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Fifteen

“Okay, let me do all the dog dietary supplements
talking,” Daniel said sternly to his willful daughter as they peered through the bushes at their gateway into Icaria, the glass tower rising from the outer-city rubble that rippled in the heat. “Remember, I used to live here.”

“That was twelve years ago, Dad,” she reminded him. “Things probably changed a lot since then. Like that skyship we borrowed.”

He frowned at her and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Smart aleck,” he murmured. She was alluding to his less than impressive ability to pilot the skyship, despite the fact that he used to drive tubejets, Icaria’s commuter trains. Once Angel had convinced him to use the skyship, it was she who eventually figured out how to drive the odious thing and navigate to the towers of Icaria. The skyship had saved them three weeks of travel, which meant that they were now hot on Julie’s heels. Daniel noticed Angel staring at the towering structure that rose like a shining sentinel out of the ruins of the surface city and realized with wry amusement that she’d never seen a building higher than one story before.

“It’s magnificent,” she said.

“Is it?” he teased, following her gaze up. Wait until you see the inside, he thought ~

Angel tugged the sleeve of his leather shirt. She looked concerned. “Dad, do you hear it too?” To his puzzled frown, she explained, “Those funny sounds . . . in my head.”

“Your mother heard them too.” He patted her on the shoulder as if to console her. “Don’t worry, they’re just the lower forms of artificial intelligence in the city talking to each other. You can hear them for the same reason that you and your mom can ‘talk’ to each other. Just ignore them.”

“Okay, Dad,” she said, tilting and shaking her head as if trying to get rid of water in her ears. That confirmed it: his daughter was a veemeld like her mother. And like her mother, one with special talents, he thought.

After stashing their packs, Daniel approached the building. He glanced down at the old service card he’d kept all these years and wondered if it would still work on the entrance door. This was not exactly the place he wanted to be. In fact, it was the last place he wanted to be. No great memories here. Except meeting his beloved Julie. She was the best thing that happened to him in Icaria. Now he had to go back in and try to find her and get her out. And he didn’t think it would be easy. First he had to convince his stubborn wife to leave. Then he had to convince Icaria to let her go. He thought of another possibility, one that had ached deep inside him and surfaced now. There was the awful but very possible chance that she was in no shape to leave or was even dead. He recalled those assassins she’d lured away from camp, for instance. Who had seized his wife? What if they’d taken her to the DP and conducted debilitating experiments on her? Turned her into a half-machine, eyes vacant and tubes coiling out of her into some immense A.I. device ~

“Daddy?” Angel looked at him expectedly.

“Think they still speak English?” Daniel winked at her, then drew in a deep breath.

In a few springing steps Angel beat him to the door. When she tried the door it refused to open. She turned back to her father with a frown.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her with a smirk. “This might work.” He held out the old card. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll find some other way. I was pretty good with technical stuff in my day,” he said, recalling how he’d tapped into the cyber-network to feed and clothe his fellow techno-slummers in the inner city. He extended the card, secretly wondering if they were setting off some alarm inside, and couldn’t pass it over the reader. His hand didn’t want to do it.

Angel took it gently from his hand and waved the card and they heard a soft click. Angel shrieked gleefully. “Look! The door’s opening!”

Too easy, Daniel thought and managed a wry smile. I’m starting to think like my wife. He put a finger to his lips, indicating silence, and walked through the open doorway. It led into an empty hallway with another door. Once they entered, he shut the outside Exit door behind him and felt a strange foreboding he couldn’t shake off. Exhaling, he led Angel to the next door. She was looking around her at the smooth peach-coloured walls and floor with interest. Just you wait, little one, he thought, waving his card at the next door. There’s more, he thought. So much more . . .

When he opened the inner door, they were assaulted by a dizzying cacophony of sounds, smells and images that made Angel start with surprise and gawk. Despite his unease with this place, Daniel couldn’t help laughing at his overwhelmed daughter. She’d just entered her first mall.

~~~~

A lot was the same. But a lot was different too, Daniel thought, noticing the inordinately high number of droids in the milling crowd as he surveyed Darwin Mall with his daughter and fought from wincing at every booming sound; he hadn’t remembered this place so noisy. Daniel swallowed self-consciously as they navigated the moving sea of dazzling colours. Instead of quietly blending in, they stood out of the crowd in their faded clothes like blazing holo ads.

Angel’s excitement drew him out of his dark thoughts and he let his gaze drift beyond the crowd. He’d forgotten how splendid Darwin Mall was with its vaulted arches of white light, intoxicating music and heady perfumes. As he watched Angel gawking in wide-eyed wonder, he was keenly aware of the mall’s alluring qualities. As though she’d entered an enchanted land, Angel kept snapping her head left and right then up to catch everything.

She pirouetted and twirled giddily as if animated by some invisible puppeteer. As if afraid to miss something. Like the giant moving holos above . . . the rushing sound of Icarians who sounded like a flock of chattering birds . . . the many droids that plied through the sea of people like shiny vessels . . . the glittering shops and restaurants and strobing signs that beckoned even the most seasoned Icarian with their alluring messages of pleasure and delights.

Once Angel had become used to all the people, she maneuvered the crowd easily, pulling Daniel along and bombarding him with questions: “What are those things they wear on their heads?”

“Vee-sets, darling. Like wearing a vee-com.”

“What’s a vee-com?”

“It’s a machine that thinks for you.” Big frown.

“The people look like machines,” she said. He had to agree; some looked mostly machine. Then Angel’s eyes lit up, “Who are they? How come they can fly like that?” Pointing to the holo ads floating above them.

“Those are holos, three-dimensional projections. They’re not real, Angel.” The feeling of discomfort, of conspicuousness returned.

“Look at that!” Pulling him toward a park. “They stuck part of the heath inside the mall!” Acutely aware that people were staring at them now.

“I think we should leave the mall, darling . . .” He sensed the crowd drawing away from them as if they had some disease ~

“Show me your ID,” a baritone voice commanded. Daniel turned, hand still clutching Angel’s, and felt the surge of alarm. It was a Pol dressed in beetle black. The crowd continued to swarm around them, leaving an empty space around the trio.

With a convulsive swallow, Daniel fought from cowering and started to stammer an incoherent reply, when Angel spoke up, “We lost them. Are you a cyborg?”

The Pol’s mouth grew stern, eyes hidden beneath his opaque visor. He towered over Daniel like a behemoth. Everything about him was huge. His chest distended like a barrel and his arms were as thick as Daniel’s legs. Ignoring Angel’s question, he asked Daniel in an unfriendly voice, “How did you manage to lose your I.D.s?”

“We-we . . .” Daniel stuttered desperately, his mind blank.

“We came in from Icaria-6 and left our I.D.s on the transport,” Angel said with a friendly smile.

The Pol decided wisely to direct his next questions to the girl and bending a little to look at her directly, he asked in a softer voice, “What’s your name?”

“Angel,” she said before Daniel could stop her. “Angel Woods. And that’s my dad, Daniel.” She pointed to Daniel, who was trying hard not to look agitated. But Angel seemed to have disarmed the Pol. The man was almost smiling.

“What’s your business here?” asked the Pol, now glancing at Daniel.

Daniel started, “We’re here to ~”

“Look for my mother,” Angel said. “Julie Crane.”

Time stopped.

Daniel’s stomach heaved. His heart hammered and he thought of seizing Angel and pelting out of there. Then his gaze fell on the Pol’s gun.

“I see,” the Pol said. His mouth tightened and it was obvious that he knew who Julie Crane was. “I think you better come with me.” His hand now rested on the gun.

“Do you know where she is?” Angel asked him, completely unaware of what she’d done.

“The legendary Julie Crane?” A smile finally slid across the Pol’s rough face. “I might.”

Fourteen

Julie walks SAM’s cold matrix with unease. No longer sparkling, the cat nutritional supplement
crystal walkway under her feet ripples as if alive and she feels her stomach twist with alarm. As the cloying wind blows into her face like an old man’s putrid breath, Julie knows she will see the dark figure again. Feet moving mechanically, against her will, she rounds the corner and encounters the dark figure. It beckons her and she recoils, but skids uncontrollably forward. Trying not to look into the shadowy face, she demands in a splintering voice, What do you want with me?

[You must not struggle, Julie Crane. It is time to complete the joining . . .]

Never! Leave me alone! Shuddering, she’s drawn nearer to the figure still. Its arms reach out for her and she cringes, knowing somehow that if it touches her she will perish. The cowl of the figure’s robe falls back, revealing its face. Her own face, strangely distorted. NO!

Julie bolted awake to her own outcry. Blinking away the sleep and sweat clouding her vision, she realized that she was lying on a comfortable bed, covered in soft sheets. Heart still pounding, she pulled in a ragged breath as she untangled the turmoil of post-dream emotions that poured through her. That had been less a dream than vision . . . or communication. A jolt of adrenalin surged up her chest. If that was Darwin creeping unbidden into her mind, intruding . . . What did Proteus want?

Forcing herself to breathe deeply, she raised herself on an elbow and surveyed herself and the room. She was wearing a silky nightdress and she wasn’t in a Med-Center. The room was too nice, containing expensive furniture and personally decorated with art. She saw a desk with a Vee-com, and a glass door to a patio outside, revealing a sunny day. There was no sign of her old heath clothes. They’d probably been recycled, she thought sadly.

Julie sat up, feeling completely strengthened. A quick inspection revealed that her arm was totally healed. Nuergery and Icaria’s wonderful nano-drugs, no doubt. She ran her hands over her bare arms and legs and confirmed nuyu-smooth skin. Cuts, tears and scars had been healed and she was smoother than she’d ever been. She was reminded of the first time she’d been treated without being asked, when she’d been brought back to the outer-city after searching unsuccessfully for her lost sister. They’d straightened her teeth then. She wondered what they’d done to her this time. Coloured her hair? She pulled a strand in front of her eyes to inspect and smiled with relief. No, they’d left her sun-streaked hair alone.

As she focused outward she noticed someone seated quietly in a chair near one of two closed doors. It was Frank. Arms folded over his chest and one leg crossed loosely over his thigh, he was looking directly at her with a thoughtful look and eyes the colour of a stormy sea. He smiled cautiously when he noticed her looking at him.

She tilted her head and returned his smile with a wry one. “You the guard?”

He smirked. “To keep the notorious Julie Crane from rampaging Icaria, you mean?”

She let her smile fade. “Something like that.” The last time she’d seen him, she had been tearing around Icaria and half the Pols chasing her, with Frank, barely mended from her shot, leading the pack.

He nodded soberly then turned the chair around and sat down again, folding his arms over the backrest. “Wrong. Like you were about a lot of things back then.”

“So it seems,” she returned, thinking about Darwin. Was it possible she’d misread him that time when he and Vadim’s gang had cornered her and Daniel in that inner-city mall?

“Oh, I had Darwin, all right,” he answered her unspoken question with a glower. “Pretty bad, too. But miracles do happen in Icaria.”

She wondered how that had been possible. Had Burke managed to find a cure that fast? The bitterness she’d detected in Frank’s voice . . . Did he blame her for his sickness?

“So,” he said with a frosty smile, “imagine my delight the day I dutifully gave Burke your data cube and discovered that I’d been infected with Darwin by none other than Prometheus herself ~”

“Frank, I didn’t know until after we broke up that I was Prometheus . . . and I don’t think I passed it ~”

“Yes, the woman who willingly exchanged her bodily fluids with me ~ for months ~ without telling me that she had Darwin ~”

“I didn’t know!”

“Then left me once she was sure I was dying from it.” He leaned forward. “You knew all the signs, sweetheart.” His smile grew surly. “Elegant revenge ~ I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

They’d each had reason to invoke revenge: Frank’s father had arrested hers for a murder he didn’t commit, and Julie’s father had supposedly incriminated his as a Dystopian, which he wasn’t. Both had died maligned.

She gave up trying to convince him that she hadn’t known. The information on the cube had incriminated her. She’d have a hard time proving that she’d only discovered herself that she was Prometheus after they’d broken up. SAM had provided evidence to suggest that she couldn’t pass it on. But Frank wouldn’t listen to that ~ he was too set on blaming her. And maybe he was right.

“But, just like you escaped execution, I escaped death. Not only did I defeat Darwin in me,” he went on, “I’m now the Head Pol.” He laughed sharply at her stunned expression. “So, no harm done, eh?” he ended in a mock cavalier voice. She had no response for that and bowed her head.

After some silence, he asked, “How are you feeling?”

She looked up to meet his eyes. “Much better, thank you,” she said honestly and searched his face for genuine forgiveness. She couldn’t find it.

“That was some nightmare you just had,” he said, obviously expecting her to elaborate.

She didn’t. “How long have I been here?”

“Since yesterday. You were in the Pielou Med-Center for two days until I had you returned here. Don’t you remember anything?”

She blinked with a thoughtful frown and let her gaze drift as she sifted through fragments of memories . . . or dreams . . . or feverish visions . . . it was hard to separate them, they all ran together like a water-colour painting left in the rain. They churned in a maelstrom of burning images and sensations. Blistering pain flaming through her ~ that was real. Bright lights hurting her eyes . . . foreign faces peering at her and discussing her by name . . . sighing into a soft pillow and being held in a warm embrace . . . inhaling a man’s scent . . . hearing Daniel’s soothing whispers ~ that had to be a dream . . . or was it? Her narrowed eyes snapped to Frank’s.

“Seems you do remember,” he said with a smirk as her expression of confusion bloomed into distress with understanding. “That’s my bed you’re in,” he ended, openly appraising her with smug pleasure. “This is my office suite and you bathed in my bathtub.” He pointed to the other door. But he was looking elsewhere.

She followed his devouring gaze to where her skimpy nightdress revealed the contours of her breasts. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, she brought the sheet up over her. As if in response to her action, his eyes narrowed. Was he insulted by her sudden coyness? During their torrid affair years ago when he was a Pol in the Shadow Unit, he had never taken her home. Now she was lying in his bed. Had he lain beside her delirious body last night? And touched her? Of course he had. She felt her anger spike like a hot knife twisting inside her. “You took advantage of me.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said pointedly. “But I could have.”

“By who’s definition ~”

“So, after all these years why did you decide to come back?” he demanded.

“Decide?” she retorted, straightening up in the bed. “I was kidnapped by your cronies. Tyers, who works under Dykstra, I take it works for you as a Secret Pol.”

“But you wanted to come back,” Frank insisted, avoiding her question. “Tyers said you’d abandoned your family and were heading for Icaria-5.”

Julie swallowed and wondered if she’d imagined his voice soften with compassion. She couldn’t trust him with the truth . . . yet. “I had my reasons.”

He studied her for a moment, then straightened suddenly as if he’d made a decision. “Well.” His voice was crisp again. “You look well enough to take a journey.” He stood up and tossed her the Com-Center clothes and turned toward the door. “Get dressed.”

“What about my other clothes?” she blurted out. “The clothes I came in?”

He didn’t turn or answer her. “I’ll get Tyers ~”

“Wait ~ Frank. Please,” she said, pleading. “Why am I here? What do you want of me?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said, turning his head only slightly to speak to her. He left the room and the door shut behind him with a soft nick.

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Thirteen

They’d walked four days and Daniel felt his breaths drag through him like a hollow wind. “Slow down, Angel,” he called out, annoyed at her sprinting ahead of him like a white-tailed deer. He walked gingerly to keep his blisters from pinching his heels. “Isn’t it lunch time by now?” he said, stopping to catch his breath.

She turned to face him with a look of impatience. “Come on, Dad,” she insisted. But she stayed put and let him catch up. “You look like an old man,” she said rather disrespectfully, he thought.

“How do you know this is still the way?” he asked, having long forgotten the way back to Icaria. “We haven’t seen the river since yesterday afternoon.”

“It fits,” she said matter-of-factly. “Look over there. See all those scree slopes. They’re part of a major system of ancient alluvial fans when the river was in a different place from now. We’re still close to the big river that flows from Lake Ontario into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s just over that ridge there, I bet.”

“Smart aleck,” he muttered and pulled out a chunk of rabbit jerky from his pack and chewed. When he’d admitted finally to Angel that he wasn’t certain of the most expeditious route, she’d insisted on leading the way. Aard had shown her maps and educated her about the terrain. Although Daniel had found it odd that Aard would have given her that particular information ~ perhaps Aard had used it as a way to teach Angel navigation and orienteering ~ he was certainly grateful for it now.

Angel impressed her father by keeping up a ruthless pace and hiking a relentless fourteen hours a day. While he felt exhausted after ten hours, he refused to be the limiting factor and pushed himself to keep up with his spry daughter. She’d kept them on a grueling schedule, hiking across streams and gullies, through forest, bog and marsh. This rescue mission was killing him, he thought, reminded of the painful blisters on his feet and the gashes he’d received when he’d fallen several times, trying to follow his nimble daughter through steep hogbacks and gullies. He never could control any of his women, Daniel lamented. Why should Angel be any different.

When Angel saw that his breathing had returned to normal, she sprinted off again along the deer trail she’d discovered, leaving him behind as usual. With a resigned smile at his energetic daughter, Daniel hiked his heavy backpack over his shoulder and trudged after her. He wondered if Julie had walked this very deer trail and couldn’t help searching for any sign as he followed Angel up a scree slope of loose talus.

She’d stopped at the crest and waited for him to scramble up beside her. Below them a dried creek bed wove its way through a steep ravine and more scree rose on the other side. Great, Daniel thought, heaving in a long breath and mentally preparing himself to climb more loose talus.

“Let’s stop and eat here, Dad. I’m hungry.”

He smiled at her in silent appreciation. Angel had her limits after all. They ate from their store, which served a dual purpose of lightening his heavy backpack over time and making good time without needing to stop to hunt, forage and trap, which no doubt had slowed down Julie’s pace considerably. Daniel had noted that she hadn’t taken much from their supplies. Just a few essentials. She’d expected to support herself entirely and he had no doubt in her abilities to accomplish this. If not for her pursuers, she was capable of living indefinitely off the land.

For an Icarian technophile who’d relied on her house droids for food, clothing and vitamin c dogs
the comforts of home, Julie had cheerfully and competently embraced her life in the wilderness. Daniel never would have thought that a veemeld who epitomized the virtual world of human melding with the machines of Icaria would take quite so well to living in the harsh reality of the wilds. Not only had she fully complemented his skills and become his ideal helpmate, but she’d also been his constant companion in the heath. Was that the real reason he was chasing after her? Because without her, there was no point in living out here? What fear was driving him? It wasn’t so much fear for her welfare ~ if she was in trouble he wasn’t going to make a difference. No, it was the same old fear, the fear of losing her to the lure of that exciting technological world. Losing her to SAM. She’d never spoken about SAM, but Daniel knew she must have missed it ~ him ~ whatever. How couldn’t she have, though? She’d had SAM “living” in her head, sharing her most private thoughts for years. Ironic, Daniel pondered, how Julie could be so reclusive with people, yet so openly share herself with a machine.

After Angel chased down the rabbit jerky she was chewing on with some of her dad’s unleavened cornbread and a drink from her canteen, she abruptly wrinkled her nose and sniffed the air. “What’s that awful smell?” she asked.

Daniel sniffed too. “It’s just the Spirea. They give off a strong fragrance.”

“More like a dead animal,” Angel countered, frowning. “You need to get your nose fixed if you can’t smell that, Dad,” she said, shaking her head at him, and raised her brows for emphasis.

He shrugged and gave her a lame grin. Like her mother, her sense of smell was far superior to his. With a sigh, Daniel searched yet again for any sign of Julie having passed through here.

That was when he saw the body.

He stiffened with alarm then quickly ruled out Julie. From what he could see under the Spirea bush near the creek bed some fifty meters away, it was a man’s body. Angel sat cross-legged facing Daniel and therefore had no idea what he was trying not to look at.

“I need to pee,” he suddenly said, failing to keep his voice calm. “Don’t look.”

“I won’t,” she said with a smile of amusement. “But you better go!” she sniggered, obviously translating the distress in his voice to a sense of urgent need.

He scrambled down to the dead man’s body and, after a glance back at Angel still sitting with her back to him, Daniel bent to take a closer look. He’d been shot in the chest. Once. Had Julie done this? The process of decay was well advanced thanks to the summer heat. Flies and gnats buzzed and crawled over the rotting flesh, which gave off an incredibly offensive odor. He stumbled back, gagging. Holding his hand over his nose and mouth, Daniel scurried back to Angel.

“It’s time to go,” he said brusquely to Angel’s bewilderment. Shrugging into his heavy backpack, Daniel added. “Let’s go that way.” That way led far away from where the body lay. As they walked in solemn silence, Daniel reviewed what he’d seen. Judging from his clothes, Daniel concluded that the dead man came from Icaria recently. No doubt one of Julie’s pursuers. And she’d neatly dispatched him. She was a dead shot, after all, usually catching her prey on her first try. Was this where she’d been seized? If they got her she must have been taken by surprise, he thought, thinking of her gun and the dead man. Nevertheless, he searched as discreetly as he could for signs of further struggles.

Angel shouted excitedly from the top, “Look!” She pointed to the other side at something he could not see. Alarm spiked and clenched his heart. He quickly reminded himself that, according to Angel, Julie had been taken to Icaria, so she wouldn’t be lying there. “Hurry, Dad!” Angel shot down the other side.

“Angel, no! Wait!” he shrilled. When he crested the rise, chest heaving, he stared. Glinting in the sun with Angel stroking its smooth surface, was a skyship.

Twelve

It was over twelve years since she’d had a warm bath, Julie thought as she slid into the steaming water and shuddered with the tingling rush of awoken sensation. Unfortunately that also included her many cuts and scrapes, which stung sharply. As if the little injuries awoke the large one, her arm began to throb angrily under the bandage and the slightest movement sent a jagged shaft of intense pain splintering through her. She supposed that in actuality it was simply the mitigin wearing off, then she saw that blood and fluid had seeped through the bandage and felt a pulse of alarm. Trying to keep the arm out of the water, Julie washed her hair and body with her other hand, soaping herself in slow caressing motions, then rinsed.

She lay back in a half-daze and let memories scud in ~ memories of when she and her father stood, marveling at a sunset, perhaps for the last time before the Pols took him away for a murder he didn’t commit. Her father’s eyes had creased when he smiled and lifted his face from its usual sadness. He had been a quiet man of few words, but with an intensity that often struck her with awe. Julie recognized nature’s role in her father’s demeanor. Under the sunset’s forgiving radiance, his bronze face had glowed like a warrior poet as he sucked on his pipe. She remembered savoring the sweet scent of burning pipe tobacco and watching the plume of blue smoke curl over his shoulder. It rose, then broke up into swirling tendrils as he lectured her.

“We have much to learn in stable chaos science, Angel. Ecosystems cycle over millennia in ways we may never discern. This heath, for instance, is a complex system, poised on the edge of chaos. It has the ability to balance order and chaos in ways we have yet to comprehend. Creation and destruction are parts of the same thing, Angel. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that everything degenerates toward entropy. Yet spontaneous order exists all around us in galaxies, cells, ecosystems and human beings. We’ve miraculously managed to assemble ourselves from a primordial, chaotic, soup of chemicals.”

“Mom says God made us.”

Her father smiled thoughtfully. “Perhaps it’s the same thing.”

She slipped her hand into his much larger one and rubbed against him like a cat, studying his great hand. It wasn’t the hand of an outdoorsman. Neither rough nor callused like her uncle’s, whose brown paws were seamed and cracked from the sun. Her father’s hands were pale and smooth like her mother’s, with slender fingers. They were the hands of a scientist who wrote intelligent words. Secure in his firm grip, she was convinced that her father and his words would protect her against anything . . .

More memories bubbled up in cats vitamin
a febrile mixture of garish images . . . trying to keep up with her mother as she pulled her and her sister through a sea of people and droids, then feeling her mother’s hand slip away . . . striding the glittering malls festooned with cultured parks and fragrant gardens . . . pushing her way into the crowded tube-jet . . . sitting in her dark office and laughing at SAM’s crazy jokes . . . watching in frozen anguish as her friend, Nancy, was Shamed, then feeling the disgrace of her own Shaming . . . discovering that she was Prometheus and that her own father had given her away as a child to science without asking her and damned her to Darwin disease . . . discovering that her lost sister had died of it. . . stunned by her Uncle Bobby’s suicide in the Pol Station after he was arrested for peddling dystopian literature . . . quarrelling with Frank, then shooting him out of uncontrollable rage . . .

Out of those dark swirling visions, thoughts of Daniel floated to the surface . . . When they’d first snuck out of Icaria to walk the beach of Lake Ontario, already in love but too shy to admit it . . . the time she and Daniel bathed naked in a shallow lake the first day they’d left Icaria for good. She’d bashfully undressed in front of him then took his tenderly offered hand and followed him into the chilly water. They washed each other, then, still dripping wet, they made love in the shallows ~

A brusque knock at the door jolted her out of her reverie. She jerked up with a splash and snapped her eyes open.

“You ready, Ms. Crane?” Tyers called from the other side of the washroom door.

“Yes. Right there,” she responded and pulled herself unsteadily out of the water to dry and dress. When she saw the clothes Tyers had selected for her, she frowned. He’d left her a Com-Center uniform to wear. As she felt the soft crimson fabric and brought it to her nose, inhaling its freshly laundered scent, a whole new jangle of memories scudded in like missals that knocked her off balance. She leaned back against the wall to steady herself, feeling a sudden splintering pain rip through her arm, and saw spots in front of her eyes.

Once dressed, Julie opened the door with her left hand, her old clothes tucked under that arm. Tyers stood up from the same chair she’d sat in before and his mouth twitched as he appraised her, obviously enjoying the view. She was too annoyed to blush. “Why this?” she demanded, looking from the uniform to his face. “I don’t work in your Com-Center anymore.”

“It matches the fire in your eyes,” he teased, then added, “The colour red suits you,” and used the excuse to look her over more.

She held out her soiled clothes. “I’d like these cleaned and returned to me.”

“Why?” he asked, eyeing them with distaste. He added to her slight dismay, “You won’t be needing them again.”

She brought the clothes close to her face to take in the tantalizing scent of seasoned leather. “I just . . . want them. I don’t want to argue with you ~”

“Good, considering how you like to end your arguments,” he said with a smirk. He’d obviously alluded to her shooting Frank during their quarrel in the Den so long ago. Tyers swung his arm in an arc around the room. “You were asking about the Head Pol . . . This is his office and suite.”

Yes, it had been familiar. She’d never come in through the door, always by lift. Clutching her old clothes against her chest, Julie observed that the new Head Pol had thoroughly redecorated. Gone were Kraken’s antique wooden furniture and bookshelf, his classic sculptures and paintings. They’d been replaced with modern designs, sleek black leather furniture, abstract art and stark white walls. The new Head Pol had traded the romance of regal tradition with elegant but stark reality.

“Someone’s anxious to meet you.” The smirk became more pronounced. “An old friend.”

She did a quick rundown of who she might still know in Icaria. She had no friends left here. At least not live ones. The locked door to her left opened and Julie came face to face with a ghost.

“Hi, Julie,” Frank said. He was looking very much alive for someone who should have died from Darwin eleven years ago. He was dressed in a black Pol uniform and wasn’t wearing a helmet. She thought him thinner and lankier than she’d remembered him. Frank appraised her whole body, undressing her with his eyes, glanced briefly at the clothes she clutched, then rested his gaze on her face with a smirk. That recklessly handsome face had definitely aged since she’d last seen him. He’d let his dark hair grow long and had it pulled back in a ponytail. It gave his thin face a severe quality that brought out the coldness in his sea-blue eyes and a lingering bitterness in his sardonic mouth. She thought he resembled an undernourished timber wolf. “You look great,” he said, lips tugging into a leer.

“So do you . . .” she lied and felt her voice break up and drift away in pieces. The fire that smouldered in her arm flared up into her face as though she’d just walked into a wall of flames. Then she was falling and everything faded into blackness.

Eleven

The dog shedding supplements
skyship shuddered briefly as it landed on top of one of Icaria’s high towers that rose out of the decrepit outer façade of the ancient city. Julie recognized it as the Pol Station. Of course. No surprise there. Then a realization slammed into her and her breaths seized in her chest ~ what if she’d misinterpreted their motives and this was just a simple mission on the part of the Pols to bring Julie Crane, the murderer, back to justice. Was she headed straight to a Pol Station dungeon to await execution with no chance to plead her or her family’s case? Was it possible that Burke was the only one who knew the truth about her and now he’d disappeared?

The pilot was the first to leave the ship. He opened the passenger door and waited for them, right hand resting lightly on his holstered gun.

Before disembarking, Tyers turned to her and spoke for the first time since they’d lapsed into silence at the beginning of the trip. His one question told her he knew everything. “So, did they all come back?”

She knew he meant the lower order A.I. machine voices in her head. And probably SAM, too. “Yes,” she replied, deciding that there was no reason to hide it.

Tyers simply nodded. “Shall we?” he motioned to the ship’s exit. She clamored out of her chair then felt her knees cave in under her. He was at her side instantly and steadied her. Giddy under a hot wave of nausea, she reluctantly took his arm as they stepped off the ship. Once on the platform, she slid from his grasp and walked stiffly on her own behind Raymond to the door leading from the roof. Raymond stopped at the door. Tyers held his card in front of the I.D. plate and stood aside as the door opened for Julie to step inside. As she did he tilted his head and asked, “You’ve demonstrated quite clearly that you’re the independent type, but what was it you were doing, splintering off from your family?”

Taken off guard, Julie stammered as she passed him through the doorway, avoiding his eyes, “I just needed some time to myself.”

“Ah,” he nodded, raising a brow, following her inside with Raymond behind them. “A domestic dispute.”

“You might say,” she said in a hollow voice and looked away. Let him think that. Perhaps he wasn’t so far off the mark, she considered, thinking of Daniel’s likely reaction to what she’d done.

“Yeah, I’d heard that about you, too,” Tyers said with a slick grin. “Bit of a loner, eh? Never even joined the veemeld association, your own kind.”

Hard when you’re one-of-a-kind, she bit out the thought. Even the other veemelds would have thought of her as a freak back then.

“At any rate,” he went on, leading her down the hall, “you made it easier for us to retrieve you.” That was the idea, she thought sardonically. “If your mate is anything like you,” he blithely continued, “we’d have needed reinforcements.”

No mention of Angel. That was good, she decided, and turned her attention to her surroundings. Upon entering the building, she’d instantly noticed the change in the air quality and recognized the stale smell of re-circulated, vented air. The building seemed alive with the droning of machines and technology. She didn’t remember the halls being so narrow and cramped. She was struck by their bright cleanliness and felt self-conscious walking through them in her dirty hiking shoes. She must look filthy and she knew she stank because she hadn’t bathed in days and had hiked hard in the heat of summer.

Tyers led her to a small room. There was nothing in it save a second door, a wall vee-com and a swivel chair. They stood in the room as though waiting for something or someone. Julie noticed Tyers tapping his foot nervously. Within moments the far door opened and a slim but muscular man with a dour face and stern mouth strode in as if he owned the place. His head was shaven and he wore a green Enviro-Center uniform like Tyers. He looked uncomfortably familiar.

Ignoring Tyers for the subordinate he was, the man fixed sharp eyes on Julie. He glared at her with such fierce hatred she almost recoiled and wondered what she’d done to warrant such malevolence. She didn’t know him. Or did she? The man nodded, looking her over like merchandise, as if confirming his loathing with what he saw.

“Well, well,” he said in a basso voice that carried a tone of contempt. “So this is the legendary Julie Crane.” Even though he was looking directly at her, he’d made it clear in every way that he was not addressing her, as though she was a dumb animal.

Julie glanced down at herself and felt her face smolder. Her leather shorts and faded blouse were stained and torn. She and her clothes stank from nervous sweat. Her nails were chipped and filthy, her legs and arms smeared with soil and blood, her boots scuffed and caked in dirt. Her hair, at the best of times a mess, was a shocking matt that hung like string over her eyes and stuck out in all directions. She knew she looked like a wild animal, with a dirty face browned from the sun. No, not too impressive, she supposed, especially for someone who was trying to gain concessions for her family. But there was more to his hatred . . .

“The notorious Julie Crane,” he repeated as if to himself and pushed out his lips in sober thoughts. “The woman who likes to shoot people.” He paused, raised his chin and sneered, “The woman who single handedly caused the worst epidemic humankind has known, assassinated the Head Pol and sent the whole Pol force running in circles like city-fools chasing a fox in a forest.”

The man then turned toward the door through which he’d entered, dismissing her from his attention as though she was no longer in the room. At least now she knew her status in Icaria and fiercely stomped down on the anxiety pulsing up her throat. So, they were pinning the whole Darwin plague on her too. Why not? She’d given them the means, revealing herself as Prometheus with that info-cube. Now she knew what Burke had done with it, but she was tired and hungry and out of patience. “Am I under arrest? Why have you brought me here?”

The man halted at the door. “Get her cleaned up,” he said, not bothering to look back. “She looks and stinks like an animal.” He flicked a hand. “Use Suite One.”

Julie noticed the surprise in Tyer’s face. She drew what comfort she could from the man’s order. For whatever else it meant, at least she knew she wasn’t going straight to a dungeon and execution. Whatever they had in mind for her entailed some level of presentation.

“Then take her to the Pielou Med-Center for processing,” the man added and disappeared through the door that had just irised open.

That sounded less promising, Julie thought. The door hissed shut and she felt Tyers relax. The man obviously intimidated Tyers also. She bridled in her despair with a question. “Who was that?”

Tyers turned to her with an even look. “Brian Dykstra.”

She swallowed. “A relative of the previous Chief of Secret Pols?” Julie had been instrumental in John Dykstra’s arrest and incarceration twelve years ago. Not only had her model identified him as a Dystopian, but her research had also uncovered his involvement in criminal activities for Gaia.

“The son,” Tyers responded.

Julie held back a grimace. John Dykstra had hated veemelds with a passion, especially her. So, apparently, did his son. He had good reason, she acknowledged ~ she’d put his father in jail. “Your boss?” she asked, projecting a false calm in her voice.

Tyers scowled. “Yes.”

“And he answers to the Head Pol, I guess.”

“All in good time,” he said with a sneer. She was fishing but he didn’t take the bait. He turned to the door and she followed him out. Who’d replaced the dead Kraken? Who was the Head Pol now? She didn’t like the sound of Dykstra’s command to “process” her. What did he mean by that? Was Gaia still running everything, including the Circle and Icaria-5’s mayor? Twelve years ago Julie’s sleuthing had uncovered Gaia’s blackmailing of virtually every member of that planetary governing body, but it seemed as though that information, like other parts of her info-cube, had never made it out of Burke’s office. Julie shuddered as she thought of the DP, the place Gaia had had in mind for her once she’d discovered Julie’s lack of cooperation. No one ever left the DP, at least not in one piece.

There was one sure way to find out the truth, she thought, as Tyers led her out of the room back into the hallway where Raymond waited, but she stifled the urge to communicate with SAM again. SAM wasn’t SAM anymore. She wasn’t sure what her A.I. friend had become, now that he’d joined with Darwin’s virus, Proteus, and she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. Her strange, recurring nightmare flickered back and she felt her stomach twist. A disturbing idea that had been simmering in her mind surfaced briefly: that Proteus was behind the dream. That Proteus was sentient and messing with her psyche. The thought was too terrifying and she shoved it to the back of her mind again.

Tyers stopped at another door. When he opened it and motioned for her to enter past him, Julie saw that it was a large, fully furnished suite. Suite One. It looked oddly familiar. A swift appraisal revealed a set of glass doors leading to a patio, bathed in evening sunshine, two other closed doors and a set of doors for a lift. The room was elegantly furnished with comfortable chairs, a sofa and table, vee-com-equipped desk and artwork.

Tyers followed her into the room with a smirk. “Don’t bother with either that door or the lift,” he said. “They’re locked. There’s a bathtub in the washroom, there.” He pointed to the third door. “I suggest you clean up and change. I’ll have some clothes sent up via the washroom chute.” He moved back to the hall door. “I’ll be back in an hour to take you to the Med-Center to heal that arm and your other injuries.” He closed the door and she heard the click of the lock.

Left alone for the first time since she’d been apprehended, Julie gave in to emotional exhaustion and dropped into a plush chair. She closed her eyes and exhaled, long and slow. How was she going to convince these people to leave her and her family alone? Was she being held? And by whom? The success of her “mission” depended on the answers to these questions and she was now having her first major misgivings. In good time, Tyers had said. Yes, all in good time . . .

Swallowing down her rising confusion and despair, she refused to admit to having regrets. A part of her had felt inexplicable longing to return here and now that she was back, it felt all wrong. The city felt nothing like she’d expected. Instead of evoking warm familiar feelings, it felt like a foreign and eerie place from a discarded dimension of her existence. She remembered how she used to find the constant thrumming of the environmental system soothing. Now it only added to the discomfort she was feeling.

Even the machine voices in her mind annoyed her. They chattered in her head like a room full of strangers telling secrets she couldn’t understand and she kept shaking her head as if that would make them go away. Of course it didn’t. Then there was SAM, the one thing she’d openly looked forward to. Once her best friend, SAM was now a stranger to her. She felt betrayed somehow; and very lonely. She missed Daniel and Angel.

Blinking back tears, she pushed herself from the comfortable seat and wandered to the patio doors. They were locked, of course. She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked out onto the stark patio, unable to see beyond its walls to the heath. Her gaze rested on the evening sky, now inflamed with the blushing shades of red and ochre, and she imagined the heady fragrance of sweet bog and pepper and the rowdy clamoring of birds that rose at this time of the day.

After confirming that the other door and lift were indeed secured, she shuffled to the door Tyers had suggested. It opened into a spacious bathroom, complete with large bathtub, toilet and separate shower. Three of the walls were alive with the sights, smells and sounds of lush jungle vegetation ~ the latest in holo-art, she supposed. There was a second door but it wouldn’t budge. It probably led to the mystery room behind the locked door in the living room.

She started the water then gingerly undressed, wincing as pain shot through her arm. She dropped her filthy bloodstained clothes on the floor and stood watching the tub fill with churning water through a haze of thoughts.

As the laminar flow spilled into riotous tendrils only to find a uniform pattern of turbulence, she was once again reminded of her father and chaos theory. Stable chaos, he’d insisted, permeated everything and everyone. Like fractals of a larger interconnected universe, each person had his or her own cycle of creative destruction to experience before merging into a greater community of consciousness. Where was she in that cycle? Would she be as serene when it was her time like her father was the day the Pols took him?

Ten

Angel was pulling his arm. “Dad, they took Mom!”

“What?” He turned to hartz cat vitamins
his distressed daughter from his workbench. Lately, she looked more like a scamp than a young girl, taken to wandering off to explore while he worked silently on projects with little meaning.

“I couldn’t talk to her,” she continued, her words rushing out like a turbulent brook, “because the insects played interference.”

“The insects what?” She wasn’t making any sense, he thought, realizing he was annoyed that she’d brought up her mother. He was trying his hardest, without much success, to forget her. Since Julie left them over a week ago, he’d sadly accepted that he’d probably never see her again and the loss opened up a huge, pulsing wound. The wound was healing, at least going numb, and here was Angel opening it up again.

“Got in the way,” she explained. “They got in the way.”

Daniel frowned, confused as well as annoyed. “But I thought the insect noises carried your voices, let you talk to one another.”

“Except they got too loud. As if they didn’t want me to hear Mom.”

“That’s—” ridiculous, he silently added to himself. She was implying that the virus had a mind of its own. He dismissed the thought as absurd, just a child’s impression, and exhaled with impatience. “Who, Angel? Who took her?”

“I don’t know. But they’re taking her back to Icaria,” she continued, dancing from one foot to the other in nervous agitation.

Icaria, he thought, looking off into infinity. Icaria ~ the last place he ever wanted to be, but the place Julie had never stopped longing for. Although they’d never discussed it, he knew of her strange yearning to return. There were a lot of things she never discussed with him, he thought. A lot that she kept secluded, close to her heart. Her family, for instance, and her father particularly. Daniel had met Bobby, her eccentric uncle, her only living relative at the time. After the cypols took her and tagged her a veemeld, useful to the outer-city, she’d lived with Bobby for a while until the DIC offered her a high-end job with high-end pay.

Bobby was a crusty old hermit and didn’t like attachments, but he had a tender spot for Julie and they’d become very close. When her ex-boyfriend arrested Bobby and her uncle died while in custody at the Pol Station, it hurt her deeply. Daniel supposed maybe that was exactly what that Pol had in mind when he’d arrested Bobby: to hurt Julie. Revenge for leaving him ~ and loving another. Only days earlier Langor had spotted her with Daniel and had hurled an insult, one that had convinced her to reveal her identity to Daniel. The Pol had done his work: Daniel left her in disgust. It was, ironically Langor’s further action ~ Bobby’s arrest and incarceration in the Pol Station ~ that brought Daniel and Julie together again.

Of her mother, Daniel knew only a little from the hushed arguments between Julie and her little sister when they techno-slummed with him in the inner city. Despite Julie’s defensive remonstrations, her sister had insisted that their mother was a drunk and had deliberately let go of them in the crowd that day that they’d lost her. For years Julie continued to look for their mother. They never found her and had to resort to living in the streets.

Then her sister was snatched by a cypol and Julie left Daniel to look for her. Julie had finally tracked her down: she’d died in a foster home, but Julie had refused to discuss the details with him. Of Julie’s father, Daniel knew nothing, except that he’d been arrested for a double murder and had left Julie, her sister and mother destitute. Julie had adopted the nickname he’d given her when she was a child: Angel.

Julie so fiercely locked away that part of herself, but he knew it was there. He’d caught glimpses of it from time to time during their twelve years together. Usually it boiled to the surface during arguments, the kind they used to have during their early years outside.

It often began with some innocent remark on his part, followed by a surprisingly biting response from her then a bark of rebuke from him to which she would take great exception and throw him a monosyllabic word like “fine.” He’d learned to dread such a response for what it was: a smoldering rage building inside her. Eventually he recognized ~ always too late ~ that he’d unwittingly touched upon a close-guarded fear or pain that erupted in a stunning explosion of emotion that she just as quickly subdued and tucked away, leaving him dazed, as though he’d just slammed head-first into a tree.

He never understood Julie’s obsession with Icaria. It should have been the last place she wanted to be. They’d barely gotten away with their lives. Memories of that last day in Icaria still strobed through him like a fibrillating heart. He’d already left her by then, because she’d deceived him by concealing who and what she was, but then she got in that row with Langor for arresting her uncle and she accidentally killed Langor’s partner. Someone then tampered with the vids, cleverly skewing her actions into those of an assassin and suddenly the whole Pol force was chasing her and only Daniel could help her.

He found her huddled and shivering in a grimy lower-level hall, sobbing uncontrollably, overcome with despair and completely undone. He’d never seen her that way before ~ she’d always been the quiet and stalwart inspiration of their techno-slummer group ~ and that momentary breakdown alone had shocked him into feeling immense compassion for her. He took charge, for once, and led Julie to the inner city ~ straight into an ambush by Pols, lead by a Secret Pol who wanted her info-cube, and wanted her dead. She and Daniel only slipped away because a techno-slummer she’d mothered recognized Julie and the gathering mob did the rest.

Daniel had never intended to join her: he’d promised himself that he would help her escape outside, where she could eke out a living on her own . . . but as they said their good-byes, both miserable and lonely, something snapped inside of him and he knew he couldn’t live without her. He had never regretted coming out here with her, but he sometimes wondered whether he really knew his wife . . . and whether she had ever really been happy.

Angel’s glum voice filtered through his miserable thoughts: “ . . . and it’s because of me that she left.”

Startled, Daniel studied his daughter for several heartbeats and finally realized that she blamed herself for her mother’s departure. He berated himself for not noticing before. Angel had probably been beating herself up this whole time, but he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice just how much his own grieving daughter was hurting from misplaced guilt. He’d spent many hours picturing Julie back in Icaria, striding with confidence in that blazing tunic that looked so good on her and brought out her forest-green eyes. He saw her lured back into the technological paradise to which she was so accustomed and possessed such prowess. He saw her laughing with her A.I.-friend, SAM. And he felt hopeless ~ so hopeless he hadn’t recognized the quiet agony his daughter was suffering.

Daniel leaned close to Angel and took her hand. “Sweetheart, it’s not because of you . . . well . . .” he trailed. That wasn’t strictly true either.

“I was so mean to her. She got mad at me and I shouted at her and didn’t listen. We’ve been arguing so much. I can’t do anything right ~”

“Now hold on there, Angel.” He squeezed her hand for emphasis. How mother and daughter resembled one another in temper, he thought. “Your mother loves you more than anything. She left because of you but not because of anything you did. She left to protect you.”

“Well, we have to go after her! Now!” Angel shook out of his grasp, agitated.

Daniel stiffened at the thought. Then he rested his hands on her shoulders to calm her. “Listen, Angel, that would undermine what your mother just did. She left to lure them away from us ~ from you. She made it clear from the way she left that she didn’t want us to follow her. If we did, we’d make her sacrifice meaningless.”

“I don’t care!” she said hotly.

“Icaria’s 500 kilometers away. It’s at least three weeks, more like two months, just to get there. By then she could be ~” he cut himself off but finished the thought in his head: she could be dead . . . or worse.

“All the more reason to go NOW!”

He slumped in his chair, meeting the blazing eyes of his fierce little daughter. He’d just started getting used to the idea of losing Julie again ~ maybe forever this time. Well, no, he’d never get used to it; there would always be a gnawing empty ache inside him where she belonged. But he’d visualized a life without her. Now Angel wanted him to go on some rescue mission to save Julie who likely didn’t want ~ or need ~ to be saved, in a place where he no longer belonged.

“They hurt her, Dad,” Angel finally said in a low voice. “I felt her pain. I heard her mind scream.”

Swallowing hard, he put an arm around Angel and squeezed her tight to him. He felt her anguish ooze into him like blood from one cut to another. He understood Julie’s compulsion to save others. Her history of abuse and abandonment had taught her to be fiercely self-reliant but also to care for others less fortunate than her. He’d let self-centered and selfish anger rule his adolescence. While he lay passed out in self-pity in a dark alley, covered in his own vomit from drinking tub-jet fuel, Julie had swept in like a warm ocean tide, raised his techno-slummer group out of the gutter of despair, fed them with love and hope and set them on the shores of self-sufficiency. She was his valiant hero and he loved her. Then she deserted him to go save her sister, who’d been taken by a cypol. But instead of finding Diana, Julie was taken to the outer-city for her useful abilities as a veemeld. Only years later she found her sister: she’d died of Darwin Disease in a foster home.

Now Julie had left him again ~ but this time to save her daughter, and maybe make peace with a place that no longer cared for her. Was that what drew her there? Was it her perception of unfinished business? She’d inadvertently started the Darwin plague. He recalled the time he found her in the lower levels when he’d gone looking to rescue her, and she’d refused to go with him. She still intended to deliver into trustworthy hands the info-cube that held the answers to Darwin. It was only when Pols caught up to them and opened fire, that she relented. She’d finally left the cube with Frank, the only Pol she could trust because he wasn’t a Secret Pol. Daniel had never asked Aard about the state of Darwin in Icaria, and he knew Julie hadn’t either. Was she afraid of what the place might have become? Was she still blaming herself?

Now his beloved wife was hurt and needed him again . . .

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Angel patted his hand with an optimistic smile. “We’ll find her and bring her back.”

Nine

It took her a organic dog vitamins
while to realize that the thunder in her head came mostly from outside. Some motor was pulsing to the rhythm of the sharp pain that resonated through her head. Her whole body ached, she felt sick to her stomach and her arm smoldered with a brooding pain where the laser shot had burned her. She cautiously opened her eyes and when her vision cleared she saw that she was slumped in a curled position in a back passenger seat of a skyship. A pilot in front of her was doing diagnostics on the ship and the blue-haired man sat next to her, regarding her with a faint smile.

“Ah, welcome to the living again, Ms. Crane.”

She straightened up and winced from the painful jolt in her right arm. “Who are you?” She noticed that the wound in her arm had been bandaged.

“Inquisitive. Good. You must be feeling better. Don’t worry about the arm. Raymond treated it topically with mitigin and gave you some ambrosia to ease the pain.” That explained her nausea, she thought ~ Icaria’s drugs had always made her sick. “But we’ll soon get you to a Med-Center where they’ll treat it properly and clean you up. I’m Greg Tyers.”

The ship shuddered, beginning its ascent. Julie looked outside and caught a glimpse of Aard lying in a heap. She watched his dark corpse recede into the vast heath. Seen from this vantage point, the heath’s brilliant purple and green patchwork blazed with breathtaking beauty on either side of the widening river with its thousands of islands and the lake beyond. Then she could no longer make out Aard’s body from the heath’s multi-coloured quilt-work.

As the skyship skirted along the shore of Lake Ontario, Julie gazed to the north. Like pointillist paintings, the ancient remains of the old roads and buildings revealed themselves from the air in an abstract network of light green lines and shapes. The history of human habitation spoke in subtle whispers of shade and texture.

Just as with humankind’s many artifacts, the heath would reclaim Aard into its fractal fabric of colour and filigree, while she hurtled toward the dark and sterile halls of Icaria. She couldn’t help feeling that her journey ~ and her end ~ lay in those dark halls, not in the heath below, where her sweet child was born and belonged. Not me, thought Julie. It seemed her own destiny lay along a path different from Angel’s or Daniel’s. A darker path. She’d cheated destiny, after all. She’d fled and raised a beautiful child in nature’s wilderness. Now the fate she’d forged for herself over twelve years ago when she’d discovered who and what she was had caught up to her at last and was drawing her back into the dark place.

Within minutes the ship was soaring southwest over the vast lake and Julie stole a glance at Tyers, seated beside her. In contrast to her tattered leather shorts, rumpled shirt and her sweaty body, dirty and rough with abrasions and cuts. Tyers looked groomed in his freshly-laundered Enviro-Center uniform and his creamy complexion that radiated with nuyu treatments. He sat upright, manicured hands folded over his lap, and gazed with detached interest at the lake below. He looked about her age, in his thirties, with a square, unexceptional face. A pleasant kind of face with unobtrusive features one never remembered ~ the kind that dangerously blended into a crowd.

Did Tyers work for Gaia or was he a hired assassin of some new government faction that had subverted her? Time had a way of changing players; yet somehow the game stayed remarkably the same. Pol renegades. Dystopians . . . Did these dissidents still exist or had others subverted them in turn? She supposed that hinged on what Burke had done with her info-cube and what Darwin was presently doing to Icaria. Julie thought of the irony of Gaia’s Secret Pols, her Gestapo that secretly reported to her while Mayor Burke and his Head Pol thought they were running the show. The chief of Secret Pols, in turn, kept his own agenda hidden from Gaia: the trickster tricked, subverted by her own rebel unit. Dykstra’s agenda ran counter to Gaia’s who wanted to empower veemelds under her influence; he just wanted to eradicate them. It was all such a tangled web.

When Julie first met Gaia at Kraken’s fateful birthday party, she was mesmerized and strangely drawn to the captivating woman, as if to a beautiful but deeply disturbing piece of art. Gaia had brought up the grizzly example of vampire bats’ mutual sharing of blood to illustrate the need for reciprocity in Icaria and to reprimand Julie for her reckless and uncooperative behavior. Julie had no idea until later of Gaia’s role in her own fate as Prometheus because she hadn’t yet discovered that she was Prometheus. Was Gaia behind this current abduction?

Julie looked Tyers directly in the eyes. “So, are you with the group who wants me alive or the one that wants me dead?” she demanded, realizing as she did how naïve she sounded. No matter, she didn’t have time to be delicate about the situation.

He smiled with what looked to her like sardonic amusement. “You don’t mince words, do you?” he said. “I’d heard that about you. Something about razzing the Shame Court judges . . .” No mistaking the sneer now.

He would bring up her awful Shame Court appearance for tripping a Pol twelve years ago, she thought with a glower. And what else had he heard? That she had a gifted daughter? “You didn’t answer my question.”

“You needn’t be concerned, Ms. Crane,” he said in an assuring tone that sounded condescending. “Our intention isn’t to harm you.”

“Could have fooled me,” she said with open sarcasm, glancing at her injured arm, and temper flaring. “Like your intention not to harm Aard?”

“Regrettably, we had to suppress you somehow,” he said, lips curling with a little more amusement than she cared for. “You didn’t give us much choice, attacking us like that.” He raised a hand and flicked it. “You should count yourself lucky that it was us or you’d be dead now. Raymond’s a crack shot. He only meant to slow you down. If he meant to kill you, believe me, you’d be dead now. As for your friend, we found him that way just before we caught up with you.”

He was lying, she thought. She could see it in his cloyingly sweet smile of reassurance and that overly earnest voice he’d adopted. “Sure,” she said not hiding her disgust and turned to stare pointedly out at the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Strange, for instance, how Tyers had come to haul her back to Icaria right on the heels of that assassin. Julie didn’t believe in coincidence.

They remained silent for the remainder of the journey. Tyers settled back in his seat and donned his vee set while Julie kept her eyes riveted on the glittering lake and the rough heath scudding past her. She saw her past and future flowing on a collision course and it seemed that the greater distance they put between them and her former home, the more keenly she felt those contented years in the heath dissolve before her. But it was tempered by a mixture of relief for the family she’d left behind. If they knew about Angel, they certainly weren’t pursuing her . . . yet. She and Daniel were safe for now. If they could stay that way for a little while longer until she succeeded in securing them permanent safety . . .

Suddenly Julie thought to try reaching her daughter with her mind. Angel? It’s Mom. I’m okay . . . The chittering grew animated with a grainy sound. Can you hear me, sweetheart? She shook her head to try to clear the static. Go away. Let me hear my daughter! As if in response, the virus twitters only increased. Julie slumped in her chair. It was as though the virus refused to carry her message . . .

An hour later she could make out the glimmering towers of Icaria-5 to the northwest and ran her teeth absently over her lower lip. It was a beautiful sight, she conceded with growing excitement. The enclosed city had sprung up literally from beneath the ancient surface city. Icaria had evolved from Toronto’s extensive underground malls, connected to its transportation system, then burst like a phoenix out of the abandoned outer city, glass towers reaching for Heaven. She’d had a lot of time to think of what her return here meant to both her and to the family she’d left behind. Hopefully, she could fulfill both her needs ~ getting concessions for her family ~ and Icaria’s need ~ whatever that was ~ then return home to the heath. There lay the quandary. Depending on what Icaria wanted with her, it was also possible that those needs were mutually exclusive; in which case, she was ready to abort her mission and flee, knowing that she’d once again be condemning herself to a fugitive’s existence, this time never to see her family again.

Over a decade ago, the Pols of Icaria had chased her out of Icaria for a murder she hadn’t committed. Now she was returning there.

She wondered if Darwin had removed more than half of the population, as predicted. Funny how she’d never asked Aard, who used to travel to Icaria at least twice a year. Perhaps she didn’t really want to know. And what about the veemeld community? Had they finally consolidated and become a power to contend with? Or had they remained the same disparate and disorganized group of individuals they were when she left? She remembered how Zane, obviously desperate for members, had tried to lure her into joining their organization. And the A.I. community? What about SAM? Just before her departure from Icaria, SAM had talked about his ambitions for an “A.I.-community”. Did he have friends now? She wanted desperately to ask Tyers. She was certain that he had all the answers, but she refused to speak to him and instead let her curiosity rage inside.

As they approached the high towers, Julie felt her breathing escalate. This was where Icaria’s machine voices had faded away when she’d left. Would they . . .?

Abruptly the machine voices of Icaria-5 washed in her mind as if on an incoming tidal surge and she inhaled sharply. She’d initially thought that they would burst in, but, perhaps because she’d anticipated them, it felt more like walking from an empty hallway into a crowded room.

She caught Tyers watching her carefully and wondered if he knew about her strange abilities. Of course he did. It was obvious that she was being brought back because of those very abilities, though for what exact purpose she could only guess. Ignoring him, she felt her heart slamming as she prepared to veemeld. She knew she was within SAM’s range if the machines of Icaria were already talking to her. Would she remember how? Was SAM even there? Or had they dismantled him? Or had Zane, who’d inherited SAM as his new veemeld partner, irreparably changed SAM’s personality? Only one way to find out. She plunged in: Hey, SAM . . . It’s me . . . Julie . . . your . . . well, hi . . .

[Hey, Julie. Welcome home . . .]

SAM sounded strange. Different. His gentle voice resonated like a cool rippling wave. Julie didn’t care. She felt a smile blossoming on her face. SAM! You’re there!

[Yes, we are. We’ve been expecting you.]

We? She killed the smile and felt her stomach twist with a dark dread.

[We are joined. Proteus and SAM.]

Julie realized that she was staring wide-eyed at Tyers who was looking directly at her with intense interest.

Eight

Julie walks SAM’s cool crystal matrix with a vitamin supplements for dogs
disquiet she is unaccustomed to feeling here. She can’t find SAM. Abruptly the glittering walkway swells into a fetid-smelling hollow and Julie knows she will see the dark figure again. Moving mechanically against her will, she rounds the corner and sees the dark figure. The smell of decay overpowers her. The figure beckons her. She recoils, resisting the force pushing her closer to the figure. Feet skidding, she slides forward. Where’s SAM? What have you done with him? she demands, trying to hide her rising panic.

[SAM is with us, a part of us now. Soon you will be. You must join us also . . . It is time to return . . .]

NO ~

Julie jolted awake to the cacophony of chirping in her head, her danger sense flaring. She shook the sweaty hair out of her eyes and threw a searching glance around her in the pre-dawn glow. She saw nothing in her immediate vicinity, but something had woken her. A noise perhaps. She slid out of the sheet, hastily dressed and slipped the gun beneath her shirt in the small of her back then pulled on her hiking boots and threw things in her pack. As she slung the backpack over her shoulders, she flinched at the sound and knew one like it had initially roused her: a laser blast. To the northeast.

Heart slamming, she sprinted in a semi-crouch up a rise toward the east. When she crested the hill and peered over to the other side, she saw a shape, sprawled on the ground below, midway down a scree slope across from her ~ it was Aard! After a darting glance to ensure no obvious danger presented itself, she scrambled down the other side of the hill and up the scree slope to his side.

His shirt was soaked in blood that issued from a dark tear. She crouched close to his head. “Aard, who did this to you?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. She heard his breaths rattling in his throat. Someone had shot him in the chest. He blinked up at her and tried to point with the gun still clutched in his shaking hand. After a glance in the direction he was pointing and seeing nothing, she patted his shoulder and made to get up. “I’ll get help ~”

“No!” He clutched her arm. “No time,” he choked out the words. “Victor Burke hired me to protect you. But things have changed in Icaria ~ Burke’s no longer mayor. He disappeared. I came to warn you ~ his replacement knows you’re out here.” He gasped in a breath. “So do those who want you dead.”

“Terrific,” she muttered. A dozen years ago it was the Dystopians who wanted her dead, not to mention Icaria’s entire Pol force once she’d been accused of murder and sedition. The Dystopians wanted to prevent her from getting her incriminating info-cube to the Head Pol. What they didn’t know was that her info-cube also held the key to Darwin’s creation and the possible answer to its cure in addition to Gaia’s pernicious conspiracy to reshape Icaria.

She knew Frank had delivered the cube to Burke. What had Burke done with it? Had the Circle removed Gaia? Given the present circumstances, it seemed unlikely and Julie was no doubt still considered a murderer.

“Something happened,” Aard continued in gasps. “Burke’s replacement ordered you hauled in, which made the others desperate to kill you. They kept sending more assassins. I took care of two of them.” So he had been shadowing her, after all. She’d guessed right; Aard had been picking them off her back. He’d saved her life several times already. Aard forced gurgling breaths in and out. “I got the one at the creek.” Julie felt her face warm briefly at the thought of Aard watching her bathing naked. He inhaled sharply then choked out, “. . . but his partner got me . . .”

“Oh, Aard,” she murmured sadly and gripped her lower lip with her teeth.

Aard clenched her arm and his eyes blazed like the sparks of a dying fire. “Julie, they want to kill you,” he forced the words out in halting breaths. “You’ve got to run. I can’t keep them away anymore.” The fire in his eyes was fading. “I failed.”

She swallowed and had to ask: “Aard, do they know about Angel? Who ~ what ~ she is?”

“We didn’t tell anyone,” he said, drawing in ragged breaths. “But they might know from their own spies. I’m sorry ~” he strangled out the last words.

“Aard, no. Don’t be. I want you to know that ~”

She didn’t get a chance to finish. The chirping in her head spiked and she swung around just in time to catch the glint and to jerk out of the line of fire. Missing her by millimeters, the silent burst of laser fire hit Aard in the chest. He gasped and shuddered violently, then lay still. Julie bolted to the cover of a nearby boulder, realizing that it must be a Secret Pol ~ a Dystopian ~ hunting her. Those had definitely been silent laser pistol shots, standard Secret Pol issue.

The shots had come from the top of the scree slope behind a large boulder. She thought she made out a head poking out of the dark boulder silhouetted against the blood-red sky. Pols were typically dead shots, but she still had one advantage over him ~ she knew this terrain far better than her pursuer did. Aard had also shown her a few tricks over the years.

Julie slipped off her backpack, then threw a last glance at Aard’s crumpled form before scrambling out from behind her rock shelter and pounding down the steep valley slope. The ground spit rocks around her from wide laser shots. The shots soon ceased as the man abandoned his vantage point to give chase.

Ditching silence for speed, Julie crashed through Spirea and willow shrubs and felt branches and leaves slap her bare arms and legs. With some satisfaction she heard the thuds and grunts of her predator’s awkward descent into the gully. City boy.

Julie led the assassin down the scree to a small winding ravine of a dried up creek. Once she heard him stumbling along the cobbles twenty meters behind her, she picked up several mid-sized water-worn rocks and ducked behind a thicket of Spirea and sweet-gale. Inhaling their pungent sweet aroma, she watched him pass her with awkward steps. She flanked him silently and smiled grimly. Then she pulled out her sling, tucked a rock in the pouch and, taking careful aim, sent the rock hurtling. It hit him on the back of the head with a sickening thud. He stumbled forward and fell but quickly scrambled up and spun around, weapon tracking toward her.

She inhaled sharply when she saw his face. It was the first time she got a good look at him. His shaven head and face were a monstrous tangle of scars and stubble. His crooked nose had obviously been broken at least once. One eye drooped as scar tissue pulled it down. Some new breed of killer, she wondered and reached for the small of her back.

He touched his head where the rock had struck him and brought his hand in front of him to see blood. He’d already spotted her standing in the bushes and now smiled with malice. “Thought a rock would do it, huh? Let’s see you do magic out here, veemeld, where you can’t use your A.I.-lover,” he spat out. “Die, bitch!”

Hand concealed in the bush, Julie pulled the trigger of Aard’s old gun a split second before the Pol did. The laser squealed and he jerked back. He stared at her in disbelief then toppled.

Shaking with fear and rage, Julie stepped out of the bush and stood over the dead man. She’d shot him in the heart. “No magic. Just a gun,” she said.

She forced herself to bend down and search him for identification then abandoned the grizzly task. He’d already identified himself as a veemeld-hater. Probably a Secret Pol. Had nothing changed in Icaria?

A swift glance confirmed that the man’s boot tread matched the prints she’d seen. Julie replaced Aard’s gun in her makeshift holster and grabbed the dead man’s weapon, a Secret Pol-issue silent laser pistol, and tucked it beneath her cinched-in belt. Then, grimacing with effort, Julie dragged the body to the bushes.

It was only as she regarded the crumpled form lying in an unnatural position in the bush, that she fully acknowledged what she’d just done ~ intentionally killed a man. She stared at the body and hugged her arms around her waist, feeling the air shiver through her lungs. It had started again. Would it ever end? That awful foreboding she’d felt lately of an imminent collision between past and future made her shake. How could she protect her cherished daughter and husband from this? Would she ever see them again?

Leaving the dead man behind, Julie sprinted up the dried creek bed back to the scree slope where she’d found Aard. Her assailant must have had a vehicle. She was going to find it, she thought as she scrambled up the steep ravine to retrieve her backpack. She was almost to Aard’s body when ~

Mom?

Julie jerked to a stop. Her chirping sounds warbled as if tuning to the transmission. Angel?

I didn’t mean what I said. Angel’s voice was edged with pain. Please come back.

Julie dropped into a cross-legged sit on the talus. Oh, honey. I didn’t leave because I was mad at you . . . I . . .

The chirping abruptly changed to a staccato grating like sheet metal ripping. Not the usual spike of danger. Just major interference. Julie couldn’t help grimacing with the effort of hearing her daughter through the fierce static that hurt her ears.

Please come home . . .

I can’t, darling. Not yet. Julie glanced down at the gun she’d taken from the man she’d just killed. Her nose flared as she tried to keep her composure. The Icarians are after me right now, sweet pea. She swallowed convulsively and brought a hand to her mouth. Look after Daddy for me, will you? Until I come back? The static became overwhelming. She couldn’t be sure Angel had heard her. I love you, Angel. Her throat closed and she felt her eyes heat with tears. Tell Dad that I love him . . . Angel?

There was no answer and soon the insect wail subsided to its normal trill. Julie dropped the gun, leaned her elbows on her knees and then cradled her head in her hands. Running her fingers into her matted hair, she let her tears flow. The chirping in her head spiked. She fisted away her tears then grabbed the dead man’s gun and leaped into a crouch, eyes roaming the slope. The sun was breaking over the horizon, firing the red sky with bold brilliance. There . . . on its highest point. Of course, her hunter had a friend. She caught a glint from a weapon and saw him, silhouetted against glittering sunlight.

She didn’t hesitate this time. Her shot missed and he returned fire.

Her right upper arm exploded in a blaze of pain. The next thing she knew she was sliding uncontrollably down the slope, smashing into jagged rocks on the way down. She heard the pistol that must have flown from her hand clatter far from her. Had she cried out? When she finally came to a stop on the dry creek bed, she pushed herself up with trembling hands and shook her head to clear it.

The nervous chirping spiked. She dropped on one knee and scanned for her assailant. He’d already moved off the slope top. Nauseous with the shooting pain in her arm, she looked at it and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach twisted in alarm at the site of the large burn that had angrily carved through muscle. Shiny blisters and black flakes of burnt flesh boiled up and wept plasma and dirt. Fighting the urge to throw up, Julie scrambled unsteadily to her feet to bolt for cover.

“You’ve led us quite a chase,” said a calm voice close to her. “No need to run anymore, Ms. Crane.”

She spun toward the voice, squinting at the sun, and whipped out Aard’s weapon from her back holster. She didn’t get very far with it. Something hit the back of her head. The pain arced and shafts of brilliant light lanced the image of a man with tidy blue hair looking at her with an amused smile. The last thing she saw as the ground rushed toward her were several size-nine, freshly made boot prints. Then the darkness took her.

Seven

As she crested a ridge above a stunning vista of the river valley below, Julie stopped to wipe the sweat that was dripping into her eyes and took in the view of the swollen river, lined with a thick canopy of trees and shrubs. The river had widened considerably here and was dotted with numerous islands. SAM, her A.I., had once told her that around 700 million years ago this whole area was a large mountain system that had eroded down over millennia. All that remained were the harder Precambrian rocks scattered as islands in the Saint Lawrence River, much like the pink granite outcrop she was standing on.

This region was aptly called the Thousand Islands and a hundred years ago it supported a tourist industry of avid boaters. Now the hazy blue-green landscape before her lay silent to its history, and for a moment she felt akin to the first explorers like Cartier, Cavalier and Champlain, who had forged their way up the gulf of Saint Lawrence and gazed in wonderment at this new foreign land.

Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and longed for fresh meat. She’d run out of her store of dried venison a while ago and was tired of eating roots, herbs and berries. She decided to risk a fire and catch a vole or shrew with her sling. For silence it surpassed the Pol laser gun. She’d made the sling long ago from a piece of rabbit pelt and Aard had shown her how to use it. She’d quickly become adept at hurtling a stone and hitting its target ten meters away. She’d downed grouse, other birds, voles and even rabbits with her silent weapon. Although her hunting weapon of choice was the crossbow, it had not been practical to take on this trip, so she’d settled for the sling, which she could fold up and stash into her pocket.

Julie found a small grotto with a thicket and slung her pack out of view in a silver birch tree before proceeding to a clearing where she’d seen several burrow holes. Accepting that she was trading good travel time for some comforting food in her belly, Julie resigned to wait it out. She found a comfortable position and sat cross-legged, the sling poised in her left hand, and watched the scrubby ground littered with den entrances.

As she waited patiently, Julie took a deep inhale of the sweet peppery fragrances of mint and heather, mixed with the boggy-sweet smell of poplar, hickory and pitch pine. The breeze that sighed through the shrubs and the snapping of the broom’s drying seedpods reminded her of the time Angel had discovered these delightful things. Three years old, Angel had shrieked with joy at the explosive pop of the pods as they threw their seeds into the air in one of nature’s many exuberant displays of propagation. Julie pulled one of the mint stalks beside her to her nose and after a long sniff, she sighed deeply. Am I doing the right thing? Dear Earth, I hope Angel’s safe~

There! A head popped out of the nearest hole. In one fluid motion, Julie aimed and let fly. Thunk! First shot and she’d successfully struck a vole on the head, instantly killing it. Thinking of supper with a smile, Julie sprang up and fished the limp animal out of the hole it had fallen into.

Back at the grotto where she’d hidden her pack, Julie waited for sunset to hide the smoke and then made a fire using some birch bark and dried grass she’d gathered as tinder. She impaled the animal on a willow branch for a skewer. As she waited for the fire to die down to cook the animal over the hot coals, Julie absently watched the flames lick the darkening sky to the east. Her gaze followed the soaring sparks that winked out one by one like dying stars and found her thoughts drifting home to Daniel and Angel.

When the fire had subsided sufficiently, she propped the skewer against several other branches teepee-style over the coals and let the animal cook as she turned to watch the sunset and sip chamomile tea she’d brewed in her small pot. The pungent-sweet smell of the tea made her smile through the corner of her mouth: Angel hated this tea.

Julie stirred the floating chamomile heads with her finger and let her mind wander to the past. When she’d discovered that she was pregnant with Angel she’d become terrified of whether she’d make a good mother. That had all disappeared when Angel was born. One look at her sweet helpless baby and Julie knew exactly what to do. And she’d continued . . . until now. Her little girl was growing up and both mother and daughter were suffering the growth pains. Lately they’d snapped at one another like snarling cougars while Daniel looked on in bemusement. She’d give anything for even that now. Julie wondered when she’d see her little girl again.

It wouldn’t be in Icaria if she could help it. Where they’d hate and fear Angel for her abilities even as they’d coax her for services from those same abilities. Angel was never going there, Julie thought grimly, her nose flaring with fierce determination as she watched the sun disappear behind the horizon. What if she failed in her mission? It was ambitious at best, with significant deterrents, such as her own status in Icaria. It was going to be difficult to find, let alone convince, those in government to leave her and her family alone, if she was still considered a murderer.

What had Frank done with her information cube? She’d pleaded with him to give her information to someone trustworthy ~ Victor Burke, the mayor of Icaria. Had she been wrong? Her cube not only contained vital information on Darwin’s manufacture and etiology but also held her models of personality-types for Dystopians in addition to incriminating information on Gaia and her henchman, John Dykstra, Chief of Secret Pols ~ information that would have cleared her own name. She knew Burke got her information because SAM told her during their last communication that Burke had arrested Dykstra. What about Gaia, then? Was she so powerful that Burke didn’t want to touch her?

Julie realized how hungry she was when she inhaled the delicious aroma of roasting meat carried on the smoke of the fire. She turned to check the cooking animal and gasped. The rodent was on fire!

“Terrific,” she snarled, grabbing the stick and blowing out the flames. She poked the skewer into the ground and put out the campfire, then turned back to her food with a sigh of disappointment. She gingerly picked the black and smoking vole off her skewer and with wincing fingers practically threw it on her bark-plate. It was one sad looking specimen. “Don’t look so glum, pal.” She smiled sadly at the vole’s melted face. “Someday I’ll be just like you. What goes around, comes around. Happens to all of us.” She sighed, taking a small bite. Her teeth sank through the burnt crust into soft meat and she thankfully chewed.

She had to vitamins and minerals for dogs
admit that her luck couldn’t hold out indefinitely. On good days, she made about twenty kilometers. On the bad days, when she had to traverse or veer around a tributary, bay or marsh, she gained less than ten kilometers in her trek. At this rate she was at least another week, possibly two, from Icaria-5. She hadn’t even reached Lake Ontario yet and she still had to cross the turbulent Gananoque River, then hike another three hundred kilometres to Icaria-5. Someone was bound to catch her off guard and she’d be either dead or hauled to the Pol Station for execution or dissected at Icaria’s DP, depending on who caught her first. “Dead or worse . . . just like you,” she said to the vole then took another bite and chewed slowly, letting the evening cacophonies of birdsong lull her.

Her gaze drifted back to where the sun had set to the southwest, the direction she was going. Glowing like crimson embers beneath dark purple clouds, the sky lit a brilliant red gash over the dark horizon. The contrast was remarkable.

Contrast and paradox were deeply embedded in nature, she mused. Her father had always recognized that these lay at the heart of chaos theory. Just as wisdom existed in folly, action in inaction, bravery in cowardice, and ultimately order in chaos. Julie knew her father had been an honorable and meticulous scientist, a fractal ecologist who didn’t shy away from controversy. He’d been brave and daring when it came to seeking the truth, yet he’d carelessly cast her to the neurologists to play with and then lied like a coward to her about what he’d done. Julie looked down at what was left of her food and sighed, no longer hungry.

How did chaos theory apply to her? Irregular phenomena, that’s what chaos was. She seemed to cause it wherever she went ~ like the spread of an epidemic. Changing populations of insects, the propagation of an impulse along a nerve, the random changes in weather, the rise and fall of civilizations . . .What had her father created? A paradox. That’s what she was. He’d called her his angel. “Yeah,” she murmured to herself. “I’m an angel alright, an angel of chaos . . .”

After cleaning up in the growing darkness, Julie carefully surveyed her surroundings to ensure no one lurked nearby, then laid out her insupad and sleeping bag on a flat piece of ground inside a tight ring of bushes. She placed her backpack as a pillow at the head of the insupad then took off her sweaty clothes and slid into the bag, tucking Aard’s gun beside her. She lay on her back, hands clasped behind her head, and looked up at the clear night sky through the broken canopy of shrubs above her. She spotted the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and Cepheus and wondered if Daniel was gazing at the same night sky. The rhythmic sissing of crickets covered the night with a comforting mantle.

She felt Aard’s gun nestled against her skin like a lover’s hand. It seemed so long ago, she thought, when out of rage she’d shot Frank in the crotch for hurting her uncle and then accidentally shot and killed Ron Hicks, Frank’s Pol partner in the ensuing struggle. Where was Frank now? Probably dead. While he’d recovered well enough from her gunshot wound, he'd told her just before she fled Icaria that he was battling Darwin disease. No one lived more than six months with Darwin, she thought, stroking the weapon and feeling it warm in her hand.

She heard the lonely cry of a wolf echo in the darkness. It sent her mind traveling to the times she and Daniel curled up together with legs and arms entwined and watched the stars, wrapped in nature’s exquisite night sounds. Since they’d come out here they’d never been apart. Until now. Was she soothing herself or torturing herself by coaxing out these thoughts? She supposed that depended on whether she expected to see him soon again . . . or not . . .

Julie turned on her side and, shutting her eyes, she imagined Daniel’s arms embracing her from behind, his warm body moulded to hers. His warm breath sighing on her neck. She felt the ache of longing swell inside her and wrapped her arms around herself. Did he ache for her too? More likely he was outraged with her.

Heather Dugan is a dog shedding supplements
voice-over artist and on-camera talent. Born in Ann Arbor MI, Heather resided in beautiful Ohio, state of rivers and streams, most her life. She received a BA in Communications from Indiana University, Bloomington. After making a splashy entrance in the media field as Miss Columbus (“Sshhh,” says Heather. Sorry! I just had to!), Heather went into radio sales where she was discovered as a talent in “voicing”, which jumpstarted her varied career that included community theatre, radio/TV commercials, industrial films, narrations, phone network commercials, and talk show co-hosting. She has done voicing for Nationwide, The Columbus Dispatch, Bank One, Verizon, Honda of America, Cintas, Lazarus, The Truberry Group, among many other prestigious clients.

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Heather is also an accomplished writer, photographer and musician (keyboardist). She wrote and co-wrote several documentaries, plays and musical compositions. You can see her photography on her travel blog, “Footsteps”. Her first poem, written when she was seven years old, was framed by her mother and sits on her desk. Heather is herself a devoted mother of three children. An avowed passionate traveler, Heather loves the outdoors and adventure. She keeps fit by running in races, kayaking, biking, swimming and weight-lifting. Heather currently lives in Lewis Center, Ohio, with her three children and chocolate lab. Thanks so much, Heather. Your dedication, professionalism & excellent work ethic, and remarkable voice are truly appreciated.

~ Nina Munteanu

Six

In the dim light of pre-dawn, Julie rose from the bed with a sad but determined look back at Daniel’s sleeping form. He murmured something in his sleep and continued breathing heavily. She dressed quickly then slipped the gun into the makeshift holster at the small of her back. After stuffing more clothes, her knife and sling and a few other essentials into her backpack she turned for the door then stopped and let her gaze linger over Daniel’s bearded face. Mouth open and snoring softly, he showed the vague contentedness of deep sleep. His dark hair, a mess of sleep-tangles, spread out from his face over the pillow and she wished with all her heart that she could be curled up beside him, to make love again when he woke.

As she committed that image to memory, she felt her throat swell with longing and regret. He’d think she was abandoning him again, and she was certain that this would irrevocably shatter his trust in her. It was a fragile trust that he’d forged over twelve years and which she would crumble within moments. Julie swallowed down her emotions, realizing that everything Daniel had built and accomplished had been to keep her here, content with him. Perhaps he never did quite trust her. And perhaps he was right. Darling, forgive me . . .

But there was no stopping what she had to do and she knew he’d try to stop her. Icaria wasn’t going to get Angel and the only way she was going to prevent that was to leave. They were after her now ~ Aard had as much as told her that ~ and they weren’t going to stop following her. She thought of the clean, fresh boot track she’d spotted yesterday in the mud among the willows. That had been the first time a spy had come so close and so soon after they’d relocated. She and Daniel hadn’t even finished building their new home.

That was distressing enough, but then she’d spotted the unique and unmistakable tripod impression of the Shadow Unit’s assassin’s gun mount. She’d recognized it from ones Frank had shown her a long time ago. A further examination of the area had revealed that a struggle had occurred where branches had snapped off and a body was dragged for some distance. Who had stopped this operative from killing her? She wondered if Aard was still out there, fulfilling his initial directive. Either way, the stakes had escalated and she knew she was lucky to be alive. If they wanted her, they’d have to follow her and find her, she thought.

She paused at Angel’s own half-finished hut and peered inside. Her daughter lay sprawled on her stomach on her bed, covers akimbo, feet exposed, mouth open in the bliss of sleep and auburn hair spilling in all directions. Julie raised her hand to her mouth and took in a halting breath, fighting the urge to stay. She swung her heavy backpack over her shoulder and that simple action coaxed back a flood of memories: how she’d carried Angel everywhere as an infant in a modified backpack without once considering the added weight. Julie had carried Angel as she tilled the garden, foraged, fished or hunted or fetched firewood or water; while the happy baby pulled her mother’s hair and put it to her mouth, wriggling with pleasure. Julie had never been apart from her child. Now she was willingly leaving her.

Fighting down a moan of grief rising in her throat and quelling the need to seize Angel in one last embrace, Julie turned away and hurried out of the camp.

~~~~

She struck southwest in the burning summer heat toward the large river once called the Saint Lawrence. She intended to keep fairly close to the river in her 450-kilometer trek until she reached Lake Ontario on whose northern shore the ghost surface city, Toronto, used to sprawl. Lying beneath it, with its resplendent towers sprouting up like great crystal stalks out of the brown froth of heath was Icaria-5.

She foraged and ate as she hiked. The season was ripe for berries and ground herbs and so she had plenty to eat. While her plans were admittedly a bit sketchy, her mission was clear: lure them away from Angel and Daniel and then stop them from pursuing her and her loved ones, forever. The first part had been easily accomplished by leaving her family behind. The second part of her mission ultimately relied on her returning to Icaria-5 and confronting those responsible, Julie decided, as she bedded down for the night under a grove of feral apple trees in a long-abandoned settlement. Before she fell asleep, she wondered if she was just rationalizing her urge to return to Icaria.

On the second day she reached the great Saint Lawrence River at the remnants of the small village of Iroquois. Julie made out the seaway locks and the dam as she waded through the hummocky wetland of sedges and purple loosestrife. Overgrown and crumbling from disuse, the locks used to control the river’s fluctuating levels and linked the northern shore, once a part of Ontario, Canada, to the south shore that used to belong to New York State in the United States of America. Now it was all simply Icaria’s North Am.

The Iroquois Locks formed part of an extensive navigation system of dams, powerhouses, locks, channels and dikes that made up the St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Julie imagined the deep-voiced grinding of those locks a hundred years ago, serving the constant traffic of heavy cargo ships and pleasure boats. Now these monoliths languished under a thick mantle of moss and scrub in a quiet breeze, ghosts of a bygone age.

~~~~

She’d known the day was going to be hot when she woke from a restless sleep the next morning already perspiring. By mid-morning, the sun blazed with an oven’s heat, rousing the grasshoppers into an oscillating chorus. Their hissing songs seemed to commiserate with the heat that crawled over her body as sweat ran down.

Around noon she stopped to eat a meager lunch of berries, roots and several over-ripe plums she’d picked from a derelict orchard. In the shade of the copse of pitch pine trees she had a view of a bridge remnant that once spanned the two-kilometer wide river. As she leaned back, letting the drowsy heat of mid-day envelope her like a narcotic, Julie peered abstractly up at the canopy overhead. How deeper a shade of blue the sky appeared through the gap in the green than in the open. This was, of course, perception, perhaps enhanced by the physics of increased moisture from the trees ¾ it was the same sky, after all.

Was that how her father saw the world? The same ~ yet different ~ through his lens of stable chaos? And how was it possible that he chose to make his world ~ the very same one as hers ~ so different? She would never, NEVER give up her daughter to anything or anyone, no matter what the cause. Julie realized that she’d squeezed the black berries in her hand and their crimson juice ran through her fingers. She jerked to her feet and pressed onward.

By mid-afternoon she was sweating under the beating rays and found an inviting cold creek to cool off. When she returned to her pile of clothes and bent to put them on, she inhaled sharply at the sight of a fresh men’s size nine boot print with unworn treads in the sand of the dried creek bench. After the initial surge of adrenalin, she realized that if he’d meant to kill her, he’d have done it by now ~ even taking into account a delay out of vicarious pleasure to watch her bathe. She let herself feel the thrill of knowing that she’d lured her pursuers away from her family and concluded that this one was simply a spy like Aard, not an assassin. She smiled grimly and fought the impulse to look around as she rose, feeling like a celebrity caught in a compromised position.

Okay, buddy boy, get a good look, she thought as she dried off and hastily dressed, careful not to display Aard’s weapon. She slung her backpack over her shoulders and sprinted up a long rise into scrub-forest. In her dash from the open heath, Julie decided against any more luxurious baths. Dirty was better than dead.

That night she camped inside the foundation of an old church beside a hickory woodland populated by moss-eaten gravestones. Despite her physical exhaustion from the fourteen-hour hike, it was a long time before her restless mind gave in to sleep. She lay on her back inside her sleeping sheet and gazed up at the night sky listening to the crickets that chirped together in an endless hypnotic oscillation. It reminded her of her father’s lectures on stable chaos. How order emerged spontaneously from chaos as synchronous self-organization. Like this field of crickets chirping in concert. Or the millions of neurons firing together in her brain to control her breathing . . . Darwin’s “insect” jargon in her head seemed to follow a similar synchronous pattern. Was it self-organized too and what did that mean?

~~~~

Julie smelled smoke long before she saw the blazing wildfire. It was the middle of a hot day and she’d scrambled up a hogback ridge after traversing a small creek. The smell grew stronger but she saw neither smoke nor fire as she wound her way through the thick forest in the creek’s grotto. She made for higher ground, hoping for a clearing so she could make a bearing and assess the fire.

At the top of the ravine, the trees opened up and she saw carbon-coloured smoke fill the sky. She heard the snapping and crackling of flames ravenously consuming forest and scrub. It was difficult to tell where exactly the fire was burning. It seemed to be all around her, Julie thought with rising alarm. She darted in one direction, realizing she’d chosen it out of no particular reason except to keep moving, only to catch a blaze eating up the trees ahead of her. She veered left, thinking she recognized a clearing. She smelled charcoal and heard the fire sizzle as it gobbled up the juicy flesh of living plants.

Julie burst into the clearing and gasped at the blazing wall of fire as a blast of heat hit her face. Tall flames licked the sky and thick smoke billowed up and roiled in the wind. Coughing from the smoke that burned her throat, she turned and saw that the wind had thrown sparks into the trees behind her. They’d caught like torches dowsed with tube-jet fuel. The fire to her right moved with incredible speed, meeting the flames behind her like mating amoebas.

Julie bore left again, the only direction open to her, and pelted through the scrub forest. She was vaguely aware that several small animals bounded alongside her, likewise dashing for safety.

Somehow ~ she wasn’t sure how ~ she made it through an opening in the advancing firewall and pounded down another valley into a shallow wetland. She plunged with a sharp intake of air into waist-deep bog and scared up a large bird. It squawked and took flight, its great wings sweeping with the sounds of wind gusts. Julie gasped with excitement, momentarily forgetting the fire behind her. A crane ~ her namesake! No, it was just a heron. Since they’d come to live in the heath, Julie had sought the supposedly extinct crane, hoping it still existed. The Head Pol had lectured her once on the Whooping Crane and how it was considered extirpated. Then he’d made some awful reference to her name and her family’s unlucky legacy and personal extirpation.

“Nice guy,” she muttered, stumbling out of the marsh down-wind of the fire. Julie pulled herself out of the rank bog water and forced her screaming muscles into a jog. She refused to stop, throwing frequent glances to her right where the scorched heath continued to smolder.

Exhausted, Julie approached a small creek with giddy relief. She shrugged off her backpack, pulled off her soaked hiking boots and stumbled into the shockingly cold water, sliding and almost falling on the rocks. She directed one of her stumbles into a motion to sit-down and sucked in a sharp breath at the bracing temperature. Pulling off her wet clothes, she once again washed herself, her hair and then her buckskin shorts and faded blue shirt with the soap she’d brought along. It was only then, as she splashed the cool water over her and felt the sharp stings, that Julie noticed the burns on her legs and arms.

She laid out her clothes on sun-heated rocks to dog vitamins reviews
dry and settled herself on the nearby grass with her ankles crossed and hands clasped behind her head. She watched in a daze as the cumulus clouds scudded overhead, dotting a shocking blue sky. To the north, from where she’d just fled, whorls of carbon-coloured clouds spiraled up from the still burning forest in self-entangled streams of black filth. They threatened to swallow the sky in a turbulent display of pure destruction. She remembered her father’s creative definition for turbulence. He’d called it the result of a steady accumulation of conflicting rhythms. Odd, pondered Julie, how the fire, in having destroyed so much life in its expansive sweep, was still part of the natural world. Was this simply nature expressing itself in an inexplicable way, seeking harmony in a scabrous world? Another one of nature’s paradoxes, she thought.

Fire had been a constant hazard in the heath. Yet, fire served the heath by discouraging invasive shrubs and halting succession. The grazing deer populations completed the job of keeping the heath from reverting to woodland. So, fire had its place as creative destroyer in the natural cycle of ecosystem behavior. Stable chaos, according to her father.

It was a harsh and rude environment, Julie concluded. Like thieves in the night, bell heather, gorse and purple loosestrife snatched everything for themselves, leaving nothing for the others. Like many things in nature, the heath plants, though beautiful and fragrant, were ruthlessly greedy. Just like Gaia, Julie thought suddenly with a wry smile . . . Yes, Gaia . . .

The same day Julie and SAM had discovered that she was Prometheus, they’d uncovered Gaia’s dubious history and her insidious connection to Julie’s dead father. When Julie was five, Gaia, still known as Monica Schlange, the mayor of Icaria-11, oversaw the creation of Proteus by Dr Damien Vogel and its injection into Julie. Schlange had cleverly convinced Janet, the cousin of Julie’s father, to spread the virus, hoping that it would give her city a decided advantage. Instead, Schlange watched in silent complicity as Proteus pathogenically morphed into Darwin disease, the killer plague of the century that eventually destroyed Icaria-11.

Schlange quickly slithered out of that mire, covered her tracks by arranging her own “death” and ensured that all witnesses to the creation of Proteus were silenced, including Darwin’s creator, Vogel, whose murder was blamed on Julie’s father. With the help of nuyu and nuergery treatments, she then emerged as Gaia.

Julie snapped into a sitting position with an exasperated grunt. Summoning her earlier resolve not to expose herself in the open like this, she rose, flung on her damp clothes and got back on the move.

~~~~

When Julie doubled back around a treacherous river gorge, she found fresh boot tracks and a recently dropped soy-chip wrapper on the ground. They were getting sloppy, she thought, picking up the wrapper. Or was that they didn’t care if she knew they were there. Either way, it suggested over-confidence. Reminded of how she’d evaded Frank when he’d stalked her after she broke up with him, Julie found the idea of playing cat and mouse with her pursuers strangely pleasant.

A sudden breeze cooled her face and Julie stopped to gaze at a dark anvil-shaped cloud rearing up like a fierce dragon above the lower cumulous layer. The storm cloud cast a rain shadow that bore down on her and within moments black clouds scudded overhead. A salvo of huge raindrops hammered down on her like missals, soaking her instantly and sluicing down her back and front. The wind wicked away her remaining heat and she ran for cover. Her magnified senses now detected someone following her, about fifty meters behind. Her sloppy pursuers, she thought, fingering their litter in her pocket.

She found a small grotto and hastily erected her tarp under a few scrubby birch trees as if to settle in. She left her pack inside then slipped out through the scrub and doubled back to where she heard the sounds of her pursuers, rustling nervously and whispering to one another. She found them hunkered under an ash tree that offered little protection from the pouring rain. One lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes trained at her tarp, still thinking her there. The other pressed into the tree to get out of the rain and complained about everything, including her: “Vee-damn it, Roger. Every time our air scanner finds that crazy chickyvee, she takes off. It’s as if she knows we’re here. Veemelds give me the creeps. Especially her. Chaos, she deserves to be dead. When do we pull her in?”

She felt anger boil up and broke into a crouched run. Before the complainer had time to react, she’d raced up from behind and whacked him hard with the butt of her gun. Roger, who’d trained his binoculars on the tarp the whole time, turned. For a heartbeat they stared at one another, eyes blinking back the rain. Then, hardly breaking her initial momentum, she leaped, leg flying. Her boot connected with his chin. It threw him back and he collapsed on the ground as she landed on her feet.

“Now you have a reason to call me a ‘crazy chickyvee’,” she said darkly.

Both men were going to have king-size aches when they woke up, she thought as she tucked the discarded wrapper into the waste-band of Roger’s pants. She found communicators and Pol-issue laser guns on both men. Julie grabbed the pair of binoculars, the communicators and the guns and was about to leave when she turned back, smiling suddenly with wicked inspiration.

After a few moments, she sprinted back to her tarp and backpack, both pairs of pants under her arm. She removed the spare laser-cells, tossed the guns and the men’s pants into the bushes, then packed up and set off in the hissing rain as darkness fell. Negotiating rough terrain was treacherous in the dark, but Julie pressed on, needing to gain a good distance from her clumsy and no doubt angry pursuers.

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Five

Daniel wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, set his mortar trowel down beside the unfinished cabin wall of their new campsite then rose to stretch. He watched Julie’s slender figure below him, as she negotiated the river cobbles with the ease of a dancer. She pirouetted from one rock to another over the churning water, sun-bleached hair bouncing behind her like a wild river. She resembled a wild prairie nymph in her buckskin shorts, faded blue shirt and buckskin jerkin.

It drew out a sighing smile from him and reminded him of when they’d first met: two urchins facing each other, arms diving into a garbage can for the half-eaten sandwich some woman had dropped in moments ago. Meeting her savage eyes, set in a belligerent face of big protruding teeth and a shock of straw-coloured hair, he’d liked her instantly. They called a truce and shared the sandwich.

He’d invited her and her little sister to join his rag-tag group of orphans ~ abandoned by confused parents in the chaos of the Darwin plague. For two years they lived in bivouacs built of the city’s refuse, sleeping in nests of garbage and stealing food ~ mostly nano-soup ~ and technological equipment. Techno-slumming. And always on the run from the cypols, the inner-city’s predatory robots that chased them like they were vermin. Julie called herself Angel, and that was what she was, a savior to his disparate group.

When she let herself be captured by a cypol to find her sister who’d been taken earlier, Daniel never forgave her. He knew she was safe because veemelds were prized in the outer-city. Because he didn’t have to worry for her welfare, there remained only a burning resentment that she’d left him behind. Eventually his orphan group fell into disarray and he was left miserably alone with the empty dreams she’d fed him. Daniel vowed never to trust his heart to a veemeld again.

Years later, fate threw them together again, but by then they didn’t recognize each other. When she’d been taken to the outer-city they’d fixed her over-bite, then she’d let her hair grow long and eventually she’d filled out from that scrawny garbage-picking kid into a graceful, beautiful woman. Daniel, too, had undergone the obligatory transformation toward outer beauty once he made it to the outer-city: he’d fixed his broken nose and acne scars, then he’d changed his brown eyes to blue and coloured his hair with ‘nuyu’. They fell in love, of course: two strangers, inexplicably familiar and on a collision course with deception, lies and betrayal . . .

Julie made it to the other side of the creek and scrambled up the steep slope to a willow stand she intended to cut down for the insulation of their new roof.

Daniel returned his gaze to the wall he was building and exhaled. Several days ago he and Julie had finished hauling in five dozen birch logs from the woodland a kilometer to the south and he was presently sealing the horizontal logs stacked between support poles with straw-and-mud mortar. Unlike their cabin at the camp they’d shared with Aard, this one would have rough wooden shutters rather than duraplast windows because there was no Aard to provide them with materials from abandoned dwellings. This was going to be a very basic log cabin, Daniel concluded. They required a solid shelter to keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer but it wasn’t worth the bother to make it fancy, he thought, especially if they weren’t going to stay in it for long.

This was their third camp in three months and Julie remained restless like a trapped cougar, like she was running from something. Herself, maybe? She’d always given them good reason to break camp but he knew she was lying and it disturbed him that she’d resorted to that. It saddened him that she didn’t include him in her greatest concerns. She didn’t trust him anymore. Since Aard had disappeared, her nightmares had also increased and a subtle darkness around her eyes told him that she wasn’t sleeping well.

Daniel picked up his binoculars to observe her more closely, something he’d taken to doing a lot lately. Watching her from his vantage point half hidden by the wall, he thought she looked remarkably the same as she did twelve years ago when he’d fallen in love with her. They’d had an interesting time of it, he pondered with a wistful smile. Not easy. Not smooth. But wonderful. Those green eyes that stormed into a wild tempest when she was angry flamed as brightly as ever with joy. There were certainly a few more lines radiating from them but he still felt a thrill when he caught her fierce gaze, especially when it was accompanied by that lopsided smile. Framed now with a permanent crease, her smile melted him into acquiescence every time, and she knew it.

Their love had evolved from a tumultuous brook into a rich deep river as their bond cemented. Fiercely independent and as stubborn as he was, she’d overcome many obstacles through cooperation and co-reliance. Despite her reserved nature she’d learned that they complemented each other well and could rely on him.

But lately she’d grown extremely restive and withdrawn, as if guarding a dark and bitter sadness growing inside of her. Aard’s disappearance spooked her. Daniel could sense it in her taut muscles whenever he embraced her. Could see it in her ever-alert posture. Could hear it in the edge that crept into her voice, but most alarmingly in her darkly veiled references to some arcane, sinister force that connected past to future. She knew something she wasn’t sharing.

He recognized that she’d always harbored suspicions about Aard, but even her weak, half-hearted efforts to search for him seemed uncharacteristic of her. It only fueled an already existing tension between protective mother and rebellious pre-teen. Julie’s insistence on breaking camp soon after Aard’s disappearance hadn’t been popular with Angel, who’d accused her mother of being callous. Perhaps more perplexing was Julie’s own reaction to her daughter’s seemingly founded accusations: she refused to explain herself and made no move to repair the growing rift between them.

Julie was in mid-cut when she abruptly dropped to one knee, her attention caught by something on the ground. Although Daniel couldn’t tell what she was looking at, he saw in her sudden frown that it distressed her. After spotting something further to the side she sprang to her feet and scanned the woods around her, letting her hand fall to the small of her back as she often did lately when she was spooked by something.

A few weeks before, when he’d seized her in a playful embrace, he’d felt a hard object beneath her shirt, tucked in her belt at the back. She’d jumped out of his arms but when he questioned her about it, she’d given him a silly answer and diverted him with another comment. He started watching her more closely after that and soon realized that she guarded something on her at all times. Periodically he searched through her rumpled clothes when she went to the creek to wash up, but he never found anything. Whatever it was, she never went anywhere without it and yet she managed to keep it hidden from him at the same time.

~~~~

Listening to dog vitamins supplements
the chorus of crickets in the heat of the night, Daniel stared at the stars sparkling overhead through the gap in their partially complete roof and waited until Julie’s sighing breaths told him she was asleep. He carefully pulled his arm from under her and looked down at her sleeping form, eyes tracing the lines of her face defined in the faint moonlight. No nightmare yet, he thought, appraising her sanguine expression. But she had behaved very strangely today after the moment in the willow stand. She’d snapped at Angel one minute and then snatched her up in a fierce hug the next. The smallest things set her off and Daniel noticed Angel watching her with confused apprehension. Julie’s face, already overly pensive these days, seemed to withdraw completely at times, as if she’d left them for another world.

He smiled at the beauty of a few rogue hairs lying across her cheek then he got up slowly. A quick glance back at her ensured him that she was still asleep. He stole over to her side of the bed and bent over the clothes she’d discarded in a pile. There, beneath her buckskin shorts and rumpled blue shirt and nestled inside a pouch on her belt, he found it. His hand slid under the shirt and pulled the heavy object out of the pouch. He stared at it and felt his stomach clench ~

“What are you doing?”

Daniel jerked around to see Julie, raised on an elbow, gazing at him with a tight face. Then she looked down his naked figure and he followed her gaze to the laser pistol in his now shaking hand. His eyes seized hers. “Where did you get this?” he asked, realizing his voice had acquired an edge.

She sat up sharply, flinging the blanket from her and swinging her legs over the side. “Since when are you in the habit of going through my clothes?” she demanded.

“Since you started carrying this,” he answered bluntly, waving the gun in his hand. “Julie, what’s going on?”

She inhaled sharply and seemed about to retort but slumped back on the bed instead. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she brought her hands up against her forehead and exhaled. “Yes, you deserve an explanation.”

He laid the gun carefully on her clothes and sat down next to her. She told him about Aard being a Pol and his secret hanger. She told him about the two times since Aard had left that she’d seen signs of someone spying on them, pressing her to urge them to break camp. He felt like she was still withholding something even as she said in a hollow voice, brimming with emotion, “There’ll always be someone watching us. And one day they’ll snatch me ~ or Angel ~ right from under us.” Her face grew somber. “Or worse.”

Daniel put his arm around her. He searched for something reassuring to say but couldn’t find anything, so he simply held her tighter. She said in a dark voice that startled him, “I won’t let that happen, Daniel. I’ll do what I need to keep them from harming or taking her.”

Her face pinched with the fierce determination and protectiveness that only a mother could feel for her child, and his unease spiked into alarm. It was as though she’d made some ominous and irrevocable decision. “What do you mean?”

Her dark eyes flared and she held his gaze for a long time before finally turning her profile to him. “For now it’s me they’re interested in, one way or another. But that’ll change. Angel will be next.”

The determination in her eyes frightened him. “Who?” he prompted.

She pursed her lips. “I’m not sure who’s behind it. There may be several groups with different motives, like before. Some probably want to use my abilities and others just want me dead,” she ended flatly.

Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back, with difficulty. A lot of Icarians had reason to want her dead. It was said that she’d caused the plague that killed millions of people, and if that wasn’t enough, she’d also been accused of terrorist acts and murdering a government official. Daniel had tried to help her escape and instead led them into an inner-city ambush, lead by a Secret Pol.

Some time before, Julie had been hired to create the personality profile of Dystopians, a terrorist group who hated veemelds and were bent on bringing down the current government. But Julie’s model had been too accurate and implicated the Chief of Secret Pols himself ~ John Dykstra ~ and all those under his employ as Dystopians. She sent the info cube containing her findings to the Head Pol, entrusting the cube to Frank Langor, a regular Pol and her former lover. Vadim, one of the Secret Pols, took some regular Pols to intercept the info-cube before it reached the Head Pol, but Vadim never got the cube because an inner-city mob in a frenzy of anti-government rage rushed the Pols and in the ensuing melee, Vadim was beaten and his head crushed.

The Dystopians had boldly taken the name that described the outlawed scientific movement that promoted the heretical science of Julie’s father, who was ironically a veemeld himself. Although she had trusted Frank Langor at the time, judging from the news shared by Aard when she last saw him, her trust had been misplaced with Frank. Was it possible he, too, was a Dystopian?

“And the ones following us?” Daniel posed.

“Could be either. Or both.”

His mouth went dry. “What can we do?” he whispered hoarsely.

After a long silence she turned to him. The dark purpose that had fired her eyes now smoldered beneath the cloak she’d drawn around herself and her eyes glistened of unshed tears.

“Just hold me, Daniel.” Her voice trembled.

He folded his arms around her and they reclined on the bed. Curled inside his protective arms, face pressed against his chest and silky legs entwined around his, she shuddered with silent tears and clung to him. Wanting to comfort her, he bent to kiss her wet cheeks and wished she would share it all with him.

As if sensing his disappointment, she lifted her face up to his and looked into his eyes with longing and fear. He was reminded of the first time that they’d made love, when she’d looked at him with almost the same expression. She’d harbored a secret then, too. The secret of who and what she was. He’d thought then that she was just Julie, a bright data handler, but she’d turned out to be a veemeld, one who could talk to machines in her head from anywhere in Icaria.

She was also Prometheus, the alpha carrier of the deadly Darwin. And she was Angel, his long-ago inner-city sweetheart who deserted him suddenly. Now, as he gazed back into her eyes, sparkling like constellations in a black and infinite universe, he sensed that she’d faced yet another dark decision without including him. What had she seen in the willows?

She startled him by taking his face in her hands and kissing him fiercely. She’d learned over their years together how to please him, hands caressing him in a delightful way from the soft curls on his neck down to his thighs. He threw his doubts aside and let her pour her gift of selfless devotion on him, taking him to a world where only the two of them existed. She seized in halting breaths, soaring alongside his swelling passion. He responded by pleasing her in turn with his fingers. She gasped into a keening wail that roused a pack of wolves in the heath. They made love that night to the echoing bay of the pack as shafts of moonlight glistened like beaded jewels on their wet undulating bodies.

When Daniel woke drowsily to the light of a breaking dawn and reached out for Julie, his hand caught air. She was gone. So were all her clothes. And the gun.

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Four

Angel bounded into their campsite as Julie sliced winter carrots for supper. “I still can’t find Aard, Mom,” she said, coming alongside her mother.
Julie responded without looking up, “I don’t think you’re going to find him, honey.”
Daniel, who’d been patching the roof of their hut, looked down at them with sudden interest. Aard had disappeared the same time that Julie had for several hours and then she’d returned with bruises and cuts she’d unconvincingly explained. Something happened that she didn’t want to discuss and he wondered if it had to do with Aard’s mysterious absence.
“What do you mean?” Angel asked with a frown.
Julie turned to her daughter. “I mean when you checked his cabin on the hill, it looked like he’d taken things with him, right? Like for a trip?”
“Yeah, but not to go away.”
Daniel climbed down from the roof and joined the girls. “Maybe he went to Icaria after all,” he suggested. “It’s over four hundred kilometres away. And he’s usually gone for a month.”
“He would’ve told me,” Angel insisted.
Daniel watched Julie’s face and caught the expression, subtle but definitely there. Her mouth had tightened and he read a defensive look in her eyes. Did she know why Aard left? She might even have had something to do with it.
“What if he fell off the cliff or something?” Angel said, her voice rose to a pleading squeak. “I’ll go look ~”
“No!” Julie’s sharp voice startled Daniel. She gripped her daughter’s arms firmly and leaned her face close. “Don’t ever go there again. I told you, it’s dangerous. Don’t make me ground you.”
Angel stared at her mother, briefly dumbstruck by her vehemence. Then her eyes flashed with defiance, blue ice glaring into Julie’s forest-fire green. But the mother’s fire easily melted the daughter’s icy resolve and Angel lowered her eyes with a pout. “All right, mother.” She always called Julie mother when she wasn’t happy with her.
“Aard knows how to take care of himself, honey. He’s too cautious to get hurt.”
“Then where is he?” came the retort.
They’d come full circle, Daniel thought with a sigh. Julie glanced at him, her face bridling with anxiety. She returned his silent question by setting her mouth and went back to her vegetables. The subject was dropped.
~~~~
“We have to break camp,” Julie announced.
“What?” Daniel and Angel said in unison. They were doing math exercises on the outdoor table he’d built when Julie returned from her herb forage. “Why?” Angel asked the obvious question. She’d pushed out her lower lip and clenched her hands.
Daniel noticed that Julie was trying to hide a nervous distress. A glance at her satchel revealed that she hadn’t collected many herbs either. Her buckskin shorts and sleeveless faded blue shirt were smudged from scrambling along the glacial till slopes. Where’d she been exploring this time? She seemed to be doing a lot of that lately.
“We can’t leave,” Angel insisted before Julie had time to explain why they had to leave. She leaped up from her chair. “Aard’s still missing!”
“I’m sorry, Angel. But it’s too dangerous here,” Julie said. “I saw some animal tracks and a den not far off on that ridge,” she pointed. “The cougar that almost ate you wasn’t a lone migrant.” Daniel knew she was lying. She never was good at it, he thought. But, then, what had she seen that had her spooked?
Angel exploded, “We can’t leave! It’s only five days since he disappeared!”
Julie laid her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Listen, Angel, I know what Aard means to you. He’s our friend too. But we have to leave. Now.”
Daniel watched her in pet food supplements
silent unease. There was no mistaking the urgency in her voice and body. Breaking up camp was not an activity he looked upon lightly. A lot of sweat and resources had gone into constructing these cabins, the garden and the fence around the compound. Both he and Julie had spent weeks finding, chopping down and hauling in the timber to build the houses. Daniel had spent many days further insulating the cabins by creating an additional wall and filling the gap with grass and leaves. Five years ago, with Aard’s help and his findings from an old abandoned town to the south, Daniel had even installed windows made of duraplast.
Angel turned to her father in desperation, “Daddy, make her stop. This isn’t fair. We can’t abandon Aard . . .”
Daniel threw a glance at Julie and found to his amazement that she remained unmoved by Angel’s reference to abandoning someone.
Angel wailed, “He might be hurt out there!”
“Or more likely he just left,” Julie responded.
Daniel stared along with Angel at his wife. Those were cruel words, and Julie knew it. Her face wore a complicated mix of expressions that Daniel found hard to read. “He’s a hermit, Angel,” Julie tried to reason with her daughter. “He just wandered into our lives six years ago and now he’s probably just wandered out. I know it’s tough on you, but hermits are like that ~”
“No!” Angel jerked out of her mother’s hands. “He’d never do that. He’d never leave and not tell me.”
Julie’s face, though it mirrored Angel’s pain, remained determined.
Angel glared at her mother. “What if he comes back and we’re gone. He’s my only friend. You don’t care if I’m happy. I hate you! You can’t keep me trapped this way forever. One day I’ll be all grown up and I won’t need you anymore. And you won’t be able to do anything about it!” Then she stormed out of the camp.
“Angel!” Julie ran her fingers through her chaotic hair and turned to Daniel with a desperate look.
He shrugged. “She’ll get over it ~ eventually. Now,” he said, giving her a stern look, “tell me the real reason why we have to go.”

In vitamin supplements for dogs
honor of Nina's appearance at Con-Version, Calgary's Premier Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention, we have decided to offer our readers a treat!

Follow along as Nina virtually transports you through her latest science fiction thriller...

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Three

Gathering her lower lip in vitamins dogs need
her teeth, Julie peered over the ledge of the gorge. She could just make out the tree that had saved Angel’s life, its gnarled branches stretching out from a crevasse about ten meters down. She firmed her lips with determination and tied the rope to a pitch pine tree behind her. After pulling on her gloves and looping the rope through her belt buckle as a makeshift caribiner, Julie flung the remaining line over the edge. She’d have preferred to use a caribiner to rappel down the cliff but Aard’s zeal to carry out her command to conceal climbing equipment from Angel had backfired on Julie. She couldn’t find her own equipment either. So, the belt buckle had to do and she’d have to rely fully on the strength and balance of her limbs to climb down. She was just using the buckle to train the rope close to her body. It wouldn’t help break a fall but she didn’t intend to fall . . .

She eased herself down, bracing herself against the craggy cliff face and finding cautious foot holds. She soon reached Angel’s tree and made the mistake of looking down. After taking in a sharp breath she continued her descent. Let’s settle this mystery once and for all, she thought. The sun beat down on her back. Sweat dripped down from her hair into her eyes. She blinked it away and felt the strain on her legs and arms. Her arms started to tremble.

“Terrific,” she muttered, stopping for a break. “Not in as great shape as I thought I was.” The breeze wicked the sweat off her neck and invigorated her. She pushed on, taking care to go slowly, testing each foot and handhold. Part of her muscle tension was from exertion, certainly, but most of it she recognized came from apprehension and excitement. What awaited her below? Those strange sounds and lights . . . No, not northern lights nor dry thunder and lightning. Certainly not ~

She yelped in surprise as her left foot suddenly gave way with a clattering of loose rock. Pay attention! She clung to the wall and tried to regain the foothold when her right foot slipped. NO!

She fell several meters before she was able to grasp the rope with enough force to stop. She bounced hard, hands burning and arms splintering with pain as they supported her swinging body. She looked down at the gorge below her and her stomach cramped with fear. There was absolutely nothing but air between her and the yawning gorge a hundred meters below.

Her arms and shoulders flamed as she desperately held on. Great, Julie. This was pretty stupid. No one knew she was here. A quick check, she’d thought. She’d return with some early-season blueberries and no one would be any wiser. Except she wasn’t going to return.

Then she saw it, just below her ~ an opening in the cliff. A cave! If she could just loosen her grip a little to allow herself to descend a little more, then swing into the cave . . .

She wrapped her legs around the rope to support some of her weight and lurched her body forward then back to initiate a swing. When she was close enough to the rock face, she kicked herself off into a wide swing with her feet then eased her grip. She slipped ~ a little too fast! She saw the cave mouth rush up and swung forward with her legs then let go. She tumbled onto the cave ledge and felt the sharp pain of the impact.

When she looked up, she inhaled sharply and stared. She was in a hanger with a fairly large air vehicle. Julie scrambled to her feet and pulled off her gloves to wipe her clammy hands on the back of her leather shorts, ignoring the rope burns. She wandered closer to the ship. It reminded her of the small one-man skyships the Enviro-Center used for reconnaissance jobs when she lived in Icaria. So much for heat lightning. This was what Angel had heard and seen. Julie warily circled the ship, confirming that it was empty. She proceeded to the back of the hanger past a well-equipped workbench and chair to an open door, which led into a lit room.

She entered cautiously, giving the room a sweeping gaze to find no one inside. The room housed a set of lockers, a table and chairs, a fridge and a desk with a fully functional vee-com. As if to verify her suspicions, she recognized Aard’s faded jacket draped over the back of the desk chair. But where was Aard? He sure had a lot of explaining to do, she thought with mixed emotions. This was the result of much more than a few “foraging” trips back to Icaria. What was he doing with a skyship?

She opened the fridge and found it well stocked with bottles of a recreational drug and packaged nano-food. Hunting and gathering indeed! When she opened a locker door, she sucked in her breath and stared at the standard-issue Pol’s laser gun on the shelf. What on Earth was Aard doing with one of those? Heart racing, Julie pulled open a drawer and found several pairs of folded and freshly laundered black jackets and slacks. Her chest pounded as she examined the clothing. The material was high quality durafabric, standard Pol issue. Her hand felt something hard tucked underneath. She pulled the clothing away and gasped at what she saw. A Pol helmet!

Abruptly the chittering murmurs in her head rose to a shrill chorus and she spun to face the door, seizing the laser gun. Aard stood at the hanger door, his shoulder leaning against the door jam, arms crossed, and eyeing her with cautious curiosity. “What are you doing here, Julie?” His voice was edged with annoyance.

“I could ask the same of you, Aard.”

“Curiosity kills the cat,” he smirked.

“Which one? Felix the cat or the . . . Pol-cat?” she asked, pulling the gun into view with a half-cocked smile of her own. “Yours?”

The smirk disappeared. “So you found . . .” he trailed off as she pulled out his Pol uniform with her free hand then threw it back.

“In pretty nice condition too.” Her voice grew sharp, “Who exactly are you?”

He shrugged. “Just another Icarian trying to survive.”

“A Pol? In the heath?” She gave him a mocking incredulous look. “Try again, buddy boy.”

He compressed his lips. “So, you want to know how I got here?” He gazed past her, eyes focused on the past. “I was a no-good drunk. Couldn’t keep a job. Never had a problem getting one because of my superior cognitive abilities. But every time I messed up. It always seemed to end with me slugging someone, because they called me a ~” He broke off, pursing his lips and stealing a strange glance into her eyes for a moment. “I ended up wandering the inner-city, drunk and useless until a man named Victor came along, cleaned me up, believed in me. He gave me a job in the Pol force and gave me this mission.”

Something he’d said nudged a memory to the surface. It finally drifted up and she stared at him, seeing the resemblance to that scruffy fifteen-year old SAM had shown her on its database years ago. “You’re a veemeld too. You’re Isaard Henigen.” His stunned look told her she’d guessed right. “I researched you when SAM and I were trying to find Prometheus, the test case that started the whole Darwin mess,” she explained. “We found that there were only a few of us, like Prometheus, who scored perfectly on the STAT-LOG exams. Before I discovered that I was in fact Prometheus, I thought you were.”

“Yeah, it was you who brought me to Victor Burke’s attention, with your research on Prometheus. So, now you know everything.”

“Except why someone like you is living out here.”

“I’d have thought that someone with your enhanced cognitive abilities would have figured that out by now.”

“Okay.” She firmed her lips and narrowed her eyes at him. “They sent you here to watch us . . .” He raised a brow. She amended, “to watch me.”

“Very good,” he nodded, ankles crossing as he continued leaning against the door in a relaxed pose. Deceptively relaxed, she thought, noticing that he kept his hand in his pocket. Probably on a concealed weapon.

“And the reason would depend on who sent you.” Was it Victor Burke, the mayor of Icaria-5 when she left?

“Right.” He nodded, not offering more.

“So, what do we do now, Aard? Now that I’ve blown your cover.” She gave him a crooked smile. “And I have your gun.” She didn’t exactly aim it at him, but held it loosely in his direction. Its grip brought back dark memories of other times she’d held such a weapon.

“Well, you do ask the hard questions, Julie.” He pushed himself from the door jam and pulled his hand from his pocket, gripping a small laser pistol, which he aimed at her abdomen. She tightened her grip on the gun and tracked it toward his chest. To her surprise he lowered his weapon. “Well, I suppose now that we’re stalemated, I’ll just have to leave,” he said.

She blinked, stunned. “You don’t mean that. Just pack your bags and leave, give up your surveillance?”

“I have my orders. And they don’t include taking you prisoner ~ at least not now, anyway.” Her stomach squirmed at his inference. She’d fled Icaria accused of murder and sedition. If he brought her back it would be as a prisoner. “And, like you already said,” he went on, “You’ve blown my cover.”

Suddenly drained, Julie lowered her gun. “Before you go, can you at least tell me why you’ve been watching my family and me? You owe us that much, Aard. After we trusted you all this time.”

He put his gun back in his pocket and sighed. “You’re right. And I’m going to miss Angel. She’s a beautiful girl, Julie. You should be proud.” He scratched his beard absently and frowned. “I only made contact with you six years ago but I’ve been out here since you left the city. Do you think they’d have just let you go? You’re Prometheus. The only person on Earth who could talk to your A.I. in your head without Interact-SYM.” He studied her for a moment and sighed. “Surely you don’t think you actually escaped. Burke let you get away. He has the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. He always knew where you were, inside or outside of Icaria. I was sent to keep an eye on you, make sure you ~ and any of your offspring¾ remained safe. For possible future needs.”

She fought the involuntary shudder that ran through her at his mentioning her offspring and ominous possible future needs.

“I’m one of Burke’s carriers,” Aard explained. “Everything I see, hear . . . feel . . . he can too.”

“Brain implant?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “When you had Angel, I was supposed to make contact once she was five.”

The magic number five, she thought, swallowing down bitter memories of when her life had irrevocably changed at that age. She balled her hand into a fist as a fierce protectiveness for her daughter burned inside her. The number of times she’d left Angel alone in Aard’s company . . .

“I was also instructed to train you in survival and combat techniques.”

“In addition to reporting on my developing abilities, no doubt,” she said, eyes narrowing slightly.

“Yeah. They keep getting better, don’t they?”

“You’d know,” she retorted, recalling how he’d frequently tested her enhanced vision, hearing and reflexes like a scientist. There was a moment of silence. “And not just me,” she breathed, starting to understand the scope of it all.

He nodded, pursing his lips in a tight frown. “Yeah, Angel too.”

She bridled a surging fear and searched deep into his eyes. “Why, Aard?” Part of her didn’t want to hear his answer. A vision of Gaia’s brooding face slid like an oil slick into her mind. Gaia was easily the most beautiful ~ and most dangerous ~ woman Julie had ever met. Like the treacherous Venus Fly Trap, she’d lured too many prey into submission with her sweet nectar: striking midnight hair that shone like silk, eyes the colour of an enigmatic sea and a voice as dark and rich as coffee. Then she struck them dumb and ate them with her sharp wit and cruel design. Gaia had relinquished her mayorship of Icaria-5 to one of her underlings, Victor Burke, to serve North Am’s governing body, the Circle. What she never told Burke was that she’d continued to run his town through her gestapo, the Secret Pols. Was she still?

The woman’s nefarious plan to rule Icaria through a cadre of trained veemelds, capable of communicating with the A.I. network through Interact-SYM and immune to the disease devastating the rest of Icaria, was a scary thought. Plainly, it was controlled genocide she had in mind. Then there were her specific plans for Julie ~ the only veemeld who didn’t need Interact-SYM to talk to her A.I. Plans for the DP, that awful place no one ever came out of. The reason Julie had to stay away.

Aard smiled grimly. “I think you know why. Let’s just say that some would rather you didn’t exist and will do anything to make sure.” Like the rest of Icaria, she thought miserably. “Hence me, your bodyguard.”

She couldn’t seem to get away from bodyguards, Julie thought bleakly, recalling the awful scene in the Den. Frank, the Pol she’d foolishly become infatuated with, had scornfully revealed to her that the only reason he’d hung out with her was that he’d been assigned as her unofficial body guard, and was secretly looking to avenge what her father had done to his.

“As for who, I can’t say,” Aard continued. “But you’re a smart woman and you can probably guess that too.” He stepped past her to his storage locker and gathered up his Pol uniform and other equipment into a pack, then came beside her and reached for the laser pistol.

She glanced down at the weapon, warm in her sweaty hand, and was about to hand it to him, then twitched it out of his grasp. Their eyes met. “Collateral,” she said with a lopsided smile, pointing the gun at him again. “Good bye, Aard.”

He frowned but nodded. “There’ll be someone else, you know,” he said, closing his backpack and hoisting it over one shoulder. “There’ll always be someone, Julie,” he said over his shoulder as he turned and left the room for the hanger. She followed him into the hanger bay. “They’ll never leave you alone,” Aard went on, turning to face her again with a pointed look. “Not Prometheus and her gifted daughter.”

“It’s a pretty big planet, Aard. They’ll have to find us first.”

“Well, I wish you luck,” he said, not sounding convinced, then turned to enter his ship. He stopped and fished something out of his pack. “Here,” he said, brusquely nodding his head toward her and tossing her a small package. “Laser cells. You might need them.” Then he studied her briefly with what looked like regret. “Watch your back, Julie,” he added and climbed into his vehicle.

Standing where he’d left her, she watched him enter the cockpit. Within moments he’d started its rumbling engine, made the necessary adjustments, then he nodded gravely to her and brought the vehicle with a shudder off the ground. The ship threw itself out of the hanger with a blast of hot air that stifled her breath and sent her hair flying behind her. She stared out at the disappearing shuttle for several moments then let herself collapse on the workbench chair and exhaled slowly.

As she had quietly feared all these years, it had started again. No, she amended her thought: it had never ended, it just finally caught up with her.

The safety net that Daniel had so assiduously built around his family had torn. And she’d done the tearing. She’d lured Icaria’s spies and murderers out here and put her family in danger just by being who and what she was ~ something Daniel refused to even consider. How was she going to tell him?

Perhaps she wouldn’t, Julie decided recklessly and felt the thrill of anxiety knot inside her. She’d watch and see what happened. And if she had to, she’d do something about it, Julie thought, with a glance down at the gun.

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Two

“Here, this’ll help you relax.” Julie sat on the pet nutritional supplement
bed beside Angel and handed her a tumbler. Angel rose up on her elbow and inhaled the pungent smell of chamomile tea. She wrinkled her nose. Her mother smiled with amusement and pushed the tumbler into her hand “It’s good for you. Drink it.”
Angel knew better than to argue with that tone of voice. As Angel took a small sip of the tea, her mother inspected the flexible splint Aard had used to set Angel’s leg. “He did a good job.” Then she tilted her head and smiled lopsidedly with wry amusement. “That’s a heck of a way to get out of doing Tai Chi with me this morning.”
“Yeah,” Angel laughed with embarrassment. She wanted to talk some more about their new way of communicating between their minds, through those chirping sounds in their heads. On their way back to camp, she’d babbled excitedly about it and her mother had eagerly listened. But now Angel felt ashamed of what she’d done, and angry at herself for letting the accident happen. It would be one more thing she’d done wrong that her mother would go on about.
As if reading her mind, Julie sighed. “Why do you keep doing things we tell you not to do?”
There was enough exasperation behind her voice to draw out Angel’s anger.
“Everything fun and neat isn’t allowed,” she said, pouting.
“That’s not true, darling. You’re being dramatic again.”
Angel huffed. “Mom, I’m eleven ? I’m not a kid anymore. I can think for myself. You don’t have to keep doing it for me, you know.”
Her mother stiffened and gave Angel a lame smile. “I do that, don’t I?”
“Now that we can ‘think’ to one another, are you going to do it then too? One day I won’t be around and you won’t have anyone to order around ?”
From the way her mother looked at her, Angel wished she could have taken that back. But it was true, she decided, feeling just a little bad that she’d hurt her mother’s feelings. It didn’t stop Angel from setting the tumbler down and turning her back on her mother to lie down again.
“Get some sleep, darling.” Her mother got up from the bed. Angel wanted to turn, be kissed and hugged, but her mother was already out of the cabin.
~~~~
Angel sighed awake. She rose with a stretch and, feeling very hungry, hobbled to her parent’s birch log cabin to ask about lunch. She hadn’t broken her leg, like she’d thought. Aard figured she’d stretched a ligament, though, and it would heal soon enough with careful working of the muscles.
Angel stopped in her tracks when she overheard her mother’s clipped voice inside: “Don’t you think it odd that Aard happened to be there right then? We got there when we did because she called me. But what’s his excuse? That he just happens to hang around cliffs at five in the morning?”
“He’s just odd, Julie,” her father responded with an impatient sigh. “He could’ve been there doing his Tai Chi meditation ?”
“Fine,” her mother said sharply and the sound of her voice told Angel that she’d turned and was heading outside. Angel hopped around the hut just in time to spy her mother storm out and across to the cooking hut.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Someone laughed behind her. Angel jumped. Aard leaned against the hut wall, arms folded over his chest, his tangle of blond hair and bushy beard sparkling like gold in the sun. “Spying on your parents again?”
“Please don’t tell.”
“I won’t, but you definitely need some lessons in covert ops.” He grinned.
She grinned back. “Teach me.”
~~~~
“What’s for supper?” Angel sat down next to her father. “Where’s Mom?”
He looked up from the sock he was mending using the sewing kit Aard had given him from his last trip to Icaria. Angel knew her father never asked Aard how he’d gotten it because he thought Aard had stolen it. Aard was in the same position as she was ? her parents didn’t trust him either. “She went berry picking,” her father replied. Then he gave her a hopeful smile. “Maybe she’ll get enough for a pie.”
“Why does she need to be alone?”
He frowned for a second and tilted his head. “What makes you say that?”
“She always goes ‘berry picking’ when she needs time alone to think, Dad. Besides,” she rolled her eyes in sarcasm, “there aren’t any berries out right now. It’s April.”
Her dad ruffled her short auburn mop. “You’re a funny one,” he laughed. “Don’t worry,” he hugged her reassuringly. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with you.”
She wasn’t so sure of that. Her ability to communicate with her mother’s mind had taken them both by surprise, and although she’d seen evidence of great joy in her mother as they’d briefly discussed this discovery between them, she’d also sensed a wary concern.
~~~~
Angel noticed a thoughtful look on her mother’s usual sanguine face when she returned and prepared the meal. Her eyes gleamed with a distracted intensity, as though she was holding a private discussion in her mind. Was Angel the subject?
Aard, who often joined them for supper, begged off, explaining that he needed to investigate the cougar tracks. He’d sounded strange and Angel noticed her mother’s eyes narrow as she looked in his direction. Angel didn’t blame Aard and wished she could disappear, too.
The three of them spoke little during supper and Angel watched her father throw glances at her mother when he thought she wasn’t looking. Angel felt tension in the air. A kind of sadness had fallen on her mother that made Angel feel uncomfortable. She wanted to have it out, discuss her act of disobedience openly, shout at her mother for being so controlling, but neither of her parents brought up her accident.
After supper, as Angel did her assigned chore of the dishes, Julie slipped out of the camp toward the rock pile that overlooked the western gully and brilliant sunset. Angel watched her then made to follow. She felt a restraining hand on her arm. Her father smiled down at her. “Finish the dishes, honey” he instructed. His silent message: my turn to talk to her. He set off down the trail, after her mother.
~~~~
Julie listened to the carillon of the birds and let her gaze stray to where the heath melted into sky. Five hundred kilometres beyond that shimmering horizon lay what used to be home. She cupped her hand to shield her eyes from the blazing sun and squinted, picturing the glinting towers of Icaria-5 in the distance. She inhaled the sweet, boggy scent of cottonwoods that rode the gusts and she frowned at her inexplicable yearning to return there. She was happy here, living a simple natural life with her cherished family. What was drawing her back to the city that had exiled her in the first place? Did it have to do with Angel and their newly found communication? No, she’d always felt it. So, maybe it was guilt . . .
All of the machine voices that used to reside in her head since she was five had disappeared long ago when she and Daniel had traveled out of their range. But the chirping sounds had never left her. Constant companions, they’d melded with her intuitive awareness, providing her with enhanced cognitive and motor skills and an uncanny danger sense. She remembered back in Icaria when the chirping had saved her life once from the slashing knife of a crazed victim of Darwin disease. Darwin disease . . . they should have called it Julie Disease. She’d been its first carrier. When she was five, her father had relinquished her to a hubristic team of scientists who’d code-named her Prometheus. Her father’s cousin, Janet, then gave Julie a dose of the artificial virus, Proteus, thinking it would change the world for the better. Instead it unleashed a plague and changed Julie’s life forever.
Initially encouraged by preliminary results on Julie, Janet had over-zealously introduced the virus to the public through a common drug and watched in horror as it morphed and devoured the lives of millions of people. Because Julie had the subtly unique genetic makeup of a veemeld, the disease didn’t kill her like it did everyone else. To her it did what it was designed to do: it provided a conduit to hear all the intelligent machines in the city, including SAM, her cherished A.I. friend and mentor. Unable to reconcile with her atrocity, Janet had committed suicide, leaving young Julie to live out the legacy of what she’d erroneously inspired.
Her father had never told her what was going to be done to her. One night she went to bed and the next morning she woke in a hospital with strange sounds screaming through her head. She’d fallen suddenly ill in the night, her father had explained and said no more. He took the secret with him when the Pols dragged him away years later. The secret ruined Julie’s family: her mother turned to alcohol and ? sober or drunk ??could barely look at her any more. She often beat Julie for no reason. Julie remembered how, after the Pols took away her father, her mother, smelling of whiskey, used to awaken her at night by crawling into Julie’s bed, clutch her to her breast and sob until she fell into a restless sleep. It was only when Julie turned twenty that she and SAM made the discovery that collapsed her world: she was Prometheus, responsible for the plague.
Weeks before Julie found out that she was Prometheus, Zane, an epidemiologist with the Special Pathogens Branch at CDC, had confided to her at a party that the first stage of the virus, called Pro-1, was sexually transmitted, invading the brain and central nervous system. But his lab also proved that a non-infectious transposon stage, a second stage of the virus called Pro-2, replaced Pro-1 after five months, during the last stage of an infected victim’s dementia.
It bound itself to a specific site on the female gamete, where it lay dormant ??a provirus like the ancient hantavirus in mice ??waiting to vertically migrate from host to offspring; except in the case of a Darwin host they were usually dead or certainly incapable of giving birth by then. It was, in fact, this discovery that had alerted Julie to the possibility that Darwin was manufactured rather than natural, and had mutated from its original purpose: it wasn’t logical that a natural virus would invest energy in a transmission stage that was destined to fail, as if its maker was irrational . . . like a human.
The fact that she was only five when she supposedly carried the first stage of the disease and that SAM believed that she had never carried an aggressive form of the virus strongly suggested that she had indeed not infected anyone. This theory was confirmed when Daniel didn’t contract Darwin from her in all the years they’d been together. Although there was still the question of Frank . . .
Julie had known that her gametes probably carried the virus. When she found out that she was pregnant with Angel in the heath, she couldn’t help worrying how the virus might affect her baby. Would it kill her precious child like it had millions of Icarians or would it just continue to live inside the daughter like it did inside the mother? To her relief, Angel was born healthy and seemingly unaltered. Once Angel started talking, Julie quickly discovered that her daughter could hear the same chirping sounds she did. Julie had no doubt what it was ? it was Darwin speaking to her. Now mother and daughter could speak to one another through the virus. As wonderful as it was, Julie wasn’t so sure she liked its vehicle.
Daniel came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. She flinched in surprise then relaxed when she realized who it was and folded her hands over his, leaning comfortably against him.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said too quickly then pulled away to give him a reassuring smile. “Just thinking about stuff.” He didn’t ask what and moved beside her to watch the sunset, obviously waiting for her to elaborate in her own good time. He’s learned to be patient, she thought with an inward smile and followed his gaze to the fired ripples of altocumulus clouds. She tracked a line of jet stream across the darkening sky. It was one of the few signs that Icaria ? civilization ? remained. If not for signs like that jet stream and Aard’s occasional pilgrimages back there for supplies, Julie often had the unsettling impression that they were the only people left on Earth.
She stole a glance at Daniel’s profile, bronzed by the setting sun. He’d matured since their hasty exodus from Icaria-5 twelve years ago. A network of smile lines radiated from his coal-black eyes, reverted from their previous nuyu-treated blue. His hair, once blue, had also returned to its natural dark-brown colour and he’d let it grow out in a thick tangle over his shoulders. It reminded her of when she’d first met him as Neo, the awkward cocky techno-slummer, who’s breath smelled of nano-soup and who kept trying too hard to impress her.
Years living out here had settled Daniel. He’d let his anger go, grown content. He’d moved on from those belligerent teenage years when she’d first met him in the slums of the inner city. Even from those cynical years as a young man when she’d met him again. He’d taken to building and gardening with ease and she could sense in him a quiet calm. A practical man, he reveled in the simple tasks allotted to him in his role as hunter, gatherer and protector of his family. He’d embraced the heath since that first day she’d introduced him to it and he’d since fine-tuned that relationship into one of deep spiritual appreciation, letting the heath nurture and calm his soul. The heath had been good for him, and perhaps, she thought, letting a faint smile cross her lips, she might have had a little to do with it . . .
And what about her? Had the heath been equally good to her? At first she’d missed her A.I.’s constant company, his banter and his crazy ‘blonde’ jokes. Eventually, though, she got used to the relative silence in her head. She’d had moments of doubt, curiosity and a yearning to return to Icaria. She’d hoped that over the years those feelings might diminish, but they didn’t. In fact, they’d escalated.
Daniel flashed the same dimpled smile that had captured her heart the first time she’d met him ? obviously hoping to rouse her from her brooding. She gave him a crooked smile, then turned back to the crimson sun about to sink below the horizon, and exhaled slowly. “I was just thinking about Angel. What are we going to do about her?”
“She’s learned her lesson. The injury will heal. Aard’ll have her back doing Tai Chi with you and doing flying kicks in no time.”
Her eyes focused on him again. “I don’t mean that,” she heard the edge of nervous tension creep into her voice. “She’s eleven, Daniel. And her only friend is a mangy hermit four times her age whose best gift to her are his lessons in combat and survival training. Don’t you see a problem with that?”
“No, actually, I don’t. This isn’t the city, Julie. The heath operates by different rules. We’re fortunate to have Aard around. He’s taught us a lot about how to survive here ?how to hunt and trap, make efficient shelters and use the bog as fuel. He’s taught her ? and you ? so much about training your body. It’s come in handy lots of times already. Plus he’s a gentle and good man, a good friend for Angel.”
Julie pictured Aard in her mind. Even under that bushy tangle of blond hair, his attractive features were obvious. He looked like a Greek god in disguise, and he smiled like he knew it. He’d certainly captivated Angel. “But she’s in his company a lot now,” Julie objected. “He lets her take risks and do things that aren’t safe.”
Daniel smiled suddenly ? indulgently, she thought. “You can’t protect our little hatchling forever, you know. Some day all too soon she’s going to need to fly.”
Julie cringed at his words. What Angel would do when she grew up was a sensitive topic. She was alone here in the heath. Surely she deserved a chance at friendship, love, and creating her own family.
“Aard’s giving her some of the tools.”
“What kind of tools? Besides, she’s so young, Daniel.”
He laughed with sudden amusement. “First she’s already eleven, now she’s so young. Make up your mind, Julie.”
“That’s just it. She’s both, don’t you see?” Julie focused hard on him. “She’s old enough to think she can make her own decisions but too young to make the right ones. This is a dangerous time for her. Who is Aard, Daniel? We still don’t know anything about him, like why he knows all this sleuthing stuff. And why he keeps sneaking back into Icaria even though it’s 500 kilometers away. And how come we stumbled on him in this wilderness in the first place.” From the day they’d met, she’d sensed something disturbingly familiar about that scruffy blond that she could never shake off. And what was he doing there at the gorge this morning?
“Good Earth, Julie! You’re too suspicious. We’ve been through this so many times already.” Daniel broke from her grasp and waved a hand in annoyance. “Aard traveled along the river just like we did. And he goes back for supplies. Supplies that he shares with us.” He pointed down. “Those Enviro-Center hiking shoes on your feet, for instance. Everything you’re wearing, for that matter, is thanks to him. He taught you how to tan hides and make clothes to replace our worn-out Icarian stuff.”
Daniel was right. She had so much to thank Aard for, including his incredible patience with her as she bumbled through her first efforts at preparing the hides of young does. Killing the deer had been the easiest part, she recalled, admitting that her aim and speed surpassed even Aard’s expert marksmanship. He’d painstakingly taught her how to glove-skin rabbits, how to flesh, soak, grain and dress, and then smoke various larger animal hides like deer and moose. She’d even learned to apply the grizzly task of cracking open the skull and removing the animal’s brain for later use when “dressing” the hide. He’d shown her how to remove and prepare sinew fibers for cordage and thread and so much more.
“Besides,” Daniel went on, “it doesn’t matter who or what Aard was in Icaria. Out here he’s proven to be our friend.”
She winced and fought from glaring at him. His words carried with them a hint of their own history in Icaria, one of mutual deception. She’d also been Prometheus, the reason for Darwin disease. When they’d first left Icaria, there had been some concern as to whether she would pass the lethal form of Darwin to Daniel, but obviously, that didn’t happen. As far as Daniel was concerned all that was history, along with her communicating in her head with Icaria’s machine world and SAM, her A.I. But he was wrong, she thought. She was still a veemeld, even if he’d decided it was irrelevant out here and didn’t want to talk about it ? or think about it. And she still carried Darwin. So did her daughter. There was no doubt in her mind that Angel was also a veemeld and, like Julie, one with extremely unique qualities.
“I think you’re selling Aard short,” Daniel continued, crossing his arms over his chest. “He has lots of admirable qualities that he shares with Angel ?”
“Like feeding her all those tall tales about Icaria?” she said with a sharp laugh. Angel had been getting annoyingly curious, almost obsessed, about Icaria of late.
“You’re just jealous he isn’t filling you in on the news,” he responded, smirking back at her.
She blushed at his inference. He knew her feelings about Icaria, even though she tried to hide them. She knew she wasn’t easy to live with and her incomprehensible yearning to return to Icaria must have played havoc with his ego at times.
“And you’re one to talk,” he went on. “I can remember a certain young girl feeding an impressionable inner-city boy with the tantalizing wonders of the outer-city . . .”
She blushed harder and bowed her head, ashamed at having fed Daniel those stories when they’d techno-slummed in the inner city as adolescents ? before she’d left him behind for the outer-city. Despite his earlier insistence that he’d understood her actions, she wondered if he still harbored a trace of bitterness.
As if reading her mind, Daniel chuckled and embraced her by the waist, touching his head to hers. “Darling, I loved you for sharing your dreams,” he said quietly. “You were my angel.” He kissed her forehead. “You still are.” When she looked up, his mouth closed over hers.

One

Julie walks SAM’s crystal matrix, gazing at the organic dog vitamins
shimmering of purple and green logic along the passageways. She imagines herself a creature of coloured light, a pilgrim like Dante, who wanders SAM’s vast and ordered crystal landscape in search of home. SAM used to “live” in her head back in Icaria. Her A.I. partner . . . her best friend . . . This must be a dream then, she thinks.
She knows her way around SAM’s peaceful digital home, but the place is strangely empty and she can’t sense her A.I. companion’s presence. Abruptly, eerie shadows scud over her and the glittering walkways morph into slithery, monochromatic tangles. A warm, cloying wind blows across her face, carrying the organic stench of something festering. As her steps echo toward a corner, an awful foreboding creeps into her heart. ‘When I get around that corner I’ll see the dark figure again,’ she thinks, the memory splintering up and sending a shudder through her. The stifling air rasps through her lungs as Julie wills her feet to stop, knowing full well what will happen ? her feet walk on, no longer hers to control through muscle or mind.
As she rounds the corner she sees the dark figure looming in the center of the tunnel and the rank perfume of decay overwhelms her. Enshrouded in black robes, the figure casts a gloomy shadow that reaches out and touches her feet. She shivers, trying to make out a face, remembering that in all her previous dreams she never could. Like all the times before, the figure beckons her with an outstretched, gloved hand.
She recoils, resisting the force pulling her closer to the figure, but her feet slip. Panic rising, she slides toward the figure and stares, drawn to look at the shadowed face but terrified at what she might see. She glimpses fluid features, swirling from one thing to another: first a young woman’s face, then a child’s, then a decrepit, wrinkled mass. The figure’s arms reach out to embrace her and she starts to slide forward again, arms thrashing out, grasping only air. Her feet skid on the slimy surface. Somehow she knows, deep in her dreaming soul, that if she touches the figure she will die.
Where’s SAM? she demands, certain that this shadowy figure is somehow responsible for her A.I. companion’s disappearance. What have you done with him?
[SAM is with us, a part of us now,] the strangely mellifluous chorus of voices resonate in her gut. [Soon you will be. You must join us also. . . It is time to return . . .]
“NO!” she screams defiantly. As she fights the force of the voices and the dark figure, a soft chirping sound in the back of her mind suddenly escalates into wails of panic. Among the discordant alarm, a single note cuts in and she recognizes Angel’s voice: Mom! Help! The dark, deadly figure is abruptly pushed aside by a vision of her daughter, desperately hanging on to a tree over the gorge.
~~~~
Casting a brisk glance around her, Angel slipped out of her cabin and stole across the camp. Only the trilling of a robin broke the silent mantel of first light. She inhaled the sharp sweet smell of wild honeysuckle that clung to the haze of early morning and hesitated at her parent’s cabin door to peer inside. Both lay asleep in bed, facing her direction, her father’s tanned arm folded around her mother in a loose embrace. Angel studied their peaceful faces and let a sigh escape her. She suddenly felt lonely. She knew they loved her, but they also had each other. Angel only had Aard, the scruffy but strikingly handsome hermit her parents had cautiously befriended six years ago. Aard wasn’t just her friend; he was her only friend. He was also thirty years older than her. A kind, yet somewhat mysterious man, he’d taught her family the art of survival in the wild. He also spun stories about life in Icaria that her mother seemed oddly reticent to share.
As Angel watched her parents sleeping her mother twitched, her face tightened and she mumbled something unintelligible. She’s having the bad dream again, Angel thought, as she shrugged her climbing rope over her shoulder, and turned away from her parents’ cabin.
Angel darted out of camp, down the well-worn path toward the meadow where she and her mother would pick blackberries later in the summer. Angel gave the flowering brambles a glance and picked her way through the heath scrub toward the gorge. Her heart raced as she neared the place she’d been repeatedly forbidden to visit, but she’d be back long before either of them woke up and no one would be the wiser. Angel smiled, excited, and quite pleased with her plan.
The clearing just before the gorge yawned ahead. This marked the place in the gorge where she’d heard the strange noises and seen those flickering lights. No creature she knew of could have made them and she didn’t for a moment believe her mother’s lame explanations that they were swarms of fireflies, northern lights or even dry lightning. Time to finally check out what lay below, she thought, peering over the cliff edge and into the gorge.
Angel secured her rope to a nearby tree and was just about to cinch it to the caribiner on her strong belt when the chirping noises in her head suddenly flared, sending a clear note of alarm through her. She spun around and met the feral eyes of a cougar. It snarled and she drew in a sharp breath, instinctively jerking back from the beast.
Too close to the edge, she slipped with a shriek. The rope ripped from her hands and she tumbled over the edge. Something caught her hard on her leg, abruptly stopping her fall and sending a flash of pain that brought out a cry. She scrambled for a hold and realized she’d landed on a stunted, gnarled tree that grew out of the cliff face. She clung desperately, body dangling over nothing.
Mom! her mind screamed. A rock slithered past and she dared to turn and watch as it clattered down the cliff, starting a small slide of rocks and dirt into the deadly darkness of the gorge. She hoped the cougar was long gone, spooked by her cry and sudden fall. Her arms shook with a biting ache and a sharp pain shot up her left leg. She wondered briefly if she’d broken it then bit back the thought and replaced it with another: soon my whole body will be broken. I can’t hold on much longer . . .
~~~~
Daniel twitched out of sleep and realized that Julie had awoken him by jerking herself awake with an outcry. She was sweaty and her breaths came in shuddering spasms. He lifted himself up on an elbow and gently brushed the long strands of honey-coloured hair from Julie’s flushed face. She seemed to be dreaming about Icaria a lot lately. “That nightmare again?”
Julie threw off the blanket and sat up, swinging her legs over the side of their bed. Daniel stroked the gentle, beautiful curve of her tanned back. She glanced back at him and he saw that she’d traded her usual expression following the nightmare ? that of distraught confusion ? with one of alarm. “No ? well, yes, but that’s not it.” The words rushed out, urgency edging into panic. “It’s Angel. She’s in trouble. At the gorge.”
Julie was up and dressing before Daniel had a chance to check the light outside. “That’s ridiculous,” he objected, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “Angel’s eleven ??she sleeps in every chance she gets.”
“She’s down there, I tell you,” Julie insisted, eyes flashing like a forest on fire. She’d pulled on her buckskin shorts and was cinching in the belt. “Are you coming or not?”
“How do you know she’s there? Did you hear something?” Her senses were far superior to his. She heard and saw a bird in the distance minutes before he heard it fly overhead, and she brought it down for supper with her bow long before he even made a move.
“Don’t ask me how. I just know,” she said in a voice strangled with emotion. She pulled her sleeveless buckskin top over her head.
“That’s ridiculous.” He watched her lace up her old Enviro-Center hiking shoes. “She knows she’s not supposed to go there ?”
“Well, she’s there,” she cut him off, her voice sharp.
He stared at her with startled realization. “You don’t trust your own daughter.”
“Should I?” she snapped. “Come on!” She ran out of the cabin.
“Okay, I’m coming!” he called. “Wait up!” Daniel pulled on his buckskin pants and hopped out of the cabin to keep up. Julie was already out of the camp, sprinting down the main path by the time he got his boots on and caught up with her. “Shouldn’t we have checked to make sure she isn’t in her cabin asleep while we’re out here running like idiots in the dark?”
Julie slowed for a moment and glanced sharply at Daniel as he came along side her. “The insect-voices in my head warned me,” she explained, “and I heard her scream in my head. I know I didn’t imagine it, Daniel. I saw a clear image of her on the gorge cliff. She’s hurt and she’s hanging off a tree branch.”
They ran faster.
~~~~
“Hey,” Aard’s friendly voice called from above. “What d’you think you’re doing? Training to fly?”
Angel wanted to cry out his name in relief but she burst into tears instead, unable to look up. Her breaths shuddered through her, threatening her tenuous grip on the tree. She slipped a few centimeters and screamed in renewed alarm.
“Angel,” Aard’s voice took on an edge. “Try not to move. I’m coming down!”
She heard him scrambling above her then her own rope snaked down beside her as dirt and pebbles rained down from the ledge above. The rope twitched and bounced as Aard maneuvered himself down hand over hand. Then he was beside her on a tiny ledge. He tied a loop in the rope and clipped it to the caribiner on her belt. “Okay, you won’t fall now if you let go. Grab a handhold on that branch and work your way across.”
She couldn’t move.
“Let go, Angel,” he said.
She shook her head, crying.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice softening.
“My leg,” she said between choking sobs.
“Okay,” he said, almost as if to himself. “I’ll get you up. Just stay there.” She heard his labored breaths as he climbed back up the cliff free-hand. He finally called down, “Okay, Angel, I’m going to pull you up. Just let go when you feel me take up the slack on the rope.”
She felt the hard tug on her belt and felt secure enough to unclench her hands from the tree and grab hold of the rope. She unhooked her good leg from the tree and bit by bit, Aard pulled her up to safety. As she neared the summit, she heard concerned murmurs and knew her parents had arrived.

Serialized stories have long been a staple of literature.  Many classic authors originally published their installments in magazines.  Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle each started their writing careers this way.

Stephen King used the story arc format as a vehicle for his novel The Green Mile.

In recent years, readers and viewers have become increasingly more aware of story arcs.  You may have seen the story arc in action in TV shows like:  The X-Files, E.R., The West Wing, Desperate Housewives, Hill Street Blues, 24, Alias, Lost, Farscape, and most notably, Star Trek: Enterprise.  The format lends itself especially to drama and the science fiction genre.

With the advent of the internet, the story arc has found a new home.  Why is it so popular?  It allows us to enter the lives of others.

In that vein, I’d like to present the story arc for Darwin’s Paradox, a new novel by Nina Munteanu.  Follow along as Nina weaves her intricate story into your heart.