Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  Ella understood.

  Nick understood.

  Logan and the rest of the Lightborn understood.

  And what’s more, while the rest of the Ember Flats Ark was losing its sense of place and history, the Lightborn’s connection to other Lightborn on other ships was increasing. Clara found she could dip into the collective and speak with a boy from Hanging Pillars as easily as she could speak to Logan beside her. Maybe it was the lack of interference, as the rest of the world’s minds went dim. As the rest of humanity became the blank slates preferred by the Astrals.

  Sometimes, Clara envied them. The collective remembered every bit of their shared past. Clara knew how to play video games she’d never experienced, enjoyed by teenagers before the fall. Clara knew the best place to buy a taco in New York, though she’d only been there as an embryo. She had lived the invasion and occupation from every possible angle. She’d seen them come to Iraq. The Northern Territory. She’d seen them above London and Budapest and Warsaw and Chang Mai. She’d seen Moscow destroyed from the inside, through the memories of a child who’d been there. She’d seen Black Monday’s decimation hundreds of times, when the Astrals had made their first round of human cuts, knocking the planet’s population from nearly eight billion to three. And of course she still saw Heaven’s Veil in her dreams.

  Her father’s death.

  Her grandmother’s death.

  The deaths of hundreds of other kids’ fathers, other kids’ grandmothers.

  What would it be like to forget like the others? To arrive one day on dry land, and start over without history’s agony? Without all the baggage?

  At night, Clara let her mind drift into the collective. Into the place that seemed unable to forget. And in that space, she watched connections form — fresh meat forming beneath a diseased skin. Too late, something was happening. They were waking the other young minds, but in time it only happened below the level of consciousness. The girl she’d talked to her first day on the vessel, Zoe, could barely remember Clara’s name. But she was there in the collective, like one more node in an outward-spreading network.

  Nodes here and there. All over the globe. The brightest were Lightborn, and the second-brightest were the non-Lightborn children they touched. But there were dimmer nodes too — more precisely wired and not as flexible or bright. To Clara, they felt like adults. With her eyes closed, the network was a thing of beauty. Ideal pieces in perfect slots in the big puzzle, each placed as if by design. The growing hive couldn’t have existed before humanity’s garbled noise had been pruned. There’d been too much distraction. Too many flimsy connections. Only now could she connect to an Indian man she felt staring out at the ocean. Only now could she hear the thoughts of an Asian fisherman, whose mind was a curious puzzle box that acted like a key the man had never known was there.

  Usually it was too much to think about. The network — forged from genocide, invisible except to the Lightborn as the race memory of humanity melted to mush — was pointless. It helped nobody.

  Days ticked off.

  Clara found a node in the network that felt familiar as if from long ago. Just an ordinary mind, nothing special.

  With her eyes closed, she nuzzled her mind close to the unremarkable node, wishing it could sing her to sleep like it used to.

  On the thirty-fourth day at sea by Peers’s count, Lila spotted land and shouted down to Piper, telling her to steer toward it. But Piper didn’t hear because she was huddled over the controls, in her own little world as usual.

  Peers caught Piper’s attention. She glared at him. Then he took the controls and tried to steer toward the land, but the ship’s rudder wouldn’t turn. Or it would, but the boat wouldn’t follow. The sub moved in the same direction it had been, and in that moment something in Peers finally broke, and he pounded on the instruments while Lila shouted from above. When she finally came down, Lila shouted at him for his obstinance. And shouted. And shouted. But this time Peers shouted back, and the fight became about something else entirely, and Lila threw a stainless steel cup at him, bouncing off his elbow. By the time the fight was behind them, so was the land.

  Another day.

  Another day.

  Peers pulled out a roll of nautical maps stowed in the sub’s nose, mostly useless without land above water to use for comparison. Peers had tried to guess their position at night and came away frustrated, unable to tell anything more than that familiar constellations meant they were still in the northern hemisphere. The total lack of information was unsettling. Weather had changed, and there were no landmarks. Hot days followed frigid ones. They gutted the few fish they managed to catch and often ate them raw. They constructed rain traps on the sub’s top and caught rainwater to drink. But there was no end in sight. No place to go. Only Piper seemed to have any thoughts on their direction, but she never shared her reasoning, or used GPS to navigate. He had no idea what Piper was using — only that the instruments bowed to her fingers alone.

  The little boat powered on, somehow avoiding swells and storms and ice, the engines forever spinning on tanks that never needed fuel.

  Carl woke with a start when the world jarred on the thirty-eighth day, tossing its contents hither and yon. It took him a while to realize that the disturbance had been caused by the freighter grinding to a halt. He ran to the deck, looked around, and saw nothing.

  He didn’t know how to fire the engines, because they’d come alight without human intervention. He didn’t know how to figure out where they’d become inexplicably marooned because he knew only that they’d started south and steamed north. But in the intervening five weeks, they’d taken one detour after another, filling the big ship to what had to be quarter capacity or more, moving east and west, then south again, obeying the weather and the silver ball’s whims. But now Carl was worse than lost, and there was no way to fix it.

  Still he lowered one of the small boats stowed on deck from their massive boom arms, the motor operating as inexplicably well as the rest of the ship’s systems. While in the water, he steered the boat around and away, searching for the problem. And after much peering and staring down, he found it. Or rather, Lawrence did. The ship had run aground. On what, nobody knew.

  They slept. And in the morning, the underwater obstruction was just visible from the freighter’s deck where it hadn’t been before.

  Carl went to sleep that night wondering if what he suspected might be true.

  And the next morning, the fortieth day, he felt the ship tilt as its weight betrayed it, coming to rest at a few degrees of lee.

  Below the bow was a low rise covered in long and bedraggled green grass, now visible above the water.

  They’d come aground two days ago. And now, as water receded, the ground was finally making its way to them.

  The next time they saw land, it was Meyer, not Peers, who took control. He was prepared to cut the ship’s hydraulic and electrical lines to stop and change its course, ready to jump into the water and push. He’d make them all get out and kick, if it came to that.

  But the controls obeyed his touch, turning them toward land. Toward, he saw, a large something near the land’s edge that had to be man-made.

  Piper didn’t stand in his way as she had before. She sort of blinked and looked at him with curiosity, as if this were a party she was just now entering. When Meyer ignored her, she turned to Kindred. But he’d weathered the trip worse than the rest of them. Which was to say he’d weathered it better. Lila had complained; Peers had exacerbated his own obnoxious, compulsive habits; Meyer had stewed, and Piper had been in a fugue. But Kindred had been none of the above. Most days he’d sat in one place, staring out at nothing.

  Meyer called to his double for help when they got closer. He’d need the help to shore them up, and no one trusted Peers. When Kindred came up, Meyer tried to see into him, the way they once shared a mental office. But there was nothing there. Kindred was an empty vessel, still half of Meyer, but touching his mind was like touching nothing at
all.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Meyer asked, not bothering to blunt the point.

  “I can tell he’s close,” Kindred replied.

  “Who?”

  But Kindred had already finished his work with the dock line, tying it to a dead tree just breaking the water’s surface. He’d waded to the new shore and was making his way, alone, toward the man-made thing Meyer had seen from open water.

  Meyer recognized it immediately. He’d seen it — or one of several just like it — over and over on Jabari’s tablet, on the Astral broadcasts.

  One of the big vessels the aliens had left behind as human lifeboats, sent from a distant capital.

  Liza Knight stood on her vessel deck as a dozen people with sponge brain attempted to figure out how to extend the gangplank and disembark. She had no idea where they were, but she’d been circling this place for days and had been watching spots of land appear — here and there, then suddenly everywhere. Based on the underwater obstacles they’d encountered just trying to get close and tie the thing off, they’d come upon a relatively flat, definitely large area. By tomorrow or the next day, their Noah’s Ark would probably be permanently beached, fallen over on its hulking side in the middle of a gently rolling meadow.

  “Um …” said a voice at her side.

  “Liza,” Liza growled, seeing Mick’s perplexed expression. In the past two weeks, she’d gone from sympathetic about his mental issues to irritated to flat-out angry. She didn’t like spending more than a month on a boat to nowhere more than anyone else, and yet everyone came to her expecting things, trying to tell her what to do. But wasn’t she the one with the little metal ball that told the ship where to go? Not that she’d shared that tidbit with anyone.

  “Liza?”

  “Do you have any idea who I am?” She should be more elated at finding land, but found herself nonetheless unable to enjoy it while surrounded by monkeys.

  “You’re Liza.”

  “I’m in charge here. I’m the fucking viceroy, Mick.”

  He watched her vacant, as if waiting for her to finish.

  “What do you want? If you can even fucking remember.”

  “I left myself a note to ask you to try a GPS bearing.”

  Some of Liza’s annoyance departed. She’d forgotten. But at least it was garden-variety forgetting, not the amnesia they all seemed to have caught like a cold. Or so she hoped.

  She pulled the mobile phone from her pocket. Mick looked at it as if he’d never seen something so fascinating. Like showing fire to a caveman.

  “Nothing.” She put it back in her pocket.

  Mick nodded. She realized he had no idea what a ‘GPS bearing’ was despite having made the suggestion. Mick’s new systems were more efficient than sensible. He left himself reminders but seldom knew what they meant.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter where we are as long as there’s land. Make yourself another note, Mick. Check all of the communication devices in there to see if anyone else has popped up, if there are any broadcasts, anything.”

  “Um … Liza?”

  “You don’t know how to work any of the equipment, do you?”

  Mick shrugged.

  “Fine. I’ll do it. But I sure hope you like the people on this boat. Because if the Astrals are leaving soon and communications stay down like I think they will, like forever, this is your life.”

  Mick waited for her to finish. Liza realized that if what she’d just said was true, she was going to be supremely unhappy. But what had she expected? The capitals had been spread across the globe. If Jabari’s plan had worked out and the viceroys had managed to reach their virtual meet-up and make their plans, maybe there could have been a New World Order. But now she was destined to be a queen among idiots. The other ships could be anywhere, if they’d survived.

  “You can go,” Liza said.

  Stewing, she moved around the big boat, inspecting her soggy new home, for better or for worse.

  But it seemed that Liza wasn’t alone after all.

  There was a small watercraft in the distance, aground not far off. It wasn’t big like the ark, or small and flat like a normal boat. It was almost rounded, like a mini-sub.

  A man was walking toward her.

  And far behind him, Liza saw another man who looked an awful lot like him.

  Stranger hid behind the big rock, watching Kindred cross the new land toward the Roman Sands vessel. He watched as the leaders stood face to face, unable to see their expressions, knowing they’d be good. He watched as Liza Knight extended her hand, as Kindred took it, as they shook. And then he watched the two larger parties move toward each other, local pools of thought already beginning to intermingle.

  The next day, the water had moved more than ten feet farther down, and Stranger knew without looking inside that the big Astral ship had moved back to one of the poles and would soon go to the other, siphoning the global flood back into mountains of freshwater ice. The ice didn’t return to the north and south as glaciers. It returned as liquid, then obeyed the ship’s whims and went to freeze where the Astral machinery told it to. If human scientists were to bore into the new ice, they wouldn’t know what to make of their discovery. But the world’s population was down to the seed number the Astrals had wanted, and the Forgetting had already peaked.

  There would be no more scientists on Earth. Not for a very long time.

  A few days on, Stranger moved to where Carl Nairobi had run his big ship aground. He stayed out of sight — more because he was curious than out of need. Carl had seen enough wonders that he might not even be surprised to see Stranger. The man might even expect it. And by the time Carl crested a particular hill not far on from his group’s position, he wouldn’t have much surprise left in him, anyway. Carl, like the others, had no idea where they were or where they’d been headed throughout the past month and a half. And yet over that hill, he’d find Jayesh Sai and Maj Anders, who’d already made each other’s curious acquaintance. But, Stranger thought, was it really so shocking that they’d been drawn together? Life always began in this place, every single time.

  Stranger watched the disparate groups assemble, keeping his distance. He felt the click each time a new piece was added to the whole, as new humans found the swelling collective. As the Roman Sands survivors and Meyer Dempsey’s small group met with Spiros Cocoves of Hanging Pillars and his group, as both watched Lee Sūn’s group, summoned by her small silver ball, enter the plain to join them.

  With proximity, mentality grew. And the Forgetting, its work done, allowed their minds to function again. Friends could soon easily remember friends and new shared histories, but the old past — and its mistakes — were gone forever.

  Stranger watched for two weeks, staying apart, letting the new city form in the drying land. The sun came out as the continents returned to the surface, and the land became arid, and the survivors marched until they found fresh water again in a fertile valley not far from the desert, where they discovered other viceroys who’d already made temporary homes.

  Last to arrive was the Ember Flats group, who found ground late and stayed far off until they began to run out of drinking water. Then they followed Clara’s ball, and Stranger watched the final thing he’d wanted to see before joining the group, finally a participant instead of a puppeteer.

  And that thing, he watched close: Clara finding Lila. The two reconciling and Lila’s heart breaking with joy, two halves made whole after a drought.

  Stranger watched. And waited. Then he entered the new city as the mental grid flickered.

  His work as maestro was done.

  Now it was another’s turn to guide them.

  Chapter Fifty

  “All that remains,” Eternity told Sadeem, “is the matter of your Legend Scroll.”

  Sadeem looked up. Having essentially been abducted, he’d brought no belongings onto the first mothership, then onto the larger Deathbringer. So he wasn’t precisely packed to leave, but it was a similar vibe. He wa
s in the same white room as always, fed and healthy but phenomenally bored after nearly two months in captivity, now standing with no bags by his side and the unmistakable air of a man about to pick up and shove off. And yet here was Eternity, saying something that could change everything. His insides longed to scream.

  “I’ve shown you all our scrolls. All my key can access.”

  “And we’ve sent all that was previously paired to the old Mullah Temple to the new one,” Eternity agreed, nodding slightly as if finally comfortable acting human. “Your key will now access all of what your Elders were granted at the prior Temple. Your portal links to ours, and the knowledge has been sent there, from our side, for any new Elders you groom and train.”

  “So nothing remains. And I can go home.” Sadeem thought to correct himself — wherever he was headed, it wasn’t home. Floodwaters had receded and the ice caps had been restored, but the planet was cleansed, with most of what humans had built upon it now shrapnel, half-buried in silt or washed away.

  “The Legend Scroll,” Eternity persisted.

  “I know of nothing by that name.”

  “We scanned you during your sleep last night, using the same process used to create progenitors and progeny.”

  Sadeem had heard those words. He didn’t like where this might be going.

  “Are you saying you’re going to duplicate me like you duplicated Meyer Dempsey? You extracted my mind the way you did with him, and now you’re going to bring a Titan in here and … and …”

  “It is merely the same process.” Betraying what Sadeem had watched bloom in the Astrals over the past months, Eternity’s face wore an expression that seemed to add, So fucking relax already. “The human conscious mind is only so aware of itself. As we created the new portal, we needed to be certain that information obtained by the Mullah and elaborated on in our absence — not just from your perspective but from your admittedly weak attachment to a species collective — was accurate. The scan went as anticipated, and gaps on the human side have been filled. Information required for the new Temple and Mullah knowledge base is complete. And yes, you can … ‘go home.’ But first there is one unexpected discovery, hidden within your mind. Of the Legend Scroll.”