by Brian Yansky
I never really understood that saying before. How could a ghost walk over my grave? I didn’t have a grave — not yet. Of course, if Running Bird is right, I do have a grave, just in another moment. Which means that someone could walk over it. I could shiver.
I pull away from Catlin. It’s an odd feeling, almost like pulling away from an embrace and missing the other person’s warmth.
“It’s going to be okay,” I say to cover my awkwardness and reassure all three of us. But I’m not sure even I believe me.
I pull the car off the road and into a copse of trees. We get out and walk toward the stone wall that encircles the palace, trying our best to be as silent and as invisible as possible, though we’ve yet to catch sight of an alien ship or guard. Everything is still and quiet. Too still. Too quiet.
There’s an iron gate blocking the entry at the top of the drive and a guardhouse just beyond the gate. I don’t know if anyone’s in the guardhouse — it’s too dark to see — but we won’t be going in that way. Too risky. We circle around the wall. It’s about seven or eight feet tall, impossible to see over.
“I don’t feel any sensors, do you?” I ask in a whisper.
Neither Catlin nor Zack feels anything. But instead of making me feel more comfortable, it worries me. It’s too easy.
“I’ll give you a boost,” I say to Catlin. “You check it out. If it’s okay, go over.”
“How am I going to go over?” She’s small, about five one. She says she’s five one, anyway, but it’s possible she’s rounding up.
“Hang from the wall and drop,” I say.
“Oh, is that all?” she says sarcastically.
“Let me go first,” Zack says.
I hesitate, but he is a little taller than Catlin. And he doesn’t seem intimidated by the thought of an eight-foot drop. We boost him up to the wall. He balances there for a bit and looks around. Then he shrugs and disappears over the other side.
I boost Catlin up and hear Zack coaxing her to jump, promising to catch her. I can’t blame her for having her doubts about that. I manage to find a toehold and quickly scramble up about the same time as Catlin lands on Zack and they both tumble to the ground. I drop down next to them.
“This place is unreal,” Zack whispers, sitting up and looking around at the grounds and the big white palace beyond them.
“I need to get in better shape,” Catlin says, rubbing her shoulder.
“When we get back, I can help you get in shape,” I say.
“Yeah,” Zack says. “You can join our training group.”
When we get back. I’m using the power of positive thinking here. My power of positive thinking isn’t very powerful, though.
“Keep looking for traps,” I say to them as I start walking toward the house.
I don’t feel any, though. And we don’t see any guards, either, but we do see ships. There must be hundreds of them parked in the giant lot where the ships were parked before we escaped. It worries me that there’s no security. It seems too easy.
We get all the way up to the house before Catlin says, “Wait.”
Zack and I stop, and Zack even crouches a little like he expects to be hit.
“There’s a spell on the doors,” she says.
“They aren’t really spells, you know,” I say. She’s the only one who calls them that. She’s the only one I’ve met who thinks of this power of the mind as magical. It’s us. It’s not magic. She thinks it is.
“Whatever you want to call it, this door is booby-trapped.”
Finally I get an image of the “spell” Catlin is talking about. But I get an image of something else from Catlin, too, one that floats in her mind for a second.
“Were you a member of the Harry Potter fan club when you were younger?” I say. “Because I’m pretty sure I just saw some kind of club symbol.”
“Stay out of my mind,” she orders.
“‘Harry Potter Rules’? Was that your motto?”
Zack laughs. She glares at him and tells me to shut up.
“You were president of the club, weren’t you?”
She shoves me a little. “They’re great books.”
“Sure,” I say, “but a fan club?”
“I was eight, okay? Can we just, you know, get on with saving Michael and escaping the aliens and getting home in one piece?”
Home. The weird thing is, I feel that way, too. The rebel camp is kind of home. New America is kind of home.
I look at the door, but whatever is protecting it is complicated. Too complicated for me.
“We should join,” I say.
She agrees, and we open ourselves to each other. Our minds pull together. A word comes to me that I don’t want: intimate. Joining with Catlin is intimate. It’s my mom’s word. It makes me uncomfortable that I’m so comfortable with her.
We feel our way to the door and undo the alarm first and then the block on it. We’re careful. We work together. We are together, almost like one. We’re so close that when we finish and step through the door and break our joining, I feel lost for a moment.
“I’ve never seen anyone join like you guys join,” Zack whispers. “People always said my mom and dad were good at joining, but they were nothing like you two. You make it look easy.”
I can’t meet Catlin’s eyes. It’s almost like we’ve been caught kissing or something, even though joining isn’t anything like kissing. It’s just about increasing our power. That’s all.
Lord Vertenomous’s palace feels different from when we lived here. The house isn’t full of minds. When I was a slave here, there were sixty of us plus Handlers and the staff. But now all of the humans are gone. A few of us escaped, but most were killed. I can feel that, feel the horrible truth of it, and I’m pretty sure Catlin and Zack can, too.
We pass through the room where we ate and had an hour to relax in the evenings. The room where Betty died. It looks different. The tables have been taken out. It looks more like a big living room. I can feel a spike of fear in Catlin. I know she’s thinking about Lord Vertenomous.
He’s dead, I mindspeak. You’re safe. Safe from him, anyway.
Way to be reassuring, she mindspeaks back.
I have the touch.
“There’s something really strong here,” Zack says. “Really strong.”
Catlin frowns. “I don’t hear anything. Not even Michael.”
I force myself to reach out around us, to listen more intently. I check the rooms upstairs and hear the aliens in their beds, but I know almost immediately that the Hunter isn’t up there.
I broaden my search from the upstairs to the first floor, to the back. I don’t hear the Hunter, but I do hear a voice, a human voice. Michael’s. It’s faint; he’s dreaming. That’s when I realize he isn’t in the house; he’s below it. In something like a basement, maybe. The word dungeon comes to mind.
“The library,” I say, following Michael’s dream until I’m as close to the source as I can get from up here. Michael’s dream comes from under the room filled with books.
“There’s a way down,” I say. “It’s in here somewhere.”
“Down where?” Zack says.
“The basement,” I say. Dungeon, I think.
“I don’t see a door,” Catlin says.
And then I can see what Catlin and I think of at the same time. “Secret passage,” I say.
“It must be behind the books,” she says.
We pull out books as quickly and quietly as possible. Then I see it. It’s a button that’s the color of the stain on the shelves. I push it, and the shelves slide back.
“Awesome,” Zack says.
“The guy had too much money,” I say, trying to sound like Lauren. The truth? It is awesome.
We’re all about to go down, but then I have an important thought: one way in probably means one way out.
“You two stay here,” I say. “I’ll get him.”
“It makes more sense for you to stay here,” Catlin says. “You can fight th
em better than we can. No one is down there guarding him.”
I scan the cell and see that she’s right. She’s right most of the time. But she’s quiet about it. A lot of people probably don’t even notice how right she is most of the time.
“Okay,” I say. “You two go. I’ll just wait here. Maybe read a book.”
They rush down the stairs. I locate Michael’s voice and call his name as loudly as I can.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” I say.
He mumbles a little about steak and potatoes and rolls over.
An excellent plan, but with at least one or two fatal flaws, a voice says.
My body tenses. My breath quickens. Fatal is definitely not a word I want to hear right now. FLIGHT. FLIGHT. My whole body yearns for this choice. But I know it’s not really an option.
FIGHT.
A shiver runs through my body as I look for him. I see myself in a grave. For a moment it feels like I’ve walked into the future again. It’s set. It will happen. But then I remember how I could put Lauren to sleep even after I saw her waking the camp. I changed the future.
I can change the future.
The Hunter, hunters, appear. I was fearing one, but now I see a dozen. A dozen dealers of death — my death. Sandpaper throat. Wobbly legs. It takes all my will to face them.
Think, I think. It’s always a bad sign when you have to tell yourself to think, when you have to hope that the word will actually remind you to do something you should already be doing.
I look at the many hunters, and I realize that something is wrong — I mean, besides the obvious wrong place/wrong time. He’s smiling — they’re smiling — in exactly the same way. In fact, they look exactly the same.
My terrified little brain finally kicks into gear, and I start forcing the hunters to fade away until I come to the real one, which doesn’t fade but glows stronger in the darkness.
You see right through me, don’t you? You see the real me. None of my wives have been able to see the real me. I blame it on the modern Empire.
I will say this for this Hunter: he has a good time — I mean, in a homicidal alien maniac kind of way.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I say. “Let us go, and I won’t kill you.”
Trash talk. Well, polite trash talk with a definite wishful component.
I can’t do that, so I guess you’ll just have to go ahead and kill me, product.
Still smiling. He’s so confident in his strength and my weakness he doesn’t even bother to create a strong shield. I’m an ant to him. He will squash me when he’s done playing with me.
“I’d rather not,” I say. This is actually true. I don’t want to kill him even in the very unlikely event that I could. “Come on, let us go. Just this once. It will make the whole hunting experience more fun for you.”
He snaps his fingers, and a document of some kind appears in his hand. How, I don’t know. The mind can’t make something appear from nothing. Magic. I make a mental note not to tell Catlin about this.
I don’t think our contract has a provision where I let you go. He looks it over in a dramatic, overacted kind of way. So maybe he is a hundred times stronger than me, but he’s no Johnny Depp when it comes to acting. No, nothing in here about predator letting prey go. Sorry, afraid you have to die. He tosses the document in the air, and it disappears.
I frantically look for a weakness in him. Anything. Anything. Nothing.
I do have a weakness, he mindspeaks. I have a weakness for games. Here’s a clue. I have one great passion. I’ll give you five seconds to guess what it is. Four, three . . .
I’m not much of a game person, but this seems like a good time to make an exception.
Two —
“Um,” I say, “hunting?”
And they say your species is stupid. I never thought so. I’ve hunted all manner of creatures, you know. The great ones like the serpents of Radian Eight, eight-headed creatures able to shoot poison from any of those heads from fifty feet. Massive bodies. They can only be killed when the central head — and there is really no way to know which head that is until you find it — is chopped off. And I’ve hunted the weak, too. Even weaker than your species. Does the fact that I love killing make me a bad Sanginian? I don’t think so.
“I do,” I say.
We are all predator and prey. It is as natural to the universe as gravity. Naturally, prey is bound to feel there is a certain unfairness inherit in the relationship.
Except we’re not supposed to be prey, I mindspeak at him. We’re not product, and you know it.
I want you to know that I intend to mount your head on my wall with my other trophy heads. Dreamwalking is rare, and I like the cheeky way you escaped me.
“I’m sure it’s an honor,” I say, “but I’d rather keep my head.”
Maybe I can convince you otherwise.
The lights come on, greenish rather than the familiar yellow tone, and I see other aliens enter the room. Two from the front and another from the back. They’re all small, with big power. Not as big as the Hunter’s, but big.
“Crap,” I say, too frazzled to be more inventive with my language — sorry, Mom. I try to send a warning to Catlin and Zack. I’m not sure it gets through, though. The glow of the Hunter’s power feels like it’s all around me, encircling me, smothering me.
Here’s an interesting question. Does product-that-is-not-product who dies where no one can see it ever really exist? My employers would say no. Def-in-ite-ly no. The product-that-is-not-product never existed.
“I’d like to debate that point,” I say. “In public.”
I would want Lauren right there beside me. She would kick the alien’s butt in a debate. He’d be all, “A hunter should hunt.” And she would give him like a million reasons why he was wrong in general and especially wrong when he was talking about humans.
If you give us the location of the product you’ve been hiding with, I might give you another minute or two of life. Most prey will give anything for an extra minute or two. Most of their lives have passed unnoticed by them. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, entire years in your way of measuring time. But for two minutes they will do anything. How about you?
“Can I think about it?” Some people are good at stalling, and some are not. Guess which kind I am?
Just then, Catlin, Zack, and Michael slip out from behind the bookcase. It’s a relief to see Michael. He’s real. He’s alive. He looks worn and thin, and he’s limping, but he has that unmistakable mischievous twinkle to his dark eyes. He would hate to hear me think twinkle. I make a note to say it to him — several times — in the unlikely event we survive.
“Damn, Tex,” he says. “You didn’t have to wake the whole house, did you?”
Zack tries to laugh, but it comes out like a squawk. His face is pale, and the skin around his small mouth is stretched tight. I’m worried he’ll faint.
“It wasn’t my plan,” I say. “Lindsey?”
“Dead. They kept me as bait. Mostly this dude here,” he says, nodding at the Hunter. “He took my memories, too.”
Borrowed, the Hunter corrects. I gave most of them back. But you’ve served your purpose. You’ve brought me the anomaly.
“Anomal-what?” Michael says.
“He thinks I’m special,” I explain.
“You’re special, all right,” Michael says. “Specially stupid to come back here.”
“You mean ‘especially,’” I point out.
“Shut up,” Michael says.
I smile. It’s good to have him back.
“Special,” the Hunter says, ignoring us. “Much more powerful than he should be.”
“He’s the Chosen One!” Zack says. “He has the Spirit of the Warrior in him.”
The Warrior? the Hunter mindspeaks. What is this?
“A god,” Zack says. “Or half god, really. His spirit is in Jesse. . . .” His voice trails off, and his cheeks color.
The Hunter mindspeaks, You are a very strange species.
I say, “I’m not an anomaly. There are more like me. Some even stronger than me. You’re in a lot of trouble here.”
The Hunter seems even more amused. I don’t think so. If there were others more powerful than you, we wouldn’t have been able to take over your planet in a matter of your seconds. There is nothing left for you to do but die. Do it with honor. Die well.
The Hunter flicks his finger. Nothing more. Zack screams and falls. I manage to deflect the last of whatever the Hunter has shot at Zack, but Zack hits the ground hard.
Send me a message from the land of the dead, the Hunter mindspeaks.
Zack’s dead? Before I can check, the Hunter flicks his finger at me and something happens. Instead of dying, I stumble into dreamwalking. I can’t control it. I feel like I’m in a dream. The moment I’m in splits into a lot of different moments. I see, all at once, all these possible moments, each branching off from the one like streams from a river. And I see us die in all of them — every possible stream. Until I don’t. Until, in just one, I don’t see us die.
I’ve seen some strange things since the invasion, but this is by far the strangest.
Then I’m back in the main moment, no longer dreamwalking. It feels like I’ve been taken to some other place and brought back. Places. Some other places. I was more than myself, like I was somehow all the possible mes at once. And now I’m back.
And while I was gone, the Hunter’s death ray completely missed me.
The Hunter looks perplexed, like he knows something just happened but he doesn’t know what, and that hesitation gives me enough time to do the one thing that will lead to the moment in which we aren’t killed. The one moment.
I join with Catlin. My dad, soldier and real warrior, used to say there was no weapon stronger than surprise. And the Hunter is definitely surprised.
Catlin and I create a whole room of the two of us — way more than the lousy dozen Hunters he produced earlier. Some of us run at the aliens and some of us run for the doors and some of us just stand there and make faces at the aliens. Stick out our tongues. Pull our mouths wide with our fingers. Laugh at them. It may be a little childish, but it’s totally satisfying. Our power is awesome and it’s different. I’m not sure how, but it is different from their power.
