“There’s only a short while left before it’ll be too late to return the arc,” he interpreted aloud, face laminated in sweat. “The orc doesn’t even have to stop us, just delay us. And we’ll be the ghosts you’re talking about.”
Dirk’s hand tightened on Reena’s. “We’ll make it,” he mouthed just loud enough for her to hear.
The distress in Reena’s face softened, and she squeezed Dirk’s hand. She recognized the caring in his stare, and it meshed poorly with the urgency in her to reach the arc and her new life far from this world. Sadness lifted through her. “I’ll miss you,” she whispered. “We’ve only been together a couple of hours—but I’ll miss you.” Her words loosened all anxiety in her. There. She had said it. She had admitted her bond to this world, this life. It would have been a good life, if it had been whole. This love-drowsy face was the certainty of that. She smiled to think that she could be loved.
A pall filled the car, and Dirk’s happiness dropped from his face. Reena had that stupid, soft-eyed look again, and Jiang jabbered something in Chinese.
“Oh, no,” Dirk whispered. He looked to Howard, who sat back scowling.
“The alien’s out again.” Howard rubbed his face vigorously and blinked at the highway. A beach park of wide shade trees trundled by on the right, and he pulled in.
“There’s no time to stop,” Dirk said, anxiously.
“Balls!” he shouted and parked the car at the far end of the lot, nearest the sea. He turned off the engine, and his voice went flat with tension: “Do you think we’re going to face down the orc like this?” He jerked a thumb at Reena. “We’ve got to stay calm, even if there is no time. Or we’ll wind up like those suckers back at the warehouse.”
Dirk cast him a sour look, saw the grim insistence in Howard’s wrung features, and restrained an impulse to give him the finger. With the alien out, Dirk’s sapience had withered again to the anger of his hurt soul. His jaw pulsed.
Howard blinked like a newt and got out of the car.
The old man nodded wearily at Dirk. He hadn’t understood a word they’d said, but he knew from the distemper in the air that the ground had fallen from under them. Reena curled up on the back seat, mewling catgut whimpers.
Dirk cradled her. She felt large in his arms, long-boned. Her face burrowed into the timber scent of his shoulder, and her cries softened to sobs. Twitches flitted through her muscles. The hopelessness of loving this woman invaded him, and the tightness of his embrace relaxed. She could never be his. Yet she was all he wanted.
Howard walked away from the car, mounting a grassy dune and staring across the beach park to the sea. What was the last thing he had said to Cora? He couldn’t remember. He breathed the emerald sea, both glad to be free of his timesense and frightened without it. The world around him, empty of implication, seemed deceptively easeful. Surfers careened among steaming waves, children splashed in the shallows, oiled bodies lay in the glamour of late morning, all one with the moment. Yet namelessness stalked all of them with the tread of their hearts. None of them could see it. It was just an understanding, as it had been for him, that life changes, accidents happen, people grow old, wars are made, suns die. Now that he had seen that namelessness in the mad infinity of its choices, he could never be the same. Every gesture inscribed a signature now, every decision a testament.
He looked back at the car, at Jiang scrolling the electric window up and down and Dirk hugging Reena. Her vapid, tear-bruised eyes and the confusion in her jarred features aimed right at him. He wanted more than anything to get this craziness over with. Dying was preferable to living like that, he thought.
The fragrance of the sea reminded him of the encounter with Insideout on the speedboat. Anything was possible, that’s what the alien had shown him. “Okay,” he said aloud, resolving to keep his anxiety under control. “We’re going to make it.”
“Talk about the orc,” Howard said, getting back behind the wheel and starting the engine. “I sat through one timespell after another last night, and almost all I saw were you and the others getting chewed up by huge insects and the Yakuza when you came to get me. But that didn’t happen. The orc should have killed us. I know that. I saw it. Instead, it killed itself. Why?”
Reena’s closeness had cooled Dirk’s anger enough for him, too, to remember what Insideout had shown him at sea. The abandoned euphoria he had known then could have faced death. What had the alien called it? “Lusk.”
Howard glided across the traffic on Ala Moana Boulevard and turned off onto Atkinson to avoid the congestion of Waikiki. He frowned with incomprehension into the rear-view mirror.
“Remember Insideout showing us yes-out-of-mind on the speedboat?” Dirk asked.
“You mean that standing dream?”
“That’s all we got to remember, Howard. When we stop struggling, the arc will beat the orc.”
“I didn’t know what you were yelling about in the warehouse,” Howard admitted. “I’m still surprised we’re out of there and alive.”
“She’s the only one that had to believe,” Dirk said, nodding to Reena. “Her power is what really binds us. She’s got telepathy. She’s feeling us from the inside out. And what she thinks can influence how we feel. As long as she believes in the lusk, that’s good enough. Her thoughts can carry us.”
“But what exactly is this lusk?”
“It just means we do next to nothing, Howard. An old man, a schizo, and losers like you and me don’t stand a chance against most of life. What can we do against a mad alien? We gotta stay out of it and trust in the arc’s power to get itself back to where it belongs.”
“Right. And if we blow it—we’re blown up.” He snorted ruefully.
“So when your timesense comes back, don’t put your thoughts into the orc’s future. Hold on like a bronco buster to any future you can find that gets us free.”
“It’s not that simple, Dirk. I can’t choose the future.”
“You can’t—but I think the alien can, or at least the arc can. The alien’s humanlike mind is gone. It lost that to keep us alive back there. But it’s still living, in an alien way. Your timesense comes from the arc. It knows the path of events that will free it. All the other paths are just emptiness, distracting illusions. So don’t do anything. Be lazy. Lusk. Let the true path reveal itself out of the emptiness.”
“You sound like a Taoist,” Jiang said and laughed. The vitality bloomed again in him, and he filled with jocular clearheadedness. A moment ago, he had been once more at the shriveled end of life. Now his blood crooned with enthusiasm, and his muscles were supple as an athlete’s. What a flourish of life and wonder for his last days! He knew his ancestors were watching. He knew they were amazed and proud. He laughed again, with gusto.
Reena agreed with him. As the arc’s power lifted her from her stupefaction, she soared to a new revelation. The dead watched the living. In fact, the dead and the living were interchangeable. The two created each other. Like light and emptiness.
Happy to find herself in Dirk’s arms, she felt the love in him, and she sat up with a clear smile. She sensed mental linkages in an unconscious corner of Dirk’s mind. He knew that Reena tapped his rational access to the alien. And though he was concerned that this disregard for lusk strengthened the orc, he didn’t say anything. She had to work out her fate. She wasn’t long for this world, whatever happened to the arc.
Dirk watched Howard. The man looked torpidly sick. His head lolled from side to side, evading some terror.
“How ya feelin?” Dirk asked him.
“Mint.” Howard’s narrowed eyes looked foggy.
“No speedtraps, tire blowouts, or roadblocks up ahead?”
“Wish there were. I’m looking for anything human.”
In Howard’s mind, leopard-muzzled humanoids with lobster eyes, scorpion bodies, and taloned limbs ghosted among vistas of cactus, scrub brush, and black rock. Cora was there, too—tiny with distance, crying his name. He rocked among the paisley of hallucin
ations, keeping his attention on the slim path of the road. They drove past sea cliffs, a golf course, and grassy beaches where people ran, flying kites. A green mountain with its side and insides scooped out rose ahead.
“Koko Head Crater,” Dirk announced. The gravel and dirt turnoff they bumped over wended through a chaparral of dwarfed kiawe trees toward an extinct volcano. Half of the volcano had blown out, and the cone appeared as a massive, lopsided bowl.
Howard leaned against the wheel, amazed at the precise fit of vision and timelines. There was obviously only one way in. They drove past a horse stable to where the road ended at a tarred log. They got out and surveyed the expanse of the crater. Barrel cactus and pale-limbed kiawe covered the floor of the caldera, and the far wall of the volcano seemed a long way off.
“I guess from here we walk,” Dirk said and turned to Reena. “Which way?”
“I feel Donnie and the arc in there, somewhere.” She nodded to Howard. “He knows which way to go.”
Howard’s vision blurred in all directions but one. He stepped over the log and hopped through a tangle of dead branches in the direction of his clearest sight. The timelines were steady now, as they had been before the Yakuza kidnapped him. His fate became empty of choices.
Jiang instinctively took a position beside and half a step ahead of Howard. He had willed his power to envelop them like a soft balloon, and it gently rattled the shrubs and gravel nearby. Lizards squirted across the red sand, and myna birds big as crows flapped blackly from their coverts.
Over the rough footing, Howard matched Jiang’s strong pace, and, with Jiang’s force pushing the thorny branches out of their way, they moved swiftly. Reena reached for Dirk’s hand to help her across a squabble of rocks and dead branches. His touch steadied her anxiety. From up ahead, a psychic pulsing ached in the air like a deep drum.
They scrambled farther into the crater among its woe of twisted trees and wormholed rocks. The drummed tautness in Reena vibrated deeper, making the joints of her bones ache. And she was about to ask the others to slow down, feigning exhaustion, when the fevered air suddenly chilled.
Jiang stopped short. The soft balloon of force bouncing around them had been stabbed a few yards ahead, and he sagged as strength drained from him.
Howard caught him, and they knelt in the pebbly sand. “It’s just ahead of us,” Jiang said.
Howard peered at the wall of thorny shrub and spied nothing in the clarity of converged timelines.
“I’ll check it out,” Dirk volunteered, but Reena grabbed his arm. She shook her head. Psychic space droned like a hive, and she could barely hear her own thoughts.
“I’m fine,” Jiang said, standing. His body felt as though it had been rubbed all over with steel wool. The orc drained his power through the pores of his skin. “Whatever it is, it has already seized me. I must face it.”
He stepped quickly into the bush, the snare of branches snapping apart before his advance. The others hurried after and almost collided with him when he pulled up short. He yelped once with shock, and when the others spotted what he had seen, they too cried.
Volt-flames flashed bluely, and two animals lunged from among the rocks. Jiang caught them with his invisible strength. Sparks gnashed in the space between them, and the beasts lifted into the air and hung before them, straining among flitting corpuscles of blue fire. They were not animals but animal husks inflated with crackling orc-energy. Poised in midleap, the shaggy skins and greasy pulps of a cat and dog patched together with lightning squirmed. Dirk whelped a scream before the resurrected bodies of Peppercorn and Hunza.
“Hurry!” Reena called against the scream of the electrified air. She stared with horrified fascination at the suspended animals and felt Jiang’s mind lock with the screeching force shredding into sparks and raving the jaws of the carcasses. Immobilized by his strenuous effort, he could not last long. “Find the arc!”
Howard faced away from the blur of voltage and located the timelines lensing clearly, with only a hint of rainbow, toward a gully fifty yards away. He ducked under a bower of thorns and clambered atop a spill of boulders, Reena and Dirk scrambling behind.
Sliding and jolting down the far side of the spill, they heard a voice flap from across a distance. “How-ie!”
Howard stopped and cupped his eyes against the sun. Timelines smeared, and he could see nothing. But Dirk and Reena made out two figures at the distant mouth of the crater: a large woman with red hair, hot as a flag, and Cora. They were waving.
Cora and the federal agent, Charlotte, had arrived at the site of Cora’s dream to find a maroon Mercedes parked at the end of the road. Charlotte used her radio to describe the car to the police, and Cora stood on the log with her hand shading her eyes. When the report on the car came back clean, Charlotte took out her binoculars and joined Cora.
Charlotte spotted movement in the scrub right away, and when Cora took the glasses, she identified her husband and Dirk. “It’s them!” she squealed and hopped off the log. Charlotte ran back to her car and called her operations chief with the news. After signing off, she removed her thirty-eight from under her seat and followed.
“That’s Cora,” Howard said, hearing her call a second time. “How’d she find us here?”
“It might be some orc trick,” Dick warned.
“No, it’s your wife,” Reena knew. “We must really hurry now.”
Howard faltered. Was the orc drawing Cora into this? He wouldn’t allow that. But he couldn’t go back for her. He couldn’t even see her. He swung his vision toward the one direction in which he could see, and his blood thickened like jelly.
A disfigured man shambled toward them out of the brush. Face smashed beyond recognition, a disjointed arm swinging at its side like a club, its whole body caked in dried blood, the figure advanced, outlined in the orc’s ultraviolet aura.
“Ipo,” Dirk whispered, his insides twisting coldly.
A bull-bellow shook the thick-hulled corpse, and it charged.
Howard cowered, seeing only the hulking mass of the blood-gouted thing. Dirk crouched, readying himself to leap at it. And Reena stepped forward. Her mind already reached within the corpse, engaging the clear, dark, ancient creature there. She remembered the lusk she had learned in the warehouse and did nothing to touch the power waves reverberating through the animated body. Instead, she linked herself with her telepathy to the corpse, and its one good arm reached out to embrace her, its candescent flesh brightening.
Dirk leaped to intercept her but didn’t touch her. Sunlight jerked in her eyes, and she stood entranced. Just watching her, he grew aware of her mind in the tightening spaces of the clotted body, miming nerve flickers in those dead muscles, fixing her memory of life and will into the dead meat.
Ipo’s corpse bellowed again, and the skim light of its outline spiked to burning needles. Even Cora and Charlotte, struggling through dense and thorny weed growth, heard it and caught the sharp flash. “What was that?” Cora asked.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte admitted, all her alarms clanging, “but we’re going back to the car and waiting for reinforcements. Come on.” She grabbed Cora’s arm and pulled her back toward the road.
Cora yanked her arm free and skipped away from Charlotte. “You go wait for reinforcements,” she said, clattering over rocks and dodging the claw of a thorn tree. “Howard’s down there.”
Charlotte cursed and dashed after her, her broad shoulders immediately snagging on the bramble.
Ipo’s corpse had straightened from its charge, and it stood swaying heavily, its mask of smashed-in bone and crusted blood crawling with green wattage. Reena stood facing it, the space around her tensed with stretchmarks of violet light.
“It’s you and me now, Howard,” Dirk said, grabbing his shoulder. “It’s on us. Find me the way to go.”
The way opened clearly: Narrow goat-stairs climbed down past a stand of ohia bushes into the gully. Howard walked with Dirk as far as the floral bushes, where the ground bro
ke into a rocky descent. There, in spalled shadows, timelines closed in. Vision went chirpy, and his hearing shivered like an Arctic cross-wind. This was the timewall, hackled with horrifying visions that had almost smothered him at the warehouse.
Dirk recognized the stricken look on Howard’s face. The older man dropped to his knees and held his arms up as if against a glass wall. A mane of fiery blue marblings sheathed him, and Dirk stepped away. “Lusk, Howard,” Dirk almost shouted. “Lusk!”
Howard heard him—and Reena—and Jiang. Their voices embodied an insistence of will, a human sodality wavering like wind-kicked flames against the noisy force of the orc. Demon faces trolled closer, and their stench poisoned the air. The screaming became a roar, and the smallness of Howard’s strength trembled. In moments, he would collapse.
Without hesitating, Dirk brushed past the ohia bushes and hopped and skipped down the lava rocks into the gully. Donnie waited for him below, hunched on a scissure of rock. Dirk’s descent staggered when he saw the transfigured shape staring at him. Donnie’s semblance had flattened tinily on an insanely disproportionate shape, insect-contoured, lizard-spiked, slithery as a squid.
He stopped, and the orc rose, triangular head cocking to face him. A sizzling noise like a torrent of ants or the rasping scales of heaped vipers came from its cleft jaws. In the split rock between the things legs, the arc burned like a keyhole to the Earth’s core.
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