Infinite

4 GATHERING

HEAD ACHING FROM lack of rest and too much mortal peril, I slumped down the stairs to find that Stef had arrived with several other friends.

“So much for sleep,” Sam muttered.

“Rin is here.” I nodded toward the crowd. “She can look at your hand.” Rin was a small girl, about ten or eleven years old, but she was one of the best medics in Heart. For some reason, she liked me. She’d stuck up for me several times, even before I’d known who she was.

“Wow.” Stef looked up as we descended the stairs. “You two look terrible.”

“Ana!” Sarit jumped up and threw her arms around me. “You’re okay.”

I hugged her back, relieved she was here. Everyone knew Sarit and I were best friends; Deborl would target her if we left her behind. Stef could take care of herself, but Sarit was gentle. She wouldn’t hurt anyone, even to protect herself.

“Are we safe here?” someone asked.

Stef nodded. “I’ve secured the library entrances. And when we leave, no one goes anywhere alone. Take groups of at least five.”

People nodded.

“What’s your news, Stef?” Sam glanced around the crowd, and found an unoccupied chair to collapse into. Everyone looked exhausted, their coats on over nightclothes and hastily packed bags by the door. Weapons had been piled onto one of the tables, and several people were hunched over SEDs, sending messages or checking some sort of function that involved a map.

Everyone was newsoul-friendly. Some had given me lessons on various subjects, while others were simply close friends of Sam. There was another handful I recognized from a list Sarit and I had made: they were pregnant women. They might be carrying oldsouls, but . . . they might be carrying newsouls, too.

“It’s all bad news.” As usual, in spite of the chaos, Stef looked like she’d spent an hour grooming herself. Not like she’d just been sneaking people out of their houses, and possibly killing others.

I glanced at Sam on his chair, but there wasn’t room for both of us unless I sat on top of him, and no one else was sitting on their friends. Even the other newsouls were tucked away somewhere, sleeping. Grudgingly, I claimed my own chair on the other side of the crowd.

“Everyone knows that Sam and Ana were attacked tonight. They asked me to bring most of you here in case there were other attacks, but the truth is there’s much more for us to worry about. I’ve sent a program to all of your SEDs. Whit and Orrin already had it, of course, but the rest of you should pay attention.” Stef held up her SED. “This program is linked to the monitoring stations around Range. They read all seismological activity and translate it into information that’s useful to us.”

As she spoke, I found the new function on my SED and opened it. Several small red dots appeared over a map of Range. A large one was centered right under Heart.

“The dots are recent earthquakes,” Stef went on. “The bigger the dot, the bigger the earthquake. If you tap the menu, you can switch between different types of events. There’s another that shows where the hydrothermal eruptions took place. We won’t know all the details on those until someone actually goes to look. I’m afraid some of the equipment was damaged or destroyed, but this should give you an idea of what’s going on.”

“And what is going on?” Rin pulled a blanket around her shoulders and yawned. “Sorry, I’m just tired, not bored. Stef woke me up, even though no one was trying to kill me.” She flashed Stef a dark look, suggesting she should probably not sleep anywhere close to Rin or risk waking up dead.

And that was curious. Why were all these people here? I’d been expecting the parents of newsouls and a few of our closest friends. Ten or twelve people. Not forty.

Whit spoke up. “The caldera is unstable. The ground has been rising measurably over the last few months, and Midrange Lake is draining, probably from a crack at the bottom. The geysers have been going off more frequently, and the number of earthquakes—even small ones you never feel—has more than tripled.” He looked all around the group, meeting my eyes for a moment. “The caldera is going to erupt. I don’t know when, but I know it will be soon.”

“It will happen on Soul Night,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

The seconds stretched like minutes, and finally Sarit said, “Well, are you going to explain how you know that?”

“Meuric told me, the night of Templedark. He said something would happen on Soul Night, and that nothing would matter after it. I think he meant the eruption. And”—I glanced from Sam to Stef, who nodded encouragement—“that Janan will ascend.”

Someone gasped.

“Janan isn’t real,” Aril said. I only vaguely knew her from mathematics lessons; while she was always friendly, I’d never realized she’d cared about me that much.

“He is real. Menehem proved it the night of Templedark. He stopped reincarnation with a poison, remember?”

Everyone shuddered.

“Janan is real,” I went on, “but he’s not what you think he is. He’s not what Meuric and Deborl have told you.” That was probably safe to reveal, though the truth—that Janan had once been nothing more than a human—was no doubt something they would immediately forget. “He’s going to return on Soul Night. Or rise. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know what will happen after. But it’s pretty certain that his ascension will cause so much instability in the caldera that it will erupt. Not just hydrothermal eruptions like we had tonight, but a cataclysmic event.”

Stef nodded. “I agree. Whit? Orrin? You’ve been studying Rahel’s work.”

People winced at Rahel’s name—she was a darksoul, a soul lost during Templedark—but Whit and Orrin nodded. “That does seem to be what all this is pointing toward,” Whit said with a sigh. “But what can we do? There’s no way to stop it.”

“No way to stop the caldera,” I said, “but if we stop Janan from ascending, perhaps that will put everything else back in order.”

“That sounds impossible.” Sarit leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “It sounds a little crazy, too. I believe what you’ve said about Janan, but it sounds crazy.”

“I know.”

Stef put her SED in her pocket. “I agree with Ana about stopping Janan.” When she met my eyes, I knew she was thinking of Cris and his sacrifice, and everything else that had happened inside the temple. “But let’s debate that later, because there are other things we need to discuss before everyone passes out from exhaustion.”

I shot her a grateful look. I didn’t want to discuss a plan for stopping Janan in front of all these people. Particularly since I didn’t have a plan.

She looked at all of us. “Deborl and his friends want to harm newsouls. We know this. The laws the Council has been working to pass won’t do anything to deter them. But the truth is that we’re all in danger.”

I studied the crowd, their weary postures and disbelieving looks. “The best thing for newsouls—and anyone who wants to help them—is to get out of Heart.”

“We’ll have to go very far to avoid the eruption,” Orrin said. “If the caldera does erupt, Range will be nothing more than a hole in the ground. Everything surrounding Range will be covered in ash as high as Ana. Beyond that, there will be yet more ash. The air will be toxic across most of the continent, and ash in the atmosphere will drop the world’s temperature. Animals will die, and crops won’t grow.”

“How far away will people have to go to be safe?” I thought of the globe and how big the world had seemed, not half an hour ago.

Orrin shook his head. “Everywhere will be affected somehow, but the farther we travel, the better our chances of survival.”

“Both from the eruption and Deborl.” I swallowed hard. “Please consider leaving Heart soon.”

“This gives me a good place to lead into the next bad news,” Stef said. “It seems Sam and Ana weren’t the only target tonight. Every Councilor who approved the newsoul protection laws has been killed. Frase, Antha, Finn, Sine: they’re all dead.”