The men escorted their captive into the room with her, and Crash was more than a little surprised by the heft of the chains they’d bound the man in as they clinked along between his legs and down his back. He was wet and shivering, looking a little wide-eyed. “I heard you had a rough trip,” she said, in her best imitation of ancient North American with an Egyptian accent.

The man flinched like she’d slapped him and suddenly looked hunted, his brown eyes fixed on her like some sort of snake. He didn’t say anything, but by the way he paled, Crash knew that something of what she had said had gotten through to him. She grinned. This was going to be easier than she thought.

“Don’t forget the food!” she called to the two soldiers who were departing to give the tiny interrogation room more space. Five other guys—including Lieutenant Marks taking up the chair beside her—stayed behind, supposedly to make sure the chained-hand-and-foot savage stayed in his chair.

“So I haven’t quite gotten a handle on your language,” Crash said, again using their common root as a starting point as she set her tablet to record. “I only had a few videos to go by, but you’re understanding some of this, aren’t you?”

Very warily, the man nodded once.

“Great!” She clapped her hands together. “The more you talk to me, the easier I’ll be able to talk back. I’ve…kinda got a knack for this sort of thing.”

The man gave her a long, wary look. “You have ships of air.” His voice was more guttural, more emphasis on the consonants than she was used to. He gestured with his chin in the direction of the tarmac from whence he’d just come.

“Yes, we do,” Crash said, adjusting her Ancient American with more throat articulation to mimic him.

He flinched again, looking at her like she’d grown fangs. “You…speak the Pharaoh.”

Crash quickly readjusted a few more of her assumptions on sentence structure, then replied, “The Pharaoh…is that a person?”

He nodded, eyes wide. “Big person.”

“Big…probably meaning strong or powerful. You taking notes, Marks?!”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Marks cried, scrambling to pull out his tablet from his combat bag.

Crash rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the prisoner. “Is that who sent you here? A Pharaoh?”

He frowned at her. “Pharaoh not here.”

Crash adjusted again, accounting for a different divergence than the Eastern half of the North American continent had experienced, probably due to the cultural laziness of the Ancient Californian influence over the more uptight Ancient Midwest and Pre-Fall Eastern seaboard before it was annihilated. “Okay, so the Pharaoh isn’t here with you. Is she the one who sent you here?”

The man hesitated, looking wary again. He glanced over his shoulder at the men guarding him, then back at Crash nervously. Then he ducked his head and leaned closer with a desperate enthusiasm that did not need to be translated. “No fly. No fly, I talk. Oathbound me.”

Crash nodded, making more adjustments in her mind. “I’ll get you immunity. Sounds like you were here on orders. Let me get a full lexicon and speech pattern down and then—”

A soldier trampled her train of thought by gingerly lowering some food—looked like burgers—in front of her with a soda and a mug of coffee.

“Goddamn it!” Crash called, throwing the food aside and glaring at the man. “Can’t you see I’m fucking busy?!”

The soldier blinked at her and, bowing his apologies, quickly backed out of the room.

Crash plucked one of the hamburgers off the floor and started eating it. Around the burger, she said, “So you wanna make sure nobody takes you on another sky-ride, and in return, you’ll tell us about this Pharaoh.”

The man nodded enthusiastically, his brown eyes wide with sincerity. Marks was watching the exchange, his mouth falling open a little, but she didn’t see his stylus moving.

“Notes, Marks!” Crash snapped.

“But I don’t know what you’re—” He gulped at her dark look. “I heard fly.”

“He’s afraid Commandant is going to make him go on a sky-ride again,” she said, distracted. Then she returned her attention to the prisoner. “Okay,” she said around the burger. “So you’re—” She grimaced, picked a long blonde hair out of her mouth, peered at it, then flicked it aside and kept chewing, watching her visitor closely. She liked the way they used their lips. Most cultures got lazy and didn’t fully enunciate the plosives, but he was either well-educated or the whole culture had taken plosive anal-retentiveness to the next level. She liked that.

“So,” she said, imitating him, “help me get this straight. You’re from the other side of the Edge?”

He squinted at her, clearly struggling, but not quite able, to put her words together.

“The big cliffs,” she said, gesturing in a wall-shape with her hand as she held the half-eaten burger with her other. “You came from the other side of those?”

“Cliffs, yes.”

“We call it the Edge of the World. What do you call it?”

The man uttered something and Crash frowned, then cocked her head and started calculating root word evolutions until she figured it out. “Divide!” she finally cried, after several minutes of the man staring at her and giving Marks a questioning look. “You’re calling it the Divide.”

Warily, the man nodded.

“So, this Pharaoh sent you here… He’s the leader of your country, yes?”

He frowned. “Pharaoh—” he made a few more words she couldn’t quite catch, then glanced pointedly at Crash’s breasts.

“Hey man, keep your eyes to your—”

“A girl!” Crash cried, slapping the table to shut Marks up. “Their Pharaoh is a woman.” She gave Marks a pointed look.

Marks, wincing, retreated back to his chair with his tablet and made another note.

“So this woman…is she an elected official? I’m guessing by the title of Pharaoh that it’s probably hereditary…” She hesitated, waiting to see how much the man understood.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He didn’t. He just squinted at her like she’d taken a shit on the table.

Speaking of… She bent down, grabbed the other burger, dusted some dirt off the meat, put it back together, and held it out to her guest. “Hungry?”

But he immediately made a face like she’d just bathed in the blood of babies. “Don’t eat unclean.”

Crash stopped chewing and blinked at her half-eaten hamburger. “I mean, it wasn’t the five second rule, but it’s not that bad. Just a few hairs, but I got most of that off.”

If he understood her, his hard face never shifted. “From fire only. Fire to mouth.” Then he babbled something about the blessings of volcanoes.

Crash glanced down at the burger, then, shrugging, tossed it back on the floor. “All right. Let’s talk about volcanoes a sec. I’m guessing your people live near one?” Beside her, Marks bent to squish the remnants of the burger into a pile on a manilla folder and hold it out to the guy who came to take it, but Crash wasn’t paying attention. She was watching the prisoner’s face.

His gaze had grown sharp again, wary. “I want oathbound,” he said again, in vaguely ancient North American.

“You have my word,” Crash assured him. “I can get some papers drawn up. They’ll pardon you for cooperating.”

He squinted at her as if that made no sense to him. He glanced at the men around her, then said, “You Pharaoh here?”

Crash laughed so hard she spat out the rest of the burger.

At his dark look, she coughed and collected herself. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I am.” Because she was a goddess when it came to getting weird new guys to talk.

But that seemed to convince the man. He nodded. “I want oathbound. I go home, my Pharaoh kill me. I want new Pharaoh.”

“Interesting,” Crash said. To Marks, she said, “You getting this?”

“Yep, got it,” Marks said, scribbling something on his pad. “Wants to switch sides.” Crash found herself slightly impressed. As a linguist in the Corps, he was versed in Ancient North American in preparation for another exploratory mission across the Edge, so he, unlike the other imbeciles in the room, had been able to piece together bits of what was said.

“Be sure you note that he’s using ancient Egyptian words that could’ve been copy-pasted into an otherwise natural evolution of the ancient English dialect of the Californian seaboard,” Crash said. “Someone kept those words relatively unchanged for fifteen hundred years, so I’m guessing his religious ceremonies are all done in Ancient Egyptian, with both an oral and written component.”

Marks nodded, making more notes.

The prisoner, who couldn’t understand their own language, watched the exchange with suspicion. Crash smiled at him. “Marks is trying to pick things up as we go along,” Crash said, to ease his fears. She scooted the mug of coffee across the table. “He’s pretty good. Only one I’d work with after I quizzed a few of their guys at one of the stops. Knew Ancient Mexican, if you can believe that. You drink coffee?” she suggested, raising a brow.

The prisoner glanced at the drink, then swallowed. He was still shivering now and then, his plain white clothes still damp from being outside.

“Someone get him a straw!” Crash shouted.

Men scrambled. Crash wasn’t paying attention. She was processing again, trying to calculate how to get inside the man’s head. The linguistic evolution wasn’t quite right for a natural path through the ages—it was too close to Ancient American, almost as if they had something anchoring it through time.

…and all of it seemed to come back to these very old, very perfect Egyptian words.

“Tell me about this Pharaoh,” Crash said. “How’d she gain power?”

The man blinked at her again.

“How did she become your ruler?” she tried again. Then, at his continued confusion, offered, “Your master? Leader?”

But he continued to stare at her as if he couldn’t comprehend the question. “Pharaoh always Pharaoh. She live through time and space, a great power that gather the storm beneath the great Burkan, appease him with her energy, keep him from being angry at the world for humanity’s sins in the Fall. She save the world, watch over Burkan as he sleeps.”

“Bingo,” Crash said. “You get that, Marks?”

Beside her, Marks didn’t reply. She glanced at him. He was wincing, his stylus paused over the tablet. “Uhh…” he said, “no?”

Crash narrowed her eyes at her ‘assistant’.

He swallowed. “He said something about a Pharaoh and volcanoes…” he offered with a wince.

Crash rolled her eyes and sighed, deeply. “This Pharaoh running their civilization is old.” She jerked a thumb at their captive. “As old as he can remember, at least. And she’s set herself up as some sort of volcano goddess.” She nodded at the man. “Did your Pharaoh have a mother? A father that was Pharaoh before her, perhaps?”

The man frowned as if what Crash was suggesting was some sort of heresy. “No, always Pharaoh.”

Crash frowned. “How old is Pharaoh?”

The number he provided was strangely precise. “Sixteen hundred, eighty-two years.” The way he rattled it off, it had to be some sort of cultural canon.

“Marks…” Crash said, beginning to get a little chill. “Wasn’t there something about those alien symbionts making people immortal back during the Fall?”

“That’s what the myths say,” Marks said, clearly not believing it.

“How old are you?” Crash asked, looking the man over as she took a sip of soda. She guessed twenty-six, maybe as much as thirty.

Thus, she spat it out in a spray when the man confidently said, “I have seen two hundred and three winters as the Pharaoh’s slave, and another six as an unclaimed child in the city.”

“Maybe he means seasons,” Crash said idly.

Marks, who was obviously still struggling, said, “Did he say he’s two hundred and three?”

“Two hundred and nine,” Crash said. “But that’s not really possible, is it?” To the man, she said, “That’s…a very long time. You’re telling me you’ve been alive two hundred and nine years?”

“Only the High Minister of War is older,” the man said, with pride.

“Rank title. Mark it.”

“Got it,” Marks said, scribbling on the pad. “High…priest…of war?”

“Minister, fuck!” Crash cried.

“Minister,” Marks said, noting it.

“Okay,” Crash said, leaning forward over the table, then was interrupted by a big hand with a straw dropping down into the coffee in front of her. She stopped everything to glare up at the man, who froze and blinked down at her like a startled rabbit. She slowly pushed the coffee out of the way, still glaring up at the intruder in warning. He backed away. Crash returned her attention to the captive. Testing a theory, she said, “How many winters would you guess I’ve seen?”

“One thousand six hundred and fifteen,” he said, without hesitation.

Crash winced. “It’s forty-seven.” Eyes narrowed, she dropped her face in her hand and tapped her fingertips on a cheek. “What about Marks over there?” She gestured at her assistant.

The man’s brown eyes hardened in obvious disdain. “Thirty-five.”

When Marks didn’t respond, Crash glanced at him.

“It’s thirty-four,” Marks confessed.

“What about him?” Crash asked, gesturing to one of the slack-faced guards standing along the wall.

Very slowly, as if it were a waste of his time, the man turned to look. “Twenty-three.”

Crash raised a brow at the big lug.

“Twenty-two,” the man confirmed.

Crash winced inwardly, that theory dismantled. “Well, I think it’s safe to say our visitor accurately understands the concept of years,” she said, “though I wonder if the sixteen hundred year thing is somehow symbolic—an artifact of the Fall, not a realistic age. Like an honorific.” She squinted at the captive, tapping her cheekbone again in thought.

“Maybe he’s saying that’s when the world—” one of the soldiers began. Crash snatched up her spray bottle and squirted it a few times without looking. Then she set the bottle back down, still frowning in thought.

The captive glanced over at the now-dripping soldier, then back at Crash. He cocked his head, waiting.

“So is this Pharaoh human?” she asked. “Like me?” She gestured at his elongated yellow irises and glassy hair. “Or more like you?”

“Pharaoh is goddess,” he said. “Mistress of the Changes, divine ambassador of the Fallen. She channels great powers from deep in the ground. The only one who can stave off Burkan’s wrath.”

“I see.” Without looking, she said, “Marks, make a note, I think she might actually be an immortal. The words he’s using to describe her show essentially zero evolution since ancient times.”

“Shit, okay.”

“All right,” Crash said, “Let’s shift topics a sec. How many guys did the Pharaoh send with you?”

“Eighteen,” he said.

“Did he say eight?” Marks asked.

“Eightteen, Christ!” Crash squinted at the man. “And how many made it to this side of the great canyon?”

Hesitantly, he said, “Six.”

“That’s how many we found,” Marks agreed.

“Yeah. He’s lying, though.” Crash was watching the man’s eyes closely. Lying, she had noticed, was a universal language, one you just had to live and learn, and now that she was in her forties, every time it happened, it was like the fingernails of God scratched across the chalkboard of her mind until that’s all she could hear was all the little imperfections in the lie as the dumb asshole spewing the bullshit thought he was outwitting her.

Marks hesitated, glancing up abruptly. “What do you mean, he’s lying?”