âGrantâs brain is fractured,â Kane said.
âMore like his consciousness is spread over two levels. Like a shadow cast on an uneven surface,â Brigid told him. âHere, heâs a ghost. Pure ego.â
âAnd in the past, his body is running around withâ¦what?â Kane asked.
âA good vocabulary, but not much memory, going by our encounters with him,â Brigid explained.
âSo Grantâs not operating at his best,â Kane said.
He could read his own face reflected in Brigidâs concerned features.
âWeâll find him. Weâll bring him home and make him whole again,â Brigid told him.
Kane squeezed his eyes shut, then looked down at the darkened pit, where weak, helpless moans rose. He didnât want to think of what horrors Grant had to face five millennia in the past.
The Road to Outlandsâ From Secret Government Files to the Future
Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermathâforever known as skydarkâreshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.
Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlandsâpoisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.
What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.
Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.
In the villes, rigid laws were enforcedâto atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the baronsâ public credo and their right-to-rule.
Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technologyâ¦a question to a keeper of the archivesâ¦a vague clue about alien mastersâand their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.
But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?
Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigidâs only link with her family was her motherâs red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grantâs clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.
Parents, friends, communityâthe very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the cruxâwhen Kane began to wonder if there was a future.
For Kane, it wouldnât do. So the only way was outâway, way out.
After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltvilleâs head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.
With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.