Free Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams Page A

getting to safety. So
I cleared the walls, still holding on to Eli the Boy, thinking we’d
be safe once we were away from all the stampedes.
    Instead of tigers and lions, we found more
humans. The angry mob had chased the girl up from the lighthouse
and into the public market, where they had her surrounded. Then I
saw Eli the Boy do an amazing thing.
    After my appearance caught them off guard
once more, Eli declined to continue our escape and instead released
himself from my arms.
    “Get her away from here,” he instructed me.
Here I’d just arrived on their planet, and they were already
getting me involved in their fights. This certainly wasn’t a
typical school assignment!
    But I trusted Eli, and had a sense that the
girl —for I didn’t know her as Thea yet — could use a helping claw.
I took her, and, as we jumped away, caught sight of something
extraordinary:
    Eli voluntarily put himself in danger,
drawing the wrath of the mob, giving Thea and me a better chance to
escape. Then he put his cap on and disappeared back into the Fifth
Dimension.
    Meanwhile, I took the girl and returned over
the wall into the Royal Quarters, since the four-legged mammals
suddenly seemed less dangerous than the two-legged ones.
    I heard another distant thump as the rhino kept charging at my poor ship. The
girl spoke to me, but in a tongue different from the boy.
Apparently Earth Orange is so early in its development that it is
still multilingual! I could see I would need the lingo-spot again
to learn how to converse with her.
    I had some of the plasmechanical substance in
the emergency kit in my uniform, and I quickly applied some. She
was pointing frantically toward some buildings on the edge of the
great lawn, and I jumped in that direction.
    After we landed, she turned to me. “Are you a
lizard god? Or just a lizard man?”
    I responded, but she couldn’t understand me.
I reached out to give her a lingo-spot, but she stepped back. I
could understand her caution, but it would take me at least a few
minutes to pick up some words in her language.
    “Well,” the girl said, “I suppose it doesn’t
matter who you are. Or what. Thank you for your help. You’re in my
city, Alexandria, now. And I’m afraid you’ve come at a very
dangerous time.
    “This is the library. We have all the
knowledge in the known world here. My mother, Hypatia, is the head
librarian, lecturer, and the city’s principal mathematician. I am
Thea. I have recently discovered a new star and am also finishing a
rebuttal to Pythagoras. He claimed each number has a male or female
personality, but he made too many of them masculine.”
    There was a pause after that, then she grew
terribly sad. “I suppose none of that matters now. I saw them take
her away.” Then she did something strange: It involved water coming
out of her eyes, which she eventually wiped off. After she regained
her breath, she looked right at me—a look of amazing intelligence.
“Whatever you are, you’re in danger, too. No, Tiberius won’t stop
until everything he can’t control, or doesn’t understand, is
destroyed. And he wouldn’t even try to understand you.”
    “No,” I said. It was my first word in her
tongue. She looked surprised. But I still don’t know if I meant
“No, he won’t understand,” or just “No,” as if I could personally
stop what had already been set in motion.
    It turned out none of us could. Not even Eli
the Boy, when he returned to us through time mere minutes
later.
     
     
     

Chapter Eleven
    Eli: DARPA — The First
Tunnel
    August 2, 2019 C.E.
     
    I keep looking at the picture of my mom. I
don’t think my dad knows what to say, either. He just looks sad,
drained, and even weirdly amused, all at once. “She always wanted
more time for her music,” he says.
    More time for her
music? I get really impatient when grownups make bizarre
jokes that only they understand. Especially in a situation where it
makes more sense to be scared. “Well, is she