Remnants 14 - Begin Again

by Katherine Alice Applegate

  The voice laughed, but not nastily. “Oh, I’m here. And there. But I think the more important question is —”

  “2Face!”

  2Face whipped around again, eyes darting through the gloom.

  This voice was a man’s. 2Face didn’t recognize it at all.

  “Stop playing tricks on me!” she shouted.

  “You came here to finish some business, didn’t you?” the voice boomed. “Well, then, come on! Get it over with.”

  Angrily 2Face rushed back toward Billy. He was still doing his magic act, hanging from invisible wires. With a cry of rage, 2Face thrust the knife through the golden humming glow —

  And it was whipped from her hand, tossed away. And 2Face herself was lifted up and into the circle of light with Billy.

  She felt her body recede from consciousness, her mind open, her heart bleed….

  A face smiled….

  “Mommy? Is that…”

  “Yes, Essence. It’s me. Oh, my daughter, all you needed was to forgive. How did I fail that you so easily hardened your heart against me? Against the world?”

  “I was angry. I was hurt I hated you.”

  “I cared about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I wanted to punish you.”

  “You only punished yourself.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. …”

  Tate’s voice now, in her mind. From long, long ago. From now. From the future.

  “It’s over,” the voice said sadly.

  2Face crumpled to the floor, an expression of rest spread evenly across both the beautiful and ugly sides of her face.

  Violet noticed 2Face was missing. She went directly to Mo’Steel. Mo’Steel gathered Jobs, Sanchez, and Cocker They entered the ruined ship. And found 2Face’s body.

  Worse, they found Billy, still in the golden glow, but now the glow was dull and Billy was lying on the floor in a fetal position. Sanchez determined that Billy was still alive, though weak, and stayed with him while the others removed 2Face from the ship.

  Once outside, they placed her gently on the ashy ground, and Jobs told the gathering crowd about Billy

  “How do you think she died?” Noyze asked, her voice hushed.

  Olga knelt and quickly examined the body. Finally, she stood and wiped her hands on her thighs.

  “No visible wounds. No signs of struggle on her, though there must have been some kind of —

  violence — in light of Billy’s state.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. A heart attack, maybe.”

  “Maybe something frightened her,” D-Caf suggested. “Maybe she died of shock?”

  Noyze frowned. “But she looks so — peaceful. I never saw 2Face look like that when she was —

  here.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Jobs murmured.

  “Could she have died of—of a broken heart?” D-Caf ventured now.

  Violet laughed. “She had no heart to break.”

  “Now, come on,” Olga admonished. “She wasn’t all bad….”

  “I didn’t like her, you know,” Violet said, matter-of-factly. “I didn’t at first. I thought she was obnoxious, but I also admired her. She was tough and knew how to take care of herself. She knew how to be strong, and I wanted to learn that from her. But over time … I came to hate her.”

  “2Face changed,” Jobs said. “We all did.”

  “But not everybody changed for the worse, like 2Face did,” Noyze said.

  Violet laughed. It sounded bitter. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” she said.

  Jobs frowned. Now didn’t seem the time for acrimony.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Violet apologized. “I’m in a bad mood. This isn’t helping.”

  And what also wasn’t helping. Jobs thought, was the very disturbing fact of Billy’s having been — hurt, diminished — in whatever happened between him and 2Face.

  Billy was supposed to be infallible. Perfect. Beyond damage or despair. Invulnerable.

  But he wasn’t. He’d survived 2Face’s supposed attack but it had made him weak. Weaker than he needed to be to perform the regreening ritual? Jobs sincerely hoped not.

  As painful as it was to admit, Jobs’s ironclad faith in Billy’s ability to save them all had been shaken. It was the poet in me, he told himself now, looking down at 2Face’s lifeless body. The poet I thought was long gone. The poet who believed in a weird little orphan from Chechnya via Texas.

  Who believed that a kid could save the world?

  Interesting, Jobs thought, as he walked away from the others. After all I’ve been through these past five hundred years, I’m still a romantic at heart.

  CHAPTER 19

  “THE END OF THE WORLD IS SOMETHING BEYOND OUR CONTROL.”

  Mo’Steel just wanted to hang with his best bud, Jobs, just for a while, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. Because Sanchez and Violet were striding toward them looking all grim and purposeful.

  “I have something to tell j’ou,” Sanchez said when they’d come to a stop.

  Violet took a step closer to Sanchez. “We have something to tell you,” she amended.

  “Something we should have told you before. But we had our reasons for keeping silent. But now, with what’s happened to Billy …”

  Mo’Steel shot a glance at Jobs, who just shrugged. He did not like the sound of this. Couldn’t one moment go by without some sort of crisis exploding in his face?

  “What is it?” he said tensely.

  Sanchez told them. He told them that if the regreening ritual didn’t work, they’d all be dead, instantaneously.

  “At least,” Violet added hastily, when Sanchez had finished talking, “that’s what Sanchez thinks Billy told him. Lately, Billy’s not been so clear.”

  Mo’Steel waited thirty full seconds before losing it.

  “Are you freakin’ insane?” he shouted. He wasn’t a guy who easily lost his temper, but this …

  this was a damn good reason to blow. “There’s only five hours left until Echo’s birthday….”

  Mo’Steel put his hands in the air as if in surrender. “Okay. All right. Let’s just take it easy and figure this thing out.”

  “Could we stop Billy even if we tried?” Jobs wondered. “I’m not so sure. What if he’s committed beyond our fears. Everything’s in place…. Why should he stop now?”

  “Maybe he can’t stop, even if he wanted to,” Violet suggested. “What if he’s, I don’t know, answering to a higher power or something?”

  “The Source,” Sanchez said softly.

  “Billy is not the point here,” Mo’Steel argued. “The point is the big picture. Do we withhold this information from the others? Do we have the right to withhold it? Man, I can’t even begin to get around all the moral twists and turns in this scenario.”

  “We could put it to a vote,” Jobs said, almost to himself. “Tell everyone what we know. Or think we know. Ask everyone to vote — go ahead with the ritual or call it off.”

  Violet shook her head. “It would only create panic. Maybe violence. And what if the vote is to call off the ritual and Billy goes along with that, and our lives continue to be awful? Then what? A month down the road people are furious that they missed the chance for a better life and they take it out on us. For giving them a choice.”

  “Sanchez, what do you think?” Mo’Steel asked.

  “I would rather not answer,” he said.

  “I’m ordering you to.”

  “Then I say we say nothing. But j’ou are the leader We must do as j’ou say.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.” Mo’Steel sighed. “Personally, I’ve never been one to bunny out.

  But I don’t like the idea of dragging people along with me. Especially when they don’t have all the info I do.”

  “If we all just die — so what?” Violet said fiercely. “No one will be to blame. The end of the world is something beyond our control. We should know that by now! We’ll
all just be —

  gone. No one will be around to blame us. There’ll be no us to blame.”

  Mo’Steel looked up at the endless gray sky.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  Echo walked purposely to the ruined entrance of the Source. Lumina lay gurgling happily in her arms. Then Sanchez appeared ahead of her, his eyes solemn but bright. Gently she placed the baby in his arms.

  “Thanks to j’ou,” he said softly and stepped inside, out of sight.

  Echo stood and waited.

  EPILOGUE

  “Tate! Come on, it’s time for lunch!”

  “In a minute. Daddy!” the little girl calls. “I found a whole lot of tadpoles!”

  “Now!” Jobs turns from the open window and grins at his other daughter, the one born to Echo back in the Alpha colony’s underground bunker Back In that other world. “Your sister is impossible,” he says fondly.

  Lumina, already taller than her mother, laughs. Her gray eyes are bright and clear Jobs thinks he sees the heavens in them.

  “I’ll go and get her,” she says. “I might have to bribe her by offering a peach.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Jobs says and suddenly he is his father, pretending to be exasperated by the demands of domestic life yet failing to hide his joy in his children. His own beloved father, dead now for so long.

  “Jobs?”

  He turns, smiling again.

  It’s Echo, standing by the rough-hewn table around which the family will eat their meal. In old-world reckoning, she and Jobs met for the first time almost ten years ago, just before Lumina’s birth. Six years before Tate came along.

  The sound of girlish laughter reaches their ears.

  “J’ou knew to call her Lumina,” Echo says, walking over to Jobs and slipping her hand into his. “J’ou knew she would know the light.”

  Jobs smiles and shakes his head. “If I did know,” he laughs, “I didn’t know that I knew.

  Make sense?”

  “Nothing makes sense,” Echo teases. She gives his hand a squeeze and goes back to setting the table.

  Listening to his younger daughter’s shouts of glee. Jobs remembers the first Tate with gratitude. Not for the first time he wishes that she was here to share with them all the newly born planet Earth. And on rare occasions, he even misses snotty ole Yago. And poor Kubrick.

  And …

  But there’s still Mo’Steel and Noyze, and their son, Boyd. Another child is on the way.

  Olga lives on her own in a tidy” little home. She and Aga were inseparable until Aga passed away, the first to move on after the birth of the new world.

  Violet and Sanchez are going to have their first child. Not surprisingly, Sanchez is viewed as the wise man in their community.

  Edward, now sixteen or so in old-world reckoning, is no longer the Chameleon. The mutations some of their group had acquired have vanished. Now, everybody’s just — human.

  Rarely does anyone refer to him-or herself as a Remnant or a Marauder or an Alpha. Jobs knows, of course, that the distinctions are there, but for the most part, people don’t dwell on those distinctions.

  Edward’s been spending a lot of time with Grost, who seems to have blossomed under the influence of kindness. On the other hand, Nesia, once 2Face’s nemesis, hasn’t changed at all.

  Newton’s long gone. No one’s seen him since the night he tried to kidnap Lumina.

  Lyric and Mattock share a home with their three small children. Mattock and Olga share what work there is tending to physical ills and complaints. Lyric is the community’s historian.

  Badger and Yorka are inseparable. Noyze has taught them both sign language and they spend hours talking about the wonders of their world.

  Occasionally, Mo’Steel and Cocker strike out to explore beyond their small community.

  They still hope to find those Alphas who refused the call to the Source. Or the Savagers. So far, they’ve found no one.

  On the whole, it’s a contented group.

  On the whole.

  Jobs knows that nothing lasts forever. That’s a lesson he’ll never forget. So while life is good, he enjoys it. Every single moment of it.

  And he tries not to let memories overwhelm the here and now.

  Especially memories about Billy.

  Billy didn’t survive the regreening ritual. Jobs wasn’t surprised, but still, he misses Billy in a way he knows no one else does.

  So — what’s the value of this new world? There are no great works of art and no fast-food joints, and there’s virtually no technology and nobody has an SUV. But there is food and water and day and night and the warmth of the sun and the cool of the breeze.

  What there isn’t, is war. Yet. Squabbles, sure. Big abusive government? No. Normal human weaknesses like jealousy and greed? Of course.

  The world as Jobs knew it from the great scientists hasn’t started over. Evolution? Jobs has no idea how this place works, or why. Where did the cows come from? The ants that eat his lettuce? Sometimes, in his more whimsical moments, Jobs wonders if it’s all a dream. Or if this is a form of heaven he’d never considered. Which means that maybe he’s really dead….

  Which is okay. Jobs thinks, watching his daughters run toward him, laughing. Because wherever they all really are and however it all really works, it’s all good.