"...You were pretty young when it happened," Tim commented quietly in the silence that followed.
"He shouldn't have died," she shivered in reply. "And he certainly shouldn't have died like that, confused and seizing in that...that stupid little isolation hut they forced us into. I didn't want to watch, you know?" Her voice dropped as if she were sharing a great secret. "I didn't want to, but there was only one room, and mother..."
"Your mother made you?" he ventured a guess.
"Y-yes. She said...she said it was important that I see the sort of pain people make each other go through because of their own selfishness. She said it would help me understand, but-"
"But it wasn't a lesson. It was just your father dying horribly in front of you."
Charity just nodded, her face pinched and tear-damp. "...Yes," she managed after a minute. "Yes."
He glanced over at his brother, sure that the girl's having lost a parent at the same age he had lost both of his would get him to look up from his fake slumber. The older man gave no sign of wakefulness, however, and Tim frowned. What the hell, Dick? Help me out here. This should be your territory...
With a vague worry thrumming in the back of his mind – it wasn't like Dick not to respond to a tale of woe – he focused on the conversation again. They needed to strike soon, before Dr. Collins could set off the New Madrid fault; if he acted without knowing what had been going on in the ten years since Jerome had died, though, he would be missing a piece of the puzzle, a crucial piece, possibly. He couldn't risk it. "So...you said your mom kind of lost it after that?" he pressed gently.
"Oh...well, yeah. She...I didn't think there was anything going on at first," Charity said, wiping at her eyes. "I thought...I thought we were just going to be normal. We went home together, mom and I, and for a while things were okay. She home-schooled me like dad had done. I told her I wanted to meet other kids, but she didn't give me the choice. She said I was all she had left, and that she wanted to keep me close, and...well, how could I argue with that?
"It was better at first than it had been before our trip, except for dad not being there. But she started talking about causing earthquakes again six months after he died. I didn't know, Tim," she begged. "I didn't know that she was mad at everyone after what happened to dad. Those villagers were the sort of people she was trying to help with her plan, and they wouldn't give us so much as an extra blanket. She never forgave them, I realize now. She wanted – wants, I guess – revenge. What she told me, though, was that we had to prove how well the system worked so that the scientific community would pay attention and take her plan seriously. She told me...she told me that we had to work so that the whole world would know how brilliant daddy had been. I believed her. I didn't know...
"She'd found this place," she waved an arm to indicate the cavern, "on a hiking trip that she and dad took for one of their anniversaries before I was born. I don't know if she thought that it would make her feel closer to him to base herself here, like he was still involved, or if it was just convenient, but...well, she picked this place, anyway. It took a long time for us to set all of the equipment up and make sure it was working right. We had to bring it in a bit at a time, you know? But-"
"Wait," Tim stopped her. "How...how did you get everything back here without anyone at the park office being suspicious? And what...what is all of that machinery out there, anyway?"
For a moment Charity almost looked proud. "Mother's no applied physicist, but she's not an idiot, either. This is a seismically active area; all she had to do was get forged USGS credentials, and we were in. Nobody in park administration questions stuff like that, you know? You print out an official-looking badge with your name, photo, and the right logo on it, and you're in."
"…Oh." So much for homeland security, he sighed.
"The park director didn't raise an eyebrow, at least. She told him that she would be flying in some sensitive measuring equipment and staying back here for several weeks at a time with it. He didn't mind; it was all in the name of science, right?" Charity snorted. "Fool. He could have brought her down with one phone call, and he didn't so much as lift a finger. So every summer we brought back another helicopter load of supplies; plywood for walls, dehydrated food, daddy's machines. He'd still been working on his dome project when he died, and-" she broke off. "You know about the force field around us, right?"
"Uh..." He waffled, trying to decide whether or not to lie to her. If he didn't, a part of their 'no-nothing hikers' facade would be destroyed; on the other hand, she'd already told him so much that she probably wouldn't care what they'd come in knowing. "...Yeah. We tried to walk out after the earthquake, and we bumped into it."
"Okay. I figured, but you never know. So...it's the biggest dome he ever managed to get working. It's not nearly as easy to carry around as the quake network spheres are, obviously, but we got all the pieces here in a couple of trips. It was the last thing we brought in other than ourselves; mom didn't want to risk something happening to it or someone else stumbling into the cave while we were gone. The other stuff we could replace if we had to, but the dome and the radio tower, they were essential."
Radio tower? Tim bit back a frown. That was what the huge silver structure outside had appeared to be, but it didn't make sense. If signals couldn't get past the force field, what was the point of having a radio tower? Charity had gone on, though, so he held his questions.
"I was starting to get an inkling then that what we were doing was...well...questionable, at the very least. I asked her why we needed the protection of a force field if our project would help people. She had a lot of different reasons, but none of them really rang true. I ignored it, though. I mean, she's my mother. I don't have anyone else in the world, and I thought...I thought I could trust her. I still thought she was an angel..."
She shook her head, seeming to banish a bad thought. "Anyway, we got everything in finally. Last fall she told me that it was time to show the world daddy's genius, and we came here on her fake USGS pass again. No more equipment, no more supplies, just us and a couple bags of personal stuff. She told the park we were helicoptering in and back out, like normal, but she told the helicopter pilot that we were going to walk out after our work was done. Our stuff was in hiking backpacks and we had a history in the area, so again, nobody questioned it.
"It took months to get everything set up. The radio tower was the easy part; all we had to do was find a safe place for it where it wouldn't stick out when it was folded down. That's my father's invention, too," a faintly beaming smile crossed her lips. "The whole idea with the spheres was to trigger them remotely, so he made a collapsible tower that was tall enough to get the triggering signal to a satellite even in rough terrain. All we had to do once it was in place was make sure no one saw it until the dome was in place.
"Mom started running tests as soon as it was up. It had been fifteen years since she'd planted the earliest parts of her network, and she wasn't sure they would all still work. She made them all produce small quakes, one at a time, always working on cloudy nights to keep anyone from seeing. She didn't want to risk clustering the trials, so it took forever to run through them all. Two weeks ago she tested the last one, and then last week...last week we finally got the dome finished."
"It took that long to put back together?" Tim boggled. He didn't expect to find that the compacting sphere was a simple piece of machinery if he ever got his hands on one – what it did certainly wasn't simple, at least – but nine months seemed a bit excessive.
But Charity was shaking her head. "It wasn't the above-ground machinery that was the problem. The little spheres, the ones that just have to produce one quick force field to push at plate boundaries, they don't need nearly as much power. Just burying them in the ground and letting their batteries charge is enough. Some places take longer than others to fully power up because of variations in the magnetic field and local geothermals, but after that it's ready to go. The dome, though...the dome is constant. The dome can't flicker and go out when it's time for a recharge – it has to have a constant flow of power."
"Wait, wait, wait," Tim breathed, shaking his head in disbelief. There was only one source of geothermal energy he could think of that would provide the sort of power that Charity seemed to be saying was required, but it couldn't be… "You don't mean...you didn't tap into a magma pocket, did you? Like...the magma pocket?" Please, please say no. Nothing will ever break through the force field if it's drawing off of a supervolcano…
But a happy grin broke across the girl's face. "You guessed it!" she cheered, then immediately sobered. "...Sorry. I suppose I shouldn't really be happy about that, considering, but...it is amazing, isn't it?"
He was impressed despite his best efforts not to be, and couldn't argue. "Your mom might be trying to destroy the world, Charity, but...that's some amazing science, right there. How...?"
"I don't know the specifics," she shook her head. "She wouldn't let me near the actual drilling. There's a fissure further back in the cave that she pushed deeper to get a more regular flow, but all I was allowed to do was run the computer from here and shout readings at her. I've never even seen where the feed goes into the ground.
"Anyway...we finally got it hooked up. We were supposed to time it so that there wouldn't be anyone trapped inside with us, but after all those months – years, really – of waiting and working towards her goal, she couldn't help herself. Once the dome's system was ready she just refused to hold off any longer.
"The problem was that she'd never operated one of the domes; that had been dad's department. She knew how to manipulate the earthquake-causing spheres, though, and she assumed that the dome would work the same way. It...sort of did," she winced, "we got the dome up, at least, but...it wasn't supposed to cause that awful earthquake."
Tim's jaw dropped. "The quake here was an accident?!" You've got to be shitting me. All the hell we've gone through in the last few days, and you're telling me she didn't even mean it?!
She gave him a scathing look. "Of course it was an accident. Who sets off a massive temblor right under their own feet? We're lucky it didn't destroy the equipment or collapse the whole cave right on top of us. Well...she's lucky, I guess. I'm not such a fan of this project anymore; I kind of wish everything had buried us in here."
There, finally, was the confirmation he needed that Charity might truly be able to be won over to his side. "Why's that?" he asked as carefully as he could.
"…Look, I believe in her idea, okay?" The girl raised one hand from her gun to her lips and began to gnaw at her fingernails. "I really think that scheduled quakes could save a lot of lives. Daddy believed that, and I do too. But what she's doing now...the only person who knows the schedule is her. She won't even tell me more than one at a time. And she's not warning anyone, she's just striking. We were supposed to help people, not murder them, but she's…" She turned her head away. "...That's why I said what I said earlier, about not killing you once I told you the story. I'm not a murderer – I'm not like her – and I don't want to be."
Her eyes were full of guilty tears as she met his gaze once more. "I know I'm technically complicit in all of the deaths she's causing, but it wasn't my fault, Tim. Please, please believe that it wasn't my fault. I could have told someone earlier, or tried to sabotage it, or...or something, but...but it was supposed to be a good thing. It was supposed to save lives, not take them. She's...she's my mother, and I...I trusted her..."
Author's Note: As many of you have no doubt guessed, this is all taking place in/around the area we know as Yellowstone. As a fun little visual, I've added an infographic about the Yellowstone Hotspot (magma pocket) on my blog. A request was made to know the name of the game I've been asked to write, as well, so I'll also post that. Happy reading!