by Sean Platt
“I’ve been dreaming of this place,” Peers said.
“You all have.”
“Everyone in the village?”
“No. Just those with a job to do.”
“So they’re not dreams? Are they like …” Peers swallowed. “Like before, with the Astrals and their rings of stones?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why now?”
“It has something to do with Clara.”
“Meyer’s granddaughter?”
Stranger nodded. “She’s been waging a silent war. She seems to have finally scored a victory, but the Astrals hit her back. I was supposed to find her, but I came here instead.”
“Why?”
“I can’t see it as I used to. But you’re proof that something is different. We were supposed to forget. I remembered. So did Clara and a few others. But that was supposed to be all. Your knowledge was like a sickness, and for some reason, they were unable to kick it.”
“To the Astrals?”
Stranger’s eyes were fixed on the freighter. He nodded.
“Do you know why? Or what it means?”
“One day I might have. But not today.”
“Maybe it will come back to you. Like everything came back to me.”
“I’ve gotten something else,” Stranger said. Peers shifted to look at the man’s face, then wished he hadn’t. People in the village treated Liza Knight like a holy mother and her priests and clerics as wise men. But when they truly needed something important, the people went to Stranger. It was hard, feeling as lost as Peers suddenly felt, to see the man bothered.
“What?” Peers asked.
Stranger turned to Peers. His eyes could only be described as haunted.
“A grudge,” Stranger said. “A vendetta.”
Peers let a moment pass, unsure how to respond. Finally he shifted on the sand. “So what now?”
Their attention was drawn back to the ship before Stranger could answer.
A new woman approached from the far dune, walking toward the hulking ship in the bright wide open.
CHAPTER 14
Liza just wanted to get out of the sun.
She wasn’t afraid of the cargo ship the way so many people were. Why would she be? It was only a ship. But even if she’d been like the others — blank-headed, unable to fathom the idea of the thing being crafted by human hands (or robots, or whatever it was that built ships back before the whole damned planet was resting in peace) — Liza doubted she’d have been afraid. Many things in the world weren’t easily explained. The big ball of fire in the sky, for instance. Nobody really knew what that was these days now that all the scientists were dead or stupid. The theories were hilarious. She kept waiting for someone to propose that thunder was surely the gods dancing.
But even with her remembering mind, Liza might have feared the ship. Strange things happened out this way. People got lost and never came back. They saw things. And at night, the thing was creepy beyond belief. It would be easy even for a rational person to believe in ghosts — even if she was supposedly a holy person, which Liza, beneath her skin, decidedly was not.
But today, after waking up in the middle of the goddamned desert and frying like a piece of bacon, Liza didn’t care if there were all sorts of boogies in the cargo ship. It was shade. And she was curious. She’d come out here a few times to try and raid the thing for futuristic goodies, but her devoted followers made it hard to venture off alone. The rectory was comfortably within The Clearing’s borders, and that meant she could never slip away. Some pious asshole always ended up following, asking why Mother Knight was taking a pilgrimage to someplace so unholy.
Well, she was alone now. If she could remember how she’d managed to get here from the rectory without being followed, she’d take notes on how to repeat it in the future. But Liza didn’t remember at all. One moment she’d been in the garden on the cusp of lunch, and the next she’d been sunbathing in 100-degree heat. Or so she assumed, though Liza was unable to verify without a thermometer or a watch.
“I miss my coffeemaker,” she said aloud.
But Liza didn’t like the way her voice sounded as she neared the freighter’s base and slipped into blessed shade. She’d said that tiny witticism to lighten her mood, but the problem with doing such things alone was that nobody ever appreciated your mirth. The only audience for Liza’s hilarity right now was Liza, and Liza (as a spectator) sort of thought that Liza (as a performer) was a shitty comedian, and was, in fact, a lot more scared than her stern image normally allowed.
“Bullshit,” she said.
But again, not funny.
Liza slouched. She sat against the metal, wondering distantly if the ship might choose this moment to defy two decades of sensible physics and tip over to crush her. It might be a blessing. She could spin this all she wanted, and play to all the audiences of Liza Knights that she chose, but she’d lost two hours of her life and woken somewhere far off and not terribly safe. Supposedly there were raiders from other tribes out here — folks who, despite being as saved from the big flood as her own village, still refused to play nice with the only few humans left on the planet. And of course, there was sunburn.
Maybe she was losing her mind.
Water. She desperately needed water.
Liza looked up at the ship, then along its edge, toward where she could (blessedly) walk to the nearest ladder in the shade. But she stopped when she saw that there were footprints all around. And at the end of the forward-facing footprints, a large, circular, almost smooth indentation in the sand, as if a shallow glass bowl had been pushed into the ground to hold the sand back.
Curious, Liza went to it. She had to move into the sun, but something held her spellbound. A memory trying to resurface — not of her childhood or old-world Earth or even last week but of something recent. From the time she’d lost.
It had something to do with all these footprints.
Some of which, she now noticed, were enormous, with toes, as if made by a couple of desert-dwelling bigfoot. Some were like paws, long lines dragged in the sand. There was a curious set comprised of a semi-pointed, distorted oval, always followed by a round impression like a dot — big, short, fat exclamation points, really.
Like … high heels?
It’s in the canyon.
Liza looked up, but no one had spoken. It had been a whispered voice — or rather, the ghost of a whispered voice. As if she hadn’t heard it now but had been repeating it in her mind like a song stuck in her head.
It’s in the canyon, at the bend, beneath where the sun sets.
Like a refrain. On a loop. Someone giving shitty directions to somewhere because Google Maps hadn’t been invented yet — or whatever.
Liza knelt.
She touched the impression in the sand.
This time the memory came with pictures, sensations, and sound. Was this place — in the canyon, apparently — somewhere she’d been? She definitely didn’t recognize it. But Liza had heard it. Of that she was sure. Maybe she’d seen pictures, if that were possible. Either way, it was compellingly familiar. She knew this place.
Liza realized that she really, really wanted to see it again.
What was there?
Food? Weapons? A cache containing a generator, fuel, extension cords, and a Mr. Coffee?
Liza almost knew. But she didn’t actually know — at least not specifics. She didn’t precisely feel affection for … whatever it was; this was more like the memory of warmth. An aftertaste of adoration, left like the scent of something burned hours ago.
She stood.
She knew the canyon. There was only one within reasonable walking or horse-riding distance. North, where the terrain grew inhospitable and the land had dried like old leather. The thing probably ran northwest to southeast, meaning that if someone approached from the most likely path, there were only a few jogs where the sun might seem to set into the canyon itself.
She desperately wanted to go there.
> More, perhaps, than she wanted to know what had happened in her past two hours — whatever it was that had caused her to wake in the desert, alone.
You’re losing your mind, Liza. Like you almost lost it on the ship, when everyone was forgetting and you …
But that was absurd. She hadn’t seriously considered trying to scuttle the ark and take her chances in a lifeboat. That had been a flight of fancy — the kind of thing a sane woman considers when every single person around her becomes paranoid idiots who Won’t. Leave. Her. Alone.
There were many explanations for why Liza might lose a bunch of time and wake up somewhere new. Like psychedelic drugs people told her the Mullah kept experimenting with. Or too much of the monks’ mead. She hadn’t had either, to her recollection, but maybe that was proof of how drunk or high she’d been: so high that she didn’t even remember getting high.
Liza’s mind didn’t dignify this theory with a response.
“I’m fine,” she said to nobody.
But this time, someone replied.
CHAPTER 15
The woman with the short, hawkishly styled brown hair stopped walking, turned back to Clara and Logan, then said, “I can hear you.”
Clara looked at Logan. Logan looked back at Clara. Clara felt suddenly uncomfortable with the woman’s dark brown eyes upon her. It wasn’t nerves so much as discomfort. As if she’d been caught doing something shameful in front of Logan.
“You. I can hear you.”
Sadeem was looking at Clara, his face concerned. Clara gave him only a glance and then said, “I didn’t say anything.”
The woman gave Clara a long, hard look. For a moment, Clara thought she might react like a Reptar — biting her in half and ending this tense, protracted misery. Instead the woman put her hand on her hip and gave a bob of her head.
“You know, we’ve felt you. For our entire time in orbit, trying to solve the last bit of this epoch’s ‘human problem.’ You have always struck us like a pebble in the shoe: a tiny harmless thing, irritating for its persistence.”
Clara thought, If you’re really Astral Divinity, your true form is a thing like a light-filled anemone on a ship in orbit somewhere. You don’t even wear shoes. But she kept her mouth shut, waiting for more.
The woman glanced down — at her shoes, black and sleek with a low heel.
“Your kind.” She glanced at Logan, shaking her head as if bemused, almost smiling. “You’re like ghosts. There but not quite. And that was the worst thing about feeling your little attacks on our machine: For twenty years, we couldn’t find their source. But then when you finally broke through and our … measures … to suppress your memories failed, some of the other Divinities were bothered because it meant you’d remember your pasts. But not me. Because even if the whole thing was falling apart, at least we could finally see you — right there as a big, bright light on your own annoyingly persistent neural network.”
It was such a strange way to speak, for an Astral.
“‘Divinities’?” Clara said.
“Divinities,” the woman repeated.
“I’ve never heard it plural. Usually, it’s like there’s only one of you.”
The woman’s jaw worked. Clara watched, aware in a distant way that the human thing in front of her was merely a puppet for Divinity. And yet this one sure seemed to have made itself comfortable in bones and muscles and flesh.
“The point is, I can hear you now,” she said, still stopped in the rock hallway while the Titans and Reptars waited. “And not just your thoughts about how you might be able to duck down the corridor coming up on the right and run toward the new exit you don’t think we know is there.” Her eyes flicked toward Logan, then back to Clara. “We can hear all sorts of things you might be thinking.”
Inside Clara’s mind, she heard a voice that wasn’t quite her own.
Did you make a mistake in leaving him, Clara?
Was Logan as kind a lover as you remember in what he recalls as your cold and distant way?
Divinity smiled at them each in turn, then turned and resumed walking. Clara sensed Logan’s discomfort without seeing it, feeling the blood rush to her face.
“Sadeem,” the woman said as they passed the corridor down which Clara no longer felt any desire to try and escape. “You once told our Eternity about a Mullah legend. About seven founders that you call ‘Archetypes.’”
Sadeem, between Clara and the Astral, mumbled assent.
“Why don’t you tell me the same story, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s meaningless,” Sadeem said as they mounted the stairs, coming topside. “As I told Eternity when leaving the ship.”
“We know it’s not. Nor are you fooling anyone.”
Sadeem looked back at Clara, confused. They hadn’t discussed this in years. It was an old tale for an ancient age — and like all of the legends, equated to nothing. We know it’s not? Not fooling anyone? That was news to Clara and Sadeem.
(Or is it?)
Now that Clara thought about it with the firewall down, maybe it wasn’t news to her at all.
The question must have been rhetorical because when Sadeem didn’t answer, Divinity didn’t nudge him. Instead she walked a few more paces and stopped as light dawned ahead, desert sun beating like a fire from above. They were down the outer stairs and onto a stone apron, a parked Astral shuttle resting on the sand ahead.
The woman turned.
She gave that same knowing, infuriating, not-at-all-alien smile.
Then from the left and the right, came the running and shouting and screaming.
CHAPTER 16
Kamal held the ancient piece of iron and watched the cave entrance. He’d seen the Astrals land their shuttle, cross the sand, and go in just as he himself had been about to approach the Mullah encampment. That sight had changed his mind. Shit, as they used to say back in his relative boyhood, was about to get real. And he’d rather be real from a distance than up close where things could get messy.
He hunkered down. The others did the same behind him.
Seeing the Reptars and Titans made his skin crawl. The sensation was accompanied by the weirdest, most out-of-place pang of nostalgia. He’d worked beside those things for years in Ember Flats, and even though it was clear now (and perhaps always had been) that they were the enemy, his first reaction on seeing them now was one of familiarity.
Maybe the Titans had some bland, bureaucratic paperwork for Kamal to sign like they used to.
Maybe the woman leading them (Divinity, probably, though this one didn’t move as stiffly as he recalled) wanted to have a chat with Viceroy Jabari — and while she waited, perhaps Kamal should offer her tea. Divinity had never accepted tea or coffee or anything else back in Ember Flats, but Kamal had never tired of asking. Just to fuck with those flesh bags masquerading as human proxies, because why not.
Well, Mara wasn’t around now. Hell, Mara might not even be alive anymore. Kamal himself was forty-four if he was counting right, but doing so required conversions that nobody should ever have to do: adding twenty-four years of life in the city to twenty (or so) years thinking he was head of a nomadic tribe. And wasn’t that discussion going to be uncomfortable if Kamal and his people eventually had it? The “tribe” he’d been leading for two decades, he now remembered, had once been a group of terrified government interns he’d encountered on his mad dash from the Ember Flats palace basement to its front door.
Mara would be older, and these days people didn’t live as long. But if Kamal managed to find her again, they’d have a good laugh like they used to.
Thought you were leaving me behind to die when you got on that ark and the floods came, didn’t you? Har-har; I’m back and am going to tell all of your villager friends about the time you got drunk at the palace party and accepted a piggyback ride from Dan, that fat accountant from the Ember Flats treasury.
It should have felt funnier than it was. But the man who’d appeared after communications died between K
amal and Mara hadn’t been laughing then and wasn’t laughing now. Kamal’s current situation was thick with some kind of irony, but he wasn’t sure what kind that might be. Kamal should have felt like a hero in the making — what with his pistol in hand and the enemy inside, bothering the people he’d come to see. Instead, with his memories freshly returned, he felt like Mara Jabari’s twenty-four-year-old aide again. Kamal didn’t know how to fire a pistol, and for all he knew this old thing would blow his hand off if he tried.
Meyer Dempsey is special, Mara had told him. The Initiate always knew he was unique.
And then the voice of the man in blue jeans and boots, who’d given him the ball that had led Kamal to his boat — and ultimately to shore just ten miles or so from where Jabari made her new home:
One day you will suddenly wake to a new truth. And when that happens, you must go quickly to the east, toward the rising sun, until you find her.
Not Mara Jabari. The man in jeans had meant Dempsey’s granddaughter. She was also special. Then he’d given him the ball — a burnished silver thing, smooth and beautiful to the touch — as an otherworldly token.
Go east from where? To where?
The man had nodded to the sphere. It knows.
But the flood …
It will see you to a boat. And it will see the boat to land.
Kamal had no reason to believe the man at the time. He’d recently said his final goodbye to Mara on her ark as she went about her horrible chore of choosing who would live or die. He’d made peace with the idea of drowning. But because that sounded like such a horrible way to go, he’d weighed it against a self-inflicted gunshot. There was a pistol in a safe, beside many others. He’d been staring at one, loaded in a way he hoped was correct, when the man had entered through the locked portal as if it were a screen door, twirling those spellbinding spheres in his large weathered hands.
Take the guns. All of them. You will need them. A sack will do.
