Monster Planet(91)

Finding him on Governors Island, finding him still, in a certain sense, alive, meant so much. It changed her whole life. It gave her a life, where before she'd only had a past.

On some level she wondered if she was expecting too much from him. If she was setting herself up for disappointment. But no, she wouldn't explore that just yet. She retreated into those corners of her mind where Ayaan's training still reigned. Connecting with her father was going to make her vulnerable. It was going to hurt. She didn't have time to resolve any of it, just yet. 'Excuse me,' she said, and slipped out of the warehouse.

Outside she put her hand in her pocket and touched the heart scarab. 'Ptolemy,' she whispered. 'Have they mobilized?' Time for business.

perhaps vehicles one hundred perhaps vehicles,he told her.west heading west

She bit her lip. There was still time to catch the Tsarevich'and sanitize Ayaan'but she needed to get moving herself. 'I only wish we knew where they were headed. We could just get there first and ambush him. If we follow in his footsteps there's no telling what will be lying in wait for us. But the only person who might know where he's headed isn't talking to me.'

perhaps,the mummy told her,i there help can be i of help there





Monster Planet





Chapter Seven


There was no roof on top of the ventilation tower, just a lattice of metal bars designed to keep birds out. Greasy lint matted the lattice, black with soot spewed from generations of cars going by in the tunnel beneath. Sarah kept slipping but Ptolemy was right there to grab her, his hands dry and very, very strong.

His painted face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

In the sunlight, standing upright in the breeze and the blue sky, she studied him as she never really had before. She saw how his bandages gathered in his armpits and how they had been woven across his back. There must have been dozens of layers of cloth wrapped around him. She saw flashes of gold from the small of his back, from his kneecaps, and knew he must have amulets buried in all that swaddling. She smelled her hands where he had grasped her and smelled the spice, the cinnamon and ground nutmeg smell of the resins that preserved his body. She smelled the millennia he had outlived and the strange worlds he had inhabited. To die at the height of the Roman empire, to be reborn at the end of history. She wondered what that could do to you, what it might do to your mind, your sanity.

'What did you want to show me?' she asked. He said nothing. Then he grabbed her hand. Hard. He grabbed her hand very hard. It started to hurt.

A protest bubbled out of her but suddenly his energy flooded through her body, dark and thick and her arcane vision flared up, overwhelming all of her senses. She saw him, the darkness inside of him burning intensely. She saw herself, full of golden fire. She saw through his eyes, though. Her own vision had never been so sharp. He saw what she did but with far greater detail.

Amazing. She wanted to study herself in the mirror of his eyes, she wanted to look at everything the way he did. There was no time for that, though. He turned her to look to the west. Her vision sped across the world until she saw what he wanted her to see.

Pure energy. It radiated from a single point well to the west, high in mountains in the middle of the continent. A broken chain of enormous rocks like an exposed spinal column. The light that flooded outward in long flickering beams from that place was colorless and perfect. Colorless, neither yellow nor purple, though she knew it had to be the energy that created both. Colorless because it wasn't light at all, but life, the very energy that made her cells divide and her hair grow.

It was awesome in its beauty. Jaw-droppingly, hypnotically beautiful. Sarah felt a powerful urge to get closer to it, to that Source. 'That's where he's headed?' she asked, though she couldn't imagine where else the Tsarevich might go.

it is go where we all go want to go,he told her.it source is the source

The Source. She understood immediately. 'We'll leave today, if we can,' she told him. The Tsarevich had a long road ahead of him still but she couldn't afford to lose a step. 'Your friends are ready?'

He nodded again. This time just a simple nod, his painted face bowing up and down. She followed him back down a ladder to the ground and then across the narrow causeway to the Island. Osman was waiting for her, a stack of cheaply printed technical manuals in his hands. He gave Ptolemy a nasty but brief look and then turned away, gesturing for Sarah to follow him.

'Marisol didn't want to give up any of them, and I must say I understand her logic,' the pilot told her as he lead them deep into the Island's interior, to where the big aircraft hangars loomed over the slack-haunted gardens. 'If something should happen to this place they'll need all the vehicles they have to get away. I had to really sweet-talk her for just the one.'