“We need to hurry,” I say.
I have no desire to stay for long at the base of another mutant. In my condition, it’s a fight I would certainly not survive. I’m not exactly at the top of my strength.
“We came to rescue you, Marika,” Jude says.
“Rescue me?”
She looks confused. As if she has resigned herself to her new life and never expected to be saved from it.
Jude nods. “And to ask you for a small favor. Once we’re out of here, we’ll need you to hack into an aircraft for us.”
“But where are you taking me?” she asks, wary.
“I don’t know yet. We’ll figure it out once we’re out of here. Oliver is right; we need to hurry. Pack your things. The aircraft isn’t far.”
It feels strange to hear my name coming from his lips. He usually just says, ‘hey, you’. It does something to me that I’d rather not inspect too closely right now.
“If you want me to hack into something, I’ll need my computers. They’re in the main building,” she says.
“Can you get them now?”
Marika nods and gets out of bed as Jude gestures for her to hurry. She leaves us alone in the tower where she has taken residence. I take a seat while Jude rummages through the room. There are computers, laptops, screens, and everything else that a tech-savvy person might need. She must have been doing this before the Rise. I wonder briefly how she learned to cope with the end of the world as she knew it. I’ve never known anything else. It’s difficult to imagine a life where you don’t have to constantly look over your shoulder.
Jude must have been thinking the same thing because he says, “Marika was in her twenties when the Rise happened. She worked as an engineer for NASA. You know, the ones who used to send people into space?”
I chuckle. “We really used to do that?”
“It makes me wonder,” he says, sitting on the bed, “if we had been more advanced, we could have escaped to another planet. Like they do in the movies. Leave the old gods behind.”
“This is our home,” I say.
As dangerous as it is, I can’t imagine leaving behind the wonders of Earth.
“We have to be patient with Marika,” he changes the subject. “She’s soft. Like most people from before the Rise. She survived this long out of sheer luck. She met the right people to keep her alive. The survivors, like my parents.”
“Like you,” I say.
Jude smiles sadly. “What’s funny is that my family always considered me to be too soft. They tried to beat the kindness out of me. To them, it was a weakness.”
“You’re many things, but weak isn’t one.”
Jude meets my eyes, lips parted. And for the first time, I realize that he’s on a bed. If we’re quick enough, we could—
Hurried steps come from outside—too many steps—and right as we jump to our feet, the door crashes open, revealing a small army of men and women with their guns out.
A muscular woman walks in. Her eyes shine yellow in the dark. My mutant sister, Maeve.
“Hello, boys. You should have rung the bell,” she says with a smile.
12
Altamaha-ha
“Our planet has changed a lot since the last time the old gods were awake. Some of them went to sleep in an entirely different climate and landscape and woke up in a strange place. The great lakes that appeared after the last ice age disappeared over centuries, leaving behind dry land. And some old gods found themselves stranded when they awoke. Long before that, our continent used to be separated by the Western Interior Seaway. But the old gods are not normal creatures. They’re unkillable and immortal. To them, it might just be a temporary inconvenience.”
Extract ofA Study of the Old Gods, Albany Seyra, 2048.
Maeve is beautiful, in the way that a tiger is beautiful. Strong and deadly. She’s as tall as me, and almost as wide. She has long, dark hair and brown skin. Her eyes betray her origins. They’re an uncanny shade of yellow.
