by Bob Proehl
“Sarah can you see it?” he says. “He found me when I was little. The first time I went in the Hive. The only time I went in without you. He was a little light that spoke to me before any of the others could see me. He said his name was Raygun.”
“Your friend,” Sarah says. “You said he was your friend. I remember. I kept everything I could. I tried to keep everything about you in my head. I tried to hold on to you.”
“Sarah, I—”
“Let me give it all back,” she says.
The flesh that coats the walls and floors shudders like a sail filling with air. A pool of it collects and swirls near Sarah’s feet, and Patrick’s body, naked but solid, its edges clearly defined, rises up from it. Sarah grabs him and pulls him to her.
“I did so many bad things,” he says. “And he’s not done. I can still hear him. I can’t win, Sarah. I’m not strong enough.”
She puts a finger to his lips, and he quiets. “Do you remember the thing I taught you?”
“I don’t know where he starts and I end,” Patrick says. “I tried to think of the flame like you said, but—”
“Patrick, I kept a secret,” Sarah whispers. “I taught them about the flame, but I made them think it was only a little light. It’s much bigger than that. Patrick, do you want to see how it burns? It burns everything away until it’s clean.”
“Please, Sarah,” Patrick says.
“You and me, then,” she says. She pulls him in, and although he’s taller, she rests his head on her shoulder. The room shudders, trying to tear itself apart. Carrie feels Sarah’s ability radiating out, a heat that is almost like love. It grows stronger until it’s unbearable, the all-obliterating love Carrie felt as a teenager, and she knows she’s experiencing the edge of it, a contact high. She can’t imagine what it must be like on the inside, the positive feedback loop between Sarah and Patrick Davenport as they restore each other, each bringing the other back enough so that finally they can both let go.
The room holds its breath, then releases it one last time. Sarah’s empty body falls to the floor, and Patrick collapses in a heap.
Hayden, wearing their own face again, looks around the room before turning to Emmeline. “Was that it?”
“No,” Emmeline says. “The next part is worse.” She calls to Carrie. “Can you hold me up?” Carrie rushes over and takes her arm at the elbow. “This will only take a second.” Emmeline’s body goes limp, and Carrie thinks she’s gone, like Sarah and Patrick. She tries shaking Emmeline awake when she feels the floor underfoot shift.
“Did you—” Hayden says, but before they can finish their thought, a tendril emerges from the wall and flails at Ji Yeon, batting her across the room.
“Emmeline,” Carrie yells into the girl’s face. “What do we do?” Then she hears Emmeline’s voice, through the Hive, whisper: now.
An ability is like any other talent: it needs to be developed and practiced. One thing Fahima finds impressive about Ruth is not the Craft that emerges from her body but her skill in using it: the Craft is her ability, and flight is her skill.
Fahima’s ability is twofold: she can imagine mechanics, dream impossible machines, but she also hears machines expressing themselves in strange emotional aggregates. It’s the part of her ability that overwhelmed her and landed her in the mental institution where Bishop found her. It’s the part she never bothered to practice or develop. Sitting at the terminal for Lab Bay Theta, she wishes she’d practiced more. The back door works fine, but a better version of Fahima could communicate with the system and get it to do what she needs it to do without intermediary coding.
“You should probably do that faster,” Ruth says. She keeps watch at the farthest point in the arc of the hallway where she can see Fahima.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Fahima calls back. “Thanks so fucking much.”
“I don’t want to die here,” Ruth says, “and the longer we’re here, the more likely that seems.”
“Then go,” Fahima snaps. “Fly far away and come back when it’s over.”
Ruth looks at her, hurt.
“I’m serious,” Fahima says. “Go. Get safe. There’s no point in the two of us getting killed.”
“How would you get out?”
“I wouldn’t,” says Fahima. “Which is the way it ought to go. All of this is my fault.”
“It’s not.”
Fahima wishes she had time to lay out for Ruth all the fuckups that led them to this and point out how each is marked with her initials. She can’t spare the mental effort—it’s more important to persuade the system to fire all the Chairs simultaneously.
“I’m not going,” says Ruth.
“I know,” Fahima says. “Thank you.”
“Just, faster maybe,” Ruth mutters.
The Chair in La Paz is being particularly difficult. Cedric delegated more than Fahima, which was smart in terms of speed, but produced incompatible protocols. In most circumstances, it wouldn’t matter—the Chairs were independent and didn’t need to communicate—but it makes Fahima’s task difficult. She hears the system pointing her toward a hack, when the entrance to the project’s wing hisses open and a bullet whines by her head, shattering the glass of the lab bay. Ruth runs from the other direction and skids to a stop behind Fahima.
“Did you think I wouldn’t see you scurrying around in our system?” Cedric says. “Did you think you were that much smarter that you could take control and I wouldn’t know?”
“If you were smarter than me, you would’ve shut me out instead of blundering in here with your shitty aim,” Fahima says. “But you’re not smart, Cedric. You’re a vicious little shit who stole every idea he’s ever had.”
“Seven years and you couldn’t create another Pulse,” he says. “It took me weeks.”
“All you had was a willingness to let people die,” Fahima says.
“I had courage,” he says. “I had balls.”
“If you had balls, you’d shoot me instead of shouting.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Cedric says. “Not until I take all those original ideas out of your head.” The gun shakes at his hip as he steps toward Fahima. He reaches out his empty hand like he’s about to pat her on the head.
“Don’t touch her,” Ruth shouts. Cedric turns the gun on her and takes another step toward Fahima. He puts his hand on Fahima’s forehead, and she feels him scrabbling in her brain like a rat looking for meat. She tries to summon up the white flame meditation Sarah taught her, but the scrape of his mind against her thoughts makes it impossible. She remembers the other way to get someone the fuck out of your head. Clumsy, according to Sarah. Dirty pool, Bishop used to say. But sometimes the best tool is the one at hand. Fahima takes the burning feeling of every mistake she’s made, the names of everyone who died on her watch or by her hand, and shoves it all at Cedric, pushing it to the front of her brain where he’s foraging for precious things. In his idiot hunger, he gobbles it up, taking it from her in one massive gulp. She feels his attention shift to other bits of her, things that matter, things she loves. She threw everything awful in her at him, and it wasn’t enough. Now it’s gone.
“I said don’t touch her,” Ruth shouts. The Craft emerges from her midsection as an amorphous and transparent blob and takes on a clamshell shape as he fires a shot at her. The bullet glances off and embeds itself in the metal of one of the other terminals. With a twitch of her head, Ruth sends the Craft flying at him. Its transparency allows them both to see the look of shock on Cedric’s face as he’s borne backward, speeding across the room and smashing against the wall with a wet crunch.
Ruth calls the Craft back. With hitched breaths, she pulls it into herself, sloughing off blood and viscera as it goes, leaving them to spatter on the floor in front of her.
“Holy fuck,” Fahima says, transfixed by the sight of Cedric’s
broken body. Ruth grabs her by her chin, turning Fahima’s face toward her own.
“Fahima, it’s me, Ruth.” She looks into Fahima’s eyes as if she’s trying to read something off the back of her skull. “Do you remember me? Please tell me he didn’t take us.”
Fahima smiles. “The things he took…I think they were bad. I think they were things I didn’t want.”
“Oh, thank God,” Ruth says. She kisses Fahima on the lips, on the cheeks, over and over like a too-affectionate auntie, but Fahima basks in it for as long as she can before she remembers what she has to do.
“I need to finish,” Fahima says.
“I need to sit over here and have a heart attack,” Ruth says. She slumps into a chair, her head hanging back, eyes toward the ceiling, and lets out a long sigh.
As Fahima sits back at the console, she hears rumblings from the system more clearly. It’s not that they’ve gotten louder, but a filter in her head has been removed, as if she’s taken out earplugs and hears the whole of the world for the first time.
“There it is,” she says. The hack shows itself, tying all the Chairs together, tethering them to the keyboard in front of her. One button to rule them all, she thinks. Before she has a chance to tell Ruth she’s done it, she feels a violent tug down, into the Hive.
Now, says Emmeline’s voice before Fahima bounces back up into her body.
“Okay,” Fahima says. She rests her middle finger on the Y key. “Now.”
Clay is losing his grip. The thing he’s holding at bay writhes and seethes against the membrane of his ability; it pushes at him from a thousand directions and grows new arms to grab at him. Something warm like skin brushes his belly under his shirt, and he wraps it in a bubble of slow time and spins his body away.
The wave of flesh he’d held back crashes onto Emmeline and Hayden, enveloping them, and Carrie screams as she leaps onto the mound, hacking at it with her knife, calling Hayden’s name. A blue light streaks across the room as a yard-long spike pierces the flesh, and the room shrieks as a hole opens up, with Hayden and Emmeline emerging from it, gasping for air.
Ji Yeon launches two more spikes into shapes extending from the wall, and Clay casts bubbles of slow time into the mass of the thing, hoping to find a nerve center. The thing thrashes and convulses. It doesn’t seem like a result of anything Clay or Ji Yeon has done, but the entire room is spasming. Faces appear on the wall and sink back into it, screaming masks pressed through flesh-colored latex. The membrane tears, a sound Clay remembers from the war, the sound of skin being sundered. Each hole, each tear, is a mouth, screaming.
“The body’s dying,” Emmeline says. “He needed Patrick to hold it together, and Patrick’s gone.”
“He beat you, asshole,” Hayden yells at the ceiling. “Crawl back into your fucking hole and die.”
“Glover’s not dead,” Emmeline says. “There’s one more place you can go, isn’t there, Raymond?”
As the face disappears and reappears, the tears are left behind, multiplying until every wall is covered in wounds, the surfaces stabbed again and again from somewhere, rent but refusing to bleed. Swaths and hunks fall from the ceiling and land with wet thuds. Sheets of flesh peel off the walls. It is almost over before Clay can comprehend what he’s seeing: it’s Raymond Glover vacating Patrick’s body. One last scream and the curtain of flesh that covers the wall of windows rips down its middle, parting like the Red Sea and sloughing into the corners of the room. The sickly light of evening in Manhattan illuminates a bloodless abattoir: piles of flesh shudder like gelatin as Glover gives them up. The stench of putrescence, spoiled but sweet, fills the room.
A wave of nausea passes through Clay, a gag reflex that has nothing to do with the smell. The feeling isn’t based in his stomach. He can feel it at the center of his skull.
“There’s something in my head,” he says. He can tell from Carrie’s face and Ji Yeon’s that they feel it, too. But Hayden has the same look, and they were never Faction.
“It’s something else,” Carrie says. “Oh, God, it’s my whole head.”
“My mind is a clean white flame,” Hayden screams. “Carrie, do it! My mind is a clean white flame.” Hayden repeats the mantra, but by the third time it’s the babble of a child, empty syllables without meaning.
“I’m sorry,” Emmeline says.
Clay feels it expanding out from the place where his ability resides, the beautiful bit. It’s not the same as when they put the thing in his head. This is radiating outward, a tone that becomes deeper and higher at the same time. Clay thinks of Rai’s concert, the choral voices blending into something beautiful. This is the opposite, one tone becoming many, discordant. Rai and the chorus filled him up, but this empties him out, vibrating everything in him the way you shake a sieve, only everything in him is falling through itself. Rai and Dom and everything he cares about fade behind an all-encompassing dissonance.
Emmeline knew she’d reach this point and that from here she’d be unable to look back. It wasn’t clear that she’d be walking away from her friends as they screamed for help. With the sound of their pain vibrating in her heart, Emmeline draws herself up. She wipes away the trickle from her nostrils, streaking her sleeve salmon pink with the mixture of blood and whatever powers her ability, the way the Source looks when she pulls too much power into the real world. Emmeline falls into the Hive, leaving her body unsure if it’ll be viable when and if she tries to come back.
She’s relieved that the first part of the plan worked, although the results are terrifying. As Pulses fire all over the world, the Hive is riddled with routes to the Source in which Glover was trapped. With no body to inhabit and all those paths of egress, he achieved what he had been trying to do since the idea of him crawled into Patrick Davenport’s head. Raymond Glover is the Hive. He animates every bit of its strange matter. From here, taking over the minds of every Resonant in the real world is a slow process of infiltration. He’s seeping through into them, his consciousness manifold, an end point of the omnipathic abilities he and Kevin Bishop had been imbued with in their genesis moment. When he was alive, with his ability radiating out from the tiny sea horse–shaped structure in his brain that resonated with the Source, Glover could control anyone, a few at a time. Inhabiting Patrick’s malleable body, he could infect hundreds, transmitting into their heads and taking control when he chose. Bodiless, rooted in the Hive, Raymond Glover can be everyone.
Everyone except Emmeline.
As her Hivebody touches the ground, black vines pull back, creating a clear circle for her to land on. She’s never been comfortable here—memories of her first time are of terror and constraint, a hand holding her against her will, keeping her trapped—but she has power in the Hive. She looks at the circle around her feet. She sees it at first as clear, but it’s her Hivebody extending and fusing with the space, pushing him back. Not all of the Hive is Raymond Glover. This tiny patch, the width of a spotlight’s span, is Emmeline. She pushes it outward, making the Hive more her, less him. The entire place rumbles as if it’s chuckling, amused by her efforts. Something pricks at the edges of who she is, pressing against her. She shoves it back, and the bright circle expands.
“You’re more than I expected,” says Raymond Glover’s voice, booming from everywhere at once. “I thought of you as a tool rather than an opponent.”
“I’m not your opponent, and I’m not a tool,” Emmeline says. “I’m something else.”
“You gave up the game creating so many more of us,” he says. “I’m broadcasting myself into all of them like a signal. A bit of me in everyone.”
“Is that what this has been about?”
“This is about saving us from them,” Glover hisses. “Where I was, I could see every possible future. In every one, they kill us. They keep killing us until there are none of them left. I’ve been there forever, watching the world end. I’m going to
stop it. I’m going to save everything.”
“You were so scared,” Emmeline says. “You saw everything you were afraid of reflected back at you, and you thought it was the world. It was you in the mirror the whole time, and you almost made it happen. The Source is pure potential. The possibility of everything. You imagined a bad ending, and because you were there, soaking in that potential, it happened.”
“I stopped it,” he says. “There’s so few of them now. I only have to hold on a while longer. I’ll clean up the ones who are left, and then I’ll let go.”
“You won’t let go,” Emmeline says. “I’ve seen what happens. You grip tighter and tighter until you squeeze out everything that matters. I can’t let you.”
She pushes again, and the circle of herself expands. Cracks and fissures shoot through the obsidian ground, and Raymond wails in pain. She knows she can’t win this way—she’s surrounded and so small—but he doesn’t know that. She can play off the paranoia of a man who’s had nothing to do but think of every way things can end badly.
“I’ve been watching you this whole time,” he says. “I can see you every time you use your ability. You light up everything. A flare, Kevin said. I see how you laid out your pieces across time. Without Patrick’s body holding me back, I don’t have to fight you here and now, do I?” The Hive rumbles again, bemused. “Emmeline, do you remember the first time you met me?”
“No!” Emmeline screams. She’s no actor, but she needs him to see her as scared and to think he’s about to win. She wants him to think he’s figured out the one way to beat her and end this.
The Hive goes silent, the thrum of Raymond Glover’s presence noticeable by its absence. Emmeline knows where he’s gone: right now, years ago, a little girl resonates for the first time. She sees the Hive, a sprawling, shimmering place out of a fantasy novel, and falls toward it slowly, Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Something dark, solid where everything else is ephemeral, reaches up and plucks the girl out of the air. It encases her, keeping her from seeing the new world she’s found or returning to the world she knows. It tries to push in and crush her. On instinct, she pushes back, holding it at bay, but she isn’t strong enough to break out. She won’t be for years.
