by Sean Platt
She picked up one of the Patagonia backpacks. There was already water inside, so she plopped her own smaller bag atop it and zipped up. She even had a hat for shade, sunscreen be damned.
Clara arrived on her right. Piper gave her a thin-lipped smile, imagining her somber thoughts on their return to a place of magic and murder.
Thoughts about Clara’s mother.
About the daughter Piper had, until recently, believed was her own.
“How did you sleep?” Piper asked Clara, stuffing down her ill emotions.
Clara didn’t smile, giving Piper a look that might have been a cousin of Logan’s earlier expression. Then she said, “I had a dream about all of us … including the dead.”
CHAPTER 36
The dead.
Meyer saw them before him, standing, spectral, around the Astral woman. They weren’t really there. He could tell the difference, and the vision barely confused him. It didn’t unnerve him or make him feel lost like before, when he’d seemed to see things on the planet through (he now thought) Kindred’s eyes. That time he’d woken confused, seeing Carl in the real world, his attention still drawn to the swirling haze. Whatever he’d done during that first fugue — though it felt like nothing — had made the dark-haired Astral angry. It confused Meyer because the feeling was like an ayahuasca trip, and yet he hadn’t partaken.
There had been fear. And knowing and seeing and insight and horror to follow the visions. His consciousness split between awake and dreaming.
Not this time.
“What are you doing?”
Concern. From the Astral woman. The one he could see on their collective, more networked than the other: a leader in a species that wasn’t supposed to have chiefs. They called her Eternity. But she called herself something else. Something private and forbidden.
The dead stood around her. Watching.
Heather, who’d followed his call to the bunker in Vail.
Trevor, who’d gone too young, who’d fought and died.
Cameron Bannister.
Benjamin, with his stalwart companion Charlie beside him.
Nathan Andreus.
Jeanine Coffey.
And Lila.
Lila.
But he didn’t react, just like he didn’t respond to the thin, mostly transparent forms standing around the Deathbringer room. It didn’t scare or sadden him now. He didn’t understand, but another part of him completely understood. It was like there were now two Meyers sharing the same skin. One knew what he was seeing. One expected it. So the other waited, knowing that answers were on their way.
“What are you—?” the blonde began.
“Shh,” Meyer stopped her.
She was sitting on a bench built into the wall. She had blood in her hair — evidence that even if she was an immortal anemone made of light somewhere on this ship, she was all too human here. Maybe the body her consciousness inhabited was only a shell. Meyer could see, through the Astral hive he seemed increasingly connected to, that it was how things usually were. But the woman had her secret. She wasn’t as connected, it seemed, as she was supposed to be. And in addition to blood from her scalp wound, she also had spatters on her dress — Carl’s blood, from the first wound he’d taken to see them safe.
Carl appeared among the ghosts.
Don’t feel bad, boss, he said, more in Meyer’s head than outside it. Bringing you here was what I was supposed to do.
The woman was staring at him. Not understanding. Not hearing or seeing any of this. Her attention, when not on Meyer, was fixed on the room’s floor. On the dark, leg-thick lines now visible beneath it as shadows against the light. It looked like something with a glow coming from below. The shadows, all different sizes, branched and forked throughout the room.
“Where do you go when you die?”
The woman looked at Meyer like he was crazy.
“I asked you a question.”
“Ask your churches,” she said, her eyes narrow.
“Why did you come to Earth? Why did you do any of this?”
“To understand.”
“To understand what?”
“Everything.”
“If you want to understand, why did you kill us off? Why the flood? Why the near extinction?”
“Humanity was not ready. So we reset your race, to try again.”
“Not ready by whose criteria? Yours?”
That wasn’t quite right. There was something the woman wasn’t saying.
She looked at the floor. Nervously. Meyer remembered her question, now asked twice.
What are you doing?
He wasn’t doing anything. He was simply sitting, same as her. Yet her eyes kept going to the floor as if uneasy. As if waiting to see what would happen.
Whatever was happening in this room — with the floor and its branching shadows, with the ghosts that Meyer could see and hear but that she apparently could not — was something she believed he was responsible for.
“What is this place?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I see people here,” he said. “People who’ve died.”
Including Lila.
He couldn’t process that now. A part of him had already known.
She didn’t scoff. Or deny it. Instead she seemed to focus, and he finally felt her touch the collective.
“Who do you see?”
He told her, looking at each and giving their names. Who they were. Who they’d been.
She watched Meyer. Then, seeming to weigh a decision, she said, “You must leave. We will let you go. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
Heather moved beside him. Meyer turned his head to her, the blonde Astral seeing his shift of attention, knowing what it must be even if she couldn’t see the ghost.
Heather leaned in and whispered, Don’t do it, studly. Not now that you’ve got their nuts in a vice.
He looked at the Astral and shook his head. Not all of the links were connecting, but some were, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The room.
The branching lines beneath the floor, lighting up, feeling to Meyer like a waking beast. He could feel their energy. Whatever was happening to this place, the ghosts were part of it.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“Then explain.”
She looked away.
“It’s your archive, isn’t it? What we called the Ark. This room is somehow part of it. And the people I see standing around you—”
She cut him off, uncertainty in her eyes.
“You have to trust me. What you’re doing? It’s as bad for you as it is for us.”
“I have no reason to trust you.”
“You wanted to leave and return to your people. Now is your chance. Leave this alone.”
“The other woman said that she’d use me to find them. I won’t go back, or help you trace them.”
“Then we have to go somewhere else. Anywhere else. What do you want? Where do you want to go? Anything. Just name it.”
“I want to know why I see my family here.” He met the woman’s eyes, anger percolating like lava. “My daughter.”
“You can’t possibly …”
Meyer settled into the energy around him. The room brightened. Contrasting against the light, roots beneath the floor seemed to darken. He saw more ghosts: Peers’s friend Aubrey; a nomad who, after Sinai, had traveled with them for a while, Captain Jons, a hero dead too soon.
The woman held up her hands and stood. When she spoke again, her voice was alarmed.
“Stop it! Stop what you’re doing!”
Calmly: “What am I doing?”
She watched him sternly. “We call this room the Nexus. It’s like a nerve center. Not for us. For you.”
“Us?”
“Any species we study. You since we’ve been on Earth. This is where we experience our subjects as a whole. The stones we laid around the cities sent information about your collective here, to a network under the floor
. Signals travel through the motherships on the way in and out, but this is the center.”
“Why do I see people I know who’ve died?”
“You are different. You can control it.” She hesitated. “Like we can.”
“How am I different?”
The woman seemed to be warring with a choice of what to say and what to conceal. But like it or not, he was doing something she couldn’t control. Something that scared her, that she needed his agreement to stop.
“You’re like us. What’s in you — what’s always been in you — is like a piece of our collective. But …” She sighed, clearly unhappy unearthing the secret she wanted to bury. “You’ve changed. We don’t understand you anymore. Not entirely. There are things you can do that shouldn’t be possible. That doesn’t mean you have power over us. But it makes you like a child carrying a weapon. You don’t understand yourself, and that makes you dangerous. To yourself.”
“What do you care about us?” Meyer sneered.
“We’ve invested a lot in you. Time. Thought.”
“And yet you’re ready to kill us all.”
“Your species survives. Individuals do not matter.”
Meyer raised his weapon and aimed it at the woman, finger to trigger. She flinched. Turned her head. Cringed.
“It seems to matter to you.”
“There has been … cross-pollution. This is not how we are supposed to be. Not for either of us.”
“I see. So this is all for our best interest. You’re looking out for us. Because you’re the good guys.”
He sank into the energy. Gripped the collective. The room brightened again, new ghosts coming like an undead plague. Trevor smiled. Heather touched his shoulder, her spectral hand slipping through him, more solid-seeming than before, but not there at all.
“Stop!”
“For my own good?” Meyer said, not stopping.
“Yes!”
“For your good.”
“For yours! But …” He recognized her expression. It wasn’t fear for her species, and certainly wasn’t concern for his. He poked further into the hive, effortlessly seeing connections from Astral to Astral. They were more individual than they should be, truly ‘cross-polluted,’ one species too tightly bound to the other.
Her expression was pain.
“What hurts us hurts you. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Carl said you tried to peek into his mind. He resisted. He made you push. But when you tortured his mind, that meant trauma for yours.”
Seeing no point in denial, the Astral woman said, “Yes.”
“This room. It’s a nerve center. It’s … a repository. A vast memory bank. Like a storage center.”
“It connects to a memory bank.”
“The Ark. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Each epoch,” she said, sitting again, “we reset what you call the Ark. We empty it, and the collective minds of humanity begin to refill it. What you remember goes in. And so does what you do. It’s true for all of humanity. For thousands of years between visits, the archive tracks it all so we can review your progress when we return, and see if you’re ready to evolve.”
“I guess this time, we weren’t ready.”
“No.”
“So you killed us off.”
“We reset the experiment. To let you try again.”
“How generous of you.” Meyer’s gaze was on Lila. Her presence here could only mean one thing, yet he was less mournful or angry than a part of him felt he should be. Maybe it was the difference the woman had mentioned — the way he was like them. He was at least part Astral, and as hard as it was to realize, he’d always sort of understood that deep down.
Lila’s ghost — someone’s memory of her, if Meyer understood this correctly — came forward and tried to take his hand, but of course she couldn’t. Lila smiled.
“What you’re doing right now,” the woman said, watching the floor throb light beneath its branching shadows, “threatens what remains of your species. To the new cycle of our experiment. But you must understand: The experiment is all that keeps us here. If the experiment is disturbed too much …”
“You’ll end it,” Meyer finished. The dark-haired woman had told him as much. But was it true? Based on what he’d seen in Eternity — her admission that humanity’s pain was their agony, too, thanks to the unwanted bond — it felt like a bluff to Meyer.
He looked up at her. Trying to see the truth.
She nodded.
“You’re accessing the archive. I’m not sure how, but I can feel it in the collective. And if you continue, the balance might be upset. And then what’s left …” She didn’t finish. Meyer seemed to hear her say it from inside his head: What’s left will no longer be worth saving.
Meyer looked at the surrounding memories and seemed, for a scant moment, to understand.
He was somehow accessing the Ark, by focusing his thoughts from inside this room — this Nexus. He was scraping the few thoughts and deeds that humanity’s remainders had deposited in its banks thus far, just twenty years into the millennia between judgments.
But he believed at least part of what she said: if he kept focusing on any memories in the Ark now, he might break it open.
Then even the survivors would be lost, judged into oblivion.
“Our species are in this together now.”
Meyer looked up at Lila. Trevor. Heather. All the others he’d lost and missed. He softened his focus, trying to let them go. His head sagged. He tried to forget, knowing it wasn’t truly forgetting. A great energy diminished like a sigh. The floor lost its luster; shadows dimmed as the dark roots died and the room returned to its normal state.
“Good,” Eternity said. “Better.”
But Meyer watched her face, knowing now that he was like her. And that she was like him. They were linked beneath the surface, tied to one another for better or much, much worse.
Knowing that now, for the sake of humanity’s scant future, he would have to keep his mind out of the places it longed to go. He’d have to do his best to forget them all — not through their will, as before, but through his own damned conscious choice.
The lesser of evils. He didn’t have to like it, but it seemed he’d have to accept it.
“Thank you,” she said, and in the moment, it struck Meyer as the most bizarre thing anyone, of any species, could ever have said.
“Damn you,” he replied.
CHAPTER 37
The dream wouldn’t leave Piper’s mind, clinging like the last tendrils of a spiderweb to the hand attempting to whisk it away.
She moved faster and caught up with Clara. The group was small, and if Kamal’s hunch was right (something Piper found herself agreeing with even if it didn’t precisely make sense), they might be able to cover most of the distance to the monolith in relative stealth. It seemed to Piper that someone had strategically arranged pieces years ago, then forgotten the positions and rules of the game. Now Stranger’s side was playing out against the Astrals — except that even he no longer knew why he’d done what he had, or what was coming next.
He’d been right about Kamal, though. And, apparently, about how his news would resonate with what Clara already knew.
Piper neared the young woman, walking faster. It was still impossible to think of Clara as an adult. To Piper, she’d always be the little girl with the precocious gift. Clara had been then much as she’d been now. Only her body had changed, along with the fatigue in her eyes.
It must’ve been hell for her.
Years of unending work, holding back a tidal wave while they all blissfully forgot. Even the other Lightborn had given up, leaving her to fight alone. And now, Piper couldn’t help but feel like they were entering the endgame.
“Water?”
Clara looked back at Piper and smiled. It was a small thing, but Clara rarely smiled these days — especially with all the world had given them to cry about. She f
elt the creeping, stubborn sense from her dream retreating, entering the present in the growing sun.
“Thanks.” Clara reached back, took the liquid-filled skin. They all had their own water, but it was Piper’s only offering. They’d been distant, with Clara living half her time in the Mullah caves, and her simple smile felt like healing.
Clara took a drink and handed it back. Piper sealed the top and slung it over her shoulder.
“Kamal said Stranger set things up so that they could have guns.”
“I think they’ll be better against Reptars than sticks and harsh language.” It was meant as a joke, but Clara’s second smile fell flat. They both knew from experience that bullets weren’t much better. You could wound and kill Reptars with lead slugs, but you had to get lucky and hit them in a soft spot or, ideally, the eyes. A point-blank shot could sometimes smash through their glowing scales, but they usually kept coming. Yet another reason this was a fool’s errand, and that they might all be walking dead.
“Why didn’t Stranger have Kamal stash some dune buggies, too?”
Clara sniggered. She must have been keeping some water in her cheeks because a droplet shot from her nose.
Piper let ten or twenty silent paces pass between them. Nobody was talking much. Peers and Kamal were leading the group, with Logan close behind. Kindred was nearby, but the two weren’t interacting or even seeming to notice each other. Stranger was nearly as far from Kindred as he could be while still keeping pace with the group — maybe thirty yards back, side by side with Sadeem. There were also several strangers from Kamal’s village. They walked in singles and pairs, the two groups not even trying to mingle. A grim thought struck her: maybe everyone knew this was a doomed errand, and there was no point in getting friendly.
But no. Clara was this group’s leader, even if Kamal and Peers were in front. That’s what Kamal had told her: Clara says she knows what to do. And because nothing happened for genuine reasons anymore (or, perhaps, everything did), Clara’s intuition was as good a direction as any.
“Kamal told me about Meyer.”
Clara looked over. Piper had more or less said, So it turns out Grandpa’s an alien. What’s new with you? But Clara only gave her a grim expression of consent. It hadn’t taken long for Kamal to explain it, and once he had, Piper realized she’d already known. Her mind had returned to her odd dreams, and the gossamer memory of speaking with Clara. It was as if they’d already had this discussion. As if Clara’s mind had spent subconscious hours telling Piper’s what they were only pretending to broach now.
