“Yeah,” Lila said.
“Not like ‘hilarious.’ Like … ‘strange.’”
“I know this might sound … strange,” Lila said, using her mother’s word, “but since we’ve been here, I’ve had some really wacked-out dreams.”
Heather nodded slowly. “Me, too.”
Oh, just go for it, something told her. Whether that was her own voice, the voice from below, or the voice of intuition, Lila hadn’t a clue.
“Mom?”
Heather raised her eyebrows.
“You’ve done drugs, right?”
Heather seemed to edge a knee-jerk reaction but then sighed and said, “I’ve experimented.”
“With Dad?”
“With … ?” Her aborted sentence wasn’t a no. But Lila saw confusion. Lila had never thought her father was into drugs at all. He was too straight-laced, too hard and logical, too ruthless and strong. Drugs were about a loss of control, as far as Lila’s dash of experimentation had shown. Meyer Dempsey, on the other hand, had both hands firmly on the wheel of any situation at all times.
“I just got a … a feeling.”
Actually, she’d seen it in detail. She’d had dreams, but the vision was also accessible like a memory. Maybe her baby was somehow sending her psychic messages, or maybe she was as crazy as the notion made her feel. Either way, she’d clearly seen her father and mother lying somewhere on the floor with vacant faces and far-off minds. At first, Lila had wondered why … something … had felt the vision important enough to impress so firmly upon her mind. But then she’d realized it was somehow connected to all that was happening. That the drugs, somehow, had mattered.
They were connected to her father’s preparation.
Connected to her father’s disappearance.
Connected to her mother’s odd state — her way of jumping at shadows.
And, Lila thought, connected to a truth: that Heather Hawthorne knew more about what was going on now and in the near future than she let on … or that she even realized she knew.
“And I got a feeling,” Lila continued, “that when you did them together, Dad felt like he wasn’t just seeing visions, but was, in fact … well … going somewhere else.”
Images she’d been shown but didn’t understand, some literal and some in metaphor: a door. A hole in the ground, going down into forever. A plug in a socket, a connection made. Nine pillars of fire. Nine contacts on a conductive wire. Gods of the past. Gods of the future. A sense that as much as life crept forward, they were all really on the backside of a loop, replaying songs that had been played before.
“And somehow, I just get this idea that you and Dad,” Lila swallowed, knowing she might be lining herself up for hours of mockery at the hands of a master, “somehow connected to each other when you did that stuff, and maybe are still, you know … connected now. Like in your dreams.”
A voice inside, whispering that Lila wasn’t the only person in the bunker holding a bouquet of possible answers.
Heather nodded slowly then looked at Lila’s six-months-pregnant belly.
“I’ve had feelings about you too,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Cameron found Benjamin in his office. He nodded hello, standing beside Piper, thinking of how even after three months in Moab, he still defaulted to calling this man “Benjamin” instead of “Dad.” It was old, leftover distance he’d once built between himself and the crazy UFO nut who’d embarrassed him into leaving home all those years ago. But Benjamin — his father — had been right all along. And so Cameron kept trying, now that they were finally reunited, to have a true father again.
“Well,” he said, looking up at Cameron and Piper’s arrival. “Good morning!”
“Is Charlie around?” Piper asked.
“Good morning, Piper,” Benjamin repeated, smiling slightly behind his dark, messy beard.
“Good morning, Ben.” Pause. “Is Charlie around?”
Benjamin twirled his chair in a circle like a kid playing, deliberately wasting a few seconds to slow Piper down. “Nobody ever asks for Charlie,” he finally said. “Charlie’s insufferable.”
A thin man approached, a curly gray-and-brown beard on his face, walking like a robot or a person with a stick up his butt. Benjamin rotated his chair halfway, a Boy am I in trouble now look on his face.
“Who’s insufferable?”
“You,” Benjamin replied.
Charlie turned to Piper and Cameron. “What are you doing here?”
“He says good morning,” Benjamin translated.
“Good morning. What are you doing here?”
Cameron bit back a retort. Charlie wasn’t rude so much as incredibly efficient. When he asked why they were there, he meant it literally. There was little point to pleasantries. They’d come directly into the lab earlier than usual then asked for Charlie. Benjamin was right; nobody asked for Charlie unless they had to. Cameron sometimes thought Charlie was like a vulture. He wasn’t fun to be around at all, but his function at the lab was essential, and you’d want him on your side when dying time came.
“Piper wanted to talk to you.”
Charlie’s head snapped toward Piper. “What?”
“Can we sit?”
“I have,” he looked down at his watch, “three minutes left on an enzymatic reaction on my bench. Come with me if you want to talk for longer than that.”
Piper was looking at the chair beside Benjamin with a sense of longing. Cameron had learned, after all the time they’d spent together, that she wasn’t her best in the mornings. She preferred easing into them as she would a hot bath. She’d want to sit, get a cup of coffee, and shake off the last of her sleep with light banter before delving into anything heavy. Charlie was the opposite. He didn’t yawn for fear of wasted oxygen.
“Go finish what you’ve got, and come back, Charlie,” Benjamin said.
Charlie’s head snapped toward Piper, Cameron, then the elevated gantry where the incubators were stored — “Charlie’s Nest” Benjamin sometimes called it — before he bustled away.
“Not used to him yet, are you, Piper?” said Benjamin.
“No.” She sat.
Cameron pulled a wooden chair from beneath a second desk and sat beside her. “It’s okay. I’ve known him my whole life, and I’m still not used to him.”
“And I’ve known him for five years longer than that.” Benjamin reached for a Mr. Coffee and an empty cup then poured Piper her morning routine. “It’s actually a great endorsement. You know how Smuckers jelly used to have that slogan, ‘With a name like Smuckers, it’s gotta be good’? Well, that’s how it is with Charlie. With a personality like that, my working with him this long must mean he’s outstanding at what he does.”
Piper smiled and accepted Benjamin’s coffee, soothed by his manner in the exact opposite way she was bristled by Charlie’s. Cameron had seen it before. He’d traveled the world with this man, granted access to the most forbidden and sacred of places in the unfriendliest nations, bought by that charm. When Cameron had finally grown sick of all the crazy Ancient Astronauts/UFO conspiracy bullshit and left to make his fortune with a guitar on his back, it had been hard to break away. He’d felt like he was wounding someone who couldn’t defend himself, hurting a man who loved him. But enough, teenage Cameron had thought, was enough. And hadn’t his face been red when the ships had come to prove Dad’s wacko theories true?
“So,” said Benjamin. “Not to use Charlie’s expression, but why are you here? So early, I mean. Usually, you take your walk, I thought. And believe me, it’s so much nicer now that you don’t run across as many cattle mutilations and spectral green lights. Although there is the giant floating ball.” He pointed upward and smiled again.
Cameron watched Piper squirm, unsure how to start.
Still too early. Still too crazy a thing to say.
“What’s Charlie working on?” he said, diverting the conversation.
Benjamin waved a hand. “Oh, I don’t
know. Something extremely competent but vaguely annoying, I’m sure. Charlie can’t help but pick at loose ends.”
Cameron raised his eyebrows. His father loved nothing more than to discuss his work, but these days Cameron had to goad him. A bit gun shy, probably, considering the way that fringe work had bulldozed one marriage, many friendships, and a fatherhood in his past.
“Still looking for evidence of panspermia,” Benjamin said.
“Any luck?”
“The problem with the whole panspermia theory is that it’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Did aliens seed life throughout the galaxy, including here on Earth? Maybe. There’s certainly evidence. But at the same time, life on Earth is what it is, and we don’t exactly have a lot of other life, away from this planet, to compare it to so we can say, ‘A-ha! This life is like that life! Therefore, aliens did it!’” Benjamin shrugged. “Now, with the appearance of these monolith lines everywhere — ”
Piper raised a hand. “Everywhere?”
Benjamin nodded, wiping a stray drip of coffee from his upper lip after setting down his mug. “Mmm-hmm. Our sources under the government’s skin are sending us evidence of more and more. There seem to be two basic configurations. There are lines, like the ones you walked through. Then there are henges.” He waved the jargon away and elaborated. “Circles. Like Stonehenge: stone henge, stone circle. Get it? Well, anyway. Large circles. Charlie’s still working on the scraping you brought us, but we’ve had others too. Seems like normal moss and lichens to me, probably because they’re Earth rocks. But Charlie’s relentless, as you might have noticed.”
“Might,” said Cameron.
“I’m much more interested in the network,” Benjamin said.
“Network?” Piper asked.
Benjamin rotated his monitor. He zoomed out of the displayed map of Utah to show the entire American West. They’d discussed this before — keeping it from Piper until the right moment, which apparently was now.
Benjamin looked over at Piper then continued using his screen as a visual aid.
“This is the line you crossed.” He pointed at a horizontal white line superimposed on the map, east of the Utah/Colorado border. The line exited Colorado at the top and bottom of the state, so it was good they hadn’t tried to go around for long. “This is us here.” He tapped a dot, which seemed to represent a circle. Cameron assumed so anyway; he’d seen the enormous monoliths around the ranch on their walks, keeping a healthy distance. The house and lab, so far as he could tell, were near the henge’s middle. Well, not exactly in the middle. The cavern below the arch was in the precise center.
“So last time I showed you this, Cameron, it was a scattering of lines.” Lines converging on Vail, Cameron thought but didn’t say, watching Piper from the corner of his eye. “But now, see how it’s fleshed out, with our new intel?”
“Where are you getting this information?” Piper had one hand on her heart. Cameron could see the way she wanted to ask about the spiderweb of lines all leading to Vail, but she was resisting, likely fearing the answer.
“I could tell you,” Benjamin said, smiling, “but then I’d have to kill you. It has to do with how I can still get the Internet.” He tapped the screen for emphasis. “I can’t get at the websites full of cat videos for you anymore, but I do have access to a lot of well-connected nerds. People like me who’ve always suspected things we couldn’t admit to, or who have access to information that’s been kept secret. Like Area 51. Roswell. Both quite unremarkable, by the way. Roswell was about alien craft, but it was U.S. military using them — trying to recreate them anyway, and not doing very well. And Area 51 is yesterday’s news. Do you know where the real action is now?”
“Don’t say it, Dad.”
“Area 52,” Benjamin said.
Piper smiled indulgently.
“Anyway, with all these new monolith lines filled in, a pretty clear pattern is emerging. See?”
Cameron squinted at the screen. “Looks like a mess.”
Benjamin zoomed out farther. “Now?”
It looked like a highway map, or maybe a flight map from the inside of an airline magazine. Everything connected to everything else. Except for Vail. That spot was special, and more rock lines seemed to move toward it than anywhere else.
“Not really.”
Benjamin gave Cameron a look that said, I have no son. He pointed again. “It’s a parallel processing network. Do you see it now?”
“Is this like seeing any three things as being Orion’s belt, like the pyramids on the Giza plateau?”
“Funny you mention Giza, wiseass.” Benjamin hit a key, and the screen changed to show Europe, Africa, the Middle East. There were more lines, another place more connected than anywhere else — this time in the Nile River delta. “We’re seeing the same thing there, according to my international colleagues.”
“Colleagues?”
“Well-connected nut jobs.” He smiled a toothy grin at Piper then took another sip of his coffee.
Benjamin clicked through screens, each showing a part of the globe centered on one highly networked hub. He read them off. “Giza, Machu Pichu, Teotihuacán, Xi’an in China. Do you want to know how many ‘hubs’ like this there are in total?”
“Nine?” Piper guessed.
Benjamin pointed: one win for the lady. “Yep. Same as the number of people still missing.”
“How can you possibly be sure there are only nine people missing?” Piper asked.
“Well, we can’t,” Benjamin admitted. “But we do know there are nine people missing who are highly prominent, one — ”
“’Prominent’?”
“Like Meyer is prominent. Not ‘famous,’ really, but … say … prominent thinkers? Innovators? People about whom we can, once we start investigating, clearly say, ‘Ah, yes — that’s why this person is special.’ If I were to venture a guess — ”
“Don’t venture a guess, Dad.” Cameron put his forehead in his palm. Benjamin had made many of his guesses in front of Cameron’s friends in the past. Embarrassment always ensued.
“If I were to venture a guess,” Benjamin repeated, “I’d say they’re all representative minds of the best of what humanity has to offer.”
“You think they’re forming a brain trust,” Cameron said, sarcastic.
Benjamin pointed at the screen. “We know they’re interested in our thoughts. What you described? The reawakening of latent extrasensory phenomena after crossing the stones? That’s what I’d guess this network is for. So yes, it makes sense to me that they would be interested in people who represent ‘the human mind,’ say. The nine high-profile people we know are missing? There’s one from each of these locations. In several cases, they actually built their own residences or structures there, as you described Meyer talking about an ‘Axis Mundi.’ You know that’s what the Aztecs called their great temple at Tenochtitlán?”
“She does now,” Cameron said.
“But in all cases, whether they were able to build their own Axis or not,” Benjamin gave Cameron an eye, “they were actually picked up by an alien shuttle at the hub — the ‘axis’ — nearest them. And in a few cases,” he nodded at Piper, “they had to travel quite a way to get to their pickup point. As you described Meyer’s single-minded determination to reach Vail.”
Piper sighed. It was impossible to tell how she was taking this. She’d seen the map already, but only in the past few days had the updates arrived to make Vail’s prominence so obvious. The mess of lines had looked random before, but now they seemed much more coherent.
“Piper, you said that he didn’t talk about needing to rendezvous with a ship?”
Piper shook her head. They’d been through this many times. “If anything, he seemed to want to run away from them, like everyone else.”
Benjamin nodded. “I could give you my theories about that, but some people remain doubting Thomases, so I’ll save it.” He ticked his head toward Cameron for Piper’s benefit, and her nervous veneer cra
cked enough to smile. “Point is, looking at these maps, it seems hard to deny a few things. For one, these sites were carefully selected. All are mystical places shrouded in lore except for, interestingly, your lovely home.” He nodded at Piper, again tapping the screen. “We don’t know anything special about Vail at all, probably because real estate there is too expensive for Ancient Astronaut theorists to afford land.”
Piper laughed.
“Regardless,” he said, “to me, this picture — lines of stones and henges — looks like a neural net.” He touched a white line representing a double row of monoliths on the Colorado map. “Nerves.” He touched a dot, not at Vail, representing a circle. “Node,” he said, finally touching Vail.
“Brain,” recited a new voice.
Cameron turned. Charlie was standing behind them.
“Quite right,” Benjamin said, looking up at Charlie, knowing the newcomer had more to say.
“The spores I’ve been working with have been entirely dormant. But now, they’re beginning to germinate.”
“What does that mean?” Benjamin said.
“Ask them.” Charlie nodded at Piper and Cameron then gestured toward the screen. “You ask me, the network they’ve been building to harvest our thoughts is finished.”
He squatted in front of Piper. “So tell me, Piper, your mind is waking back up, isn’t it?”
Piper nodded.
“It’s about to start, isn’t it?”
Cameron looked from Charlie to Benjamin, from Benjamin to Charlie. There was something here they hadn’t explained. Some small detail withheld, while the past three months had ticked by, while the network of stones and nodes and brains had been stitching loose ends, inching toward completion.
“What? What’s about to start?”
Cameron was asking Charlie or Benjamin, but Piper answered.
She looked up. Toward the lab’s ceiling. Toward the ship hovering above.
“I can hear Meyer,” she said, as if connecting pieces of a puzzle that had, until now, refused solving. “I can hear him in the ship, wanting to come home.”
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