At first, even though night had fallen, the way was easy, with a scattering of pines among mostly hemlocks and cedars, the trail wide and not too steep. However, with altitude the conifers came to dominate and grew closer together. Occasional low branches were to be guarded against by holding one arm in front of her face.
Colson said that any forest had neighborhoods as surely as did any town, though to Ophelia it appeared to be one wilderness with the defeating sameness of a maze. Colson said that strangers like them were well advised to announce their presence from neighborhood to neighborhood, so that no cougar or quarrelsome bear would be surprised. Inexperienced hikers tended to think that the smartest way to avoid large predators was to pass through the wilderness as quietly as possible. But it wasn’t natural for mountain lions and grizzly bears to stalk human beings; indeed, instinct inspired them to flee from such interlopers. If those animals were startled, however, they were far more likely to become aggressive and attack. Therefore, from time to time, the boy clapped his hands and then hooted loudly to spook the residents of the neighborhood, to make them hie for shelter.
They ascended the serpentine deer path to a crest, where the trees fell away to both sides, revealing the low sky. The first lightning throbbed deep in the clouds, and thunder growled.
Ophelia was not confident that she had either the stamina or the footwear for what lay ahead. Colson wore hiking boots, but she had only running shoes that served her poorly on uneven terrain.
The boy said, “We’ll follow the ridgeline from here. No more climbing. A lot less strain on you and the shoes. Less than four miles until we make our way down through the last of the woods to open land. You can do it. You have to do it. You said this is why you survived the accident that killed your twin sister—to take out Asher Optime.”
“Yeah, well, we’re running from him, not taking him out.”
“We’ve got enough on him to put him away forever.”
“I don’t want him in prison. I want him dead.”
“They’ll execute him.”
“Will they? Ten years from now? Appeal after appeal. Maybe fifteen years? While fools of one kind and another make a hero of him?”
“It won’t be that way.”
Until now, she hadn’t realized how much the encounter with Optime and her experience in the church of the necropolis had rattled her confidence that justice could ever be had in this troubled world.
“It’s always that way,” she said.
The boy seemed to have grown taller during the ascent from Zipporah, and the backpack lent him greater substance. He stood on the windswept crest like some brave figure out of mythology who was not afflicted by the elements but celebrated by them. Another pulse of lightning traveled through the clouds without forking from them, and in that spectral light, Ophelia saw determination in the set of his jaw and a righteous ferocity in his eyes that was not boyish.
“Your sister, yourself,” he reminded her.
“My sister, myself.”
This kid was something special. In another decade or two, he would grow into a man to be reckoned with, formidable of mind and true of heart. Suddenly, Ophelia knew that she had been cast into this chaos not only to justify having survived the accident that killed Octavia, but also to protect the boy, to die for him if it came to that. The weight of this realization sent a tremor through her. For just a moment her legs felt too weak to support her, and then a thrill of purpose, more powerful than either the hope of redemption or the lure of vengeance, gave her a strength she had never known before.
“My sister, myself,” she repeated. Then she added, “My brother, myself,” and reached out to him.
Taking her hand, he said, “My sister, myself.”
She knew then that not just the meaning of their lives had changed, but also they had changed. They were not who they had been when they were prisoners in Zipporah.
65
Generously configured for just eight passengers and the crew, Ganesh Patel’s Gulfstream V was as comfortable as an airborne five-star hotel suite. During the flight to Helena, Montana, he listened to his guests’ story with interest while he and they enjoyed dinner. Kenny—whom Ganesh affectionately referred to as “the Deetle”—and Leigh Ann had been subjected to an extraordinary assault by their mutual enemy, though Ganesh said nothing about that mysterious individual. Their experiences were very interesting, including the fact that, quite independently, they, too, had called it “the Other.” Everything was interesting to Ganesh. Nothing bored him. Even the dullest people fascinated him if only because no two of them were dull in quite the same way. The variety even among the dull was astonishing and indicative of the infinite complexity of all things. Kenny and Leigh Ann were not dull; they were quite the opposite. Ganesh asked many questions, literally hundreds, eliciting details of their ordeal that hadn’t seemed important to them but that mattered to Ganesh.