Three satellite dishes were fixed to the curved roof. Like Hakeem, the resident considered connectivity a high priority.
Now thirty, Panthea had moved at a distance from her family when she was eighteen because she had foreseen that eventually she would be murdered in the night by unhuman assassins, and she didn’t want her relatives to be collateral damage. As he’d finished giving us directions, Hakeem Kaspar, who’d seen a door in the day and a hole in the sky, who had shaped the previous twenty years of his life according to the belief that the territory hereabouts served as a hub of extraterrestrial activity, had winked when he told us about the unhuman assassins and said, “Panthea is a bit of an eccentric, but this territory produces more than a few. All in all, in spite of the unhuman assassin silliness, she’s a great lady and true seer.”
Having heard the Explorer approaching, Panthea was waiting for us in the open door of the Quonset hut. She was five feet one and weighed maybe ninety-five pounds, prettier than any desert flower, of which there are many that dazzle. If her ears had been slightly pointed, I would have been convinced that she had elf DNA, for her blue eyes were quite large and so limpid that you could see the radiant pleats of the layered muscles in her irises.
Although she had the physique of an adolescent and the innocent face of a child, she was an undeniably powerful presence, standing spread-legged, wearing a blood-red tunic and gray jeans tucked into black combat boots. Her black hair was chopped in a short shag, her hands fisted on her hips, as if she was confident of being able to Jackie Chan us all if we proved to be a threat.
As we got out of the Explorer, she told us to bring Winston. When he was freed from the SUV, he raced across the hardpan, past Panthea, and into the Quonset hut, as if he had once lived here and was excited to return home.
Panthea looked each of us in the eyes, nodding as if confirming our identity by some sixth sense. “Quinn, Bridget, Silas who calls himself Sparky. I knew you would come. The squad is now complete.”
“Squad?” I said.
“One squad of many but no less important than the others. Each of us is an aluf shel halakha, with a great responsibility.”
“We’re on a quest,” I said.
“It’s nothing as simple as a quest,” Bridget said.
“Isn’t it a quest?” I asked Panthea the seer.
“Perhaps a quest, but not only a quest.”
I was having none of that. “We find the equivalent of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the elephants’ graveyard, and then it’s done.”
Sparky said, “What does that mean—aluf whatever?”
“When you know why you are,” Panthea Ching said, “you will know what those words mean.”
“Why I am? My mom and dad wanted a baby. That’s why I am. Now, please, Ms. Ching, what does aluf shell halibut mean?”
“It means nothing to you now. In time it will.”
Frustrated to be on the receiving end of the kind of enigmatic statements that he and Bridget had often dished out to me, Sparky said, “It was a simple question.”
“There are no simple questions,” the seer replied, “only simple answers, some of which it’s best you discern for yourself. Anyway, some squads prefer to say aluf shel teevee chok. Still others say Legis naturalis propugnator. The sentiment is the same.”
“And what is the sentiment?” Bridget asked.
“Resist,” said Panthea.
“Resist what?”
“You need not ask what you already know. Come in, come in. The ISA will be saturating the county with agents, but we have a few hours yet before they’ll be breaking down my door. You must see what I paint in my sleep. You will recognize it.”
I began to realize that this was not going to be the date on my calendar when I would learn the identity of my parents or even the least thing about them. The theme of the day was instead about the strange, cognizant Destiny that links human lives in unexpected ways. The Ching-Rainking-Quicksilver squad had been drawn together by something more than psychic magnetism; however, any attempt that I might make to define “something more” would lead me nowhere except to the insolvable mystery of human existence or into the cold waters of Hakeem Kaspar’s obsession.
As to the latter, when we followed Panthea into the Quonset hut, she seemed to have heard my thoughts, though she was merely acting in her role as the squad’s seer, disabusing us of whatever credibility we might have given to the possibility of mother ships and off-worlders who were gray or any other color. “This isn’t about extraterrestrials from other galaxies, or from a farther arm of our own, or from a moon of Saturn. That stuff is for the movies. If only our adversaries were evil ETs, I’d rejoice. But the war into which we’ve been drafted is older than Earth itself and older than the stars, and we have no choice but to give ourselves to the current battle. The war predates the universe, as do our enemies.”