Come nightfall the second night, Skipper climbed back down the canyon and headed back to where they’d left the Skymancer. Pax, like an irritating flea she just couldn’t flick, had followed her the whole way, babbling about mutations this or extinctions that. She just wished he would shut up, and was actually looking forward to the Skymancer’s more normal conversations about how to kill people, if he was still alive.
If he was dead, well, she hadn’t gotten a lot of time to get to know him, and people didn’t grow on her very quickly anyway…
When she came to the cavern where she’d left Ptah, however, she stumbled to a halt.
Ptahmohtep sat by a fire, looking completely solid and totally unaffected by the last twenty-four hours. “Hey guys!” he called cheerfully from the fire, once he noticed her standing there. He held up a stick of skewered rats. “Hungry?”
He was not, she noticed, wearing a collar, nor did he have pieces of himself falling away in little sparkles of multicolored black dust. His body was back to the strange, hairy, spiny, bony thing that she had come to recognize as Ptah, his yellow eyes glowing once again, the irises still having that odd round shape.
He showed absolutely no sign that the last time she’d seen him, he had been a gibbering mess.
Nor did the blue strands flowing from her forehead seem to touch him anymore.
Pax, who had been babbling on about the average temperature of the planet before the Fall, cut off his jabbering suddenly and stumbled around her into the light of Ptahmohtep’s campire, frowning at the Skymancer. “Wait,” he babbled. “Wait, wait, wait, wait…” His mouth fell open and he stared at Ptah as if he’d grown antlers. “You sheaf of dehydrated rat penis. What did you do?”
Ptah gave a wry grin. “Long version or short version?”
Pax blinked at him. “Short version,” the ancient gem-alien said, mouth still hanging open.
“There’s a dog skulking around here that’s not what he appears to be,” Ptah said. “That’s the short version.”
I knew something was off about that mutt, Skipper thought, thinking back on how hard it had been to track the beast, almost as if it had known it was being followed, and was avoiding her accordingly.
“The long version,” Ptah said, his yellow eyes darkening as they fell on Pax, “is that Carymax told me exactly who you are, Pax, and why you got locked away down in that government installation to begin with.”
Pax looked like he’d been slapped. “Is she here now?”
“No.” Ptah tossed the stick into the fire harder than necessary, still leveling his angry gaze on Pax. “You were perfectly willing to let me die in order to get out of your prison. And it was a prison. You were put there on purpose. They were going to decommission you.”
Pax gave Ptah a long look. “I didn’t agree with the way the Tuliin were handing themselves over to the humans. They were getting played, and I could see it coming a mile away.”
“You’re just a criminal that was willing to kill me to get free.” He turned and jabbed a finger at Skipper’s forehead in disgust. “And now she’s wrapped up in this, and she’s just an oblivious scavver who doesn’t understand what’s going on.”
“Cragnanny,” Skipper corrected.
“Cragnanny,” Ptah said, his face softening for a moment as his golden eyes flickered to her, then immediately hardening again as he turned back to Pax. “What lies were you telling her out there, huh? I’d yank you out of her and throw you in the river, but that would kill her, wouldn’t it?”
“He’s killing me with boredom,” Skipper said. “If you think you can get it out, try.”
“He can’t,” Pax said, looking completely unconcerned at Ptah’s rage. “Let me explain something to you, boy. I’m the only one who predicted that humans were too violent and self-interested to use the Tuliin symbiosis for what it was truly meant for. Again and again, I predicted the harsh reality, but they thought of me as an outlier. They thought I was malfunctioning. Just a very old, very bitter imprint that had finally lost his mind. They imprisoned me for having a different opinion, one that didn’t hold either species in a very favorable light. Humans were too violent, and the Tuliin were too gullible. So they decided to shut me up.”
“That’s not what Carymax told me,” Ptah said. “She said you killed a human host. One of the batch of interfaces you were responsible for.”
“I did,” Pax said, totally unapologetic. “And I’d do it again. He was a complete psychopath that had somehow gamed all the tests and worked his way into the final selection process. He had everyone wrapped around his little finger—everyone, including the entire population of North America. He’d made himself a cultural phenomenon, one of the first candidates to be chosen for a Tuliin interface. Except when they introduced me to him, I saw what he really was. I could see inside his fucking mind, and I knew he was just biding his time until he got power, then the mask would come off and there would be literally no stopping him as he’d wreak havoc on the world.”
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“So you killed him and started a war instead.”
“I killed him because he was going to get Carymax killed. She was one of the oldest, one of the most important, and she had fallen in love with him. She was going to give him access to everything—her power, her knowledge, her will—and I couldn’t allow it. I did her a favor, spared her from a much more terrifying fate. They gave her some land to terraform, to anchor her and keep her from going insane.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t sound too happy about that ‘favor’ you did her,” Ptah said, looking at Pax with cold hatred. “Said she’s been trapped here for the last sixteen hundred years, and she’ll never be able to leave.”
Pax snorted. “Forgive me if I don’t feel any pity for her. She’s been able to move around under the stars those last sixteen centuries, while I’ve been babbling to myself atop a pedestal, counting sand crystals.”
“Sounds like you both got fucked,” Skipper agreed. “Can you get the stone out of my head now?”
“No,” Pax said. This time, he did look a little apologetic. “He broke the treaty…technically making him a criminal…but you’re still bound by the pact. We need to get you a Skymancer to take you to the Core. Then you can get it out of your head. Legally speaking.”
Skipper groaned. “So what you’re saying is that I’m stuck listening to you jabber about percentage of genetic mutations in plant flowers with radial versus bilateral symmetry, and evolutionary advantages of trifolate leaf patterns in comparison to pinnately compound foliage arrangements, and how minute advantages in pollination effectiveness have created a brand new species of clematis…for the rest of my life. Great.”
Both Pax and Ptahmohtep stopped glaring at each other to turn and blink at her.
Skipper dropped her bag by the fire and picked up one of the Skymancer’s roast rats. “Just tell me how to kill the Pharaoh. I’ll put up with whatever it takes.” She took a bite of semi-burned rat and chewed it, watching them over the skewer. “Even some jackass stone lodged in my head, babbling about plants.”
“Do you…” Ptah began slowly, “Understand any of what you just said?”
“Nope,” Skipper said. “But I got a memory like a steel trap. Even when I’m trying to tune it out.”
Pax blinked at her, then back at Ptah. Clearing his throat, he said, “Look. You got an ancient to break the contract for you. Fine. That’s her prerogative. I’m still going to do my job and save this place. I feel the storm brewing again, just like last time, and since I’ve been proven right again and again, so right they would have literally saved this planet had they taken my advice at least three different times, but threw me in a prison instead, my latest prediction is going to be taken seriously, even if I’m the only one.”
Ptah, still looking pissed, warily said, “What prediction?”
“Someone’s waking up old Tuliin tech,” Pax said, gesturing to the East. “For the first time since the Fall, someone is systematically finding and getting online all the old stuff. I can feel it, you can feel it. The last thirty-six years, this planet has gone from zero Tuliin infrastructure to…a wave of it. All of it getting reactivated, powered up, maybe even improved… I can’t get the best feel for the ships themselves, but they feel more efficient than they were before. So whoever it is, they’re good. Improving old Tuliin tech good. And pretty soon, once they get comfortable, they’re gonna do something stupid, like start lobbing tourino bombs over the Divide, see what they can shake out of the woodwork, and it’s gonna throw Yellowstone the rest of the way over the brink.”
“Who?” Ptah scoffed. “Scavvers have sticks and arrows and maybe lob a few stones if they’re feeling really clever.” He glanced at Skipper. “No offense.”
“I hate scavvers,” Skipper agreed, chewing on a piece of rat backstrap.
Ptah and Pax glanced back at each other. “I’m not talking about scavvers, or even anything on this side of that great big-ass canyon they tore up and down North America in the later days of the Fall,” Pax said. “I’m talking about someone from a culture that survived on the East Bank, and they’re getting ready to invade this side of the Divide.”
Skipper, who had only a vague idea what the Divide was—aside from the fact it was a canyon many times bigger than the one they now camped in—cleared her throat. “So, no offense, but how are you in this realm without an anchor? I don’t understand much about what’s been happening, but you guys were pretty clear on that—you said he needed an anchor.”
“He’ll be able to maintain his form for a day or two until the pain gets to be too much and he has to retreat to the ethereal,” Pax said, waving her question away. To Ptah, he said, “You know what Yellowstone is, right?”
Ptah immediately made a face. “It’s what Sankhotepre feeds people to when she decides it’s time to do a sacrifice.”
“Wonderful,” Pax said. “Then you know it has the potential to quite possibly blow up the world.”
Ptah recoiled, looking dubious. “That’s what her priests say, but I always thought it was bullshi—”
“It’s not bullshit,” Pax interrupted. “It’s real. It’s called a supervolcano, and the thing has spent the last six hundred thousand years festering under the continental United States like a gigantic zit, getting ready to blow up North America the moment someone hits it with enough pressure. If that happens, it’s literally kiss your asses goodbye. Not even a Tuliin terraformer could keep people alive after that.”
Ptah looked at the man from the gem like he didn’t believe him. Very reluctantly, he said, “You sure that’s not just some religious bullshit she made up?”
“No, it’s real, and for some reason, it didn’t go off the first time North America got split in half. Color me pleasantly shocked, though I don’t have any misconceptions that such luck will happen a second time.”
Ptahmohtep gave Pax a long, troubled look, then said, “Sankhotepre says she stopped it from going off and killing the world, back in the Fall.”
Pax cocked his head. “Did she?”
Ptah looked uncertain. “She told me stories, how everyone else was preoccupied with killing each other and she and her first Skymancer dropped everything and decided to put all their energy into saving Yellowstone from a big eruption. Metered the explosion out somehow, eased off some of the pressure. Her first Skymancer lost his life in the process, and she said he sacrificed himself to save the world. I… Well, honestly, I thought she was insane.”
Pax made an unhappy face. “That would do it. How do I speak with this Sankhotepre? I think it’s going to happen again.”
“That’s the Pharaoh,” Ptah said.
“The one we’re killing,” Skipper added.
Pax twisted on her suddenly. “Change in plans. We are not killing the Pharaoh, and instead, we’re going to help her.” Then to Ptah, he said, “You realize that woman saved the world, yes?”