Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3)

by Dan Rix

  Her words made my skin crawl.

  I kept reading, eyes glued to the page.

  June 12

  I tried to kill myself yesterday. I swallowed my entire bottle of meds and all the other pills I could find in the medicine cabinet. I don’t even think it did anything. I don’t think the voice will let me die. I understand what I have to do now. I have to kill myself in the real world while I’m awake. If I don’t, it will feed on my soul forever in this horrible place.

  My heart ached for her.

  I read faster, skimming the page, realizing I was nearing her final days where she’d been driven to suicide.

  It would be soon now. She’d died on July 1.

  The next entry, I saw, was her last.

  June 30

  Today is my final day. I’m becoming part of it, I can see its thoughts. I will have one last night on Earth, and then it will have fed off enough of my soul to claim me forever. Tonight will be my last chance to kill myself. But now I know how to kill it, too. Yeah, that’s right DARK. While you were feeding off me I was learning all your secrets. I know what you are. I know how to kill you, and I’m not stupid enough to write it here because I know you’ve been reading my diary. You’ll NEVER get my soul. I regret that I didn’t have enough time to kill you myself, but mark my words, someone who comes along after me will find my clues and destroy you. To that person, all you need to do is follow the breadcrumbs.

  I scrambled to the next page, breathless.

  “No,” I whispered.

  Clinging to the folds were its tattered remnants. The next page had been torn out.

  The page after that was blank.

  I flipped through the rest of the diary. All blank.

  The ache in my heart deepened. Ashley’s story was over. She had left behind so little, but I wanted there to be more. I needed more.

  A chill lingered after I finished reading. Her time here had turned into a nightmare, like mine and Sarah’s. Death had been her only escape.

  Was I being hopelessly optimistic to think we could do any better?

  “Sun’s going to set in a few hours,” Sarah said, coming through the blast door to grab a water bottle, which she sniffed carefully. “If you wanted to bring over your stuff from your house, I’d do it now.” She took a tentative sip and seemed satisfied. “Before it gets dark. We’ll test the extractor when you get back.”

  “Wow, you really were low on supplies,” Sarah said, eying the jar of peanut butter I’d set on the concrete next to her—still a good spoonful left in the scrapings along the inside. I ignored her and unloaded the rest of the duffel bag.

  I’d spent the last few hours raiding cupboards and closets and drawers at my house for anything useful and lugging it back here by bike—I’d found one of those bike trailers for kids at my neighbor’s house and refashioned it as a cargo trailer—and now the late-afternoon sun beat on my neck.

  It would be night soon.

  I extracted my cell phone and put it next to the peanut butter.

  “Hah, good luck getting reception,” she said.

  “I’m using it as a flashlight.”

  I unpacked the bulkiest item next—my telescope—again feeling Sarah’s eyes on me.

  “That’s a nice telescope.” She leaned closer, frowning at how I was manhandling it. “Is that a Celestron?”

  I sighed. “Aren’t you supposed to be busy?”

  She smirked and went back to work on the water machine.

  I assessed my pile, wondering which item could teleport me back to Earth.

  “What if we put dark matter on again?” I said.

  “Tried it,” she said, without looking up.

  “And?”

  “It loops back. The white space spits you right back out here.”

  “Fuck,” I breathed.

  “Yeah. I know. Once it collects you, it doesn’t let you go.”

  “Did dark matter ever talk to you?” I looked up at her.

  She twisted the ends of two wires together. “It told me to take it off. It told me I wasn’t ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “By the way, strange question, but uh . . .” I picked at my fingernails, avoiding eye contact, “what happens if we die down here?”

  “Like, what happens to your soul?”

  I swallowed. “Yeah. That.”

  Her eyes darkened under brooding eyebrows. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” She stood up and clapped her hands, ending our talk. “Come on, let’s make some H2O before the sun goes down. It’s all finished.”

  Nearby, she’d filled a huge plastic cistern with pool water and attached the hose to an intake on the machine. Next she plugged the machine into the power cable from the solar panels.

  Nothing happened.

  “Uh . . .” I began.

  “Relax, I haven’t turned it on yet.” She poised her finger on the switch, inhaled slowly, and flipped it.

  A high-pitched whine revved up inside the machine, and the hose in the cistern burped up a bunch of bubbles, then sucked them back in.

  On the side of the machine, the needle in a pressure gauge jiggled, then began to climb.

  “It’s working . . . it’s working . . .” Sarah backed away slowly, as if one sudden movement might bring the whole contraption crashing down.

  Water sprayed from a spigot at the base of the machine and ran down the driveway.

  I jumped sideways to dodge the splash. “Is that supposed to happen?”

  “That’s the contaminated water,” she yelled over the spray. “Look . . . it’s working!”

  I followed her finger to a plastic cup under another spigot, where a tiny, wobbling bead of water clung to the metal. The bead grew fatter before our eyes and finally plunked into the cup, only to be followed by another, and another, until a steady stream of droplets were pittering out.

  The machine drained the cistern in ten minutes, and Sarah switched it off, leaving a ringing in my ears. We would lose power soon anyway once the sun set. Downtown was already in shadow.

  She extracted the cup—scarcely a tablespoon at the bottom—sniffed it, and took a sip.

  I watched her, holding my breath.

  She swished it around her mouth, and her throat tensed briefly as she swallowed. She stared straight ahead, deep in concentration.

  Then her eyes bulged.

  “Sarah?” I said nervously.

  She made a choking sound and clutched her throat.

  “Sarah, are you okay?” I ran forward to help.

  She spun and grabbed my shoulders, eyes wide, and a desperate gurgle bubbled up from her throat. “Help . . . me . . .” she wheezed.

  “Sarah!” I screamed, powerless as she died in front of me.

  She stopped choking and broke into a grin. “I’m kidding. It’s fine.” She held out the cup, fighting laughter. “It’s just water.”

  I glared at her, heart still pounding from the scare. “Okay, seriously, it’s crap like that—”

  “Come on,” she said. “It was funny.”

  “No it wasn’t,” I muttered darkly. “I thought you were dying.”

  “Ooh . . .” she clicked her tongue, “then you’d have another body to hide. Another moral dilemma.”

  The words stung. “Take that back,” I whispered.

  “Relax,” she said. “I’m just trying to lighten the mood. You’re always so serious.”

  “No.” I folded my arms. “I’m not going to let you. I’m not going to let you make light of what I did and the fact that a girl is dead because of me, because when you do that, when you make a joke out of it, out of her, you disrespect her memory, and you disrespect everybody who ever
loved her, and so I’m not going to let you do that.”

  “Whoa, now look who’s all high and mighty,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to be high and mighty,” I spat. “I’m just trying to hold on to what’s left of her.”

  “Then stop,” she said. “Let go. Look around us, Leona. Look where we are. Look!” She gestured vaguely into the distance, where the sunset faded to a bronze haze. “None of that stuff matters anymore. Whatever you did or didn’t do on Earth, none of it matters here.”

  I held her gaze. “How can you give up like this? Don’t you want to go home?”

  “You just got here. I’ve been here three weeks. I tried everything, I checked everywhere, I did everything, so don’t lecture me about giving up.”

  “Did you check every house? Did you check inside every car? What about other cities? Did you check LA? Maybe there’s something in LA”

  “LA’s a hundred miles from here.”

  “Or South Carolina. The biggest meteor hit in South Carolina, maybe there’s something there. All I’m saying is we have everything we need. We have a year’s supply of food. We can at least try.”

  “So you spend two months crossing the country and there’s nothing there. Then what?”

  “Then we try something else. We look somewhere else.”

  “There is nothing out there,” she spat. “Nothing. This whole planet . . . it’s a copy of what’s real, an imitation. A fake. It updates only when it collects a victim, and only locally, only the relevant parts. I doubt there even is a Los Angeles out there, or a South Carolina, or a Europe or an Africa or an Asia. Because none of that exists here. None of it.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but a faint sound tickled my ear, cutting me off. Music.

  Music?

  “What is that?” Sarah looked around. “Where’s that coming from?”

  I traced the sound back to my sweatshirt, which I shoved aside. My cell phone tumbled out of the folds and skittered to a rest, screen brightly lit.

  “It’s my cell phone,” I whispered.

  “Did you set an alarm?” she said.

  “No, it’s . . . it’s . . .” I picked it up, hardly believing my eyes, “it’s my ringtone. It’s ringing.”

  “It’s ringing?” she said.

  “Um . . . I think?”

  “You mean someone’s calling you?”

  “Uh-huh. What do I do?”

  “Well . . . answer it.”

  Chapter 13

  “Wait, do you recognize that number?” said Sarah. “That’s an eight-oh-five area code.”

  I squinted at the number on the phone, which continued to chime in my hand. “I think . . . I think it’s my number.”

  “Your number?”

  I nodded.

  “How can it be—never mind, just answer it.”

  I swallowed and accepted the call, raising the screen to my cheek. “Hell . . . hello?” I croaked.

  The other end hissed.

  “Hello?” I said again. “Is anyone there?”

  Nothing. Just background static. My own heartbeat, amplified against my ear.

  Now that the sun had set, its warmth quickly receded from my skin, leaving only cold. I shivered and reached for my hoodie.

  Then, so faintly I almost thought I’d imagined it, a girl’s voice spoke on the other end.

  “. . . ello . . . nyone . . . ere?”

  At first, I thought it might be my own distorted voice echoed back to me.

  But the inflection was different.

  I squeezed the phone to my cheek and swiveled away from Sarah to better focus, clearing my throat. “This is Leona Hewitt,” I stated. “I can’t hear you very well, so you’re going to have to speak up. Do you need help? Where are you? We have food and water and shelter. I repeat, we have food and water and shelter. Do you need assistance? We can help you.”

  Silence.

  “Kind of hoping they could help us,” Sarah muttered next to me.

  “Shh!” I waved her off.

  Then, scarcely audible, the voice from the other end spoke again. “. . . ona! . . . oly shit . . . at . . . eally . . . ou?”

  I recognized the voice.

  “Megan!” I shouted. “Megan, is that you? How are . . . how are you . . . ?” A tear welled in my eye. “Where are you? How are you calling me? Are you here?”

  She continued, “. . . ajor Connor’s idea . . . your phone . . . wrapped it . . . ark matter . . . alled it . . .”

  And then I understood. She was calling from Earth, not here.

  “Megan,” I squeezed the phone to my cheek. “It’s so good to hear your voice—”

  The line went dead.

  Call ended. Zero bars of service.

  Hands shaking, I redialed the number, but it gave me an error. Mobile network not available.

  She was gone.

  “Megan,” I whispered.

  “Your phone . . .” Sarah peered intently at the device in my hand, rubbing her jaw. “How’d your phone do that?”

  “Megan has it,” I said. “When I was disappearing, I told her to get it and call Major Connor. She has the fake copy of it. This is the real one.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said she wrapped it in dark matter and called it, but for some reason I got the call here. On this phone. There must be a connection between them.”

  Sarah rubbed her jaw harder, nodding. “Wrapping it in dark matter . . . that must have caused the mobile carrier waves to cross over into dark matter, so they were transported here, just like we were transported here.”

  “My voice went through,” I said. “My voice went back to Earth. She heard me.”

  “She would, yes. While the channel was open.”

  “But that’s proof, right?” My pulse hiked at the realization. “That’s proof something can get back to Earth. You said that was impossible.”

  She shook her head. “That is not what I said. I said it didn’t work. In theory, it’s possible, since the channel will permit travel in both directions. But there needs to be a hole in space on the other end, an opening, a volume of dark matter large enough that a human can pass through. Otherwise it just loops back to its starting point. In this case, a channel formed between your two phones, but it was miniscule, and unstable. Just enough for an electrical signal to get through, but nothing else. Sending actual matter through dark matter is a completely different story.”

  “Sarah, if you knew all this stuff about dark matter, why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

  “Because it’s graduate level physics and you’re only sixteen. It would just confuse you.”

  “I’m smart,” I said hotly. “Try me.”

  “I barely even understand this stuff, Leona. It won’t make one bit of sense to you.”

  “I don’t care. Just tell me.”

  “Fine . . . fine.” She exhaled a sigh, puffing her cheeks. “You want to know what dark matter is? You want to know how it teleported us here? You want to know how it’s possible that our entire planet has been replicated here in a nonreal medium? You want to know how a creature that lives a billion miles away can talk to you from inside your head?”

  “Yes, yes! I do.”

  “Dark matter is a naked singularity. That’s how.” She glanced up at the dusk sky, now showing the first stars. “We should be going inside. It’s getting dark.”

  She stood up, indicating the conversation was over. Explaining nothing.

  “Wait!” I grabbed her elbow in the doorway. “What is that? A naked, uh, singularthingy, what does that mean?”

  “Singularity,” she said, shaking me off. “A naked singularity.” She glanced over my head again at the night sky. “Come inside
and shut the door, Leona.”

  “But my stuff—”

  “Go,” she barked. “Now. Right now.”

  I sprinted back down the driveway, pocketed my cell phone, threw my hoodie over my shoulder, and hoisted the telescope under my arm. With a terrified glance up and down the darkening street, I ran back.

  Sarah yanked the door shut behind me. Then she locked it, deadbolted it, slotted the security chain, and backed away. Next she went around the room and drew all the blinds, plunging the room into blackness.

  She paused at one and nudged it aside to peek out, again looking up at the sky.

  “What is it?” I stammered. “What’s out there?”

  “At the center of every black hole,” she said, “lies what physicists call a singularity.” She let the blinds shut. “It’s a theoretical point of infinite density. A black hole forms when you have so much mass that gravity overpowers all other forces and pulls everything into a tighter and tighter ball until it collapses in on itself and has zero size. What you have left is a singularity.”

  “Uh-huh.” I followed her silhouette into the kitchen, where she flipped on the lantern, bathing us in a cold fluorescent light.

  “So here’s what happens,” Sarah continued. “Mass causes spacetime to bend. Einstein figured that out. That’s general relativity. Imagine a bunch of balls resting on a rubber sheet. Heavier balls form deeper depressions in the sheet. The sheet is spacetime. You following me so far?”

  “I . . . think so?”

  “Good. You’re doing better than my undergrads. Now imagine a singularity. It’s a point of infinite density. It doesn’t just form a depression in spacetime, it punches a hole right through it. Like a needle. It’s a complete breakdown of physics. It’s a division by zero. A hole in spacetime. No one knows what that does. One theory is that the holes can line up, forming what’s called a wormhole, a tunnel between two otherwise vastly separated locations in space.”

  “A wormhole,” I muttered, struggling to follow along. “Is that how we got here?”

  She nodded and shuffled to the window above the sink, nudging the curtains aside to peer up at the starry sky. Her eyebrows furrowed. “The trouble is, a singularity only forms at the center of a black hole, at the bottom of a deep gravity well, forever beyond our reach.” She tucked the curtains back in place. “For a long time, though, physicists have theorized about the existence of a singularity that can form without a gravity well around it—a naked singularity, as they call it.”