Slavemakers

by Joseph Wallace

  At the same moment, she understood something else. The thing that Trey had discovered when he saved Malcolm’s life in the helicopter, the night the Last World fell. He’d saved Malcolm by shouting out a warning—a false warning—to the thieves, and by doing so had allowed Malcolm to save his life in turn.

  Kait understood that amid the ebb and flow of information that threatened to overwhelm her, to drown her, she could discern individual thieves’ responses. She could see through their eyes.

  See through their eyes. See that every nearby thief was avoiding Shapiro, the twins, everyone who’d taken the vaccine. Echoes of alarm that translated into a “stay away!” call transmitted instantly.

  Transmitted by every nearby thief . . . but one. One was different.

  Kait detected it, that one thief—and was immediately inside it. She saw that it was focused on Shapiro but, instead of adding one more alarm note to the endless stream, was registering something quite different.

  It saw Shapiro, and it saw her as a threat. A threat it could eliminate.

  Kait knew what it was. The new kind of thief, the one that had developed an immunity to the vaccine. The kind that would, without effort, cast all free humans—the ones whose lives had depended for all these years on their fragile vaccine—into slavery or extinction.

  Starting with Shapiro, whom it unerringly recognized as their most powerful fighter.

  Kait, simultaneously watching the thief and looking through its eyes, saw it, felt it, rise in the air. Such a familiar motion, the one that preceded the dive, the fatal sting.

  As this thief, this new thief, reached its apogee, it paused. This was the instant when Kait’s hand would have darted into the air, fast as a blur. When she would have snatched the wasp, rendering it suddenly harmless and easy to kill. If only she’d been close enough to reach it.

  Except . . . she was.

  Closing her eyes, she threw herself, her consciousness, her thief awareness, at this individual fragment of the hive mind. Feeling it shudder in the air, seeing it lose contact with the whole for an instant.

  Just for an instant, but long enough for Kait to commandeer it, to send it spinning to the ground. To the ground at her feet.

  Or had she done it alone? Had she done it at all? She didn’t know because when her vision focused again, Aisha Rose was looking up at her. The glimmering light in her eyes was very strong.

  They both looked down at the wasp, quivering on the ground. Still alive. Until, with an efficient little movement, Aisha Rose reached out with her right foot, clad in one of the bright blue sandals that Kait had found for her, and squashed it.

  It might be the first of a new horde, a new conquering army, but it was not going to be present at the conquest.

  Aisha Rose straightened, looked up at the sky. Suddenly she seemed to stand taller, more erect. All of her exhaustion seemed to disappear in an instant, and for the first time Kait sensed her true power. And understood that Aisha Rose was also the beginning of something new. The point of the spear.

  But at that moment something happened, and Aisha Rose cried out and crumbled to the ground. That was the last thing that Kait saw—Aisha Rose falling—before something pulled her inside out, and she fell, too.

  Reaching out with the last of her strength, and gathering the girl’s still, slight form into her arms.

  * * *

  IN HIS DUNGEON, Malcolm, sick, drifting, had been listening to the battle outside. Hearing the gunshots, the screams, thinking as he listened that he recognized who was in agony, who was dying.

  Waiting to hear the sound of Clare Shapiro’s death.

  They’d come back for him, Shapiro and the others. He knew that. They would have been long gone if he hadn’t allowed himself to be captured. If, at the last moment, he’d turned his gun on himself. If they’d seen his blood flow, if they’d seen him die, they would have fled and never looked back.

  Their deaths were his fault.

  The smell of blood came through the small window high on the far wall, the hole in the stone showing only a patch of gray dawn sky gradually turning the palest eggshell blue. That pure, beautiful African sky he’d always loved so much, tainted forever for him. Tainted by the smell of death and the black cloud of thieves whirling above the carnage he could not see but could hear and imagine. Imagine too well.

  Soon enough, he knew, the screams and other sounds of battle would die down. The whirling thieves would settle once again, and the slave camp would resume its normal activities. Growing, spreading, until it covered all of Africa. All of the earth.

  Would that take one year? A hundred? A thousand? It didn’t matter. Eventually, the planet would be one giant slave camp, and no one would remember the glories that humanity had once been capable of, or the atrocities.

  He heard someone cry out and thought, his heart shattering, Kait.

  And then, Trey.

  Trey, I’m so sorry. I promised.

  But I couldn’t stop her.

  And then he was shouting, cursing, filling his cell with his bellows as he tried to tear its stone door apart with his bloody hands. His unbridled rage at first causing him to miss the change in the sound the thieves, the slavemakers, were making.

  It was the sound of their wings, a million wings, rising in pitch.

  Malcolm stood still, looked back at the tiny window high in the far wall. Through it he saw an enormous knot of thieves form against the blue sky. Then they broke apart in confusion, came together, fragmented, rejoined again.

  And they were screaming.

  * * *

  MARIAMA KNOCKED HER attacker’s hands away from her neck. It wasn’t hard to do: The hands had lost all their strength, her attacker all its will.

  Six of them there were now. Six clustered around her, who would have slaughtered her where she stood.

  But now, when she stepped forward and cut the throat of the creature nearest, the one whose hands had been on her, it simply fell straight down. Its life gurgling away into the soil at her feet.

  And the rest did not seem even to notice. They were standing there, unmoving, as if thunderstruck by the sight of the thieves spinning in confusion above Refugia.

  Four of them were, at least. Two last-stage hosts and two who until a few moments before had been thief-ridden. Paralyzed by whatever was possessing their masters above.

  And the fifth? That one was human. Mariama could tell that, had been able to tell even as the attack unfolded. It had moved faster, had quicker instincts. Less brute force, but a more developed sense of self-preservation.

  Now it was staring up at the spectacle above them, then shifting its shocked gaze down to Mariama’s face.

  It. He.

  Mariama felt a powerful revulsion blossom inside of her. She leaped forward, and a few moments later this human, this one who had made his own choice, was dead anyway.

  The four who still lived stared upward. Their faces showed . . . fear? No, loss.

  As if they’d been abandoned.

  Mariama, taking a breath before finishing them as well, looked up at the screaming mass whirling above her and felt something she hadn’t experienced in decades.

  An emotion so unfamiliar that at first she didn’t even recognize what it was.

  * * *

  THE BOY STOOD on the edge of his perch, the wind enveloping him, blowing so strongly that he thought it must be passing through his emaciated body. If he leaped, he wondered for a moment, would the currents carry him? Would they bear him gently to the ground? It was so tempting to find out, to take that leap and see what happened.

  No. It wasn’t time.

  Not yet.

  Below him, above him, inside him, all was darkness. The sky above covered with clouds and the curved earth below not illuminated by a single flame.

  Had this place once been lit? Had it once glowed? He kn
ew it had, but standing there in the utter blackness, he could not imagine it.

  But that wasn’t true, not entirely. The world wasn’t entirely black. She was still there, inside him, as she always was now. Crouching behind her pitiful walls and in danger. In more danger than she’d ever been before.

  But so far out of his reach that he had no way to protect her.

  No way but one.

  He was nearly done with his game. He’d pulled the net taut. They were all inside it. Every one.

  The net was full, and he was the one holding its mouth.

  The boy stood in the darkness and sent out the command. It wasn’t even hard to do. All he had to do was begin, and one by one, million by million, they would do the rest for him. Do the rest, and end themselves.

  And then his job would be done, except for the last, most crucial part. The part that he’d been training himself so relentlessly for, all these recent weeks and months.

  * * *

  IT WAS A wave. Kait could tell. A wave as big as the world, as the universe, coming toward her. Purifying the earth as it came, sweeping the stain before it.

  She saw it coming and knew that she was standing directly in its path. It towered over her, and she understood that in a moment, she, too, would be swept away, along with the rest. The rest of the stain.

  That was okay. She was part of the stain now.

  It was only right.

  * * *

  “I LOVE YOU so much,” Mama said, “that I would stand between you and a bullet, a lion’s jaws, a tsunami.”

  Aisha Rose knew that. She knew how much Mama loved her. She’d always known.

  She also knew, now, that Mama was truly gone. That her soul had ascended when the vultures took her body up on the mountain. And that, regardless of Aisha Rose’s daily recitation, neither of them—neither Mama nor Aisha Rose herself—was human. The thief inside Mama had changed her into something else and had made something new of Aisha Rose as well.

  She, and the boy, and all the other lights, had been wrought out of new clay.

  But none of that was important, not anymore. The only important thing was that Aisha Rose’s plan had worked. The boy had unleashed the tsunami, and no one, not the slaves, not Aisha Rose, not the hive mind, not even the boy himself, could stop it now.

  Already it was spreading across the earth, and all who belonged to the mind would be swept away. The stars, the galaxies that had accompanied Aisha Rose on her journey, and of course, Aisha Rose herself. New clay and old.

  And Kait. Kait, too. The newest, and the only one that mattered now to Aisha Rose.

  But then, as the wave towered over them, she saw that it wasn’t what she’d expected. And she understood: He was choosing to save her. He was choosing to keep her alive.

  So only the two of them would remain. The two of them standing on a cleansed earth.

  That was his dream.

  Her heart broke then. I’m sorry, she told him, though she never knew if he heard her. I’m so sorry.

  The wave broke. And Aisha Rose Atkinson, human being, something else, something more, stood in front of Kait, so she could be swept away in her stead.

  * * *

  “NO,” KAIT SAID, her arms around Aisha Rose.

  She thought of all the people in her life who had fought for her, protected her. Her birth mother and father, who had never seen the Next World. Her grandmother Mary, who’d brought her to Refugia. Trey. So many dead, and she hadn’t been able to save a single one of them.

  No.

  Not this one. Not this time.

  * * *

  IT WAS OVER.

  The boy stepped forward into the darkness and let the wind carry his fragile body away.

  * * *

  THE SCREAM OF wings had built to an impossible crescendo. Followed by . . . silence. Complete, utter silence.

  Malcolm awoke. He had no idea he’d been asleep, unconscious. At first, he didn’t even know where he was. He didn’t understand a thing.

  And then he did.

  His belly hurt. He noticed that. And, when he pulled his ragged, stained shirt up and looked down at his flesh, he saw for the first time what had been done to him.

  The tiny swelling. The pinprick of an airhole.

  And, half-emerged from the pinprick, the minuscule larva. Newly hatched from its egg yet already dead, hanging limp in the midst of its hopeless attempt to escape.

  Revolted, Malcolm pulled it from the hole.

  Then he looked back at the window, at the patch of blue sky. There was not a movement there, not a single black dot, no shimmer of bloodred wings. Nothing but silence.

  A silence broken by the sound of voices. Familiar voices.

  Shapiro’s voice.

  He stood, head spinning, but somehow maintaining his balance. Four steps across the slick stone, and he stood beneath the window.

  “I’m here,” he called out. But it was only a whisper. No one would hear him.

  He took in a deep breath, and when he tried again he shouted more loudly than he ever had before, or ever would again. I’m here.

  He heard answering shouts from outside, then another voice coming from much closer. A familiar voice, one he recognized right away even though he hadn’t heard it for so long.

  Calling his name.

  * * *

  THE GROUND WAS carpeted in thieves. Normally, this would have been the most dangerous time, dying wasps desperate to sting or lay their eggs in anything warm-blooded.

  Only . . . not this time. Not now. These thieves were still, unmoving, not even a twitch or quiver, much less that rhythmic pulsing of their abdomens, the jagged, mindless punch of the stinger.

  Unmoving. Shriveled. Again, and for the last time, just bugs. Harmless, finally and forever.

  A scene repeated across the world, Kait thought. All was silence inside her head as well. The hive mind was gone.

  Taking most of the slaves with it. The last-stage hosts and the ridden ones, all the ones that had ever been infected, had been struck down. Kait could tell this, too.

  All except Kait herself, and she knew why. She knew what Aisha Rose had done for her, and for all those other lights she saw in her mind. The other ones like her, scattered across the earth.

  What Aisha Rose had done to protect them all from the wave, and what Kait herself—far too weak and new to save them all, but strong enough to protect just one—had done in return.

  Kait looked down at the girl cradled in her arms. As she did, Aisha Rose opened her eyes and looked back up at her.

  “Mama?” she said, her voice a breath. Then, a little more strongly, “Kait.”

  “I’m here, Aisha Rose.”

  “They’re still there,” she said. “I can still see them.”

  “See what?”

  Though she knew. Constellations. Galaxies.

  Aisha Rose, smiling, burrowed more deeply into her embrace.

  EPILOGUE

  Kait

  Nova Refugia

  Year 5

  IT TOOK THE dinosaurs ten thousand years. At least ten thousand.

  I remember learning that from Carl, a friend of Jack Parker’s at the American Museum of Natural History back before the Fall. I was . . . God, I was ten, and I’d never been to the museum before, and Carl took me on a behind-the-scenes tour of the dinosaur department. It was so cool, that huge old building with shiny floors and hidden rooms filled with shelves and drawers and old wooden crates containing fossil bones and teeth and who knew what else. I remember they had one fossil that had come from a uranium bed, and it was still radioactive.

  And Carl was easy to talk to, kind of like Jack. So I asked him how quickly the dinosaurs had gone extinct after the earth had been hit by an asteroid. (I’d read that in a book.) And he shook his head and told me they’d never gone extinct—that
modern-day birds were dinosaurs, too.

  “That pigeon you saw sitting on Theodore Roosevelt’s head on your way in . . . that’s a dinosaur,” he’d said. “Dinosaurs are everywhere, even now.”

  I saw him smile at the expression on my face. “Oh,” he said, “you mean the nonavian dinosaurs? Well, paleontologists have been arguing about that for a long time, and we still don’t know. Some believe it took as long as a million years, but others think as little as ten thousand.”

  I remember he snapped his fingers, and said, “Ten thousand? A million? Both of those are nothing. Gone like that!”

  But I’d thought they’d both sounded like a long time. An incomprehensibly long time.

  And I still do, and always will.

  You want “Gone like that”? Forget dinosaurs, even “nonavian” ones, and look to humans instead.

  Because it’s possible that the human race won’t last anywhere close to a hundred years, much less ten thousand.

  Only . . . not if we have anything to do with it.

  And not if we’re willing to tweak the definition of “human” a bit.

  * * *

  IT TOOK US eleven months, but we finally made it back to Refugia on the Trey Gilliard. Forty-one of us, in the end: twenty-one from the original crew and twenty more who hadn’t taken the outward journey.

  Twenty strangers, even though it’s hard to remember now, five years on, that they were ever strangers. They’re woven into Refugia’s fabric now. Part of Nova Refugia.

  A strange section of the weave, admittedly, but a section nonetheless.

  Twenty of them then, many more now, five years in, and we hope for still more in the future.

  There are no guarantees, of course, but someday we might even get past the point where we’d have to worry about minimum viable population for species survival, one of those subjects that can keep people like Shapiro arguing all night. You see, back in the Last World, some scientists believed the minimum number was this, and others believed that, and . . .

  Never mind. We’ll just see what happens.

  What a relief to be able to say that.