Chapter 2
This time, Kate stayed awake, binoculars to her eyes, watching the terrain around them through the hull of the chopper as if it were glass instead of cold, hard metal. She saw no sign of life on the ground, and searching the area around what was left of Aldeia showed much of the same.
Nothing. Kate was starting to feel discouraged. There was the matter of finding the humans that were missing, but there was also the matter of the girl. If the human village was gone and the area surrounding it deserted, was the girl really here at all? Maybe she’d been wrong about where the child was.
Or maybe the child didn’t exist at all. Kate sat with that doubt for a moment, then pushed it away. The child did exist, and Kate was going to find her. She didn’t know why, but the fate of the world depended on Kate not giving up. She couldn’t let it go, even if she didn’t believe in things like fate and destiny. Kate made her own luck and her own path in life, and she always had. A year ago, if someone had asked her if she believed in predestination, she would have laughed in their face. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
It wasn’t until they passed over the palace of Aman that Kate perked up and realized that she’d been quietly sulking. She recognized this place! It was the hillside in her dream, the very place that the girl had battled with the dragon.
Kate scanned the hillside, noting the charred patch of grass a good distance away from the palace grounds but seeing nothing else out of the ordinary. Breathing a sigh of relief, she panned around the scene again, finding nothing that suggested that the little girl had died in the battle with the dragons.
Maybe that battle hasn’t happened yet, she thought, but in her heart, she knew that wasn’t right. The battle had happened and was over with. The only thing she didn’t know was how it had ended for the little girl and for the silver dragon who dared get in the way of the dark dragon who had been trying to kill her.
Take a breath and chill, Kate, she thought angrily. She was always thinking the worst, but the truth was that she wouldn’t still be drawn to the child if the child was dead. She had to be alive, and Kate had to find her. It was just that simple.
“Should we head back, General?” a voice asked over her headphones.
“No,” she said. “Keep heading west. If we get to the coast and see nothing worth investigating, we’ll settle down for the day and start fresh in the morning.”
“Understood,” the tinny voice over the headset said.
Kate shook her head; they had binoculars that could see through metal and all the other advancements they had in this world, yet no one could manage to make a human voice sound good over a two-way headset. It was ridiculous.
Binoculars up again, she kept scanning. She ignored the eyes she could feel on her back and the occasional mutter from the group that served under her. They were tired from a long flight. Ten hours was a long time to fly for a mission that was basically beneath them. Her team was comprised of the best of the best, and search and recovery wasn’t really their style. These men and women were used to going in hard and solving problems with quick, quiet firepower before they disappeared into the night. She had tried to play this mission off as an easy one-off, but she ran a team of adrenaline junkies, and their irritation with the mission was evident. They would rather be at home cleaning their weapons than looking for humans that had broken off from the rest to live in the past fifty years. Kate understood, but that didn’t change anything.
Something inside her felt different, and she knew that they were getting close. Suddenly feeling excited, she scanned the horizon, noticing the houses that were coming up ahead of them. As they got closer, the yards and the people in them came into view, and Kate sucked in a quick breath and almost let out a cry of delight.
She’d found her!
The little girl was playing in the yard while a small group of adults stood by the entrance of the home. From what she could see, it was a woman and two men, though Kate couldn’t be sure at this distance.
She knew the instant that the group noticed her, and she watched as the little girl looked to the adults for a second, then ran, ducking behind the group of them and staying still. If Kate hadn’t watched the child run and hide through the binoculars, she might have missed her altogether.
It’s Fate, a voice whispered in her head, but Kate tried to ignore it. The voice had been whispering to her in one form or another since she’d started dreaming about the child.
“I have visual confirmation,” she said over the two-way, giving the coordinates of the house to the pilot after double checking them through the binoculars. “Hover over the house; I’m repelling down.”
“Ten-four.”
Kate slid the side door open, marveling at how easily this new model responded to the panel in the wall that was invisible until she held her hand up. It was a far cry from the choppers that carried the legendary moniker over the past hundred years, and Kate was glad that the plan to retire the chopper on the hundredth anniversary had been scrapped. The Chinook was by far her favorite mode of transportation.
Slipping a harness over her black fatigues and adjusting her plain, black helmet, she hooked herself onto the line and held the handle by the door, waiting until they were locked in a hover over the yard of the house before she left the chopper. They were still a few minutes out, and Kate could feel her stomach knotting up. It was one thing to pursue the promise of finding the child, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what she was going to say. Did the child know that she was special? Who were the adults that were with her, and what was a human child doing in Aman? These questions and more were racing through her head. She laughed at herself.
Was she nervous about meeting a child? It was ridiculous. Over the course of her career, Kate had seen things that would terrify most people, and she had survived with her sanity intact. Why her hands were trembling over the prospect of meeting this child in the flesh was beyond her. But she was excited and scared all at once, and it hurt to admit that to herself. Kate was usually the toughest person in the room, man or woman. She would never let on to the rest of her team how nervous she was, but she couldn’t hide the truth from herself, so she didn’t bother trying.