CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE DAY HAS GROWN DARK. THE WARM NIGHT carries a soft wind and the sky is scattered with intermittent flashes of light, clouds turning to brilliant colors of blue and red and green. Fireworks at first. Fireworks that segue to something else, louder, more menacing, the oohs and aahs turning to shrieks and screams. A chaos erupts. People running, children crying. Me, standing in the middle of it all, watching without the benefit of being able to do anything to help. The soldiers and the beasts pour onto the scene from all directions as I have seen before, the continuous fall of bombs so loud that it hurts the ears, the reverberations felt in the pit of my stomach. So deafening it makes my teeth ache. Then the Loric charge back with such intensity, with such courage, that it makes me proud to be among them, to be one of them.

Then I am gone, sweeping through the air at a rate that causes the world beneath to pass in a blur so that I can’t focus on any one thing. When I stop I am standing on the tarmac of an airfield. A silver airship is fifteen feet away and forty or so people stand at the ramp leading up to its entrance. Two people have already entered, standing in the doorway with their eyes on the sky, a very young girl and a woman Henri’s age. And then I see myself, four years old, crying, shoulders slumped. A much younger version of Henri just behind me. He, too, is watching the sky. On bended knee in front of me is my grandmother, gripping me by the shoulders. My grandfather stands behind her, his face set hard, distracted, the lenses of his glasses gathering the light from the sky.

“Come back to us, you hear? Come back to us,” my grandmother says, finishing speaking. I wish I could have heard the words that came before them. Up until now I have never remembered anything that was spoken to me that night. But now I have something. My four-year-old self doesn’t respond. My four-year-old self is too scared. He doesn’t understand what is happening, why there is urgency and fear in the eyes of everyone around him. My grandmother pulls me to her and then she lets go. She stands and turns her back to keep me from seeing her cry. My four-year-old self knows that she is crying, but he doesn’t know why.

Next is my grandfather, who is covered in sweat, grime, and blood. He has clearly been fighting, and his face is twisted as though he is straining, ready to fight more, ready to go and do all he can in the struggle to survive. His, and the planet’s. He drops to a knee as my grandmother did before him. For the first time I look around. Twisted heaps of metal, chunks of concrete, large holes in the ground where the bombs have fallen. Scattered fires, shattered glass, dirt, splintered trees. And in the middle of it all a single airship, unharmed, the one that we are boarding.

“We gotta go!” somebody yells out. A man, dark hair and eyes. I don’t know who he is. Henri looks at him and nods. The children walk up the ramp. My grandfather fixes me with a hard stare. He opens his mouth to speak. But before the words come I am again swept away, hurled up through the air, the world below again passing in a blur. I try to make it out, but I am moving too fast. The only discernible sights are the bombs, continually falling, large displays of fire of all colors that sweep through the night sky and the perpetual explosions that follow.

Then I stop again.

I am inside of a large, open building that I have never seen before. It is silent. The ceiling is domed. The floor is one great slab of concrete the size of a football field. There are no windows, but the sounds of the bombs still penetrate, echoing off the walls around me. Standing in the very middle of the building, tall and proud, alone, is a white rocket that extends all the way to the apex of the ceiling.

Then a door slams open in the far corner. My head snaps around to it. Two men enter, frantic, talking quickly and loudly. All at once a herd of animals rush in behind the men. Fifteen, give or take, continually changing shape. Some flying, some running, on two legs, then on four. Bringing up the rear, a third man follows and the door is shut. The first man reaches the spacecraft, opens a sort of hatch on the ship’s bottom, and begins ushering the animals in.

“Go! Go! Up and in, up and in,” he yells.

The animals go, all of them changing their shapes in order to do so. Then the last animal enters and one of the men pulls himself in. The other two begin throwing bags and boxes up to him. It takes them a good ten minutes to get everything on board. Then all three scatter around the rocket, preparing it. The men are sweating, moving frantically until everything is ready. Just before the three of them climb inside the rocket, someone runs up with a bundle that looks like a swaddled child, though I can’t see well enough to tell. They take whatever it is and go inside. Then the door snaps shut behind them and is sealed. Minutes pass. The bombs must be just outside the walls now. And then from nowhere an explosion occurs inside the building and I see the beginnings of fire shoot from the bottom of the rocket, a fire that quickly grows, a fire that consumes everything inside the building. A fire that consumes even me.

My eyes snap open. I am back home, in Ohio, lying in bed. The room is dark, but I can sense that I am not alone. A figure moves, a shadow thrown across the bed. I tense myself to it, ready to snap my lights on, ready to hurl it against the wall.

“You were talking,” Henri says. “In your sleep just now, you were talking.”

I turn on my lights. He is standing beside the bed, wearing pajamas pants and a white T-shirt. His hair is tousled; his eyes are red with sleep.

“What was I saying?”

“You said ‘Up and in, up and in.’ What was happening?”

“I was just on Lorien.”

“In a dream?”

“I don’t think so. I was there, just like before.”

“What did you see?”

I scoot up the bed so my back rests against the wall.

“The animals,” I say.

“What animals?”

“In the spaceship I saw take off. The old one, at the museum. In the rocket that left after ours. I watched animals being loaded into it. Not many. Fifteen, maybe. With three other Loric. I don’t think they were Garde. And something else. A bundle. It looked like a baby, but I couldn’t tell.”

“Why don’t you think they were Garde?”

“They loaded the rocket with supplies, fifty or so boxes and duffel bags. They didn’t use telekinesis.”

“Into the rocket inside the museum?”

“I think it was the museum. I was inside a large, domed building with nothing inside of it but a rocket. I can only assume it was the museum.”

Henri nods. “If they worked at the museum then they would have been Cêpan.”

“Loading animals,” I say. “Animals that could change their shape.”

“Chimæra,” Henri says.

“What?”

“Chimæra. Animals on Lorien that could change their shape. They were called Chimæra.”

“Is that what Hadley was?” I ask, remembering back to the vision I had a few weeks ago, the vision of playing in the yard of my elders’ home when I was lifted in the air by the man wearing a silver and blue suit.

Henri smiles. “You remember Hadley?”

I nod. “I’ve seen him the way that I’ve seen everything else.”

“You’re having the visions even when we’re not training?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“Henri, who cares about the visions? Why were they loading animals into a rocket? What was a baby doing with them, or was it even a baby? Where did they go? What purpose could they possibly have had?”

Henri thinks about it a moment. He shifts the weight of his body to his right leg. “Probably the same purpose we had. Think about it, John. How else could animals repopulate Lorien? They too would have to go to some sort of sanctuary. Everything was wiped out. Not just the people, but also the animals, and all plant life. Maybe the bundle was just another animal. A fragile one, or maybe a young one.”

“Well, where would they go? What other sanctuary exists besides Earth?”

“I think they went to one of the space stations. A rocket with Loric fuel would have been able to make it that far. Maybe they thought the invasion would be short-lived, and they thought they could wait it out. I mean, they would have been able to live on the space station for as long as their supplies lasted.”

“There are space stations close to Lorien?”

“Yes, two of them. Well, there were two of them. I know for sure the larger of the two was destroyed at the same time as the invasion. We lost contact with it less than two minutes after the first bomb fell.”

“Why didn’t you mention that before, when I first told you about the rocket?”

“I had assumed that it was empty, that it went up in the air as a decoy. And I think that if one space station was destroyed, then the other was as well. Their trip, unfortunately, was probably done in vain, whatever their goal was.”

“But what if they came back when their supplies ran out? Do you think they could survive on Lorien?” I ask in desperation. I already know the answer, already know what Henri will say, but I ask anyway in order to hold on to some sort of hope that we aren’t alone in all this. That maybe, somewhere far away, there are others like us, waiting, monitoring the planet so that they, too, might one day return and we won’t be alone when we go back.

“No. There is no water there now. You saw that for yourself. Nothing but a barren wasteland. And nothing can survive without water.”

I sigh and scoot back down into the bed. I drop my head onto the pillow. What’s the point in arguing? Henri is right and I know it. I saw it for myself. If the globes that he pulled from the Chest are to be trusted, then Lorien is nothing more than wasteland, a dump. The planet still lives but on the surface there is nothing. No water. No plants. No life. Nothing but dirt and rocks and the rubble of the civilization that once existed.

“Did you see anything else?” Henri asks.

“I saw us on the day we left. All of us at the airship right before we took off.”

“It was a sad day.”

I nod. Henri crosses his arms and gazes out the window, lost in thought. I take a deep breath. “Where was your family during it all?” I ask.

My lights have been off for a good two or three minutes, but I can see the whites of Henri’s eyes staring back at me.

“Not with me, not on that day,” he says.

We are both silent for a time and then Henri shifts his weight.

“Well, I better get back to bed,” he says, bringing an end to the conversation. “Get some sleep.”

After he leaves I lie there thinking of the animals, of the rocket, of Henri’s family and how I’m sure he never got the chance to say good-bye to them. I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I never can when the images visit me, when I feel Henri’s sadness. It must be a thought constantly on his mind, as it would be for anyone who left under the same circumstances, leaving the only home you’ve ever known, all the while knowing you will never see the people you love again.

I grab my cell phone and text Sarah. I always text her when I can’t sleep, or she texts me if it’s the other way around. Then we’ll talk for as long as it takes to become tired. She calls me twenty seconds after I hit the send button.