John took his hand and shook it. He looked as if he wanted to speak again but thought better of it.
“Thank you, Seb,” he said. “I wish you the same.”
Seb walked away a few paces, then turned.
“Why do I keep feeling I know you?” he said. “As if we’ve met before. When I know that we haven’t.”
John looked into Seb’s eyes and held his gaze for a few moments.
“We did meet once,” he said. “Kind of. But you won’t remember. There’s something I want to tell you. I wasn’t sure, but—well, I guess you need to hear it. You’d better sit down.”
Seb sat down.
45
“The first person I killed was my father,” said John. “His death is probably the only one I can’t bring myself to completely regret. Beating the crap out of his family was the closest thing to a hobby that man ever had. I can’t even picture Mom without bruises.”
John was looking straight ahead, hardly seeing the mid-afternoon Central Park population in front of him.
“My mother died eight months after I last saw her,” he said “A few days after giving birth, she left her baby on a doorstep. A week later, the river police pulled her body out of the Hudson. I—Mason, I mean—was glad. She was a complication while still alive. There would have always been the tiny possibility she might have come back, or gone to the authorities, despite the threat to her and her child. But she did what she thought was necessary to protect her newborn son. She removed herself as a link, hoping that even if I had kept watching her somehow, I would lose interest in my sibling. And she was right, to an extent.”
“To an extent?” said Seb.
“Yes. She was right to be paranoid. I had no network of Manna users back then, so my methods were old school. I employed a private investigator. He found her fairly quickly and sent regular reports. She never went home. She saw out her pregnancy in a refuge for battered women in Brooklyn.”
John stopped speaking for a while. When he resumed his story, his voice was quieter.
“Some people say suicide is a coward’s way out,” he said. “They’re fools. Not an easy thing to do, deciding to end your life and then going through with it.”
Seb thought back to the feeling of disconnectedness as the last of his lifeblood had seeped out of his veins into the dusty ground of the Verdugo Mountains. As he remembered, it was as if it had happened to someone else. In many ways, he had been someone else back then. And the gift of Manna, while saving his life, added to that feeling of disconnection with his younger self.
“She had married an older man who knocked her up while she was barely out of school,” said John. “Then, he quickly showed his real colors. A hard-drinking, wife-and-child-beating bastard. Some women might have struggled to love the son of such a man. Not Mom. She taught me right from wrong, and I never felt anything other than unconditional love coming from her. But she never had the strength to leave him. I don’t know why. I can never put myself in her place. She was manipulated and tortured physically and psychologically from the age of seventeen. Who knows what that does to someone? And then, when she was finally free of him, she had to face the nightmare that the son she loved was even worse than his father.
“I know now what I couldn’t know as Mason. She didn’t kill herself to protect her baby from me. She threw herself into the river because she thought her tiny newborn son might turn out just like his daddy and his brother. Hell, no wonder she couldn’t go on.”
Seb let John cry for the woman no one was able to save. Eventually, he continued his story.
“I watched the boy grow up. Didn’t interfere, just had a report every six months. My main interest was in his Manna ability. As my network grew, I took the investigator off the case and had a powerful Sensitive pay a visit to the neighborhood every now and then. Right up to adulthood. No evidence of Manna use at all. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved, or a little disappointed in my little brother’s lack of talent. At that point, I let him go. And I honestly barely gave him a moment’s thought until recently, when he reappeared. And I—Mason—wished I’d killed him while he was still in the womb.”
“Where is he now?” said Seb.
John’s eyes were unfocused. He wasn’t seeing the park at all anymore.
“She loved music, you know,” he said. “She was a religious woman, and she used to listen to sacred music when Pop was at work. She thought certain composers were touched by God. One in particular. Bach.”
“I love Bach,” said Seb, softly. John didn’t seem to hear him.
“She even named her sons after him,” said John. “The English version of Johann is John.” He looked directly at Seb. “Johann Sebastian Bach.”
The truth of it hit Seb like the huge wave that had dragged him under during his first—and only—attempt to surf. He gulped air into his lungs and stared at the man he had come to kill only hours before. This morning, he had been an orphan with no information about his family. Now, he knew who his parents were. And he had a brother.
The signal came through from the orbiting ship.
Seb blinked a couple of times, still looking at John. Then he stood up.
“I have to go,” he said.
John looked at the expression on Seb’s face.
“I did the right thing? Telling you, I mean.”
“You did the right thing. I’ll come back. You said you were going to volunteer. Where?”
“St Benet’s,” said John, smiling. “Where else?”
Seb couldn’t quite bring himself to smile back. This was all happening too fast. But he had to admit he felt a huge sense of grounding, knowing he had a family member. Even if his brother was a former psychopathic criminal mastermind and mass-murderer. It would all take time to digest. Time he didn’t have right now.
“I have to—” he gestured toward the sky as if that might explain his intentions. John nodded.
“Off to save the world, right?”
Seb nodded and—to the immense surprise of two passing teenage girls and a pigeon—Walked.
Innisfarne
The beach at Innisfarne was nothing like the golden sands Mee had grown used to living in LA. And the temperature was a rude reminder that Britain, the country of her birth, served up some bitterly cold days, even in early Fall. She wrapped the shawl more tightly around her shoulders as she picked her way through the scattered rocks and shallow pools in the twilight.
Even though she was shivering, she was still moved by the wild beauty of the island. She had been there less than an hour, had greeted Kate with all the intensity of a long-lost sister, then felt a strong pull toward the beach. She went alone, obeying her heart’s need for solitude. There were a few gulls still crying mournfully to each other from the cliffs, but other than that, the murmur of the sea, and the rise and fall of the wind, there was silence. Palpable, profound silence.
She stood still for a few minutes. Innisfarne had been known as a Thin Place for over a thousand years, but the irony was that there was no Manna here. The members of the Order who took refuge on the island did so without Manna, ensuring a fairly constant turnover of guests as Users quickly became twitchy without their regular fix. The reputation as a Thin Place came from something quite different. ‘A deep sense of the eternal dance of silence,’ was how a visiting Hindu guru had put it.
Mee hadn’t realized she had been waiting for him until Seb suddenly arrived, stepping out of nothingness and standing in front of her. The expression on his face was oddly unreadable: was he scared, happy, awe-struck, bursting with news, upset? She didn’t know whether to kiss him, shake him, or hold his hand and tell him everything was going to be ok. She settled on kissing him.
When they took a breath, she looked at him again.
“What is it?” she said.
“Mason’s gone,” he said.
“Dead?”
“Long story. He’s gone and he’ll never be back, that’s the main thing.”
She breathed out.
“Good. What happened?”
Seb took a deep breath.
“You’d better sit down.”
Thirty minutes later, it was Mee’s turn to take a deep breath. She tried to digest what Seb had told her.
“Brother?” she said, not trusting herself at that point to attempt a full sentence with a subject, object and verb.
Seb nodded.
“Right,” she said. Another deep breath.
“Not homicidal maniac?” she said.
“It was never him, Mee. The tumor created a parasitic personality with no sense of right or wrong. He’s been a passenger in his own mind for most of his life.”
“Brother,” said Mee again. “You have a brother.”
Mee’s eyes opened wider.
“The tumor!” she said. “You both—he—the tumor. You both had brain tumors.”
Seb smiled. “Must run in the family,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” she said. “I mean, now you have a family. Well, when I say family, I mean a mass-murdering brother who kidnapped me, cut off my finger and ordered you killed? You going to go on picnics together? Get drunk and talk about sport?”
“Mee,” said Seb.
“Yeah, I know. Brain tumor did it. Blah, blah, blah.”
Seb raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry,” said Mee. “I’ll get used to the idea. And look, seriously, it’s amazing. You have a family now. How does it feel?”
“I can’t think about it yet,” said Seb. “I will. Just not yet.”
He stopped talking. Mee looked at him.
“There’s something else. What is it?” she said.
He sighed. “Seb2. He’s gone. It’s just me again.”
Mee put her arm around his waist.
“That’s good, isn’t it? He was you, after all. Nothing has really changed, has it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided if I’ve gained something or lost everything.”
“What?”
Seb looked at her. His expression was unreadable.
“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Just ignore me. I’m tired. Been a busy day. Not just Mason.”
“Rozzers?” she said.
“Yes. I’ve saved the world once, since I last saw you. Now, I have to make sure it stays saved.”
She looked into his eyes. He didn’t look tired. He looked distant, disengaged, almost blank. She shivered. And then she asked a question she wasn’t sure she wanted answered, since Seb would never lie to her.
“Are we going to be ok?”
“I don’t know.”
The mood was getting darker, so Mee did what she always did, even though she felt like a coward for doing it: she made light of the situation. Turned it into a joke.
“Spoken like no superhero ever,” she said. “You really need to work on your patter, Walkyboy.”
“Walkyboy?” said Seb, his face finally creasing into something resembling a smile.
“Hey, you can’t think of your own super name, someone has to do it for you.”
“What was wrong with the World Walker?”
“Boring.”
There was a pause while neither of them spoke, then Mee leaned forward and put her arms around him.
“Sock it to ‘em,” she whispered, before licking his ear, stepping back and giving him her trademark grin. “Now, bugger off.”
Seb Walked.
Mee looked up at the distant stars, feeling powerless and small. The tide gradually receded, dragging grains of sand away from the beach as it went. Eventually, the wind dried the salt tears on her cheeks, leaving her skin rough and sore.
46
Tibet
Seb sat in silence. He was thinking. His thoughts followed five separate strands. Simultaneously. Which didn’t seem unnatural. Not having Seb2 didn’t seem unnatural, either. The fact that it didn’t seem unnatural seemed unnatural in itself, but Seb couldn’t spare the time to unravel that particular riddle.
He thought about humanity. Homo sapiens, at the vanguard of evolution, the tool users, the thinkers—therefore, the Manna users. A species still fighting itself, still struggling to do more good than harm. Also, a species capable of love, selflessness, sacrifice. A species deserving a future.
He thought about the aliens orbiting above. In the eyes of the Rozzers, humanity was a failed experiment. The aliens had put the petri dish under the microscope, taken a look and decided to start again. There was no malice in their actions, they were scientists. A failed experiment was just one step closer to a successful experiment.
He thought about Manna. Internationally, Manna users only made up a tiny fraction of the population. No properly researched figures were available, but—roughly speaking—Users estimated that for every 5,000 people, only one had any ability. And the odds that the one person in 5,000 would discover their Manna ability were low. Perhaps as low as two out of every ten. Therefore, worldwide, there were fewer than 300,000 Mana users. In a country the size of America, about 12,000 Manna users were regularly visiting Thin Places.
He thought about the Unmaking Engine. The way it had been designed to use the water cycle. There was no possibility of the device failing once it had been deployed. Even in the driest areas of the planet—where rain seldom fell—the human inhabitants needed to drink. And, over time, the Earth’s entire water supply would be contaminated by the Engine’s payload. No one could avoid being infected.
He thought about H’wan. A sentient ship made up of a swarm of nanotech, closer in its structure to a termite mound than to a human, yet showing a personality instantly recognizable as individual, relatable. An observer, seemingly unmoved by the imminent demise of an entire species. And yet, death itself surely had a different meaning to a fragment of a greater whole such as H’wan. And the Rozzers, with their store of DNA, never faced the final annihilation that death meant for humans.
When Seb finally stood, it was nearly dark outside. He walked forward to the ledge at the front of the cave. The location he had chosen was 19,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas. Labuche Kang was, reputedly, an unclimbable mountain, so Seb could be reasonably certain he wouldn’t be disturbed.
The wind made a high-pitched keening sound as it whipped between crevasses and ice fissures in the thin air of the mountain. In the blue-tinged twilight, Seb could easily have imagined he was the only living being on the planet. He looked out across the wilderness for a few minutes. He had made his decision.
“H’wan,” he said.
An hour later, the Gyeuk and the T’hn’uuth stood together on the ledge. It was fully dark now, the sky a riot of stars.
“They won’t be happy about it,” said the ship. “Interference on this scale is unprecedented. What if they won’t do it?”
“If they refuse,” said Seb, “I won’t let them leave.”
H’wan considered the implications of that threat. The T’hn’uuth possessed power the Gyeuk could not explain. Which, as its/their knowledge was beyond any fleshbound species, was virtually impossible. And ever so slightly humiliating. But there it was. It would surely be in everyone’s best interests not to test that power. H’wan decided to pursue the path of diplomacy. Albeit with some caveats.
“You realize,” said the ship, “that another species may supersede humanity on this world?”
Seb said nothing. H’wan pressed its point.
“Probably an ocean dweller,” it said. “Humans are forced to live on only twenty-nine percent of your planet. There are creatures in the deep water who will surely develop the level of intelligence necessary to use Manna.”
H’wan looked at Seb for a response, but didn’t get one.
“When that happens, humanity will have to hope that the new masters of Earth are less aggressive and destructive than themselves. If such an outcome proves to be the case, humans will have to accept their new position as subordinates, inferiors. Do you suppose that will be a smooth process?”
Finally, Seb spoke.
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“Smooth? No. Inevitable? Perhaps. Maybe that’s been part of our problem as a species. It might do us good to give up the illusion that we’re in charge.”
Seb handed H’wan a small dark object.
“It’s unlikely we’ll meet again, H’wan. Safe travels.”
H’wan turned its dark, swirling, smoky body toward the T’hn’uuth. This really was an historic encounter. It hoped it might encounter another Gyeuk ship on its journey back. This experience definitely gave it bragging rights.
“Safe travels, T’hn’uuth.”
The International Space Station was no longer in synchronous orbit with the ship, so saw nothing when the second Engine was launched, dropping rapidly, the wide end of the teardrop glowing with intense heat as it pushed through the atmosphere.
NASA tracked it as before. The similarity in size and location to the meteorite detected the previous day raised some eyebrows, but as it once again seemed to break into smaller parts before crashing into the deepest part of the Atlantic, no one was willing to sign off on the significant dollar investment it would take to investigate further.
Other than a few fishermen, only one person saw the brief fiery glow in the heavens.
The same observer was the only witness to the change of shape, as the teardrop opened up into a bowl and slowed on its final approach.
Perching on rocks surrounding the tiny beach at Nightingale, hundreds of indignant birds eyed the figure who had disturbed them for the second time in twenty-four hours. They squawked and flapped their wings at the intruder, ignoring the small object out at sea, which had now separated itself from the bowl above and was hurtling toward the water.
At that distance, the splash was barely audible. The Engine dived to two hundred feet below. There, it exploded, thrusting the nanotechnology inside it outward and upward to the surface.
H’wan turned away from Earth and began the long journey to the Rozzers’ home.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 65
