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“Could we send another message now?” asked Kyle.
“No! Not without draining you children of all the life you have. You would end up like me, and I’ll not have that, no matter what happens.”
A deep sadness filled Lottie’s ancient voice, but underneath it was an iron backbone that reminded Jack of Grandma X, and convinced him that this really was his great-aunt.
He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but his vision was blurry and it was all he could do to raise his head.
“Ah, Jack is awake,” Lottie said. “Help him up and give him some food.”
Kyle and Tara appeared at Jack’s side, and eased him up by the armpits. He blinked and his eyes cleared. He was still in Lottie’s cabin, and had been lying on an ancient rug that smelled of dust. He let himself be led to a wooden chair and collapsed gratefully into it. Tara gave him a fruit that looked like an orange banana. Kyle pressed a gourd full of liquid into his other hand. Jack stared at them blankly for a moment. It had been so long since he had eaten or drunk anything that he had almost forgotten how to do it.
“What happened to me?” he asked.
“You overused your Gift,” said Lottie from where she lay tucked up in her bed. It looked as though she never moved. Boughs reached over her, all of them laden with produce. All she had to do was reach up and take what she needed. Cornelia sat on one of those boughs, gazing lovingly down at the old woman.
Jack remembered Custer warning him and Jaide about the dangers of using their Gifts too much without eating.
“I didn’t mean to make things so dark,” he said.
“Our Gifts are much stronger here,” Lottie explained. “But the effort of using them still costs you. I’m glad you didn’t work that out earlier, or else you might have drained yourself dry. Three of our number did exactly that. They’re buried out on the port side.”
One thin hand moved slightly, as though to point.
“Are we really in a ship?” asked Jack. He had so many questions, but that was the first one to trip across his lips.
“Yes. We found Omega right where it is. Ships go missing sometimes, when The Evil is trying to break through. This could be one of those. Or else it’s the remains of a previous expedition. There were no logs for us to check. They had been taken or destroyed long ago, along with the crew. We needed somewhere to live, so we just moved in.”
“Try the banana thing,” said Tara. “Seriously. It’ll make you feel a lot better.”
Jack did so, biting numbly until the taste hit him. It tingled like sherbet all along his tongue. Without stopping for breath, he gulped the whole thing down in three bites. Then he sipped from the gourd, which made his parched flesh sing.
“Take it slowly,” Lottie warned him with a tiny but warm smile. “Rest, and I’ll tell you everything. You’re safe here, and that’s the first thing you need to know.”
The oasis, she explained, was as invisible to The Evil as it had been to Jack. Only when Lottie broke her telepathic silence did The Evil have anything to home in on, so she had tried to call them only twice, once at the dead tree and then a second time when they were right on her doorstep. The Evil had followed her first call to the general area of the oasis, which is how it had known where to lay its trap.
“Does that mean it definitely knows where we are now?” asked Kyle, glancing out one of the cabin windows.
“It has a much better idea now, yes,” said Lottie. “But it was worth it. If I had said nothing, you would have died.”
“How did Cornelia know?” asked Jack.
The old woman raised her head and smiled at the bird. “David Smeaton used to take me on day-trips to Rourke Castle. I would bring treats for us to eat, but Cornelia always fished them out. It became quite a competition. I soon learned that I could never hide anything from my old friend here, no matter what charms I employed. Her eyes see the world much more clearly than ours — and her ears and nose, too, I suspect. She could always tell when we were coming, even from miles away.”
Cornelia bobbed her head and seemed to grin through her beak. “Got you!” she cackled.
“What about those creatures back there?” asked Tara. “Some looked like people, but most of them were … weird.”
“Everything and everyone The Evil has absorbed is stored in its vast mind,” Lottie explained. “We’re not the first civilization it has attacked, and we’re not likely to be the last.”
“Project Thunderclap —” Jack started to say.
“Yes, your friends told me something about that,” Lottie said with a roll of her rheumy eyes. “Aleksandr hasn’t changed a bit, has he? Only ever thinking of himself, never seeking a permanent solution. His plan might make humanity safe, but what about other people elsewhere, who live on other worlds? Isn’t it our responsibility to protect them, too? And what about The Evil itself? Doesn’t it have any rights of its own? It’s a living thing. We can’t blame it for being what it is.”
“But what it is,” said Tara, “is evil.”
“Tosh.” With a small gesture, Lottie dismissed the remark. “We have to see beyond our version of reality. The Evil is trying to survive, just like we’re trying to survive. Just like a lion is trying to survive when it eats an antelope. Is the lion wrong? Is The Evil? Maybe from its point of view, we’re the ones who are wrong. That’s hard to imagine, I know, but you’ve got to open your minds. You can’t defeat your enemy unless you understand your enemy, and maybe when you understand your enemy you won’t want to defeat your enemy anymore.”
Jack’s still-woozy brain struggled with this. “Do you mean we should just give up?”
“Of course not! But there are other ways. The Evil is an intelligent being — we know this because it’s so hard to fight. It can reason and plan and communicate. Why can’t we learn to coexist? We owe it to ourselves to try, or else we are no better than monsters ourselves.”
The old woman sighed. “Of course, that’s what brought me here. Trying. I’ve had so many years to wish I’d done things differently, and so many reasons to feel regret, but I remain certain I did the right thing. No one else has studied The Evil as I have. No one else has the knowledge I have of its nature. I must get home to share what I have learned with everyone.”
“We want to take you home,” said Kyle firmly.
“We just don’t know how,” Tara added.
“With your youth and my knowledge,” the old woman said, “I’m sure we can find a way. But first, I must ask you something about the world I left behind. I have heard nothing for so long. I want to know more about my family. Jack, you say you’re my great-nephew, and you have the look of the Shields about you. You’re definitely Giles’s grandson. Tell me about your twin. I want to know all about your parents, my nieces or nephews. And my sister! Oh, she was so against me opening the Bridge. We argued something fierce the night before; she actually threatened to tell Father on me. I don’t suppose he is still alive. Did he ever forgive me? Did he ever live down the shame of a disobedient daughter like me?”
Jack’s stomach clenched around his food. Of course: She wouldn’t know that her father had died the night of the Catastrophe. How was he going to tell her that? She looked so small and frail. He was afraid it might kill her.
But it didn’t. She took the news quietly and silently, offering no more than a nod to confirm that she had heard. Her shining gaze never left Jack’s as he stumbled through the words, and when he was done she reached out, with no small amount of effort, and took his hand. Her fingers felt as dry and light as autumn leaves.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Father was a good man, and a very good Warden. You have something of him in you, I think. Gifts pass down the generations by other means than genes, you know.”
Jack nodded, thinking of his secondary Gift.
“And what of Lara Mae?” she asked. “Did she ever forgive me?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Lara Mae. My sister, your grandmother. Don’t tell me she died as
well?”
“No, she’s very much alive. We call her Grandma X. I don’t know why. Is Lara Mae her real name? Jaide will have a fit we found out first.”
Lottie’s grip tightened, then abruptly let go. Her hand flew to her mouth, and pressed there, as though to keep something terrible inside.
