Extinction

by Sean Platt

  The man put one hand over the other to cover the balls. When he parted his hands there were two black balls per palm. Then he did it again, and this time there were three in each hand, circling with tiny chimes. The city soundscape seemed to have gone mute. Not far off, a red beam lanced into a building, and it detonated, throwing brick like shrapnel into the air. Debris rolled between the Titan and the man, but neither looked down to see it.

  “Thing about being me,” the man said, “is that there’s always plenty to go around. I can be where I was or I can be where I stand. I can be what I used to be or what I am now. It’s not always easy. Not like you forgetting where that gift I gave you ended up.”

  The man nodded toward the Titan’s palm. The ball was gone.

  He raised his right hand. Combined it with his left. There were six balls in one hand, no balls in the other. Then five, four, and the original three. Nothing hit the ground. Nothing rolled up the man’s sleeves. The balls circled fingers and thumb as if mocking gravity. He splayed his fingers with the balls between them, rolled the balls from back to front, clenched them in his fist, and made them vanish. Then he opened the opposite hand and the balls were now there, still moving.

  “Funny thing about all of this,” the man said, closing his hand and opening it again to reveal four balls instead of three, then five instead of four, “is that I think we both know there’s more happening than meets the eye. The question isn’t about yes or know. It’s not really about win or lose. It’s about how, ain’t it? There’s what you see and what you don’t. But it’s hard for anyone to guess what’s going to happen if they don’t see the how and the why. If they only see a slice, is what I mean.”

  The man pressed his hands together. The balls vanished as if they’d never been.

  “If you thought you knew how I did that trick, friend, you’d be wrong. Just like if you think you know all that’s in play this time you came to visit your little ant farm.” He held out his large, empty hands and smiled — a strange expression on his long and leathery face, which seemed far more suited to scowling. “Now how ’bout you let me in to have a chat with the man in charge? Or the thing in charge; sorry.”

  The man stepped forward, toward the shuttles. The Titan moved to block his way.

  “I just want to talk. And despite how you won’t stop yammering on, I don’t think you’re the fella to talk to.”

  He tried to move around the Titan again. Still, the alien blocked his way. So the man said, “Think you can see all that needs seeing? Think you’ve got it all figured out?”

  The air shimmered between them. A thought, finally lubricated and frequencies duly tuned, shot from one mind to the other, handily translated by the black orb, their minds finding resonance like clacking spheres:

  It doesn’t matter.

  “Of course it matters.”

  Judgment is at hand. Selection is coming. Extermination will follow.

  “Same as always?”

  Same as always.

  “What about me?”

  You don’t matter.

  “What about the kids, fella?”

  Nothing changes. As with earlier epochs, they will self-select, and some will remain.

  “To perpetuate the species, huh?” the human said, nodding knowingly, hands on his hips.

  Yes.

  “And no other reason. No other point in considering the kids. Even those your stubborn asses can’t see?”

  The Titan’s head cocked.

  “I’m on your side, friend. Which is to say I’m on no one’s.”

  The man tried again to circle around but this time didn’t stop when the Titan moved in front of him. He pushed against the alien’s strong arms. Fought him. Punched at him, determined to pass.

  A rolling, gravel-filled noise percolated from the Titan’s throat. When the man looked up, he saw a blue spark blooming inside the Titan’s mouth.

  Instead of backing away, the man pushed harder. And as he pushed, the Titan changed. Shining black carapace covered smooth white skin. Limbs elongated and cracked, becoming multi-jointed, creaking with stretching tendons. The man stepped back, seeing the half-Reptar thing, watching it shift.

  “Let me through,” the stranger said, “or this time, everyone loses.”

  The Reptar didn’t hesitate. The psychic bond had soured; the man could feel its animal cunning replacing calm Titan logic. He felt its bloodlust and primal anger. He seemed to see himself through the Reptar’s eyes as it stretched out, jaw unhinging, and bit him in half.

  Only the man wasn’t bitten at all. He was standing, fully intact in his blue jeans and dress shirt, rolling three black balls in his big right hand.

  The Reptar pulled back, confused. It had tasted flesh. It was still swallowing something that wasn’t precisely there when the human signaled to a pair of Titans who’d come to investigate the Reptar’s purr, to see what was at the courtyard’s perimeter. The Reptar didn’t turn to look, but both Titans trained eyes on the human, polite expressions on their faces.

  “You there,” the stranger called. “Did I ever tell you about my cousin Timmy?”

  The Reptar coiled its panther-like rear legs and leaped, but as it launched itself at the man, there was a low yet horrible popping, and it detonated in a flesh bomb of black shell and gore.

  The stranger looked at his shirt with distaste, reaching down to flick away wet pieces of the Reptar’s body, then strolling nonchalantly forward, toward a trio of shuttles. The door of the middle one was open. The human made for it, nodding toward the two newcomers with a tip of an invisible hat.

  This time, the Titans did not interfere.

  CHAPTER 4

  Clara stirred, found herself blind, then remembered that she’d fallen asleep in the tiny, cramped closet under the subterranean set of stairs in the Mullah tunnels. That realization led to a question: Why, exactly, had she fallen asleep? Sadeem had shoved her into the secret cubby, and she’d watched what looked like millions of flying Astral spy BBs swallow them whole.

  Even thinking back on what she’d seen through the slit around the concealed doorjamb made Clara’s head feel garbled. The scene had been like watching swimmers in undulating metallic waves, except they never surfaced for air. There was only the slow — and yet somehow furious — ebb and flow of massing drones, moving in tandem as if they were one thing rather than untold numbers of individuals.

  Kind of like the Astrals themselves.

  Or humans. Because that’s something that had been clear to Clara from the start, though it often felt like she was the only one who truly got it. Sadeem and the others were fascinated with how she solved puzzles years too advanced for her (or perhaps years too advanced for even the wisest adults), just like how Mom and Dad and Piper and all the others had once been fascinated by how she learned anything. They seemed enthralled that Clara had walked when she had, that she’d talked when she had, that she’d spoken in full sentences from the start and understood even what her parents tried to protect her from. But how could a girl not know how to do all those things? It was all so obvious. She’d known most of it from the start, before she really even had a body, before she left her mother’s womb. What was the big deal? Did “normal” kids just decide not to walk and talk and be who they obviously already were? That had never struck Clara as particularly normal.

  After swarming the room for a while, the balls must have left. She could hear no commotion outside. But that, Clara had no memory of. Because she seemed to have fallen asleep, watching the lazy rhythms, feeling the sights and sounds of shifting silver waves working on her mind like a lullaby.

  She put her eye to the crack, peeked out, and saw nothing but an empty room beyond.

  “Sadeem!” She said it in a harsh whisper.

  There was no response.

  Clara twisted her face all she could, shifting from one eye to the other, laying her nose to the side and pressing her cheek to the door, hoping to see more than her limited panorama. But she could only make
out that tiny sliver of the room.

  “Sadeem! Quaid! Anyone!”

  Nothing.

  Clara touched the knob. Turned it slowly so as not to make sound. Opened the door a hair and peeked out the new crack, still seeing and hearing nothing. She opened it farther, millimeter by millimeter, until there was enough of a gap that there was no longer any point in stealth. She opened it the rest of the way and looked out into the Mullah’s underground chamber, tunnels branching left and right.

  The strung lights were still lit, black cords tacked to the walls and ceilings in long ribbons.

  The rooms were utterly silent. Even when Clara had first followed the dog that wasn’t a dog to this place, they hadn’t been so still. But now, she’d be able to hear a pin drop from the complex’s other end. The echo, in all this stillness, would have seemed titanic.

  But: nothing.

  “Sadeem!”

  Nothing.

  Clara closed the cubby behind her, aware that if something was quietly amiss, she might still need a place to hide, and crossed into the far tunnel, then the next chamber, and beyond. There was no one around.

  She stifled her fear. Sometimes — most times, really — Clara could sense the emotions of others around her, even if they weren’t there. That’s why she didn’t worry about the Mullah’s intentions once she’d met them, and why she didn’t fret much about her mom or the others. Clara understood that the Mullah would finish with what they needed and then send her home. Mom would get past her worry. But right now she sensed an emotional void. The ever-present knowledge— served up, it seemed, by some sort of invisible censor for Clara to sample — had gone missing. She couldn’t stretch her mind to try look. It simply wasn’t there.

  She didn’t know where the Mullah were or what they might be thinking.

  Before, even when she’d had that strange feeling about Cameron and the city’s mood had soured like bad milk above them, she hadn’t been too concerned about her family and friends because she’d known they were fine and would — for at least the time being — remain so. But now she couldn’t sense any of them, either.

  She couldn’t see or feel or hear her mother inside her mind.

  She couldn’t feel Piper.

  She couldn’t feel either of her grandfathers.

  She could only feel herself.

  That never happened. She felt acutely, intensely alone, as if she’d gone deaf and blind in unison and was being forced to navigate her world by touch.

  She forced herself to breathe slowly, and stay calm.

  Chill out, Clara. This must be how it is for most people every day. For Mom. For Mr. Cameron. For all your Mullah friends. Everyone but you and the other freaks seem to do just fine without a window into anyone else’s head. You’re fine.

  She moved on, feeling as if she were groping through the dark.

  Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Before long, Clara arrived at a section of tunnel she recognized. Only now the slab at the hallway’s end was open, and she could see muted fluorescent light beyond. She walked out, found herself in a more traditional-seeming basement, then moved up a quiet set of stairs. She was in a dwelling, also vacant.

  She moved to the window. And that’s when it hit her.

  The wave of intense emotion — not bubbling up from inside this time, as usually happened when she was alone and her mind traveled to those she cared about most. This was raw and forceful, beaten into her from the outside.

  Now that Clara could see the city streets, she couldn’t help but feel them as well. The entire world, so recently quiet, was now stuffed full of noise. It was like the time she’d borrowed Uncle Trevor’s music player back in Heaven’s Veil then hit play without checking the volume. With her walls down and her sensitivity all the way up to catch any whiff of emotion, intensity from the streets was a tsunami of mental clatter. For a few terrifying seconds, it felt like it might blast the brain right out of her ears.

  Clara winced, bit down on the feeling, and gripped the windowsill until she found herself able to breathe again. Then her muscles relaxed, and she looked out on the city, realizing she could see and hear and feel and sense and taste everything.

  While she’d been playing games, Grandpa Meyer and Grandpa Kindred had made some sort of announcement. Clara could hear snippets of that announcement deep beneath the raw fear that rode on the surface. That’s what had started this all — or maybe more accurately, that had been the first in a chain of events that had caused whatever had gone wrong.

  Betrayal.

  Terror.

  Confusion.

  Meyer Dempsey was supposed to be dead, or at least disappeared. There was only supposed to be one of him — the one wasn’t far off from a modern Hitler or Stalin — two names Clara didn’t factually understand but knew plenty from mental context. But now there were two, and they were very much alive. Now Heaven’s Veil wasn’t his fault at all. Now blame belonged to the Astrals, and the aliens weren’t doing much to contradict the story.

  The Ark is open.

  The inner whisper made her flinch. She’d been there, at Mount Sinai. She’d seen what had come out. She’d known what it must mean. How had she missed this? Had the Mullah really kept her mind so occupied with the endless puzzles? Had they done it on purpose, to keep her blind?

  But it was true: Cameron had opened the Ark. And what she’d sensed seemed to be true: The Ark was an archive of all humanity had done and said and felt and intended and explored and rejected and exploited and committed since the Astrals had left the last time. It was a record of humanity’s good and evil, and popping its top had called the Astrals to sort through the evidence and render their judgment.

  The judgment was in.

  And the verdict was guilty.

  Ember Flats knew it. Even if the people couldn’t spell it out, they felt it in their bones.

  Clara moved to the door. Looked up. And found that the presence she’d felt wasn’t all in her mind. She could see the enormous low moon exactly where she’d expected, for the last thirty seconds, to see it.

  The Dark Rider. That’s what the Mullah’s minds called it. The final Horseman. The bringer of death, the one Mullah legend said started the plagues.

  Clara ducked back behind the door, closing it most of the way, as a Reptar patrol galloped by on their strange insectile legs: half-distorted black mammals, half things. The horror of seeing them was more immediate and visceral, less predictive. Knowing what was happening made it no less terrifying. Seeing the entire picture did not, Clara realized, make her any more prepared or unafraid to face it.

  Clara closed the door, slumped against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the floor of the unknown stranger’s empty house. She didn’t feel special. She didn’t feel Lightborn.

  She felt like a seven-year-old girl who wanted her mother.

  Clara began to cry.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  CHAPTER 5

  Piper saw it coming, but there was no time to stop it.

  Peers, in a dead sprint but looking behind him as if being chased, collided full-on with Kindred’s back. The pair didn’t crumple so much as slam flat onto the floor. Kindred managed to break the fall with his hands, but Peers wasn’t as elegant. His momentum rolled him along Kindred’s body like a stuntman toppling across the hood of a parked car. He ended up crashing shoulder first into the floor beside Kindred then sliding across the hardwood until he wedged into the corner where floor met wall.

  Kindred was up in a second, every inch the intimidating physical specter Meyer — or his duplicates — always managed to be. Meyer himself was two feet away, his eyes also on Peers, his hands also raising to fight. It seemed to dawn on them both that Peers hadn’t tackled; he’d bumbled in like a fool. And as he was standing, rubbing his shoulder, his eyes were so wide, they were like giant white saucers with circles of spilled tea in the center.

  “Meyer!” Peers blurted. “Thank God. You
must come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a way out. There’s … ” His eyes went to Jabari. “She has a plan. I need to get you out of here.”

  Meyer’s eyes narrowed. “You?”

  “We know about the escape plan, Peers,” Piper said. “But Mara says we can’t make it.”

  “We can make it,” Kindred mumbled.

  Jabari sighed. “You’ll just hold umbrellas over your heads and run there, I suppose? Hope the giant ship that knows your name doesn’t notice or care?”

  “We have to hurry.” Peers kept looking backward, as if still fearing the arrival of whatever had him running. “Come with me.” He tugged at Meyer’s blazer. Meyer, disgusted at the base gesture, shook him off with disdainful eyes.

  “We’re not leaving without Clara.”

  All heads turned toward Lila. Piper — and the others, apparently, judging by the group’s puzzled looks — had forgotten she was there.

  “Of course we’re not.” Piper looked at Peers but cast much more meaningful looks at Meyer and Kindred in the doing. “Peers? We’re not going anywhere until we find Clara.”

  “The Mullah have her. Come. We have to hurry.”

  “We know the Mullah have her,. That’s why we need to find her. Cameron did what they wanted. So they’ll let her go. Right, Piper?” Lila’s look was pleading, begging for knowledge Piper couldn’t possibly have. Though she did, sort of — after Cameron’s mental presence had vanished from her mind, she’d had an intense flash of emotional knowledge. She’d known he was gone, and that Clara was safe. But now she couldn’t access the feeling or be sure that Clara was still safe, let alone where she might be. And she hadn’t a clue as to the Mullah’s intentions. Trying to restore her flash of empath’s sight was like trying to move a new limb: she could do it, but not entirely on purpose and certainly not reliably.

  She’d sensed Clara, a little.

  She’d sensed the city, a lot.