Authors: Adrian Howell
“The Angels control entire countries?” asked James.
“Not entirely,” replied Proton. “Not even King Divine can convert everyone at once. It simply takes too much time and increases the risks of exposure. The Angels have a handful of converts in high positions of almost every world government now, but they are more like spies. They can push their countries’ policies in the interests of the Angels, but they can’t openly serve Randal Divine because of various checks and balances in their governments. Even converted military dictators need the support of their non-converted government employees to rule their countries.”
“But every day more and more people are being converted,” put in Mark. “It’s a whole new ball game with a psionic king. Conversion never wears off so there’s no need to reconvert, which means King Divine’s influence has no natural boundaries.”
That, of course, wasn’t true. Our team knew that Randal Divine wasn’t a master controller and that the Angels didn’t have the ability to permanently convert anyone. But Catherine Divine was young and powerful, and her conversions wouldn’t wear off for many years, even decades. She could keep converting people for now and worry about the maintenance of her empire later.
“People have to be taken to the king to be converted,” Ed Regis pointed out. “That means he has to be out there somewhere.”
“If we knew where he was,” Proton said with a touch of irony in his voice, “we could turn this whole war around in a heartbeat. The Angels know that and they have learned from their mistakes at the gathering of lesser gods. They underestimated the Guardians there. They won’t do it again.”
The Historian had told me to seek out Randal and Catherine’s location from those closer to the conflict. Entirely frustrated, I blurted out, “You don’t know anything?”
Proton laughed. “We know some things, Richard.”
There was a knock on the doorframe. A Knight stepped through the curtain and announced, “There’s a transmission incoming from the Council.”
“I’ll take it,” said Proton, standing up as straight as possible without bashing his head against the concrete ceiling. He said to Mark, “It’s probably just a routine update.”
Mark nodded. “I’ll finish briefing Tiffany’s team and then show them around.”
Proton left with the Knight.
Not to say that I wasn’t interested in the “some things” that Proton claimed the Resistance knew about the Angels, but as he had said, first things first. I asked, “So how did you end up becoming the leader of the Guardian Resistance, Mark?”
“Jacob,” Mark corrected gently. “Remember, Richard, call signs only in Lumina.”
I said exasperatedly, “Can’t we at least use our real names when we’re alone?”
“No,” Terry said flatly. “Jacob is right. We should stay consistent. Otherwise we might say our names when we shouldn’t.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine, Jacob, so how did you become the leader?”
“Co-leader,” said Mark, correcting me again. “And there isn’t really much to tell. The night that New Haven fell to the Angels, I was being evacuated along with Cindy, Mr. Baker and the rest of the New Haven Council. But when we got to the airport, we discovered that there weren’t enough seats on the airplane. Since I was neither psionic nor politically important to the Angels, I was asked to stay behind.”
“Lucky you,” I commented.
“So it turned out,” Mark agreed grimly. “I escaped the city by public transportation. Later, I met Proton and his Lancers at a Guardian outpost. We slowly re-entered this town with the help of a handful of Guardians who had never left. Proton and I have worked here ever since.”
Mark was a pacifist like Cindy, and by the brevity of his account, I could sense that he didn’t want to talk about some of the things he had seen and done in the service of the Guardians here. I didn’t press him for details.
“Now, if it isn’t part of your great secret,” said Mark, “I would very much like to hear where you people have been all this time.”
I was about to start explaining, but just then we all heard a loud whine escape from Alia’s stomach.
Trying not to laugh, I said to Mark, “We don’t want to be rude, but we missed lunch and we’re starving.”
Mark immediately called through the makeshift wall for some food to be prepared for us. As we waited, Mark apologetically informed us that Nonus Twenty Point Five didn’t have a proper kitchen and that meals were often fairly basic in nature, or “prison-grade” as he jokingly put it.
“It’s fine,” said Terry. “We were spoiled rotten at Wood-claw.”
Within minutes, a Knight brought in bowls of instant tomato soup, some dry crackers and very tossed salad.
As we ate, we told Mark most of our story: our escape from New Haven, our training program at Walnut Lane, Alia’s abduction and subsequent rescue of her and Ed Regis, our expedition to the Historian and how we ended up at Wood-claw. We of course didn’t tell him what the Historian had revealed to us.
When I told him the bit about rescuing Ed Regis from the Angel outpost, Mark was astonished to learn that Ed Regis had been the leader of the Wolf unit that captured and tortured Alia and me so many years ago.
“I was pretty desperate for help, Jacob,” was my lame excuse.
“Nevertheless, a forgiving spirit is truly divine,” Mark said approvingly.
“Well, who says I’ve forgiven him?” I chuckled. “But Edmund pulled us through a lot of tough places since then, so I consider us pretty even by now. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for him.”
“Then you have my deepest gratitude, sir,” Mark said to Ed Regis.
Ed Regis merely nodded silently.
Mark said to me, “You don’t know how happy I was to hear from Wood-claw that you and Alyssa were still alive. I’m so sorry about what happened to Cindy. And of course about your sister Catherine. It must be terrible for you.”
Mark’s words about Catherine threw me for a moment. Then, understanding what he meant, I replied, “That’s why I’ve come back, Jacob. To save Cat from Randal Divine. If we can somehow kill the Angel king, then my sister’s conversion will break and so will Cindy’s. We can still save them both.”
“I’m hopeful for that, too,” said Mark. “I had feared that you and Alyssa had been killed last year, and recovering Cindy would not have saved her in the least if you two were already dead.”
We were done with our soup, and Terry decided that it was time to bring the meeting back to its original purpose. “What do you guys know about the Angels and King Divine?” she asked.
Mark replied, “Well, we know that the Divines do not reside in Lumina.”
“We suspected that,” said James.
We knew from the start that Lumina wouldn’t be an ideal spot to keep the world’s last psionic master, especially if this master was rumored to be an all-powerful king. Lumina was too obvious a target. If all else failed, our country’s government (assuming that it still had the capacity) could just drop a nuclear weapon here to guarantee the king’s death.
“But there is a definite connection between this city and the Divines,” continued Mark. “Many of the captured members of Guardian breakaways and independent factions are brought to Lumina, some of them from considerably far away. Of these people, the potential converts are held here and evaluated, and then shipped to the king by order of priority. High-ranking Guardians first, of course, followed by Knights and key members of their families. Some low-level Guardians and independents have been held here for months and still haven’t been taken for conversion.”
“Potential converts…” I repeated. “Does that mean there are people who are brought here but not put on the waiting list for conversion?”
“Certainly,” said Mark. “There are simply too many people coming in now for King Divine to convert them all. Nor does he need to. In the case of families that willingly turn themselves in, at most only one member is converted while the rest are screened and then just trusted.” He smiled, adding, “Many of our Resistance members come from such families. Raider, who we assigned to bring you here, is one such person. His wife is converted but he and his daughter are not.”
“And the Angels don’t suspect him at all?” asked James. “Wouldn’t his wife turn him in if she found out?”
“I’m quite sure she would turn him in, but the Angels have yet to suspect anything. Raider is a delver himself so he knows a few tricks around delving without directly blocking the mind readers. And if his wife did suspect him, we have our own mind-writers to take care of that, too.”
We had gone off topic and I wasn’t interested in Raider or his wife. “Tell us what you know of the people who are sent to Randal for conversion,” I said.
“They’re usually taken in groups of ten to thirty,” said Mark. “They disappear from Lumina for a month or so before they return as new converts. We figure the travel time is about eight to twelve days one way. Then there can be extra time depending on how long the conversions take and whether some of the candidates resist or not. All of the candidates are pre-screened and, if necessary, psychologically broken prior to shipment so that they accept their conversions quickly. But some of them probably still resist when they arrive.”
I kept my shudder to myself. “Some of them don’t come back?” I asked.
Mark nodded. “It’s rare, but it happens.”
“Ten days,” mused James. “There are few places in the world that people can’t get to in ten days.”
Ed Regis shook his head. “Not covertly, Jack.”
Mark agreed with Ed Regis. “We do believe that the Divines live in this country somewhere.”
“I assume you have tried to follow the transports?” asked Ed Regis.
Mark nodded. “We did, back when we still could. They were bussed to a local airport and put on a sightseeing aircraft which did a six-hour loop around the countryside and returned to the same airport. When the planes landed, the candidates were gone. We believe they had been parachuted out at some prearranged location and then shipped on their way.”
“What do you mean by ‘back when you could’?”
“They stopped bussing people to the airport a few months ago,” explained Mark. “Rumor has it a new underground tunnel was completed starting in the gathering place under the Lumina Prime building, and that it stretches to the starting point of the journey to the king’s secret palace. The problem is, we can’t get into the gathering place, and we can’t yet locate where the tunnel comes out.”
“It’s our own damn gathering place!” James said in a frustrated tone. “You can’t get in?”
“Well, no one we sent in came back out, Jack,” said Mark. Then, after a moment’s pause, he corrected himself, saying, “Actually, two did come back out. But they had been converted.”
“So what is the Resistance actually accomplishing here?” asked James.
“Not as much as we would like,” admitted Mark. “Our presence here has grown greatly these last few months. At any given time, we have between fifty to eighty operatives working in Lumina. But our operation remains primarily observation, occasionally punctuated by kidnapping and general mischief. Recently, we managed to capture one of the Seraphim’s top commanders. We were hoping that he would know the whereabouts of King Divine. Unfortunately, he managed to kill himself before we could extract any information.”
“That seems to be going around,” Terry said wryly.
Better safe than sorry,
I thought to myself as Terry told Mark the story about the two Angels who cracked their heads open at the Wood-claw outpost three days ago.
When Terry finished, Mark nodded and said, “I agree that it sounds like they knew something important.”
“We’ve brought photos and fingerprints of them if you’re interested,” said Terry.
“We’re always interested in any possible leads.”
“They’re in my bag, which I think we left at the trapdoor,” said Terry. “I’ll get them to you later.”
“Thank you,” said Mark. “We need everything we can get our hands on right now. As Proton said, the only thing we really need to do is kill the king, but that is proving most difficult. Even high-level Seraphim who are part of the shipping process know only their own small segments of the path that the prisoners are taken on. And, of course, the returning converts have their memories of the journey completely erased.”
I could sense Ed Regis itching to ask about Cindy, so I saved him the trouble by bringing it up myself. “Does Cindy really live at the top of Lumina Prime?”
“We believe she does, Richard,” replied Mark, “but we have never seen her out of the building.”
I explained stiffly, “Some of us think that Cindy might know where Randal Divine is hiding.”
“And we agree that it’s possible,” Mark said carefully. “But capturing Cindy Gifford alive may prove nearly as difficult as capturing Randal Divine himself. Also, as she is a converted Angel, it’s doubtful that we could extract the information we need without breaking her mind completely.”
I could tell that Mark was as against going after Cindy as I was, but it annoyed me that he didn’t straight-out say so. At first, Mark had looked like the same nice man I had known when I was a boy. Now I could see how much this war had changed everyone.
Mark continued in a businesslike tone, “At the present, in addition to searching for the exit point of the secret tunnel, we are constantly on the lookout for other potential targets who might supply us with a lead on the Divines.”
“You really talk like a military commander, Jacob,” I remarked, shaking my head.
Mark shrugged. “I am, in a manner of speaking.”
“You used to be a priest.”
“And I hope to be one again someday,” Mark said with a grim smile. Then, leaning forward in his chair, he said, “But since you mention Cindy, Richard, there is something I have been meaning to ask you about her. That is, of course, assuming you were still alive to ask.”
“And here I am,” I said evenly. “So what about Cindy?”
“A long time ago now, Cindy’s husband, Eric Laude, killed the last Guardian queen, Diana Granados,” said Mark.
“So I heard,” I replied, remembering the story Cindy had told me in her car one wintry night.
“Then I assume you also heard that Eric was killed by Ralph Henderson and that Cindy went into hiding shortly thereafter.”