by Sean Platt
His eyes opened. “No. I don’t think I want to escape. Not anymore.”
Melanie tried to probe deeper. To touch Meyer from the hive side. He was supposed to be accessible, but wasn’t. Meyer Dempsey, unfortunately, was a product of chaos. The Founders had wanted uncertainty, and this time it had come in spades. His turnabout had been apparent since they’d reestablished contact. From inside Meyer, the Seed energy could barely observe. Every time they’d tried to access this man, they’d come up empty. The synergy was gone. Two failed Titan duplicates had resulted from attempts to bridge the gap. Plus some sort of ghostly wildcard that, frankly, scared her a little.
They’d thought they could fix what had been marred with Meyer. But in the case of this particular hybrid, the fixing refused to take. Or even begin.
Melanie didn’t like that she felt the need to ask questions. Before Earth, she’d never cared much for questions. Questions didn’t truly exist in a hive. Whatever needed knowing was known, simply by being in the collective. Too many years in this surrogate had changed that. Melanie had the habit of not knowing. But not knowing in the face of her own hybrid? That felt inexcusable.
Saving her, Meyer asked his question first. Melanie didn’t see it coming from the collective before it left his lips. If he was hooked into the others, his connection was one-sided: able to receive without the need to broadcast. It made him a black box and a spy. She didn’t like the implication.
“What did the other woman mean, when she came to interrogate me earlier?”
“I don’t know what you discussed.”
Meyer closed his eyes again. She felt his node churning.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Meyer chuckled. “She said something about ‘what I am.’ She was mad because of something that happened to me, where I sort of slipped into a haze. I didn’t know what I was saying in the haze, but she did, and was clearly bothered. She made it sound like I was communicating with Kindred and the others. Like I was leaking information to them.”
“I don’t know what she meant.”
Meyer studied her. Melanie felt him study her from the inside, too, but individualism had its benefits. She kept her wall up, refusing to share. It was translucent, like a window. But he was outside; she was inside, and without her permission, he couldn’t enter to steal her secrets. She was still Eternity here. And he was still a glorified probe, no matter how awry it had gone.
“What does it mean to ‘see’?”
“To use your eyes.”
“What is a ‘rift’?”
“You’d have to ask Divinity.”
He continued to study her. But then he seemed to surrender, perhaps to decide she was telling the truth. He sat back in the big, red chair a human would have no way of conjuring and said nothing more.
“They won’t let you go.” Then, because it gave away nothing new and helped make her point, Melanie added, “You’re too important.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Do you just plan to sit there?”
“Maybe. Something led me here. There must be a reason.”
“Titans led you here.”
Meyer shook his head slowly. “Carl and I led the Titans. I came here.”
“It wasn’t well thought out. Carl is dead.”
“Yes, he is. And do you know why? He might have been fine, but he got between us and a Reptar.”
“He saved you.”
“Actually, I think he saved you.”
Melanie stopped. She searched for context, but the blow to her head had knocked those moments blank. Only the stream would show her for sure, and although she didn’t want him to know, Melanie was needing an access point more and more often. It should have been available from anywhere at any time. But it wasn’t — not from this body.
“Reptars wouldn’t harm me.”
“There was a Titan, too. It fired at me as the Reptar came. See?” He pointed. A subtle burn mark marred the otherwise pristine wall. “I can’t say for sure, but I think it might have hit you if Carl hadn’t shoved me away.”
“He shoved you.”
“And you were already knocked out. The shot went there because Carl got in the way. It didn’t hit him either. The Reptar got him. But that doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t get shot because he intervened.”
Melanie waited a beat, processing.
“Absurd.”
“You were already knocked out. I was there.”
“There’s no reason to ‘save’ this body. It’s a puppet.”
“We’ve been through this.”
“And you reached an incorrect conclusion.”
Meyer shook his head, saying nothing.
“Why would he try to protect me? He had me by the neck, ready to kill me.”
“Instinct. Maybe it was his nature.”
Melanie huffed. He was wrong. On so many levels and for so many clearly obvious reasons, he was wrong.
“Tell me something,” Meyer said. “You brought me aboard. You brought Carl. But then you held us in a cell. Carl said you hooked him into some sort of fancy electronic hat, but that didn’t seem to go well on the surface. Yet you didn’t try again up here. You haven’t tried with me. It wasn’t like last time, when you hooked me up and drained me dry. You let me starve. There were two times — once at the start and once what must have been years later — where it felt like my mind was combed down to nothing, like I spent several days inches from death. I assume the second round was when you made Kindred. But this time? Nothing. Why?”
“Would you rather be set up as a donor again?”
“I get the feeling we were in purgatory. Waiting. But what for?”
“Irrelevant.”
“You took me, but not Piper or Lila. And you took Carl, but you haven’t gone into the village to take anyone else. You’re not killing us; you’re collecting us, and being particular about it. You didn’t show yourselves in ships; you came on the sly, in shuttles. It’s almost like you don’t want the folks who are still alive to know you’re orbiting our planet. I’ve been sitting here while you’ve been sleeping, trying to figure out what you’re up to. Why you haven’t come in force like before. What makes me and Carl so goddamn special? I started to get this feeling that you’re up to something. Your girlfriend? She made it sound like you’d nuke the planet if I didn’t play along, but it’s not just about me if Carl was here. And it’s not even just the two of us, is it?”
Melanie didn’t respond.
“Who else were we waiting for? Who else were you bringing aboard?”
Still, she said nothing.
Meyer slid the weapon forward and leaned toward her in his big red chair.
“You say what I’m doing is pointless, but nobody’s so much as knocked on that door since I dragged you in here and threatened to kill you.” He nodded toward the closed entrance. “Your girlfriend said you were prepared to nuke the planet if I didn’t play along, but I haven’t played along, and the planet remains un-nuked. She got all mad about me talking to Kindred, but I didn’t talk to Kindred. And when she mentioned Clara and how she’s been a constant thorn in your side, I got the impression there was a specific reason you haven’t gone right at the problem and pulled out that thorn.”
“We incapacitated Clara once she became a problem.”
“I know. That’s where I was headed when you picked me up. But it’s clear you didn’t do a good job because I know she’s far from ‘incapacitated’ now. You’re supposed to have all this power over us, but your actions don’t back it up. So do you know what I’ve decided, while I’ve been sitting here, thinking?”
Melanie couldn’t keep herself from answering his rhetorical question.
“What?”
“Either there’s a reason you haven’t used that power you’re not sharing — something you still hope to get from us — or do to us — without awareness, and that has you sneaking around keeping secrets. Or …”
Something snagged Meyer’s attention. Hi
s head jerked away. Melanie felt a surge through the hive. Right through the Nexus under their feet. Maybe Meyer could feel it too, but she hoped not. It might give him ideas about uncomfortable options. About acceptable risks and losses that even she, as Eternity, was unwilling to take.
“Or what?” she said, luring his attention back to center.
Meyer finished. “Or you no longer have any power over us at all.”
His words gave her a chill. She didn’t even know why, but the fact that Meyer Dempsey had become so impossible to read or predict unsettled her deeply. He’d started out as a their tool and became a wild card. And now that the Forgetting had lifted and the observer within him was awakening, the man was becoming something else — something worse. He could see beyond the veil, if he knew where and how to look. He had allowed both Stranger and Kindred, according to outbound energetics visible in the stream, to do the same thing. The Ark had responded to them, and they’d responded right back. Chaos had sifted to one place and formed a knot. There was no telling what Meyer might become next.
“Release me,” she said, seized by a sudden urgency, “and they’ll let you go free.”
“You said they wouldn’t.”
“They will do as I say.”
Meyer watched Melanie. He seemed to consider. She kept her face straight, feeling transparent under his assessing gaze. Truth was, keeping him no longer felt like an option. It almost felt necessary. Not because she wanted to be free from his captivity but because the alternative was having him here in the Nexus, his hybrid hands practically gripping the Earth experiment’s controls.
He couldn’t know that, could he?
The few random thoughts she could sense coming out of Meyer and spilling into the collective like explorers in search of an answer … Those were indeed random, weren’t they?
His thought of Cameron Bannister — just a stray recollection, correct?
And his thought — almost an inspiration — about Piper Dempsey. There couldn’t be any reason he’d been thinking about her, as if part of a plan.
She felt him push something out. It didn’t go to the collective. It went somewhere else. He probably didn’t even know he’d sent anything off the ship. Like his haze-addled mumbling into Kindred’s and Stranger’s ears while on the freighter, Meyer likely didn’t even know he was communicating with someone else. Yet.
But Melanie felt the thought as it left. She couldn’t see its content, only that he’d sent it. And as it went, her surrogate’s skin crawled, recalling the human notion of the devil you don’t know.
Meyer shook his head.
“Go to the panel, and call for Divinity,” Melanie said, fighting a creeping sensation without any source. “Call for her, and I’ll command that they let you leave the ship and go home.”
But Meyer’s head never stopped shaking. Perhaps subconsciously, his eyes went to the dead center of the room, and the heart of the Nexus.
“I’ve changed my mind. I think, instead, you and I will stay here a while.”
CHAPTER 35
“Grandma Piper.”
Piper heard the voice but tried to ignore it. Walls of sleep were already crumbling as she clung to her dream.
“Grandma. Wake up. We need to get going.”
Piper kept her eyes closed, no longer asleep but vainly pretending, for herself rather than Clara. She’d been in a painfully bright room long, long ago. A feeling of nascent betrayal had lurked in her chest — the sense that she’d turned her back on one person and was now turning it on another. She couldn’t have both — something a less time-bound part of herself knew she’d attempted and failed. Many times. She was thinking about Meyer, and … the one she’d left behind.
“Five minutes, okay?” Clara said.
Piper’s eyes still hadn’t opened. She listened as Clara padded away, now clearly feeling the grit of sand shift beneath her blanket. Time and place were returning, leaving the bright dream shared with Meyer behind.
Piper remembered Kamal’s camp, the sand, and Lila’s death. Particularly the last. But strangely, the moment turned her mind back to Clara. Another of her unearned links to the Dempsey family had departed with Meyer’s daughter, but it made her cry that Clara, fully grown, would always call her Grandma Piper.
She tried for a few extra minutes to reach back into her dream, but she couldn’t. Missing the ending was awful. The dream had felt real — more memory than fabrication. Something she’d done in a place that was mostly forgotten. Thoughts from the life of a much younger woman.
Cameron, now long dead.
Meyer, alive, though she’d once thought him gone, taken again.
The flood. The extinctions.
Stranger and Kindred, compelled together yet always apart.
Cameron, with that satchel forever by his side, which in Piper’s memories always held the Ark’s stone, like a fragile plate he’d never managed to break.
Trevor, dying to protect her, and recover that key.
Meyer, on the ship. Then and now.
Herself in that bright room, finding him alive and aboard when the mothership picked her up over Moab, leaving Cameron behind to shout as the ship took her away.
Cameron, with his satchel.
Cameron, with the key.
Cameron.
The Ark.
The key.
And herself, in the white room aboard the big Astral ship with the thrumming underfoot, imprisoned with Meyer — the energy somehow resonant even when she was back with Cameron, as if he’d been there, too.
Piper opened her eyes in surrender. The dream was gone.
She gathered her scant belongings and fluffed the sand from her hair, annoyed that she’d regrown a modern woman’s sensibilities after twenty years as a bohemian. She didn’t stink or appear unkempt any more than she had before her memories had returned, but now Piper had context enough for disgust. So before leaving the tent she used the basin to wet a rag then reach under her shirt and swab her pits. She wished the world had deodorant. She missed shampoo.
Ugh. She was so gross.
There was a piece of silvered glass in the hut. Piper looked at her reflection and sighed. She appeared old. She felt old. Fifty-six fucking years now, and with the lines to prove it. Had aesthetics really once been her business? She’d once owned a clothing line. Was sort of F-list famous for it, too: Quirky Q.
Hard to imagine there’d once been a world where “quirky” meant anything, let alone an attribute worth paying for.
Sighing, Piper stepped into the sun. It was low in the sky, but the day was already warming. In the shade, she wanted her long sleeves down, but in the sun she was almost too hot. Another damned day in rare air, and they’d spend it hiking. Lucky them.
“Sleep well?” Kamal asked, nodding hello.
“Yes. I guess I needed the rest after yesterday.”
“Morning,” Kamal said to Logan, waking up a few feet away.
“Good morning,” Piper echoed.
Logan responded with a simple, “Hey,” then he looked at Piper, holding his gaze too long.
“What?”
“Are you okay?” Logan asked. Kamal, needing to prep, turned away.
“Of course.”
Logan continued to scrutinize her, puzzling. Like he smelled something and was searching for its source.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You just seem … off.”
“Off how?” She tried to smile. “Is it my breath?”
Logan didn’t laugh, still studying her, looking as much around Piper as at her. He shook his head. “I can’t put my finger on it. It’s not really something about you. It’s in you. Almost like you’re Lightborn. Like it’s … I don’t know, in the air.”
“So it is my breath.” Again, the joke fell flat.
“I had kind of a funny dream last night. I think you were in it. I told Clara when she woke up. She had ‘a weird dream about Piper’ too. Did you
have any dreams last night?”
“I did, but how is that—?”
Logan’s head ticked sideways as if he’d heard something. “Who is Cameron?”
Piper’s mouth opened. She had no idea what she planned to say, but a booming voice from behind saved her from deciding.
“Okay,” said Kamal, ending their discussion. “I think we’re about ready to head out.” He looked around the assembling group, including Piper’s party plus a few of Kamal’s people. “Everyone carries their own supplies because that’s the way we roll in this clan. We have plenty of backpacks. We thought we’d made them ourselves, but turns out it was Patagonia. Anyway, pick one, and load it up if you haven’t already. Water. Sunscreen.”
“I don’t have sunscreen in mine,” Logan said, peering into a green pack.
Kamal rolled his eyes. “Obviously there’s no sunscreen. I’ll dispense with sarcasm at this point because I guess we’re all too tired to appreciate it. Anyone going to the freighter, tour group leaves in two minutes. Can I get a break?” He put his hand in the center of the loose group of sleepy people, said “BREAK!” and shot the hand high when no one set their hand atop his. He looked around and mumbled something about this group having no team spirit and was gone.
Piper watched him go, feeling uneasy. It wasn’t the trip ahead — back to the freighter, where reminders awaited with probable death — that bothered her. The trek across the desert weighed heavy but not as much as an uneasy feeling she couldn’t shake. One that had no antecedent other than the vanished threads of her lost dream and an interrupted conversation with Logan.
Right now, talking with him was the last thing she wanted to do.
Fortunately, Logan was already packing his bag. Whatever had perplexed him about Piper was forgotten or paused — and the stirring from his question (Who is Cameron? And this from a kid Piper had met only after she’d forgotten Cameron’s name) would leave her in time.
