Incarnate: Infinite Part 2

"They should."

That was good. Our trip out of Heart and Range would have been much more difficult without roads.

Banging sounded on the door. A second later, it pulled open, revealing darkness. I jumped to turn off the light, but Lidea said, "Watch out. The earthquake moved a table here." A small cl.u.s.ter of people waited at the door. Lidea and Geral held babies against them, while Orrin carried bags.

I sagged in relief. "Actually, that was Sam." I hurried over to drag the table out of their way, and when they were safe inside, we sat around the lamp to trade stories.

"Mat tried to kill you?" Orrin sounded incredulous.

"He was one of Deborl's followers." Maybe one of Meuric's followers before Deborl. "I think he attacked me once before."

Orrin glanced at Sam. "When did that happen?"

"Remember when Ana was missing a while ago?" Sam said, and everyone nodded. I hadn't actually been missing. I'd been inside the temple, but thanks to the memory magic Janan worked on oldsouls, Sam hadn't been able to remember where I'd gone. He'd told everyone I was sick, while he and his friends searched for me.

I wished I could tell my friends the truth about the temple, but they wouldn't be able to remember it without months of my reminding them, like I'd done for Sam. It was easier not to burden them with knowledge they couldn't hold on to.

"Well," Sam went on, "she appeared in the market field one morning. Shortly before I found her, someone shoved her and stole a key from her, but she was so exhausted and afraid, she wasn't able to identify him."

I nodded. "But it was Mat. I recognized him tonight." I didn't add that he was probably bleeding to death in Sam's washroom. "After he attacked, we contacted Stef and came here."

"What happened to you?" Sam asked.

Lidea and Geral glanced at each other, and Lidea started, "Well, there was the earthquake."

"Ariana wouldn't go back to sleep," Geral said, "so I was already awake when Stef sneaked into my house. Orrin was with me. We had to pack in the dark, in case anyone was watching the house."

Orrin took up the story. "We went to Lidea's house, and then Stef activated the labor drones and told us to ride to the library."

"Clever." That sounded like the kind of plan Stef would come up with.

"Are you worried they'll attack newsouls now?" Lidea asked. "I thought the Council promised to protect newsouls. I thought your demonstration worked."

I shook my head and repeated what Councilor Sine had told me once. "There's a law about killing me. Murder is frowned upon, of course, but with me, they didn't know whether I would be reincarnated, so they made it illegal to try to kill me. The law extends to the other newsouls, but Deborl, Merton, and their friendsa"they don't care. They think any punishment is worth it. They just want us dead."

"Why?" Lidea held Anid to her chest. "I just can't understand why."

I didn't want to explain Janan and their misguided devotion to him. Not right now. So I shrugged and leaned against Sam's shoulder. "The Council is working to protect newsouls, but this is the truth: they won't succeed. They can make rules, a.s.sign guards, and lock up everyone they think will cause trouble, but there will always be someone they miss, some hole in their security they overlook. Newsouls aren't safe in Heart. And neither is anyone else."

"What are you saying?" Orrin leaned forward, darkness in his eyes.

"I'm saying I'm not the only one who needs to leave Heart. We all need to get out."

After changing into the spare clothes Geral and Orrin had brought, Sam and I headed upstairs to where the maps were kept.

"I thought you knew where we're going." The dusty air of the library smothered his words. "Back to Menehem's lab, right? For the sylph?"

"Yes, but then where? We can't stay there." We could, I supposed, but there had to be something better. "I don't know. I think the sylph will have answers. I'm sure they'll be there. They were before."

Sam nodded.

"I need a better idea of the world surrounding Range. There's so much of it. I need a plan." I slumped into a chair when we entered the map area. "Sam, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to stop Janan."

He looked at me, all longing and sadness, and said nothing of my confession. "What maps do you want?"

I gazed around the s.p.a.ce, filled with rolled sheets of paper and large books. There had to be a hundred maps. Maybe more. "I don't know."

"Perhaps let's start with Range." Sam drifted around the small, closed area until he found a rolled map. Together, we spread the thick paper across the table, smoothing the corners with our hands. I didn't know how to read it, not as far as figuring out distances or elevations, but I recognized familiar locations.

Rangedge Lake was in the south, near where I grew up in Purple Rose Cottage. Midrange Lake was a huge body of water right by Heart. Small Xs marked geysers and fumaroles, while Os marked mud pools and hot springs.

Mountains were everywhere, continuing northwest in a line of jagged peaks. Forests covered the map, all across Range, and everywhere beyond the human haven.

I dragged my finger eastward, until I found the twin peaks visible from Menehem's laboratory. "The lab should be somewhere here, right?"

Sam nodded and pointed at what looked like a random spot. "There." He moved his finger. "See, here's the road."

Now that he pointed it out, I did. It had almost been lost in the other lines and splotches of ink. While I bent to study the land surrounding the lab, Sam fetched more maps and laid them on the table.

North of Range, the forest grew denser and the details less frequent, as though few people had bothered to explore and chart that area. A line of writing warned of dragons in the frozen north, though I wasn't sure how far out one had to go in order to see them. Would it take a week to get there? Probably more.

"Sam."

He paused next to me, arm around my waist.

"Remember when you told me about how you died in your last lifetime? You went north, saw a huge white wall, and there were dragons?"

He hesitated. "Yes."

"Where would that be on this map?"

"I . . ." His bandaged hand drifted over the map, but never paused. "I'm not sure. You don't want to go there, do you?"

"Of course not." The last thing I wanted to do was put Sam in the path of dragons. He'd died by dragons thirty times. By some fluke, I'd managed to save him from dragons twice this lifetime. I didn't want to risk him a third time. "I'm just trying to get an idea of the rest of the world, since I won't be able to come back here."

Sam sighed a little, like relief. "I didn't mean to be suspicious. We've learned a lot about sylph in the last few monthsa"enough to know they might not be as evil as we'd thoughta"but dragons still terrify me."

Thirty times. I couldn't imagine dying thirty times because of dragons. "I wouldn't put you in danger."

He gave a weak, exhausted smile, and we both dropped our attention back to the table. "Stef can put maps on your SED for you. It's not as good as seeing the whole land on paper, but it's better than nothing."

"Oh, good." I found warnings of trolls in the east, centaurs in the south, and rocs in the west. And these things were only the creatures that citizens of Heart might encounter on the edges of Range. There were more creatures beyond, though this map didn't show that far. "I think I need a bigger map."

Sam produced a globe, the whole world on a piece of polished stone. Continents were outlined in gold and silver, dressed in green and brown and beige and white, depending on the vegetation or lack thereof. Oceans and large lakes were brilliant, beautiful blue.

I caressed the globe, stone and metal smooth beneath my palm. "I had no idea there was so much beyond Range. Where are we?"

"Here." He pointed toward the middle of a northern continent. "Range is smaller than the s.p.a.ce my fingertip takes up."

"Oh." I turned the globe. It was tilteda"one of my teachers had told me the world was tilted, but on what, I wasn't surea"and gazed at continents that suddenly seemed so far away it was pointless even thinking about them. "Range feels so big."

"It is big." Sam smoothed hair off my face. "The rest of the world is even bigger."

"It makes me feel small. I don't like it."

"Me neither." Sam sat on the edge of the table and watched while I looked through more maps, dismissing some and moving others into a pile. He answered whenever I had questions, but for the most part, he kept his eyes closed and seemed lost in thought.

I yawned as I finished with the maps and rolled them up again. "Let's go to sleep, Sam."

"Right here?" He eyed the floor. "Right here looks good."

I helped him off the table and we headed downstairs, dousing lights as we went. As we reached the stairs, my SED buzzed with a message from Stef.

Get down here. Big news.

4.

GATHERING.

HEAD ACHING FROM lack of rest and too much mortal peril, I slumped down the stairs to find that Stef had arrived with several other friends.

"So much for sleep," Sam muttered.

"Rin is here." I nodded toward the crowd. "She can look at your hand." Rin was a small girl, about ten or eleven years old, but she was one of the best medics in Heart. For some reason, she liked me. She'd stuck up for me several times, even before I'd known who she was.

"Wow." Stef looked up as we descended the stairs. "You two look terrible."

"Ana!" Sarit jumped up and threw her arms around me. "You're okay."

I hugged her back, relieved she was here. Everyone knew Sarit and I were best friends; Deborl would target her if we left her behind. Stef could take care of herself, but Sarit was gentle. She wouldn't hurt anyone, even to protect herself.

"Are we safe here?" someone asked.

Stef nodded. "I've secured the library entrances. And when we leave, no one goes anywhere alone. Take groups of at least five."

People nodded.

"What's your news, Stef?" Sam glanced around the crowd, and found an unoccupied chair to collapse into. Everyone looked exhausted, their coats on over nightclothes and hastily packed bags by the door. Weapons had been piled onto one of the tables, and several people were hunched over SEDs, sending messages or checking some sort of function that involved a map.

Everyone was newsoul-friendly. Some had given me lessons on various subjects, while others were simply close friends of Sam. There was another handful I recognized from a list Sarit and I had made: they were pregnant women. They might be carrying oldsouls, but . . . they might be carrying newsouls, too.

"It's all bad news." As usual, in spite of the chaos, Stef looked like she'd spent an hour grooming herself. Not like she'd just been sneaking people out of their houses, and possibly killing others.

I glanced at Sam on his chair, but there wasn't room for both of us unless I sat on top of him, and no one else was sitting on their friends. Even the other newsouls were tucked away somewhere, sleeping. Grudgingly, I claimed my own chair on the other side of the crowd.

"Everyone knows that Sam and Ana were attacked tonight. They asked me to bring most of you here in case there were other attacks, but the truth is there's much more for us to worry about. I've sent a program to all of your SEDs. Whit and Orrin already had it, of course, but the rest of you should pay attention." Stef held up her SED. "This program is linked to the monitoring stations around Range. They read all seismological activity and translate it into information that's useful to us."

As she spoke, I found the new function on my SED and opened it. Several small red dots appeared over a map of Range. A large one was centered right under Heart.

"The dots are recent earthquakes," Stef went on. "The bigger the dot, the bigger the earthquake. If you tap the menu, you can switch between different types of events. There's another that shows where the hydrothermal eruptions took place. We won't know all the details on those until someone actually goes to look. I'm afraid some of the equipment was damaged or destroyed, but this should give you an idea of what's going on."

"And what is going on?" Rin pulled a blanket around her shoulders and yawned. "Sorry, I'm just tired, not bored. Stef woke me up, even though no one was trying to kill me." She flashed Stef a dark look, suggesting she should probably not sleep anywhere close to Rin or risk waking up dead.

And that was curious. Why were all these people here? I'd been expecting the parents of newsouls and a few of our closest friends. Ten or twelve people. Not forty.

Whit spoke up. "The caldera is unstable. The ground has been rising measurably over the last few months, and Midrange Lake is draining, probably from a crack at the bottom. The geysers have been going off more frequently, and the number of earthquakesa"even small ones you never feela"has more than tripled." He looked all around the group, meeting my eyes for a moment. "The caldera is going to erupt. I don't know when, but I know it will be soon."

"It will happen on Soul Night," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

The seconds stretched like minutes, and finally Sarit said, "Well, are you going to explain how you know that?"

"Meuric told me, the night of Templedark. He said something would happen on Soul Night, and that nothing would matter after it. I think he meant the eruption. And"a"I glanced from Sam to Stef, who nodded encouragementa""that Janan will ascend."

Someone gasped.

"Janan isn't real," Aril said. I only vaguely knew her from mathematics lessons; while she was always friendly, I'd never realized she'd cared about me that much.

"He is real. Menehem proved it the night of Templedark. He stopped reincarnation with a poison, remember?"

Everyone shuddered.

"Janan is real," I went on, "but he's not what you think he is. He's not what Meuric and Deborl have told you." That was probably safe to reveal, though the trutha"that Janan had once been nothing more than a humana"was no doubt something they would immediately forget. "He's going to return on Soul Night. Or rise. I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't know what will happen after. But it's pretty certain that his ascension will cause so much instability in the caldera that it will erupt. Not just hydrothermal eruptions like we had tonight, but a cataclysmic event."

Stef nodded. "I agree. Whit? Orrin? You've been studying Rahel's work."

People winced at Rahel's namea"she was a darksoul, a soul lost during Templedarka"but Whit and Orrin nodded. "That does seem to be what all this is pointing toward," Whit said with a sigh. "But what can we do? There's no way to stop it."

"No way to stop the caldera," I said, "but if we stop Janan from ascending, perhaps that will put everything else back in order."

"That sounds impossible." Sarit leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. "It sounds a little crazy, too. I believe what you've said about Janan, but it sounds crazy."

"I know."

Stef put her SED in her pocket. "I agree with Ana about stopping Janan." When she met my eyes, I knew she was thinking of Cris and his sacrifice, and everything else that had happened inside the temple. "But let's debate that later, because there are other things we need to discuss before everyone pa.s.ses out from exhaustion."

I shot her a grateful look. I didn't want to discuss a plan for stopping Janan in front of all these people. Particularly since I didn't have a plan.

She looked at all of us. "Deborl and his friends want to harm newsouls. We know this. The laws the Council has been working to pa.s.s won't do anything to deter them. But the truth is that we're all in danger."