by Sean Platt
“I didn’t know how to shoot Sadeem’s rifle,” Clara said, “but it worked fine as a bat.”
A scream.
Piper had run toward Kamal and Logan and Kindred, somehow ending up in the middle. She remembered the freeway catastrophe outside Chicago a thousand years ago, recalling those close quarters, and feeling the same sensation now. How had she been surrounded? She’d been firing the entire time but didn’t think she’d killed a single Reptar. She’d been prepared to kill or die herself, but neither happened. When that massive batch had dropped dead all at once, she’d seen Logan, Kindred, Kamal, and Kamal’s friends. Now she was in the middle. Why weren’t they attacking, until the one struck at Logan?
Clara had pushed right through the Reptars, not minding them at all, and whacked the one over Logan hard with what turned out to be a rifle. It was still where she’d dropped it, but Clara and Logan were gone, retreated through a wall of Reptars like a bead curtain.
Now the scream. Piper saw the Reptar Clara had clocked recovering, now ripping the woman from Kamal’s village down her middle. Blood spurted as she separated. The man shouted, pointing his gun at the Reptar’s body, firing, bullets scoring only fractured scales. He needed to aim at its mouth, its eyes. Getting a body shot with a bullet, on a Reptar, came down to luck.
Piper watched as the thing turned him to mincemeat.
Peers watched a bloody-armed Sadeem cross the space between the groups, already feeling the oddity of all that was happening. The Mullah had legends about this sort of thing — about illusions pulled by the Horsemen. But what were these creatures if not Reptars? He’d fired through several, struck a few without any damage. The dead had fallen without effort from Peers, but he could already tell that whatever riddle had transpired, Sadeem had figured it out.
He took off after the old man, watching him raise a weapon to a solo Reptar that was very near Stranger, shooting at it from the other side. There was something in its jaws. By omission (not Clara, who’d run the other direction; not Sadeem; not Peers or Stranger), the anonymous puree dripping from its maw had to be Marcus — a guy who, Kamal had joked on the way in, had once perfected the art of making copies and bringing coffee to Jabari.
Sadeem seemed to hear something. His head turned, and he moved away, toward another bit of quarry, leaving Stranger to duel with the Reptar alone.
But when Sadeem was a handful of yards away, the Reptar turned its attention from shots fired by Stranger, opting for a less painful direction.
It took Sadeem down, ending him before the old man could look back.
Logan heard a cry. Clara watched his eyes widen, then saw the rarely observed hero within the skinny man surface. A woman’s shout; it had to be Danni or Piper. Logan was off his ass, gun in hand and through the surging mass of decoy Reptars, before Clara could shout. And then she was alone.
She tried tuning her attention to the collective but could no longer hear her grandfather. Was he dead? He’d cut off so suddenly. She’d have to close her eyes and focus to see if he was still on the grid, but she couldn’t do that here. At least two of these boogeymen Reptars were real, yet she had no idea where to find them. The real ones acted differently than those Clara gathered must be “the same thing seen in many places,” which was as far she understood Meyer’s impossible concept. But if Clara couldn’t see beyond her protected knot, she couldn’t tell.
Toward Logan?
Yes, it made sense. But she’d already lost his direction. She guessed, knowing that staying where she was would end up being the only wrong choice, suddenly and surprisingly sure that dying today might not be all that bad. The years had been hard, and death promised rest.
But beyond the knot, Clara found herself in a curious calm. They were fighting behind her, but there must not be any real ones over here. None were paying attention.
Then she saw two people between the fighting groups — Stranger and Kindred, now moving slowly toward each other.
The air crackled. From the ship, from the Ark. From the two men. A current of deadly potential.
They moved forward. Moved forward. The sizzle lifted her hair, filling Clara with foreboding.
She opened her mouth to shout.
“Don’t—!”
“—get any closer!”
Peers’s head spun to find the source of the shout: Clara, yelling at Kindred and Stranger, their faces confused, as if they’d woken from twin trances.
As all three began to study one another, Peers wanted to raise a shout of his own. He was out of ammo, as were several of the others. Something strange was happening, and they had to figure it out. Several were dead, including his late-life mentor. Their only option was a hasty retreat.
Dazed, Stranger and Kindred were now both walking slowly backward, wary, seeming only now to realize they’d narrowly avoided doing something deadly.
But then Peers saw movement. On the left. Coming fast. Clara didn’t catch it, but Peers was closer.
He didn’t think. He ran. Full out, he ran.
He wasn’t going to make it. The Reptar was too fast, and Clara still hadn’t noticed. Stranger had, and was, shouting. But he wasn’t close enough, and his bullets — if he was still aware enough to have kept his weapon — might hit Clara from that far away. Peers realized only once sprinting that he’d dropped his own empty gun.
So what are you planning to do?
He didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He could barely see Clara. Instead he saw the temple he’d visited as a child, entering the dark room with the voice he’d learned was Astral, telling them it was cool if they came for a visit. He saw the cannibals outside Ember Flats. He saw the day he’d lost Clara in the hallway when she’d been little, knowing that no matter what, he couldn’t lose her again. And for some reason he saw his son, James, whom he hadn’t allowed himself to think of for years. James would have been over forty by now — old enough to fight in this battle for himself if the Ember Flats security forces hadn’t ended his life so early.
Was it really bad, sparing him a life in this place?
Yes. Life was always better than death, Peers thought as his lungs burned — running toward Clara, who’d had one of the hardest lives he could ever imagine.
Peers gasped, his legs on fire. The Reptar would take her first, for sure. The beast knew it, and so did Clara; her head had turned, now hearing its approach.
The Reptar leaped, struck Clara, and knocked her flat. No pause. It reared back with its throat flashing and swung down, hard, as Peers watched visions of failure in his head, knowing there was nothing he could do, no weapons in his possession, no time at hand to so much as grab the thing. He had nothing at all, except for sand and …
A millisecond flash of a small brown face. A face Peers failed like he’d failed everyone else, all his life.
And himself.
The Reptar bit down.
Clara rolled away as Peers thought his final thought, his torso thrust between the thing’s closing jaws.
The thought went out to a small brown boy, taken before his time: I’ll see you soon.
CHAPTER 45
“Find me Divinity,” Melanie ordered.
The Titan before her did nothing. She didn’t like the way it was eyeing her. Maybe Melanie’s time in Meyer’s captivity inside the Nexus was coloring her perceptions, but she’d have sworn his expression was one of condescension, perhaps even pity. They usually appeared neutral. Her time in a human body had flavored that neutrality, allowing her to see it as polite, or perhaps even pleased. But this one’s face struck her as belligerent. Annoyed by Melanie’s instructions.
“Is there a problem?”
She was speaking like a human. Like a military commander from a pre-invasion drama, bustling to retain order as their command fell apart. Titans didn’t speak. It wasn’t going to snap off a salute and say, “Sir, yes, sir!”
Its lips wouldn’t tell her the Titan’s reasons for not moving — she had to dip into the collective and listen.
> Divinity is here.
Well, shit. Melanie knew that. The entire Divinity class was inside the collective, same as the Titans and Reptars — lines between the latter two almost indistinguishable at the mental level. More than even the soldier classes, Divinity’s home was inside the collective. It (they) had bodies, but only due to biological necessity. The same as Eternity was supposed to be, before the surrogate. But these days she didn’t like the collective much. It had always struck her as a place of serenity and order — a place where her mentality felt at home and right. These days it felt as chaotic as the ships. When the Titans escorted her away from Meyer and the Nexus, something had rampaged through her quarters. It was barely a surprise because that’s the way the collective seemed right now.
Everything inside was tipped over and messy. So much was broken. It was as if something had stomped through and laid waste. Now even the line between Melanie and this Titan felt untidy. It should have felt like they were adjacent cells in a larger body, working as one toward a common purpose. Instead she felt their butting heads. Trying to convince the Titan to cooperate rather than knowing and accepting that it always and inevitably would, and that the alternative wasn’t possible.
“I mean Divinity’s surrogate,” Melanie told the Titan.
But now she got the distinct impression that the Titan was toying with her. She’d swear it was on the verge of asking, Why would you need to locate its puppet body if you need to speak with it? Instead its mind asked something more poignant — something Melanie found herself struggling to articulate. Something she had no reason to voice or specify at all.
Which surrogate?
Meaning: Which Divinity do you want? Which pointless, artificial line do you wish drawn to separate an entity that is normally considered to function as a singular, distributed mental being?
“The short one with the dark brown hair.”
She could have sworn the Titan smirked. She shouldn’t have said that. She might as well have asked for the Divinity that wore culottes and liked long walks on the beach. But the words had come out because lately she (as a surrogate) had only interacted with the one Divinity (as a surrogate). And because of it, she’d come to think of “Divinity” as that one’s name, just as hers was Melanie.
That surrogate of Divinity is in Control.
“What is she doing in Control?”
This time, the Titan’s silence inside the hive felt less smug and more like uncomfortable uncertainty. She didn’t want to poke the Titan further; Melanie could find the roots of whatever-it-was on her own. But she could sense echoes of what the Titan had said from many facets of the disorderly collective. Whatever Divinity was up to was something the Titans, Reptars, and remainder of Divinity either didn’t know or entirely trust. It had the feeling of a disagreement or a schism within the group — but more on the level of intuition than anything fully understood.
It is not entirely clear.
“Bring her to me.”
Divinity is not alone in Control. She seems to be with a hybrid.
“A hybrid!” But no, Melanie’s knee-jerk alarm was absurd. Meyer was back in custody where he belonged. A trio of Titans, if nothing else had fallen apart between her orders and now, would be sitting opposite him, staring him down and holding his thoughts in a vice. Maybe he could push through three mental guards and communicate with the surface, but she doubted he could do it without them at least knowing what he was up to.
“Fine. Bring them both to me.”
More uncomfortable thoughts from the Titan. Had it always been like this? Was she the one out of touch, feeling the collective as it had always been from her own warped perspective? Or was the Titan different too? This interaction should have been simple, almost immediate, and transparent. Instead it felt like an interrogation — of a reluctant subject.
“What?”
And the Titan’s thoughts said, Control has been rendered inaccessible.
“She’s locked you out?”
Emotions swirled, fogging Melanie’s capabilities, same as her emotions always did. The mute white form seemed like an enemy. She wanted to shout at it, hit it, rail against this single stubborn body as if it would solve all the baffling problems gone so recently, terribly wrong. It would do nothing; the correct response was to focus surface Reptars on hunting down and eliminating the three humans harboring the remaining Archetypes. Only then could order be — hopefully — restored to the collective.
Melanie’s lips firmed. Her fists clenched. She wanted to know the meaning of this. She wanted someone held responsible and punished.
But she was interrupted when the opposite door to the small room opened, and a contingent of new Titans entered, apparently to deliver news in person that, if not for the Archetypes and human pollution, she should have already pulled from the hive mind at a distance.
The Nexus is activating, said the new thought. Meyer Dempsey has spooled it up from his cell.
From his cell? How could he possibly do that? It was as impossible as a hybrid going rogue and creating Palls when replicated. As impossible as a human memory cluster too redundant for the Forgetting to erase. As impossible as subject minds leaking into their own minds, turning them into individuals too unused to autonomy to so much as deploy more Reptars to the surface.
Enough was enough. Melanie, she was shocked to discover, felt more furious than afraid.
“Kill him,” she said. “Just kill Dempsey, and be done with it.”
But the Titans just looked at each other.
And the collective mind said, We can’t.
CHAPTER 46
“Piper. Wake up.”
Piper shook the voice away. She didn’t want to wake up, and she sure as hell didn’t want any more dreams. They’d plagued her every blink, as if just waiting for her to fall unconscious so they could move in for the kill. Her mind was full of all she’d seen only in sleep — particularly dogging her as they put enough distance between themselves and the freighter where the battle finally ended. Nobody, it seemed, had expected retreat to be possible. The Reptars would follow them until their party was dead. But Peers bought them time, and once Piper had run, she’d seen the others: Kindred, Logan, Kamal, Stranger — and blessedly, lest Piper’s heart fail, Clara. They’d crested the first dune at a sprint and the second at a run, but the Reptars stayed behind. All five hundred. Or, if Clara was to be believed, two, somehow enabled by the Ark’s power to display many faces to the world.
But Piper didn’t want this new dream. Or the thing that felt more like a memory: herself, in that round room with the lit-up, tree-branched floor, with Meyer. She’d been unable to push the last from her mind even while awake. It had the feeling of persistence — a thought demanding attention lest something important be forgotten.
“Piper.”
She pulled her thin blanket closer, fighting for slumber.
The speaker punched her hard between the shoulder blades. Piper spun, annoyed by the intrusion, and sat up.
Trevor Dempsey was kneeling behind her.
Piper looked around, certain that she was dreaming even though she knew better. She’d moved away from the group, feeling an overwhelming need to be alone. She couldn’t even see the spots where the others had bedded down without standing. She’d told them she didn’t need or want the safety of numbers. She didn’t particularly care about snakes or scorpions.
It should have been dark, and it was. But still Piper could see everything, as if the full moon was a bit too bright.
She lay back down and closed her eyes. Trevor punched her again.
“I’ll keep doing it. It doesn’t hurt my knuckles at all.”
Fighting unreality, Piper sat back up, her heart pounding. Trevor hadn’t aged a day.
“What are you?”
“Don’t do that, start blabbing on about how I’m supposed to be dead.”
“But you’re … dead.”
Trevor gave a very teenage sigh.
“Are you the Pall
?”
“I wasn’t around for the Pall.”
Now she’d caught it, sussed out this strange thing’s lie. Claiming ignorance of the Pall while using its name was a bit like saying “What?” when someone asks if you’re really deaf or only playing.
“Let’s not do this. You used to be an empath. Can you really not tell it’s me?”
Piper stopped, her mouth open.
Trevor shifted on the moonlit sand. He was also glowing a bit, from the inside. Like a ghost that’s found substance enough to move sand with his feet, to punch a girl in the back to get her attention.
“I was in love with you, you know. You were too old for me, but too young for Dad. It wasn’t fair. You have no idea how hard that was, to be a teenage boy with a stepmom like you.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Piper said, looking around the quiet desert, wondering at the trickery upon her.
“Oh, it made perfect sense. You were hot. And fun. It was hard to be around you. It was the king of all crushes. I never really got over it. Not before I died.”
Piper shook her head, watching him, disbelieving her eyes but unable to ignore the feeling inside, growing where her old psychic abilities once made their home. It wasn’t the Pall, because now that was Stranger. This was something else.
Only: not something else. This was Trevor.
“How are you here?”
“Dad sent me.” Trevor gave an annoyed, eye-rolling laugh. “Poetic, right? He never understood it any more than you did. ‘Trevor, go hang out with your stepmother for the afternoon. You two can hold hands.’ ‘Trevor, take your stepmother to the mall, and help her pick out bikinis.’”
“We never did those things.”
“‘Trevor, go see your stepmother in the middle of the desert after midnight to tell her about the Ark.’ It never ends with him. And you know what? I thought it would be easier. But I guess I’m sort of frozen where I was … and you’re still beautiful.”
