by Isaac Hooke
The Direwalker drew its sword.
Jacob, in the staging area beneath the house across the street from Jeremy's estate, wasn't surprised when Helen brought the two-way diary to his side early.
The book was open, and three words were inscribed on the page.
Defend the gates.
Jacob regarded the three hundred uncollared men crowding the marble corridor behind him, and he filled himself with vitra.
"It's time," he said.
Almost as one, the three hundred men unsheathed their fire swords.
118
Briar felt his gut clench as his turn to cross the hall came.
His gut did that a lot lately.
He was uncollared now. He had vitra in his body, vitra in the rings he wore at his fingers, and vitra in the sword at his belt. Vitra, the power over life and death. He should have courage. He really should.
Yet it was all an act, a pretense, this newfound bravery of his. His sister Cora was dead, and he felt sure she was watching him now at this very moment, judging him. She was the reason he had agreed to come along on this suicide mission in the first place. It was bad enough that he couldn't visit the whorehouses anymore, let alone touch himself, knowing her ghost was watching—though there weren't any whorehouses open anyway now that the world was ending, he supposed—but to be forced to come here out of guilt when he could be under a warm blanket somewhere, hiding through the end of the world? It was just preposterous.
Damn you for dying, Cora!
He wanted to prove to her ghost that he was the man she thought he was.
He supposed he wanted to prove it to himself.
The pipe bombs in the satchel slung over his shoulder seemed to be growing heavier by the moment. Why Al thought he would make a good packmule was beyond Briar. Al should be the mule! He certainly had the face for one. Briar already had enough weight to lug around as it was. He patted his starving belly with a sigh. He was leaner, thanks to the magic of Tanner's unseen "children," but it seemed an illusion because Briar felt fatter than ever.
Briar could hear the fighting from the first floor, a din of clashing swords and roaring flame and crackling lightning and splattering blood. And screams. Sickening, gurgling screams. That was the worst part of it.
Tanner had run into some trouble apparently.
When Al had first heard the sounds of battle, he'd immediately ordered his secondary group to the kitchens instead of the backyard. Briar had protested, wanting to stick to the plan. It was a good plan after all, a plan that would have seen them away from most of the action, planting bombs in the backyard while Tanner went upstairs and bitched the mayor. Tally-ho and all that.
But Al had taken Tanner's route for himself. After the kitchens, Al hurried his men up the servant stairs and then, following Briar's reluctant guidance, he led the men the back way toward Jeremy's bedchamber. The group slunk through oddly empty corridors—Tanner's attack was proving to be an excellent diversion, admittedly—and eventually stopped beside the hallway they sought.
Al peeked round the bend and then instructed the men to cross one-by-one to an alcove he'd spotted midway the hall. Al went first, and the men followed one at a time. Briar wasn't sure why they didn't just cross all at once, but he supposed there was a Direwalker guardsman or some such out there.
Now that his turn had come, Briar peered past the corner for himself. He saw triple-pronged candelabras, paintings of sea creatures, a floor covered in a gold-rimmed red carpet, and the alcove where Al's men crowded between the sculptures on pedestals. Jeremy's bedchamber lurked at the hallway's far end, set in the same wall as the alcove.
He understood now why the group had crossed one by one, because Direwalkers emerged from the bedchamber every few seconds and vanished an instant later, taking the corridor directly opposite, which afforded the quickest route to the main stairs and the battle in the reception hall. None of the Direwalkers even bothered to glance down the hall.
Al and the others beckoned to Briar from the alcove, urging him on.
He was the last one left on this side. It was just a simple crossing. All he had to do was move his feet around the bend and cover five paces or so, timing it so that he avoided being seen by the Direwalkers coming out of Jeremy's room.
Just five paces.
Yet his legs didn't listen.
"Come on," Al mouthed from the alcove.
Briar watched another Direwalker emerge from the bedchamber and vanish. Three seconds passed. The distant din of fighting rose and fell. Another Direwalker marched across. Three more seconds. Another Direwalker...
"May the whoremongers protect me." The instant the Direwalker disappeared, Briar rounded the corner and huffed and puffed his way across the hallway. He literally dove into the alcove, and nearly knocked over one of the four busts on display. Luckily one of Al's men was paying attention and hugged the sculpture before it toppled. Briar would have thanked the man, but he struggled to keep his breathing in check as it was—not the easiest thing to do given the exertion of racing across a hall with a satchel full of bombs.
Al held out a hand, calling for quiet or motionlessness or whatever he thought the gesture called for. Briar gladly obeyed.
Al peered beyond the alcove's edge.
The fighting seemed even louder from this alcove, and Briar wondered if Tanner was already battling his way up the main stairs.
Al ducked back inside and retrieved the collar from underneath his coat. He withdrew his fire sword. "Are you ready to bitch us a mayor, men?"
"Wait!" Briar said in a hushed voice. "That's not the plan! We're supposed to provide a distraction! Blow up the back of the mansion! Not rush Jeremy's bedchamber!"
"Plans need to be flexible," Al said. "Tanner's the distraction now in case you hadn't noticed, and I ain't waiting around while he dies for nothing. We finish this here and now. We do Tanner right. We do our duty."
"But that's not the plan," Briar could only repeat weakly.
"One of us has to succeed," Al said. "That was always the plan."
"You're mad," Briar said. "You've gone mad, ye have."
"Mad?" Al's eyes glinted with a strange light. "I'm the sanest I've been in a long time. Are you with me, soldiers of the Resistance?"
Al gazed from man to man, and Briar watched them nod in turn. Swords were unsheathed. Collars removed from coats.
"Let's bitch us a mayor then!" Al said.
Al and the others abandoned the alcove and rushed the bedchamber.
Briar remained behind. He sank against the wall.
I can't do it. I can't do it.
Here he was, a grown man, and all he felt like doing was crying.
So now you know, sister.
I'm all bluster and huff, little more.
A rich, pampered coward.
A spineless wretch.
Screams of horror came from the bedchamber.
Briar slid to the floor and wept.
119
Ari followed Hoodwink through the metal halls in a daze.
She had almost crossed over entirely to the other side of existence. She remembered everything of her time in the hereafter vividly. But she hadn't told Hoodwink any of it. She couldn't, not yet. The magnificent Gate. The thin strand tethering her to the world. The beings of light. It had all been so unlike anything she'd ever witnessed before. She wasn't quite sure she could believe it all herself.
But then she'd been yanked back to the world of flesh and blood, where she'd awakened naked on a flyer of some kind. Hoodwink had been there. He'd undocked the flyer from the ship in orbit over Ganymede, the same ship responsible for the surface bombardment, she thought.
The flyer descended rapidly, and hit the moon's surface pretty hard. Some kind of dampeners prevented Hoodwink and her from turning into a pulp on impact. She donned a spare spacesuit—her legs were no longer weak and toothpick-thin, but toned, and she could walk on her own. Together they bounded across the icy surface of the moon to the crashed ship.
Hoodwink destroyed two iron golems with some sort of hand-crossbow that shot energy bolts, and she entered the ship with him through an airlock.
She carried the helmet from the spacesuit in one hand as she followed Hoodwink through the corridors of cold metal. Around her, people burst from pods left and right. Half the pods in this section were already empty, or black inside. She wanted to stop and help people, but Hoodwink said there wasn't anything to be done, at least not out here. There was a war going on in the Inside, Hoodwink said. A war that had to end.
In her daze she let Hoodwink lead her on.
Everything passed in a blur. There were iron golems up ahead, scooping people up, and Hoodwink made short work of them with the hand-crossbow. He led her to a sealed door, and keyed a code into the pad beside it.
"Hoodwink!" Stanson's voice echoed from a speaker somewhere.
"Nice to see you too, Stanson," Hoodwink said. "Now open the door."
Only static came in response. Hoodwink glanced at Ari uncertainly. He pressed the transmit button again. "Is there a problem, Stanson?"
Finally the door slid open and Hoodwink and Ari stepped inside.
"Ari!" Caylin rushed forward and, giving Hoodwink a wide berth, hugged Ari's thigh. Still somewhat in a daze, Ari gingerly patted the little girl's head. The other children looked at her blankly from their terminals, their eyes as haunted as ever. Why weren't any of them running over to greet Hoodwink?
"I'm so happy to see you Ari, so happy!" Caylin said.
But you hardly know me. "It's nice to see you, too," Ari said.
"You look so... healthy now!" the girl exclaimed.
"I suppose I do."
The little girl squeezed harder. "Really really beautiful."
"Thank you, Caylin." Ari wasn't sure what else to say.
Hoodwink smiled proudly. He knelt and extended his arms toward Caylin as if he also expected a hug.
Caylin buried her face in Ari's spacesuit. "No hugs for Hoodwink. Not after what he did!"
Hoodwink frowned. "What did I do?"
One of the younger boys stepped forward. A frail, bald kid. "I told them about the Direwalkers. And we know about the Dwarf. How you gave it to Jeremy. To One."
"Ah." Hoodwink smiled sadly. "Thank you, Andes." He sat down at one of the empty terminals, and didn't look at anyone. "So now you all know. You must think I'm a monster. And I wouldn't blame you for that, I wouldn't. I am a monster."
Andes went to him. "You said making the Direwalkers would help humanity."
Hoodwink sighed. "I did say that. And it did help humanity, in a way. Because it bought me time to figure out what I was going to do. How I was going to stop them."
"Stop who?" the one named Stanson said. "When are you going to tell us what's going on, Hoodwink?" Ari would have thought Stanson a girl if it weren't for his gravely voice.
Hoodwink glanced at Ari. "My daughter knows. Why don't you ask her?"
Ari hesitated. She really didn't know how to put this. Finally she just spat it out. "We came from the ship in orbit."
Stanson's breath caught. "Hoodwink is one of the Enemy?"
Caylin pushed away from her, eyes wide. "Are you one of the Enemy too?"
"I—" Ari found herself at a loss for words. "I don't know."
"She's not." Hoodwink smiled wistfully. "She's human, through and through. But that doesn't make her any less my daughter. Adopted, of course, but still my daughter."
"It's true then, Hoodwink?" Stanson said. "You're the Enemy? One of those who've come to erase humanity?"
Hoodwink nodded sadly. "The Satori, we're called. The Enlightened Ones. We came to Earth because of our mission. It's, uh, hmm. How can I explain this? The Satori believe in a reincarnation of sorts after death."
Ari could believe that too, after what she'd seen.
"There are only a few races left in the galaxy that can hold a psyche," Hoodwink continued. "When a Satori dies and reincarnates, they believe their psyche can be reborn into any one of those races. Species 15-B. Species 98-J. Species 87-A. Human. The Satori hate that. They want to be able to control where they'll reincarnate. They want to return as Satori every time, because all the other races are inferior. Or so they believe.
"It's why they feel they're doing humanity a favor by wiping them out. With no human bodies left, the dead human psyches have a greater chance to come back as 'enlightened' Satori. The final goal is to wipe out all the other races in the galaxy, so that when a Satori dies, his or her psyche can only return as a Satori in the grand simulation called life. They're doing a good job so far—humanity is one of the last non-Satori species left in the galaxy."
Ari had thought the Enemy came for Earth's resources. Apparently she'd been wrong.
They had come for their souls.
"After wiping out a conquered race," Hoodwink continued. "The Satori reshape their planet, and turn it into a colony. They go into a kind of mating frenzy. After all, more bodies are needed to hold the rush of new psyches that flood the afterlife when a whole race is snuffed out, otherwise the waiting list gets too long. The oceans of Earth are full of Satori now.
"When the last of humanity is gone the Satori will save the human genetic code for future use, and keep a few bodies around as playthings, empty shells for them to enter and control whenever they want. It's all one big existential game to them. They want humanity to become Satori, and yet they themselves want to play at being human."
Ari rubbed her forehead, and gently shoved Caylin away so that she could sit down. She was just too dazed for all this.
"Why are you telling us this?" Stanson said.
Hoodwink gave him an annoyed look. "Because you asked. And because you deserve to know. Ari. Caylin. All of you." He ran his eyes across the children. "I came back because I couldn't let them wipe out humanity. I'm more human now than Satori, I am. So tell me, has Tanner returned yet? Do we have a plan?"
Tanner. In her daze she'd forgotten about him entirely.
But he was the last person she should have forgotten. The one person more important to her than anyone else, including her father.
While Hoodwink talked to Stanson, she slid her eyes across the terminals. There, someone she'd missed on first glance, hunched with his head down on one of the desks. Someone wearing the same skin-tight blue uniform as Stanson.
She got up, and stumbled to his side.
It was Tanner, unconscious, tethered to a terminal.
She knelt beside him. It was so good to see his face again, even if he wasn't awake. His short, wavy, ruffled hair. His three-days-old stubble. His thick jawline and heavy brows. She held him in her arms and closed her eyes.
"Oh Tanner. Tanner." She had died to save him.
And she'd do it again without hesitation.
It was a funny thing, knowing that.
Is that what love was? She'd never been in love before. Not really. She'd been revised to love Jeremy, and she might've loved him for that one day when she had first married him, before she'd realized his personality didn't match the memories of the revision. So that didn't count.
And she'd never really let anyone get close to her when she was Leader of the New Users. Sure, she'd had her playthings, but sex wasn't love.
Yes, she'd never really been in love before.
Stanson was telling Hoodwink something about Tanner and his plan to stop One.
When Stanson finished, Hoodwink nodded. "That's as good a plan as any."
"And we've successfully tweaked the gol mind disease," Stanson said. "It now infects Direwalkers only. They fall dead the moment it hits them. We've let it loose in the system, and its spreading. Direwalkers across the world are slowly dropping. All that's left is to shut down the originator of the Direwalkers."
"One," Hoodwink said.
"One," Stanson agreed. "But we can't do that from here, obviously."
Hoodwink glanced at Tanner. "How long has he been under?"
"About an hour," Stanson said.
"A lot
can happen on the Inside in an hour." Hoodwink clapped Stanson on the shoulder. "Send me in. I'll do what I can to reverse the damage my race has done."
Stanson opened his mouth, and then promptly closed it again. He glanced at the children.
Hoodwink frowned. "What is it?"
"Well, it's just that..."
Hoodwink raised an eyebrow. "Out with it, Stanson."
"You're one of the Enemy." Stanson blurted. "How can we trust you?"
Hoodwink seemed to consider this. "You might have thought about that before you blabbed your mouth off about Tanner's plan and your little tweak to the gol mind disease. But I'm guessing you're too young and naive to know any better. How can you trust me, you ask?
"I could give you some clichéd bullshit about how you have no choice. But the thing is, you do have a choice. You can choose not to trust me. You can out-and-out refuse to send me Inside. But if you do that, I'll just take my daughter and we'll go on over to a different control station and get access anyway. Of course, you'll be costing us valuable time that could be better used helping Tanner. Time that might mean the difference between a win or a loss. So think good and hard before you decide to send me away, because I'm here to help you, I am, and if you can't see that then you've been living your life dipped headfirst in shit for far too long, unable to recognize a genuine offer of help when it comes your way. Even if that offer comes from one of the Enemy."
Stanson seemed taken aback, and he worked his jaw, but couldn't come up with anything to say.
"Dipped headfirst in shit," Caylin repeated quietly to herself, as if memorizing the insult for later use.
Andes stood. "I'm going with Hoodwink if he leaves."
"Me too." Another child rose. Another. Soon about half the children were on their feet.
Caylin got up and padded over to Ari. "I go where Ari goes."
Ari smiled at her, and held her hand.
Stanson hadn't said anything the whole time. Finally he nodded slowly. "All right, Hood. Get tethered. We'll accept your help dammit."
