Of Blood and Bone (Chronicles of The One #2)(107)

Since the Doom, those who clung desperately to power or craved it had unleashed weapons. The magickal in killing lightning and burning winds, and the bombs men made that turned cities to rubble.

The problem with bombs was they could be turned back on those who launched them. In her nighttime journeys, Fallon visited the craters and ruins in Texas, California, Florida, Nevada.

The destructive power scorched her soul, but more, much more, the knowledge that humans would use such evil to destroy their own.

How many more waited to be woken to fly and fall?

Eradicating that power, that evil, had to be a priority.

“Even if you figured out how to disarm or destroy every bomb, every drone, and/or the capability to use them, globally,” Simon told her over one of their late-night strategy sessions, “they’ll build more.”

“Then we eliminate them. It’s too easy to kill when you’re not looking your enemy in the eye. You don’t see the child hiding under his bed when the flames take him. When black magicks fly, they seek to destroy. This isn’t any different. We’re asking people to fight with swords, small arms, their fists, and their powers when one of the enemies has the capability to turn them into dust with … technology. We find a way to destroy that technology. How do we thrive, Dad, after the battles, after all the blood and sacrifice and risk, if someone somewhere can kill thousands with a machine, with a code?”

She pushed up from the table, paced the kitchen, their usual meeting place. “It’s man’s magick—the atomic, the nuclear, the remote killing. And it’s just as dark as a strike of black lightning or the shearing of wings, the hanging of children.”

“Logistically, realistically, what you’re talking about may be impossible.”

“Did anyone believe, logistically, realistically, that it was possible for billions of people to die within weeks across the planet? That a shield broken in a circle of stones in a field in Scotland would kill so many and, because of the killings, change the world?”

“No. We weren’t prepared.”

Now we have to be, she thought. We have to be prepared. “You and Mom insisted we study history, and we did. Wars, so many of them useless, waged for greed or twisted faith, and rebuilding from the rubble only to war again. But it changed, Dad, from spears and swords and arrows to guns, explosives to bombs. To weapons capable of wiping everything away. Oppenheimer was right: ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ We didn’t survive the Doom to let the rest fall. It’s easier to destroy than to build. We’ll find a way to make it harder, to take away the ability to kill masses.”

“So if we, I don’t know, turn bombs into flowers, we save the world with spears, arrows, and swords?”

“And tactics and courage and light.” Idly, she rubbed a hand on the cuff she’d made from the tree. “You’re thinking if we manage that, they’ll build bombs again. They’ll rebuild the cities, plant crops, make communities. And some will build bombs and weapons to kill masses again, and some of the some will do it believing it’s for defense, for protection, a deterrent.”

“Yeah. Still, it’ll take a while.”

She chewed over it, studied and considered methods from every angle she could devise. Every night now she went through the crystal. She stood on the tarmac of what had been O’Hare in Chicago. The tower that had guided the planes, gone. Planes in hangars, at gates, on runways, burned to husks. And the remains of bodies inside the husks, inside terminals, hangars, offices. No one had taken them out, buried, or burned them.

She walked the hallways of a small, rural hospital in Kansas, an empty school in Louisiana. She watched mustangs and elk, buffalo, red-tail deer run the plains in Montana.

She saw settlements as well, and farms, noted that most had regrouped, rebuilt in remote places.

Once she stood in a bunker deep inside a mountain. All the computers, the monitors, the controls lay dead and quiet. Her first instinct urged her to make certain they stayed that way because she recognized the place as not just for defense, but also capable of launching an attack.

But she’d learned, from her parents, from Mallick, from what lived inside her, to weigh instinct against cool blood. She didn’t know enough, she decided as she wandered the counters, the buttons and switches and keyboards. What if by trying to eliminate she awakened?

Instead, she searched through, impressed that men could build so much so deep.

And as she had with every other place she’d traveled to, she marked the site on a map.

That night she dreamed.

She stood in the moonlight and fog at the circle of stones, studied the scorched and cracked ground within. A weight lay on her, in her, like lead.

“So many lost, so much death.” Her voice flowed out across the empty fields to be whisked away by the wind. “Was it sacrifice so I could be? It’s my blood that opened the door to the light and the dark.”

“Our blood.” Duncan stood beside her. Older, as he had been in that long-ago dream. “We’re cousins, after all, if you go back a few centuries. Are you going to stand here and blame a young boy or the old man he became?”

“Your grandfather isn’t to blame. What used him is. Why was it allowed? Why wasn’t it stopped?”

“Why do you think questions always have answers?”

“Because they do.”