Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(39)

I look and see nothing. The only light comes from the shuttle behind us. My imagination turns the city’s deep shadows into creeping spiders.



“What is it?” I ask quietly. “Do you see—”

“Shhh.”

He leans forward slightly, peering—he smiles.

“They’ve returned.”

The shadows move, take shape: Bishop, Visca, Bawden. Long vines are wrapped around their black coveralls. They look like part of the landscape, even though they’re running. Standing still, they would be invisible. As they draw closer, I see their faces: covered in plant juice and dirt.

Coyotl runs down the ramp, feet hammering on the metal. Bishop is right—he is noisy.

Coyotl meets them halfway. His left hand goes to Bishop’s right shoulder, Bishop’s left hand goes to Coyotl’s right. Coyotl repeats the greeting with the other circle-stars. There is something formal about the motion, and also something deeply emotional. None of the other symbols do that. In many ways, the circle-stars are a people unto themselves.

Coyotl and Bawden enter the shuttle, leaving me with Bishop and Visca.

“Welcome back,” I say to them.

I was so worried about Bishop. Now that he’s back, I feel exhausted. I just want to sleep.

“We saw spiders,” he says. “They stay still and hidden, mostly. We couldn’t get a good look at them. We saw some lurking around a strange building near the Observatory. I think it’s their nest. We had to go all the way around so the spiders couldn’t see us, and approach the Observatory from the far side.”

Visca shifts from foot to foot, so excited he can’t stand still. Even with the coating of dirt and gunk, his skin is so much paler than Bishop’s.



“Some of my training came back to me,” Visca says. “I know tracking, even better than Bishop does.”

I remember how Bishop tracked the pig back on the Xolotl.

“I don’t think the spiders hear very well,” Visca says. “When we decided to take the long way around, we didn’t see any sign of them. No tracks, no broken vines—nothing. We can take that same path tomorrow and avoid the spiders completely, I bet.”

I look at Bishop. He nods in agreement.

“The Observatory is big,” he says. “It’s cold at the top. We could see the entire city. The landing pad, the shuttle, the city wall, the jungle and the ruins…everything looked so small.”

“What about other people? Anything moving?”

“No,” Bishop says. “We saw maybe four different spiders inside the city limits. When we got up high on the Observatory, we could see over the city walls. We saw more spiders moving through the ruins.”

Four of them inside the walls? And more in the jungle? I had held out hope there was just one spider. So many…we could never stand up to that many.

“Gaston thinks the wall goes all around the city,” I say. “Does it?”

Bishop nods. “Except for the river that leads to the waterfall. There is a gap in the wall where the river flows in from the jungle. Past the wall, there’s nothing but ruins and jungle. In all directions.”

I’m not sure what I was hoping for. Valleys and fields? Forests? Maybe another city like ours, far off, a city that wasn’t abandoned?

Bishop seems uncomfortable. He has more bad news.



“Tell me,” I say. “What else did you see?”

Visca stops shuffling. He looks down. Whatever he saw disturbed him.

Bishop takes in a slow breath, lets it out even slower.

“There were pictures carved into the Observatory walls,” he says. “They showed people who looked so real I would have thought they could talk to us. Some of the carvings were of people killing each other. It reminded me of all the bodies on the Xolotl.”

If the images disturb Bishop this much, they must be awful.

“You didn’t get inside, though?”

He shakes his head.

“At the very top, there were lights,” he says. “Small lights, so small you can’t see them from here. Gaston is right—the building has power.”

It’s not Gaston who is right, it’s O’Malley. No use in explaining that now.

“I don’t know what good that does us,” I say. “If we can’t get in, what’s the point?”

Bishop’s jaw muscles twitch. “I think we can. There’s a pillar at the top, with all the symbols on it. Each symbol is big, taller than I am. The gear symbol is at the bottom. In the empty space inside the gear, there’s a handprint—and on the palm, a golden double-circle.”

Damn.

If we want to enter the Observatory, we’ll need Aramovsky to get us in.





The Observatory is massive.

The vine-covered ziggurat rises into the afternoon sky, enormous layers of stacked stone, one on top of the next. If a giant hand turned it upside down, I bet most of the city could fit inside it as if the other buildings were nothing more than a collection of pebbles. The Xolotl was huge, so large I couldn’t really process it, but this is different. That was in space. That was…well, it wasn’t real. The Observatory sits on solid ground.

If this is a testimony to what the Grownups can do, I am so grateful they are not here.