But that had been more than enough time for Wyeth. Wyeth had stolen the instant portal from the Requisition building. Wyeth had installed the instant portal in Team Thirteen’s door. He’d sent the message to Alexander from inside the Workshop, making it look like Darius had sent it. The Signature Algorithm couldn’t detect Wyeth when he came out because there was one place the shadow map didn’t cover—the Hadley Academy itself.
Jack could almost remember those blackout moments now, when his mind belonged to Wyeth. They glinted like fleeting nightmares.
Wyeth boarded the plane. He checked on the pilot in the cockpit, a Colombian who wore a long knife on his belt and an oversized headset. As instructed, the pilot didn’t turn around.
Wyeth pulled the door of the fuselage closed as the propellers started up. He sat in one of the twelve seats. Thayer and the armored truck backed off the runway.
With the door closed, Jack felt Wyeth’s suspicion—not nervousness but practicality. He didn’t know the pilot. He could not trust the pilot. The feeling poured over Jack through Wyeth’s consciousness. Wyeth stood and walked into the cockpit.
“Do you speak English?” he asked as the pilot steered the plane down the runway.
“Sí, senor,” the Colombian answered, facing forward. “Commander Thayer says you will direct me, yes?”
Wyeth reached over and took the man’s shoulder. The pilot jerked, then twitched. His face contorted in agony, and his eyes shut tight. His body crackled as it iced over. When his eyes opened, they were black. The man was gone. In the pilot seat was a darkened.
“I trust you haven’t lost your ability to fly.” No response. “Good. Follow the southern coast of Long Island, 120 miles, then north-northeast. From there I’ll instruct you.”
Jack wanted to stop him. But he couldn’t any more than a child could have snatched the moon out of the sky. Jack was fading in and out of consciousness. Soon he would black out for good. He could feel himself slipping away. The plane rose into the air. Wyeth settled again into one of the seats.
A thunderclap woke Jack. He didn’t know if a minute had passed or an hour. Wyeth looked out the window at the pounding rain. Jack could see the window. He could see the dark storm clouds against the night sky.
“Hello, David.” The voice came from the front of the plane.
Wyeth’s head jerked toward the cockpit. The door swung wider. The pilot had vanished, leaving only a hint of violet smoke in the air.
Who had spoken? Nobody called Wyeth by his first name. It was a name long forgotten. Then Jack saw him standing at the front of the plane. Wyeth didn’t move from his seat.
“Have you come to try to stop me, Hans?”
Jack was alert and bewildered. He struggled to focus from his darkness. He thought he might be hallucinating, a last trick of his mind before his consciousness faded forever. How had Hans gotten on the plane?
“I do not need to stop you, David.”
Wyeth glanced into the cockpit. “You killed my pilot. How?”
“You had already killed him. I merely helped free his soul.”
“You are avoiding the question.”
“I whispered to him that I could free him from your bondage,” Hans answered. “All it took was a butane lighter he kept in his aviator jacket. He is at peace now.”
Wyeth sat back. “You can’t stop me, then. You are only a hallucination.”
“The Grays would call me a vision.”
“You were a hallucination to Jack Carlson. He believed you were real. He believed you brought him into Hadley, when in reality he found his own way there. He never discovered you were only in his mind, did he? Just as you are only in my mind right now.”
“The mind is a powerful thing, David. You can see me now, can you not?”
“Yet you have no hold over me, as you had on Jack.”
“I do not have a hold on Jack. Jack believes in something greater than himself,” Hans said. “You, though, David—you believe that there is nothing greater than you. You believe you are the Guardian because you are strong. Because you have the gift of long life. Because you have a vision for the world. Because the Shadow lives in you. But you are only human, and humans are broken.”
Jack listened in stunned disbelief. He tried to hold on. He hoped he wouldn’t disappear without hearing this.
“The Order of the Grays were weak, Hans.” Wyeth spit as he said the name. “Species that survive fight for survival. The Grays want to destroy our instinct for self-preservation. If they had succeeded, it would have ended civilization. I am rescuing humanity itself. The vaccine will usher in a new kind of humanity. A humanity that has the strength to survive,” Wyeth said. “I have won the Reaper War.”
“We have always known you would,” Hans said.
Jack felt Wyeth swell with pride. “And now you cannot stop me—there is no you.” Wyeth stood to face Hans. “So the question remains: Why are you here, Hans?”
Hans stood as tall and solid as a statue. “I did not come for you, David,” he said softly. “I came for the Guardian. I came for Jack.”
“Jack is dead. He is a vanishing mist. He is not the Guardian.” Jack felt Wyeth’s anger, like high-voltage electricity running through a power line. “I chose him as a baby, a baby with no parents, alone in a hospital. The day I let the Bulgarian destroy David Wyeth’s body, I knew where I would go. I knew the baby was there—one that nobody would miss. The power the Grays detected in him was me.”
“Jack chose you,” Hans said.
Wyeth laughed. “He was an infant. He didn’t choose anything.”
“But he did,” Hans told him. “You have not brought the Guardian here. He has brought you to this moment, to fulfill the Great Prophecy. This is not the end, David. This is the beginning.”
A lightning bolt hit the plane with such force that the aircraft rolled, knocking Wyeth from his feet. Hans stayed upright, a vision not beholden to gravity. Immediately another surge of lightning lit up the plane, this time so powerfully that it blasted out the windows as if they were tissue paper. Rain poured in sideways. Alarms blared from the cockpit. Even with the automatic pilot on, the plane listed sickeningly to one side.
Wyeth grabbed the blade from his hip. He twisted his wrist. The blade would not deploy. Hans watched with interest.
“The Silo Blade won’t deploy for you, David,” Hans told him. “It was forged for the Guardian.”
Wyeth roared and threw the blade to the ground. Hans still stood between him and the cockpit. “Get out of my way, Hans,” he snarled.
“You have nothing to fear from me, David. I am not really here, remember?” Hans’s voice was calm in the howling storm. “I am merely the messenger. And now I will deliver my message before I leave.”
“What message?” Wyeth shouted angrily.
“It is not for you, David. It is for Jack. It is to remind him who he is.” Hans stared at Wyeth. Jack felt him. He was looking at Jack. He was looking through Wyeth and into Jack’s very being, still alive, down in the dark.
“I am here to remind Jack that he can end all of this. I am here to remind Jack that the last of the reapers will die with you, Wyeth. I am here to remind Jack that he stopped you once already, when he stopped you from killing Claire Lacoste,” Hans said.
“I am here to remind Jack what his mother once told him: He is strong. He is brave. That One Life for Many was never a motto, and it was never a creed; One Life for Many has always been a prophecy about Jack. He was born into this world to end the Reaper War. He was brought here to bring hope into despair. And just as you fulfilled your prophecy, he will fulfill his.”
Then Hans was gone.
Wyeth was panting heavily, gripping the seat with one hand, knuckles white. He whirled in place. The alarms still blared. He pushed his way to the cockpit. He would pull himself in and close the door behind him.
But he didn’t. Wyeth had one hand on the cockpit door frame. And he couldn’t move.
From somewhere deep insi
de, Jack Carlson had stopped David Wyeth.
Wyeth felt a wild fear growing inside him. The fear was not Jack’s. The fear belonged to Wyeth.
Wyeth’s hand let go of the door frame, one finger at a time. His body straightened and balanced against the unsteady plane. “Jack.” Wyeth spoke aloud. The panic rose in his voice. “Jack, I can save us—”
And then the voice was gone.
Jack Carlson stood in the plane, rain and wind whipping his skin. He felt Wyeth inside him. Wyeth shouted, trapped deep inside. “I am brave, and I am strong,” Jack whispered into that dark pit. “And there is no us.”
Jack took two steps to the emergency exit. He wrenched open the handle. The storm engulfed the plane, as if he were standing in a tornado. He felt Wyeth scream. Then he let himself fall. He fell through the blackness and the rain and the howling wind. He fell through the nothing, toward the sea far below.
Then he fell into something. But it wasn’t the ocean. It wasn’t earth.
Whatever it was, he was tearing through it, as if the air itself had hardened into a cobweb of whips that lashed his back, searing his skin. The pain was extraordinary. Then he did hit the ground, so hard that his neck whipped and his back cracked and his head smashed into the dirt.
CHAPTER 33
A CIRCLE OF STARS
The world was dark. It was cool and dry and quiet.
Jack’s eyes opened, slowly and painfully. Above him was a circle, filled with the clear night sky. It was no longer raining. In the circle he could see stars. The sky was so beautiful and impossibly far away. It reminded him of home.
From the corner of his eye there was movement. But he couldn’t turn his head—something was wrong with his neck.
There was a woman. The woman gathered Jack’s head in her hands, gently lifting it. She cradled it in her lap. The walls surrounding him were curved.
Jack’s lungs labored. Every inhale brought scorching pain to his broken rib cage. And yet he cherished that breath. He wanted to hold it inside him. The air he drew in was perfumed with earth and pine and the distant sea. Those things would exist long after he had passed on. He wished more than anything that he could remain a little longer. One more breath, one more laugh, one more cry. One more moment with people he loved.
But there was no more time. This is what it feels like to die. This is what the end is like. It was agony. It was separation. It was unbearably sad.
The woman gently touched his forehead, and he saw her face: his adoptive mom, Sarah Carlson. The Gray who had raised him and protected him and loved him. “You’re safe now, my sweet boy,” she whispered.
Jack woke up.
He was in the first soft bed he had slept in in a long time. He had forgotten they made beds this big. The ceilings were high and vaulted, and morning sun streamed through the tall, narrow windows that broke up the wall of books.
Jack eased himself up into a reclining position. His chest was wrapped in a wide bandage, but there was no pain. When he moved, he dragged with him a tangle of IV tubes. Was this another dream?
“You’re not dead, you know.”
Jack turned his head. Sitting to the left of him in a tall-backed upholstered chair was his mom. She leaned forward. “It’s nice to see you awake. How are you feeling, Jack honey?”
He tried to speak, but nothing came out. His throat felt like sand. She handed him a glass of water, which he sipped, then gulped, water trickling down his chin and wetting his shirt. She reached behind her for a large ceramic carafe and poured him another glass. He drank again and felt his vocal chords coming back to life.
“I think . . .” he croaked. “I thought I died.”
“You did die, Jack. Your heart stopped for a while there. You fell from a long way up.” She took his hand and held it for a long time.
“Dr. Horn said nobody could handle that fall, even with the safety net. The only reason your body wasn’t broken in two was that blast suit. You left us for three long minutes, the worst minutes of my life, but I believed you were coming back to us. I believed it.”
Jack saw in her face the pain laid bare. What it must have been like, that bare-knuckled fistfight against despair for every second of those three minutes. Emotion swelled in Jack like a balloon stretched too far, squeezing against his organs until it popped and flooded his body. His throat tightened, and his eyes stung. He felt the tickle of tears on his face. What if they hadn’t reached him in time? What if something had gone wrong?
But he was here. He was alive. He inhaled and exhaled slowly until his body calmed. “How long have I been out?”
“A long time. Almost eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks?” He shuddered. “You’ve been waiting for me for two months? In here?”
“You’re my son. I would have sat here for eight years.”
The image of her face came back to him. It was the last thing he had seen before everything went dark. “That was you? In the Silo?” She nodded. “How did I land there? Or did I dream that?”
Jack’s memories of the plane and the storm seeped into his psyche like poison gas. They had been thousands of feet in the air when he fell, in high winds. He was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle that was missing too many pieces.
But one piece came back to him. “Wyeth.” He could barely get the word out. His heart began to pound uncontrollably. “He’s inside—it was me all along.”
“You killed him, Jack. He died with you. He’s gone.”
“How can you be sure?” he whispered.
“Because the Grays have been waiting for this moment for a thousand years. It happened exactly as it was supposed to. Wyeth died because this was when the Reaper King was always going to die. This was how he was going to die. It’s why when the Bulgarian seemed to kill the Reaper King, the Grays knew he hadn’t. Now it is done. Wyeth is dead.”
She spoke with complete certainty. Wyeth was dead. Jack felt gratitude rush over him.
“When you adopted me,” Jack said slowly. “When I was a baby, that was Wyeth, wasn’t it? He had died, and he took the baby—me—and buried his consciousness inside, so he could disappear.”
“Yes.”
“But did the Grays know that I was Wyeth? Did you know?”
“Yes, Jack, I knew.”
“And you took me anyway,” he said. “Because I was the Guardian too.”
His mother looked surprised. “Yes . . . that is true. I knew you were the Guardian. But that’s not why I protected you.” A single tear trickled down the side of her nose. “I protected you because you’re my son, Jack. I brought you home when you had your blackouts. I found you, even after we had lost you for three days. I found out later that was when you made your way to the Asylum, when Wyeth recruited Thayer. Maybe others wouldn’t understand why I loved you through all of it. You’re my son. That’s all that matters to me.”
“Who is the Guardian? Who am I?”
His mother reached over, pushing his overgrown brown hair back from his eyes. “I know it’s difficult. But Wyeth is gone. You are just . . . you. You are the Guardian, and the Guardian is you. You trusted your visions.”
“I don’t have visions.”
“No?” His mother sat back and grinned. “A thousand years ago a young monk had a vision: The Guardian would fall from the sky. The Grays would catch him. The monk saw where that Guardian would fall, and the Grays crossed the Atlantic Ocean to this island and built the Silo. You know that story.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know anything about the young monk who had the vision, do you?”
Jack shook his head.
“That young monk was born to show the way to you.” She paused. “You know his name, Jack.”
Jack knew. “Hans.”
“You saw him, didn’t you? He spoke to you?”
“I was sure he was real! He was my school security guard.”
His mother laughed. “I would have loved to have seen that. He was with you in spirit, Jack. On the plane, W
yeth could see him because you could see him,” she said. “One day you have to promise to tell me everything you remember about him. Do you promise?”
Jack nodded, still trying to get his head around it. But thinking about Hans was bringing everything back.
“Mom, I did all of it.” He fought to keep his voice steady. “During my blackouts. I almost killed Claire on the street. Wyeth wanted her dead, and I darkened that man to kill her. I woke up when it was all done, back at my bike, outside the diner.”
“You also stopped him before he could.”
“I darkened the bride in that cathedral. I darkened the man at that rally. I found Thayer at the Asylum and spread the virus. I led the Rogue Team. I even sent reapers to chase me into Hadley from Jersey City, so Wyeth could be inside the academy. I did all of that.”
“Wyeth did it, not you, Jack,” she said, taking his hand. “You were supposed to be an empty vessel. The world is forever free of reapers now because you found the strength to give your own life to end it all. That was you—the one who sacrificed. The rest was Wyeth.”
“But there’s been so much death. And the darkened are still here, and even more millions of civilians that Pacifica has injected with the vaccine.” Jack’s voice caught.
Then he remembered Times Square. The images struck him like live electrical wire, and he broke down. He saw the ice fortress and the darkened pouring into it.
A door on the far side of the room cracked open. A whisper came from the other side. “I heard them talking.”
“Close the door, idiot.”
Jack sat up so quickly he got dizzy. There was no mistaking the mop of shaggy, black curly hair poking through the door or the muscular black arm pulling it back out of the room. “Hey!” Jack’s throat was so dry it came out as a squeak.
“I knew it!” Then Freddy shouted in the opposite direction. “Hey! Hey! He’s awake.” Freddy’s body couldn’t decide whether to get to Jack or to run out of the room to get the others. The convulsion looked like bad break dancing. He held a finger up to Jack. “I’m back in one second! One second. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go back to sleep!”
The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted Page 28
