by Platt, Sean
“I was sent. By a man who frequents my shop, named Logan.”
“Why did Logan send you to the town mystic?”
“Because of my dreams, sir.”
Stranger had been facing the mirror. He turned, pleased. It really had begun to fall. His own dreams — not nearly as prescient as they once were, now that he’d become so much more human — might have been telling him the truth after all.
“What about your dreams?”
Carl shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Stranger hadn’t seen the man, other than in passing, in what felt like forever. The village had grown closer to a town in two decades, but it was still small. The town mystic scared many of its occupants just as they were frightened by Governor Dempsey’s twin. Even after a global reset, the human brain recoiled from the unknown.
But still it was hard not to imagine Carl as he’d been when they’d first come to this place, when the floodwaters had receded and returned land to the Earth. He’d been angrier then, the way Kindred still was. And his speech patterns had belonged to the old world: attitude, slang, and a South African accent. Today he might be from the pages of a history book if such things still existed.
“The monolith. Do you know it?”
“I know it well.”
“I’ve been there just once,” Carl said. “Just once, because it frightened me so badly. It’s like a thing from the underworld.”
Stranger nodded for the man to continue.
“In my dream — and it’s the same every night — I’m standing outside the monolith. On the low side, where its edge has dipped nearer to the sand. There’s a door above. Between me and the door there’s a ladder. The whole thing is made of smithed metal. But not in any way I’ve ever seen or known or can understand.”
“I know its construction. Go on.”
“It’s very clear that I’ve just stepped out of the thing. And there are others with me. They’re watching me, waiting. And it’s … It’s …”
“What is it?”
“It’s as if I brought the thing to us. As if it’s my fault it’s there.”
A haunted look crossed his features.
“Is there more?”
He nodded. “Five people come from the horizon. From across the dune. Six who have come to join me and one who has come to take something away. Six friends. One enemy. And then the people who were with me when I … when I somehow brought the monolith forth … are gone, and there are only eight of us. Friends and enemy together. But no fighting or arguing. Only expectation. They look at me and say, ‘We need it, Carl. We need it, or nothing can change.’”
“Then what?”
“That’s how it ends,” Carl said. “But I don’t understand it. I don’t know what they want from me or who they are. I can’t see their faces. I have no idea what I’m expected to give them. But it’s clear that they expect me to know — as if I’ve been sent to a far village on an errand and they’ve been waiting for me to return.”
“Why does it trouble you? It’s just a dream.”
Carl shook his head. “It’s every night now. Every night I have the exact same dream. Every night I see a few more visions.”
“Like what? What kind of new visions?” Stranger repressed his emotions but couldn’t help the burning curiosity. There’d been a day when he’d been able to look out on the grid inside his mind and see details as well as Clara could — as well as she used to, anyway. These days it was all lights and shadows. He’d helped build that grid of minds, in a way, but twenty years was a long time to hold a memory that the very air around them pressed him to forget.
“Me inside the monolith. Me on the sea, in this vast thing of heavy metal, somehow above the water rather than sinking beneath it. Me holding a small silver ball, in another place, finding the monolith in a new, odd land I don’t recognize and cannot understand. The ball seems to speak to me. To take me away from something and toward something else. I follow it, and people follow me. And when I reach the part of the dream where the others arrive, I’m more and more convinced that their expectant stares are right — that I truly am to blame for bringing the thing to its resting place in the sand. But I’ve never done those things, sir. I’ve—”
“Stranger, Carl. You used to call me Stranger.”
Carl’s brow furrowed. “But I don’t remember you. We’ve never spoken.”
“We have,” Stranger said, reaching into his robe and producing a small silver ball. He held it up and watched Carl’s face change. “You spoke to me once, when I gave you something like this.”
“When? Where?”
“When we were younger. In a land you once knew but can no longer recall.” He paused, then added, “But that you one day will again.”
He handed the ball to Carl, who seemed perhaps overly willing to take something that filled him with fear. But then Carl’s large mahogany hand closed on the thing, and Stranger felt the resonance. He could close his eyes and see Carl’s node in the network brighten. See the breach in the walls, where the demons kept fighting, finally fail.
They can’t fight us forever, Stranger, said a female voice inside his head.
Carl looked up. Stranger raised his eyes to meet him.
“The gods,” he said. “The black ship in the sky from long ago that people whisper about. It was real, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Carl,” said Stranger, leaning in, excitement building in an all-too-human cavalcade of emotion. “And do you remember why it came back? Why it appeared after the water was gone, after you moored the giant ship on the old shores to rust? Do you remember why the ship blackened our skies for a full season after we thought they were done with us, after their Forgetting had already started, after we were sure they’d left for good?”
Carl’s mouth opened.
The monolith.
The freighter.
Carl.
The Seven, or the Eight.
And the network. Puzzle pieces that spawned a new dimension, immune to the Astrals’ best attempts to fight back.
“Because … because they …”
But before Carl could finish, Stranger’s door banged open with a pop like a wood knot in a fire.
“Stranger,” said the woman at his threshold, her cadence rushed. “It’s Clara. She’s collapsed.”
Chapter Two
Piper’s eyes opened. There was no threshold between sleep and wakefulness. She’d been in one place but was now in another, eyelids not at all heavy as they usually were when slumber departed, looking up at the roof of the small stone house that Meyer and his brother had built with their bare hands. Or at least that’s what Piper seemed to remember them doing, though for some reason now, on this particular morning, she had her doubts. Beams overhead were large and thick — denuded trees made more or less round. But she didn’t remember Meyer and Kindred felling the trees, just like she didn’t remember how two men had lifted something so heavy over their heads.
Something was wrong. It had nothing to do with the beams. It was something more. Something worse. And yet, in its own way, better.
“Meyer.”
He was already as awake as she was, as if he’d been lying beside her all night with open eyes, watching stars the roof kept them from seeing.
“I know.”
There was a knock. The door wasn’t latched, and swung inward as the visitor tapped it, pivoting on forged metal secured to the frame, pinned together with a small rod. Clara had told them how to make the doors swing, and as far as Piper remembered they hadn’t had a clue before. She’d done it as a girl, a long time ago.
“Mom.”
“Come in,” Piper said.
The door swung the rest of the way. Lila entered. She seemed out of sorts, a bit manic — exactly the way Piper’s insides were starting to feel. Exactly the way Meyer, now that Piper glanced over, appeared.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Lila said.
“But there’s something else. What is it, Lila?”
Piper was looking o
ver at Meyer. When she’d said his name, he’d muttered two words as if awaiting her prompt. His response had made sense in the moment, but now she was already forgetting what that meant.
“I don’t know. I had a dream. With Clara. She was a little girl again. But …”
“But what, Lila?”
“She was asking about her father.”
“It was just a dream.”
Still, Piper felt a chill. She’d been dreaming of Lila, back when Lila was a child. And Lila hadn’t been asking about her father, but she had been asking about her mother. About Piper. But Piper couldn’t remember having ever given birth. She remembered Lila growing up, but didn’t remember being pregnant. The dream felt weary. Just thinking about it made her tired again, but it wasn’t the usual phenomenon of a fading dream. She was detouring around a blind spot, pretending it wasn’t there.
She didn’t used to have these thoughts. But lately, spots in Piper’s memories had plagued her. She’d look at Clara and wonder. She’d look at Meyer and wonder. She’d look at herself in the mirror, and she’d wonder. There was a recurring image of Lila, still in her teens, standing beside a boy with severe black eyebrows. Not Clara’s father, whom nobody spoke of (and pretended they didn’t talk about for reasons of decency, not because nobody, including Lila, knew who he was), but someone else. A hole in the family that was supposed to be here. On waking, Piper wanted to prowl the village, looking for that young boy who’d gone missing, who wasn’t ever actually there.
“And her grandfather,” Lila added.
Piper looked over at Meyer. He was almost seventy. Piper, at fifty-six, was courting the reaper. Meyer’s age flat-out thumbed its nose at him. But Meyer never got sick, same as his brother. Sometimes it seemed like the governor was blessed by the gods and might live forever. Or by someone else — a bargain made, to keep his spirit young.
Meyer looked back at Piper, his eyes still as vibrant as they’d been when she’d met him. Which had happened when …
But that box in her mind was also empty.
Meyer stood. He pulled on loose pants and a shirt, then opened the rear door. She knew where he was going, and the knowledge took some of the air from her lungs. Every day, he visited Kindred in the small hut on their small plot, nearest the governor’s house but still separated by a sparse, ratty lawn. It was more like feeding a wild animal than paying a visit.
“Meyer,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Meyer!”
He turned fully, waiting.
“Something’s happening, isn’t it?”
He turned back and left without a word.
Lila came forward. She sat on the bed’s edge, watching her father leave and close the door. She swept her housedress up beneath her and perched half-on, half-off. A flash of something nostalgic invaded Piper’s mind —
(She and Lila in a dark place, made of stone, underground, quiet, the darkness lit not by candles but like some bit of leftover magic that today they’d have run straight to Stranger’s Church.)
— and then she was Lila again, her own daughter now seen through a recent veil of unreality, sitting on the bed, making Piper feel like an imposter. As if Lila had come to her for something that Piper wasn’t qualified to dispense.
“She was asking me again, Mom,” Lila said, and again Piper felt a strange reaction to the word, wishing for once that Lila, now an adult, would call Piper by her name. “Clara was. And not just in the dream, I mean. In wakefulness.”
“Asking what?”
“Asking me about her father. About you. About my mom.”
Piper didn’t like the sound of that. Lila had listed three items, not two. And from experience, Piper knew exactly how Clara asked those questions: not like she wanted to know but like she knew fine — and wanted to see if you did, too.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“That’s probably why you had your dream.” Piper’s eyes went to the still-open door. She’d accepted this early intrusion without question and so had Meyer, but Lila hadn’t really explained. It was only a dream. But Piper’s own dream was still clinging to her insides like a drowning man fighting the tide. It was true: Something was happening. The idea of Lila bursting in to tell them something so mundane made sense, and that in itself was a bother.
“Maybe.” Lila sighed. “Probably.”
The rear door opened. Meyer was already back, this time with Kindred. They’d once been identical, but Piper now found herself drawn to their change in diverging directions. Meyer’s clothing was sold by the tradesmen, but Kindred wore mostly loose shirts that had gone threadbare at the elbows. Kindred spent more time in the sun — he’d burned, tanned, then wrinkled. Meyer’s skin was comparatively smooth. Kindred’s hair had grown long, while Meyer kept his short.
“Something’s happened with Clara,” Meyer said.
Piper answered, reaching for Lila’s wrist. “What is it?”
“Word came from the Mullah in the hills,” Kindred said. “Through a courier.”
“Is she with them? With the Mullah?” Lila said it like an accusation, but just because Kindred and Meyer supported Clara’s bizarre practices didn’t mean they were to blame. Clara was twenty-seven years old and far beyond needing her mother’s permission or approval. Piper, however, could hear the edge in Lila’s tone.
You two got her into this, and now look what’s happened.
Between the lines, Piper got a distinct, obvious flash of knowledge that had no business being in her head, and she knew what Meyer had been keeping from her. They’d had their bond from the start, and Piper had always felt excluded. Now she was trying the Mullah’s brew — and Meyer, Piper knew without a doubt, had been drinking it alongside her.
(It’s not true.)
But no, it very much was. Piper knew, because she’d always known more than she should … or at least, that’s the impression she was now beginning to get, more and more with every passing moment.
“I think so. Yes.”
Piper raised her eyes. Looked into Kindred’s and saw more than the darkness seen by the others. Now Piper saw something else. Something so familiar and so near, she could almost touch it. She almost flinched, wanting to avert her eyes, because in that moment it was as if she and Kindred shared an intimate history: as if before she’d been with Meyer, she’d been with him.
(In an enormous stone house with many levels. In a city that fell to ashes. Before the New World. When Lila was …
When Lila was …)
Piper put her hand over her mouth and uttered a noise like a squeak. All heads turned to her, and Piper could only look back, pulse heavy, chest wanting to heave in a parody of panic.
Lila wasn’t her daughter.
Clara wasn’t her granddaughter.
In all their lives, how had none of them known?
“Piper?” said Meyer.
Meyer and Kindred weren’t brothers.
And there had been another man in her past. A man named … named …
“Clara will be okay, Piper.” Meyer put his strong arm around her, keeping legs made of jelly from letting her fall. “But we need to go to the Mullah. Now.”
Piper took two long, deep breaths, then nodded to indicate that she was okay.
But she wasn’t.
Because something had changed.
It wasn’t the drink, the drug, or the practice Meyer and Sadeem the Wise simply called “meditation” that had caused whatever was wrong with Clara now.
It was something else. Creeping and distant, crawling back into Piper’s awareness with black claws and purring throats.
A wall had fallen.
Whatever Clara and the Mullah had been trying to do in those far-off caves, they’d either catastrophically failed or catastrophically triumphed.
Chapter Three
“Come. Hurry.”
Sadeem waved a frantic hand at Peers. He scuttled over, ducking low to avoid the outcropping. Watching him approa
ch, Sadeem wasn’t sure whether to envy the younger man’s agility or give thanks for his own increasingly stooped posture. When he’d first come here — in his midfifties, about the age Peers was now — he’d hit his head on that stupid outcropping three times out of every four. Now he missed it because he’d aged into clearance.
“Yes, Sage.”
“Bring her water.”
“Can she drink it?” Peers looked down at the young woman who, if they all didn’t know better, might appear to be sleeping with her head in Sadeem’s lap.
“She’s not actually unconscious. Just … below consciousness.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes, Peers. She is still here. Just kept from us, as if she’s been taken behind a curtain.”
“Was she taking …” He trailed off.
Sadeem shook his head. “Clara doesn’t need the medicine to talk to the others.” In truth, he was thinking of discouraging the medicine’s use for the whole clan instead of just keeping Clara off it. Only Governor Dempsey seemed to benefit from the drug, but even that felt to Sadeem like playing with fire. Not only did they need to tiptoe around Dempsey as a need-to-know visitor (even he didn’t realize which portals into the collective the medicine opened; he simply knew it felt familiar, as if from a forgotten life), but Sadeem wasn’t convinced the Astrals didn’t see through Meyer’s eyes whenever he took it. If they kept giving Dempsey the drug, they might be turning him into a spy against them. That’s how the Astrals had originally seen much of the world and selected their viceroys, after all.
Meyer and even Kindred — though Sadeem had his doubts about the latter — were part of this. But letting Meyer participate in the ceremonies was simply playing their part as the keepers of the Astral portal so that they could do the rest without being watched. If he knew too much about what Clara and the other Lightborn were doing, he wouldn’t understand.
At least not until he and everyone else truly understood.
Peers nodded assent, then ran off to fetch the water.