“It said it’s four thousand years old,” Joanna recalled. “It said for centuries it watched Native American tribes enslave one another, war with one another, kill one another.”
“Slavery has existed since there were enough humans to form different communities,” Wyatt said, “enough to stop thinking in terms of us against nature and start thinking of us versus them.”
“Then Europeans came along and did much the same thing. So how long has this ET been here, Wyatt? At least several centuries. A thousand years? Two thousand? Three? Don’t you think the purpose of traveling hundreds of light-years would be to make contact? Why would it stay concealed all this time?”
“Maybe when it arrived, it found us too primitive to warrant contact. Maybe its protocols required it to study us, like an anthropologist, until we . . . matured.”
“Yeah, well, we became a high-tech civilization a long time ago. Another thing—is it alone?”
He shook his head. “Surely not. If we had the technology to cross a galaxy, we wouldn’t send an expedition of one.”
“But when he uses Jimmy, when he speaks to me, it’s as if there’s no others, just him. Although . . .”
“What?”
“Earlier this evening, in the orchard, I remembered a curious conversation with Jimmy, with the thing using Jimmy, when I was eight years old. He said something about an awakening . . . a prince and his retainers who were bespelled, waiting to be awakened. He said that only he had the power to wake them.”
Wyatt felt the skin crepe on the nape of his neck. His hands were suddenly clammy, and he blotted them on his pants.
Beyond the big windows, landscape lights relieved just enough of the darkness for him to see concatenations of wind-whipped rain and willow leaves that raged across the lawn like the shapes of strange beasts seen through a suddenly thinning veil between this world and an even more hostile realm.
82
The wind-shaken pines shed dead, wet needles that were slippery underfoot. Occasionally they cast off large cones that rattled along the deer trail. When one of those struck Ophelia on the back of the head, she cried out and stumbled and nearly fell, certain that the bear had returned and loomed behind and had just taken a swipe at her. They hadn’t seen the grizzly for a while. It seemed to have gone away, as if it had followed them only until it could be sure that they were committed to this trail rather than another, which was a peculiar and troubling thought.
Another troubling thought had occurred to Ophelia about half an hour earlier, and she had obsessed on it as if it were the one rough pip on a string of smooth worry beads. Now, Colson stopped and said that they were nearly out of the woods and clicked the Tac Light and quickly swept the beam in a circle to verify their location and to confirm that the bear no longer lurked in the vicinity. When the boy doused the light, Ophelia put a hand on his shoulder and shared her new concern. “Maybe this is a mistake.”
“I know where we are,” he assured her as the storm brightened the night above the treetops. Shapes of light and shadow winged down through the interlaced pine boughs, like bright spirits harrowing fallen angels, and a judgment of thunder rumbled through the forest and out into the open land. “I memorized the trail maps before Dad and I left home. Beyond the last trees, there’s a sloping meadow to Lake Sapphire. We head west along the south shore of the lake. It’s private land, Rustling Willows Ranch, but hikers are welcome to pass through. Eventually there’s a house above the lake, the ranch house. We can’t miss it. There’ll be someone there to help us.”
“If we get there alive,” Ophelia said. “Colson, we split from the saloon in Zipporah just as Optime showed up in the street.”
“Yeah, the sun was setting.”
“If he came in there right after we left . . . how soon would he have realized that a backpack was missing, trail maps, the compass, the protein bars?”
“Obviously, he didn’t realize right away or he’d have come fast behind us, taken a few potshots.”
“Even if he saw us when we were out of range?”
“No, not if shooting was pointless. But I looked back before we started across the river and again after we got to the other side. He wasn’t there.”
“Neither of us looked back during the crossing. We were too busy keeping our footing on the rocks. While we were locked in the church, he went through the contents of those backpacks. Everything was scattered across the table in the saloon. What if he looked at the trail maps? Even if he didn’t, maybe he’s so familiar with this territory that he’d know where we were likely to go, the nearest we could find help, this Rustling Willows Ranch.”