CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
Marty heard François’s cries, but he needed all his attention for the Gray warrior Pinosh, who was turning out to be a ferocious combatant. He retreated until he could catch the Gray off-balance and then advanced with a flurry of blows until the Gray countered. Pinosh moved with the practiced confidence of a warrior of long experience. He possessed the energy of a wild cat, snapping his teeth when he attacked and hissing in disappointment when Marty parried.
But Marty’s stamina was not waning, while the Gray showed signs of flagging.
He caught a kick aimed at his head, throwing the Gray away from him. Pinosh caught himself on his knuckles and kicked back with both feet, this time catching Marty on the shoulder. He melted away from the double kick, moving with the energy of the blow and pirouetting out of range.
When François slipped and fell, Marty was tapping aside a savage storm of attacks and couldn’t free himself. He briefly feared François was doomed, despite his vocal tricks, but then Kareem slipped up from behind and stabbed the Frenchman’s opponent through the heart, saving his life.
Feeling a sense of relief, Marty focused solely on his fight with the Gray. He fought better when he thought less, even about the fight he was in. His body and spirit could fight without his brain overthinking his moves. He sent Pinosh away with a graceful kick, then raced up the wall, gripping the edge of the balcony above him with both hands and spinning up and over, landing on his fingers and toes.
He scuttled backward, imitating a centipede. He had played strange movement games with Grandpa Chang as a small child. Move sideways like a crab. Jump from hind legs to front legs like a dog. Roll on your back like a flipped turtle. Creep on toes and hands like an insect. Crouch like a snail. Dart forward like a snake. Some of those games had later turned into stances he’d used in his forms and his fighting. Some of them never had, but he was beginning to see their possibilities now.
He remembered where he had lost the scimitar, and he found it again now, scuttling over it until the hilt was in his hand. Just as he gripped the sword, he felt the Gray coming up the wall behind him, so he rolled onto his back against the wall. Pinosh had found another weapon, and the sight of it left Marty momentarily stunned.
Pinosh held a sharpened ankh.
Marty’s own ankh was in his belt, and he felt like an idiot for not having it already in his hand. He strongly suspected that if he tried to parry an ankh attack with the scimitar, the metal of the sword would fail. Pinosh stabbed down and Marty rolled to his left, pinning his stomach against the wall and trapping his ankh for the moment. With the so-called star-metal weapon, Pinosh gouged a divot of stone out of the floor of the balcony. Marty kicked Pinosh in the knee and he slid back, but he kept his grip on the ankh and it came away with him.
Marty rolled to the center of the balcony again, and this time, when Pinosh lunged forward with the ankh, Marty rolled right off the edge.
Pinosh dove, throwing himself onto his belly and grabbing Marty by the forearm. He stabbed downward with the ankh. Marty knew he had no hope of parrying the ankh, so he writhed sideways to dodge and stabbed Pinosh in the shoulder of his sword arm.
He drew blood. Pinosh growled in rage, the ankh cut through the bronze, snapping the blade in half, and Pinosh dropped the ankh. Marty heard the exotic weapon hit the steps beneath him and clatter away. He tried to shake himself free, but Pinosh wouldn’t let go. He scrambled to draw his own ankh, and maybe the Gray would drop him.
Then Marty saw motion out of the corner of his eyes, and Kareem pulled himself up onto the balcony. The teen was spattered in blood, which Marty thought nothing of—they were all gory at this point. But fury blazed in his eyes as he stalked across the balcony, his own ankh in his hand, point forward.
Marty drew himself up and grabbed Pinosh’s head, pulling it against the stone of the balcony. Pinosh tried to shake Marty free, and now Marty gripped him by the head and shoulder, pinning him in place. Pinosh wriggled and raged.
“Cattle!” he cried. “You are nothing but cattle!”
He held up an arm to defend himself, and Kareem sliced the arm off.
“Kill him!” Marty cried. The wounded Gray was still dangerous. “Don’t play with him! Stab him in the chest!”
Pinosh raged. Marty kept him pinned to the balcony, his grip increasingly slick and tenuous. Kareem stabbed again. Pinosh shuddered but still didn’t die.
Marty couldn’t see what was happening. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Killing my enemy.” Kareem leaned over the balcony and tossed something large to the ground. It landed with a wet thud, and Marty looked down to see Pinosh’s leg.
“Kareem, no! Just kill him!”
But Kareem ignored Marty. He sliced off another leg, and then Pinosh finally lost consciousness. Marty let go of the warrior and ran down the wall at an angle, wanting to get away from the gore and the violence.
He retrieved the dropped ankh. It wasn’t Kareem’s, so it must belong to the Frenchman.
“What are you doing?” he called to Kareem.
Kareem stood finally, holding Pinosh’s severed head over his head and yelled, “Kareem did this! Know it and cower!”
He threw the severed head into the canyon.
The severed bits of Pinosh all separately shuddered into ooze.
“What are you doing?” Marty repeated himself.
“These things murdered our kind, Marty. It happened in Egypt, and it happened here as well. They murdered them and ate them, and they planned to do it again. They are monsters, not men. They would have eaten any of us. Now they will fear me forever. In their worst nightmares, in their folk tales, in the very blood in their veins they will regret what they tried to do to me and fear my name.”
Marty could only stare at the young man. He had no experience of war and didn’t know what to say to such bloodlust. The mournful wailing of Yotto caught his attention. What could he do to offer solace to the engineer who had helped them at risk to himself, and had suffered loss? What could he do for the other Grays? The Neshili had escaped, and that was good. But would the Herders now destroy the Farmers here in the city of the Grays? And if so, then what? Had he accomplished anything at all? The Grays were sentient, they had feelings. Was it any great win to save humans at the cost of Gray lives?
Maybe it was. The Grays had intended—some of them, at least—to eat the humans and not the other way around. Maybe there was a morally preferable side. And maybe, in any case, it was morally acceptable to take the side of his own species, when it came to a war for survival.
He realized that François was tugging at his tunic sleeve and had been tugging for some time.
François’s voice was tired. “We’ll figure out how to help the boy later. For now, we need to get into the portal. Gunther’s in there trying to make it work, and the ship’s on fire.”
Marty handed the ankh back to the Frenchman, who tucked it into his belt. They turned to climb the stairs, Marty feeling the ache of the long day and all the battles in his muscles. As they trudged forward, Kareem dropped down from the balcony in front of them. Without turning to look at them, he marched up the steps toward the burning saucer.
Yotto still wept, hunched over the slimy remains of Gollip. Kareem stomped up the steps in a beeline toward the engineer, and Marty got a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Kareem!” he called. “Kareem, don’t do anything foolish!”
Kareem kept marching and Yotto continued to wail.
“Kareem!” Marty called. “He’s not our enemy!”
Kareem sank his ankh into the engineer’s forehead, silencing the Gray instantly. Then he walked to the flaming ship and stepped inside.
Yotto dissolved.
François staggered and fell to his knees. Marty tried to help him up but ended up dropping beside him, on a step slick with blood and slime.
“Great god of heaven, I have failed,” François said.
“You didn’t fail,” Marty said. “Kareem is in a bad place right now, and he made a terrible decision.”
“Because I didn’t lead him right.” François buried his face in his hands. “Yotto . . .”
“François,” Marty said. “Listen to me. Kareem is not your son. Even if he had been your son, he is a grown man, making his own choices, and is responsible for them. Remember that he came to you fully formed, and maybe already broken.”
François struggled to his feet ponderously, moving like a man three times his weight. “We’re all broken, Marty,” he said. “Kareem made a terrible mistake today, but it could just as easily have been me.”
Gunther stumbled up the stairs on hands and feet.
Activate the portal.
“I don’t understand. How?” He coughed from the smoke billowing up from the lower level of the flying saucer, and the heat was almost unbearable.
Activate the portal. I’ll show you.
Surjan and Lowanna stood at the command console of the upper level. “Hold on,” Lowanna said, “I just got an idea.”
She rested both hands on the control panel in front of her and, tapping into whatever it was inside of her, focused on the panel. A pale violet light flowed from her fingertips and bathed the controls. The panel activated, symbols scrolled on a screen, and the console began to glow of its own accord, in a purplish cast.
Air moved through unseen vents, slightly cooling the room and wisping away smoke.
Gunther stared at the control panel, and nothing made sense to him.
“Now what?” he demanded.
Activate the portal.
Gunther yelped in dismay and pounded the edge of the console. “Come on! Help me!”
“We’re right here,” Surjan said. “What do you need?”
Gunther ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. His skin felt hot to the touch. “How do I activate the portal?” he asked.
“We thought you knew,” Lowanna said.
“There’s power,” Surjan said.
“Also, not to put too fine a point on it,” Lowanna added, “there’s fire. This vessel is on fire. Hurry your schnitzel up, Gunther. You can feel angst about it later. Now is the time to do the thing.”
Kareem plodded to the top floor of the ship. “What now?” His voice was flat and affectless, inhuman.
“We’re trying to make it work,” Gunther said. “I’m trying to make it work, but I can’t figure it out!” His own voice sounded like screaming to him, and Lowanna patted him on the shoulder.
First, activate the portal.
“How?” he yelled, staring at the controls. “How do I activate the portal?”
Like before.
Gunther looked to the rest of the party. “What did we do before?” he asked. “How did we activate it before?”
Surjan furrowed his brow. “There were some panels. Like a checkerboard, almost. And King Narmer touched some of them in a certain sequence, and then it worked.”
Gunther gestured at the control panel. “Do you see any such checkerboard here? Do you see buttons in the same arrangement, or levers in the same layout, so we could use them to touch the same control sequence Narmer touched?”
“I don’t,” Surjan admitted.
François and Marty stumbled into the chamber, coughing. Flames licked up behind them.
“I don’t know how to activate the machine,” Gunther said.
Marty stared at him. “This is the whole thing! Gunther, you have been telling me for weeks that your voice will teach you how to use this portal! Now we’re here, and the ship is on fire, and you don’t know anything!”
“The voice is saying to turn it on!” Gunther screamed. “I don’t know how to turn it on!”
The seer knows.
“Wait!” Gunther exclaimed and he pointed at Marty. “The voice says that you know how to turn it on. You’re the seer, right? Didn’t you say that you’d been called that before?”
“What did you do in Egypt?” Lowanna asked Marty.
Marty shrugged, brow furrowed. “We just got inside.”
Kareem stepped into the white-walled portal, moved onto the rearmost of the dark circles, then turned and faced his comrades. Gunther caught his eye for a moment and was disturbed by the flat look of hatred burning there.
But new lights appeared on the panel.
Marty scooted around and looked down. “It’s just a blank panel.”
“Narmer touched an activation sequence in the wall panels to start the portal that brought us here,” Gunther said. “Please tell me you remember the sequence of the squares he touched. Hell, you also did it to get us into this in the first place.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Marty said. “This is like Grandpa Simcha asking me to remember some passage he recited out of the Mishnah Chagigah two years earlier.”
“And how would you remember that passage when Grandpa Simcha asked you for it?” François asked.
Marty chuckled. “Kind of the same way I accessed my chi when Grandpa Chang asked me to do that. By relaxing and trying not to remember.” He closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose three times, and then opened his eyes again.
“Get in the portal,” Marty said.
Gunther shuffled in beside François and was quickly joined by the others. Marty took a deep breath. Gunther heard an ominous creaking sound, like a heavy piece of metal bending or buckling.
In his mind’s eye, Marty saw the tunnel before him.
They were in modern-day Egypt and they were stuck, staring at an impenetrable wall.
Looking down at the panel, it had the same shape as the wall.
Could it be that simple?
It seemed like a lifetime ago, but he recalled the instructions he’d written to himself on that ancient wall.
With a chill racing through him, he saw himself reach out and touch the top left corner of the top left panel.
He touched the same area on the panel in front of him.
He then touched the center of the top right panel, then continued through the other panels, following the memories of what he’d done before.
He felt foolish as he tapped the panel, just like he’d felt foolish the first time back in Egypt, not knowing if it would work.
As he finished the first sequence, he touched the top-left portion of the panel in front of him again and felt a trembling beneath his feet as a whirring noise appeared, sounding almost like an engine spinning up.
The holographic image of the portal map popped up above the console.
“You’re doing it!” Lowanna yelled triumphantly.
As he tapped out the rest of the sequence, the whirring got louder and louder.
“You need to teach everyone that sequence just as soon as we get through,” François said.
Marty stood by the control panel, his fingers hovering over the final sequence of buttons. The rest of the team stood on dark circles embedded in the floor, the whole thing reminiscent of scenes he’d seen in old Star Trek episodes when a crew was about to be teleported. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to ease the tension in his chest.
He glanced at the others—Surjan, Lowanna, Kareem, François, and Gunther—each standing on their designated pad, their faces illuminated by the faint glow coming from the holographic image.
With a deep breath, Marty tapped the final sequence on the control panel. The lights in the room blinked off, plunging them into darkness. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Then, slowly, a bluish-white glow began to bloom from the pads beneath each of his teammates, bathing them in an ethereal light.
The glow pulsed softly, casting long shadows on the walls. Each member of the team stood in their circle of light, their faces calm but their eyes filled with the quiet resolve that had brought them this far.
The holographic image of the portal map reappeared, yet this time it seemed so real Marty was tempted to reach out and touch it.
Marty’s heart raced as he looked at the empty pad waiting for him. It was the last step, the final commitment to whatever lay ahead.
Lowanna caught his eye, a small, wry smile playing on her lips. “I’m guessing at this point we’re going to go somewhere as soon as you step onto your spot,” she said, her voice steady despite the tension in the air.
Marty nodded, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his own mouth. “Seems like it,” he replied, his voice betraying a mix of anticipation and nervousness.
Lowanna looked down and then gazed at the others on the team and grimaced. “Oh Lord, we’re all covered in gore. Let’s just hope we can wash it off before anyone spots us at our destination.”
“Where are we going?” François asked, turning to Marty and back to Gunther. “Gunther, do you think you have an idea how to steer this thing?”
Everyone shifted their focus to Gunther. His jaw dropped as the light underneath him wavered for a moment and then returned to normal.
“I c-can do this,” Gunther stammered with a shocked expression. “Where do we want to go?” he asked the group.