Page 25 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Beautifully Terrifying
C ian flew the Berg as if he had been flying one his whole life. “Where did you say you were from again?” Isaac asked, looking at all the buttons and measurements on the pilot dashboard. He needed to know more about the two strangers he’d be stuck with.
Cian and Erros looked at each other before Cian answered. “South of here.”
“Do they all have Bergs there?” Jackie walked up and asked, eyeing the controls.
Cian just shook his head. Isaac wanted to ask a million questions, but first he needed to figure out how to tell Jackie and Old Man Frypan that he’d made up his mind to stay with Ximena to find the Master Villa and destroy the island’s coordinates from its records.
If he left Ximena alone to do it, she might do something crazy and Cian and Erros could get rid of her before she was able to destroy any trace of how to get to their island.
It killed Isaac to have to leave the others, and possibly never see any of them again, but he owed it to everyone back on their island.
He had nothing left to go home to, but the others .
. . they deserved to feel safe and be safe when they got back home.
And maybe it was a way that Isaac could finally make his mom proud.
Heavy stuff to think about.
“You’re deep-frying something,” Frypan said, spooking him. Isaac would miss that old man the most. Somehow Frypan always knew when he was in his thoughts too much.
“Yeah, I am . . .” Isaac looked back at Ximena who had her head in her hands. Probably trying to use her second-sight somehow. “It’ll be okay though . . .”
“Never another option,” Frypan said with a half-smile.
“We’re close.” Erros pointed ahead, but what he pointed at caused all thought to escape Isaac’s mind.
“What the heck is that?” he asked. “More colors?” It was so green but bright, a color he didn’t yet have a name for, draped across the deep, deep sky.
“I can’t tell if it’s beautiful or beyond terrifying,” Jackie whispered in awe.
“Feels like both . . .” Frypan added. “This is the aurora?”
The way the colors radiated upward felt unearthly. “Are we . . . are we going to fly into it?” Isaac asked.
Cian and Erros just smiled. “The auroras have fully returned. It’s happening. The Evolution. All part of the plan, apparently.”
Isaac watched the sky in wonder as they flew right into the mash of flares. Translucent colors and vortex shapes of energy swirled around the Berg. Ximena finally looked up, a bit of wonder lighting up her eyes for once.
“The Borealis is spreading. A tornado of hydrogen and nitrogen in the atmosphere.” Cian said all this with great pride, all while he piloted the Berg. “Nothing to worry about.”
Isaac knew enough to know that when adults said not to worry, it meant there was usually something to worry about. Jackie grabbed Isaac’s arm as she looked straight ahead, her eyes fixated on the green swirls in front of them. Faint reds joined in, and they danced together like flames of a fire.
“The Sequencers would love this . . .” Erros said to himself.
A feeling of finality drowned Isaac. He would have given anything for Cian and Erros to fly them all the way back home to their island, but he realized as he looked at the colors moving in the darkness all around them that nothing would ever be the same. He couldn’t unknow what he knew.
“You okay?” Old Man Frypan asked. “It’s something, isn’t it . . . ?” He looked ahead with something like glee.
“Yeah . . .” The colors brightened as the Berg drew closer.
“The aurora means . . .” Ximena stepped closer to the window.
“The Evolution.” Cian and Erros answered in unison. “Welcome to the site of the Maze, home of the Evolution.”
The City of the Godhead. They’d made it.
A bright orange glow shone from below, and it grew more solid in the darkness than the other colors floating in the sky.
“We should have waited until daylight, how are you going to know where to land?” Isaac asked, looking down.
“Wait, there’s an aurora on the ground, too? ”
Ximena touched the window of the Berg right where Isaac was squinting to see the orange flares of light. “No . . . that’s . . . a fire.”
Isaac shook his head. “It’s glowing. Like the blue aurora we saw but red.”
Jackie and Frypan got quiet. The Berg flew closer and closer and the red-orange glow grew bigger. Cian pointed at something that Isaac couldn’t yet see. Erros erupted, “Shitstains of Shitstorms. . . . Those are fires of war.”
Cian pulled the Berg to the left without another word.
“All these years and now the Remnants strike?” Erros flicked one of the controls.
Cian steered the Berg farther away from the City of the Godhead. The glow of the fire grew small and distant, but the panic inside Isaac exploded in size.
His friends were down there.
“Stop!” he yelled. “What are you doing? We need to get down there to help our friends!”
They didn’t stop.
Alexandra pulled out what she could use from the cabinets, letting her inner knowledge guide her.
Vials. Liquids. Needles. She had Sadina, Dear Sadina.
She’d use the digits. The sacred digits.
The Flaring Discipline. All of it. The Goddess spread everything she’d pulled out onto the table in the center of the room.
Think, Alexandra, think. But it was hard to conjure thoughts with noisy children carrying on.
“Stop that!” She turned to their chaos and laughter, and the young ones froze, beakers in their hands. “Take that off,” Alexandra said to Dominic, who had put on one of the women’s lab coats. “Reverence. Please.”
“I don’t know what that means . . .” the boy mumbled.
“Respect!” the Goddess answered. “Don’t you have respect for objects, people, places?”
Roxy set her knife on the table, right in front for Alexandra to see. “All due respect to you, they’re still children.”
“And what’s your excuse?” the Goddess said.
“Excuse me?” Roxy leaned in with her hand on her knife.
Alexandra shook her head. “I’m sorry. You’ll understand that I’ve been grieving.
The stress of this . . .” She smoothed out her cloak.
“This robe . . . was a gift from my dear friend Flint, who perished from an arrow in his back—from your war-crazed people.” She pointed at Roxy and the other soldiers.
“Yeah, not me. I’m from ya-never-heard-of-it-ville, not that Remnant Nation. But I’ll cut anyone who hurts these children. Any of them . . . they’re all my kids now.” She pulled her knife back from the table. “And they’ve been through a lot, too. If they want to play dress-up, let ’em.”
Alexandra breathed in for three seconds, held her breath for three, exhaled for three.
She composed herself. She’d use this to her advantage.
She just needed the children’s blood. She needed them.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Thank you,” she gently said to Roxy, who picked her knife off the table with a nod.
“I need your help. All of you. Gather close.”
“We’re not scientists, just so you know,” Dominic said. Of course he wasn’t, neither was Alexandra. But anything was possible with the digits, the Flare, the discipline.
“What can we do?” Sadina asked. Helpful. Sweet. Immune Sadina.
Alexandra didn’t have a plan, but she had the tools. “Come closer. Quickly.” She lifted the sleeve of her cloak to show them the marking Nicholas had given her when he first taught her about the digits. “This sequence of numbers makes up all life. Makes up all of time. Makes up all of nature . . .”
“And makes up the Cure?” Sadina asked. Alexandra smiled her first true smile since the war had started.
“Yes, Dear Sadina.” It would.
“Is it magic?” Trish asked in the most imbecilic of voices.
Alexandra looked at the girl’s face next to Sadina and she couldn’t help but touch her cheek.
How soft and innocent, yet mind-maddening dumb, children were.
She then placed her other hand on Sadina’s cheek, a descendant of Newt.
The past could be the future again. She believed it to be true more than she believed anything. The Goddess pulled Sadina to her.
“Yes. In a way, someone might call it magic . . . yes.” Alexandra continued to break Nicholas’ rules: to share the secrets of the digits, the Sacred Truths, and the Flaring Discipline with the unanointed .
. . because soon enough . . . the whole world would be anointed with the Cure, with the gifts of the Evolution, and she would need a group of Devout Evolutionaries underneath her. To help her usher in the new world.
She traced the lines of her tattoo. “There is a spiral that connects us all. Every piece of nature, every person, every part of history is a part of the spiral.” Part of the whole. Every person a digit. Every outcome already set in motion.
“Spiral? Like a pig’s tail?” the worthless Dominic asked. Only he would acquaint something so sacred as the digits to an animal’s ass. The thought of a squealing pig sent a shiver of death through the crown of Alexandra’s head.
The Goddess shook her vision clear. “No. Nothing like that.” She scoffed at him.
“The Golden spiral. The Sequence. It connects to everything in life and in death, in space and time.” She traced her finger around the spiral of the tattoo to show them.
They all leaned in to see, and even Minho and Orange came from around the corner to listen.
Minho interrupted her speech. “That’s great and all, but we went through the whole place, and there’s no food.
No water. Pipes aren’t working. What’s your plan, Goddess ?
” He poked his gun’s tip against a hanging medical skeleton in the corner.
“We need a plan or this is going to be all of us pretty soon.”
“Nonsense,” the Goddess replied. “We’re safer here than anywhere.” But if the soldier was right that the women were gone . . . they’d taken all the supplies with them . She looked through the cabinets for something, anything—she’d know it when she saw it.