactite that has nearly completed its journey; a slime of mudwater and regurgitated seeds oozes beneath her fingers. Water, dripping for eons from the roof, creates hundreds of stalactites that slowly point their way toward the ground.

Leone’s voice ricochets around the cave. “Ah, the perfume of shit and slime.”

The revenge of life. Joan’s thighs ache.

They make for the lowest point of the initial cave’s two-hundred-meter vertical range, a sump just to the right of the entrance. When Joan first found this sump—a pit collecting undesirable liquids from the cave’s walls—she modified it into a filtration basin to manage surface runoff water and recharge underground aquifers. Clean water. Irrigation for plants and fungi. A mini ecological weather system.

They drink heartily, Leone on the far side of the water.

“I can’t stay long,” Leone shouts from across the chamber. “We don’t have a lot of time to get the rest of that crap. I’ll need to get to the Humvee at B-Forty by nightfall. I dunno who those clowns were, but eventually upstairs they’ll figure out they’re dead—and that a line’s been compromised…” Her voice trails off into the depths of the cave as she walks away.

They’d mapped out zones of hidden weaponry, ammunitions, even vehicles—terrain vehicles like Hummers and tanks and motorcycles—but fuel was nearly nonexistent, and biofuel took years to home-brew. More and more, what was the point?

Once, they’d found a graveyard of airplanes, abandoned like giant whale carcasses, FedEx stenciled on their rotting sides. In their travels they’d located five stealth fighters, seventeen Black Hawk helicopters, and four jets: one American, one Russian, one French, and one Saudi. There was even a Japanese World War II fighter jet they’d found in museum rubble. The stories of kamikazes still enthralled Joan; they displayed a form of self-sacrifice devoid of ego that Western nations had never understood. They’d hidden the fuel from the planes and jets near Ryusendo Cave, one of the three great limestone caves in Japan, its caverns and tunnels more than five thousand meters in length, fresh water forming underground lakes up to 120 meters deep, long-eared rabbit bats thriving overhead, the water so emerald-green and transparent it felt like swimming inside a gem.

But what was the point of the machinery? Dead and useless.

Here, beyond their little cave’s entryway, stretched five miles of underground life thriving beyond imagination. Former geographies and nation-borders had overlooked the place—a biodiversity so rich and secret it was nearly its own world. A jungle, a river, a lake; countless old and new species of plant and animal life; even some things in between that Joan was still studying. Fields of algae as large as foothills. Stalagmites as tall as old-growth redwoods. A whole verdant underworld defying the decay of the world above it. There were times Joan half expected a mammal to emerge from its waters, blinking and dripping, the new species taking its first steps onto land.

They’d made a life here. No. Life made itself here. They merely coexisted.

Joan squats underground at the water’s edge and runs her hand through its cool wet. Then a great draft of warm air, accompanied by the sound of a low engine’s hum, builds around her. Louder. Vibrating her sternum. But it is not a machine’s noise nearing.

Diablotin. French for “little devil,” since their loud cries are likened to the sounds of tortured men.

Oilbirds.

A perfect babble of harsh cries fills the space, the beating of their wings like rushing wind. Then in great patterns thinning into lines they disappear into the cave ledges and crevasses where their nests are lodged.

She admires them. Oilbirds were outcasts from other species, alone with their gifts. They are the only nocturnal bird that uses echolocation to navigate, like the bats down the deeper throat of the cave. In fact you could not prod a single oilbird to leave the cave during daylight. They made their lives—chose their world order. Surely an evolutionary process, but to Joan, it was more an act of perfect imagination. They reminded her of her own warrior-child self. The hawk-like predator that ate only fruit. The birds made nests of shit. She identified with them.

Even before the atrocities, the oilbirds had withstood genocide, as they were hunted and exterminated as a resource. Years ago, she knew, the walls of this cave had been lined with long bamboo poles, each with a torch on one side and a sharp iron hook, like a fishhook, on the other. The hook was designed to fish the young oilbirds from their nests. Some sixty young could be tumbled out into what had previously been a great hot spring and immediately drowned this way. Once dead, they could be “picked.”

Young oilbirds, when just beginning to feather out, weighed double the weight of adults. Everything about the child birds outdid their makers.

In her mind she watches them struggle and flap, useless in the scalding water.

Tears run down her cheeks as she thinks of it, the young oilbirds, drowning in the heated waters of the earth’s gut. She weeps for her parents, unable to survive catastrophic geologic events; she weeps for everyone who died on the planet’s surface; she weeps for the dead men she’s so recently killed. She weeps for who Leone was at fourteen, her body still girlward.

Then she notices a young oilbird lying dead in the hot spring not twenty feet from her. Perhaps it fell. Perhaps her thoughts created an action.

She scoops up the oilbird from the water and lays it on the ground. She squats down and pulls her knife from her calf holster. She slits open the bird’s belly and starts pulling the skin from the fat. She hums a childhood song in French about how birds flew away in the sun. Still crying.

She sets about picking the young bird, a process that involves removing the viscera so that the fatty birds can be cooked in various ways—some for food, some for oil to cook, some for oil for lighting.

She hears Leone approaching from far away. After preparing the bird, they will eat, perhaps sleep, and part.

She touches her chest and makes a promise to use every part of the young bird: its bones and feathers and meat and fat, its beak and claws, its blood and brains and sinewy muscle tissue. Spear points and modified thread and eating utensils and paint and salve and tiny sharpened sticks, useful for filling improvised bombs.

She promises to deliver back to the bird a world whose life originated from the hot and cold underground places, almost human-less.

But a rustling catches her attention as Leone enters the cave, her entire body surrounded by some grotesque creature—no, it is a man, or perhaps a woman, Joan can’t tell which—but a very human head and brow bone and eyes set deep and covered in mud emerges, and a human hand holding a knife at Leone’s throat, slowly walks her forward.

Chapter Fifteen

Beneath a gaunt stare and filthy skin, a man holds a knife blade to Leone’s throat. He inches Leone forward. His eyes black bullets.

Joan does not flinch. In fact, she barely breathes. She holds the bullet eyes of the man in her gaze, returning something of her might silently back at him. He coughs. A tiny trace of blood where the knife presses in makes a line at Leone’s neck.

Joan shifts her attention to Leone’s face. Nose. Eyes. When Joan looks into Leone’s eyes, she sees two small blank pools. Without emotion. A jaw set against anything in the world. What other reason was there to survive? Leone’s eyes carried everything they’d ever been through together. Small familiar worlds.

Courage. Do not fall back. It was the look she’d given Leone in battle for years.

What, what does this idiotic half-dead man think he is doing in the face of their combined strength and experience? Has he no idea? With his tiny knife and clearly malnourished body? Is he an alien? Does he believe he’s stumbled upon two women from some past where women spoke of la cuisson and les enfants, rather than RPGs and improvised explosive devices? Is she supposed to consider him a foe? She waits. She can smell him as he nears. Dirt, sweat, urine, and the breath of someone who has not bathed or eaten or properly cleaned his teeth in a long while.

Across from her, with a knife at her neck, Leone closes her eyes. Then opens them and smiles.

Unbeknownst to the intruder, Leone has slipped her hand down low enough to recover her favorite companion: a Laguiole, a French fighting knife beloved for its cruciform blade and its ties to history. Little Bee.

Leone swings her arm up and punctures the man’s neck with the knife before he can react. Joan crosses her arms over her chest and tilts her head to the side, silently wondering if Leone has delivered a death stab or merely a wound. Judging from the blood flow, a wound. But this poor pale soul, grabbing at his neck and staggering around the dirt floor in circles, may die anyway.

She walks over to the man, who drops to his knees and sits panting, his head down, his shoulders heaving.

“What shall we do with you?” Joan says, squatting down to his level while Leone cleans blood off of Little Bee on her pants leg.

The man lifts his head.

Joan puts her fingers under his chin to tilt his face upward. He opens his mouth.

“C’est moi,” he whispers, “Peter…” Blood veins down his forearm between his fingers in rivers. “You are…” he says almost inaudibly, slumping farther toward the ground, sucking in a great chestful of air. “You are real after all.” And then his head thuds against the dirt.

A jolt of recognition shoots through Joan’s shoulders. She lifts his torso. She cradles his head. “Peter?” she shouts.

Leone at her side, wiping dirt from the man’s face: “Your brother?”

Chapter Sixteen

In the auroral glow of the cave’s light, now orange, then blue and green, shimmering, shifting, Joan watches a dozen or so tiny black worms traverse the landscape of her own palm.

Worms from hell. That’s what they’d named the tiny creatures upon their discovery long ago—unusual nematodes living and thriving miles below the earth’s surface in water hot enough to scald a human hand. She remembers reading about them as a child in school.

And yet here they are, surviving forty billion years without notice. That’s how dumb we are about our own origins, our present tense, our future survival. We always look up. What if everything that mattered was always down? Where things are base and lowly. Where worms and shit and beetles bore their way along. Halicephalobus mephisto, named for Mephistopheles, “He who loves not the light.” Lords of the Underworld. “Discovered” back in the day, as if they haven’t already been here forever.

Joan squats next to her dying brother and watches his eyelids twitch. Her thighs burn from crouching so long next to him. Not long now. He’s in that place between sleep and dead. Soon he’ll turn to energy. Dirt. Worms’ meat. She strokes his head. She remembers him as a boy: his dark thick hair, his eyelashes. Then she dumps the palmful of little worms onto his forehead. She doesn’t know why. He doesn’t move.

The first nematodes found in the rock-walled mines of South Africa were radiation-eating microbes, complete with nervous, digestive, and reproductive systems. What did it ever mean, discoveries of new realms of biology on Earth? At the time, scientists were giddy over the implications for extraterrestrial research, or astrobiology. A smile stretches over Joan’s face. All that looking up—it meant only that we barely had time to learn about the world around us before the whole shithouse came down. It meant that life not only went on in so-called impossible, inhospitable places, it flourished.

Absentmindedly, Joan’s fingers flutter at the blue light at the side of her head. Radical changes in morphology brought on by the temper of the sun. Halicephalobus mephisto.

Her brother moans the moan of the dying. She can see Leone’s figure approaching from a cave corridor. She smells her. Dirt and water and skin.

What she’s learned from the worms, in her life as a survivor, is more profound than any philosophy or volume of man-made knowledge. The hell-worm is resistant to high temperatures, reproduces asexually, and feeds on subterranean bacteria and toxins. The tiny black swirling colonies live in groundwater that is three to twelve thousand years old. They survive in waters with next to no oxygen. They ignore science and carry on.

He who loves not the light. “Like me,” Joan whispers to her near corpse of a brother. His body shudders under her speech.

Like the little worm devils, Joan also found what scientists had left behind when the Earth’s population was subjected to survival of the fittest: fungi. Amoebas. Multicellular life-forms adapting and evolving at fantastic rates—all of it underground. Blind fish and transparent lizards and bone-white long-legged spiders. Spectral bats. Electric freshwater eels. Sound. Light. Energy. And not just in cave-dwelling animals. In plants, too. Living energy. Without photosynthesis.

Like me, she thinks.

But now her hands tingle. Leone. Next to her.

“Are you going to do it?”

Joan raises her head from her squatting position and speaks to Leone’s pubis. Before she can stop her own imagination, she pictures the barren cave of Leone’s reproductive system. “I don’t know.”

“He’s your brother.” Leone sighs.

“He’s dying.” Joan looks up. “That’s what the dead do. They die. We’re meant to die. From the moment we are born.”

“Bullshit.” Leone shifts her weight to one boot and crosses her arms over her breasts. “No one will ever know. It’s just you, me, and him.” Leone puts her hand on the top of Joan’s head. “And if he knows anything about… anything, we need to hear from him.”

What do we owe the dying? Joan closes her eyes and thinks of burying her face between Leone’s legs. Her whole chest cavity aches, as if her ribs are caving in. Leone, of course, is right. Not because any familial loyalty or love exists between Joan and her brother—too much has happened since. They share DNA, but only in the way the stars and planets and ocean flotsam do. But he’s traveled all this way to find her, and she doesn’t even know what “all this way” really means. Where did he come from? What does he have to tell? How has he survived? Are there others?

There was only one way to find out, and that was one way she’d vowed never to repeat.

When Joan learned she could raise the dead, she was fifteen. CIEL was barely in control, engineers still building it ever upward and away from the dying masses. Jean de Men conjured himself as leader. The water wars had ravaged all the continents, laying waste to what vegetation remained under the gray orange glow of the dying sun. People had become territorial animals, Darwinian cartoons. Cannibalism was rampant except among clusters of well-armed cells, people brought together by desperate familiarity. But cannibalism wasn’t the worst of it. Wars were not the worst of it. A blotted sun, starvation, radiation, violence, terror, were not the worst of it. All the dire fears of a population’s mighty history had been proven petty.

The worst of it were the radical changes in the human body.

After every human lost its hair, after fingernails and toenails began peeling away, humanity itself flashed backward.

Penises atrophying, curling up and in, like baked snails.

Vaginas suturing themselves shut, using the very secretions that once lubricated the reproductive system. Without fully understanding why, Joan was the only one spared.

Children born with unformed genitals, without ears, with barely there translucent lids on their eyes, with unformed fingers. Webbed toes. Little protuberances at the base of the tailbone.

Devolution.

When she was fifteen, Joan became responsible for a small cadre of orphaned children. Forty or so of them, in various states of fear and animal longing. Though her parents were long dead, she still had claim to the family home and land; she had fire on her side, which she could raise from the earth by placing her hands on the ground long enough to pull telluric currents alive in hellish swirls. She’d learned to control it. Napalm from the ground up.

When threatened, burn.

She kept the children fed. She kept them sheltered and together. But when they were attacked, the danger was always mass death. CIEL militants who came for them didn’t want just one of them, they wanted all of them, for food or slave labor or both. And so, she’d constructed a plan for hiding a field of children.

She dug forty-one children’s graves on the land where her father had once grown vegetables, carefully lining the graves with mud-green industrial plastic left over from farming, with enough plastic up and outside of the grave to hold the dirt. She designed forty-one rubber tubes leading to an underground airshaft—a vast tubular cave with an underground river—and placed the tubes down in the graves, at head level, for breathing. And when they faced attack, the forty-one children ran to their forty-one gravebeds and dove into them and pulled the plastic sheets over them, forcefully enough to cover themselves with dirt, and breathed life under death through the rubber tubes.

All anyone who arrived saw was the evidence of a mass burial. A mass murder. Little mounds of dirt clearly meant for children. There, she thought, they would be safe.

But she underestimated the power of evil. Or, perhaps, the power of power. One night, there came the familiar crack and thunder in the sky of a CIEL probe entering the atmosphere. The children went into action, burying themselves alive with great precision and speed. All night Joan watched over them, waiting for a glimpse of a Skyline. What she did not know was that CIEL had attained the technology to hide the elevators, to render them invisible. And that they could detect the heat of the little bodies still alive beneath all that dirt. They pumped methane gas into the tiny graves, displacing enough oxygen to make the children cough and sputter against their breathing tubes, asphyxiating them all in their false sleep. Like killing moles or rats.

Joan herself noted the hint of a chemical scent for a moment, but then chemical smells weren’t uncommon in this place.

In the morning, no one woke.

One by one she dug them up. She lifted their blue-gray bodies out of the holes and placed them on the higher ground next to their graves.

The grief that entered her body then was worse than what she’d felt when her parents were killed. Worse than when her brother had been shot and captured. Her grief for these mutating children rose in her like a second self, another body overtaking her own, until it was not an abstract sadness but a material, weighted thing. And the grief turned to rage. And the rage rocked her head back and shore the clothing from her body and cleaved her sight and the song sound emerged in her skull, only so loud this time that it seemed to break every tooth in her mouth. The ground she stood on rumbled and tilted and dropped her to her knees. Recovering her balance, she placed both hands flat on the dirt. Her eyes blue and blazing. The light at her head dancing alive. And then her hands shot light and sound in a thunderous lateral pulse across the dirt.

Forty small corpses coughed and gasped, shaking their heads in bewilderment, looking around at each other covered in dirt and smelling of death, as if to say, Am I dead, or born?

A miracle.

They lived less than twenty-four hours. By the end of the next day they had dropped dead again, some wearing expressions like the ash-covered corpses at Pompeii.

Her power, then, was impotent. Forever after, the comrades she tried to revive all died the same way, a day or so later. She had the power only to bring death twice.

Her resurrections, she learned eventually, only succeeded in plants and organic material. Her powers were useless in terms of saving humans. Her powers were of the dirt.

She knows now, then, that she can bring her brother back to life, only to watch the life drain from him in a second death, one of her making. Or she can let him die his own death, free from the wrong miracle of her.

She stares at the worms spreading over his forehead and skull, almost like hair.

“Do it,” Leone says. “I’ll bury him.”

Chapter Seventeen

The walls of the cave glow brown and black and orange, shapes running and mutating across them. Joan watches Leone add peat to the fire, changing the patterns of the flames, then retrieve Little Bee from her boot sheath and hold the blade into the flame. Joan turns and stares at her brother’s corpse. In this shadowy light, he looks like a film of someone sleeping.

The line between living and not. In medicine, they don’t call bringing the dead back to life “resurrection.” They call it Lazarus syndrome: the spontaneous return of circulation. You’d think that, after all these years and dead gods, they’d have used a less biblical term. And what is the word for what she is about to do?

Joan looks at her hands as she washes them in a bowl, then watches her own hands between Leone’s hands, Leone washing her hands for her—a mixture of silver and lavender.

Out of the blue, Leone says, “Remember the ribbon eels?” and her face lights up.

Joan’s heart beats up in her chest for a long minute. She remembers: a month’s respite from war she’d spent with Leone, near Australia. The neon blue and yellow backs and bellies of ribbon eels, sliding through ocean water, alongside them in an underwater cave pool. The two of them laughing.

If she closes her eyes she can almost remember that sound, Leone’s laugh.

In the subterranean caves of Christmas Island, a variety of hermaphroditic and protandric species thrives. The ribbon eel is one of them, an elegant creature with a long, thin body, high dorsal fins, and huge nostrils. Juveniles and subadults are jet-black with a yellow dorsal fin; females are yellow, with a black anal fin with white margins. The adult males turn blue with a yellow dorsal fin. As they mature, they would swap genders. Eels that were born male grew into females that changed color and laid eggs. They could live twenty years this way, their gender entirely fluid.

Without looking up she says to Leone, “Remember to make the incision just underneath the rib, about—”

“I know,” Leone says, “about the length of your finger.” Leone holds Joan’s left hand, the hand missing its pinkie. For a while they just sit there on the ground like that.

“Okay,” Joan says. “Now.”

Leone kneels and Joan helps her to rest Peter’s head and shoulders up onto Leone’s thighs. His arms stretch out to either side of him. His head tilts, his lips part. How serene the dead can look, like dreamless sleepers. Leone, in one perfect motion, leans in and presses the skin of the dead brother’s flesh smooth, then slices open something like a mouth just below his last right rib. A dark red, almost black ooze emerges in a thin line.

Without hesitation, Joan slips three of her fingers through the ooze into the wound. Inside, his body is moist and cool and wrong. She places her other hand on his shoulder. She closes her eyes, drops her head, and slows her own breath to next to nothing. She listens for blue light.

The heart, filled with electrical impulses—without moving a muscle, she reaches for it with her entire body.

A low hum strums the floor of the cave, the walls. The faint crackle of the fire. Then the hum crescendoes and a flutter of batwings rise and fall.

Nothing.

“Joan?” Leone says.

But Joan doesn’t hear her. The blue light at her head expands out in waves. She’s gone in, gone deeper. So deep that her hand passes through her brother’s body and into the dirt beneath him—into the memory of him as a boy, running in the yard. “Look at the sun,” he said, “it knows our names!” The walls of the cave ring her ribs, her jaw and skull. And deeper still, into the wound of memory: she can see the day he was born in the past. She can see the umbilical cord, slimy pearled spiral of life.

“Joan?” Leone shouts.

Joan opens her eyes. Sound falling away.

His eyelids quivering.

And then he gasps so violently that his chest lurches upward and Leone falls backward, and when Joan’s hand lunges deeper into the gash they’ve cut open, blood spurts out in a blue-red surge. Joan suctions loose her fingers and then covers the bleeding cut with her hand flat, holding it hard against him. “The poultice,” Joan says.

Leone recovers her balance and applies a poultice and bandage they’ve prepared.

For a time, all three of them sit huddled together, just breathing. As their breathing quiets and settles into quiet harmony, a déjà vu joins them in the room. The last time they were together they were at war, the last battle so to speak, the one that included Joan’s capture, and they’d each been gravely wounded, and Joan had been taken from the world.

Joan looks into the face of her brother, the man whose life she’s restored. For however long that will last. His skin still glows faintly blue; slowly it takes on the color of flesh, human, alive.

He opens his eyes. Like hers.

He looks up at her and half smiles.

Perhaps he thinks he’s dreaming. Like Plato’s cave.

“Peter,” she says. His face is so familiar she almost doesn’t recognize him.

“Remember…” Peter says, then coughs violently. His whole body spasms and shakes. His voice sounds like old dead leaves blowing across dirt. “Remember when the sun was what we thought it was?”

Joan smiles and nods. As children, they believed what everyone had: the sun emitted energy from the inside out, that it was a limiting, self-energizing ball of gases that could burn itself up. But everyone was wrong. That’s how history works. New truths atomize old ones, endlessly. The world used to be flat, remember?

Her brother sighs the sigh of wavering life. “I don’t know why I said that just now. I don’t know why I thought it.”

“When you were very young,” Joan says quietly, “you used to think the sun was a benevolent being. You thought it was an alien watching over us and keeping us warm. Like the man in the moon, only better.” She smiles. “You also thought the sun would kill God someday. It was quite a theory. For a kid.”

Peter inhales a long, slow breath, then exhales what seems like years. “We were some weird kids,” he says.

Leone laughs under her breath.

Joan strokes his temple in response. Some of the tiny black worms she put on his forehead earlier remain. They give him a dark angel look.

“How long do I have?”

Joan closes her eyes and sucks in the air between them, holds it, and lets it loose, quiet as whisper. Wishing it could breathe years back into him. Or their whole childhood.

“Hard to say. A day? Maybe more.”

“Is there… pain?”

Joan considers the question. She can’t know. It has never happened to her. From what she has witnessed, people simply dropped dead, as if their power was suddenly cut. It looked… peaceful. Like fainting or falling asleep. Bodies going limp to dirt.

She could not perform the power on herself. The only death she’d experienced had been when they tried to burn her alive, and that was profoundly different, she surmised. The thought of it skull-shoots her memory, hard enough to make her eye twitch.

“Shhh. Save your breath,” Joan says.

He looks at her more intensely than a child. “Why?” he asks. “For what?”

Joan lowers her gaze.

He rasps another cough out. For a moment she thinks he will choke and die again right then. For a moment she almost wishes it. She does not want the responsibility of his life, or his death, or any of it.

Then Leone puts a cup of liquid to his lips. “Drink this,” she commands. “It’s got an organic stimulant and a painkiller in it. You’ll be alert and high at the same time. A liminal state that would make anyone jealous.” Leone smiles.

Joan winces.

Peter drinks. And drinks. Within twenty minutes he has regained his composure, which is unsettling for them all.

“When you died,” he says, “or when we believed you had, I felt sure you hadn’t died at all. I don’t know. I just didn’t… feel it. They took everything from us, you know. Everything. I’m not talking about how they slaughtered or enslaved us. I’m not talking about the rape of the earth and all that, or even about their refusal to give basic humanitarian aid—medicine, water, food. I’m talking about you. You were the only thing we had left to follow, to believe in. It was like they’d killed God. Isn’t that funny?”

Joan rests her head on her knees and holds her own shoulders.

“After a while, though, we made you undead. We re-created you.” He pushes himself up to his elbows. “We made a story of you to keep us going. So for me you never really died, do you see?” Peter touches the place on her hand where her finger used to be.

Slowly, in a voice bending back toward death or dying, he relates to Joan the story that emerged in her absence:

“In the year of the death-giving sun, as the demise of the world we knew grew ever closer—and, with it, the need to choose a destiny, to die out underground or be reintegrated into a floating consciousness under the ruling class of CIELs—a child courier emerged through a tunnel. No one knew the child. His eyes were sunken into his skull; his cheekbones revealed how long it had been since he’d eaten; his ribs were the main feature about him. He coughed, stood up straight as a dangling skeleton, and said ‘I am here.’ He closed his eyes and smiled, as if he’d arrived at the blessing of life itself. He handed us a cloth-wrapped object and dropped to the ground, dead.

“A few who were crowded around kneeled down to attend to the boy. A woman made a soft cooing sound and touched his head. I looked at the cloth-wrapped object in his hands. I carefully began to open it. The cloth was oily and filthy, as if it had passed between a thousand hands. When I finished unwrapping the thing, what emerged from the small corpse was this: a crude handwritten letter. On paper.”

Peter coughs as if his ribs are coming up. Leone shoves a cup of water to his lips. He continues. “I confess, I forgot that dead child at my feet immediately. A letter! Suddenly I was flooded with words we’d all long since forgotten, except as symbols: Paper. Writing. Books. Libraries. I started to shake. A crowd pushed in around me. I could smell human sweat, and something else—pulp, I think. I held my breath and peeled it all the way open. But you already know what was inside,” Peter says. “In place of a signature, the letter closed, ‘To you I give this Earth.’

“Some were eager to charge forgery, for anyone could be anyone at this point in history, identity being as mutable and reproducible as language or image, and everyone knew there were pits of old realities left scattered about the world in hidden and forsaken places, so it could have easily been some kind of trompe l’oeil or worse. But the letter contained things other than what may or may not have been writ in your hand.

“As I stood shaking with the thing in my hands, several of the people gathered around me saw what I saw, and gasped into the semidarkness. Inside the letter was nothing less than a human artifact: a lock of hair, so thick and black it curled like a giant ink comma before them. When I looked up, I saw one man rub his hairless head slowly and close his eyes.

“I thought for a moment I could smell the letter—something about rain. Something about sleep. We were afraid to touch it. We stared at it as if it were something sacred.

“For it was not just a thick lock of silkblack hair, miracle enough. The thick black lock of hair had a fastening of sorts. Looped around the hair to keep it intact, curled tight, as if someone had waited for the rigor to achieve perfect pliability before carefully molding it, curling it into a seashell spiral, was a pinkie finger. Only the slightest idea of life left in its grayblue skin…”

He pauses. He stares at Joan. “We made an acquiescent vow. We would from that day forward cease making crude, mistaken images of you. The CIEL’s plan—to ravage what was left of Earth and us—was a hair’s breadth away from success. If you were out there, you were worth finding. I’ve given this end of my life to finding you.

“When that boy arrived with your hair,” he says, winding his fingers into her long black hair, “and your finger, I was shocked, but not beyond belief. As a boy, I’d seen you walk out of fire in a wood. I’d seen you walk from the sea, glowing like the aurora borealis. I’d fought alongside you and watched you not die and not die when others—anyone else—would have. And here you are. Maybe it is enough. To see that you are still alive.”

Leone swallows. It seems the only sound for miles.

All three of them know it is not enough. Their reunion has only one aim.

Leone rises and walks a small distance away. As she cracks shrub twigs into the fire, the smell of sage and moss and peat fills the cavern. Peter stretches up and cranes his neck to see Leone. “I missed her,” he says. “Believe it or not.”

Joan looks up at him and almost smiles.

Above them, firelight paints the cave ceiling and walls. Some of the worms Joan placed on Peter’s forehead trickle down toward his eyes like little black tears. He brushes one away.

“It’s okay,” she says, “let them. They eat all sorts of bacteria.”

“What difference does that make?” her brother asks her.

And he is right. None. There is only one reason for him to be alive in that cave with them, and any time wasted on childhood nostalgia is wasted energy.

Joan looks over at Leone. Get his story, her face reminds Joan. Stories save lives. They give shape to action.

Joan suddenly hates herself for doing this to him. What can he possibly tell her that she doesn’t already know?

Leone brings over a cup of hot water filled with ginger root and belladonna. She pulls Peter back up onto her thighs while Joan feeds him sips of the hot liquid.

“Thank you,” he says. “There isn’t much time, apparently, and you’re still missing an important part of this story. Until now, it was a tragedy.” He pauses. “Come on now, don’t look so glum. I already died, remember? Besides. I have a present for you.” Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he buries his hand deep within the pocket of his pants, searching for something. When he brings his hand out between them, Joan sees a spider, a long-legged silvery little thing.

“What the hell is that?” Leone interjects, hovering over his hand and squinting.

“This has traveled a long way to find you,” he says. He reaches his hand out toward Joan, and she in turn opens and offers her hand, and the tiny silver spider crawls the bridge between them until it sits in her palm.

“Now let me tell you what I know,” he continues, “before my… what should we call this? Before my second leaving?”

Joan laughs. Laughter and tragedy, two sides to the same face.

Chapter Eighteen

Once, when they were children—maybe when Peter was seven, maybe younger—Peter had developed a fever so intense they thought he might die. When the doctors came to their home, they discovered that his brain was swelling. His skin grew covered with palm-size scarlet blotches, like red shadows of leaves. Then all of his hair fell out. Encephalitis. In the days just before his fever lifted he’d been delirious, and he told Joan that he’d seen her turn to fire and ascend into the night sky, like a long-missing star returning to its constellation.

The silver spider crawls across Joan’s palm and up her forearm. Even in the diffused light of the cave she senses that it is not entirely natural, although it looks biological enough. Its movements seem a little too well ordered; the thin needles of its legs are as weightless and delicate as a spider’s, and yet somehow mechanical. Is she overthinking things? Haven’t her own movements over the years become calculated and inhuman?

“It’s an AV recorder,” Peter says. “The spider. Mostly biological, but wet-wired. We’ve developed tens of thousands of them, in differing guises. Homebred troglodytes. Spiders, worms, salamanders. Underground creatures. The spiders seem to travel the best between worlds without deterioration of data.”

Joan’s head shoots up and Leone’s jerks toward Peter. “Between worlds?” Joan asks.

Peter inhales and holds his breath. Joan wonders how many breaths he has left. She is already thinking of where to bury him—across the wide lake in the crystal green waters reflecting the entire ceiling and opening of the cave like a moss-colored mirror, perhaps, or in a grotto where geological patterns make malachite and azure seem to shimmer alive along the walls. If she feels anything about the word brother, it is here, in this space that smells of water and dirt and living things. Her memory remains loyal to all the times they played in the woods together as children. His death, then, should bring life back into the walls and ground and water.

A faint ticking sound scatters across the walls of the cave. Water seepage, or bats, or just geology stretching.

“These troglodytes we’ve created, they can travel up and down Skylines. They can ride telluric current without a trace. We’ve been gathering tactical information about CIEL inhabitants and technologies for more than three years now. When they started sending explosives down the Skylines, it revealed that the lines could be used to transfer matter, not just energy. The more death they sent down the elevators, the more troglodytes we sent up, like invasive species. We’ve developed maps of their entire territory: their weapons systems, their food and energy supply chains, their social organization, their power center.

“And we know something else. We know they have a problem. A big one.”

“Fuck,” Leone whispers, and in her voice Joan hears the trace of the question she knows they all three share. “What about humans? Can humans travel the Skylines?”

Peter looks down at his own arms and hands. “We don’t know about humans. So far, no. At least, no humans like me.” He pauses and shifts his gaze away, then continues.

Leone makes shapes in the dirt with her foot.

“But we do know how to draw CIEL attention to a specific target. We know how to draw their energy to a source—we’ve successfully blown former ammunitions dumps or wired old technology heaps to create something interesting for them to track down here—which gets their attention, and when we do, they send a bomb exactly where we want them to. Or clusters of them. And then, when the explosives start raining down, our troglodytes are able to use fissures in the ensuing electrical storm to travel up.”

Joan and Leone exchange looks. They’d just witnessed such an attack—the sky opening up and nearly blasting them to fuck.

Peter looks back up at them. “We can’t win any wars with weapons. But we can using data. At this point there’s almost nothing we don’t know about their technologies. And something of their day-to-day life, though the images taken are blurry and static.”

His chest seems to growl… perhaps a cough that got stuck. But in the cough Joan hears what she already knows, that his body is rapidly decomposing, going back to dirt. He has less than half a day or night, if that. And yet he looks beautiful. His cheeks like the petals of roses, his eyes like blue-green stones. The waxen white of his hairless skin gleams like its own light source there in the cave world of her life. But the veins in his arms, climbing up from his wrists, are already turning a faint blue. When he crosses his arms and speaks again, her throat tightens.

“They can track and target certain intensities of electricity,” he says. “That’s why we thought you might still be alive. They are trying to track your energy. Though they are trying desperately to uphold the story of your execution. We were able to infiltrate enough to understand the new reality they’ve constructed up there. And what they still have planned for you. And for all of us.”

Leone stands up and adjusts Little Bee at her calf, then the Beretta holstered at her thigh, and rubs her hand over her head. “They want what they’ve always fucking wanted. Slave labor and slaughter for the rest”—Leone spits—“with a dead planet orbiting beneath them like a giant turd.”

“Yes, in general terms,” Peter answers.

“General?” Leone lashes. “There’s something specific about genocide?” Leone’s face flushes, then she turns abruptly away. Joan knows her ire is not for Peter. In fact, she knows, Leone loves Peter. At least she did the last time they’d all been together in battle, years ago. The three of them were once united in violence and blood. There was no stronger bond.

Peter’s breathing grows labored. Listening to him makes Joan’s chest hurt.

“Joan,” he says, sitting down near her now Indian-style and placing his hands palm-side up on his knees. “They don’t want to kill you anymore. They need you, Joan.”

His veins river up his arms like small blue serpentines.

The walls of the cave tick.

“Again? What the fuck for?” Leone shouts. “Executing her and annihilating everyone near her the first time wasn’t enough?” Leone walks over to the side of the cavern and picks up a shoulder load of ammunition.

Joan sits silently, staring at the spider on her flesh, her thoughts between Leone’s and her brother’s words. The spider dances between her knuckles, skitters up her arm a little, then back down toward her hand. It seems… happy. She wonders if it wants to make a web there between her fingers. Some creatures are content in contained worlds. She looks over at Leone and feels a wave of something without a name. Leone is not like the spider. Leone isn’t content with states of being. She wants states of doing. In stasis, even Leone’s biceps and shoulders look wrong. She needs action. And what had Leone’s life with her all these years been reduced to? Killing. Survival. Pure action.

“So what’s the story?” Leone asks. “What the fuck do they need her for?”

“To reproduce,” Peter says.

Leone laughs. The echo mixes with the cave sounds and the murmuring micromovements of water in the deep underground reservoir next to them.

Joan can’t even get the word to go inside her ear. Reproduction? What on earth was he talking about?

“Joan.” Peter’s voice slices through her thoughts. “I need to explain. And I better do it quickly. I feel dizzy.” He hangs his head for a moment. Takes in a deep breath. Joan counts. Seven seconds, like their mother taught them as children. This is how to calm yourself.

“We haven’t just gained information on them. About CIEL. We know things about you,” he says, his voice sounding to her again like leaves and dirt blowing across barren land.

“What things?” is all Joan asks. Her voice sounding like a child’s. She holds her breath and counts to seven.

“Fucking spit it out, then,” Leone says.

Joan’s head fills with all the dead people she could not save. Armies. Her eyes sting. The spider in her hand tickles. The walls whisper and creak.

Peter digs into his rucksack and pulls out a tin container. He opens it briefly. Inside are about a dozen salamanders, all without pigment, their white bodies and eyeless heads looking vaguely embryonic. “Everything you need to know—where all our bases are stationed worldwide, what our numbers are, who to contact, how we travel, and most important, the entire cosmology of the CIEL—is contained in these. Joan will be able to upload them.”

“Upload them exactly how?” Leone asks.

“Listen,” he says, directing his attention briefly to Leone, “these are Olms. They use light and electronic microscopy. They have ampullary organs—”

“Electrical receptors?” Leone asks. She peers into the tin and watches the little blind white creatures squirm. “They transfer current?”

“Yes. Sunk deep into their epidermis. They register electric fields. They use the earth’s magnetic fields to orient, which makes them superb carriers of information. You need only let them crawl on her body.” He stares at Joan. “Your particular body.” He hands the tin filled with blind white salamanders to Leone.

“What?” Joan mutters. And then: “I’m like an Olm, then? I’m like them?” Her own thoughts and words seem dumb to her.

Peter moves closer to Joan there in the dirt. He places both of his hands upon her shoulders. Joan closes her fingers gently around the spider to protect it from harm, though briefly she wonders why. Peter looks so deeply into her eyes that, for a moment, she can see his face as it was when he was a child. Had there been a world, people who worked and raised children, families that ate meals and pet dogs and watched television in the evenings? Wasn’t there a moon in the sky at night, stars, a sun in the morning brilliant and true, and animals and trees and fertile dirt and birdsong?

“It’s more than sound, what you heard, what moved through you, Joan. More than song. More than energy even. You are…”

Joan had to catch her brother by the elbows as his knees buckled. “There’s so much more,” he whispers, tears filling his eyes.

In that moment, the cave’s walls creak. She looks at Leone, whose face wears the same worry. Something is coming, or something is about to fall apart; they usually happened together.

“Joan!” her brother yells and coughs out to her above the rising geological noise. He grabs her arms tight enough to leave finger bruises. “Your hands in the dirt. Remember?” he rasp-screams at her. His eyes fluttering. His breath leaving.

“Remember what?” Joan screams while trying to support his falling weight. Leone moves in to help carry him—but then there is a crack as loud as a continent breaking free. The granite ceiling of the cave groans and then splits in lines extending outward; the ground beneath them arches and contorts, bringing them all down. She sees the curve and sheen of the cave walls flexing—dust falls slowly like ash, and then pellets of rock like rain and then larger stones crumble loose, until the very walls heave and shatter around them. Another blast sends a jolt up her spine and she hits her head on the cave floor. When she opens her eyes, a hard lightning of white and silver light scissors down into the cave with such force that Joan loses her hearing. If it had hit her, she would have surely died.

As the dust and light and sound dissipate, Joan crawls on the ground to her brother. She shakes him violently. Nothing but corpse. She crawls farther to Leone, who rolls back and forth on the ground holding her ears. Up close she sees why: it isn’t the noise that is traumatizing her. Leone is missing an ear. And more: she is bleeding from the nose. As they look into each other’s eyes, though, they manage to understand one another. Leone, beautiful even at the most insane moments, still clutching her rifle in one hand and the tin of Olms in the other, blood pouring from the place where her ear used to be, smiles with animal ferocity.

“What? I can’t hear you motherfuckers!” Leone shouts, grinning like a jackal.

Then comes a thunderous roar that presses both of their eyes closed. White light. Silence. Then a black and blue tornado of electrical force that shoots through everything living. The sound is so hard and loud that Joan’s mouth blasts open involuntarily and her arms fly out on either side of her body and for a moment she lifts off the ground and then back down with an impact so terrible it seems like her entire skeleton collapses.

And then a terrible silent nothing.

For a moment she thinks she is dead. She can’t hear. She can’t see. Her whole body feels electrocuted.

When sight and sound return to her, she realizes that the cave walls and ceiling have collapsed to open air. Her brother’s body rests half-buried in rubble. But something is even more profoundly wrong.

Leone is gone.