by Platt, Sean
Carl looked away then ran toward the commercial — behemoths that were like small towns more than vehicles.
“Hey! Hey!” Lawrence shouted from behind him. For a second Carl thought he might be on his own again, then the man decided he’d rather not go it alone and gave chase. The woman, the kid, and the rest of the group followed.
“This?” Lawrence looked up at the ship Carl was crossing a gangway to board. The huge ship. He was looking at it as if only seeing the thing’s unwieldiness, but to Carl — who’d never been on open water and wasn’t looking forward to doing it now — saw only practicality. They could try a yacht and live in luxury, or board something meant to survive the open ocean — maybe something that, if they were lucky, came standard with stocked cabinets and freezers, made to serve hundreds of people for weeks.
Carl didn’t answer, uncaring if they came or not.
“Can you drive a boat?” Lawrence asked, scampering along behind him.
Carl didn’t answer until the entire group was aboard and the door was closed behind them, the watertight wheel already spun.
“I guess we’ll find out,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The river surged upward. Piper, with one foot in the sub, faltered. She almost fell, but Meyer caught her. She gave him a thankful look and was about to say the same, but a loud shout from the south grabbed her attention. Piper turned to see something that, at first, knocked her sense of equilibrium out of kilter: They were all soaking wet, climbing into tiny submarines they didn’t know how to use, without yet knowing where they were going. And now there were rows and rows of people on the opposite bank, painted blue and red and black and purple. Someone had shouted, audible even over the downpour. Even as hard as it was to see them (only the slightly abated rain and their colors made it possible), every one seemed ready to spring forth, bellowing, coming hard.
Menace, in multiple human forms.
“Get inside,” Meyer said, looking back.
“The cannibals,” Piper said.
“Get inside. Leave me if you have to.”
Piper was about to protest, but Meyer shoved her roughly downward, through the hatch. The interior space wasn’t as cramped as she’d feared — utilitarian but well lit as Peers managed to spin up the power from the front, surfaces padded in what almost looked like tan-colored acoustic paneling. There was a bench along each side and a circular hole in the floor that looked like it might be home to the supporting post of an easy to stow, temporary table. There were strapped-down cabinets along the top like airplane overhead compartments that Piper assumed (and dearly hoped) were full of food.
There were portholes along the outside. She pressed her face to one, noting the glass’s thickness. The thing, as Piper understood it, wasn’t a true submarine designed for depth. It was more like a boat meant to skim just under the water as much as on top of it — and, if she’d read things right, could float topside where the river got shallow. But the portholes still meant business, and seeing how thick they were gave her a creeping sense of claustrophobia.
Meyer and Kindred were still outside. Peers was in the nose, monkeying with controls, oblivious to the newcomers’ arrival. Lila was beside Piper at the next porthole, her presence more felt than seen.
“Are those … ?” Lila trailed off.
“I guess they followed us. Got tired of staring at the big ship.”
“Or maybe they saw the broadcasts, too. Maybe they know what’s coming.”
And although Piper didn’t want to say so, she tended to agree. When they’d approached Ember Flats the first time, the cannibal crews had chased them almost like sport. This time, she could see method to their colorful madness. They seemed to be lined up almost like allies: hundreds of warriors meaning to pull the sub’s occupants into the open first then turn to the task of deciding who’d replace them in the lifeboats after.
The cannibals knew the flood was coming, all right. Many of the other capitals had already been hit, and Ember Flats was living its final hours on borrowed time.
Meyer and Kindred stood in front of the sub, hands defensively raised. The clans were moving in an orderly fashion toward the line Meyer had pulled across the river, already grabbing at the big piece of sheet metal to climb aboard as a pull-along ferry.
“Close the hatch, Piper.” She heard Meyer’s words as if through a pipe, coming down from above.
She moved away from the porthole and poked her head topside. Something shot past her and struck the metal, making her duck. The sub lurched upward again, harder than it had moments before. Piper, feeling dizzied, poked her head back up and looked north, toward the surge, and saw a torrent of water coming from the Nile’s gaping mouth.
“Close the hatch!”
“The flood is coming, Meyer! Get inside!”
Something else flew past Piper’s head, milliseconds after barely missing Kindred. It was a spear. Some of the clans had fashioned them, just as others brandished knives. More were poised to throw, their arms back like tensed slingshots. Their clan vehicles were just behind, and only the river held them in check.
“Meyer! Kindred!”
Sounds from behind. From the other bank.
Piper turned and saw more of them behind her, engines idling, shouts and motors beaten down by the rain.
“Get inside, and close the fucking hatch, Piper! Go without us!”
The cannibals began to cheer and shout.
The onslaught came.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Clara’s idea crumbled the instant she had it, and the panic began.
Just as she and the others were moving forward, something seemed to crash on the outskirts of town. Rain slowed, and a new surge entered the square, carrying debris — and bodies. Several people screamed, but most didn’t even see the dead people floating in. Their attention was on a big screen at one end of the square that the Astrals and viceroy used to project news or magnify the faces of speakers on the platform, and as the town watched, it changed to show cities Clara had never seen and now knew only from the banners at the bottom.
El Dorado Lea, Peru. Underwater, civilization’s remains turned to floating detritus, humans clinging to whatever they could, screaming for help that would never come.
Etemenanki Sprawl, Iceland. There was literally nothing visible above water during the brief clip other than a single mountain peak: just wave after wave battering its shores as people shuffled worriedly about at its top, water eroding rock at its enormous base, trying its best to knock away the last of what remained.
Avalon Downs, Iraq. This one was equally flooded, with one macabre addition: Astral shuttles flying above, shooting lifeboats from the water. The Lightborn watched, feeling a sickening drop inside as beams struck and each ship exploded in splinters and blood, as each death seemed to erase someone from their internal equations — gone, as Clara nearly met their eyes onscreen, from the collective unconsciousness.
“Wait,” said one of the adults near the group of children. “If that’s Iraq and it’s already underwater, isn’t that about the same latitude as—”
A horrible wrenching of rending metal screeched through the square like a living thing in pain. There was a distant explosion, possibly an implosion. And in the abating rain, a lesser but much more frightening sound grew dominant: the immense rush of oncoming water.
“Hurry!” Clara shouted to the Lightborn.
And as she led the group, only half caring if they followed, Clara thought: So much for the plan. So much for Mara’s lottery and ensuring that only the best and brightest made the vessel’s manifest. So much for subtlety and the need to find a way onto the ships in the name of the greatest good.
They rushed forward, stopped short by a human wall made of muscle and fat and bone and unyielding backs. Nobody in Ember Flats seemed to care about decorum, or about the children prying and pressing at their backs. There was only their own survival and those of their children, clamped fast at their fronts like belongi
ngs. The Lightborn had homes and mothers and fathers, of course, but based on what Clara had seen inside their minds, those old ties were so far abandoned that they might not have existed. Logan and Nick and Ella and Cheever and the others might have once had parents in the crowd to protect them, but they would never find them now.
Josh, the big kid who’d been so near panic, was ripping and clawing at the people in front of him, his fear a red-hot presence in Clara’s mind. Others were doing the same. There was the hive, and then the individual.
Clara forced herself to breathe. To press something cool and quiet into the Lightborn mind. In her internal vision it was blue-green and viscous, like aloe smeared atop a burn.
In the chaos, minds turned to her. Panic eased.
Around the back.
Water came fast. Clara chanced a look behind her as she led others to the side, away from the gangplank and Mara’s gatekeepers — away from the shoving throngs reduced to the monkey brain’s animal needs — and saw it come as rounded surges like the waves in a water park pool. It squeezed between Ember Flats’s curious old-new buildings, stone, glass, and wood finding harmony in the city that was so recently desert. Astral glass didn’t crack, but wood did, and stone beneath crumbled as debris struck it. Even as far forward as Clara and the others were, the mostly-filtered water struck and shoved them into each other, jostling like bobbing corks. The wave passed, and Clara found it had reached her armpits. It was no longer walk and wade. Now it was push or swim.
Inside her mind, the cool aloe pacifier bubbled as the panic beneath threatened to boil.
There’s a cargo hold. Around the back. Just keep moving.
And someone thought, How do you know? We’re moving away from the entrance!
But they’d never make it through the entrance, properly, up the gangplank. Water was coming hard, but there were still minutes on the clock, and Mara’s people were still in front, holding hurried court, seemingly intent on properly loading the vessel before it was forced from its moorings. Many of the Astrals had lifted off in their shuttles, buzzing over the water in the square. Clara watched, rationally understanding they still meant only to assist the orderly loading of the boat, irrationally certain at the same time that they’d turn on the citizens and blast them to ash. Visions from the screen were on her mind, of Avalon Downs and the target practice there.
What’s the difference between there and here? she wondered. And the difference, she decided, was time. In ten minutes, Ember Flats might be like Avalon — if too many people took to unsanctioned rescue vessels, insistent on saving themselves in unapproved ways.
They’re going to kill us all, someone said.
Just keep moving.
Clara could feel them behind her. She felt their hesitancy, wanted to leave without them if they chose to stay and drown. But this wasn’t about saving their lives. She understood that now. The man in boots wasn’t here, but she could hear him as though he was. And in that way, his ghost kept whispering in her ear:
The children are the tinder. But you are the spark.
Soon there would only be a few humans left — millions still, but a handful for an empty and flooded globe.
Those who remained would be disproportionately children because they were the future.
And if the Lightborn weren’t around to light them up, the future’s children would remain … only that.
Around the vessel’s back, away from the crowds, not at all away from the rising water.
Clara moved to her tiptoes. Some of the smaller children were swimming, fighting the current. Bigger kids had taken those who couldn’t swim — some tottering on unstable backs, some merely clinging, treading water as they held tight with one arm. They pushed forward, into a protected pool behind a stack of crates beginning to lift up and float away. Once at the rear, the shouting grew hushed. The water’s surge waned, and they found themselves in a still pool that had become a flood’s version of stagnant: cluttered with everything floatable that had previously lined the streets. It was filthy, clotted with garbage, topped in places with the rainbow slicks of unknown oils.
“Gross,” said Ella, treading along at Clara’s side, dodging something that looked like a sock.
Beyond the great vessel, there was a long, low crumbling. Screams chased the sound like an aftertaste.
“There’s nothing back here, Clara,” Logan said. “Maybe we should … you know … try to find our own boat.”
But inside his mind, she saw only death. Logan wasn’t a fool. They wouldn’t allow any boats to survive, even if the Lightborn could find one. Which they couldn’t because water kept surging, bringing the level nearly to Clara’s chin, lifting her like a tall slat of balsa wood on her scrabbling toes.
“We have to get on. We have to!”
“That’s what everyone feels, Clara. Maybe it’s not meant to happen. Maybe we should just accept that …”
He sighed, half shrugged, and gave Clara a frown that looked like the one Cameron used to give when he said, Shit happens.
He didn’t understand. She wanted to shout at his idiocy, but that was only frustration. Logan meant the best but didn’t see that his best wasn’t good enough, and that if they stayed behind to let others have room on the boat, they were merely condemning them.
There was a loud commotion from the boat’s far side. Clara heard bodies shuffle and strikes clang on wood or metal. There was a gunshot: Someone had kept an illegal firearm and was now using it as an ace. Then there were screams, more clangs, and a heavier shuffle. Finally there was the brief, businesslike pfft sound of an Astral weapon discharging.
More screams.
Then mutters and the soft sounds of sobbing, the trudging of feet.
“We can get in through the cargo hatch.”
“What hatch, Clara!” It came out as an exasperated sigh rather than a question.
Something broke in the distance. Something fell. There was another bang, but this one more like an explosion than a shot. Water surged, making the junk behind the vessel rise, sickening Clara with its filthy presence so near her face.
Clara’s eyes scanned the vessel’s smooth, metallic hull. Nothing else would get loaded. But Logan was right: there was no hatch to the rear. She’d been so certain. This was the only way to do as the man in boots had told her. Had told them all, Clara thought in frustration, if the other Lightborn would only look back to their shared vision and listen.
Not just the Lightborn in Ember Flats.
Every Lightborn child, everywhere.
A great surge tore through the square. Clara sensed it before she felt it, then experienced it before she saw it. The vessel creaked on its big base, the scaffolding holding it upright creaking like a tree in high wind. Her feet left the ground for the last time, and they all found themselves swimming as the waves rose and fell, fighting the current, gasping to stay above the surface.
With a mighty groan, something snapped like a twig, and the vessel drifted toward them, its enormous side leaning over as the thing’s supports broke, the water not yet quite high enough to support it. But that lasted only seconds, then another wave came. This time Clara could see buildings in Ember Flats succumb and fall as the water lifted her higher. The ship settled in, now a giant bobber, its smooth sides offering no purchase. On the far side, people screamed and shouted and splashed — Clara heard a long and low grating that must be the gangplank being retracted.
To the north, water came. The next swell toppled the church tower and the library’s western spire, red bricks hitting the waves and vanishing. Then water took the gymnasium dome and the white stone buildings where the government had made its home.
She looked up at the vessel’s side, couldn’t look at the children behind her, whom she’d led around to the back, away from the entrance, to drown.
They were going to die.
But then an aperture opened in the vessel’s side, just above the waterline. No hatch, only a hole, born from nowhere.
One by o
ne, they swam over, clambered up, and climbed in. Within minutes all the Lightborn found themselves inside the big ship’s guts, wedging feet against down-arcing support members to keep from sliding to the pinched space at the bottom of the thing’s long keel, below the cargo hold.
The hole closed.
The dark that came next, made worse by the ship’s sickening sway in the rising water, nearly stopped her heart. She felt around blindly, groping for the hatch, unsure why. Was it so terrifying in this rocking, lightless space that she meant to open the door and jump back out into the flood?
But she couldn’t find the door’s edges because the door wasn’t there.
A hand somehow found Clara’s in the darkness.
I’m scared, said Ella.
Said — in feelings if not in words — every member of the collective.
Clara realized that they were no longer looking to Logan as their leader. She had somehow led them here. And it was Clara, if anyone, who’d know what to do next.
But Clara was scared, too.
Something hopped into her other hand. Small. Heavy. Warm. It had the feeling of a small animal climbing into her palm, but for some reason Clara didn’t flinch. It was already giving her the comfort that Ella wanted from Clara. A comforting presence. Something she didn’t try to understand, because confused comfort was better than raw-edged terror.
Clara closed her hand on the thing.
It felt like a small, smooth sphere, about the size of a golf ball.
Chapter Forty
Meyer was about to climb up and slam the submersible door — knocking Piper out to keep her from preventing it, if he had to — when he heard the sounds.
The cannibals seemed to hear it, too, even over their shouting and deafening engines. A one-two punch, two events in seconds. They shouted; they drove forward and they ran; they threw their spears and brandished their blades. But almost immediately afterward there came the cacophonous riot of a levy breaking, like the roar of an oncoming train.