Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  “Clara? What happened?” Sadeem repeated.

  Softly she said, “Logan. Why are you here?”

  “Sadeem sent for me.”

  “You should have called Stranger.” Clara lifted her blue eyes to Sadeem. They were like azure mercury, as if a glance might catch her irises shifting rather than staying where they belonged. Sadeem had always been her senior in years, experience, and knowledge, but between them Clara had always been the truest elder.

  “I sent for both. Logan came first.”

  “Where is Stranger?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t arrived.”

  “And Kindred. Did you send for Kindred?”

  “Why would I send for your uncle?” Sadeem asked.

  Clara shook her head — not in confusion but as if things were coming at her too fast and that particular wrinkle, which required too much explanation, would have to wait for later. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find them. When did you see them last?”

  “I haven’t actually seen either,” Logan said. “But I sent someone to Stranger. Yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “A blacksmith. Carl. He was having dreams. About the freighter. The one they call ‘the monolith.’”

  “Carl Nairobi.”

  “I think his name is Smith,” said Logan.

  She turned the tables on Logan, taking his hand instead of him taking hers. She looked from Logan to Sadeem, speaking to both.

  “Listen to me. Both of you. Sadeem already knows this, but Logan, you and the other Lightborn didn’t want to listen. The blacksmith—”

  “Clara …”

  “It’s not important right now,” she said, swinging herself around so that her legs rested on the floor, letting the young man’s hand drop. They’d had plenty of fights — Sadeem had only seen a fraction, and been a shoulder for Clara regarding many of the rest. But she brushed it away like an irritating distraction, returning the issue to center.

  “The blacksmith, Carl, drove that freighter from South Africa in the flood. It’s his, but he’s forgotten. What were his dreams? Did he tell you?”

  “Just that he was at the monolith. With …” Logan’s brow pinched. “With others.”

  “And what’s he doing there? In the dream.”

  “He didn’t tell me. Why?”

  Clara didn’t answer. Instead she turned to Sadeem.

  “I had my fingers in it, Sadeem. Same as every day.” She cast a quick apologetic look at Logan; between them, that “every day” had a hammer’s blunt force. “But it was like something started to move. And then it was there — just … there. But they must have felt it, because they stopped repelling me one to one and turned all their attention on me. It was like a blast. I was still in the grid. But I couldn’t move. Or pull back.”

  “Pull back from what?” Logan asked.

  “They — what? — shut you down?” Sadeem asked, ignoring Logan.

  “I gave them a target. I’ve been hidden by the … you know, the firewall thing. But once I got it open …” Clara shrugged.

  “So how did you …?” Sadeem trailed off, the rest of his question implied.

  “What are you two talking about?” Logan said.

  “But it’s happening, Sadeem. The puzzle. Its finally solving itself. But there’s more. Something went wrong.”

  “Wrong how?”

  Logan physically inserted himself between them. Both shut their open mouths, seeming to see him for the first time.

  “You called me here,” Logan said. “So how about you clue me in?”

  Clara hesitated, and for a long second Sadeem thought she might refuse to tell him out of spite. In the strictest sense, Logan had an opportunity to be involved from the beginning, but in the much more realistic, everyday sense Sadeem would have sided with Logan in the split. The work felt important now that Clara had broken through, but for two decades it had felt like a fool’s errand. Clara had given him little choice but to leave.

  “I broke through, Logan,” she said.

  “Through what?” Then: “Not through …”

  “Yes. Through the Forgetting.”

  “But …” Logan looked at Sadeem for help, and for a moment Sadeem thought the man might inform him that breaking through the Forgetting was a lost cause and that they’d been chasing that particular dog for twenty years. As if Sadeem didn’t know. But then Logan turned back to Clara and said, “How?”

  “They’ve always erased our minds before they leave. Sadeem told me that’s what the Mullah knew—”

  “What they believed,” Logan corrected.

  “What they knew,” Clara insisted. “The Astrals and the Mullah have had a pact since much, much further back in time than is commonly believed. There’s always been a group who knew about the Astrals, so they could pave the way.”

  “Traitors?” he said, glancing at Sadeem. But it was only a question, despite the word’s baggage.

  “More like representatives. The Astrals returned regardless. The Mullah are there to make sure things are fair from our end.”

  “Okay,” Logan said.

  “Remember how I said humanity is like a big ant farm to them? How the Astrals don’t really care what we do so long as they can observe it?”

  “But they judged us, Clara. That’s what the Ark was all about.”

  “Yes and no.” Sadeem, watching, knew this was something Clara said that Logan and the others never truly understood. “At some point, if we develop in just the right way between visits, they’ll decide we’ve evolved enough and have become worthy. But even the judgment we saw wasn’t due to our doing something wrong. It was just another test. When the whole thing began — when Cameron opened the Ark — that was humanity saying it was ready to take its shot. All that the Ark had recorded while the Astrals were gone came spilling out and into their minds, sort of like a jury seeing evidence in a trial.”

  “Like I said,” Logan told her.

  “But the real test came afterward. All those so-called plagues. The blood turning to water. Remember the mind-sharing stuff the Astrals had set up, to let us pool our thoughts through the stones around the capitals? When the Ark opened and what people thought was ‘judgment’ began, that was just one more thing the Astrals wanted to see us react to. And to get on the arks during the flood, each capital had a different ‘test’ to pass while the Astrals watched. In some cities, you had to be clever or strong or persistent to earn a place on the ark. In Ember Flats, it was the lottery. Remember how they made Mara Jabari choose who lived or died? That was just one more stimulus for response — so they could study Viceroy Jabari under pressure, and see how the rest of us behaved during it all. Maybe it looked like a heart attack killed her, but it wasn’t.” Clara’s face became grave. “I could see her from inside the network, Logan. It wasn’t a heart attack. It was guilt, built up below the surface like a blood clot.”

  “You can’t know that, Clara.” He said it to pacify her, but Sadeem wished he’d keep his platitudes to himself. Logan was out of the loop, in the periphery with the other Unforgotten, trying his damnedest to forget. He still thought he knew best, but he didn’t know half of what he thought he did.

  “I can see it all.” Clara was exasperated. This was an old argument, one the Lightborn had once understood but that only Clara had ever been able to immerse in — to touch and feel as if it were a real place. “I see our connected minds as a place of dots and lines. Like a giant web made of light, where each person is a shining node. And that network didn’t go away as the Astrals intended — the way it always has. They tried to erase us so we could start their experiment fresh, but we” — she emphasized the word, meaning the Lightborn — “were like a wild card they’d never encountered before. Every time they tried to erase one node on the web, the surrounding nodes brought it back. Like redundant backups. Or like a hologram.”

  “I know all of this,” Logan said.

  “I told you all of it. But you never listened. You were in too big a h
urry to give up and start forgetting like a good little boy.”

  Sadeem put his hand on Clara’s arm, breaking their imminent argument. He looked at Logan and said, “The Lightborn kept their foot in the door so the Astrals couldn’t finish the erasure. That’s why they came back months after everyone had forgotten them: to try again, with a new round of force.”

  “And then it would have been over,” Logan said, his eyes still hard on Clara. “They’d have let us get on with our lives, if some people could just let it go.”

  “It wasn’t over, Logan! I’ve been fighting them every day! Every goddamned day, their … their virus pushes against us, and I push back. Every day, they’re trying to finish the job.” She gave a tiny smirk. “But even the Forgetting is a system. And that means I can ‘hack’ them, too.”

  Logan stopped. Something seemed to dawn on him, darkening his eyes.

  “Is that what this is all about? You didn’t just ‘break through’ on our end, did you? You pushed back into the Astrals’ network. Their minds.”

  “Yes, and—”

  “I know you talked about it, but I can’t believe you’d be stupid enough to—”

  “What were we supposed to do? Just lie down and forget, like they wanted?”

  “Yes!”

  Clara smirked, crossed her arms, and turned away.

  “Logan,” said Sadeem. “You have to understand. The fact that you exist — you, Clara, all the others? That is what kept our ‘foot in the door.’ As long as there are Lightborn, the Astrals can’t erase human consciousness.”

  “They’re back, you know,” Logan said. “Some of us are starting to see them again — not through our own eyes but through other people’s. They came back to Earth because of your stupid foot in the door.”

  “They never left. It’s like Clara said. We’re a loose end. They can’t go until they’re sure. And they can’t be certain because as long as there are Lightborn, the network is too strong. Not consciously, maybe, but below the surface, where Clara can see it and the rest of you can feel it, if you’re honest. Something about you stymied them this time. You can’t just ‘decide to forget’ and expect them to go away. Fighting back was the only way to break our twenty-year stalemate.”

  “They did something to try and shut me down,” Clara added, her tone a bit quieter, less angry. “Because once I pushed into them, it’s like something new broke open. The whole network started to light up.”

  “So?”

  “People are remembering, Logan. That’s why we have to find Stranger. And Kindred. And, I think, your friend Carl.”

  “Why?” His own anger was mostly gone. Now he looked concerned, maybe confused. Sadeem couldn’t blame him. The village — and, presumably, the many other villages like it pocking the globe as seeds — had spent twenty years missing the past. If it had come screaming back all at once, the result would be chaos.

  For the first time in years, Sadeem saw the young Lightborn smile.

  “Because I know something the Astrals are just now beginning to realize,” Clara said. “They came here to infect our minds — but as it turns out, the stream flows both ways. And that means that we’ve infected them, too.”

  Logan looked from Clara to Sadeem, but the old man had nothing to offer. A few minutes ago, Clara had been unconscious and in trouble, but now she seemed nearly victorious. Whatever her implication, it was news to Sadeem.

  “When the wall fell, I could see into their collective instead of just ours,” she said, lips smiling wider. “I know what they want. I know what they don’t understand and what they’ll try to find out. I know they’ve had an agent here, among us, all along, spying for them. And I think I might have an idea what we need to do next.”

  But something was bothering Sadeem, and had been since his subconscious mind began putting two and two together: if the Lightborn problem couldn’t be solved, the Astrals would eventually tire of trying to fix it — and if they’d been bothered enough by Clara’s intrusion to return as Logan suggested, it could only be one thing.

  If you can’t fix a condemned house, the best choice might be to declare a loss and burn it down.

  “They’ll kill us off,” Sadeem said. “We have to warn people. We have to find a way to … to …”

  But where would they go? Where would they hide?

  Clara grabbed Sadeem by the wrist when he turned away. Her small hand was more powerful than it should have been.

  “Sadeem,” she said, “did I ever tell you about my Cousin Timmy?”

  Chapter Ten

  Stranger stopped. He moved behind a large rock formation, wondering if he should have come this way. It was a neither/nor decision. He wasn’t doing what he’d been asked, though that last blast had left him with the impression that it didn’t matter — Clara was fine. And he hadn’t followed Carl when he’d spotted him heading out while overanalyzing his choices, though maybe he should have done that, too. Hell, they could have gone together. It would spoil Stranger’s image as an all-knowing sage, but what the hell; other than his memories, he hadn’t been much of a know-it-all since just before the Forgetting, anyway.

  There had been a time when he’d been more energy than man. He’d once fed himself back into a Reptar and blown it to bits. That trick might come in handy now if the Astrals had really returned, but those days had passed. By the end, once Stranger was done sowing his seeds — obvious ones like the viceroys and their guiding helpers, plus less-conspicuous souls like Shen the fisherman — something had shifted. That extra unedited Meyer Dempsey he’d copied from the mothership after getting himself temporarily abducted must have altered something inside himself. For twenty years, he’d been more man than energy. But didn’t that make sense?

  The first fake Meyer’s anomaly had been purged when the Astrals tried a second time with Kindred. Sacrificing himself for Heather had been delicious icing on that particular ironic cake.

  The anomaly had decided it didn’t like being forced out, and then — perhaps more human than humans themselves — had become the Pall.

  Cameron’s blind leap — another sacrifice, if Stranger was keeping score — had changed the Pall into something else, sending feedback inside the system, magnified like an echo back on itself.

  And now here Stranger was, twice the man he used to be, if he’d ever really been a man. It was as much of a neither/nor as his present course of action. Man enough to live among them, not quite man enough to fit. He’d forgotten some of himself — but like Clara, he was plagued by what he’d remember forever.

  Like the way Heather had died saving Cameron … and how Trevor had died saving Piper.

  Heather. Cameron. Trevor. Piper.

  He was kin to them all — twice the kin, perhaps, than Kindred. But he’d never lived, technically speaking, with any of them. He’d walked alone, taking long pilgrimages while the villagers stayed complacently, ignorantly rooted. And yet in some ways, the people who’d died and those who still lived were like a splinter. In some ways, Clara was like his own granddaughter, the way she was Meyer’s and sort of Kindred’s. But in other ways, she was a troubled girl who’d never stood a chance. Like Stranger, the girl was born with a burden. For now, they were friends, same as he and Piper. But his inner Meyers screamed to differ, and Stranger had grown adept at stuffing them down to bury his subversion.

  Stranger stood. He looked around. The sky was still clear. Of course it was; he couldn’t exactly read Astral minds these days, but knew they wanted to keep a low profile. There was still something here to lose. The aliens didn’t want to give up on the millennia-long human experiment any more than the humans wanted to be shaken from the Etch A Sketch. If they were good scientists, they’d have similar experiments running on other worlds, possibly all seeded from the same stock. There might be quasi-human populations out there on countless worlds — and for all Stranger knew, Astrals merely hopped from colony to colony checking on subjects. But they’d invested a lot of time in humanity, according to Sadeem
and Peers Basara, back before Peers had mentally erased his apocalyptic mistake. The Mullah knew how far back the Astral chain went, and how important the experiment was. They’d end it if they had to. But given all the trouble this latest batch of humanity seemed to be having forgetting, the aliens probably didn’t want to pock the sky with shuttles and motherships.

  But of course the Astrals would be out here.

  Stranger pulled one of the polished spheres from his robe, set it on his palm, and waited to see what it might say. But there was nothing. The things didn’t see the future, and if Stranger himself was having such a hard time guessing where the players had ended up (understanding chaos as he did), then there was little chance the balls would.

  He pocketed the sphere. This was unwritten. It wasn’t in the Mullah’s history, or even the Astrals’. There were ways the resets were supposed to play out, just as there were ways they were supposed to begin. But there had never been Lightborn. Or Cousin Timmy.

  Truth was, Stranger had been having dreams, too.

  He ascended the rise, peered again at the hulking metal form in the distance. It looked different now. Part of it was the sun; he tried never to visit the old freighter in the daytime. Part of it was knowledge: something new he’d realized — that they all were realizing — about this place. When they’d parted, before Stranger had moved to find Clara then changed his mind, Carl’s forehead had wrinkled, his lips pursing. And he’d said, You told me not to get on the boat, didn’t you? But here I am, right where the boat I didn’t take ended up. So why did it matter?

  But maybe the most significant thing making the beached freighter feel different to Stranger was the shuttle at its stern, winking in the sunlight as a woman in an incongruous red dress approached it, flanked by black Reptars and bone-white Titans. The Titans were holding yet another form between them, this one almost completely inert — Carl Nairobi, barely able to stand.

  Stranger watched the group board the shuttle. It levitated a foot or so then streaked skyward. It took mere seconds to accelerate, for Carl’s benefit no doubt. Subject a human body to that many Gs, and he’d turn to jelly.