Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  In Stranger’s hut, he and Clara discussed things they shouldn’t know but both did. Long after the Astrals were gone, Clara asked about them. Long after the ships had last graced the others’ memories, Clara and Stranger still whispered. And they spoke in hushed voices about Stranger himself, who struck Clara as instantly familiar in a way she didn’t entirely understand — and most often about Kindred, whom Stranger avoided like a plague. Many avoided Kindred, but with Stranger it was intentional — each steering clear of the other despite what both called “an intensely strong mutual attraction.” Whenever Clara spoke with Stranger or her grand uncle, the other man surfaced in conversation. Kindred wanted nothing more, it seemed, than to sit opposite Stranger for a meal. And Stranger, likewise, wanted nothing more than to visit with Kindred. Clara could feel their mutual pull, but for a reason neither would divulge they refused to meet — as if doing so was dangerous.

  Stranger would say, “We all have our burdens to bear, Clara, just as you have the burden of knowledge and insight.” And Kindred, who knew less of Clara’s unique “insight,” would say the same. Kindred spoke of little but Stranger, using drink to still unknowable demons. Except that when he drank enough, another subject would surface. Lila heard this topic often, as the one tasked with shuttling Kindred to bed when his intoxication became too great and filled him with menace. He spoke of a woman named Heather, who seemed to haunt his past, but that Lila had never heard of.

  In the mornings, Clara would often tell her mother that she was going to Stranger’s place then walk past it, headed to a place far in the hills — too far for anyone to walk alone. She could make it in two hours, most of that time spent crossing barren desert with no landmarks to guide her. Clara never got lost. She tuned inward to another kind of guidance, listening to whispers from her friends: a group sometimes called the Unforgotten, but which called themselves Lightborn. Clara could hear them any time she chose to tune in, same as she could still see the strange network with all its nodes with her mind’s eye. When she walked, she called on the Lightborn to guide her, to the cave where she’d find Sadeem and the Mullah. But when she realized it wasn’t just the Lightborn offering directions from afar, she chose to ask the Sage, knowing he’d have answers to questions nobody else had — that nobody else could even understand.

  “All the time I was on the vessel,” Clara told him, “I could see this network in my head expanding. And I could mentally tap each of the bright spots, which I kind of thought of as nodes. And when I did, I’d get a sense of what that node was: not just a spot in a grid but as a person. You were one. So was Piper. All of my Lightborn friends were in there, each appearing as a node in this big, expanding grid of people. At first I thought we were connecting, the way my mind plugs into the Lightborn. But it’s still there, even after everything! I think that’s how I can see my way through the desert: Millions of people saw this piece of land before the flood. Even with all the landmarks washed away, what they know — or knew — seems to have made me a map.”

  Sadeem nodded, thinking. “It makes sense. Many tiny inputs from nodes on the grid, and your mind assembles them into a picture of the whole.”

  “But they’ve forgotten, Sadeem! Nobody remembers the old world! Nobody even remembers the flood, the Astrals, none of it! My own mom doesn’t even remember her mom — she thinks Piper had her!”

  “And?”

  Clara looked at Sadeem with disbelief. He was sitting in front of her cross-legged, peaceful like a meditating yogi.

  “And?” she repeated.

  “Why would you expect it to be different? Just because they’ve forgotten doesn’t mean they don’t remember.”

  “Stop speaking in riddles!”

  Sadeem’s composure broke. He laughed.

  “I suspect we’ve always been connected a little, Clara. That’s what you’re able to see. You’ve kept an eye on what humanity lost. It changes nothing, but at least offsets the burden of being how you are.”

  “So I can remember things that everyone else has let go? How is that a benefit? I wish I’d forgotten, too!”

  “They told me everyone would forget, Clara. But they’ve never been able to see the Lightborn. It’s one tiny piece of victory. They knocked down the buildings but left the foundation, in you.”

  “And what good does it do me?”

  “You won’t get lost, for one. And at least until you die, a small piece of the old world won’t be gone forever.”

  “The same is true of you. Big whoop for being special. Even if we told people how it used to be, nobody would believe us.”

  “Part of their plan, I suppose. The Astrals wanted us to start over, and that could only happen if we were blank slates. It had to happen before they left. But it’s good because we needed them to go. The healing had to begin, and if memory was the price, so be it. The network you see won’t last forever, Clara. It’ll wither and die. Enjoy it while you can. Your mind, my mind, the minds of other Lightborn and perhaps the one you call Stranger? That might be all that’s left of the world we knew. But like all things, it’s only for a time. I’m already forgetting things — naturally, at least. Just as your subconscious network is fading. Don’t resent it, Clara. Pity it. Don’t push those people’s remains away. Embrace and celebrate them while they’re still here.”

  Something sighed inside her. Sadeem was speaking as if the world wasn’t dead, but dying. As if the people she already knew and loved, in the small village and the others pocked across the planet, were dying.

  She closed her eyes, feeling exhausted. She saw the network almost immediately. And it was as he said: a still-vibrant core of bright nodes surrounded by endless acres of slaughtered chattel. Subconscious minds of the more than seven billion humans who’d died during the occupation were now husks. But the rest of what Sadeem had said wasn’t as obviously true: As those old minds shed, leaving the living to burn inside Clara’s mental network, the remaining nodes weren’t dimming. Each mind still in the grid fit perfectly — more perfectly than they ever could have during humanity’s populous but scattered heyday.

  Clara opened her eyes.

  “Sadeem?”

  “Yes, Clara?”

  “You say the nodes — this collective network — I see inside me … you say those are the roots of people before they forgot everything? So the Peers Basara node inside my head, for instance — that’s Peers as he used to be, not as he is now?”

  “It’s his entry into the collective unconscious. So yes.”

  “And because everyone has forgotten, that’s why the whole thing should be shutting down? Because all those old memories and thoughts are erased?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But Sadeem?”

  “Yes, Clara?”

  “It’s not shutting down. The network keeps growing brighter and brighter. It’s not dying. It’s almost like it’s coming alive.”

  “I think you’re imagining things.”

  “No, Sadeem, I’m not,” Clara insisted. “It’s been getting brighter since we boarded the vessel. Since those other, non-Lightborn kids started to light up, and even some of the adults.”

  Sadeem looked puzzled. “But they forgot. All of them. The kids. The adults. Everyone.”

  Clara closed her eyes. Watched a small blip of internal light move from a live node to a darker one. The new node brightened a hair, then passed the light on.

  She was about to try and describe it when the walls began to shake. Dust sifted, and Mullah began to shout. Then Clara saw it, all at once — inside her mind before she saw it with her eyes, as the people of the distant village saw it first, and uploaded the knowledge directly to her screaming cortex.

  “It’s a quake,” Sadeem said.

  “No. It’s not.”

  They walked up the tunnels, reached the cave’s mouth, and emerged into the open air. There they saw it together: overhead, covering half the sky, was the enormous Deathbringer that had supposedly left Earth three months earlier.
/>   Sadeem gaped up at the thing, his Mullah ranks speechless beside him.

  “They were supposed to leave,” Sadeem said. “Why didn’t they go?”

  Clara looked inside. And in one gestalt leap, she knew the answer in full.

  “Because this time it’s different,” she said. “This time, they can’t.”

  Resurrection

  Chapter One

  The hooded figure slipped out of the village before dawn, setting off from his dwelling before most of the others had risen for their daily chores. This was saying something because the village woke early. The sun was oppressive by midday, so people worked at first light then stayed in the shade to stay cool later — or bathed in the river, or slept in their small homes with the doors open on both ends to invite a breeze.

  When they did the latter, the villagers napped on cots high enough to keep the insects and snakes at bay. Superstition said that if you slept on the ground, minions from the underworld would take you for your laziness — for putting your back to the ground rather than toiling on upright legs.

  But that was all bunk to the cloaked man. The idea of never resting used to be called the Puritan Work Ethic and had, unfortunately, survived the Forgetting deep in the people’s minds. And as to snakes and spiders? They weren’t from the underworld. Near as the cloaked man could guess, the Astrals had somehow preserved them and the other creatures from the Old Earth on an unknown ark — or, for all he knew or cared, created them again once the land had dried.

  He passed the Dempsey house — made of better stone and larger than the rest but still surprisingly modest.

  He passed the rectory, which had grown, where Mother Knight held her meddlesome meetings.

  And finally he passed the outer ring, where most of the Unforgotten made their homes. Beyond them were the wilds and the desert, and as the man walked west and the sun blushed in the sky behind him, he found it fitting that The Clearing had known just how to form itself. Like a flock of birds instinctually finding its array, so had the thousands instinctually settled into their ideal configuration.

  The Unforgotten — who’d taught The Clearing’s villagers so many things they didn’t question their knowledge of — didn’t usually need defense from the desert and the wilds. They knew when unwanted things were coming.

  But even windows of the Unforgotten weren’t lit with candlelight as he passed, leaving the quiet of night’s end unbroken.

  He crested a rise then walked down its lee side. The bluing horizon vanished for a while, restoring his world to near darkness. And so he walked that way for a while, his eyes closed because the moon was new and the stars were hidden behind clouds and seeing simply didn’t matter.

  One foot in front of the other.

  No worries of stepping into something. Or on something. Or going the wrong direction.

  Because the true guidance was within him, on the network, when its horizons managed to remain unobscured.

  After perhaps twenty minutes by an Old-World clock, he reached the monolith, less than a quarter day from the sea. It reared up before him like always: first a dark triangle above the farthest dune, then growing into something flatter and wider as he neared. By the time he was over the dune, the eastern sky had faded from dark blue to light, warming with the first hints of blood red where land met sky.

  He stood before the thing, looking up. He waited. He remembered the feeling of knowing so much more than he knew now, but that was when he’d had a global mind to guide him. Now their number was trimmed, and for a while, that had seemed to brighten the feeling. But despite all his shuffling, it had been dark for a while. Until the recent, new round of sparks. This time, he swore they were different. And Clara agreed.

  But today as with every day before, the monolith offered nothing.

  He stayed for long enough to know he was wasting time, hoping in an all-too-human way that the solution would magically present itself. But it didn’t. There was magic, and he could make it. But the monolith was unchanging, and gave him as little as it gave the others, who believed it simply to be junk.

  Before leaving, he lowered his hood and pulled three small polished silver spheres from his pocket. He held them flat in his palm, trying to feel, knowing he’d sense nothing. The spheres had given him plenty in the past. But then again, he’d felt his origin more fully before. His power had departed like memory from the others. How had he once fed back into a Reptar and destroyed it with a thought? How had he created the duplicate that lived inside? He remembered doing it all, but his how was as lifeless as the spheres. They told him nothing, only showing him his own long, lined face — the same face he’d seen in mirrors when the forgotten floods had started.

  And that unchanged face told him: It feels like it’s been forever, yes. But it all might as well have happened yesterday.

  He pocketed the spheres. There was still magic in them, for sure — just as there was still magic in the monolith. But he couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t access it. Like a memory he almost knew but couldn’t recall. A face he knew yet couldn’t place.

  He turned and headed back to The Clearing.

  He arrived at his shop to find a man waiting outside. He was very tall. Very broad. His arms were as big around as a normal man’s thighs. Everyone understood the man’s build because he labored as a blacksmith — another curiously no-questions-asked skill the Unforgotten had taught the village’s population ahead of the way things were probably supposed to happen. But his size was cause, not effect. He was able to blacksmith because he was big; he wasn’t big because he smithed. And there might be another reason he smithed, it seemed: because smiths made weapons as well as tools, and a warrior would one day need weapons with which to fight.

  “Sir?” said the big man.

  “Yes?”

  “They call you Stranger, don’t they?”

  “They call me many things. Especially behind my back.”

  The big man cracked a smile. Small wrinkles formed at the corners of his mouth. A tentative smile, but there.

  “My name is—”

  “Carl Nairobi,” Stranger finished.

  “Carl Smith,” Carl corrected.

  Stranger shrugged as if it didn’t matter. Then he opened his shop’s door and let Carl inside, where he indicated two handmade chairs for each to sit.

  “Why is your name Smith?” Stranger asked.

  “Because I am a blacksmith.”

  “Were you always a blacksmith? Is that why it’s your surname?”

  Carl started to speak, but Stranger cut him off before he could.

  “Five years ago, were you a blacksmith?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Ten years ago, were you a blacksmith?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your father a blacksmith? Is that how you learned the trade?”

  Carl’s mouth opened, and his whole face formed another yes, but then he stopped.

  “Do you remember your father, Carl?”

  “Yes?”

  “You do or you don’t?”

  “Yes. Of course I do.”

  “What was his name?”

  There was a pause. Into it, Stranger said, “If a man’s surname were Nairobi, what might that say about him? What might it say about his origins?”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re so polite these days, Carl. When I first met you, you tried to beat me to death. Hit me once, in fact. I remember it well.”

  Carl’s face scrunched. “Have we met, sir?”

  “Yes. When you went by a different name. In a different place. Look inside, Carl. Do you seriously not remember me?”

  Carl focused. He watched Stranger for a very long time. It was such a tiny thing, Stranger thought as he watched Carl back, but a telling one. People used to have such a weakened attention span, but these days, stories spun for hours. People walked without hurry. And when one man studied another, it could take a minute or more, feeling no need to fill the silence with distractions.

  �
�When do you believe we met?”

  “Twenty years ago, Carl.” Then he shifted to the village vernacular, knowing “years” was a concept they never quite agreed on. “Twenty summers and winters.”

  “I’d have been a young man then.”

  Stranger looked him over. Carl still looked like a young man even at his current age of fortysomething. They had all visibly matured, but by the old standards it sure didn’t look like a full twenty years of aging to Stranger. The Astrals must have done something to them when erasing their memories, and it made sense. Most of humanity had perished. If the species was meant to restart from the small seed populations left around the globe, they’d have to be hearty stock — the best of the best, a bit younger than their years.

  “You were. Twenty-five at the most. But no bigger or stronger than you are now, I’d wager.”

  “But you,” Carl said, still studying. “You’d have been a child.”

  Stranger stood. There was a silvered glass on the far wall that he used when people came to him for advice. His face was long and lined, but not with age. He didn’t consider it much, but he understood what Carl meant. Most who didn’t know him well thought he was thirtyish, and were forgetful in exactly the way people around here were. Those closer to Stranger knew he looked the same today as he had for every subsequent yesterday. Twenty years gone in this strange new world, and he hadn’t aged a day.

  “Why are you here, Carl?” Stranger asked, leaving Carl to wonder. He’d been watching the node representing Carl just as Clara had suggested, and now he was starting to believe she was right. The walls were breaching, and Carl was one of those in whom the change might have already begun.