Kumari - Meaning Of Kumari, What Does Kumari Mean?

Hindustan extended from present day turkey to Indonesia and Japan.
Benzeiten is the Japanese goddess of learning. That is our saraswathi. Benten in Japan is our brahma. Read about this on Wikipedia if you like.
The Kushan empire, based out of present day Afghanistan was one of the mightiest known to man. They occupied the same areas mentioned earlier. But they came later.
Semula was an island continent about 300 miles off the east coast of India. This was the site of the epic war between Shri Ram and Ravan. The war did not happen in Lanka.
Lanka was 20–30 miles away from Semula separated by sea. It was not more than that because periodically the parties would eyeball each other.
The present day Lanka is one small portion that is left over after Semula went beneath the waters in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption.
This Semula (or kumari kandan or Lemuria) is the same place known later as Atlantis that Greek philosopher Plato mentioned.
However, Plato did not discover this. He heard the story from another Greek, Solon. He too is not the original source.
Solon heard about it from Egyptian priests.
The Egyptians were land lubbers. Their sea going adventures were limited to the Nile and minor forays into the Red Sea.
So the priests heard this from Indian traders of that era. Indian traders built their ships out of teakwood. So these did not rot in salt water. They sailed the world and populated the areas of south and North America.
Look at the incas, Mayas and red indians. They are all brown skinned Indians. The swastika symbol is common all over South America. The temples in Mecca destroyed by Mohammad in 600–700 AD were all Hindu temples.
Before the Kushan line around 5000 BC came the Harappa civilization. By the way Mohenjodaro built at the same time was not a fancy touristy place. It was merely a place of burying dead bodies. There isn't even a semblance of living arrangements in that area. You conducted ceremonies and then cremated the dead in that place. Then you went elsewhere. The name Mohenjodaro is itself a clue. It means “mound of the dead”.
So that is the story. Or at least a bit of it.
And where is the rest of it you may ask. I'll share one more bit.
Suvarna Dwipa (sometimes spelt as Suvarnadvipa) is a term you come across often in ancient Indian literature. It means “The Golden Island”.
Our ancients had a tough time as it is making sure their knowledge was passed on to us.
Oral transmission to each generation worked to some extent. They sometimes painfully etched out granite stones with the highlights of their times.
Typically they left clues on their monuments and prayed that future idiots (me; you;) will decipher WTF they were communicating.
So ancient Indians would not invent grandiose words like this unless it meant something.
It does.
I will tell you about SD. Very briefly.
For reasons that I may share later Garuda (Shri Vishnu’s preferred ride) was extremely hungry. He was holding on to something when Hanuman set fire to the original Lanka. Garuda let go of what he was grabbing with his beak.
It turned to gold.
The heat of Hanuman’s pyrotechnics melted it. 1/3 rd of Lanka got covered in molten gold. That portion of the land sank beneath the waters.
Hanuman most definitely did not care about gold. Mortals living in that era did.
They may have attempted to retrieve the gold. On the day when they knew that their time on earth was over, they passed on that information to subsequent generations.
And that is the origin of the word Suvarna Dwipa.
Jai Shree Ram

This is quite a long post, however I truly urge you to have the patience to read it all as you may learn something new from it to spark an interest. Here it goes!
It's no surprise that Isayama has taken a lot of inspiration from real life history, however theres some parallels that people don't talk about because they aren't as well known. Yes, the Holocaust similarities caught on to everyone's eyes but there are other aspects of the story that, whether intentional or not, seem extremely similar to certain real life events.
We've all discussed the fact that Paradis Island resembles Madagascar next to Africa. However, there is another Island that this is extremely similar to, and once you finish reading this post explaining all the context of its mythical history, you may be quite surprised.
I'm talking about Srilanka. Let me explain.
Srilanka is an island next to India (of course) and is inhabited by mostly Tamil and Sinhalese people. More importantly, it has a history of a horrible civil war between the two races I just mentioned. The conflict ended with a massive genocide of the Tamil people and forced many Tamil families to run away from the Island and raise kids elsewhere.
Here is where it gets even more interesting. The Tamil race had their own army of soldiers that wanted to fight for their country. They were I believe called the LTTE (I am still researching this topic so forgive me for any mistakes) and get this. They were falsely accused of being terrorists for fighting back against the Sinhalese government for their country. In fact, even currently as of this moment, they are labelled as a terrorist group in 32 countries. And recently, it was announced that Switzerland spoke out about this and declared that they are not indeed a group of terrorists.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/law---order_tamil-tigers-acquitted-in-switzerland/45409056
A race falsely accused of being something terrible that they weren't, who also live on an island following a civil war...sound familiar yet?
Yep, this is literally a mirror to the Eldians being accused of being devils from Paradis Island, if I haven't got your jaws dropping yet, just wait, there's more...
We've spoken about the island, the races, the genocide and false accusations of being evil. Lets step away from politics for a bit and talk about some tales. It's time to talk about the forgotten continent of ancient Tamil civilization: Lemuria.
For some brief context, Lemuria, also known as Kumari Kandam, was an ancient lost continent that was connected to India, and the remains of it are told to be Srilanka. Now look at these two images of the same map, however one will be more zoomed in:
https://prnt.sc/qo7mwk The map itself. You can see that this continent actually connected Madagascar to India and Srilanka.
And now a closer look: https://prnt.sc/qo7njl
Has your jaw dropped yet? Literally the same name, Paradise.
Now I want you to see this too, another picture. https://prnt.sc/qo7pbx
An ancient continent, a bridge between an Island and main land, what does this all lead up to?
The bridge you see is called by scientists "Adam's bridge," which is, according to Christian mythology is what Adam used to cross the bridge from Srilanka to India after he was banished from Eden. And it was told that he went there to reach "Paradise."
However, another name this bridge has is "Rama's bridge," and the idea behind this was the Ramayana from Hindu mythology, that Rama and his army of ape men (Vanaras) constructed a massive land bridge composed of mountains to get to the Island to save his wife from the demon king Ravana.
Where else have we heard of mythical beings constructing massive land bridges for humanity? That's right, the Titans from Attack on Titan's history!
Now considering the current situation of Attack on Titan, how does this all relate? Well, we have a land bridge that could allow the Titans that Eren unleashed to travel to Marleyans to destroy them, maybe he uses the Wall Titans to harden and create a bridge between Srilanka and India...I mean Paradis to Marley. We also have a a mythical land that sunk into the oceans from continental shifts and flood levels, if Eren truly is going 100% aggression on Marley, what if he uses the Rumbling to cause these earthquakes and turn Marley into another Island, just like the forgotten Lemuria? What if AOT is a modern version of an Earth where Lemuria still existed, and it tells the tale of how it really got destroyed?
I think there are many points we can gain from these past history lessons. But whatever is true or not, it was fun to do this research and honestly, Isayama truly is a genius for creating a story that has so many areas of discussion with its community. I thank you for reading this! I look forward to hearing your theories!
Tl;dr: AOT heavily references Srilanka, an island where a horrible civil war between two races took place, a genocide, and tales of an ancient forgotten continent ,Lemuria, that also housed an island called "Paradise", and a land bridge "Rama's bridge" that connected the island to India which could be a possible connection to the Titans reaching Marley from the rumbling.
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Edit: Another interesting point by this comment:
I’m a Sri Lankan Tamil and I saw those similarities too when I first saw the show on Netflix. The thing you missed is that right across the Island on the mainland is the Tamils’ original home of Tamil Nadu home to nearly 70 million Tamils. And on top of this is that the Sinhalese majority group in Sri Lanka base their history on an ancient tale of their origin on how they sailed from Northeast India and repelled South Indian Invaders (Tamils) for hundreds of years when in fact many of their ancient Kings and warriors are of South Indian descent and some of their former Presidents have recent Tamil origin too. jovijovi99

I mutter faex on pure instinct as I blink away the sensations of a tremendous roar and find myself sitting in a wooden chair on a rickety porch somewhere unknown. The day is warm, distant pine trees murmur in a rich breeze, and the sky... shimmers. I recognize the subtle pattern instantly.
I'm home.
I'm home the way I remember it, from before the Troubles, the Time of Sickness, the Rotation, and the Grey Flood. All political issues aside, it was a natural paradise before, and this world is just as clean, beautiful, and safe as I remember it being when I was a child. From everything my Empire friends have told me about philosophies and religions, this has to mean...
I'm dead.
Sitting stunned for a moment and looking around to check the realness of the moment, I let the soft windy whispers fill my thoughts, so that I will not instead explode with a thousand pained emotions. After all that—after how far we went, how bitterly we struggled, and how deeply we refused to give up—to die simply because the Earth exploded underneath us—! Is it ridiculous that I still feel such an apocalyptic and cataclysmic death does not truly honor the bravery of the Second Tribe?
I didn't look when the time came, but Ed described what would happen well enough while we were hooking ourselves to conduit handholds during the ruby cube's ramping-up. The anti-gravity field, he said with sad eyes that now haunt my thoughts, might continue to grow until it pushes too deeply into the crust. Once it breaches even a small part of the inner magma, a catastrophic cascade of releasing pressure will eject core material in an explosion forceful enough to shatter the planet—and the moon, and everything else nearby. "It'll be so fast, so loud, and so hot, we'll die instantly," he said blankly. "There won't even be time to comprehend it happening."
And he was right. They were right. Here I sit, somewhere else, suddenly and unceremoniously deposited in paradise.
But if this is truly my paradise, a world crafted for me...
I reach down behind my chair, and my bare hand closes on an assault rifle.
I have not forgotten the promise I screamed into the storm.
I'm only clad in some sort of light sundress, but I'm on my feet, loading ammunition, grabbing gear from a nearby table, and running out across waving grass without hesitation. It doesn't matter which direction I go, just that I go with such speed that the forces of the afterlife will be caught off guard. Where are the others? There should be seven billion of us arriving around the same time.
My running gait feels off somehow, and I feel weaker than I remember, but I think it's because I'm merely human here. It doesn't matter. I've trained my whole life for physical exertion—and physically exert I shall. Curving around a corner in the path between trees, I recognize a wooden palisade and many rustic buildings. This is the distant town somewhere near New Moscow where my parents were exiled when I was young.
And the battle has already begun.
Two dropships lay burning on a green hill, but eighteen are unloading. Hundreds of soldiers clad in the colors of the Amber Three military spill out, only to be met by a screaming charge of green-and-brown-draped rebels from every direction. I run between two hills, dashing headlong into the sounds of gunfire, and I am soon joined by decrepit old men and fiery-eyed women. Exiled, outcast, they have nothing left to lose, and I can immediately understand why they are part of the rebellion.
But who is in charge? I release a small burst to down two of the closest enemies, then lead my stream of fighters around a low hill to fire from another angle, downing five more. There is no time for tactics or communication, but none is needed. It was obvious from the moment I left the trees that this was a trap laid by the resistance, and I continue in that vein, pushing forward, felling soldiers from a flank they don't expect. The old man to my left and the wild-eyed woman to my right dash with me to the nearest dropship with such energy that we crash right into the opposite inner wall at a full run, already firing. The men still inside die with a choir of surprised shouts. Only one manages to return fire.
The wild-eyed woman slumps, bleeding from six places, but the old man closes the back ramp while I push the dead pilots out of the way and grab the dropship's controls. Lifting off ever so slightly, I pitch the flying boat one way, then the other, getting a feel for it—then, I soar sideways, crushing an entire row of fleeing soldiers. It's a brutal action, but necessary, and I have a feeling those soldiers are less than real.
The battle is over.
Not from my actions alone, but it's over. The rest surrender.
I bring the craft to rest with an exhausted sigh. Combat is difficult and draining without the gifts of my father's lineage, but there is so much more ahead. Turning, I watch the rear ramp of the craft as it opens at the old man's behest.
My heart leaps in my chest.
Tacitus lowers his rifle and smiles.
But it is not he who speaks. "Venita, you pulled that crazy stunt?" Celcus pushes in quickly to check on me. "What are you even doing here? You promised you would stay home!"
From the back, tending to the injured woman, Porcia quips, "You know how hard-headed she is."
Rufus laughs. "You can say that again."
They're all here. They're all here! Flavia and Sampson pull dead soldiers out of the craft swiftly, readying for immediate takeoff. Looking at each of them with wide eyes, I ask, "Where's Septus?"
"That traitorous bastard?" Rufus asks. "At the target compound, if we're lucky. I'll shoot him myself."
There must be more to the ambush. "Compound?"
Touching my forehead, Celcus says with concern, "Yeah, the compound we're leaving to attack in two minutes? Legate Blue is supposed to be there in person today?"
Sitting roughly in the pilot's seat, I ask warily, "But we already—I killed him."
That gets their attention. Porcia asks hopefully, "Where? Was he in this dropship or something?"
"No, years ago," I tell them, feeling very strange. "I died doing it."
Sampson raises one eyebrow at Celcus, and my antikin puts a hand on my upper back. "Is the pregnancy making you hallucinate?"
Wait, what? I look down, only now noticing that I'm slightly fat. Is this why I find myself so tired? Also—what?!??!
I—
I'm—
If this is the afterlife, it has a very strange way of playing things.
No. Something's wrong. My entire life has been uprooted and rewritten. I can almost hear Ed's words, advising me to keep my 'yap shut' until I learn more. They're all here, and my heart is swelling with a storm of emotions I can't possibly face, but it's too much to accept at face value. There's only one person who might have answers for me. "Is my father in town?"
Compassionately, Celcus nods. "Yeah."
"I have to go see him right away." Halfway to the exit ramp, I pause. "Don't go attack that compound. It's a trap."
They all stare at me.
"Legate Blue's reaction to strife is to lock himself away behind a dozen walls and thousands of lackeys," I tell them from experience. "I guarantee he's not randomly at some base here in the middle of nowhere. It's a trap. They let you have this success just to get you to rush headlong into danger."
My squadmates look at each other worriedly.
If I stay, it will give them a chance to debate it. Knowing that, I leave quickly, not letting myself look back. If I look back, I'll stay with them, and I'll never want to leave.
Walking past hundreds of prisoners being corralled into one controllable area, I make for the town's entrance. I feel strange and sick watching the captured soldiers. I just crushed a swath of my fellow Ambers with a ship. What if they are real? It's not their fault the Legates are corrupt. My chest is a horrible vortex of hope, anticipation, sadness, and confusion. I fight to keep that all down as I enter the town proper.
The wooden palisade gates look exactly as I remember them, and I know the way to my father's little house in the back by heart. I shout as I approach, "Dad!"
He's already coming out, and he leaves the wooden door swinging open behind him. "Beloved daughter, what have you done?"
I throw my rifle aside and hug him hard. "I don't know. Where are we? What's going on?"
"I can only guess that Time suffered a schism, daughter," he says with awe and worry, clasping me in return. "A great deal changed in a single moment of blasting white. What did you do?"
Frowning, I think back on what happened. "Someone in the future told us we were all going to die. So we tried to survive. It doesn't make sense. We failed. We did die. I thought this was the afterlife!"
Letting me go, he regards me with a piercing gaze. "Are you sure you died? Did you feel the pain? Did you travel through the Restless Hedrons?"
"Well, no..."
"Then you have not died. More likely, someone was not where they were supposed to be when Death came for them."
They followed me... were we all supposed to still be hanging on to the conduits when the Earth exploded? "But we were going to die in a few seconds anyway!"
"Are you sure? Did you manage to save anyone who should have died?"
Trying to think through the emotions clawing for supremacy, I can't help but let a small brimming layer of moisture rise under my eyes. Billions dead in every which way, and all of it fated. It was a tapestry of pain and hopelessness, and, with all our years of struggle and sacrifice, we only managed to tug a single thread—the engineer, Neil, was headed off into the future on Gisela's ship despite Kumari telling us that never happened. "Just one."
My father nods slowly. "That would be enough. Time is a crystal lattice, and any change propagates outward in many dimensions." His eyes turn to the distant horizon. "This isn't supposed to be possible. It's never happened before. I'm going to retreat into my home and meditate on this. It may take some time, perhaps months. I will find you when I know more."
I understand, but I still feel strange watching him enter his house and shut the door. My rifle lies on the ground, and I am alone under a placid shimmering sky. Shimmering? I recognized it immediately when I awoke here, but I didn't think it through. If the sky is shimmering, the Inner Shields are still in place, which means the Crushing Fist never happened.
Is Ed still living in the Empire somewhere? All the people I've met, all the places I've been, all the victories we won together... is Cristina still out there, and still cold and hard without the lessons she learned along the way? Is Conrad still asleep in his distant facility? Is Gisela out there making machines in exile? All the threads of my life are separate once again, and I never knew how much I valued my experiences. I hated Gisela and waged war on her at one time, and thought Conrad an ass and an idiot for years, but now my ancestors will never know me. Cristina, too, the woman who filled the role of my mother in some part...
I do have a family. I sit in our house each day, surrounded by my brothers, sisters, and beloveds. Tacitus, Porcia, Rufus, Flavia, Celcus, Sampson; they move around me, saying and doing things in ways that I remember, alternately breaking my heart and making me smile. This is the life I once dreamt of, a dagger through my heart which was at its greatest when I aligned with Noah to sense the Empire and felt someone's whole lifetime go by in their red zone of fast-time.
But this is the Empire, and that timeline is gone. That person's life is gone.
This is what I wanted; what I felt incomplete without. My belly keeps getting bigger, and my family happier. The rebellion against the Legates goes well with my knowledge of events, and nobody understands how I know.
But it doesn't fit. It's wrong in a way I can't quite pin down. It's not the loss of my father's gifts. Those are still there in my genetics, just dormant, because I never went through countless near-death experiences to activate them through overwhelming stress. Flavia says it is due to 'epigenetic markers,' and I understand enough without needing to know the actual science: this Venita has made a trade. The Venita of this life chose family.
Some nights, I sit on a high hill near our house. The sunsets in this part of the world are pretty enough, but they hold nothing on the raw wild horizons I saw out in the multiverse. I was never more myself than wearing that jade armor and that grey uniform while sitting on a high crag and watching a blazing red or green sky sink into primordial night on a world that had never known mankind. Our enemies were so much more than the Legates; our challenges so much greater than mere soldiering. After such a bitter conflict against existence itself, why would Fate let us dodge out like this?
Epigenetic markers...
This Venita may have made a trade, but I don't have to. I absolutely love Valentina, my adorable little daughter, but she's a year old now, and can be without me for a little bit.
There is a facility on Amber Three that can sometimes send messages to the Empire, and I direct the others to assault it. For the first time since I got here, I go on the mission with them. The townsfolk will watch Valentina.
The mission goes smoothly, for the facility is of little tactical use to anyone else, and I find myself standing in a control room filled with darkened monitors. "Everybody out," I request calmly. "This is for me to undertake alone."
I sit, and I send out messages.
I get no response.
After the first week, Celcus suggests we return home. The forces of the Legates will eventually notice our presence.
"No," I tell him, and continue to keep my intentions secret.
The second week, I try a different tactic. I begin saying key words I heard in my previous life.
The third week, I start messaging out names that I remember.
Apparently, someone was listening, because eight seconds after I say, "Ward Shaw," one of the monitors finally flares to life.
A bearded man with a grim face stares back at me. "Stop spamming these channels."
"I know you!" I reply, energized at finally getting a response. "We need to talk about—"
His eyes grow dark, but not the black I heard about. "The timeline, I know."
"How do you—?"
"We all remember," he says, his tone haunted. "Every single citizen of the Empire is well aware that hundreds of billions died in another timeline. Our worlds are in absolute chaos."
I almost tell him that nobody on Amber Three remembers, but I realize why as soon as the thought occurs to me. "So what do we do?"
"Nothing. The Amber Worlds are surrounded by Shields. You can't get to us, and we can't get to you. That's it. That's how it is."
His monitor goes dark.
I guess I have my answer.
We abandon the facility and return to safer lands.
I sit each day at our house, watching our daughter grow up. She's two, then she's four, then she's eight.
The Legates cede power when she is sixteen. Our world is free at last.
It's strange, but not being allowed to fight makes my soul feel strange. There is nobody to resist, nothing to defeat, and nowhere to go. The Empire no longer sends us cultural media blasts every ten years, so we have no idea what is happening to them outside our Shield.
Every year, I wait and I watch for an opportunity to rise, but none ever comes. Is Fate actually going to leave us alone? This is safety, but also a prison.
It's taken two decades to feel this way, but maybe I should finally let myself be happy. I can't save the Empire, but I can be here for those I love. I encourage my daughter to go on a first date with someone, and, before I know it, Valentina is getting married. I'm at the wedding when my father finally emerges from his house.
He sits next to me at the reception table and picks up a name plaque with a worried gaze.
I haven't seen him since my first day in this timeline. "Father?"
"It's cruel," he whispers. "Beyond simple torture. Unbelievably cruel."
Alarmed, I ask, "What is?"
He finally looks at me. "My beloved daughter. I haven't been here for you, but I am now. It's me. Truly me."
"Truly you?" I sit up taller in my chair and smooth my dress down in anticipation of danger.
He looks past me at Valentina and her new husband, who dance on the floor in front of our friends and family. "I don't know how to get you out of this."
"Out of what?" I ask the question, but I think I always knew. I never let myself care too much, not like I did before. I was full of so much love in my previous life, but this just never felt right. People and events moved around me, rather than with me, and I always kept myself guarded against happiness. Fate was never going to simply let us live and be happy. It had simply been biding its time, waiting for us to lower our defenses—but I never did. Tacitus, Rufus, Porcia, Flavia, Celcus, Sampson—and now Valentina. I will never let the cruelty of the multiverse harm them. "How's the attack going to happen? What's it going to do to get at us?"
He's still looking at Valentina. "Is that your daughter?"
I nod warily.
"You should say goodbye to her."
How bad is it? Nearly in a trance, I rise and find her as the dance ends. She's smiling at someone, and I touch her shoulder.
She turns. "Hey, mom."
Strangely, it's like it's the first time I've heard her voice. Tears are brimming in my eyes. "This has all just happened so fast. I feel like just a moment ago, you were a baby."
She nods. "Time does fly." Her hair bounces with her nod. It's red like mine, and like my mother's before me. "I want you to know, I'm glad I got to exist."
I hug her hard. "You know about the other timeline?"
"Yeah." She grasps me back. "Aunt Flavia figured it out. I would have said something, but you and I didn't meet until just now."
I don't let go of her. "I want to stay. I want to see this, so badly."
"I know. But that's not the kind of person you are. Uncle Tacitus said you would do the right thing, and staying here isn't it."
Laughing and crying at the same time, I ask, "Tacitus said that?"
"He talks," she replies, also laughing and crying. "But only to me."
For some reason, the laughter in my heart swells, and I can face it for just a moment: this is, actually, completely, and literally what would have happened. The Purple Madness is a monstrous bastard like that; making people crazy with broken perceptions of Time instead of simple insanity. I pull back and memorize her face. Tears run down her cheeks, but she's not sad.
I mold my mind to the shape I learned from Noah, gaining his immunity.
The scene in front of me fades away in a tremendous monsoon of purple.
Glowing hurricane winds batter at every corner of me as I flail about—but I am not falling. Looking down, I see Sampson, wild-eyed and sweat-soaked, holding my ankle with one outstretched hand. With the other, he holds on to a pylon made by the black spheres. All around me, the Second Tribe is comatose, their bodies strewn about the structure or simply falling into open space. The all-encompassing winds of madness have them all locked in their own minds.
It wasn't real, but it would have been.
I can't breathe. For an interminable moment, the pain is physically too much to bear. The life I dreamt of—the family I wanted—and Valentina was such a kind soul—and I—
I kept myself wary and guarded.
For twenty years, I never let myself truly be there.
I... was no good at civilian life.
The pain passes, and I clench my fists before climbing back onto the structure with Sampson's help. He's at the end of his endurance, but he's saved my life yet again, and I clasp him with all the warm thanks my heart has to offer. Around us, without a guiding willpower, the spheres are beginning to lose cohesion. The structure bends; time is short. "Beloved, keep me safe for a little longer." He nods, and I close my eyes, letting the Noah-defense fall from my mind.
Edgar Brace sits eating cereal in his boxers in a small apartment.
Rachel walks in and shouts, "Jesus Christ, are you just going to play videogames the entire weekend? Shouldn't you be looking for a job?"
Miserable, he ignores her. It's not her fault. Their relationship just doesn't work, and he's driving her crazy by making promises he can't uphold. He looks out the window and sees a blazing angel searing a thin line of blue across the distant sky.
Casey sits in a living room with her husband, Cade. Those aren't their names, of course, but they had to change them to lay low, lest the First Worlders find her.
He's a farmer, and she's a teacher. It works. They were happy, for a time, but she knows the world is so much larger than some small plot of land in the middle of nowhere, and the home she ran from so long ago now calls her back. She worries what the people there might be doing as their wills to live continue to fade.
But Cade wouldn't understand any of that. There was a time he might have, but she kept it all hidden instead of revealing it to him. Now, Laura's off at college, and there's nothing to do but... be a farmer and a teacher. Honest work, but...
She looks out the window and sees a blazing angel searing a thin line of blue across the distant sky.
Conrad sits in a field on a summer day, constantly replaying the only moment he was truly and profoundly happy. Gisela sits across from him, smiling. She is not an Empress, and he is not an Emperor. There are no responsibilities today. The future holds horrible revelations and unending pains of a thousand different varieties, but today is pure, innocent, and warm.
He looks across the plains and sees a blazing angel searing a thin line of blue across the distant sky.
To himself, he whispers, "Hundreds of years in my life spent practically comatose thinking about this day, and I can't have five more minutes?"
The distant angel flares.
He grins.
I feel them, billions of them alone in their miseries, living the wrong lives in their heads. The destruction of the planet below us and the release of the conduits' energy was part of our plan, but nobody expected this. The people of the Second Tribe are an ocean of clever agonies, but I soar above their quiet desperations. I remember now, how to fly. I remember leading armies in dreams, and I raise my sword again, calling for them to follow me.
And they do. For a second time, they all follow me.
For they, too, can shape that part of themselves that is vulnerable to the Purple Madness. For those whose spiritual presence is weaker, well, they have less to defend. For those with greater presence, their ability to defend themselves is also greater. Together, our collective barrier is stronger than the sum of its parts.
The Second Tribe awakens.
I open my eyes, still in Sampson's arms, to see them grabbing on to the structure and helping each other recover. In equal measure, the spheres begin to reassert their proper shape, and the gigantic black lattice becomes strong again, standing firm despite the raging purple storm.
Below us, the anti-gravity field has continued to grow, and magmatic glows are visible around floating continents circling and crashing into one another. The vortex we rode to get here is gone, scattered by the explosion of the conduit network; it won't be long now before the planet's core ruptures outward.
I expected despair to surround me, but instead I sense the Tribe is unified in a new way. Like me, did they learn that there was never any other path for us? We can stop lamenting about timelines and futures we'll never have, because our choices brought us here. With any other choices, we wouldn't have been us anymore.
Finding the radio at my belt, I bring it up and ask, "Ed, or Casey. Can we land this sphere-ball thing?"
"Not with that in the way," comes Ed's response, referring to the ocean of floating continents and exploding magma below.
Beside me, Sampson judges the distant chaos below.
Breathing hard from the sheer overwhelming thought of what I'm considering, I ask, "If I can stop the ruby cube, end the anti-gravity field, what about then?"
It's Casey this time. "And how are you going to do that?"
Conrad answers for me: "She's going to jump."
"No way!" Ed shouts over the radio. "Those landmasses are ripping themselves to shreds down there. The ruby cube is in the middle of all that. You'll never make it!"
Sampson motions for my radio. "Not alone. If enough of us jump ahead of her, we can radio the right way."
"Yeah, just before you—"
"Die," Sampson says calmly. "I know. This is that kind of mission."
After a moment of silence, Ed says, "Then we'll use the flares. Vanguard tactics. Spread and compress the formation on the way down. They taught us that because it was the best way to make it through unknown territory at speed. It'll work. She can follow the flares better than trying to guess who's on the radio, anyway."
While Ed calls for volunteers, Sampson nods and hands me the radio.
Only then do I process the fact that he means to go himself. "No!"
He smiles wearily. "Remember what I said?"
I do. That morning, we were sitting on a high crag watching the dawn. He said, I know you. To save everyone else, you're going to jump right into the eye of the flaming storm. The absurd, exploding, flaming, crashing storm. Just know that when that moment comes, if you jump, you won't be alone.
He nods as I recall. A cloud of specks is already leaping off from the gigantic structure around us; men and women jumping to their certain deaths in formation simply to show me the way. I don't even know what I'll do if I manage to make it to the ruby cube. The plan isn't complete, but they're jumping anyway, because there's no time. The planet could explode at any second.
Sampson gives me no time to argue. I know that he knows that arguing with him will just cause a fatal delay. His weary smile becomes wide and unburdened; he salutes me, and falls backward.
Time's violin and my father's guitar are no longer playing. Though moons are crashing into one another around us and the Earth is in a volcanic death dance, space is silent as I leap after him. As that absurd, exploding, flaming, crashing storm of a planet fills my vision, there is no sound at all.

Was it wrong to be having fun? Running as fast as she could in some moments and simply leaping at others, Venita held her arms tightly around the writhing end of the streaming portal energy while it continually tried to form into a vortex. Its blazing glow was warm, not hot, and contained a tumultuous mix of violet and sparkling rainbow-prismatic diamonds. This, then, was that conglomeration of Yngtak and Her Glory's technologies, compatible for one having descended from the other; ethereal organic blue raced down the scintillation behind her, joining the mix from her bare hands, guiding the otherwise random beast as it propelled forward with tremendous force down Concord's main dirt road. Despite the desperate context of the situation, unexpectedly having to sprint and jump and pull to try to guide this force of nature was oddly exhilarating. This was a part of her nature she'd rarely gotten to explore, and her poorly understood extra senses thrilled with feelings she imagined her father must have experienced on journeys through the stars and spaces of the vast multiverse.
Her laughter was unintentional, but her attitude spread to the crowd on either side as they parted hastily in surprise. After seeing her race by wildly whooping, they blinked at each other, then left the setting sun's dim crimson cast to join the brightly lit effort. Closing ranks in a continual stream of determined arms, they grabbed hold of the thrashing compressed vortex, dragging their feet to try to slow it down. They, too, hollered and laughed at the sudden absurdity, and she felt their hearts swell. After so long spent battered about by events beyond their control, they could finally do something, and they literally leapt at the chance.
Directly behind her, his bulky arms straining, Sampson shouted over the spiraling hurricane winds of their flight, "What's the plan?"
Across from him and on the right, a Noah yelled, "Can you aim it?"
She now regretted not having her helmet on, not just because her hair was whipping about, but because they could have spoken by radio. "I think so!"
"Copy us!" a second Noah yelled.
She couldn't spare time for a glance back. Her feet were too busy keeping up with the racing earth below. "Copy you?"
"Copy us so you can feel what we feel!"
She had, at certain times and with varying levels of awareness that she was doing so, employed the emotion-sensing ability of the Noah she'd known on Amber Three; now the call was for far more than that. She knew he had been a single person who had been duplicated thousands of times by Cristina Thompson using a quantum rift, but his nature as a gwellion had formed into a sort of collective entity born of narrative awareness. The original Noah Fulmer had been exceptionally conscious of his place and direction in the flow of Time and in what he called quantum choice-trees, thus, somehow, thousands of Noah Fulmers indirectly shared memories and experiences by being aware of each other's paths. It was this collective consciousness which she had to join.
Summoning up thoughts of her antikin, Celcus, and his ability to lead and manage people, she split her thoughts into a team. To a baser and more animal part of herself, she assigned the task of running and holding the vortex. That was one of the animals inside her; that one had evolved from apes to be suited to this world. The other animal had evolved among the stars, and that one was put on extra-sensory duty, feeling the worlds ahead on instinct and need. The rest of her—her sense of self, her thoughts, her logic—focused on shaping the mutable parts of her higher-dimensional form to match Noah's.
For Noah, too, had pieces in the higher dimensions of mind and imagination. To call those pieces limbs was not exactly the right concept, nor was the word organs exactly right. They were part brain-hemisphere, part arms, and in some cases, part eyes. Truly looking and trying to understand for the first time, she realized that all the people around her had mental and emotional limbs/organs in that higher space—except Sampson. Below the membrane of dreams and beliefs, his mind was alight as his neurons flared and his heart coursed with emotion, but his presence was more a raised impression against the fabric rather than an actual living extension into the mental plane. Amber Worlders had always been far more difficult to sense, and now she partially understood why: they were actually different. The men and women of the Empire were more like her, with some small portion of their forms cast after her higher self.
And on that mental plane, envisioned now like a vast grassland of small green plants no more than a few inches high, her spiritual self was a notable landmark: a young tree ten pedes tall, ever grasping for the sky despite its limited reach. Remembering how it felt to be around her father, she knew he would have seemed a towering ancient oak many leagues in height, with a canopy that had become one with the clouds. The only thing she'd ever felt even close to that had been the presence of Gisela the Yellow, the Machine Empress of Mankind, who played at appearing a naive young girl, but whose true inner wisdom and power had been a solid pillar of steel fifty acti high. These and more she understood now, the way a baby might begin to understand the world flowing in through its eyes over its first few years.
But the Noah Fulmers around her had no height to match Gisela, her father, or even Empire men. She knew where the Noahs were standing, but upon those spots there existed only empty blanks in the lush grasslands of the mindscape. There wasn't even an underlying impression like Sampson's. Turning her head back, she shouted, "Noah, I can't sense you!"
The many Noahs behind her seemed to understand. Looking at each other over the blazing light and winds of the compressed vortex as they ran, they made a wordless decision. The blank spots were some natural defensive property, and they lowered that defense together.
She was not on an open grassland of the mind. She was in a forest surrounded by fellow trees, but unlike any she had ever seen. These trees were strange, angular, and ordered. She perceived everyone else around her as organic, as plants with wild and unpredictable growth, but these bizarre trunks almost seemed bio-mechanical. The closest comparison she could make was to the feeling Senator Brace's book had given her when in operation, and she had been more than glad that he had given that twisted thing away. Her mental mouth agape, she asked without spoken words, "What are you?"
The answer, from all the angular exotic trees at once, like breeze among the leaves in a rustling wood, was a subtly sad, "I don't know."
At first, she reviled the thought of forcing her spiritual self into those twisted and alien angles, but then she saw something that inspired her: a small portion of each ordered biomechanical tree was new, and clearly not part of the rest. It beat like a heart, and it was human, full of emotion—compassion. Noah Fulmer had been born a gwellion, whatever that meant, but he had learned to care. That he had done himself. "You're not supposed to be helping us, are you?"
"No." Gears rolled within the ordered trees to produce the thought. "I'm supposed to be telling your story, not participating in it."
She immediately thought of her friend, Senator Brace, who was fated to die. "Does that mean you're fated to survive?"
"Often," came the many-voiced reply. "But all that truly matters is that the story survives. The form doesn't matter. I could die and leave behind writings to be found later—"
"Or someone could be reading our story from the future," she suggested, thinking of Kumari.
"Yes."
Well, it had been a faint hope, anyway. Employing her mental muscles—quite literally, in this case—she began to bend and shape herself into the form of the gwellions around her. It hurt in strange ways, and, for some reason, she briefly experienced an innate genetic memory of hating and fearing whatever force the gwellions represented, but that passed when she thought of her friendship with one particular Noah.
As she reached a close approximation of his mental shape, she began to hear the whispers of the forest more clearly. There was a great river running through them, that of constant analysis of plot lines, emotional arcs, and the meaning and the purpose of existence; these things the Noahs debated constantly. She could also sense his secrets. She could sense the results of his hundreds of debating selves.
Noah Fulmer's gwellion hive mind estimated that it was over eighty percent likely that all of them—the Noahs, the Empire, the Amber Worlds, the Yngtaks, and even the men from the next base branch, which Noah called 'the horror genre'—were living, breathing, and fighting in a text-based universe. He believed this because he'd experienced a text-expressed reality once before and sometimes recognized certain textures of that existence in his current life, and because he could still sense some unknown audience reading somewhere even when the Twisted Book was not in the picture.
Noah Fulmer's gwellion hive mind had come to believe that each of them would only be allowed to continue to live as long as their actions and experiences remained interesting. In some sense, he believed, these repeated disasters were a blessing in disguise, for all of them—everyone—got to live as long as there was danger to be faced. The ultimate secret at the core of his being was his belief that the story had gone on as long as it could, and that this was it. One way or another, he was certain that time was up. The entire region had clearly been designed as a funnel of destruction; all the plot lines were converging to ensure the death of the Second Tribe no matter how many challenges they defeated. This portal to Gath would not work, and would only cause yet another foreshadowed but unexpected disaster. They were doomed, not just by chance, but because Fate had willed it so.
Never in her life had she been so stilled. The fire drained out of her; her lower self kept operating her feet and her middle self kept guiding the vortex, but the furnace in her heart went dark and quiet. Her thoughts were silent.
The alien trees darkened in shame at this revealing of their hopelessness, but from the small ounce of compassion the Noah Fulmers had grown themselves there came words: "Don't let my dark interpretation get to you. As a gwellion, that's how I must perceive life: in the form of a narrative. And you know what? I thought the same thing about the Crushing Fist. I was certain the Empire was doomed—but here you all are, still fighting to find a way forward years later and a hundred realities from home."
Cautiously, a pilot light emerged once more beneath her inner furnace. "But what if our existence is fake, like you think?"
"Not fake," he continued. "Expressed in the form of stories. Is it possible to tell the difference? We tell the history of our worlds and societies and families in the form of tales; we recall our own lives with memories of what happened. Both formats drift, meaning the narrative changes slightly every time we tell it. We are all, each of us, just lattices of evolving stories. Each day, we turn those lattices, carving, polishing, making something new and better, always trying to find a way forward. I have always lived with the fatal cynicism you're sensing, but I have chosen to fight for a better story, because if God exists, I think he's a shitty writer."
Together, she shared a beleaguered mental smile with the Noahs. "Let's make a better ending?"
Their smile widened. "Yeah." Biomechanical branches lifted in unison, mimicking arrays like those she'd seen on radio towers. This, then, was how they sensed emotions at a distance, likely to better their gathering of the stories of existence.
Emotional resonances began to shiver through them all, and through her now that she shared their shape. A great cloud of feelings surrounded them like a storm at close proximity, but this was a torrent of forgiveness, relief, and shared sorrow rather than the hopelessness she'd expected. Further out, there was a gap, and then—through vectors not expressible in three dimensions—she could feel the invading men from the next base branch, who were dimmer and quieter on that plane, like Sampson. Beyond that lay a vast void of nothingness.
Across the many in-region realities in the direction of the Empire, absolutely no human beings were present. They'd all been drawn to Concord during the Purple Madness. Then, there was the Zkirax, a mound of insectoid clicking emotions completely inexplicable to mammals.
Beyond that was icy chill.
On the physical plane, the growing vortex continued to carry its hangers-on forward, moving them all out of the heart of the crowd of billions at a rapid pace. Her feet kept running and jumping, but her mind was focused on hearing even the slightest echo of emotion from the distant cold worlds of the Empire.
She could almost hear the polar winds encircling planets once dominated by civilization. Lack of warmth was an emotion all its own; snow and ice glimmered under lonely and empty skies. The sun itself was dimmer fifty times over in the worlds of the Empire, for the neighboring canyon of multiversal nothingness left by the Devastation was draining away energy of all kinds.
No.
Lack of warmth was not an emotion all its own, or so the Noahs thought with suspicion.
There was something out there on the cold horizon—something glacial, something slow. Beyond that, at the heart of the Empire, something golden slowly glowed.
Slowly glowed...
She'd felt a Seed of hope once before. She'd even used her hands to open a hole in a golden Shield powered by one not too long ago. It was that same pulsing feeling, but... slower.
The thoughts of the Noahs whispered to parties unknown, Oh my god, what did you do?
But she didn't understand the images they were sharing.
Beyond the vast glacier, beyond the slow golden Seed, there came a region of screaming.
The Noahs reeled.
She felt their pain, and took as much of it as she could to lessen their burden. "What's happening?"
It hurt too much for them to answer immediately. The noise coming from the region beyond the Seed was sharp, high, and keening, like a video stuck on fast forward.
As she took more of the pain for herself, she began to recognize the pattern of the blazing winds of emotion. It was hard to recall exactly when and where, for she had visited the place only in the realm of human dreams, but somewhere there existed a flat-roofed city of gold and bronze populated by men and women with blurry faces and distorted voices. The people there wore patches of primary colors on rugged brown and black clothes, and they always, always moved extremely rapidly, at times racing to dangerous and terrifying speeds.
It had never occurred to her that such a place might have a real-world analogue. That place had been populated by real people who had been dreaming at a speed all their own.
This screaming roar was the emotions of those rapidly-moving people. They were blurry and distorted in dreams for the same reason—they were fast in dreams because they were fast in life. But how was that possible? She could feel them blinking in and out of sleep; awake, asleep, awake, asleep. Even as she listened through the monsoon of love, bitterness, determination and hopelessness, she felt some lives flicker out forever, while others flared brightly, born into existence for the first time. A single tear flowed down her face as she focused on one and watched an entire life go by, from learning to understand the world, to pure innocent playing, to emotional teenager; first love, first heartbreak, becoming an adult, mastering the world, fighting cynicism, finding love, starting a family, developing parental feelings and responsibilities, aging, seeing their kids have kids, getting old... gone.
It was everything she herself would never get to experience, and it had all happened in moments.
The experience left her stunned.
Around her, the Noahs asked themselves, "How?"
Small as grains of sand next to the sun, there existed seven normal minds in close proximity to the Seed. These were the only handful not glacially slow nor blazingly fast. The Noahs recognized the feel of one mind, and the Shadow hovering above it.
To the Shadow, the Noahs called out, "Aspect of Hunger, can you hear us?"
It turned with surprise, peering back at them from the distant horizon. Yes, I hear you.
"In accordance with our alliance with you, please tell Danny that the Second Tribe still lives. We're facing great danger, but we'll find a way through. Also, his adopted mother is alive. She survived the end of the Crushing Fist. We would also like to know the status of the First Tribe."
The Shadow turned away for a time.
Venita struggled to get a hold of herself as the sensations of that entire life faded from her immediate senses. "How—what alliance?"
The Noahs murmured, "The First Tribe made an alliance with the minor Shadow aspects of the eternal concept of Hunger, with the Mictlan, and with a group of Architect Angels, which they called brownshirts."
She hadn't heard more than passing mentions of the first two, but to the third, she said, "My father's people?"
"Yes."
The Shadow now turned back, and whispered: In accordance with our alliance, Danny wishes me to convey his utmost happiness at the survival of the animal named Cristina Thompson. He says that he has tried to live by her example by pitting different armageddons against one another, and, with that in mind, he and the Council had the remaining automated Empire farm systems plant certain genetically engineered crops that have been home to dangerous small organisms in the past. Because those organisms warp the curvature of space, most of the First Tribe now moves in blue slow motion to conserve their last resources, while a small number of volunteers entered red fast motion to begin rebuilding critical Empire systems. They are small in number, so their task will take thousands of years from their perspective, but only twenty from yours.
"Can they accommodate maybe seven billion more people?"
The Shadow turned away only for a moment. Its reply was a simple: No. After a moment, it elaborated with Danny's words as it understood them. There is too little food for the existing animals, even stretching resources out in slow-time. The animals are already of the understanding that they are not all going to make it. If you were to come here, the situation would only get worse for everyone. He is... sorry.
"Thank you," the Noahs said solemnly. "Here's an interesting memory in return for your help."
Venita watched as a moment of action and daring that the Noahs had witnessed radiated out across the mental plane; the Shadow in the distance grabbed it eagerly and devoured it happily before turning away a final time.
The Noahs laughed with a sense of surprised victory. "They actually did it. Ingenious."
"What does that all mean?" she asked, again running her senses over the distant vast region of glacial quietness and small area of screaming emotion.
"One of the sister Earths was destroyed by time-dilating bacteria," the Noahs explained between happy disbelieving laughs. "It got too hot because they were receiving more and more light from the rest of the universe as the difference in time rates increased—but heat is exactly what the people of the Empire need right now." One Noah in particular felt great relief. "Those sons of a bitches actually found a way forward."
That much Venita understood. It was hope. "Then we can find a way forward, too."
That specific Noah nodded warmly and looked over at her on the physical plane. "Let's do this."
Together, they cast their thoughts out as far as they could, soaring past the Empire, past the great canyon of void in the multiverse, to the unknown worlds beyond. Here, too, it was cold, but with no emotion whatsoever. Here, there was no great population of people living in slow-time; the glacier was gone, replaced with a sense of emptiness.
Except for a single note: a laugh in the dark.
Somewhere, a woman with a formerly bitter heart had laughed at a joke she'd been told.
But, by the sensing of human emotion, she was alone. Who had told it?
"That's her," the Noahs breathed. "Has to be. The ice-computer of Gath wouldn't have emotions we can sense, or at least I assume not. She has to be talking to it."
"Then that's where we're going," Venita said with determination, focusing her awareness on that incredibly distant location to keep it with her as she ran. "I hope they're ready. They're about to have seven billion guests."
That single Noah grinned at her, and she suddenly understood that he was the one that had been her friend on Amber Three. He'd fought on her team that day she'd first died, and he had said he would be there until the end. His promise still held true. He whooped, "That's the spirit!"
Returning her senses to her physical body, she looked around and found that the extending compressed vortex had taken them far out into the fields. Behind her, tens of thousands of men and women had hold of the writhing violet and diamond energies, running with her even as the crowd of billions around them began to thin and disappear. Their blistering pace had taken them even past the spider-forest, which was passing on the left, and it was around that wood—giving it a wide berth—that Venita directed their path. The ethereal blue joining the vortex from her bare hands grew in brightness as she took the reins and began trying to aim the uncooperative thing in the right multi-dimensional direction.
It seemed to be raining somewhat, too, but in a way that made her inherited senses tingle ominously. As she leapt over the shimmering little drops on the ground, she saw that they were actually tiny little rips in the fabric of reality, and tremendous foreboding erupted in her heart. The last time she'd felt something like this had been after the explosion of Her Glory's Heart, which had cast countless ruptured portals all over and nearly caused a ripping-apart of the local region. Her instincts had directed her to use all her strength to close the worst rips with her bare hands—but now she was going to cause a tremendous rift.
She looked to Noah as she ran; he understood. This was the next big threat. Even as she told herself to be extremely careful with the volatile vortex, she realized what it was the engineers of the Second Tribe had truly created.
It was not a portal.
They'd intended it to be a portal.
But it was not.
She learned this at the same moment that everyone else did, save for a split second of absolute inner terror as her inherited senses felt it happening before it became visible.
Like hitting a vast wall of tissue paper, the compressed vortex slammed up briefly and then continued on, turning space itself into a brief cyclone of distorted visuals. Ahead, the blue sky became slightly green past the edges of an enormous shimmering border, an uneven curve similar to the outline of a mountain. That slightly green sky soon raced overhead, leaving the blue one visible only through the horrible schism behind as hurricane gales burst between.
The engineers of the Second Tribe had not created a portal.
The energies had ripped right through the wall of this reality and into the next.
Her inherited instincts screamed critical danger even as she consciously realized what was happening. A second wall of tissue paper ripped wide open right to the clouds above, revealing a pale red sky, under which they now ran. The wind became a tremendous chaotic force, sending her hair whipping around madly and causing people behind her to scream in terror.
It wasn't a portal.
It was a drill.
It was a drill, and it was violently tearing mountain-sized holes between realities, leaving space to flap and rip in the hurricane winds between different atmospheres.
Worse: the red sky tore open, leading them back to a different blue, but here the invading men from the next base branch were walking in great number through a lightly scrubby forest. They were caught completely off-guard, and she turned the compressed vortex sharply, knocking many of them over, but another dozen raised their rifles and began chasing after. They were clearly completely dumbfounded, but somebody somewhere would soon give the order to fire. Anticipating that with her trained soldier's instinct, she curved away, hoping to get the people behind her out of range before that happened.
But, as with her other instinct rising to a fever note as space began to shake, it was only a matter of time. She looked to her friend, but Noah just looked back at her.
She was in charge. There was no one else to consult, and only moments to decide.
He screamed, "What do we do?!"
The vortex drill was extremely dangerous, but it was their only shot. Holding it tight, she pulled hard, curving it away again as the air ripped open to reveal another startled legion of enemy soldiers. The instincts of her father's people told her it was deadly wrong, but her human and soldier experience told her to do it anyway. If somehow they could drill a path around the frozen Empire and the void canyon beyond before the entire region collapsed, they would have a small chance to escape, and small chances were all that the Second Tribe had left. "We keep going!"
Sampson, the Noahs, and the other men and women down the line donned grim expressions. The absurd levity of their task was gone, and it was back to cold hard reality.
But not a one of them held despair in their hearts.
And from that, she took strength. No longer did she try to slow the vortex; now she, and those behind her taking her cue, ran faster, leading it on. If they were going to die, it was not going to be while being dragged kicking and biting—it was going to be at a full run, choosing that path themselves.
Space tore again, opening right into the heart of a startled legion of enemy soldiers and tanks, but this time, she did not curve away. She barreled right at them, screaming with her voice—and the thousands of others behind her.
Amazingly, the enemy began to scatter and flee in terror. It wouldn't last, but, at least for a moment, it seemed like this might actually work.

The unmeasured eternity of silent still blue began to escape her as a familiar feeling of narrative momentum returned. All of them were long dead, Venita knew, and part of someone else's history. The story could not stop forever.
But she couldn't forget her own history, either. "We've had a good life," she said through the barrier. "Celcus and I are prepared to say goodbye if it comes to that. But I don't think you'll do that to us. To me. He needs medical attention, but you haven't fatally shot him. You still care."
Cristina did not change her hard expression in the slightest, but a small bit of clear did seem to escape her left eye to mix with the blood on her face. "I don't want to, but I have to." She swallowed down a lump of visible bitterness as she held her gun pointed at her prisoner. "I have to. The world is not just going to give me my family back. It's far too cruel for that."
Behind Cristina, the Vanguard man at the front of their group shouted, "He's a friend of ours. If you kill him, we will open fire!"
To the right, Cristina's Grey Riders held their weapons a little tighter. One responded, Then we'll open fire on you.
Behind Venita, her own men tensed.
To the left, Conrad's Grey Riders were helping their Imperator back up. He dusted off the hole in his shirt, touched the spot where strange mealy machine noises were emanating from his healing chest, and called, "We will open fire on you if you do, because the Vanguards will not die if you shoot them. They will regenerate, and the violet conduits will erupt their way here, putting us all in danger. I like to joke now and then, but believe me, this is not the time." His ancient eyes turned to look at her.
It all hinged on her. Venita kept her hand flat against gold light. There was no good path. Millions of refugee children in the ship behind her would be put at risk if she let her former mentor in with her current state of mind—but Conrad wasn't wrong. If she didn't open the Shield, her beloved Celcus would die, and then mayhem would follow.
But would the Shield keep that mayhem outside? In her heart, she knew her decision. "I'm sorry."
Despite the pain, Celcus nodded. He knew, too, and he braced himself for the lethal shot.
Cristina shook her head. "Don't do that. Don't make me do this." She added, "Not to you."
The Vanguard man spoke again: "Put it down!"
Lower your weapons! came the response from one side.
Conrad shouted over both groups: "You lower yours! There's a ship full of children on the line here!"
Shouts rose to make the spiraling tensions incomprehensible.
How backwards was the world when Conrad had become the voice of reason? Venita kept her hand forward, as if she could somehow reach through gold and pull Celcus in with her. It all made an inevitable sort of sense now: the orb of gold would crack no matter what she did. If she didn't rip a hole herself, it would go as Conrad had said: Vanguards would be injured in the firefight, and the conduits would grow into this reality and explode all around them, blowing open the Shield anyway. Everyone had family at stake, and nobody would back down.
Stop. One of the Riders in Cristina's group took off her helmet to reveal coiled black hair and a scarred forehead. "Stop!"
Beside Venita, Senator Brace stepped forward abruptly. "Lian?!"
Brace's Vanguards turned at the name.
The woman named Lian looked first to Cristina and said, "I've deceived you. I'm not from the Amber Worlds, and I'm not who I said I was."
"Who is, these days?" Cristina shot back, holding Celcus' arm tighter. "You're the Lian from the Week of Hell story? From Brace's squad?"
The Senator approached the gold wall of light beside her. Venita looked down at him. "What's going on?"
"I don't know," he replied softly. Louder, he asked, "That day, Lian. When Clint was abducted, you disappeared."
"I was already in a Grey Rider uniform," Lian responded from across the gulf. "And I didn't understand what emotions were, not really. Your theory that Cristina Thompson was in control of the Grey Riders and seeking the Finders to find her husband—you were surprisingly close to the truth."
"And Bill Nash used an amethyst device, too, so he's probably at the same place as Conn Thompson," Brace responded sadly. "So you infiltrated your best chance of finding him."
"Two years of lying was easy after a lifetime of practice." Lian nodded and moved closer to the Shield to stand across from him. "And as everyone else has begun to lose their minds, I have found mine. This isn't right. I'm a monster and even I know that this isn't right."
Venita looked between them with concern, trying to understand.
The Senator lowered his head subtly. "Venita, that prophecy of yours. The Ruthless Parent. Was it specifically a her?"
She paused. "I think, but I'm not sure."
"I have a feeling that it might be about me. This is all my fault. If I hadn't roped everyone into racing out here, we wouldn't be on the verge of murdering each other. I've been an idiot. I just—" He seemed on the verge of tears. "I was told there was no hope, no way that I could win, and it rattled me harder than anything I've ever been through." Past Lian, he called to his men, "Put your goddamn guns down. We're not going to get into a shooting war with our only allies over a cowardly escape route, not when our place is really back home trying to stop what's happening." To the other two groups, he said, "Literally every single person here owes their life to Cristina Thompson. She sacrificed herself and saved not only the Empire, but the Amber Worlds too, and her fight is over. She's earned a spot on this ship."
Conrad replied loudly, "But she shot me!"
The Senator retorted, "Weren't you calling for peace two seconds ago? Shove it."
Cristina's face had not relaxed. She pushed her gun into her prisoner's back and glared. "You're lying."
Venita studied his face with the skills an emotion-reading friend had once taught her. Relieved, she replied, "I don't think he is." After a moment of sad reflection, she added, "And he's right. We can't run away like this. It's our responsibility to put up a fight. This was all a mistake."
Those clear liquids ran down Cristina's cheeks more copiously. "But what if it's hopeless?"
Their gazes locked, Venita nodded slowly. "We'll never know for sure if we get on that ship and fly out of here. And I don't think I could live with myself if I did. I would wonder for the rest of my life if the Second Tribe—our fellow human beings—were only doomed because we ran away instead of trying." Behind her, a bike was returning. She looked back and saw Sampson's black-helmeted form.
An Architect Angel boy and roughly fifteen hundred Second Tribe civilians exhausted themselves growing the Shield at the radioed request of their approaching ally, he reported. It is unlikely they will recover enough in the next four days to modify the Shield.
Brace asked, "What about the engines?" He pointed at the massive columns being built in the distance outside the golden orb.
A crimson fish in case of attack, Sampson replied. Those engine structures are empty inside, and the fortress behind us is not designed for flight.
Confused stares replaced readied weapons.
"A... red herring?" Brace asked after a moment.
Sampson tilted his black helmet in confirmation.
"Then it's not a spaceship at all?"
No, sir. He looked this way and that, probably wondering about the situation between the various groups.
Venita nodded, indicating he should continue.
Sampson said simply, It travels in another manner.
The near-murderous tensions from the moments before drained away in the face of the news. Venita wasn't sure what that meant—another manner of travel?—but she understood now what was needed. "I'll open the Shield."
Cristina's eyes had hardly left her. "Really?"
She looked down in deference to the sheer disbelief in that gaze. Her pseudo-mother had been so mistreated by life that she couldn't believe something dear to her had gone her way. The Senator was right—this woman had done her duty, and her time to fight was over. The human race had done her a disservice by providing anything less. The various groups of soldiers began to move away in concern as she placed a second hand on gold. With ferocity, she growled, "Celcus first."
Cristina nodded in awe.
How did it work again? Each time before, she'd somehow grabbed space—gripped reality itself—with her bare hands. It'd been easy to pull apart the force field around the artificial intelligence, what with all the energy the hope of a million soldiers had given her, but after that, closing torn spatial rifts on the battlefield had been very taxing. Here, under her hands, she could feel woven patterns of compressed energy rotating rapidly around a distant central point. Somewhere inside that fortress, a Seed burned bright with the hopes of many.
She pushed her fingers forward, digging between the layers.
Ah, but she didn't need to create a massive hole large enough for soldiers and bikes and weapons. Planting her feet, she focused on the essence of her beloved Sampson, using his strength. Her sense of Celcus allowed her to add more factors and operate in harmony, bringing Flavia's analytical ability to the front of her awareness. The Shield was only so strong because of patterns, and every pattern had a weakness. There!
The air began to heat up around her.
Gold upon gold began to give way.
Trembling mightily, she managed to force out: "Now."
Many hands helped push Celcus through the gap, where many other hands caught him and carried him.
There are medical services in the fortress, Sampson ordered. Go! Take him!
They took him, but she could only keep her awareness focused on the raging tide of gold burning in a circle around her arms. Between those arms, her pseudo-mother forced her way through the narrow gap and tumbled onto the chrome ground within.
Senator Brace practically dove through, going the other direction. He yelled, "Neil, hurry!"
The pattern of the Shield was self-adjusting, and Venita leaned further forward to bring more strength to bear against the rising tide. The air around her began to froth with heat. Striving for a better position, she put one leg forward to the metal on the other side and held the gap open from within.
A dark-skinned woman with crutches and a broken leg squeezed past her, then turned around and called, "Neil, come on!"
The man that had now twice been called appeared to be hesitating. He looked to the other Riders, both Vanguard and Grey, and then to the Senator. "Ed, do you have any engineers?"
"Neil, don't. Go be with your daughter."
Unbidden, Venita's own Riders began leaving their bikes and pushing past to join their fellows outside.
But the man Brace had addressed was not moving. "Do you realistically stand a chance without someone who has the skills to understand those conduits?"
"I'm a programmer," Brace countered. "You've come all this way. Just go be with your daughter."
"Software's only half the equation, you know that! If you and I work together, we might have a shot, but—"
"Neil, go!"
"It's not a suicide mission if we actually have a chance!" the other man shouted. "What if we can stop all this? What if Kumari doesn't have to spend her life as a refugee on some weird ship?"
Venita was facing the wrong way to see them, but she did manage to call out, "Not really able to hold this much longer..." The energies surged against her outstretched arms and legs with exponentially rising force while the last of her men continued jumping out.
The woman who had just slipped past asked through the barrier, "Neil, do you really think you can do it?"
His response came a moment later: "Ed was right. I don't think I could live with myself if I just ran. I've been a nobody mid-level manager my entire life, and here I am at the end of the world—again. We ran away last time. We did. We ran. We didn't understand what was happening and our baby girl was in danger, so we ran, and it was the right thing to do. But now, Kumari's safe, and we know exactly what's going on. This time, it's a tech problem—and I'm an engineer."
She didn't wail, and she didn't argue. Her response was determined and matter-of-fact. "I'll give you two days to see how much you can do, then you head back here. I'll have some way ready to open the Shield for you, even it means getting another fifteen hundred people together. You are not to die out there, do you understand? Leave the hero crap to those guys."
"Deal. I'll see you again. Both of you. I promise."
Venita grimaced with pain. "Anyone else?"
A pile of bikes and gear had been left within; only that man's wife, Sampson, and Cristina Thompson now stood within the gold barrier.
Sampson approached and opened his visor. "I'm going with you."
Fighting the incredible weight, Venita shakily turned her head to look him in the eyes. "Not... safe..." She said the last word with emphasis: "Stay."
He grinned. "Did I stay when the Crushing Fist was bearing down us? No, and I would have died with Amber Eight if I had. I'm not the staying type." His bulky form almost didn't fit, but he managed to squeeze through, adding, "Besides, I've followed you this far. Not about to stop now."
Brace ran up. "Cristina Thompson! You'll need this!" He stuck his hand back through the gap.
Cristina took something from him with a noise of surprise.
Her strength running out, Venita leapt; Sampson caught her before she hit the ground. The gold patterns flared and crashed together behind her, sealing the way once more. Exhausted and breathing hard, she gazed back.
Cristina stood holding a large book in her hands. Looking at in wonder, she asked aloud, "How in the hell has this come back to me again?"
Brace told her, "It was always headed this way. It has to end up in a certain someone's hands in twenty years. Also, I figure you can use it to protect my son—my children, in fact, since there are going to be two of them if all goes well. Sorry to stick you with that responsibility after I pushed you like a jerk and everything."
"It's alright," she said sadly. "I'm good with kids. Or I used to be, at least."
"That ship's not the farm you might have dreamed of, but they're in your hands now."
Venita weakly regained her feet as one bike with two riders approached from the direction of the ship. It was Flavia, bringing Mona Brace.
No, she was wrong. There were three riders. Mona Brace held a young boy tightly clutched in her arms. As the bike stopped, Edgar moved off to speak with his wife and son away from everyone else.
It was only at the thought of his sorrow that Venita realized her own. She approached the gold again, this time from the outside, and put a hand against it.
Flavia removed her helmet and pressed her hand upon those energies in return. She did not cry or protest, but her normally bright eyes were dark and heavy. "Celcus is going to be fine. They're patching him up now." She did not break away her gaze, not even for a moment. "This ship has access to much of the data of the region gathered by the Empress' systems. We'll be watching you, and sending our hopes your way. And if you have to break your promise, I understand."
"I'll try to stay alive," Venita promised again, her tired muscles burning with the weight of sorrow. "I'll try to make it, if there's a way. Any way at all."
Behind her, Sampson added, "I'll make sure of it."
Flavia remained at that gold border long after the Braces had said their tearful goodbyes; long after Cristina had turned and helped the woman with crutches head for the ship. Venita looked back repeatedly as the combined forces of the Second Tribe and the Amber Worlds began their ride toward civilization once more. Even after they'd gone around a hill, even after they'd passed through a rift, even after they'd made camp for the night on the edge of the storm-ridden lands of insanity, she knew Flavia was still standing there and hoping for her return. That night, around one of a dozen fires, Venita quietly said, "Brace—I mean, Edgar. Mona asked us not to tell you, but I think you should know—"
"I know," he said with a smile unclouded by the pains and fears of the last week. "We talked." Unburdened and calm, he sighed happily. "We finally talked for real."
Neil could not stop his heart from racing. Trying to be a hero was so stupid. He should have gone with that ship. Embarrassment and feeling like a coward were both preferable to being dead, right? He shook his head and tried to focus. The strange one-armed boy he and Rani had found on the trail had failed to enter the Shield when he'd had the chance—he'd just stood there. Now, he sat at Neil's feet, silently watching.
Lian had a spread of herbs arrayed on a roll of leather. "The purple energies unbalance a healthy mind, but bring clarity to those that are already mad. I know from firsthand experience. Some of these poisons can be used to make a man delirious. It is my belief that if you take them, you will have a clear mind under those purple storms."
"It's so simple," Edgar replied, looking at the other Vanguards around him. "Why didn't we think of that?"
"Hard to think when you're nuts," one of the men replied.
Another asked, "Wait, do you just randomly have poisons with you?"
Lian ignored the question and began instructing them what to look for when the time came the next morning. She moved on to the next group shortly after.
Edgar moved closer and sat next to him in front of the fire. "Neil, there's still time to change your mind."
"Two days," he said, noting a shiver of fear in his voice. "How do you cope with it? This feeling, I mean. When you're running for your life and have no choice, there's a grim certainty about it, but somehow when I'm going out into danger on purpose I feel... vulnerable. Like I might have made a mistake."
His friend looked him in the eye. "I changed my mind at the last moment. I was fleeing out of fear, and it was almost too late. But you know what? I remembered who I'm supposed to be thanks to an old friend, and my reward was finding out that my wife actually loves me. Me. An asshole gamer nerd."
Neil laughed. "I was a gamer nerd too, once upon a time, so don't knock our kind."
"I won't." Edgar gripped his shoulder with a sudden air of seriousness. "I need to know if you're committed to this. Two days, right? That's what Rani gave you?"
"Yeah. I'll go back after two days, so let's make them count. And I am committed. I'm nobody, and I never did anything particularly special, but I have to make the right choices for Kumari. I want to be able to tell her someday that I didn't hide or run. That I was there. I want her to know she can be something special if she puts her mind to it. I don't want her to be average like me. I want her to be a badass like her mother." Despite his best attempts at restraining himself, tears began to run down his face at the thought that he'd actually found his family again.
Edgar's grip on his shoulder tightened. "Then I've got something to tell you. Something about Kumari."
His heart leapt into his throat; he swallowed it down and asked, "Is she alright?!"
"Better than alright. She does become someone special."
Neil felt his ears rise as his face shifted with wariness. "What? What do you mean?"
"That book I gave to Cristina Thompson—it's the same one from before."
"With Wecelo and everything?"
"Yeah." Edgar's face darkened momentarily with haunting pain. "But this time, Mona and I were the ones in the past; the ones talking to the future. Your daughter, Kumari, has been reading about us—all of us—for a very long time."
A notion crept upon him as he sat and thought about what his friend was telling him. That notion chilled his heart and slowed his pulse with unease. "Why would she be reading about us? Why wouldn't she just ask us what happened?" He knew the answer as soon as the question left his lips. His first breath was pain. "Because we're not there." His second breath was despair. "We fail, don't we?"
"I honestly don't know," Edgar said softly, releasing his grip and turning to the fire. "Kumari's been trying to change the past. She's special, Neil. Some sort of linchpin for an entire war effort to save all of existence in the future."
"What? How? Why?"
"She can alter probability fields."
Neil sat in silence, processing what the hell he was being told. "Probability alteration?"
Edgar's eyes turned toward him, reflecting firelight at an odd angle. "There's some sort of monstrous Emperor, a man of brutal logistics, who employs horrific Pyrrhic tactics to turn no-win battles against an unfathomable enemy into contests with an infinitesimal chance of success—rather than zero chance of success—and Kumari helps that absurdly small hope become a fighting chance. Apparently, nearly a trillion people the multiverse over are fighting to survive, and she's critical to that hope."
It sounded insane. It sounded absurd. But was it more insane and absurd than the two years he'd spent living inside a massive tentacled nightmare beast? The multiverse contained wonders and terrors beyond belief, and he knew by the tone of his friend's voice that he was being told the truth. "But why is she wasting time on us, then? On the past?"
"She's all alone there, Neil, and she needs her father to help her decide—to help her know—what the right thing to do is."
The strange silent boy sitting on the ground between them looked up, as if listening to the conversation.
Overcome with emotion, Neil reeled unmoving where he sat. He felt proud and sad and horrible all at the same time. "Why didn't you let me talk to her? Why didn't you let me use that book, then?"
"Every time I've opened those pages, it's hurt me, undermined me, or led me astray. It's a powerful tool, but not always in a good way. It would contaminate your thinking, make you doubt yourself." Edgar shook his head. "Even though you're not there with her, she's used that book to read about every decision you've ever made—including this one. I didn't tell you until after you made it so that she would understand. You actually did it. Despite all the crazy shit you went through, you found your family, you found safety, and you found a way out of all this mess—but you, an average guy with some useful skills, decided to ride out into danger with us because it was the right thing to do. The odds don't matter. The logistics don't matter. We have to try no matter what." He sighed. "I forgot that for a little while, but you never did."
He didn't know what to say; what to think. His heart was too full of too many different emotions. After several minutes, all he could ask through the lump in his throat was, "Is it possible to change the future? Do we actually have a chance to save our Tribe from this disaster?"
Edgar shrugged in self-deprecation. "Doesn't really matter, does it? We're going to try anyway."
A laugh bubbled up out of his chest unbidden. "Wow, we are stupid."
"Yeah," Edgar laughed with him. "You, me, Venita, all leaving our wives at home while we go off to fight a hopeless battle. It's like some epic Greek poem."
"Venita, that's the one they call the Angel of Battle?"
Edgar nodded and looked over at the large redhead, who sat near an even bulkier Grey Rider. "You ever get the feeling that Fate might be on our side for once? It's really strange, all of us meeting like that today." He pulled a cloth from a pocket and dabbed some of the sweat from the bruises on his face. He froze halfway through the motion as something seemed to occur to him. "Do you know that today wasn't the first time we've all been in the same place?"
Neil fought down the conflicting feelings in his chest in favor of engaging with that mysterious comment. "What do you mean?"
"When you and I met," Edgar said softly, his gaze on the distant night. "I was dead. And then I wasn't. But she was there, on the dead side of that moment—and you were there, on the living side of it. If you'd reached your hand out the right way, you might have touched her." He narrowed his eyes. "Strange. Strange days. Too many coincidences."
"Randomness is broken," Neil said by way of commiseration. "Hell, the other night, I was flipping a quarter over and over—"
Edgar turned toward him abruptly. "What did you say?"
Neil shrugged. "Randomness is broken. As weird as that sounds."
"Casey was doing something with laptops running random number generators," Edgar muttered, turning away again. "What was she doing?" He looked down at the ground, talking to himself. "What is the actual mechanism of Fate? What makes a timeline unalterable?" He got up abruptly and walked off.
There was nothing left for Neil to do but sit there by the fire, quite possibly until he got tired. The adrenaline rushing in his veins ensured that such a moment was a long way off. Kumari in the future? With the ability to change probabilities? In a weird way, he already knew. That warm glow that had made him feel safe and which had led him home could not have been anything or anyone else. That day that he'd simply spun a rock and followed it to Rani—it had been Kumari. He was certain of it. Could she hear him even now? Was she reading about him at that very moment? It shook him to his core to know that his daughter would survive and grow into someone special, and, from the sound of it, fantastic. It shook him to his core to think that he'd somehow set a good example for her. How crazy that sounded—Neil Yadav, of no great rank or wealth or talent, somehow doing right by his family! Tears of happiness began to run down his cheeks.
The boy at his feet suddenly clung to his leg and looked up.
"Oh, I'm alright," Neil told him. "Happy tears, not bad."
The boy's gaze was blank in that way that Neil had come to know—compared to all the other blank expressions—meant he did not understand.
"Happy," he said again. "You know, the opposite of sadness. When you feel good instead of bad. When you're safe, and things might get better."
That expressionless face turned down toward the ground for a time; when it angled back up, tears were flowing to match his own.
Neil blinked. "Are you saying you're happy?"
As if struggling mightily with the action, the boy lowered his head very slowly, then raised it again. The entire motion covered perhaps an inch, and took ten seconds.
"Wait, was that a nod?" When he got no further response except more clinging upon his leg, Neil moved down to the ground and held the strange young man close. "What have you been through, I wonder?" The question remained rhetorical, but in the distance, Neil could see Edgar turn and watch the two of them. His friend's gaze was grim—and subtly resigned.

"That's not thunder!" Neil shouted, trying to simultaneously protect Kumari from the driving rain, grip Edgar as they rode, and peer ahead through the grey torrents.
"No," Edgar said back, the word muffled by his helmet. His next words were louder. "Somebody's fighting!"
The distant haze lit with purple, then with white—then orange. Each glare came wide and momentary, passing with aloof but menacing threat.
Edgar pulled the bike to a sudden halt.
Neil stared up at what appeared to be streetlights for a four-way intersection bobbing in the wind and rain. The only issue: there were no streets. The bleak plain continued unabated beneath the high poles that supported the lights, and these barrens were dozens of realities distant from civilization besides. The lamp above and before them shone red. "What the hell is this?"
Edgar shook his head. "I have no idea."
"Then why are we waiting?!"
"It's about respect."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"If it's some sort of illusionary trap, it could have just put a wall in our way. It didn't. Instead, it used familiar imagery to ask us to stop without taking away the choice."
Neil held Kumari close, his eyes on the distant rotating colors of thunder and war. "You sure?"
Edgar nodded. "It's like Cristina Thompson says in the stories. What's out here didn't evolve to hunt or kill us. We're visitors, and nothing more."
The light turned green.
Neil held on tightly against the bike's acceleration, his eyes warily scanning the nearby environment. Whatever had made the streetlights did not show itself, and those green, yellow, and red auras faded into the grey rain behind as the distant explosions on the unseen horizon grew heavier. The odd encounter had passed without event, but the three of them were far from safe.
The bike rumbled as the ground darkened. Empty dirt had become biotechnological growth, and Edgar slowed somewhat to keep the wheels steady on uneven metallic roots. Small yellow lights among the twisting coils showed the way, until the nearby thunder began growing ominously loud and they were forced to change strategies. Coming to a halt, Edgar removed his helmet and pointed through the eerie yellow-tinted fog and rain. "There! See that canyon?"
Neil understood. Holding his daughter in one arm, he grabbed whatever else he could and ran across the uneven biomechanical ground in pursuit of cover. Edgar slipped down gold-glowing waterfalls ahead of him, carefully testing out a safe route down the flooding techno-root sprawl with his boots. A purple flash lit the nearby fog, and Neil steeled himself: there was no time to delay. Gripping Kumari tight with his arms, he gave himself momentum and bumped and skidded straight down to the muddy canyon floor. A rock jutted up at the last moment, threatening to impact his leg in the worst way possible, but Edgar grabbed his arm and applied force to steer him aside.
They were both up and running a moment later, splashing along the new river between the high canyon walls in search of deeper protection. A natural cove offered that sought haven, and they crawled up on top of a boulder to escape the icy waters. A partial dome kept the rain back, allowing them to warm up somewhat as they began catching their breath.
The earth trembled as the fighting above grew dangerously near. Neil cradled his daughter protectively, but she just smiled and poked at his face. She didn't seem to be aware that anything was wrong, and the wrapped blankets had kept her from getting wet or cold. The light show outside only made her giggle.
"She's a trooper," Edgar commented.
"Like her mother…"
"We'll find her."
Neil smiled weakly down at his daughter. "Yeah."
The boulder underneath them shook as one of the distant impacts hit much harder than the others without warning. Dust sifted down from the low dome of rock overhead, and both men looked up in concern—but the formation was strong and the angle shallow. It would hold.
As the nearby battle ebbed and rose at random, Neil looked to his new companion. "We're on the edge here, aren't we?" He thought about how close he had come to cutting off his arm just to feed his daughter. "Humanity, I mean."
Leaning haggard against stone, his gaze on the curtain of rain at the limits of their hideout, Edgar said nothing for a long moment. Neil actually began to think the man hadn't heard him over the booming until he finally spoke and broke the embattled silence. "Yeah."
Neil looked up at the light show and spoke of the Grey Riders out there in the rain somewhere. "At least somebody's fighting for us."
Edgar's expression darkened.
"Aren't they?" he asked. "Wait, you said you knew something about them, didn't you?"
The other man finally looked at him. "You really wanna know? The Grey Riders have taken extreme care to hide their identities and motives. I think knowing what they're about would put you and Kumari in danger."
"Oh." Realizing that he wasn't a soldier of any sort and had a much greater responsibility, Neil shook his head. "Then don't tell me."
"We'll find her."
"What?" He looked up, but Edgar was still sitting in the same place, now with an alarmed expression.
Edgar's voice came from out in the rain a second time. "She's a trooper!"
Neil half-stood and peered into the grey. "What the hell is that?"
"Mimics," Edgar said quietly, also on his feet. "Don't listen to anything they say, and don't let them near you. They will literally eat you."
They both watched in horror as spectral humanoid silhouettes began slipping through the curtain of water and clambering onto the rocks below their boulder. The newcomers seemed like mocking shadows of their own situation; gaunt, spindly, and slow-moving, they looked every bit the starving refugee Neil knew himself to be. He shuddered as otherworldly glowing eyes began turning to regard him from below—in each face, one orb dark blue and one orb a strange purple that was painful to behold.
"When they're all coming up the rocks after us, we jump and run," Edgar whispered, gripping his arm.
A nearby impact sent shivers through the rocks again. Neil hesitated as he saw that most of the starving shadows were much smaller than the main large one. More than that, they were not climbing up as his companion had feared. On a strange hunch, he slipped a hand back into his pack, grabbed a large handful of wormy earth, and threw it down to the spectral family.
They ate the worms ravenously—then regarded him again.
He threw two more handfuls. It was all he dared spare.
"We'll find her," the large one said, in Edgar's voice.
Neither group moved.
After several tense minutes, Neil slowly sat down. Edgar did the same while sharing concerned glances.
The spectral family turned their glowing eyes away and sat together among the low rocks; the cold water rushing through the little cove apparently didn't bother them, or they were remaining below out of respect. Without communication, there was no way to know.
Neil stayed quiet, aiming to do nothing that might disturb their unspoken truce, and he was thankful that Kumari was smiley and happy. How would such entities react to a baby crying?
Edgar kept his gaze on their ethereal visitors throughout the entire unseen battle, his expression more concerned than angry. Neil wondered if it had something to do with the realization that far more types of life had been uprooted and scattered than just humans; that knowledge seemed to stick to the bottom of his stomach like horrible clinging ice. Existence was tough on everyone these days.
When the awesome display of light and sound began to fade, Edgar gave a silent suggestion with a tilt of his head, and Neil carefully wrapped up Kumari's bundle and climbed down the other side of the boulder after him. Immediately chilled all over again by the waist-high water and constant drizzle, he kept his arms up and waded out of the cove. He looked back once to see an array of purple and blue eyes watching them from the shadows they had left behind. He knew they weren't human, but he still attributed to those glowing gazes a certain kind of hopeful goodbye from a fellow family.
Now that the rain had slowed to a drizzle, the climb up the techno-tangle at the end of the canyon was easier, and Edgar moved rather fast. He was over the top and shouting before Neil had even reached the last quarter of the ascent, for the yellow-lit chrome footing was still too slippery for him to catch up. The fistfight was over by the time he caught sight of the combatants.
Another bike sat by the one they'd abandoned; a tube ran between their gas caps, and a rough-shaven blonde man in a grey uniform lay sprawled in the mud. That signature black helmet was nowhere to be seen. Neil stared, realizing he'd just taken for granted the fact that the anonymous fighters were human. It was a relief to find out he'd been correct.
"They only give us enough fuel for the mission, so there's no chance of defection," the loser of the fight explained with a gasp. "The man in charge is paranoid as hell. Thought of everything."
"That sounds right," Edgar said grimly, his hand still clenched around a newly stolen gun as he held it pointed down at the man he'd taken by surprise. "And you saw our fuel as your ticket out of the war."
"Yeah, more or less." He pushed to his feet while keeping his hands in the air. His eyes jumped to the newcomer and the bundle in his arms that was obviously a baby. "Oh shit, sorry. There was nobody around. I just figured—"
"I know what you figured," Edgar countered.
But Neil cut in. "What's your name?"
The defector looked between them for a beat, and then said, "Grayson." Now that he was standing, he was surprisingly tall, but too lanky to hold an intimidating presence. His rain-slicked blonde hair was slightly thinning, too, completely undermining any sense of threat about him.
"Do you care where you're going?" Neil asked.
"No. Just as long as it's away from those crazy martyrs."
Neil turned to his companion. "We can use all the help we can get, right?"
Edgar backed off. "I'm keeping the gun. And we'll only put little bits of fuel in your bike at a time."
Grayson lowered his hands with a sigh of released tension. "Fine by me. Let's just get the hell out of here."
Edgar raised his gun again. "First tell us what the Grey Riders are after."
At seeing the gun brandished, Neil turned Kumari behind his own body and shouted, "What are you doing?!"
"No." Grayson stood in place, concerned but determined. "That's my only bargaining chip. I'll tell you when we reach a place of safety."
"Safety's not a thing anymore."
"You know what I mean."
Edgar glared for a tick, but then lowered his new weapon. "Fine."
An orange flare in the distance preceded thunder, and the three men made their preparations and exchanges as quickly as possible. Neil remained on the back of Edgar's bike with his baby while Grayson rode behind. A rift came and went, and they were finally out of the rain, but it was not warmer. Each rift brought a deepening chill.
"Are we going the wrong way?" Neil asked.
Edgar turned his helmeted head and shouted, "A little bit of backtracking. I know the region, and we're headed to the one place I'm certain civilization remains."
Riding and camping alternated in Neil's blurring awareness, and they neared that place just as the gas ran out—for both bikes. Walking for the remaining chill daylight, they camped in a thick grove of trees that already held signs of previous passersby. A fire pit had been dug and kindling had been laid out for whosoever might follow.
Grayson watched that kindling with a distant stare as Neil tried to start a fire.
"Here," Edgar said, pulling out some small tools and igniting the wood with ease.
With Kumari cradled close, Neil scooted closer to the fire. "Been out here awhile, I see."
"More than you know. I was Vanguard."
Neil raised his eyebrows in surprise, now making sense of the ragged uniform his companion wore. He'd heard of that mission, but, beyond the initial first week of injuries and immediate retreats, none of the Vanguard had returned. There was one other reason for his surprise. "Was?"
"It was a lie," Edgar said, sitting with a sigh. "Or maybe a conspiracy hidden under orders given in good faith. We were sent out to start new pockets of population without you."
"What were we supposed to do?" Neil asked, rocking his daughter gently to help her sleep.
Grayson finally snapped out of his trance. "Die."
"That can't be true."
Edgar nodded sadly.
Grayson put his hands closer to the small flames. "It seems to be the ongoing conceit of the First World Empire, or perhaps of humanity itself. They abuse the best and the brightest for their own ends, and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves."
"No," Edgar countered. "They just didn't have the resources to save three hundred and fifty billion people."
"You sure of that?"
"Yes."
"Fair enough." Grayson took a blanket roll from the back of his bike and plopped down a good fifteen feet away.
Neil watched him for a time, concerned. "What's he talking about? With the First World's abuse, I mean."
“You have to remember who these people were,” Edgar said, poking the fire intently. The resulting flare lit eyes already afire with the weight of history. “These were humanity’s best, brightest, and most selfless. They went to the Amber Worlds in service knowing they would never return.”
“But that was a thousand years ago or something, wasn't it?” Neil replied, shifting his position as his arm grew tired under his tiny infant daughter. “Does that all still matter after so long?”
“I hope so,” Edgar said softly. “I don't know about Grayson, but we captured a Grey Rider briefly. She turned out to be a teenage girl.”
Neil stared, aghast. “What, like a child soldier?”
“No. We let her go, and she rode right back into hell itself. They’re volunteers.” Edgar lowered his voice. "Grayson doesn't seem to fit the other things I've learned about them. I don't like it."
They sat in silence for a time, pondering ideas and pains that each held very heavy weights.
Neil spoke up and said, "Wait, wouldn't he be different because he's defecting? We wouldn't have run into him otherwise."
Edgar nodded. “Self-selection, I suppose. But the question we keep asking ourselves is: why do the Grey Riders fight? We should be asking ourselves: why don’t we already know the answer? And the first half of that answer involves the extreme lengths they’ve gone to hide their motivations from us.” His eyes finally left the fire and settled on Kumari. “I have a strong suspicion it’s for us.”
“How so?”
“Have Her Glory’s forces flown past and left you alone?”
Neil shivered as a course of fear ran through him. “Yeah.”
“That’s it, I think. Maybe their reason for fighting is so dark, so crucial, that we would have to join them if we knew. Or maybe they’ve scrubbed all links to us so that the billions of refugees walking across these worlds on foot remain innocent third parties. In either case, I don’t think they expect to win.”
“You mean they’re fighting a losing battle?”
Edgar nodded, and his eyes returned to the fire. “In the face of her power, we are nothing. The Grey Riders themselves can only delay her as long as her innate mercy keeps her in check. Yet, still, the level of their warfare must escalate, bit by bit, for that is the nature of war.”
"Crazy martyrs," Neil said, echoing their new companion's earlier sentiment.
"Yeah." Edgar glowered at some unseen foe. "And I think someone is using that innate heroism against them. They're being played—we all are."
"What does that mean?"
Shaking his head, the ex-Vanguard soldier turned away and moved to sleep.
There was nothing else to say; the conversation had bordered on information that would endanger Kumari. Neil sat in the chill night and scanned the spaces between the trees, keeping brooding watch over his daughter and his companions until it was time for someone else's shift. Sleep came uneasily.
The next morning their long walk took them onto a snowy plain filled with strange sculptures. Kumari cooed at all the odd snowmen until Neil realized, with a pang of revulsion, that they were walking among frozen corpses. Something terrible had happened here between men and—something else—and the casualties had never been cleaned up. The field extended as far as he could see, and the jumble of clawing and screaming dead spanned horizon to horizon without end. "Christ, what happened here?"
"Struggles," Edgar said with solemn respect. "But they're over now. We'll find the survivors underground."
Picking his way carefully between the icy statues of death, Neil stared at one human face masked by rime. As he passed, the eyes jumped to fixate on him. "That one's alive!"
Edgar and Grayson turned, but the frozen corpse took no further action.
Somewhere in the distance, a single crunching footstep resounded.
"I've seen enough out here to simply believe you," Edgar said with quiet alarm. "Let's go!"
Dashing through the field of corpse-statues, they hurried down a tunnel Edgar seemed to have previous knowledge of. Heading deep into the earth, Neil repeatedly told himself that his companion was trustworthy—even though he'd seen the man leap up from death and start wildly eating worms. The only positive sign about this venture was the increasing warmth, a sensation for which he was enormously thankful.
He grinned as he finally saw another human being guarding some deeper entrance, but his heart leapt into his throat as he sighted the other guard: a four-legged insect the height of a man, with protruding blade-like arms—
"Relax," Edgar whispered. "The Zkirax are our allies. Out here, perhaps the only ones."
He heard the words, sure, but being instinctively alright with such an imposing alien presence was a more difficult matter. Kumari began to cry as it leaned its mandibles close and chittered, and Neil moved on with a sheepish expression of apology. Could the insect even understand his body language? He hurried on past, matched by Grayson, who trembled with unspoken revulsion.
The underground situation became clearer as the tunnels opened up into a massive chamber lit by glowing orange moss and filled with little wooden booths that now served as refugee shelters. A flood of people and tall insects streamed by in both directions, and he couldn't help but smile, because this meant survival. At least for the time being, he and Kumari would be alright. He rocked her back and forth a little bit and pointed out bright banners being woven by a cadre of old women. Kumari stopped crying and tried to grab at the distant colors.
Edgar caught up to them. "I got us a spot. Row seven, fifth booth."
"Here?" Grayson asked, eyeing the crowd warily.
"No. Four chambers down."
That was unwelcome news for reasons he couldn't quite articulate. Neil followed his new friend deeper and deeper into the maze of tunnels, trying desperately to understand the colored marking and numbering system the Zkirax had set up for those without pheromone guidance. For some reason, green and red were switched: green meant stop or dangerous, while red meant human-friendly area. Did their insectoid eyes see colors differently? Fortunately, the river-like flow of bodies was constant and enormous, dragging them ever deeper along the proper paths. The sheer number of people here was staggering, and the echoing noise in the tunnels came and went with often thunderous force.
It was then that they passed through the first of the Lost Tunnels. The location was central, such that travel anywhere within this region of the tunnels usually passed through it. Neil's heart sank as he saw the walls. Pictures had been plastered layer upon layer; pictures of faces, of families, of people, all lost and being sought by someone. Notes had been scrawled upon many, featuring rows, booth numbers, and chamber levels, but an equal number had simply been posted in hope or remembrance.
On either side of him, Edgar and Grayson also stopped. The three men took in the sight with silent struck awe. This was not the only Lost Tunnel, and this one alone stretched into moss-lit orange haze miles distant.
It is uncertain how long the photos stretched on that particular day, but later counts of the eight mile distance found it to be about a hundred and twenty thousand average photos in width and about thirty average photos in height, thus containing about three point six million photos per layer; at three layers deep, that meant the primary Lost Tunnel through which the three men passed eventually held about eleven million posted images—per side.
"Got a picture of Rani?" Edgar asked, his voice cracking.
"Just the one," Neil responded, fighting back a horrible welling feeling of hopelessness. "I think I'll keep it in case I need to show it to people." He didn't say because it would just get lost among the others up there, but both his companions knew. Out in the wilds, it had been easy to forget the sheer scope of the Devastation and the Exodus it had forced upon the human race. Here, faced with it again, Neil found himself struggling to breathe against a very personal Crushing Fist around his heart. The endless images on those walls made it feel like he would never find Rani again.
They descended deeper and deeper into the warm caverns until they finally found their booth and settled in among their new neighbors in stunned silence.
"This'll be our temporary base of operations," Edgar said, after fighting off that dark feeling. "I have to figure out what happened to my squad and rejoin them. Grayson."
The lanky man blinked away some hidden pain and said, "Yeah?"
"Are you taking off, or are you sticking with us?"
He scanned the massive cavern and its chaotic sea of people. "It just hit me that I don't really have anywhere to go."
"Nobody does," Edgar agreed. "You wanna tell us what you promised now?"
Grayson frowned bitterly. "I'm sorry. I don't know anything. They compartmentalized all information."
"I thought that might be the case." Unfazed, Edgar slipped off into the crowd with a final shout. "I'll be back."
Neil sat Kumari down on his blanket and remained next to her as old women came by, cooed over the little girl, and donated bits of food and sewn clothing. He thanked them all, each and every one, wondering the whole time at the natural bond of humanity. How was it that these people had so little and yet made it their business to help strangers? He had a few worms left in his pack, but the Zkirax-made fungus gruel was, somehow, a better alternative.
The ongoing stream of people never seemed to end. Refugees moved about, looking for lost family members. Scarce doctors came and went at a rapid pace. Different Zkirax fore-insects stopped by to request volunteer workers in the crude sign language that had been developed to facilitate communication. By the end of the first four hours, Neil found the noise, dirtiness, and despair nearly overwhelming. "How are you so calm?"
"Calm?" Grayson asked, looking back at him with a haggard expression. "This is a nightmare. I had no idea."
"What do you mean?" Neil sharpened his gaze. "I think it's time you told me something about yourself."
"I'm not a good man." His gaze traveled to a wounded child that had just been brought into the booth across from theirs. The boy was bleeding profusely, and, despite the commotion, no doctors were forthcoming. Standing slowly, Grayson floated over to him and kneeled. His crying mother asked if he was a doctor, and then ignored him when he replied in the negative. But, stricken by so much despair in so short a time, the lanky man seemed compelled to speak. "It's going to be alright."
The pale-faced boy and his mother both looked up at him. The woman demanded, "How do you know? I don't want to hear any more preacher bullshit from you people."
"No," Grayson told her. He repeated, "It will be alright. I know."
"Right."
"I'm serious," he said quietly. "This'll all be over soon. Can you just make it seven more months?"
The wounded boy asked weakly, "What's in seven months?"
Neil watched, mystified, as Grayson gripped the boy's arm and said, "That's when this ends, and we all get to go back home."
"You can't possibly know that," the mother said, her anger rising. "Stop filling his head with nonsense!" She looked down at his grimy uniform, noticing for the first time that it was almost entirely grey. Horrified, she rose to her feet and began to point at him as her mouth gaped open for a coming scream.
Grayson put up both hands. "We're here to help. We're from the future."
Neil warily pulled Kumari into his lap.
Instead of screaming, she asked, "The Grey Riders?"
Grayson nodded.
Stunned, the woman fell back to her knees. "Seven months?"
"Seven months." Grayson looked down at the boy, who now bore a determined expression.
"What else?" his mother asked. "What's it like?"
"The future?"
She nodded hopefully.
"We go back, and they've solved the cold and the food problems. It's a tough year, but we get through it." Grayson looked down at his hands, thinking. "And—yeah, and since so many people died, there's more than enough to go around. Everyone gets their own house, free, and everyone gets to do whatever they like for a job. Going through all this united us, and we start finally taking care of people. There's no crime, because the food systems and housing take care of that. Money is just a horrible joke that assholes made to control people, and we just threw that whole thing out the window. I actually wasn't sure what to do with myself. One time, I went up to a hill, and I sat watching a valley for an entire day. I didn't have to fight for my life or go hungry or walk anywhere. It's good there. It's nice."
Another voice cut in. "What else?"
Neil and Grayson both looked up to find that the ongoing chaos in the cavern had completely stopped. Hundreds of people stood circled around watching in awe and silence. Tears ran down many cheeks. Even the children stood listening intently, as if this was the most important bedtime story ever told.
"What else?" a gaunt man at the front asked again, holding his children tight to his knees.
Grayson stood and looked around in rapid circles until he realized that the entire cavern's thousands of denizens were watching him with hope and need for all that he had said. "I, uh, can't say."
Dark expressions of disappointment rose up all around.
"Because of the timeline," he said quickly. "Knowledge from the future could ruin everything."
Another watcher said, "That's why they hide who they are?"
"Yeah," Grayson agreed, even as several men moving with intent slid through the crowd and grabbed him. He called over, "Best come along, Neil!" as encircled humanity swarmed forward in the hopes of hearing more.
Confused and slightly awed by what he had heard, Neil fought through the press and carried Kumari after the men who were escorting his companion away. The paths led up, and the guards refused to explain beyond, "He's been summoned." Several men stayed back to prevent the crowd from following.
The trip through the maze took them to the second level from the surface, where a small tunnel marked in green led back to a cramped series of chambers that had been recently set up for offices. A male secretary quickly stood from behind makeshift crates that someone had carefully stacked into the shape of a desk. He proceeded to whisper with the guards before peering over at Grayson and Neil. His eyes lingered in surprise on Kumari, but he soon shrugged. "Come on back."
Dozens of men and women talked over one another in the rooms beyond, each person attached to radios or piles of scrounged papers of myriad sorts. Just how hard was it to manage billions of people? Neil overheard someone say, "Zkirax food supplies exhausted in three months," and his heart skipped a beat—but he told himself he'd heard that out of context. It could have meant anything.
At last, they were led down a spiral-carved tunnel through which the previous hectic sounds did not reach, and they emerged into a wide but low chamber that housed a genuine wooden desk. That alone was impressive and strange, but the enormous man who sat behind it was even more awe-inducing. Above a heavy beard and strong jaw, calculating eyes watched and evaluated them. "I apologize for the lack of chairs. We need all the wood we can get for refugee booths. You'll have to stand."
And stand they did. Grayson looked to Neil with trepidation, and Neil returned that awkward glance. They'd been noticed and summoned almost immediately.
Their host waved away the guards. Once they were alone, he said, "Despite appearances, this haven is in no way chaotic. The guards noted that you showed up in a Grey Rider uniform, and I decided to have you watched. That decision has proven fortuitous. My men say you claim to be from the future—that all the Grey Riders are from the future." His tone left no room for misunderstanding: "Explain."
Grayson ran a worried hand down his stubbled face, visibly considering what to say.
Before he could speak, a shout came from further down the spiral tunnel, and Edgar stormed into the chamber with a guard and the secretary from the front both chasing close behind. "Why have my friends—" He came up short when he saw the man behind the desk. "Holy shit."
From the way their massive host roughly knocked back his chair and stood in one abrupt motion, Neil guessed that he was not accustomed to being surprised. Black flashed across the man's eyes, shadowing them completely, and he uttered with no small wonder: "You!"