huge explosion. He thought about the Community and saw that these ships could fire over the cliff, where it was lower, into the Community. He knew that stone walls would not stand up to the explosion he saw in the forest. He flew back over the Community and saw the females were being led away to the beach. They were taken on small boats and rowed out to the large ships. Once they were offshore, the guards watching the men and older boys began executing them. Even young boys around the age of eight were shot down. Andy felt something inside him harden. He looked south and turned the glider along the shoreline. He had to use several thunder clouds to maintain his altitude but he eventually arrived at the point where the shore turned back east. He flew for another twenty miles and saw that the ocean beside the Community did end. There was land connecting the continents. He saw it was covered in dinosaurs and many of them were moving east.
He flew back to the site of the Destroyer invasion and saw that Harmony was right; they were organized to a fault and they knew how to eradicate the local inhabitants. He flew back to the cliff and used the drafts to stay aloft. He had wondered how Harmony could have been a part of these monsters but he kept seeing in his mind one of the Destroyers turning his rifle on one of the guards that refused to shoot the young boys. The guard was shot in the leg and had his rifle ripped away as three other Destroyers came forward and hacked him to death with long sword blades. The last thing hacked off was the guard’s head and as the helmet rolled off, Andy saw the guard was a young female.
He now knew why Harmony didn’t want him to come here; he would see what she had done and would hate her for it. Her sorrow was clear when he left and he didn’t know what was causing it. Now, he did. Andy stayed aloft all night thinking about all that he had witnessed. The explosions from the boat could be heard ten miles away. They continued through the night until they stopped a few hours before sunrise.
He flew the glider more than two miles above the cliff and felt the cold air as it whipped around him. He turned toward the shore line to the south and noticed that it was eerily quiet. He moved over the water and saw that the boats were no longer anchored offshore. He looked to the east and saw them sailing away.
He didn’t know what humans had been brought back in time to produce the bloodthirsty civilization that murdered, pillaged, and plundered other humans but it didn’t appear it was the Atlantans; he had not seen a cutter blade anywhere during the invasion. The guards had used swords to hack the guard which added more confirmation that the Destroyers did not have cutter technology. Without cutters and the metal used to build them, gliders would be impossible. The Destroyers controlled the seas but the Archers controlled the air. He turned the glider north and flew back toward the cliff. An unexpected downdraft blew him to within two hundred yards of the forest but he managed to fight the air currents and arrive just in time to catch the winds blowing over the cliff. He turned north and thought about all he had seen. He was going to have to violate his banishment and return to the community. He would tell them what he had discovered and leave to complete his sentence.
As he moved north he kept flying over the plain searching for Dinah and Harmony. He suddenly thought that he hadn’t thought about Lyla once. He was troubled by that thought.
Chapter Five
H armony sat on Dinah and knew Andy was going to see the Destroyers and would find out what she had done. She knew in her heart that he would despise her. As they moved north there were ten occasions where carnivores came out of the tree lines to attack. A T-Rex had made the effort a mile back and Harmony looked around and saw there were thousands of dinosaurs inhabiting the plain. Many of them were closer to the tree lines than they were. Why
Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, June Scobee Rodgers