I wrench myself away, back into my body, and awaken in Kamali’s arms.
Even before I pull in a breath, I hear Miriam’s voice rise above the growing breathless clamor. “This is a trick!” Her voice stabs the air, puncturing the joy.
A chill washes over my body.
Then she rushes toward me with ascender speed.
Miriam moves so fast, it’s hard for me to track.
She lays out Nathaniel, swiping his legs out from under him with an augmented kick. Then she shoves Cyrus aside like he’s nothing but a big sack of flour. Tristan grabs her and slows her momentarily, but she whips a punch to his face that takes him down hard, then she moves on like nothing happened. I push Kamali down on Cyrus’s stretcher just before Miriam reaches me. I’m no match whatsoever—she shoves me up against the med pod wall, her hands on my neck and her dark eyes wild.
“I’ve changed my mind about martyring you,” she hisses in my face.
Her hands are human, but they’re insanely strong—I can’t get a breath. Tristan, Cyrus, and Nathaniel struggle up from the floor, but a dozen more hands hold them back.
I try to shove Miriam away, but she slams my head against the wall hard enough to jar my brain. Black dots swarm in front of me—either from the knock on the head or the lack of air. I desperately try to kick or punch my way out of her hold, but nothing affects her. Kamali appears suddenly and slips an arm around Miriam’s throat. It distracts her for a moment—long enough to whip her elbow back and catch Kamali on the cheek. She tumbles to the floor.
No. I land a solid punch to Miriam’s gut, but she barely flinches. Even the momentum of it only moves her an inch.
“You will not play this resurrection game in my house,” she growls. Then louder, for the hushed crowd. “Tell them how you faked this!” But she’s not giving me any air to answer. She slams my head against the wall again, fury and fear splotching her face. “Tell them!”
The swarming dots are back, and my lungs are screaming for air. No one’s going to stop her. I’m dying and desperate and running out of options. I shift slightly, and my fugue-state form is instantly in contact with hers. Startled confusion passes over her face just before I’m blown away, my fugue form ripped out of my body and tumbled across the med pod. Her mind is too strong for me, but not ascender-strong. Not enough to blow me out to the void. I snatched a tiny thought from her, but it’s not anything I can’t tell by her wild-eyed look and the fact that she’s trying to kill me. She wants me to recant—to disavow the miracle that’s occurred in front of everyone’s eyes. Miriam can’t afford to have a prophet come to the Makers. Not now. Not when she’s on the verge of realizing her destiny, as she sees it.
I flit back to her side. My body has gone limp, and she’s struggling to keep my dead weight upright. One of the Makers shouts at her, insisting she stop. There’s a swell of rancor in the crowd. Miriam’s eyes go wide, but this is a different panic—like perhaps she’s made a mistake in killing me.
Only I’m not dead. Not yet. But the Makers don’t know that.
Miriam smacks my face, none too lightly. “Stop faking! I haven’t done anything to you!” But I can hear the uncertainty in her voice.
I return to my body. When my eyes open, her disbelieving face is only two inches from mine. Seeing me alive charges her anger again, but instead of choking me, she bunches up my shirt and keeps me pinned to the wall.
“More playing dead?” she accuses. Then she jerks her head back to the crowd. “Tell them this is all tricks and lies.”
My throat is sore, but I strive to keep my voice calm. “Let me go, and I will.”
Her eyebrow twitches. She scans my face, looking for the lie, but then she slowly eases back and releases my shirt, which I straighten. Kamali stands nearby, holding her bruised cheek, but the rest—Cyrus and Basha, Nathaniel and Tristan—are still being held captive by Miriam’s overpowered jivs. All eyes are on Miriam and me, Resistance and Maker alike.
She flicks a look to them, the threat implicit. “Tell us the truth this time,” she demands. She must truly think I’m a charlatan, a false prophet come to ruin her people, or she would demand no such thing.
Because the truth would unravel everything she believes.
“You saw what happened,” I say evenly, holding her gaze like she has no power over me. Then I slowly turn to the crowd. “You all saw what happened.”
It’s a challenge, and Miriam rises to it. “I saw nothing but a boy playing prophet and trying to trick my people into following him.”
The weakness of her words ripples through the Makers. She’s asking them to disbelieve their own eyes. Half are flicking looks to the healed, the ones I pulled back from the other side. Alisha. Jeremy. Simone. Their lives are swirling through me, waiting to be integrated. Soon, they’ll be part of me, like everyone who’s passed through. Their memories still have to be sorted and cataloged, but I can already feel their Maker lives folding into the person I am now.
The boy who brings people back from the dead.
The boy who paints with reality.
I ignore Miriam’s pointed stare and lift my hand to peer dazedly at it. What can I really do with this ability? What should I do? Could I, right at this moment, conjure a gun to point at Miriam’s head? Could I pull the trigger before anyone could reach me? Would it be real?
I drop my hand and face the murmuring crowd—they’re still struggling to understand what’s happened. “I’m not the prophet you’re waiting for.” My voice is loud and clear and carries to every corner of the pod. The hush falls, sudden and fast. I get that strange feeling I’ve had before—like this moment is immutable. As if it has to happen, or maybe it’s already happened. But I don’t believe in fate or destiny or a pre-determined future. I believe in free will and free choice—and that the words I’m about to say are actually mine to choose. “You’re waiting for a Second Singularity. You’re offering up your jivs and your Makers, sacrificing them to try to become something more.” I spread my arms wide, taking full responsibility for the actions—the impossible things—that I just did. “This is what more looks like.” A jittery murmur goes through the crowd, a flutter of exchanged looks. They don’t know what to make of me, but the hands holding my friends loosen. Tristan shoves them away. Nathaniel doesn’t budge, his stony stare still hard on them. Kamali’s eyes are alight and focused on me. Cyrus slips his arm around Basha, protective, but his gaze is hot on my face, too. I can’t look at them, not now, not without losing my determination to do this.
I swing back to Miriam. The panic is alive on her face. “Do you really think you can stop me? If I want to walk my friends out of here, right now, do you think you can stand in my way?”
Her jaw is working, grinding in fury, but no words are coming out. Either she thinks it’s true—and I honestly don’t know if it is—or she’s too angry to speak. I can’t tell through the wall of hatred on her face.
I soften my voice. “Do you really want to know the truth, Miriam?”
“You have no claim on the truth!” she spits out, bitter, echoing the vision of her and her sword stabbing my body with righteous fury. So… seeing isn’t believing. Not for her. Or she’ll never admit it.
I speak to the crowd instead. “The truth is that I came here to get my friend, Cyrus. To stop him from a pointless fight. And when he died for you…” I pause, and the hush settles in again. “I brought him back. Because it wasn’t right.” I look through the crowd, finding the ones I healed staring at me with a wide-eyed wonder. They believe… even if they don’t remember the other side. “You wanted me to save your friends, too, and I did. I’m not going to use this thing that I do—this thing that I am—to destroy lives.” I return a piercing look to Miriam. “You shouldn’t be worrying about me. You should worry about yourselves. There’s no righteousness in destruction, Miriam. And that includes the ascenders.”
Another murmur, angrier this time, runs through the crowd.
Miriam’s face opens with a n
ew understanding. “Of course—you’re just like them.”
“I’m not like anyone.” Of that much, I’m certain.
Her voice gains strength again. “You’re one of their experiments—”
“I’m leaving,” I say, cutting her off and straightening my shoulders. “Don’t stand in my way.” Maybe it’s the confidence in my voice. Maybe it’s the fact that her people are already whispering among themselves, questioning all of this, wondering aloud if any of this can possibly be true. Whether they can believe their own eyes. But when I brush past Miriam, she doesn’t stop me, just follows me with her glare.
It only takes three steps before I’m face-to-face with Cyrus. “Are you coming?” I ask.
He opens his mouth to answer, but he’s cut off by a screech of metal, shouting voices, and two screaming half-grunts that have every person in the room whipping their heads toward the door—it’s coming from outside the med pod in the shops.
We don’t have to wonder for long.
Lenora appears in the doorway, her beautiful ascender form tall and terrifying. She quickly scans the room then runs with ascender speed, weaving through the Makers to reach me. Miriam is still standing close and menacing—Lenora shoves her to the ground and holds her with one foot on her neck, pinning her to the floor. Miriam kicks at Lenora with her augments, and two of her jivs shove past me to come to Miriam’s defense, but a fraction of a second later, Marcus slips through the crowd at ascender speed and knocks them all back, sending them reeling into the crowd and tumbling to the floor.
He immobilizes Miriam’s augments with a crushing grip that screeches metal on metal.
“Don’t!” I cry out, afraid they’ll kill her—and ruin everything I’ve just accomplished.
“Are you all right?” Lenora demands, but she’s already scanning me with her inhuman eyes. Her gaze lands on my throat, which has to be showing bruises. She whips an angry look down at Miriam.
“Let her up.” I leave no room for argument in my voice. The last thing I need is ascenders showing up in a rage and killing the Makers’ leader.
Marcus gives me a slightly surprised but amused look. He backs off, releasing Miriam, then he scans the jivs around us as if they were no more threat than a small cloud of flies and just as disgusting. Lenora frowns but eases off Miriam’s neck. The Makers’ leader is red-faced and spitting mad, judging by the clenching of her teeth, but she scrambles up to standing. Right then, Grayson hurtles through the door into the med pod, moving fast but not quite ascender speed. He spies me across the room and comes to a halt, quickly evaluating the situation. Then Delphina arrives at his back, dressed in the black body armor of the Resistance. Her steely-eyed glare sweeps the room.
Great.
“It looks like your Masters have come to claim you,” Miriam says, poison in her voice.
This sudden “rescue”—which I really don’t need—definitely puts me on the ascender side of things.
“The ascenders created me,” I say, lifting my voice to address the entire crowd of Makers. “Out of tech and DNA, just like Miriam.” I bring my gaze back to her. “But it doesn’t matter who created me or where I came from. What matters is who I decide to be.” I’m challenging her with her own words. The crowd must know it because they shift back from the huddle of ascenders and Resistance members in their midst, looking to her, uncertain.
Kamali has a shine in her eyes. Cyrus and Basha as well. Tristan’s expression is stunned into blankness. Nathaniel is still eyeing the nearby jivs, but he’s calm. Marcus seems amused like I’m some kind of talking parrot. Lenora is the only one still scanning the crowd like she’s not yet certain I’m safe.
But I am.
I’m walking out of here, but I have something to say first. To all of them.
“You’re striving to become something more,” I say to Miriam, who is still seething but also looks a little lost—like she can’t understand how all of this unraveled so quickly. “Something better than the ascenders. But what if you just become a different kind of killing machine? If, in order to become more, you have to extinguish someone else, even if that someone else is an ascender, someone you think is less than you in some fundamental way… that’s not good enough. You don’t deserve to be the top species on the planet if all you’re going to do with that is leave a bloody trail in your wake.” The hush is sudden and full. “Fight the ascenders, if you want. Destroy them, if you can. But if you do, you’ll be no better than anyone else in history who has decided that someone else is subhuman and worthy of elimination. And I will have no part of that.”
I turn my back on Miriam’s glare and Lenora’s defensive stance, then hold my hand out to Kamali—she looks startled for an instant, then slides her hand into mine and holds it firmly. I only get two more steps before I’m blocked by the crowd of jivs and Makers and my own people—Nathaniel, Tristan, Cyrus, and Basha.
“Follow me,” I say to them, and it’s more than a simple get out of my way I’m trying to reach the door. I know it, and by the looks on their faces, they know it, too.
Everyone moves out of my way.
Kamali and I stride down the center of the med pod. She trails behind me, still holding my hand. I don’t have to look back to know the others are following.
Grayson and Delphina are holding their position by the door, waiting.
When I reach them, I glance back at Miriam. “We don’t have to be enemies,” I say to her across the crowd.
“You carry their stink on you.” But her words don’t have the weight they would have just ten minutes ago.
I turn away and don’t look back. Behind me, rancor swells up in the med pod—the dissension reminds me of the Promised, but this time couldn’t be more different, in every way that counts.
I quickly cross the open expanse of the shops. Miriam truly is building something new here, something good—the human-made machinery and technology and innovation are shining examples of what humanity can do with their intelligence.
But intelligence isn’t the currency anymore.
The door to the outside hangs off its hinges—it’s clear where Lenora made her entrance. She and Marcus zip ahead, through the open doorway and into the night outside. The Resistance transport they’ve brought lights up the broken concrete right next to the Makers’ makeshift hangars. I head toward the ship with Kamali close behind and the others following at a short distance, a steady exodus from the shops.
No one from the Makers tries to stop us.
I stand by the boarding ramp with Kamali, letting everyone else to board first. Lenora waits by my side with Marcus, who is peering at me with alternating expressions of superior amusement and suspicion. Tristan and Nathaniel board first, followed by Cyrus and Basha. They give me nods I know will be followed by words later. Delphina passes me with a piercing but silent stare before she boards.
Grayson stops in front of me. He hands me a small cloth—it looks like something he picked up in the Makers’ shop. “Clean yourself up.” He points at my face.
I’m unsure what he’s talking about until I wipe my face, and it comes away bloody. For a split second, I think that it must be my blood, but then I realize… it’s Cyrus’s. I clean the rest from my face and hand, then toss the bloody cloth onto the grass and follow Grayson up the ramp.
When everyone is aboard, Lenora and Marcus disappear into the cockpit, and we lift off. It’s an unsettling motion that seems amplified in my stomach.
I stare out the window into the night until Cyrus leaves his quiet huddle with Basha and the others to come stand by my side. Everyone else is holding back, but the transport isn’t that big—they’ll hear whatever Cyrus has to say.
It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
“I would lay my life down for you any day of the week, Eli,” he says, quietly, but with a strength that doesn’t surprise me, not anymore, not having been in his head. I know how he really feels, how he’s felt all along about my mom and me. We’re his family as much or mor
e than the ones waiting for him in the afterlife.
“I know,” I say.
“That was true before today,” he adds.
“I know that, too.” I give him a small smile.
He frowns. “There’s something different today, though.”
“Yeah? What’s that?” I reflexively slip half into the fugue, but I’m only partially surprised to see his fugue-state form has changed from the last time I saw him in that Seattle apartment where he crossed over. The hooded jacket he was wearing before has grown, now reaching all the way to the floor. It’s a brown, woolen robe. Monk’s robes.
What does it mean? I don’t know. My mind is scattered, still assimilating all the lives, including his. He’s always been a partial believer. Always wanted to believe in something but never could get past the dingy reality of the legacy world, and then the Resistance.
Until now.
I know the difference is me… but I’m not exactly sure why. I’m still reeling from it all, still replaying the words that came out of my mouth. There’s a dissociation from it, a distance which gives me an odd kind of calm. It feels foreign. Like I’m floating in a strange sea.
That calm is a settling of purpose that’s eluded me… pretty much my entire life.
Cyrus is hesitating in answering my question, so I ask it straight-out. “What’s different now, Cy?” Although I already know, probably better than he does, given he doesn’t seem to remember his time in that Seattle apartment on the other side. But I can see it in his fugue-state.
“What guy?”
“The one who’s going to save us.”
And like that, I feel the full weight of it—the burden I’ve been trying to avoid from the beginning settles on me like a yoke. One I have no choice but to carry. Maybe Joshua’s right. Maybe the Lord chooses his prophet. Maybe I didn’t decide to say those words all on my own.
Or maybe I was simply tired of people dying because of me.
“Let’s just go home, Cy.”
He nods and leaves me alone to stare out the window of the transport at the quickly retreating night skyline of Old Portland.
The Illusory Prophet Page 18
