Old Mendenhall Mining Camp, Douglas Island, Alaska
"Arcturus," the imperious voice called. "Water."
He bowed slightly, even though Polaris couldn't see him, dipping water from the large ewer by the door into a smaller glass jug. Tipped the jug back just enough to let the water gurgle out to the invisible line he'd memorized years ago, the proper level, the harmonious ratio he'd been taught to recognize for as long as he could remember.
"Water, Polaris," he whispered, setting the jug on the little stool by the steps, head bowed, shuffling backward. He was almost out the door, almost safe, when the voice spoke again.
"The lines," Polaris said, their voice filling the low-ceilinged room. "The final lines. Bring them to me."
He shivered, trying not to let Polaris see. He knew what happened when suspected of anything even resembling doubt, even if it was an unconscious expression of fear and awe. Ran his thumb reflexively over the smooth stump of his little finger, an early and memorable consequence. Thought instead of the shimmering web that hung between the points of the stars, made up of strings of uncountable digits; thought of Polaris, surrounded by light, reading their glorious meaning to him, to all of them, describing how the universe had been, how it would finally, perfectly end.
"Yes, Polaris," he said, long hair dragging on the floor as he bowed more deeply, his forehead nearly brushing the rough planks.
Outside the Hub, across the muddy yard from the bunkhouse and the Abacus, he spied Orionis, carefully loading clean pine planks onto a cart. "Polaris wants the lines," he said, Orionis stopping immediately and turning from her work, heading without hesitation or question to the faint trail between the soaring lodgepole pines that led to the Deep Cache, where the lines were kept safe in a crevice in the mountain.
He paused in the middle of the yard, taking a slow, deep breath, letting his hands fall to rest as they had been trained to do, lightly encircling the center of his chest, unconsciously pushing outward just a little, opening himself from within. Polaris will read the lines, he thought. The final lines.
The thought made him a little dizzy. He knew it was time, after the Great Tremors and the Scouring Wave had happened; even though some among them had, he knew, doubted. Hadn't so much as blinked as the faithless in their constellation had been found out in the days following the promised cataclysm, had been gathered and brought low before Polaris, made to scream and cry and repent before they were returned to the web of starlight, their deep algorithms rejoining the strings of digits connecting all things to all things.
Ursa had been there. She had been there. She had called out a name to him, something that made his skin feel suddenly too tight, had made him shuffle back toward the dark comfort of Polaris, extending a safe shadow over him as the woman who cried to him had spat and wept and clawed and, eventually, fallen silent at their feet, her bright red blood slipping smooth and glossy over the rough wood of the Hub's floors, through the uneven gaps between planks, down and down into the hard earth below.
"Arcturus," Polaris had said that day, only days ago but it had been another lifetime, a long-shed skin. "You are my light in this darkest night before the dawn, when universe throws open its doors to us."
He'd managed to hold his knees steady against the magnitude of the words, to bow deeply, to press his head to the damp wood, Polaris reaching out and touching him—anointing him—scraping what he knew was the sacred geometry on his forehead, Polaris's holy thumb red with Ursa's thick blood as the hand was drawn back into a cocoon of shadow. "Child of starlight," Polaris had murmured. "Bathed in the glow."
"Bathed in the glow," the others had murmured, kneeling, their long hair dragging through the blood pooling on the floor.
"Clear it," Polaris had said abruptly, and the others had immediately started dragging the empty shells out of the Hub. And then, "water."
Orionis had stared hard at him from across the room before he realized that it was his job as the newly-anointed Child. "Water, Polaris," he'd said, trying to keep his voice steady. Hadn't so much as glanced down as he stepped over the remains of the faithless, their skins now emptied of use, of meaning. As he stepped over Ursa, her blank eyes still open.
Bathed in the glow, he thought firmly, feeling himself caught in the infinite strands of equations that circled around them, cutting through the very air itself, creating the air itself. Bathed in the glow.
She couldn't help the thin, high gasp that spilled out of her; she clapped her hand over her mouth, breath hot and frantic against the press of her fingers.
Did they hear?
She crouched low, pressed against the damp, splitting pine planks of the small building, praying the shadows would hide her.
"This way," one of them said. "I heard a voice this way."
"Polaris says we welcome them," the other voice, higher, younger, replied.
"You want to tell Polaris we let one free? Because we were waiting to hand them an engraved invitation and they got away instead?"
The first voice was a woman's. Monica felt her heart sink as she breathed, light and shallow, pleading silently, desperately to whoever might be listening that they wouldn't hear her. Her knees burned as she crouched, motionless, waiting for what felt like hours until the two sets of footsteps receded, the woman's voice muttering angrily. Took a shaky breath, stood up as slowly as she could, wincing at the sharp crack in her knees. Held her breath again, but heard no sign of people.
The night was clammy and cool; thick fog had rolled down from the mountain, muffling the omnipresent trickle of the abandoned mining camp's many open streams. She'd only come back because of the fog, had prayed it would shroud her as she crept from the grounded cruise ship, already a crumbling relic before the channel flooded, now pushed on its side, surrounded by debris, halfway up the bank. They'd been huddled there, all sixty of them, hiding in rotted-out staterooms and empty holds, since the disaster had happened, since the others had come creeping out of the dark.
They all knew about Polaris, everyone did. The group had been just one more in a vast number of odd little communities that had dotted the Alaskan wilderness for decades. Lost people who needed to find something, anything, and decided the rugged, isolated north was the place to look for it. The evangelicals, the anti-government radicals, tucked up in their mountain enclaves; they were as familiar and as avoided as the boogeyman.
Monica had lived in Juneau for most of her life; her mother had been a fourth-grade teacher and her father worked as a computer technician for NOAA, helping maintain weather equipment. She remembered her father coming home one night, years ago, holding out an issue of Popular Electronics, a look on his face Monica couldn't quite parse; a mixture of amusement and confusion and just a hint of awe.
"Lisa Pace just sold Polaris Technologies for $97 million," he said, Monica's mother offering a disinterested little hmm from the kitchen table where she sat grading a stack of vocabulary tests.
"You remember, we met her in Seattle must have been fifteen years ago, when I was at Boeing. Pace Biotech at the time? She was fishing around for a research partnership, some sort of deep algorithm project. Tall lady, dark hair, very, uh, intense?"
Her mother sighed, sat back, thinking. "Maybe?"
"You met her. Anyway, she sold her company and I guess she's moving up to Juneau for some top-secret project."
"Ugh, why?" Monica sneered.
Her parents rolled their eyes, gave each other a little smirk. They'd allegedly moved from Seattle when she was five in order to accommodate her father's job, but they both loved the ruggedness, the wild beauty, the quiet.
"Better dust off your resume," her mother teased. Her father laughed.
"I don't think you could pay me enough to work for that lady," he said. "She always seemed just a little weird, you know? She's a genius with a line of code but all that biotech, tracking stuff creeps me out. I'll stick to the weather."
"I remember her!" Monica's mother cried suddenly. "At Ronny and Miranda's party. She kept looking over my head when she talked to me but there wasn't anyone behind me."
"That's her. Weird, right?"
"I might take weird for $97 million."
"Good thing I'm on a government salary," her father said, moving around to kiss her mother on the cheek.
"Ugh," Monica said, rolling her eyes and going back to her room.
She inched her way around the little wooden building, pressing carefully on the door, body tense as she waited for the telltale squeak. Held her breath again, waiting. Slipped silently into the room.
She crept across the floor of the single-room shack, barely breathing. Looked around, took a deep breath, flipped on the radio, quickly covering the glow of its face with her hand.
"Hello," she whispered. "Brenda? Seabrook?"
The endless hiss of dead air.
You have to be there. You have to.
"Monica," Brenda's voice, faint through the speaker. "Monica, it's Brenda, are you all right?"
"I'm all right. They almost caught me. But I'm all right."
"Good." Her voice was thin, quiet, overlaid with radio hiss, but she sounded relieved. "We're on our way, Monica. Two more days, can you make it two more days?"
Monica frowned, uncertain. "They're moving around more," she whispered. "Groups of them. Building things. I don't know what. And—" she stopped. Found herself unable to say the next thing.
"And what, Monica? It's okay, we're coming to help you."
"Bodies," she breathed. "I saw bodies. Not us."
There was a long beat of silence, then Brenda spoke again, her voice almost too controlled.
"Could they be from the earthquake? Or the flood?"
"No," Monica whispered. "It's them. Their people. Maybe a dozen. Thrown in the woods. So much blood," she gasped. "There was so much blood."
"It's okay, Monica. You're being so brave, so brave, and this is almost over, I swear. We've got a doctor on board and all kinds of supplies for you."
"Can you protect us?"
"We can," Brenda said flatly. "We will."
She heard a loud, sharp crack somewhere outside, felt her blood run cold. "I have to go, I'm sorry," she whispered quickly, flipping off the radio and ducking next to a large freestanding cabinet, one that provided just enough cover in case anyone were to peer inside.
Nobody came. She stood motionless for another ten minutes, hardly breathing, then crept slowly, carefully back outside, making her way through the fog back to the cold, crumbling hulk of the cruise ship.
Two days.