Extinction

by Sean Platt

  “She’s been with those guys. The whatchacall’em?”

  “Mullah,” Clara said, preempting her blown not-really-a-secret.

  “Did you know that when you picked her up?”

  “No,” Nick said. “But what, were we supposed to not go out and get her? You felt it same as me, asshole.”

  “It’s nothing,” Clara said.

  “I knew,” Ella said. “She told me all about it.”

  Clara hadn’t, but she had been thinking about Sadeem and Quaid and the others. Reliving the … the attack? … in the Mullah tunnels had felt like a conversation with herself. Maybe she’d been chatting with Ella without even knowing.

  “It’s no big deal,” Ella said. “They kidnapped her.”

  “They didn’t really kidnap me.”

  “What then?” Cheever asked. “You know the reputation those guys have? We’ve been dodging them since we made this place. Now they’ve probably followed you here. Great job, Nicholas.”

  “They didn’t follow us,” Nick said.

  “You know she’s hiding something. You saw it same as me.”

  Clara decided she’d better defend herself before someone else had to do more of it for her.

  “It was just something I was thinking about. On the way over here, it was like I sorta heard something, or remembered it from a long time ago. The way you’ll hear someone hum and not remember what song it’s from. You know?”

  Cheever was still half frowning, unconvinced.

  “And the Mullah didn’t do anything bad. Mostly they wanted to know about me. About us.”

  “Right. Us. And you told them, did you?”

  “Relax, Eugene,” Nick said. “It’s not like she could have told them about the Hideout or any of us anyway.”

  “No, but she cooperated. And now they know how we think.”

  “Why is that important?” Clara asked.

  “I dunno,” Cheever said, crossing his arms. “It just is.”

  Nick rolled his eyes and pushed past the boy, leaving him behind. The space ahead was just as Clara had seen it in her head, but seeing it physically brought it to different reality. It was large and open, like a converted warehouse. She saw the poster nook and even the paint-covered couch, but with proper eyes she noticed countless details. Industrious inhabitants had somehow strung lines from the high ceiling to suspend privacy curtains. Some had fancy beds that no kid could carry alone — and that two couldn’t carry other than piece by piece.

  She had so many questions, but the decorating scheme was too far down the priority queue. She followed Ella and Nick through the cavernous space, mentally itching at the spot Cheever had been so suspicious of. Heads turned as they walked. Could everyone see it? Were they all as suspicious as Cheever?

  I don’t even know what it is. How can they blame me for something that came at me out of the blue?

  And Ella’s voice answered, even though she’d meant to talk only to herself.

  (Lightborn aren’t used to secrets.)

  I don’t mean to keep a secret!

  (It’s not your fault, Clara. There’s just never anything we can’t all share, is all.)

  The idea made her skin crawl. Was there truly nothing personal here? Did they all mentally see each other changing and using the bathroom? When a girl got a crush on a boy, was he able to laugh at her affection right away rather than the girl being able to stew for a while first?

  “Ella’s right, Clara,” Nick said aloud. “Don’t listen to Cheever. He’s a dick. All that matters is what Logan thinks.”

  Clara was about to ask who Logan was, but by looking inside herself she found the answer. He was this group’s leader. And by looking deeper, following mental branches like a river delta, she could see more of him: Logan was sixteen, wore glasses, and had grown up in Austria before being shuttled here by his now-deceased family. She had his whole dossier. It was there for the browsing, open as a book.

  “Logan’s sixteen,” Clara said.

  “It’s okay. He’s cool.”

  “No. I mean … ” She stopped, realizing her question would apply to Nick, too, as well as many of the assembled Lightborn. “I thought Lightborn kids came from being born near a ship.”

  “There’s a few kinds. You’ll learn. We all think sorta as one big brain, but at different levels. And we all shine a bit different. Ella’s pretty bright, I’m a bit dimmer, Cheever’s unfortunately pretty bright considering he was born before Astral Day, Logan’s okay … Look around once you’re settled, and you’ll see.”

  “What about me?”

  Nick laughed. “You’re super-bright, Clara. Like, really light out of all the Lightborn. It was kind of hard not to see you the second you came out from the palace or those tunnels or wherever you were. That’s the reason Cheever’s all up your butt about that thing in your head. We can all wall off parts of ourselves, but usually it’s not something we notice unless the rest of our brightness is turned up to eleven, like yours.”

  “I swear. I’m not trying to keep a secret.”

  Nick nodded shortly. “I know. I’m not Cheever.”

  He moved ahead. But the feeling of needing to divulge — of needing to make amends for the secret she hadn’t asked for — was pressing.

  “Nick?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I can hear the Astrals. There’s this sensation of whispers. It’s English in my head, and it sounds to me like whispering kids, but … well, I’m new to this, but I don’t think it’s you guys. I think it’s them. My way of imagining them.”

  Nick waited a second before nodding again.

  “That’s what Logan thinks, too. That we’re tapped into them, and they might not even know it.”

  Clara looked around, searching for their sixteen-year-old leader. But among the Lightborn, people didn’t need speech to agree.

  “So that loud alarm thing we heard? It was, like — ”

  “Like a timer going off,” Nick said. “It was right before the water became like blood. So … ”

  “Right. A timer. Time to unleash the plagues. That must be it.”

  He started to walk away again with Ella by his side. But Clara, unmoving, still felt an itch. Something else bothered her about this. Something she’d been rolling over inside her mind — somewhat guarded since she’d realized how easily her thoughts were being read. And now here in the Hideout, she realized it was something she didn’t sense in the hive mind. Something that rang funny about all of this.

  About the plague they’d already had.

  Abut the plagues the citizens seemed to be anticipating next.

  There had been a King James Bible in the craphole they’d stayed in outside Roman Sands, and Clara, then just six, had read it cover to cover. She knew what came next. By now, in these apocalyptic times, pretty much everyone knew what to expect once the rivers turned bloody.

  “Nick?”

  Nick and Ella turned.

  “There’s more. I don’t know if it’s just a feeling or if someone told me and I forgot, but I’ve sorta been … hiding it, I guess. Not on purpose, but … ”

  “What?”

  “I can’t shake the sense that they gave us plagues because we expected plagues. Because that’s what people think happens when the world ends.”

  Nick turned fully around then walked back. The mood on his face was unreadable.

  “What does that mean, Clara?”

  She swallowed and said, “What if this is all just a show — and that whatever they’re really doing and whatever they’re really after is something totally different?”

  CHAPTER 16

  It wasn’t easy for Stranger to see the world through Astral eyes, now that he had a fixed and unchanging human body.

  He thought this as he focused on the Reptar at the bottom of the big dune. The thing couldn’t see Stranger as he watched from the perch where the shuttle had left him — beyond the city limits, at the desert’s edge. But Stranger could see the Reptar just fine.
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  And he focused. Attempted to see the world through Astral eyes.

  Stranger squinted, trying to do the thing he’d done before. Trying to pop the Reptar like a big purple zit. But it was no use. Taking in all that new Meyer Dempsey on the mothership had been like drinking a bottle of liquor. He was drunk on Dempsey. The last of the Pall’s floating, ephemeral nature was gone now that he had all that extra humanity. Now he wasn’t Pall at all, as he’d been when he’d turned the last Reptar to mincemeat. He was this new thing, through and through. Now he was Stranger, from mouth to asshole. Just like any of the others.

  Well, not just like any of the others.

  He pulled a pair of silver balls from his pocket and revolved them in his palm. They orbited like twin suns. Technically speaking, the balls hadn’t existed until he’d pulled them from his pocket. How could they? His jeans weren’t loose, and the balls were big enough to play ping-pong with. You could never fit them into tight pockets without looking like you had tumors.

  Two balls became three.

  Became four.

  Became five.

  He clenched his hand, and the balls were gone.

  What was different between the balls and the Reptar? He’d blown that last Astral soldier apart just by looking at it. Simple enough at the time. He’d merely needed to realize that the thing was energy and so was his mind. It was the way the Astrals saw the world — as one big pool of energy where the line between “individuals” was fuzzy at best. Astrals couldn’t blow stuff up just by looking at it — that particular marriage of talents was his alone. To do what he’d done to that Reptar, you had to see the patterns then use feedback to disrupt the patterns from within.

  It helped that Stranger, at his core, was feedback as far as the Astral energy pool was concerned.

  And now he’d seen the stream. Now he understood what he was — what the Pall had been before him. He understood why the Pall had become Stranger when the Ark had opened. He understood what the Pall and Stranger had in common: that both were made of the all-too-human traits that had caused the first Meyer Dempsey replica to malfunction, turning from its Astral cousins toward the human side of the coin. The Astral collective, when it made Kindred, had squeezed out those negative traits and made a “better” copy of Meyer Dempsey by doing so, but the process created waste as well.

  And the Pall had been born from that waste.

  Then Stranger had been born when the opened Ark had turned that human waste into something even more human. Something that could walk around on two legs and tell Divinity what was what.

  And now, having taken in a new dose of Astral Meyer’s emotions — the same emotions that had caused all that feedback inside the hive mind — Stranger had become a bit too human to pop Reptars by thought. What a shame.

  But he could do other tricks, too. Stranger wasn’t out of magic just yet.

  He could still make inanimate props — silver balls, say — appear from thin air. All it took was intending for them to be there. Easy as pie. Things like little silver balls didn’t have brain enough to disagree, so they appeared and disappeared whenever he wanted them to.

  And he could see the truth. About the Lightborn. About the puzzle. About the ant farm. Hell — even about Cousin Timmy.

  And he could open windows.

  Stranger squatted down. He sat, wondering where he should open a new one. The Reptar was too far below to see as he came to rest on his ass; it dropped out of sight. Now Stranger could only see sand and horizon beyond the dune. Not far off was the lush edge of the Nile valley. Then the river itself, crimson with blood.

  Soon, the Astrals would make their next play — maybe their real play — or maybe more jazz-hands bullshit designed to frighten the humans. Probably the bullshit. There was so much these days. And after the bullshit with the blood was over, the Astrals would probably try some other cockamamie “plague” or scare-fest to get the humans jumping. It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

  Eventually they’d kill everyone on Earth, save a few to start over and try this whole thing again. It’s how it always happened, if the memories he still carried from his more Astral days were correct. But before killing them all, they’d play and watch the frenzy.

  To most humans, blood and locusts and other such bullshit was all worth fretting over. But to Stranger and the Lightborn, rivers of blood and other bullshit like it were obvious for what they truly were: yet another way the Astrals were shaking the planet-sized ant farm so they could see what the insects did next.

  It was cruel. And unfair. Ants were ants, and could never know you were fucking with them.

  His thoughts turned to Mara Jabari, who thought she was so clever. The Astrals knew she was plotting against them. Of course they knew, just like they knew the other human viceroys would plot against them. That was why the viceroys existed. That was why the Astrals had chosen the people they had to become viceroys in the first place. They were all leaders, thinkers, and rebels at heart. Of course they’d play along — then try to wiggle out.

  Just about everything that had transpired around the Ark and the key and the group that carried it had been allowed to happen. That group, like Jabari, thought they were so clever, too. Peers Basara, given his big cave full of Astral technology so he could find and assist Meyer’s party, then left alone no matter where he went or what he did. Cameron Bannister, who as the Key Bearer had never truly understood — except perhaps at the end — that what he chose to do with the key mattered far more than actually doing it.

  But the Astrals thought they were clever as well. They thought they were smart, staying out of sight and watching the ants. They thought they knew it all, and that the humans couldn’t surprise them.

  Well, the Astrals hadn’t known about the Lightborn. Not what they meant. And in the ways that mattered, the aliens still didn’t truly know why the Lightborn were so incredibly important. The Mullah seemed to suspect, but the Astrals hadn’t a clue. They simply weren’t human enough to get it.

  And the Astrals didn’t know what the Pall had been. What Stranger now represented, now that he truly understood what he was and why he’d been born — now that he’d soaked in so much more of the emotion that had caused him to be here in the first place.

  Maybe the newfangled breed of humanity hadn’t developed the New Age mental kumbaya that the Astrals expected, but another thing Stranger knew (that the Astrals had missed): they were mentally connected all the same.

  Meyer Dempsey proved it with drugs. He proved it by taking ayahuasca with Heather. At the time, Stranger knew by looking inside his own memories, Heather had thought they were tripping out and having fun. But even back then Meyer had suspected their journeys were something more. He’d known even all those years ago that by speaking to “Mother Ayahuasca,” he’d been talking to some kind of universal unconsciousness, composed of all the minds the world — all the worlds — had to offer.

  That had opened one kind of window — the one that had let the Astrals see Meyer’s world through his eyes, and begin to judge it while their ships were still on their way to Earth.

  But there were other kinds of windows to open, just like there were other ways in which universal unconsciousnesses were formed.

  Stranger crossed his legs.

  He closed his eyes.

  And as the window opened in front of him, he said to the New Human Collective: “What they tell you next, friends? It’s only smoke and mirrors.”

  He felt the collective’s minds turn to listen, even if they didn’t understand what they were hearing.

  And Stranger told them about themselves. About who they were and what they represented. And about how Cousin Timmy might just have his day after all.

  CHAPTER 17

  Whatever was happening, things were getting worse rather than better.

  Kindred followed Peers through the upstairs hallways, not so much oblivious to the frenzied, all-too-human panic visible through gaps in the fence as mindfully defiant of it.
All that was happening in Ember Flats struck Kindred as stupid and annoying. So the water had turned to blood? It wasn’t like the Astrals were killing everyone, which is what was supposed to happen in the aftermath of rendered judgment. The entire population — especially after Meyer and Kindred had told them about Heaven’s Veil and the massacre there — had been primed for a bloodbath. Instead, the Astrals had given them a bath in blood. Context made all the difference. Blood water smelled bad, but it didn’t hurt anyone. And yet even now that the shuttle lasers and Reptar patrols had mostly stopped (so far as Kindred could see, and so far as Jabari reported from her monitors), everyone kept right on panicking.

  Kindred kind of wished the Astrals would get on with it. At least that would shut everyone up and stop their whining.

  He clenched his fists. He couldn’t close his eyes or he’d run into Piper’s back, but he forced himself to breathe. And again he recited, for the thousandth time:

  It’s just the Ark. Cameron opened the Ark, and you’re feeling its negative energy, not just your own. Cameron dropped his dumb ass into the Ark as some sort of a mindless sacrifice, and for some reason that’s a goddamned problem. For some reason Cameron’s issue became your issue. You were supposed to make a speech. You did your, part and Cameron was supposed to do his, but he did it wrong (or maybe too right) and now the world is filled with bad juju. It’s not you who’s pissed off; it’s the world, thanks to all this bullshit with Cameron and his inability to follow a simple set of fucking instructions.

  Kindred’s fists didn’t unclench. He wasn’t calming. At first, the self-talk had seemed to remind him that he was being influenced by the Ark’s bad energy — all the judgment in the air and whatnot. At first, he’d felt a bit better with every reminder, telling himself that he felt angry because the planet felt angry. But not anymore. Now whenever he thought of the Ark, he got pissed at Cameron for botching his part of their carefully laid plan.