I sipped it. It tasted like licorice, too. Yuck.

  “You’ll need to drink all of it.”

  Of course, I would. I managed to swallow the whole foul drink. I wiped my mouth.

  “Sorry, but it’s necessary,” he said, eyes sad as always.

  “Stop apologizing. You do what you have to do.”

  He nodded. “Just like you.”

  I shook my head. “Not like me. You make people better. I don’t.”

  “You lead people. People need a leader.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Me a leader? That’s a laugh.”

  He shook his head. “No really, Mathilda, you are, really.”

  The brew was warm in my stomach. My stomach suddenly twitched.

  I was going to throw up. Damn it.

  Harris knelt down next to me, put his fingers on my stomach, and closed his eyes again. The twitching stopped, and the warmth turned to cool. It felt good.

  Harris watched me closely. “Better?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” My stomach was calm, and my nerves didn’t feel like hot wires.

  “What did you do?” I asked him.

  “Some medicinal magic along with my gift.”

  His gift. “That gift sure helps us,” I said.

  He looked away. Embarrassed. “I’m just using what I was given.”

  “The Earth’s gift,” I whispered. The words felt weird when I said them.

  “You believe that, really?” Harris asked.

  I lifted my chin, my chest tightening, then sighed. I’d been so quick to get angry up until the Sacred Spring in Sanctuary. Where had that got me? Nearly killed was where.

  I took a deep breath.

  “If you’d asked me that question a few months ago, I would have said the idea was freaking crazy. But after Sanctuary…”

  “The Sacred Spring?” Harris’s gaze was sympathetic.

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t remember who I’d told about it, but Harris had been at the last few committee meetings. We argued about it there—the Imbued on the committee wanted to believe me, but they didn’t trust anything after being freed from Loris’s control. So, they latched on to the story humanity had believed since Empowering began back in the 1950’s: that it was some frigging cosmic accident. Loris had hypnotized them with her power, and now that she was gone, they thought everything that had happened back in Sanctuary had been an illusion.

  So, the council wanted more knowledge about the Dark-Net and the source of our powers before agreeing to try and figure out what the problem was with the Dark-Net. Like why it had taken me and Alex six months to travel to Persia, when it had only taken Keisha and the Imbued a few hours. I wanted to know more about the origin of our powers, and also about the vision of my mother.

  But we had to keep moving, so getting intel on the Dark-Net was first priority.

  I had used their desire for more knowledge about it to get them, after a lot of argument, to agree to Alex and me going to the Crimea.

  Harris’s basset-hound gaze still watched me. “You believe that our powers come from the Earth?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” I pushed back my irritation. He was just asking a question, I reminded myself. Nothing to get pissed off over.

  I was about as far from a deep-thinking intellectual type as you could get. What the hell did I know? I’d rather just be living a new life with Alex and my family, but right now that wasn’t in the cards.

  I stood up. No nausea, no dizziness. My head felt clearer than it had since before Kerch, maybe longer.

  I stretched. My muscles no longer burned. “You’re a miracle worker,” I said.

  Harris looked down, shuffling his feet, again reminding me of Gus.

  “Just trying to help,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You did. Now, let’s go see what Alex has been up to.”

  5

  Our little band had an old wooden building that Keisha had reroofed with a peaked one made out of tin. This was where we’d been meeting the last couple of weeks, to decide on what to do and how to do it.

  My skin started tingling as Harris and I approached. Keisha was waiting outside, staring up at the tree tops, lost in thought. No sign of Alex. I noticed the stickiness of the air now. Near the “committee house,” as Alex called it, were vines with flowers sprouting all along them. The vines sang enthusiastically in my head, standing out from the cacophony of the combined Amazon jungle chorus.

  Keisha crossed her arms as I walked up. “About time you showed up.”

  I cocked my head. “Funny. It hasn’t been that long.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “A couple of hours.”

  My stomach rumbled. Guess it had been awhile. I glanced back at Harris. “Was I really in that tent with you for a couple of hours?”

  “Yes.” He stopped, picked at the ground with his shoe. He looked sheepish, just like Gus did when I caught him sneaking around, blending in as Blender. My heart ached at the thought. Shit.

  More tingling on my skin. Another Empowered was nearby. Right then an Asian woman appeared in the doorway to the house. “Hi, Mat.” Maria Takahashi was young, maybe eighteen. She’d joined us just a few weeks ago, right after we’d arrived at the camp. Maria was from Peru. She was newly Empowered, with the ability to have visions of people. That was her power. It was really hit or miss. Renee thought, with time, Maria would get a lot better at it.

  I smiled. “Hey Maria.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” Maria said.

  Keisha smirked. “Told you.”

  I ground my teeth. I couldn’t help it if I needed healing and it took longer. “Well, I’m here now.”

  We went inside. The community hall had metal chairs courtesy of Keisha. Hurt like hell to sit in them for too long, but it was better than nothing. The wooden furniture from the old camp had rotted away.

  Renee and Phillip waited for us, along with Ella and four other Imbued. No sign of Alex. Renee’s Zen-like calm was gone. She looked annoyed, for the first time in a long time. I wondered what the hell I’d done.

  Ella came over and gave me a big hug. “It’s good to hold you in person,” she said. I hugged her tight.

  “You, too,” I whispered in her ear. “I’d wondered where you were when I returned.”

  She let go and stepped back, looking at the floor. “In my hut, like I am most days. Trying to stay in touch with our sentries and scouts.” Scouts, members of our little band who were elsewhere in the world.

  “It has to be hard,” I said, feeling like a Class A fool for not thinking about that more often.

  She shrugged. “We each have a part to play. That’s mine.”

  Then I glimpsed a big, bald guy leaning against a metal-reinforced wall, smiling at me.

  “Yuri!” I grinned like an idiot and half-ran up to him, grabbing his arms. “I’d heard you were in town.”

  He laughed as he rubbed the back of his neck. “If this is your idea of a town, I can’t wait to see what you call a village.” He picked up a backpack that leaned against the wall by his feet.

  “Brought something for you, in here,” Yuri said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Renee and the others looked unhappy. Except Keisha and Ella, who both smiled.

  I turned to face Renee. “What gives?” I asked her.

  “See what your friend brought first. Then we can discuss it.”

  I turned back to Yuri. He walked me over to where two metal chairs sat empty. He unzipped his backpack, carefully pulled out a something bundled in cloth, and unwrapped it.

  My throat caught. An ancient root, covered in an amber-like substance. It gleamed in the dim light from a gas lamp hanging from the central roof beam.

  The root thing from Persia.

  “You brought that?” My mouth was dry. Back in Persia, at Bey’s old mansion, he’d tested my power by having me try and meld with it, like I would any other plant.

  I shivered. I couldn’t help myself. My muscles quivered. What the hell was wrong with me?

  Yuri’s smile faded. “I’m sorry if it causes you distress,” he said. “Surrell said you needed to meld with it.”

  “Try and meld, you mean.” When I had tried before, I’d just about blown my brain out.

  “No, meld, period. She said you have the ability to do so.”

  “How would she know?” I bit my lip before I said something else. Surrell’s power was to see places, not people. Bey could find things. Together they ran an information network for the black market and underground. But she couldn’t see me. That was Maria’s power, and it was erratic as all hell, from what I gathered. Visions of people came to her; she couldn’t choose them.

  “Surrell saw the potential in you, and…” he paused. Shook his head. “I’m not sure I know what to say—she told me to tell you that she sees its connection with you.”

  “But Surrell sees places, not connections!” Whatever the hell seeing connections meant, anyway.

  “She’s changed. Her powers have changed.”

  I scrunched my face, trying to figure what the hell that meant. “Powers don’t change.”

  He shrugged. “She said you’d say that. She said that her power has.”

  Changed? That was impossible. “So, she wants me to meld with this?”

  He nodded.

  I could see the rest of the room staring at us, watching our little discussion. Their faces looked wary, worried, unhappy.

  “You have a problem with this?” I asked Renee.

  “Yuri told us about the ancient root. We can see its connection to the world.”

  “You can?” I demanded. “How?”

  She nodded. “It’s obvious in the way it trembles.”

  “It trembles?” I pointed at the root, and my fingers trembled.

  “It’s obvious in the way you tremble,” Phillip said.

  I glanced at Keisha. “Yeah,” she said. I turned to Harris.

  “What about you?” I demanded.

  He flinched.

  I took a deep breath. Stupid to get pissed.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “What do you think about all of this?”

  “It’s hard to put into words, but the thing feels like power, you know?”

  “Why am I the only one that can’t sense that?”

  Renee shook her head. “Perhaps you have a block.”

  I reached for the root-thing, my fingers brushing it.

  The walls felt close, the air suddenly hot. The smell of hot cinnamon filled my nose, made me want to gag. I staggered. Yuri pulled the root thing away.

  Keisha charged over and grabbed me before I could fall.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’m used to saving your ass on a daily basis.”

  That made me smile, despite my light-headedness.

  I wished Alex was here. He’d be able to make sense of this.

  “Where’s Alex?” I asked Keisha.

  “Still working on extracting the intel.” She made a tapping motion with her fingers. “Said working computer magic can take a while.”

  Okay, that sounded like Alex.

  “Well, I guess I can try, I mean, meld with this thing.” I gave the root a hard look.

  Renee cleared her throat.

  I turned around, raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

  “We don’t think it’s wise,” she said.

  I cocked my head. “Why?”

  “The Hero Council may sense your power.”

  “That doesn’t make sense—how?”

  Keisha walked up and tapped the side of my head. “Come on, girl, even you can’t be that thick. They’ve got readers, like Frank.”

  “Frank was an independent contractor.” She had helped my Scourge cell locate the Emerald Green lab on the Oregon coast. Guilt slithered through me. I’d forced her to come with us. “She was one of kind.”

  Keisha gave me an incredulous you-can’t-be-that-stupid look. “She’s not the only one who can read objects.”

  “But the object is right here.”

  Renee spoke up. “We believe it’s not the only one.”

  I pointed at it. “You mean there’s more than one of these? How do you know?”

  “Rumors. Stories. Things we’ve gleaned.”

  I glanced at Yuri. He shrugged.

  “It could be. Surrell says it’s part of an ancient tree. A world tree of some kind, whatever that means.”

  “Okay, but, so what?” I retorted.

  Renee spoke slowly, like she was speaking to a child. “Because that means the pieces are linked.”

  I ground my teeth. “You don’t know that Support or the Hero Council has one of these.”

  “We don’t know that they don’t.”

  “It should be up to you,” Yuri said.

  “Dude, keep out of this.” Keisha told Yuri, her words thick with warning.

  My eyes narrowed. “Hey, he can have a say as far as I’m concerned. This is Yuri.”

  “Trying to meld with that nearly killed you last time,” Keisha said, voice hot. “So, he doesn’t have a say as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Why are you like this?” I demanded.

  Renee stood. “But he’s not part of our group. He’s not Empowered or Imbued.”

  He shrugged. “But I work for Empowered.”

  “They aren’t here,” she said. Her calm expression remained. Stubborn, that was Renee. Never got pissed, never raised her voice.

  I looked at Keisha. “You really think this is a bad idea? Really?”

  She ducked her head. Took a deep breath. She was worried.

  “I don’t know.” She swallowed, raised her head and looked me in the eye. “I say follow your gut, your instinct, like you normally do.”

  “I’m with Keisha,” Alex said from the doorway. “None of us know what that object truly is, or what effect melding with it will have.”

  “Hey!” I said, my spirits lifting at the sight of him.

  “What have you learned from the data you extracted?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The cracker program is still running. The data turned out to be triple-encrypted.”

  “Sounds like a royal pain in the ass to extract,” I muttered, turning my gaze back to the root thing.

  “It is,” he admitted. “But I can do it, it just takes time.”

  More skills I didn’t realize Alex possessed. The man of mystery. The idle thought spun away from my awareness.

  “I think you should meld with it,” Ella said.

  I looked up at her. She nodded.

  “I believe in you.”

  Suddenly there was an outbreak of confidence in my ability.

  Phillip looked like he wanted to argue with Ella, but kept his mouth shut.

  Renee gave me a long look. “Very well, Mathilda,” she said after what felt like an hour, but was probably maybe thirty seconds. “Do this, then.”

  I reached out and took the root. It was heavy, heavier than it seemed, like the weight of time was bound up in it.

  I shook myself, straightened up. “Okay, I’m going to do this thing. But not here. Someplace where I can concentrate. Alone.”

  I sat cross-legged on the floor of our supply hut, the amber root thing in my lap. Keisha waited outside with three Imbued and Yuri. Maybe this was crazy, but I had to try. The jungle choruses sang their songs in my head, making it hard to concentrate. I took a deep breath.

  I focused on the root-thing. It was warm to my touch. I closed my eyes, ran my fingers over the smooth skin-surface. It trembled in my grasp. The trembling echoed through me, right down to my bones. The root began to warm as I held it.

  I hesitated reaching into it, held off until I couldn’t bear to hold off any longer. I slowly extended my power into the edge of the bark. Last time, at Bey’s mansion in Tehran, I hadn’t been able to send my power into it at all. This time, it felt like I was pushing a knife into thick clay, but my power wiggled slowly into the root thing.

  I felt a distant whisper of life inside.

  I froze.

  The thing was alive, somehow, someway. I took another breath and pushed into it a little further with my power, fishing gently around.

  Life whispered again, louder.

  I flashed on the memory of Sanctuary and the Sacred Pool inside it. The power under the surface of the water, welling up from someplace hidden. The root was like that. Power faintly answered mine. I held still. Power inside it built up, stretched toward me.

  I shuddered. It was like being hit by a tidal wave of molten lava. I jerked again, gasped. I stretched out, trying to stay afloat, but the molten lava pulled me down, scorching my senses. The jungle choruses outside the hut were silenced by a deep roaring in my mind.

  I saw into the earth. Glowing golden roots stretched out beneath me. Flowed up into the jungle. Into the walls of the hut. Into the dead wood there.

  My mind stretched and my vision suddenly expanded. I could see the golden roots running for many miles beneath the earth, and for many miles above it. The roar became a deep, grinding groan that made my bones ache.

  The roots were pinned. They pulsed with energy, but the energy was blocked, pinned, like the roots themselves. I struggled to see what pinned the roots and the energy alike.

  It was like trying to see through steel and concrete. I couldn’t. I just felt the weight pressing down from, from somewhere. I couldn’t tell where exactly.

  Ancient, plant-covered ruins in jungles near and far swam into my mind’s eye. The ruins were fortress temples. Some looked Mayan, some Greek, some Chinese pagodas, others weird cylinder things I’d never seen before. All held the roots in their grip. I gasped. The necklace.

  There was something else, something invisible. I felt its grip, like dura-steel chains that weighed as much as mountains, pressing down on the roots, holding them, squeezing them until only a trickle of power could run through. Here and there the roots sprayed more power, where there were gaps in the Necklace.

  My vision sharpened. There were spirals of roots inside the roots, and places were the world folded in on itself. The Dark-Net? I strained to see more clearly, but the weight of the invisible mountains squeezed down on me. I couldn’t breathe. My chest was tight.

  The vision zoomed along a highway of roots, the world around the tangled highway flickering in and out of view. The Dark-Net. Through an ocean and around a big island, emerald green shining. An island dotted with dozens, hundreds of ancient ruins, mounds and towers. The vision followed the root highway underneath one mound that vibrated with power, but again, something held it back.

 

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