Chapter 8

He woke up and opened his eyes. There was no light. He knew his eyes were open because he could feel his eyelids move when he blinked. His left eyelid felt sticky, like someone had spilled honey on him. He reached up to touch his forehead and discovered that he couldn't move his arm. He could feel his fingers move, but something was holding his arm down.

"Status Report," his voice sounded into the darkness, sounding dry and hoarse in his ears. He had no idea if his body monitor was working or not. His breathed a sigh of relief when it spoke, its output lead still attached to the bone in his inner ear.

Feeling around with his right arm, he determined that he was lying on a bulkhead of the air limo. Immediately on top of him and holding him in place was the bulkhead from the other side of the craft. 'Great! The limo is only a foot wide now, and I'm right in the middle of it!'

He was able to scoot sideways a bit. After an hour, he had scooted about two feet. Then he found the steward. He was dead – crushed when the air limo had accordioned to its present size, or killed by the impact when the limo was blown off the roof and hit the street, if it had actually fallen far enough to hit the street before...

After another hour and a half, he managed to feel his way an additional fourteen feet to the nose of the craft. The pilot wasn't in his seat. That was probably a good thing, because the seat was crushed into the six-inch space that existed between the floor and the overhead. Through the shattered glass panels, his questing fingers discovered a solid wall of concrete that nothing could get through, not even light. He was impossibly buried beneath a collapsed building. The concrete was what probably saved him from being vaporized, but it had also created his tomb... 'Mom's going to be royally pissed if I die here... '

Exhausted from his efforts and unwilling to face starving to death trapped in an air limo, he passed out.

Jake Pestova was exhausted from worry, but couldn't sleep. He sat on the coffee table. Frank and Tanya were half-asleep on the living room couch, Tanya resting her head in Frank's lap.

'Always a dangerous idea ... especially with the swell of her breasts pressed up like that... ' Frank idly observed, much too upset to do anything with her right now.

"Albuquerque is gone," Jake whispered. He still couldn't believe it, even with the glow in the sky that had lasted most of the night from all the fires the blast had caused. 'Albuquerque is gone in a cloud of radioactive dust, along with Beth and whoever took her... '

He knew he shouldn't have left Beth alone in the mountains after their hunting games. The first time he took her hunting, he offered to wait around for her to heal and then take her home with him. Beth didn't like the idea. She knew that Jake and Béla needed their 'alone-time', and she didn't like Jake sitting around for hours just watching her regenerate. It was just too creepy. 'A girl needs her privacy, after all ... Besides, I bet you could blow me full of holes and stave my head in with a rock and I'll still get home before you!'

So far, Jake had beaten her home every time by at least an hour. 'Yay! Score three points for me! But if you really want to know, I'd rather have her here than dead... '

He was tempted to go up to the guestroom to see if, magically, she'd simply teleported in from somewhere. 'Oh! You mean me? Missing? No, I was just curious about... '

Frank Junior came down the stairs, interrupting Jake's morose thoughts.

"Well, Béla's still asleep. It's amazing that she's even alive. The stories I remember ... Anyway, the baby seems fine. I can hear a heartbeat. It's really strange, working on a different species. She looks so human on the outside, you know?"

Jake and Frank's eyes met for a few seconds. 'Human?'

Tanya sat up, her son's voice having awakened her. "What happening?" she asked. The voice in her head answered her.

'Béla is asleep. You are at Jake's cabin. Your two Frank's are here. Katie is asleep in the guestroom. The child has awakened. The Phoenix will give birth to the Second Phoenix. What the seeker has predicted will come to pass.'

"The child has awakened?" Tanya asked, sleepy and confused. "What are you talking about?"

"What?" Jake asked. "Nobody said anything."

Tanya shook her head.

"She gets voices in her head," her husband explained. "The voices keep her informed on what's occurring when she asks. It must have thought she was asking it something."

"The Praetor speaks to you?" Jake asked, astounded. "How did you get to be so lucky?"

"Praetor?" asked Tanya, scrunching her eyebrows. 'That sounds familiar... ' "You mean that box that Beth used to talk to? I don't even know where that's at any more," Tanya informed them.

"Beth talked to a box?" Frank Junior asked. "Katydid's been carrying a metal box around for the last couple of months. She won't let it out of her sight, in fact. And she talks to it! She even brought it with her – insisted on going all the way back to the trailer to get it."

"She has a Praetor?" Jake asked. 'Everybody has one of these things except me!'

"What are you talking about?" Frank asked. "What's a Praetor?"

"Well, it's a..." Tanya started to say.

"A judgment device used by the old race," Jake said. "It judged Béla once."

'More than once have I passed judgment on the Carte Blanche, ' the Praetor said into all their minds. 'The Carte Blanche is a key to the survival of your family. Another key is the Second Phoenix, which the Carte Blanche will birth shortly. You would do well to stay together as a family or a tribal unit. Your survival in the future will depend upon it.'

"Whoa!" Frank Junior said, sitting down on the stairs and holding his head. "What the fuck was that?"

"That was the Praetor," Tanya volunteered, before anyone else could speak. "You heard it too?" She looked around the room. Evidently, everyone heard it!

"It talks to me, too," Katie said from the top of the stairs. Frank, her brother, looked up at her as she trotted past him.

"How's the head, Bug?" he asked, holding his hands up, concerned that she might trip on him as she went by.

"Better, thanks," Katie told him, ignoring the 'Bug' part of his question.

"What happened to her head," Tanya asked, wanting to know if her youngest daughter was injured.

"She fell off a mechanical dinosaur and it stomped on her head," Frank Junior said cheerfully. "Just a mild concussion..." ' ... that would have killed anyone else!'

Katie said, "I heard that," referring to his private thought.

"So did I," Tanya said, concerned. "Are you two keeping secrets from me?"

The two siblings both shook their heads. 'The less you know, the better, Mom... '

'You think so, huh?' Tanya thought back at them. An image of tying them both to a ceiling fan by their naked little toes...

"What the hell is going on?" Frank angrily demanded. He was more frightened than angry because of the supposedly silent, but no longer, conversation going on around him, but he didn't want to show it.

"Everybody be quiet!" Jake shouted. 'Bunch of noisy fuckers!'

"Praetor," Jake said into the air. Nothing happened for a moment, then the Praetor answered.

'Do you have a question, Jake?' the Praetor asked, still audible in everyone's minds.

"Please disconnect us from each other," Jake requested.