John Hawks: The Dark River

“Give me a count,” Boone said, watching the live feed from the helicopter.

Concentrating on the monitor, Cossette began to type commands. “All sources of heat or just the humans?”

“Just the humans. Thank you.”

Click. Click . Fingers moving on a keyboard. A few seconds later, the sixty-eight people living at New Harmony were outlined on the screen.

“How accurate is that?”

“Ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent. We might have missed one or two people who were on the edge of the scan zone.”

Boone took off his glasses, polished them with a small flannel cloth, and watched the video a second time. Over the years, Travelers and their Pathfinder teachers had preached about the so-called Light that existed inside every person. But real light-not the spiritual kind-had become a new method of detection. It was impossible to hide, even in the darkness.

SNOWFLAKES CLUNG TO Alice’s hair as she entered the kitchen, but they melted before she pulled off her jacket. Her family’s house was built in the Southwest style, with a flat roof, small windows, and little exterior decoration. Like all the other buildings in the canyon, the house was made of straw-bales had been stacked into walls, skewered with steel rods, and then covered with waterproof plaster. The ground floor was dominated by one large area with a kitchen, living room, and open staircase that led to a sleeping loft. A doorway led to Alice’s bedroom, a home office, and a bathroom. Because of the thick walls, there was an alcove around each window frame; the one in the kitchen was filled with a basket of ripening avocados and some old bones found out in the desert.

A pot boiling on the electric stove gave off steam and fogged up the window glass. On a cold night like this, Alice felt as if she were living in a space capsule dropped to the bottom of a tropical lagoon. If she wiped the moisture away from the window, she would probably see a pilot fish gliding past white coral.

As usual, her mother had left a mess in the kitchen-dirty bowls and spoons, stems from cut basil, and an open flour container just waiting for the mice. Alice’s black braid swung back and forth as she moved about the kitchen, putting away food and wiping up crumbs. She washed the mixing bowls and spoons, and then placed them on a clean towel as if they were scalpels on a surgical table. When she was putting away the flour, her mother came downstairs from the sleeping loft carrying a stack of medical magazines.

Dr. Joan Chen was a petite woman with short black hair. She was a physician who had moved to New Harmony with her daughter after her husband died in a car accident. Every evening before dinner, Joan changed from jeans and a flannel shirt to a long skirt and a silk blouse.

“Thanks, honey. But you didn’t have to clean up. I would have done all that…” Joan sat in a carved chair near the fireplace and placed the magazines on her lap.

“Who’s coming for dinner?” Alice asked. The people at New Harmony were always sharing meals with each other.

“Martin and Antonio. The budget committee has to make a decision about something.”

“Did you get bread at the bakery?”

“Well, of course I did,” Joan said. Then she fluttered her right hand as if she were searching for a memory. “That is, maybe I did. I think so.”

Alice searched the kitchen and found a loaf of bread that appeared to be about three days old. Turning on the oven, she split the loaf in half, rubbed both sides with fresh garlic, and drizzled on some olive oil. As the bread roasted on a steel tray, she set the table and got out the serving platter for pasta. When she was finally done, she intended to walk silently past her mother to protest all the work she had to do. But when she approached the chair, Joan reached out and touched her daughter’s hand.

“Thank you, dear. I’m lucky to have such a wonderful daughter.”

SCOUTS WERE IN position at the perimeter of New Harmony, and the rest of the mercenaries had just left a motel in San Lucas. Boone e-mailed a message to Kennard Nash, the current head of the Brethren. A few minutes later, he received a response: The previously discussed action is now confirmed .

Boone called the driver of the SUV carrying the first team. “Proceed to Point Delta. Employees should now take their PTS medication.”

Each mercenary was carrying a plastic packet containing two pretraumatic stress pills. Boone’s employees had nicknamed them “pits pills,” and swallowing them before an action was called “taking your pits.” The medication temporarily immunized anyone entering a violent situation against strong feelings of guilt or regret.

The original research concerning PTS was done at Harvard University when neurologists found out that accident victims taking a cardiac drug called propranolol had decreased amounts of physiological trauma. Scientists working for the Brethren’s research group, the Evergreen Foundation, realized the implications of this discovery. They obtained a grant from the U.S. Defense Department to study the drug when used by soldiers in combat. The PTS medication inhibited the brain’s hormonal reactions to shock, disgust, and fear. This lessened the formation of traumatic memories.

Nathan Boone had never taken a PTS pill or any other kind of trauma medication. If you believed in what you were doing, if you knew you were right, then there was no such thing as guilt.

ALICE STAYED IN her bedroom until the rest of the budget committee showed up for dinner. Martin Greenwald arrived first, knocking softly on the kitchen door and waiting for Joan to greet him. Martin was an older man with stubby legs and thick eyeglasses. He had been a successful businessman in Houston until his car broke down on the freeway one afternoon and a man named Matthew Corrigan stopped to help him. Matthew turned out to be a Traveler, a spiritual teacher with the power to leave his body and travel to other realities. He had spent several weeks talking to the Greenwald family and their friends, then had embraced them all at one final meeting and walked away. New Harmony was a reflection of the Traveler’s ideas-an attempt to create a new way of living that was apart from the Vast Machine.

Alice had learned about Travelers from other kids, but was uncertain how it all worked. She knew that there were six different worlds, called realms. This world-with its fresh bread and dirty dishes-was the Fourth Realm. The Third Realm was a forest with friendly animals, and that sounded great. But there was also a Realm of hungry ghosts, and another place where people were always fighting.

Matthew’s son, Gabriel, was a young man in his twenties who was also a Traveler. In October, he had spent a night at New Harmony with a Harlequin bodyguard named Maya. Now it was early February, and the adults were still talking about Gabriel while the kids argued about the Harlequin. Ricky Cutler said Maya had probably killed dozens of people and that she knew something called the Tiger Claw Variation: one punch to the heart, and the other guy was dead. Alice decided that the Tiger Claw Variation was a big fake invented on the Internet. Maya was very much a real person, a young woman with thick black hair and ghostly blue eyes who carried her sword in a tube hanging from her shoulder.

A few minutes after Martin arrived, Antonio Cardenas thumped on the door and walked in without asking. Antonio was a swaggering, athletic man who had once been a contractor in Houston. When the first group moved into the canyon, he had built the three windmills up on the mesa that provided the community’s electric power. Everyone at New Harmony liked Antonio; some of the younger boys even wore their tool belts in the same low-slung way he did.

The two men smiled at Alice and asked her about her cello lessons. Everyone sat down at the oak wood table-like most of the furniture in the house, it had been built in Mexico. The pasta was served and the adults began to discuss the issue before the budget committee. New Harmony had now saved enough money to buy a sophisticated battery system to store electric power. The current system allowed every family to have a stove, a refrigerator, and two space heaters. More batteries would mean more appliances, but perhaps that wasn’t a good idea.