Chapter One
Calamity does not spring from the dust, nor does trouble sprout out of the ground; for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.
—Job
A dot of blue light appeared on the back of his closed eyelids, and Zachary Lee felt the icy blade of fear prickle his hackles to danger.
A dream, he reminded himself, it’s only a dream.
Zachary Lee the scientist was a logical man, but the logic that had led him to bed down and dream inside this temple of stone could not help him now.
The blue shimmer grew opalescent with its incredible speed. That bright blue butterfly bore him down the great curves of an infinite accelerator toward the very fabric of being. Zachary Lee had discovered how to mount the ride, but he knew neither how to dismount nor how to control its magnificent speed.
His life blurred past in scraps of scenes: his first tiny lab in the back of a van, the magnetic drives and servos he’d invented for his people, his daughter’s green eyes.
The blue ahead clarified into a pair of translucent wings, butterfly wings, yes, hypnotic in their flutter. He had seen that shape many times before in his experiments with the magnetic disturbances throughout the territory of the Roam.
His pendulum and its stylus had traced a huge infinity sign on this stone floor just one week past—one in a long series of tracings. His daughter called them “butterflies,” and now he thought of them as butterflies, too.
His dreams had warned him of death; that he might become one of the cinder people, hunted down by the Jaguar and the Jaguar’s priests. Informers sniffed him out by day and dreams homed in on him at night. He had to sleep sometime, and once asleep, he had to dream. Dreaming was necessary for sanity, for life itself.
Zachary Lee sped toward the butterfly that glowed and fluttered wildly, and he knew by the thunder in his breast that he was on the threshold of something great. He slammed into that butterfly with a sensation that he would describe as a kiss, but he had no time left to describe it, nor anyone to describe it to. The last battleground for Zachary Lee was his own mind, and the victory went to the Jaguar. But before Zachary Lee’s mind was reduced to a random collection of organic molecules, the shock wave of his butterfly kiss rent the great curtain of the universe and sheared the rock mantle of the valley on which he lay. The universe, on all sides of this fabric, reeled from the blow.