The Dawning
Judy Gill
Chapter 1
The child’s psionic distress disturbed Serena’s fitful sleep, sleep made restless by dreams of the past, of her dead brother and the mental connection the two had shared. But Marcus was gone, taken from her by Andrew—family friend, lover, betrayer.
Half asleep, she recognized mind-touch and felt it as the remnant of a dream, but as the demand for attention grew more insistent, stronger than any link Marcus been capable of forming, she came fully awake, sitting bolt upright. Mind-touch? Here? No one, even one capable of telepathy, should know she was here. She’d arrived concealed, hooded, safe, from an underground spot far away. Something was seriously wrong!
She untangled long, bare legs from dream-tossed sheets, flung herself out of bed, and pelted down the stairs without so much as snatching up a robe. She followed now, not only the heart-mind cry of deep desolation, fear, and mystification that translated wordlessly to Want Mama, but an audible wailing made all the more poignant accompanied as it was by the mental suffering. This was an anguish she knew all too well, an emotion from which she knew her counterparts among the Free Talents were right to ensure all Sensitives had surcease for a full quarter of each year.
She unlocked the back door and rushed onto the porch. It was daybreak. Long, dark shadows stretched from the forest, the trees of which were beginning to grow golden crowns painted by the rays of rising sun.
She found the toddler standing in a shadowy corner beneath a waist high wall on a fluffy wool blanket colorful with gamboling lambs and puffy pink clouds woven into its fabric. This was no child of poverty, so what was she doing here, dropped off like a foundling?
The gate was firmly closed and latched, exactly as Serena had left it last night following a twilight stroll to the edge of the woods and along their border. Could this child have been the Presence she’d sensed then? That Presence had sent her nervously back inside where it could not follow.
Now, in the clear light of early morning, the tension returned, along with questions. How had a tiny child, maybe a little over one year of age, managed to access the porch up a flight of seven steps, and over a latched gate? A chill ran over her naked skin and she did an instinctive scan of the baby’s talents. The child was capable of neither teleportation nor telekinesis. Hence, she hadn’t brought the pink plastic tote bag that leaned on the half wall beside her with a baby-bottle jutting from one outside pocket. There was a note pinned beside the bottle.
She had been brought—planted on the porch for Serena to find.
The baby opened her pink mouth for another bellow and the powerful storm of her emotions swept over Serena, rocking her where she stood, nearly knocking her to her knees with their intensity. She allowed herself to drop and whether it was that the foundling recognized a Sensitive, or simply an adult willing to take charge, she staggered into Serena’s arms.
“All right, peanut,” Serena said, cuddling her close, stroking her back until the sobbing began to abate, the mental emanations become less strident. Those emotions contained an odd essence of something familiar, something she should recognize, and she held the child out from her for a moment, searching the tear-streaked, red face for signs of resemblance to. . . whom? There was none. Yet that sense of recognition of some part of this child’s genetic structure was there.
She stood, fetched the bag and lifted it easily in one hand. The straight pin used to fasten the note to its side scratched her thigh. She unpinned the sealed envelope and withdrew a small sheet of hand-made note-paper with rough edges, a kind sold everywhere throughout the Territory. The text was printed, and clearly done so by a trembling hand.
“Please keep her safe,” the note read. “They’ve given me a powerful dose of manufactured AIDS. I’m dying. Her father won’t protect her.”
Her father? Again, Serena scanned that small face for signs of resemblance. Who was this child’s father? Andrew? Josh? The thought of either finding her and the baby here was terrifying. Betrayers, tools of the SAPPS, both of them, the men she had loved.
Before Serena could read on, the rising sun glinted momentarily off something high above the trees. A Sky-Eye! It hovered, turned, and released its silent drone which swept low with deadly speed and intent directly at her. The drone dropped the silver glitter of a stickyweb, which sailed fast toward her and the baby. One more frantic try, a twist of her slick hand, muscles forcing a tighter grip out of shaking, nearly numb fingers, and she had the door open. As she fell through, thrusting the child ahead of her, the stickyweb caught her, locking her lower leg and foot to the boards of the porch. With a scream of agony, she tore the strands off and slammed the door, tatters of the hateful stuff still clinging to her hand. She ripped it loose, leaving behind more skin and blood, but at least she was free, though pain ate into her very soul and the torpor-inducing drug the web carried threatened to put her into deep sleep. Fighting it, she scrambled to her feet, locked and bolted the door then pressed her back against it as if to prevent further intrusion. Its solid steel carried the chill of the early spring morning into her bones as fear and the drug continued to freeze her mind, turning it as sluggish as a gelid river.
* * * *
Jamieson, unaware of the deployment of the drone, felt the mental emissions from both Serena and the child snap off as if a switch had been flipped and knew she had taken the child inside the safehouse. He sat back in the seat of his vehicle, smiling. It was done. The bait placed, though not by his hands—he hadn’t thought to do such a thing—sensed, and eagerly taken. The minute the woman had made contact with Serena, he’d known where she was bound and his urgent request that she not be stopped, agreed to. All he needed to do was follow, keeping mental contact with the child and Serena as best he could. As the woman neared Silver Springs Farm, though it had galled him, he’d made a prudent decision and sought the help of someone more knowledgeable than he when it came to that location. Andrew knew the farm first hand.
Now, filled with deep elation, he realized he would have not only this child, but Serena, the one person who was important in his life. When he explained, she would understand, and instead of hating him, she would thank him, and love him as she had before, rejoice with him in a newfound freedom. . . .
* * * *
Through the pain, Serena sought rationality, finally found it, knowing that in this specially reconstructed house with thin, dual sheets of copper carrying between them a protective electrical field sheathing every outside surface, masked by weathered wood, she and the child should have been safe, at least in the short term. If it hadn’t been for that Sky-Eye! It would report back and within minutes, agents would swarm the place to take the Talent they’d expect to find held immobile under the stickyweb.
The Talent. The baby. Panic broke her inertia. She must run, get this child to safety!
The baby, still sending out that mind-numbing emotional blizzard, still emitting ear-piercing shrieks of outrage, had fetched up against the far wall when Serena thrust her inside. Grateful for the blood pouring down her leg, dripping from her hand, because it would help rid her body of the drug, Serena grabbed up the child, snatched her blanket and bag and made for the stairs at a dead run, wet, bloody sole slipping on oak floors as she rounded the corner into the living room. Her home, her safehouse, had clearly been compromised—the baby planted as a ticking bomb to rout Serena from hiding.
She came close to opening the front door and thrusting the baby back outside, leaving her there alone for the next Sky-Eye to scan and plaster with a stickyweb while Serena herself escaped through the bolt hole. If captured, she had information that would imperil her entire Fold. Should she lose the one to save the many? To save herself? As if sensing the coming of a brand new rejection, the baby let out a louder wail and tried to push herself out of Serena’s arms, sending her off balance. She smashed into a wall, knocking askew a framed portrait of her grandmother, whose eyes seemed to burn into Serena’s, saying What are you thinking? Shove a child out into the cold?
Twisting, she pivoted around the newel post and raced up the stairs. She’d reached the landing when the old-fashioned, grating buzzer announced someone at the front door. The SAPPS? Ringing? Never!
Whoever it might be, she had no time to deal with them. She scrambled the rest of the way up, swung around the corner and into her bedroom. Snatching up her precious wig, she whirled into her closet, whose door shut automatically as she pressed a concealed stud. The floor dropped away, carrying her with it. Down, down, down, she and the child plunged with stomach twisting speed into darkness and stopped abruptly where the smell of damp earth overwhelmed the stench of her own fear.
A single, dim light came on as she swung aside a set of shelves that bumped gently against the bottom tread of a flight of narrow stairs leading down from the basement proper. She grabbed her backpack which long ago training had forced her to leave ready on the closet floor, slammed the shelved wall back into place, all in mere seconds, automatically sending the chamber back up to conceal her passage,. Her forehead tight against the baby’s while she attempted to project calm, to keep the child quiet, she leapt across the cool, earth-floored sub-basement which had originally been built as a root-cellar, heading for the tunnel that led ultimately to the forest—and freedom.
Her bare toes found, through long practice, another switch disguised as large, dead beetle in a corner. The light went out as the opposite wall slid nearly soundlessly aside. Serena entered a tunnel, closing the opening with a faint whoosh of compressed air. As the gap shut, a pale light came on. Tears of pain blurring her vision, she ran toward it, beneath it, past it, her passage triggering more lights at regular intervals, each new one leading her deeper underground along the steeply sloping tunnel. Behind her, lights she’d passed clicked out, and none, she saw with frequent glances over her shoulder, came on again, meaning no one followed immediately after.
As she limped onward as fast as she could manage, with no sense of anyone near, panic subsided to mere terror, allowing a modicum of rationality to seep in. The dry earth floor should swiftly sop up blood that continued to pour from her hand, leg and foot. She halted, gasping for breath. Even the most astute of SAPPS agents would take some time to find the bolt hole, despite having followed her blood-tracks up the stairs and right into the closet. The assumption could be that the trail had ended with her donning shoes then making an escape elsewhere. The closet, even on close inspection, would not be revealed as an elevator.
She must slow down, make proper plans. Should she risk ducking into the concealed, ventilated room which had once offered trail food and clothing with which her grandparents had supplied the escapers brought to their station on the New Underground Railroad? Though there’d likely be little if anything left of the supplies they had kept there, since their station had been closed long ago when both Serena and Marcus proved to be Talents, the room provided even better shielding than the house. Could she hide out there and trust the SAPPS would finally conclude she had slipped away and take their search elsewhere, extending the net?
Yes. She needed medication and bandages for her wounds. She needed clothing. She needed to put her on her wig that concealed a hood, a barrier to mental projections similar to the walls of the house. Inside the safe-room, they’d not only be protected by the electronic system her grandfather had devised, but further guarded by thirty feet of soil overhead.
Decision made, she spun back the way she’d come, retreating until she stood beneath a two-foot thick split cedar beam bearing a specific knot pattern. Beneath it, she grasped a seemingly natural piece of root protruding through the earthen wall, gave it a tug up and to the right, heard the faintest of clicks, twisted it toward the floor and then pulled outward, hard. The apparently solid wall gave way just far enough for her to slide through and when she was within, it glided back into place, sealing her off into a room she hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years. It was much better preserved than she’d anticipated,
She lay the baby on the bottom most of one of the six sets of bunk beds, stacked three high against two walls, stuffed her bottle into her mouth to quiet her, and reached for her pack, shivering with cold. As she made to open it, she saw the crumpled note she had somehow brought with her and, hoping for a clue within the portion she hadn’t read, following the ominous words: Her father won’t protect her . . . snatched a rough, musty blanket from one of the other bunks, wrapped herself in it and spread open the note.
“He claims they mean to train her as an agent but I overheard them saying she would have to be killed as soon as her ova ripen because of her extraordinary powers. She is a Telepath and we don’t know what else, but whatever kind of Talent she might eventually become, they know she’ll be too strong to be allowed to reach her full potential. But she’s my baby and I cannot bear let them use her as they’ve used me, or to think of her capped—or worse. She has such a quick, bright, and enquiring mind. She’s fourteen months old. She’ll forget me. Give her any name you like, but please, please love her and take her to safety. Don’t let them get her.”
The last sentence was underlined three times.
Them. A shudder of far more than cold shook Serena. She knew to whom that referred: The State Authority for Purity & Public Safety, the SAPPS, law-enforcement branch of the Territorial Government, comprised of and supposedly representative of God-fearing people who would, without compunction, kill or cap children they feared a whole lot more than they feared any god, and with equal willingness, obliterate anyone who attempted to help those children. People like her. Children like this one who, if her mother’s supposition was right, wouldn’t suffer anything so benign as mere capping. Assuming anyone in their right mind would consider capping benign. Of course, most members of the Territorial Government were not in their right minds.
With a snort, Serena bent forward, letting the blanket slide off her shoulders, and dug in one of the outside pockets of her pack until she found a tube of anesthetic cream, which she gingerly applied to the torn areas of her leg and hand, feeling the soothing effect almost immediately. The cessation of physical pain did nothing to stem her mental anguish.
The Territorial Government was a joke, a figurehead, the real control lay with the SAPPS who held sway over the Territory and those who lived within it.
Comprised of the hills, valleys, and plains from the border with California to Mount McKinley in the north, though few people lived north of the fifty-second parallel, the Territory was really too large for total control, a fact which allowed the Free Talents some range of movement.
This far south, most of civilization occupied sections of two main trenches, plains and valleys lying between the steep eastern slopes of the Coast Range and the western wall of the Cascade Mountains, then on broader plains between the Cascades and the Rockies. The infections left by the Bio Bombardments of 2065 had been relatively minimal in the rainshadows of these ranges, except in large cities, each of which had been wiped out completely. Along the Pacific coast from the tip of the Baja Peninsula to Anchorage, all cities were empty and poisoned.
The Bio Wars, during which genetically enhanced viral and bacterial agents were deployed, instead of killing only those they were intended for—the populace of North America by the bombardment of all centers over 5,000 in population, each of which had been specially targeted—had circled the northern hemisphere, carried on the jet stream and swirled to ground on the prevailing westerlies. They’d killed off most humans world-wide, leaving a few small, widely separated pockets of civilization connected only by powerful Telepaths who exchanged minimal items of information. There was little to be exchanged beyond survival tips. The Territory, protected in part by the width of the Pacific and the rain clouds captured by the western rise of the Coast Mountains, which poured their deadly burden down those slopes to the ocean, was only one such pocket, though probably the largest in North America. The SAPPS were the enemy of the Free Talents in the Territory, but they had their counterparts elsewhere.
Even the southern hemisphere had fared no better as desperate northerners trying to escape had taken the plagues with them as they fled to South Africa, Australia, South America, the islands of the South Pacific and Atlantic. Many died of infections for which there was no cure, but millions more died from starvation and in food riots triggered by a collapsed world economy.
No Normal was immune to the viruses that still cropped up from time to time, having lurked and lived undetected and uncleansed in the soil, in the roots of trees, in the very clouds that continued to peacefully circle a depopulated Earth.
Serena closed her eyes tightly, the thought painfully reminding her of the stray wisp of viral laden mist that had taken her grandparents from her and as a consequence, Marcus. And Andrew. Her parents had been killed in an accident before her first birthday and with the loss of the rest of her family, at twenty, she had been truly alone.
With determined effort, she pushed those memories aside. She was not alone now. She had this baby to care for, regardless of the child’s parentage. First priority to was ensure that she, herself, would be able to do so. She took a roll of gauze from her pack and, beginning at her torn toes, spiraled the bandage up her foot and leg, covering the wounds well. She didn’t want to leave even the faintest trace of blood to be followed, leading the SAPPS to wherever she went after she broke out of here with Baby . . . Baby. . . um. . .baby who?—The child needed a name.
She tore the last eighteen inches of gauze lengthwise and used the two strips to tie the bandage securely just above her knee. “Who are you?” she asked, twisting sideways to look into the child’s clear, guileless dark eyes. “Who would I like you to become? Who would you like to become? What name will suit you?”
The baby looked back at her with troubled, uncertain eyes. At once, Serena was reminded of the portrait of her grandmother whose questioning gaze had seemed to speak to her, preventing her from putting the baby back outside.
“I will call you Grace,” she said, choking back emotion. In this child, with her grandmother’s name, she would have a reminder of one of the two most important figures from her youth.
As if she understood, the child’s distressed expression grew calmer and her eyes drifted shut. Milk dribbled from the corner of her mouth. With unexpected tenderness welling up from deep inside, Serena wiped Grace’s small chin, letting the caress follow through until she cupped the side of her face. “We’re partners, little one., you and I.” The baby nuzzled her cheek trustingly into Serena’s hand. Yes, Serena vowed, together, she and Baby Grace would survive, and she would protect the child with her own life to keep her from the SAPPS.
Left to them, Grace would be used as a spy to ferret out other Talents, or if she refused to cooperate, permanently capped by having certain areas in her brain destroyed, her will restrained, her individuality stifled, her life rendered one of blank hopelessness, of comparative sensory deprivation that would leave her fit for nothing more than mindless manual labor in one of the state-run factories.
The Territory, where once thriving cities and industries had flourished, now hovered perpetually on the brink of economic disaster, hence slave-labor was used to provide the few manufactured commodities available to the general populace. The Free Talents intended to change that—along with many other evils.
Talents, born of women who had contracted mild cases of different ailments and survived, mothers such as Serena and Marcus’s, were immune. The Normals wanted this invulnerability for themselves. Over the years, the SAPPS had captured, tested, experimented on, and then capped or killed as many talented children as they could find—to no avail. They could not replicate this natural immunity.
The Talents who escaped detection by the SAPPS and were discovered by other Talents, were slipped to safety in one of the many Folds where they were nurtured and trained in the development, control, and concealment of their extra sensory abilities. While the Free Talents’ numbers were increasing, they were still, in this year of 2129, a feared, hated, hunted minority race of “mutants” whom the SAPPS deliberately and untruthfully accused of carrying infections to the “pure-of-blood” Normals.
Serena tugged on warm socks, then selected sturdily made hemp jeans from her pack, pulled them up over her legs and hips, leaving them unbuttoned while she rummaged for her last cotton—real cotton—T-shirt. She pulled that over her head, tucked it in, fastened her jeans, then glanced again at the baby, whose bottle had fallen to one side as she slept, totally relaxed, on her back.
Was she born of woman or was she a Tank Talent? The SAPPS had, in their attempts to isolate the genes that provided resistance to the bio-agents, blended the DNA of many captured Talents. Though they had been unsuccessful in creating the same kind of genetic changes made at the cellular level that protected Native Talents, some of the Tank Talents had been endowed with immeasurably powerful psychic abilities.
Serena bit her lip as the significance of that struck her. If the baby was a Tank Talent, she could be signing Grace’s death warrant by taking her into uncleansed territory, and chances were high that she was. A very few Talents—such as Serena—developed their abilities to a detectable state until around their fifth or sixth year. Most did so at or shortly following puberty. It was so rare as to be almost unheard-of for a child to have reached such a highly developed stage at the age fourteen months. Were those talents enough to have called Serena?
The inexplicable urge she’d experienced to return to Silver Springs Farm had begun the moment she left her Fold. She had resisted it for nearly two months, yet all that time, against her will, she’d been slowly making her way here. Advance and retreat, advance and retreat, yet each advance had brought her closer, each attempted retreat had been shorter, so compelling was the urge to return. Maybe it was Grace’s mother who had produced the irresistible compulsion. Had she sought out any Sensitive she could reach and just happened upon Serena, or had Serena been chosen on purpose?
The latter seemed most likely because few would know how safe the farm was, unless they had been to it. Grace’s mother might have been one of the last few to have passed through the New Underground Railroad and stopped in the Silver Springs station. She might have been old enough to remember and give details, though the rescued Talents were always moved at night, and saw little. Had the mother, advertently or inadvertently, given away the location of the farm as a safehouse? Did that explain the lurking Presence Serena had sensed last night? Had the baby’s mother been waiting only until she was certain Serena was at the farm before she left the child?
It didn’t matter. Trap or not, peril or not, as a trained Sensitive, a natural Empath, it was her sworn duty to save any and all Talents she could from those who would destroy them. Or use them. She must take the chance. She must try to get this child to safety. Tank Talent or genuine Native Talent, either way, Serena had to act to save her, as she’d been unable to save her brother. She would do this to avenge Marcus’s death. And the loss of her own, unborn child four years before.
A slash of pain cut through her as she allowed the thought to form. Normally, she could keep it under control, but the advent of this baby brought it all to the surface, the what-ifs, the might-have-beens. Damnation! That was the past. The here and now must be dealt with.
With her injured hand gloved in gauze, but still painful, she quickly opened each compartment in the baby’s bag to see what supplies she had. Another bottle, food, powdered milk, more clothing, though precious little of any of it. None of it would last until Serena’s day of recall came, which made the location of a new power cell for her GPS unit even more critical than she’d thought. To keep herself and her new charge fed and clothed, she’d need to be able to access more of her caches than she had committed to memory.
One of her plans had been to search the farmhouse and the tunnel system for one and if forced, to venture out into the town of Constitution on the far side of the forest, hoping she’d recognize someone she knew to be a safe contact. Possession of the GPS, operable or not, was enough to have her shot on sight. Though there were only nine satellites left, the others having deteriorated and fallen to earth over the years since their insertion into space, the SAPPS rigorously controlled all access to the information they could provide.
With everything stowed again, and a warm woolen sweater covering her nearly to her thighs, her thick-soled hiking boots zipped, her wig tightly in place, she was about to start searching the drawers and bins of the safe-room when she felt, as much as heard, a loud, repeated thumping from somewhere back toward the house. They were there! They were battering down the almost impervious steel door!
She grabbed up the groggy child along with the blanket from the bunk and triggered the door, slipping out of narrow entrance before it was fully opened, dragging her pack behind her to get it through the narrow gap. Once through, she hitched her pack over her arm and ran, Grace’s blankets dangling, threatening to trip her. There was no time though to stop and rewrap them, no time to slip her arms through the straps of her backpack. The baby’s bag beat against her left knee. Her own pack hammered against her right one with the same cadence as her heart pounded against her ribs, sending jolts of fire through her nerves as her torn flesh protested the further insult.
When she reached the steepest part of the ramp and knew she was just below the landing from which the concealed exit led out over a pool fed by a natural spring, which then spilled down into a creek, she was forced to slow. Once she was out, she’d need all her energy for running. As she waited for her breathing to regulate, for the stitch in her side to abate, she carefully slid Grace to the broad stone slab of the landing and hitched her pack on properly. She readjusted Grace’s wrappings, took a deep breath, and with her forehead pressed to Grace’s, projecting, she hoped, the need for calm and mental silence, she reached for the portal’s release, her hand crossing an invisible beam that doused the only light on the landing. Even this deep in the forest, her grandfather had known it wouldn’t do to allow so much as a glimmer of artificial light to show when anyone made an exit during the night.
As the light went out, and just as her finger depressed the release button, a distant, heavy whump! sounded and a blast of air caught her as if in a maelstrom, lifted her, flung her outward. Her right shoulder brushed the inside of the door as it blasted open and sent her and Grace flying. The contact was enough to give her a spin, which landed her on her back in the middle of the rushing stream. Though her backpack cushioned her fall, both she and the baby were soaked.
Serena, shocked with cold, deafened by the concussion behind her, and totally bewildered as to where she was, what she was doing there, and why, lay for a moment with the water tugging at the wig incorporating her hood.
Her hood? That also meant the remote power source, which looked like a small mole under her chin, was immersed and could fail if damaged. Blinking her eyes clear of water and lifting the sodden baby, she struggled to her feet, her legs unsteady, her gaze still disbelieving on the stream swirling around her ankles. Automatically, she checked the security of her wig, then let her gaze trail around as she continued to collect herself.
A pink bag floated between her and the far bank, caught between two boulders. As she stared at the scene in puzzlement, then at her dark green pants clinging to her legs, another pair of feet appeared, large boots, almost toe-to-toe with her own.
She gasped, looked up, and saw. . . Andrew.
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