“Actually, I think about five minutes in, I think I started having contractions. Maybe actually before that. I thought it was nerves.”
“You—what? Now?”
Arlys gripped Will’s hand. “I’m pretty sure we should go see Rachel. And I think it’s—Okay!”
She braced one hand on the table, and squeezed Will’s hand—bone against bone—with the other.
“Breathe,” Katie ordered, hurrying over to lay a hand on Arlys’s rock-hard belly, and began to rub in circles. “Breathe through it—you took the classes.”
“Classes my ass. It doesn’t hurt like this in classes.”
“Breathe through it,” Katie said again, calmly. “You just did the first New Hope simulcast while in labor. You can breathe through a contraction.”
“It’s easing off. It’s easing.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” Will muttered and flexed his aching fingers. “Ow.”
“Believe me, that’s not even close to ow.” Arlys blew out a strong breath. “I really want Rachel.”
“Me, too.” Will levered her up. “Let’s take it slow though. Dad?”
“I’m having a grandchild.”
Katie lifted Hannah from his lap. “Go with them.”
“I’m having a grandchild,” Bill repeated.
“Fred?” Arlys looked back. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Really? I can? Oh, oh boy! I’ll run over and tell Rachel. Oh boy! Chuck.”
“Oh, no, thanks. I’ll pass. No offense, Arlys, but, uh-uh.”
“None taken.”
“We’re having a baby!” Fred spread her wings and flew out the basement door.
Duncan walked to the door to watch them all go. “He wants to come out.”
Katie shifted Hannah. “He?”
“Uh-huh.” Tonia walked over to stay with Duncan. “What’s he doing in there?”
“That’s another story,” Katie told her. “Come on, kids, time to go home. Good work, Chuck.”
“Best job ever.”
Over the next eight hours Arlys learned a number of things. The first, and most urgent for several of those, was that contractions got a lot harder and lasted a hell of a lot longer as labor progressed.
She learned, not with any surprise, that Fred was a cheerful and tireless co-coach. And Will—no surprise, either—was a rock.
She got reports—a fine distraction—that her broadcast had reached at least the twenty miles out where Kim and Poe had traveled with a laptop on battery.
She sure as fuck learned why they called it labor.
At one point she dissolved into tears and had Will wrapping his arms around her. “It’s almost over, baby. It’s almost over.”
“Not that, not that. Lana. I thought of Lana. Oh God, Will, oh God, to have to do this alone. Without Max, without Rachel, without us. To be alone and doing this.”
“I don’t believe she was alone.” Fred stroked a hand down Arlys’s arm. “I really, really don’t. On the night—I could feel it. A lot of us could. The birth of The One. She wasn’t alone, Arlys. I know it.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
“Okay. Okay.” When Will brushed her tears away, she managed a smile. “Almost over?”
“He’s not wrong. Time to push,” Rachel told her. “Will, support her back. Next contraction, push. Let’s get this baby into the world.”
She pushed, panted, pushed, panted, and eight hours after she made broadcast history, Arlys brought her son into the world that was.
She learned something more. Love could come like a bolt of light.
“Look at him! Look at him.” Exhaustion fell away in stupefied love as the baby cried and wiggled in her arms. “Oh, Will, look at him.”
“He’s beautiful, you’re beautiful. God, I love you.”
Stepping back, Rachel rolled her aching shoulders. “Will, do you want to cut the cord?”
“I …” He took the scissors from Rachel, then turned to his father, saw the tears on his cheeks.
He’d lost grandchildren in the Doom. A daughter, a wife, babies.
“I think Granddad should. How about it?”
Bill swiped fingers under his glasses. “I’m honored. I’m a grandfather.”
As he cut the cord, Fred swept the room with rainbows. “I’m an aunt, right? An honorary aunt.”
“Yes, you are.” Arlys couldn’t take her eyes off the baby. “You, Rachel, Katie. The New Hope originals.”
“His color’s excellent.” Rachel took a good visual study. “I’m going to need to take my nephew in a minute. Clean him up for you, weigh and measure him.”
“In a minute. Hello, Theo.” Arlys pressed a kiss to the baby’s brow. “Theo William Anderson. We’re going to make the world a better place for you. We’re going to do all we can do to make it a better place. I swear it.”
She traced Theo’s face with her finger—so tiny, so sweet, so hers.
This is life, she thought. This is hope.
This is the reason for both.
She would work and fight every day to keep the promise she made to her son.
Holding him close, she thought again of Lana, of the child Lana had carried.
Of The One who was promised.
CHAPTER ONE
On the farm where she’d been born, Fallon Swift learned how to plant and grow and harvest, to respect and use the land. She learned how to move through fields and forests, silent as a shadow, to hunt and fish. To respect the game, and take no more than needed, to take none at all for sport.
She learned to prepare food grown or taken from the land in her mother’s kitchen or over a campfire.
She learned food was more than eggs fresh from the henhouse or a well-grilled trout. Food meant survival.
She learned to sew—though she disliked the time spent sitting still plying a needle. She learned how to tan leather, far from her favorite lesson, and could, if given no choice, spin yarn. Clothes, she learned, weren’t simply something to wear. They protected the body, like a weapon.
She respected weapons, and had learned from a young age how to clean a gun, sharpen a knife, string a bow.
She learned how to build, with hammer and saw, to keep the fences in repair, to make repairs on the old farmhouse she loved as much as the woods.
A strong fence, a sound wall, a roof that held back the rain offered more than a happy home. They, too, meant survival.
And, though she often simply knew, she learned magicks. How to light the flame with a breath, how to cast a circle, how to heal a small wound with the light inside her, how to look, and how to see.
She learned, though she often simply knew, magick was more than a gift to be treasured, a craft to be honed, a weapon to be used with great care.
It was, and would be, survival.
Even with food, with shelter, with clothing and weapons, even with magicks, not all had survived. Not all would in the times to come.
She learned of a world that had existed before her birth. A world crowded with people, a world of huge cities with towering buildings where people had lived and worked. In that world people had traveled routinely by air and sea and road and track. Some had even traveled into space, and to the moon that hung in the sky.
Her mother had lived in a great city, in the City of New York. Fallon knew from the stories told, from the books she devoured, it had been a place full of people and noise and light and dark.
A wonder of a place to her, one she vowed to see someday.
She imagined it often at night when she lay awake watching the faeries dance outside her window.
There had been war in that world, and bigotry and cruelty, just as there was now. She knew of the wars that had been from the books, from the stories. And she knew of the wars that were still raging from visitors who stopped at the farm.
Her father had been a soldier once. He had taught her to fight—with her hands, her feet, her mind. She learned how to read maps and how to make them, and imagined following them one day on the journeys she knew, had always known, she would take.
She had no attachment, as her parents did, to the world that had been before the Doom had killed so many. Billions, it was said. Many remembered when those great cities fell to the burning, the mad things, the dark magicks. The cruelty and greed of men still swam in the minds and the blood of those who’d lived through it.