“Dr. Miles, Dr. Miles!”
The voice belongs to the hotel proprietor, a small, deeply tanned man with jet dark hair and a nervously formal manner, who bounds up the stairs. “There is a phone call for you,” he says with excitement. He pauses to catch his breath, waving air into his face. “Someone has been trying to reach you all day.”
“Really? Who?” As far as Logan is aware, nobody knows he’s here.
The proprietor glances at the door to Nessa’s room, then back again. “Yes, well,” he says, and clears his throat self-consciously, “they are on the phone now. They say it is quite urgent. Please, I will show you the way.”
Logan follows him downstairs, through the lobby, to a small room behind the check-in desk, where a large black telephone rests on an otherwise empty table.
“I will leave you to it,” the proprietor says with a curt bow.
Alone, Logan picks up the receiver. “This is Professor Miles.”
A woman’s voice, unknown to him, says, “Dr. Miles, please hold while I patch you through to Dr. Wilcox.”
Melville Wilcox is the on-site supervisor at First Colony. Such calls happen only rarely, and always with considerable advance planning; only by positioning a chain of airships across the Pacific, a tenuous and expensive arrangement, can a signal be relayed. Whatever Wilcox wants, it’s bound to be important. For a full minute, the line crackles with empty static; Logan has begun to think the call’s been lost when Wilcox comes on the line.
“Logan, can you hear me all right?”
“Yes, I can hear you fine.”
“Good, I’ve been trying to set this up for days. Are you sitting down? Because you might want to.”
“Mel, what’s happening there?”
His voice grows excited. “Six days ago, an unmanned reconnaissance airship surveying the coast of the Pacific Northwest took a photo. A
very
interesting photo. Do you have access to an imager?”
Logan scans the room. To his surprise, there is one.
“Give me the number,” Wilcox says. “I’ll have Lucinda send it over.”
Logan fetches the proprietor, who enthusiastically provides the information and offers to man the machine.
“Okay, they’re sending it,” Wilcox says.
The imager emits a shriek. “The connection has been made, I believe,” the proprietor declares.
“Why don’t you just tell me what it is?” Logan asks Wilcox.
“Oh, believe me, it’s better if you see this for yourself.”
A series of mechanical clunks and the machine draws a piece of paper from the tray. As the print head move noisily back and forth, Logan becomes aware of a second sound, coming from outside—a kind of rhythmic beating. He has only just realized what he is hearing when Nessa enters the room, dressed for dinner. She looks animated, even a little alarmed.
“Logan, there’s a lifter out there. It’s looks like it’s about to land on the front lawn.”
“And here we are,” the proprietor announces.
With a triumphant smile, he places the transmitted picture onto the desk. It is the image of a house, seen from above. Not a ruin—an actual house. It is encircled by a fence; within this perimeter are a second, smaller structure, a privy perhaps, and the neatly planted rows of a vegetable garden.
“Well?” Wilcox says. “Did you get it?”
There is more. In the field adjacent to the house, rocks have been arranged on the ground to make letters, large enough to be read from the air.
“What is it, Logan?” Nessa asks.
Logan looks up; Nessa is staring at him. The world, he knows, is about to change. Not just for him. For everyone. Outside the walls of the inn, the racket reaches a crescendo as lifter the touches down.
“It’s a message,” he says, showing Nessa the paper.
Three words:
COME
TO
ME
.
92
Six days have passed. Logan and Nessa, in the observation lounge, sit in silence.
On an airship, time moves differently. The excitement of travel quickly wanes, replaced by a kind of mental and physical hibernation; the days seem shapeless, the ship itself barely to move at all. Logan and Nessa, the only passengers, the objects of obscene fussing by a staff that far outnumbers them, have passed the time sleeping, reading, playing cards. In the evening, after eating by themselves in the too-large dining room, they have their pick of movies from the ship’s collection and watch alone or with members of the crew.
But now, with their destination in view, time snaps back into line. The ship is headed north, tracing the northern California coastline at an altitude of two thousand feet. Towering cliffs wreathed by morning fog, mighty forests of ancient trees, the indomitable greatness of the sea where it collides with the land: Logan’s heart stirs, as it always does, at the sight of this wild, untouched place.
“Is it what you thought it would be?” he asks Nessa.
Looking raptly out the window, she has barely spoken a word since breakfast.
“I’m not sure what I thought.” She turns her face toward him, lips pressed together and eyes slightly squinted, like someone puzzling out a problem. “It’s beautiful, but there’s something else to it. A different feeling.”
Not much later, the platform appears. Standing a hundred meters above the ocean’s surface, it has the appearance of a rigid structure, though it is, in fact, floating at anchor. The airship moves gracefully into place and attaches at the nose to the docking tower; ropes and chains are lowered; the vessel is drawn slowly downward to the deck. As Logan and Nessa disembark, Wilcox strides toward them with a rolling gait: a heavyset man with an untidy beard peppered with gray, his face and arms bronzed by sun and wind.
“Welcome back,” Wilcox says as they shake. “And you,” he says, turning, “must be Nessa.”
Wilcox is aware of Nessa’s role, although he is, Logan knows, not entirely comfortable with it, believing it is too soon to involve the press. But that is part of Logan’s design. Security is never as tight as it should be; word will get out, and once it does, they will lose control of the narrative. He’d rather get ahead of the situation by giving the story to one person, someone they can trust.
“Do you need to eat, clean up?” Wilcox asks. “The bird’s fueled and ready whenever you want.”
“How long will it take to get to the site?” Logan asks.
“Ninety minutes, about.”
Logan looks at Nessa, who nods. “I see no reason to delay,” he says.
The lifter waits on a second, slightly elevated platform, its props pointed upward. As they walk to it, Wilcox brings Logan up to speed. Per Logan’s instructions, no one has approached the house, although the building’s inhabitant, a woman, has been sighted several times, working in the yard. Wilcox’s team has moved equipment to the camp in order to bag the house, if that’s what Logan wants to do.
“Does she know she’s being watched?” Logan asks.
“She’d have to, with all those lifters going in and out, but she doesn’t act like it.” They take their seats in the bird. From the portfolio under his arm, Wilcox removes a photo and hands it to Logan. The image, taken from a great distance, is grainy and flattened; it shows a woman with a nimbus of white hair, hunched before a vegetable patch. She is wearing what appears to be a kind of thickly woven sack, almost shapeless; her face, angled downward, is obscured.
“So who is she?” Wilcox says.
Logan just looks at him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Wilcox says, holding up a hand in forbearance, “and pardon me, but no fucking way.”
“She’s the sole human inhabitant of a continent that’s been depopulated for nine hundred years. Give me another theory and I’ll listen.”
“Maybe people came back without our knowing it.”
“Possible. But why just her? Why haven’t we found anybody else in thirty-six months?”
“Maybe they don’t want to be found.”
“She has no problem with it. ‘Come to me’ sounds like an engraved invitation.”
The conversation is drowned out by the roar of the lifter’s engines; a lurch and they are airborne again, rising vertically. When a sufficient altitude is achieved, the nose tips upward as the rotors move to a horizontal position. The lifter accelerates, coming in low over the water and then the coast. The ocean vanishes. All below them is trees, a carpet of green. The noise is tremendous, each of them encased in a bubble of their own thoughts; there will be no more talking until they land.
Logan is drifting at the edge of sleep when he feels the lifter slowing. He sits up and looks out the window.
Color.
That is the first thing he sees. Reds, blues, oranges, greens, violets: extending from the forested base of the mountains to the sea, flowers paint the earth in an array of hues so richly prismatic it is as if light itself has shattered. The rotors tilt; the aircraft begins to descend. Logan breaks his gaze from the window to find Nessa staring at him. Her eyes are full of a mute wonder that is, he knows, a mirror to his own.
“My God,” she mouths.
The camp is situated in a narrow depression separated from the wildflower field by a stand of trees. In the main tent, Wilcox presents his team, about a dozen researchers, some of whom Logan is acquainted with from previous trips. In turn, he introduces Nessa to the group, explaining only that she has come as “a special adviser.” The house’s resident, he is told, has been working in the garden since morning.
Logan issues instructions. Everybody is to wait here, he says; under no circumstances should anyone approach the house until he and Nessa report back. In Wilcox’s tent, they strip to their underclothes and don their yellow biosuits. The afternoon is bright and hot; the suits will be sweltering. Wilcox tapes the joints of their gloves and checks their air supplies.
“Good luck,” he says.
They make their way through the trees, into the field. The house stands about two hundred meters distant.
“Logan …” Nessa says.
“I know.”
Everything is perfect. Everything is just the same, without the slightest deviation. The flowers. The mountains. The sea. The way the wind moves and the light falls. Logan keeps his eyes forward, lest he be consumed by the powerful emotions roiling inside him. Slowly, in their bulky suits, he and Nessa make their way across the field. The house, one story, is homey and neat: wide-planked siding weathered to gray, a simple porch, a sod roof, from which a haze of green grass grows.
As promised, the woman is working in the dooryard, which is planted in rose bushes of several colors. Logan and Nessa halt just outside the picket fence. Kneeling in the dirt, the woman doesn’t notice them, or appears not to. She is profoundly old. With gnarled hands—fingers bent and stiffened, skin puckered in folds, knuckles fat as walnuts—she is plucking weeds and placing them in a bucket.
“Hello,” Logan says.
She offers no reply, just continues her work. Her movements are patient and focused. Perhaps she has not heard him. Perhaps she is hard of hearing or deaf.
Logan tries again: “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
She stops in the manner of someone alerted by a distant sound; slowly she raises her face. Her eyes are rheumy, damp and faintly yellow. She squints at him for perhaps ten seconds, fighting to focus. Some of her teeth are gone, giving her mouth a pursed appearance.
“So, you’ve decided to come up, then,” she says. Her voice is a coarse rasp. “I was wondering when that would happen.”
“My name is Logan Miles. This is my friend Nessa Tripp. I was hoping we could talk with you. Would that be all right?”
The woman has resumed her weeding. She has also begun, faintly, to mutter to herself. Logan glances at Nessa, whose face, behind her plastic mask, drips with sweat, as does his own.
“Would you like some help?” Nessa asks the woman.
The question appears to puzzle her. The woman shifts backward onto her haunches. “Help?”
“Yes. With the weeding.”
Her mouth puckers. “Do I know you, young lady?”
“I don’t believe so,” Nessa replies. “We’ve only just arrived.”
“From where?”
“Far away,” says Nessa. “
Very
far away. We’ve come a great distance to see you.” She points toward the field of rocks. “We got your message.”
The woman’s yellowed eyes follows Nessa’s gesture. “Oh, that,” she says after a moment. “Set that up a long time ago. Can’t really remember the reason for it. You say you want to help with the weeding, though—that’s fine. Come on through the gate.”
They enter the yard. Nessa, taking the lead, kneels before the rose beds and begins to work, scooping the dirt aside with her thick gloves; Logan does the same. Best, he thinks, to let the woman get used to their presence before pressing her further.
“The roses are lovely,” Nessa says. “What kind are they?”
The woman doesn’t answer. She is scraping the ground with a metal claw. She appears to take no interest in them whatsoever.
“So, how long have you been here?” Logan asks.
The woman’s hands stop, then, after a beat, resume working. “Started work early this morning. Garden doesn’t rest.”
“No, I meant in this place. How long have you lived here?”
“Oh, a long time.” She plucks another weed and, unaccountably, places the green tip between her front teeth and nibbles on it, her jaws working like a rabbit’s. With a sound of dissatisfaction, she shakes her head and tosses it in the bucket.
“Those suits you’re wearing,” she says. “I think I’ve seen those before.”
Logan is perturbed. Has someone else been here? “When was that, do you think?”
“Don’t remember.” She purses her lips. “I doubt they’re very comfortable. You can wear what you like, though. It’s not really my business.”
More time passes. The pail is nearly full.
“Now, I don’t believe we got your name,” Logan says to the woman.
“My name?”
“Yes. What are you called?”
It is as if the question makes no sense to her. The woman lifts her head and angles her gaze toward the sea. Her eyes narrow in the bright oceanic light. “No one around here to call me anything.”
Logan glances at Nessa, who nods cautiously. “But surely you have a name,” he presses.