The audio came back with “…still alive. I have to believe that,” the lizardman said, and no amount of static could dampen the feverish intensity with which he said it. “I have to. I do.”
Static.
“Just wait. It’s coming up next,” said Nicci, slipping into the small space between Amber and Meoraq. Amber thought she heard a hiss, but when she glanced over, Meoraq was walking away, looking down empty streets in his usual restless way.
Amber waited, and after a long stretch of damaged tape and gibberish without any context to draw from, a single word leapt out: “Matezh.”
She jumped a little, but there wasn’t time to look for reactions in anyone else. The lizardman on the feed was still talking, but the sound was terrible, requiring all her concentration and a lot of guesswork to translate.
“…look for lights…careful, because the roads are…locked, but I…”
And then something else, something Amber couldn’t begin to figure out, but which made Meoraq stop and look sharply around—two words: “Nuu Sukaga.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, once the feed had collapsed again into static.
“I don’t know,” Meoraq told her, but the kiosk had all his attention now.
“It will ask for your mnabed—”
Amber touched Meoraq’s arm and he said, frowning, “A key…I think. The base of the word is the same, but I’ve never heard this variation.”
“—but just say it again. Nuu Suk—” A sudden storm of static obscured the rest of it. The lizardman on the screen kept talking, just a ghost behind waves of distortion and TV snow. The sound was nothing but electronic pops and scratches for several minutes, but there had to be more coming because several people were fidgety, anxious.
And then it came. The tape clearly hit the end of its recording, blipped to black, and then came back, relatively clear. The lizardman tapped at something at a console out of sight, looked directly up into whatever camera was recording this, and said, “If you can hear this, you’re not alone. But if you’re still in the cities, you have to leave. I know the emergency channels are still transmitting orders to stay in your homes, but that isn’t safe. And as far as I can see, the aid stations have all been overrun. But listen, I’m sending this from my base in Matezh. It’s got plenty of food, plenty of water, and it’s absolutely impenetrable. It’s also got probably the best communications system in the world,” he added with a shaky smile. Or maybe it was just the recording that shook; it was getting hard to tell. “So I know you can hear me. And you need to know—” The tape blipped and rolled back a bit, the color skewed. “—need to know that as long as any one of us is left alive, there’s still hope. But we have to come together. We have to—” Static and squeals filled the speakers for a few seconds and came back at deafening volume with, “—come to Matezh,” before snapping back into normal range. “This is no world to be in alone,” the lizardman said on the monitors. “It’s not too late. I know it seems that way, but it’s really not. I’m still here and so are you. We can still—”
He kept talking, but the audio was gone, and the next thing that came in clearly was, “…won’t help anymore,” so she knew it had gone the full loop.
“So,” said Meoraq. He looked around, not as if hunting out dangers this time, but just looking. Seeing the ruins, perhaps for the first time. “This is what he heard.”
“Huh?”
“Master Tsazr. The man I knew who entered Xi’Matezh.” His eyes finished their slow crawl over the dead city and came back to her. “He was here.”
“Maybe.” Amber spared the kiosk a distracted glance. “He says he’s transmitting across every bandwidth, or at least, I’m guessing that’s what he’s saying. So your teacher might not have been here, exactly—”
“You’ve always got to poke holes, don’t you?” interrupted Scott.
“—but this is probably something he heard if spent any time in one of these cities where the TV was on,” Amber finished, ignoring him. “I’m a little surprised you’d never heard it before. I guess you’ve never been in any ruins, huh?”
“Many times.” Meoraq tapped at the kiosk wall—the monitor nearest to his hand flickered—and shrugged his spines. “I’ve never listened to the things I’ve heard there before. Ha. I might have heard this a hundred times.” He paused and looked back over his shoulder at Scott. “I admit, you make me curious,” he said, and cocked his head (not, Amber recalled, a gesture of curiosity). “Why did you stop to listen? What is it that you believe it means?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” Scott waited until Meoraq deliberately flattened his spines before declaring, “It’s proof.”
Amber gave the lizard a few torturous seconds to jump on that, but he seemed content to just stand there and study Scott, so in the end, she broke. “Of what?”
Scott looked at her, smiling. “It’s a transmission, Miss Bierce. It’s coming from Matezh. And since you appear to be incapable or unwilling to add two and two, I’ll do it for you: There is a transmission tower at Matezh and,” he went on, raising his voice and one finger as Amber opened her mouth. “And it’s still working!”
Again Amber tried to talk, but this time it was Nicci who stopped her. Her color was high, but the shine in her eyes was too bright and brittle to be only excitement. It was a Bo Peep look, when the high was gone and she was trying to cozy just one more hit out of someone until tomorrow, just one more hit and everything was golden, just one more and it was all love.
“Listen,” Nicci pleaded in their mother’s voice, wearing their mother’s face. “Just listen to him, okay? He makes sense!”
Sense? Amber shook her head, looking back and forth from her baby sister/dead mother to the lunatic in a damned usher’s uniform, but it was Meoraq she kept coming back to. Meoraq, who merely watched it all play out with his head tipped up like that and his arms calmly folded.
“I’m aware of our situation here and I’m aware that we may all be living it with different goals,” Scott was saying, addressing all of them now. He talked fast and loud, making eye contact with everyone as he paced in front of the kiosk, and the choir was already clapping and swaying along. “I want to find a transmission tower at the end of this road. Hell, I want to find a skyport! Is that fantastic? Yes! But how fantastic, really? Meoraq—” He swung to point and Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. “—wants to find a temple where he can talk to God,” finished Scott, backing away. “And Amber Bierce wants us to find this!”
His voice bounced off the walls and down the lifeless street, making people look uneasily around them, reminded of the emptiness all over again.
“What are you doing, Scott?” Amber asked. She didn’t like the sound of her voice following those echoes. “How can you stand there and talk about skyports like it represents some sort of real chance?”
“Why not? Look around! All their stuff is still here! It still works!”
“Yeah, right. We don’t know what it’s doing, but it works. At least, the stuff that hasn’t crumbled literally to dust still works.”
“That was just the synthetic stuff.”
“And God knows there won’t be any of that on a starship!” Amber flung out her hands in a kind of furious surrender. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Let’s go to the magical land of Make Believe and pretend there is a ship somewhere in Xi’Matezh. What makes you think you could actually fly it? Piloting a starship isn’t something you just hope to figure out on the way. Do I seriously even have to point out that it’ll be an alien ship? With alien technology?”
“Technology follows logical rules, no matter who makes it,” Scott declared. “Look around you, Miss Bierce. The lights look like lights. The doors open like doors. Heck, even the bathrooms look like bathrooms.”
“And the giant fucking spiderweb in back of the building last night? What did that look like, genius?”
