by Sean Platt
“Run.”
Speaking to herself more than the others. Thinking it out. Hearing her own imperative as something foreign, wondering how she’d so suddenly and completely become a coward.
But her intention must have had an echo because Stranger and Kindred — who hadn’t been watching Clara like Logan and Kamal but had instead still been eyeing each other, still barely far enough apart to not fill the air with electricity — turned and ran.
Not away.
But directly at the oncoming horde in a sprint.
The wave of Reptars seemed to hitch. Its front edge, which had been the roiling lead of an oncoming wave, became a ripple. It was as if the first among them paused — just long enough for the rows to bunch up behind them. The flat edge became a ridge. But it lasted only a moment, and the Reptars kept coming.
“Clara!” Piper again. Rooted to her spot, watching Kindred and Stranger run full out ahead. Again her word was a question — urgent enough to warrant a shout.
“Run at them!”
Logan turned toward Clara, head cocked. But he was Lightborn, and saw her purpose. He said something to Kamal, then, without waiting for agreement began to sprint as well. Kamal followed.
“There’s only two real ones! We just have to get through them, as fast as we can!”
Piper was still watching them, semi-catatonic.
Clara grabbed her hand and pulled, too hard. Piper’s feet became unglued, and they began to run, interlinked. Maybe she got it and maybe she didn’t, but once they were moving, Piper didn’t hesitate or slow.
The idea — first in Clara then in Stranger and Kindred, possibly all through Meyer above — was simple: If they stayed put, the false Reptars would surround and hold them until the real ones could pick them off one at a time. But if they turned into the threat, they could flip the echoes to their advantage and use them as cover.
But as teeth and claws kept coming, terror rained on her body. Clara kept her feet moving only through inertia, able to keep running only because she already was. Part of her mind understood that most of these Reptars couldn’t hurt her, but a larger part rebelled at the teeth and claws and azure sparks. You ran away from these things, not out to meet them.
Sweat. Heartbeats like thunder.
The Reptar’s purrs blended into an appliance-like buzz. Clara’s feet belonged to someone else. She could barely feel Piper’s hand in hers.
They’re not real. Not in any way that matters. You can touch them, and you can feel their scales, slick against your skin, but they can’t touch you or split their minds. Not between cardboard cutouts like these. And not now, ill as they are.
She tried to feel that sickness. To remember how the Astral collective had felt the last time she’d touched it. Remind herself that this was only a trick.
Thirty feet from collision — probably four or five good strides on each side — Piper must have hit something with her foot. She faltered, staggering both of them sideways.
Clara’s eye caught a break in the pattern ahead: one of the Reptars, a line back from the front, jogging sideways a millisecond later, to match.
Of course. The real ones are out front to get the Archetypes right away. One comes for me, and the other makes a beeline for …
The bottom dropped from her mind, sending Clara into free fall.
“Kindred! Stranger! They’re—!”
Piper saw the Reptar that had changed course and yanked Clara sideways, away from it, as the lines collided. She lost sight, too many churning black bodies of decoys surrounding them.
But before they’d been surrounded, Clara had seen another break pattern. It leaped, mouth open and claws out, raging straight at Kindred.
CHAPTER 54
Kindred’s mind was outstretched like the arm of a drowning man, seeking a savior unseen at the surface. It was nearly impossible to clear his head even a little. A minute ago, he’d been falling toward Stranger the way a passing asteroid hurtles toward a black hole. Gravitational, seeded with inevitability. The black hole will devour the asteroid, but to the rock it’s neither good nor bad — only what was destined to happen. Whatever had almost happened, when a foreign presence had seized his body and began moving him toward Stranger like something on remote control, had felt like that. Relief — at least soon, it would all be over. Then the sensation ended, and he’d been himself, able to step away. Then the Reptars. And then the warning. The command — this time from a known voice.
Don’t let them use you. Use them. Don’t let them overtake you. Overtake the Reptars, instead.
Kindred had known the same voice — Meyer’s — was inside Stranger’s head. Kindred was somehow in both places at once, his spirit inside both bodies. When Stranger had decided to run, Kindred hadn’t been surprised. It had felt like himself making the choice, one thought moving both sets of legs.
He knew there were only two Reptars, refracted through the Ark’s folded space to show hundreds or thousands. Like a funhouse mirror or a disco ball’s many edges: one thing, shown many different ways. But that was hard to remember as he ran, closing the distance between himself and the Reptars as they double-took, surprised, and then kept coming.
Meyer inside his head: If you don’t let them scare you, they can hide you from the genuine threats.
But despite what Clara or the others might have believed, Kindred was plenty scared. With the Ark’s power in the air, all of his anger and resentment were gone. All of Stranger’s thoughts of vengeance and retribution: gone. All Kindred’s pain — of exclusion, of incompletion, of something left behind — gone.
And he was left with only fear.
Kindred was barely aware of himself when the Reptar broke formation and lunged.
It happened in bang-bang succession: Kindred was knocked flat, then the lights died as the swarm arrived to surround them. Reptar echoes stopped rushing forward and agitated like turbulent water, moving in sinuous, writhing patterns like a tangle of snakes. A small halo formed around Kindred and his predator, giving them room. But Kindred could barely see sunlight through all their black bodies. He could feel the press and heat of their presence. They weren’t just shadows. Nor just ghosts. Most of the Reptars around him were real: reflections shown in three dimensions instead of the usual two, seen through what Kamal had called quantum rifts.
The Reptar raked him across the chest, snarling. Flesh opened in parallel diagonal wounds. It snarled above him, the blue glow blasting from its throat. Its breath was like spoiled steak.
Kindred’s eyes watched its rows of razor-sharp teeth.
But then there was a new hum in the air. A growing static, his hair bristling as if trying to stand on end. Kindred braced, the Reptar’s reeking saliva dripping runnels onto his cheek. The hum intensified, becoming something like the drone of transmission lines overloading.
An intense, very sharp pain. A smell of ozone supplanting the reek of meat. There was a flash, and the Reptar flinched back, screeching with pain. It regained its wits in less than a second and refocused on Kindred, but then the force built again, ramping like a capacitor gathering charge.
This time when the surge hit, it knocked the Reptars around Kindred to their backs, flattening them in a circle like a burst from overhead. Another big whiff of ozone. Kindred’s fingers prickled; his muscles kept wanting to spasm.
While the Reptar that had been on him scrambled to regain its feet, Kindred rolled sideways, into the still-upright part of the swarm. Inside he found his hands and knees, then his feet.
He ran, sighting on the barely visible freighter antennae, where the other survivors would surely be headed.
CHAPTER 55
Stranger looked back, feeling the charge dissipate after the growing force had finally reached its head and popped, flattening a circle of Reptars. At first he didn’t understand. But then Stranger saw Kindred roll out of the area opened by the burst and into the Reptar throng.
He’d felt a charge build around him. Like someone overfilling a ba
lloon. His mind had been watching the feeling while he weaved through Reptars, knowing that balloon was filling more and more as he moved, knowing that if he couldn’t release some of the pressure, something would blow: the balloon’s skin finally at its limit. He’d changed directions, knowing on an instinctual level that proximity to something was the problem. But he’d gone in the wrong direction — toward Kindred rather than away. There’d been a blink of overload as the balloon was flooded with air all at once.
He hadn’t had time to flinch, knowing it was coming. It was just there, in an instant. All Stranger had managed to do was brace as the pressure discharged: a huge electric event, like a vast static spark from years of shuffling barefoot on carpet.
The charge vanished for a split second, then began to rebuild, waning as Kindred escaped the Reptar and ran toward the ship.
Meyer spoke inside his head: Now you understand. You are half of an atomic bomb.
This time, instead of running from Kindred, he found the line of deadly force leading to his opposite and followed as fast as he could.
CHAPTER 56
Meyer was grasping, trying to find his center, when the door finally opened. He couldn’t stop it. He hadn’t been punched in the gut; someone had managed to reach inside his gut and punch him there. Whatever had just assaulted him seemed to hit only his Astral half, but that was enough. The human had been beaten and dragged about, using psychic energy and effort to buoy him. With the Astral collective clutched in an iron hand, Meyer withered, his infrastructure suddenly yanked out from under him.
He couldn’t reach Clara or the others, in anything more than tiny bursts. If he’d had a fiber-optic connection before the gut punch, now he only had a telegraph. He could give them dots and dashes but nothing more. He was a man in a cell, unable to so much as hold his own door closed.
The woman stormed inside: Eternity, who called herself Melanie. She was alone.
“How did they do it?” she said, quickly crossing the room.
“Do what?”
She slapped him, hard. His cheek stung. Meyer must have grown used to the support of a now-dormant part of himself, because he found himself wincing.
“HOW DID THEY DO IT?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
She hit him again. And again. And again. Hair flew around her face. From inside, Meyer could still feel her fist on the Astral collective. Its intensity had subsided, but to Meyer it was a vise. She’d done something to them. The humanity he’d seen in the Astrals lately was upon the woman in full bloom, practically bleeding out of her even as she held precise control of her alien pieces.
“You know! I know you know! I’ll cut it out of you if I have to!”
The Astral control relaxed, and Meyer felt a scene forced upon him. The woman was opening the fist just a little, feeding him the vision as if grabbing Meyer’s neck and shoving his face against a photo.
He saw Kindred. The point of view was from above, and in the grotesque feel of the vision he could see long black legs at the periphery, emerging as if from a viewscreen. He was seeing from inside a Reptar, even feeling its parodies of emotion. He felt an alien greed subsume him — the Reptar’s hunger, perhaps — then a jolt of light and pain. The view had changed, now looking up into what appeared to be a swarm of writhing black bodies. And in that canted view, he saw Kindred roll away into the throng, as if trying to extinguish fire from his clothing.
“What did you tell them?”
“I can’t tell them anything!”
“But you knew. You knew it happened.”
After a moment, Meyer bobbed his head.
“It won’t work,” she said, glaring at him. “If this is their plan, it’s a waste. They can’t destroy the Ark. But there are other artifacts on the ship that we’d hoped to recover, and supplies that could help your race survive a harsh season. Now they will squander it all and kill each other. Kill Piper. Clara.”
This all seemed off to Meyer. Wouldn’t she want them dead?
“Tell them to stop. Tell them to stay away from each other.”
Meyer met the woman’s cool blue eyes, human and full of fear.
“Why?”
“They will only harm each other.”
“And?”
“Don’t you care? You saw what happened when they got too close!”
But this was a game of poker. Meyer set his face and held his emotion. She finally spoke again, her voice less frantic — almost resigned.
“They can’t destroy it. There’s no point in trying.”
But Meyer could tell the true issue was elsewhere. He searched her face, consulted his internal compass, and decided he might have found it — something he’d already begun to feel within himself, looking through the Astrals’ stream to find his own echo at the end of a long corridor. In the Astral stream’s history of the hybrid Meyer Dempsey were many events: a birth, an occupation by an observer, a first copy, a purge, a second copy. And then there was a curious event he hadn’t quite figured until now: a certainty that Stranger, at some point, had been aboard this very ship, looking into the Astral stream just as he himself had done. Only, Stranger had sampled something of Meyer. He’d taken something with him, before going.
It hadn’t been much. Just a memory Meyer hadn’t truly experienced that his first duplicate had: death, as the copy gave his life for Heather’s.
Stranger had taken that memory. Until the connection was severed, Meyer had felt his sense of anger centering on it, the way Stranger had held that sacrificial moment close, clinging to hatred.
But Stranger’s possession of the memory wasn’t the problem. It was that he’d been able to access Meyer in the stream to take it.
If there was a copy of Meyer’s mind — and his duplicate’s — in the Astral stream, that meant it was part of them.
It meant that while whatever was happening to the Astrals as humanity flooded it, that copy of Meyer’s mind was victim to it as well — and perhaps part of its cause.
It meant that Meyer was bound to them. Now and forever.
“They can’t die, can they?” Meyer asked.
“They can die,” she said.
“Their bodies can, maybe. But even if you kill us all, the King Archetype is part of your collective now, and always will be. You can’t remove it. Even if you erase us all, part of me has become part of you, hasn’t it?”
Kill the Archetypes; restart the clock.
But it couldn’t be done because a copy of Meyer — of Stranger, of Kindred — would live inside the collective forever.
The King couldn’t be killed. Not without killing themselves.
Eternity nodded.
Melanie nodded.
The moment lasted only a second. Then a creeping dread clawed onto Meyer as the woman looked up, new fear flooding her eyes.
Inside Meyer’s mind, a klaxon blared.
Something new was being pumped in the minds of both species, lighting thoughts in a spreading inferno.
“Let me go,” he said.
So she did.
CHAPTER 57
Piper had lost Clara’s hand in the throng but could still see the girl between the Reptars’ flashing limbs. There was only terror. Piper could taste it on her tongue; she could smell it in the air; she could feel its slick wet kiss on every inch of her skin. Reptar scales brushed and bumped her, and with every pass she felt an internal tension wind one click tighter. Soon the spring would snap and break her mind into pieces.
“Clara.”
Her lip quivering, barely able to make sounds. Every open Reptar mouth was a tomb. Every passing claw was a death knife. Piper thought she understood what Clara had said — what Trevor’s ghost had echoed. But here in the middle of the aliens, she didn’t find herself calmed by the lack of attack. She didn’t feel better because Clara had spotted a live one and dodged it. Instead she knew the killing blow would come at any instant, from any direction, the Reptar she’d seen attack Kindred had already fi
nished him. The boom she’d felt in her bones from somewhere to the left had been a bomb — a new weapon the Astrals had found, or a way to blow humans apart from the inside.
“Piper!” Clara’s answering shout was more of a hiss, barely heard through the chatter of false Reptars.
“Clara?”
Her slight form appeared between Reptar legs as if they were furniture. She was almost calm.
“You with me? Can you hold it together a bit longer?”
Piper forced herself to nod.
“We have to get up there.” She pointed.
Piper looked. They were closer to the ship than she’d thought.
“One might see us when we start to climb the ladder. Do you understand? We have to—”
The Reptars were gone. All of a sudden, like a switch flipping, they disappeared. Piper saw Kamal and Logan a hundred feet away on the sandy plain, revealed as if by a tablecloth snapped away.
Piper opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
A sound from the side. Kindred was close, alive, much nearer than Piper might have suspected. He was running hard toward them, crossing the ground in seconds. Then he was below them, all three at the ladder, shoving at Piper’s feet, trying to make her move. She finally did, and Clara followed with Kindred right below them, huffing and shouting and shoving. Then Piper saw why.
Not all the Reptars were gone. There was another just yards from Kindred.
A blur came from the other side. A man, running.
The Reptar coiled its legs, ready to strike.
And the man — Stranger, Piper now saw — hit the Reptar full on. Practically tackled the thing. At first Piper thought she was seeing a repeat of what Peers had done in his final moments, but then saw that Stranger wasn’t taking on the Reptar. He was next to it, but only because the Reptar was between him and what he’d actually been running after.
Kindred.
Piper felt the charge build before she could shout to stop it. The storm but a second away. She’d never seen Stranger and Kindred share the same frame. Now there they were, not fifteen feet from each other with only the Reptar between them.
