The Rebellion Read Online Free Page A

ofirritation. I glared up at the broad space between Rushton’s shoulders. As if he felt my gaze, he glanced back, but I let my eyes fall quickly.
    “Damn!” he muttered as he stumbled in the darkness. “How much farther is this?”
    “Nowt far,” Fian assured us, holding his lantern higher. His eyes, gleaming with amusement, met mine fleetingly over Rushton’s bowed head. In spite of my mood, I found myself smiling in response. There was something irrepressible about the highlander. His eyes sparked with intelligence and a wry humor that stopped him from being as painfully earnest as so many of his guild in the pursuit of knowledge.
    And he was one of the few at Obernewtyn who had not treated me with stultified awe since my return from the high mountains last wintertime, which had been deemed miraculous by some, since I’d been assumed dead.
    We came to a place where only a brief, murky stretch of water separated the ledge from a sloping island of rubble formed by the collapse of one of the towering Beforetime monoliths. Dark water lapped sluggishly on the makeshift landfall. Garth leapt across the intervening space with a grunt, and on the other side made his way to the foot of an intact building. The light from the lanterns reached no farther than the row of square windows on the second level; black shadows obscured the floors above. At this end of the caverns, the ground sloped up so that most of the towering building was above the water line.
    “This is it,” Garth wheezed, flapping his hand in a flourish at the construction. “All five hundred floors. Oh, you needn’t worry,” he added, seeing my look of horror. “It’s quite stable, because a good deal of it is buried in the rock above and behind, including what would have been the frontdoor. The astonishing thing is that we discovered this at all, especially with so much of the city underwater or tainted. Of course, the very fact that so many buildings are still standing is incredible in the first place. We are becoming convinced that this city was one of the last built before the holocaust. The degree of technology here is far superior to that of other ruin sites and may well explain how this city survived when so many others did not. But there are certain strange facets to the architecture.…”
    “Garth, get on with it,” Rushton said brusquely.
    Garth gave Rushton an offended look and turned to enter the building through a hole that had been cut in one of the immense walls. I glanced up, and the row of empty windows seemed to look down like eyes.
    “It took an age to knock th’ hole in the wall,” Fian said, coming through after us with the second lantern. “Them Beforetimers built solid.”
    “And we had to be careful. Our main fear was that we might destroy something irreplaceable,” Garth explained.
    The building was cast along the lines of all Beforetime constructions, walls and floors bare, squared and uniform with no ornamentation. The Beforetimers were admittedly inspired at construction, but they lacked imagination. Garth led us along the hall and up three featureless gray flights of stairs. Stepping out of the stairwell onto a small landing, the Teknoguildmaster lifted his lantern to reveal that the wall facing us had words carved into it: “Reichler Clinic Reception.”
    I stopped dead.
    My mind rushed back to the moment when I had found the book called
Powers of the Mind
in a Beforetime library.
    Standing in the darkness of another ruined city, I had readenough to understand that there had been Talented Misfits before the holocaust. The book had spoken of tests performed at the Beforetimers’ Reichler Clinic that proved conclusively that human beings of their era possessed Talents not unlike our own, though these had been largely latent. The clinic had claimed that, in time, more and more people would be born with such powers, though it would take a great catalyst to awaken the conscious mind to latent abilities on a grand