The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [63]
Wake up, Beltan. Please. You’ve got to wake up so we can get out of here.
Travis and Grace didn’t talk about it much anymore; they didn’t need to. Both of them knew they had to get Beltan out of this city before Duratek found them. He started to pick up his coffee again, then halted as a billboard across the river caught his eye. He should have been surprised, but he wasn’t. They were everywhere; he knew that now.
On the billboard, a man, a woman, and a girl all smiled with imbecilic joy as the girl released a dove into a sky that was far too blue to be beautiful. In that sky, sharp as a sickle, hung an oversize crescent moon that merged into the capital D of their logo. Duratek. Worlds of Possibility.
Travis winced. He knew all too well what the billboard really meant. Once, one of their agents had told him that the meeting of Eldh and Earth was inevitable, and that Duratek’s mission was only to manage the convergence, to make sure it happened the right way. Travis knew that was a lie. Their real mission was to get to Eldh before anyone else, to conquer its peoples, to pollute its rivers, and to strip its lands of trees and minerals. And Travis was going to do anything he could to keep them from getting what they wanted.
But even if—even when Beltan woke up, how were they going to get back to Eldh? The silver half-coins seemed to work only in one direction: from Eldh to Earth. Despite all of his and Grace’s experiments, the coins appeared to have no power on Earth. That was why he spent his days searching for Brother Cy.
“Where are you, Cy?” he murmured. “What are you?” But the words were lost on a gust of air.
He let his gaze wander. Across the river, a huge, skeletal shape forged of metal girders rose into the sky. Then the wind unfurled the banner that hung from the side of the construction:
COMING SOON TO DENVER!
THE STEEL CATHEDRAL
Everything you seek
is just around the corner …
So it was one of those gigantic new megachurches. Bigger is better, wasn’t that the philosophy today no matter what you were selling? If only the words on the banner were right, if only what he sought really was just around the corner. But whether he found Brother Cy or not, they still couldn’t go anywhere until Beltan woke up. And although Travis refused to give up hope, there was no telling when that would be.
Almost every night, usually after 2:00 A.M. when at last things grew still and silent, he would put down his mop and make his way to Beltan’s room. Each time he was struck by how frail the knight looked beneath the tangle of tubes and wires. Beltan had always said he was Travis’s protector, but Travis knew it was the other way around now. Yet somehow it was a comforting feeling. He could stand this, being the strong one.
For a time each night—a few minutes, maybe longer—he would watch the blond man for any signs of motion, however small. He knew that Beltan loved him. That was what the knight had tried to tell him once in Perridon, although Travis had been unable to hear, for he had just turned the rune of fire back on Master Eriaun, and his ears had roared with the sound of flames. It wasn’t until Beltan lay dying in Castle Spardis, when he kissed Travis with bloodied lips, that Travis finally understood.
What it meant was another question. Night after night Travis stood above Beltan, trying to imagine how someone could actually love him, and trying to imagine if he could love another, trying to feel if it was even possible. Then, finally, in what might have been an act of desperation, Travis had bent down and had pressed his lips against Beltan’s.
It had been so easy he had almost laughed. There was no lightning strike, no grand revelation, no resistance or sudden awakening. It was just flesh to flesh. Why had he expected anything else? In all his late-night reveries, he had been so busy wondering if he could love Beltan that he had forgotten to ask himself the simple question if he