Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  Sadeem, between Clara and the Astral, mumbled assent.

  “Why don’t you tell me the same story, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “It’s meaningless,” Sadeem said as they mounted the stairs, coming topside. “As I told Eternity when leaving the ship.”

  “We know it’s not. Nor are you fooling anyone.”

  Sadeem looked back at Clara, confused. They hadn’t discussed this in years. It was an old tale for an ancient age — and like all of the legends, equated to nothing. We know it’s not? Not fooling anyone? That was news to Clara and Sadeem.

  (Or is it?)

  Now that Clara thought about it with the firewall down, maybe it wasn’t news to her at all.

  The question must have been rhetorical because when Sadeem didn’t answer, Divinity didn’t nudge him. Instead she walked a few more paces and stopped as light dawned ahead, desert sun beating like a fire from above. They were down the outer stairs and onto a stone apron, a parked Astral shuttle resting on the sand ahead.

  The woman turned.

  She gave that same knowing, infuriating, not-at-all-alien smile.

  Then from the left and the right, came the running and shouting and screaming.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kamal held the ancient piece of iron and watched the cave entrance. He’d seen the Astrals land their shuttle, cross the sand, and go in just as he himself had been about to approach the Mullah encampment. That sight had changed his mind. Shit, as they used to say back in his relative boyhood, was about to get real. And he’d rather be real from a distance than up close where things could get messy.

  He hunkered down. The others did the same behind him.

  Seeing the Reptars and Titans made his skin crawl. The sensation was accompanied by the weirdest, most out-of-place pang of nostalgia. He’d worked beside those things for years in Ember Flats, and even though it was clear now (and perhaps always had been) that they were the enemy, his first reaction on seeing them now was one of familiarity.

  Maybe the Titans had some bland, bureaucratic paperwork for Kamal to sign like they used to.

  Maybe the woman leading them (Divinity, probably, though this one didn’t move as stiffly as he recalled) wanted to have a chat with Viceroy Jabari — and while she waited, perhaps Kamal should offer her tea. Divinity had never accepted tea or coffee or anything else back in Ember Flats, but Kamal had never tired of asking. Just to fuck with those flesh bags masquerading as human proxies, because why not.

  Well, Mara wasn’t around now. Hell, Mara might not even be alive anymore. Kamal himself was forty-four if he was counting right, but doing so required conversions that nobody should ever have to do: adding twenty-four years of life in the city to twenty (or so) years thinking he was head of a nomadic tribe. And wasn’t that discussion going to be uncomfortable if Kamal and his people eventually had it? The “tribe” he’d been leading for two decades, he now remembered, had once been a group of terrified government interns he’d encountered on his mad dash from the Ember Flats palace basement to its front door.

  Mara would be older, and these days people didn’t live as long. But if Kamal managed to find her again, they’d have a good laugh like they used to.

  Thought you were leaving me behind to die when you got on that ark and the floods came, didn’t you? Har-har; I’m back and am going to tell all of your villager friends about the time you got drunk at the palace party and accepted a piggyback ride from Dan, that fat accountant from the Ember Flats treasury.

  It should have felt funnier than it was. But the man who’d appeared after communications died between Kamal and Mara hadn’t been laughing then and wasn’t laughing now. Kamal’s current situation was thick with some kind of irony, but he wasn’t sure what kind that might be. Kamal should have felt like a hero in the making — what with his pistol in hand and the enemy inside, bothering the people he’d come to see. Instead, with his memories freshly returned, he felt like Mara Jabari’s twenty-four-year-old aide again. Kamal didn’t know how to fire a pistol, and for all he knew this old thing would blow his hand off if he tried.

  Meyer Dempsey is special, Mara had told him. The Initiate always knew he was unique.

  And then the voice of the man in blue jeans and boots, who’d given him the ball that had led Kamal to his boat — and ultimately to shore just ten miles or so from where Jabari made her new home:

  One day you will suddenly wake to a new truth. And when that happens, you must go quickly to the east, toward the rising sun, until you find her.

  Not Mara Jabari. The man in jeans had meant Dempsey’s granddaughter. She was also special. Then he’d given him the ball — a burnished silver thing, smooth and beautiful to the touch — as an otherworldly token.

  Go east from where? To where?

  The man had nodded to the sphere. It knows.

  But the flood …

  It will see you to a boat. And it will see the boat to land.

  Kamal had no reason to believe the man at the time. He’d recently said his final goodbye to Mara on her ark as she went about her horrible chore of choosing who would live or die. He’d made peace with the idea of drowning. But because that sounded like such a horrible way to go, he’d weighed it against a self-inflicted gunshot. There was a pistol in a safe, beside many others. He’d been staring at one, loaded in a way he hoped was correct, when the man had entered through the locked portal as if it were a screen door, twirling those spellbinding spheres in his large weathered hands.

  Take the guns. All of them. You will need them. A sack will do.

  “But there’s only one of me.”

  For now.

  But as Kamal watched the cave’s entrance with his heart beating out of his throat two decades later, every one of the interns-turned-tribesmen held a weapon. There’d been exactly as many guns in that old bag as there were people, all of them dry, all of them right where Kamal had left the weapons before forgetting, easy to find when his memories returned. And somehow, he was sure every one of those guns, despite their age, would shoot just fine.

  Kamal had watched the stranger, spellbound by his manner, irrationally sure that he’d spoken perfect truth.

  Why are you doing this? Kamal had asked. I’d made my peace. I was ready to die.

  It’s not time for you to die, the man in boots had said. You know what needs knowing — what needs telling to the future. And you have work yet to do.

  Kamal remembered how he’d cried, all his usual sarcasm gone.

  Thank you, he’d said. Thank you for saving my life.

  But the man had shaken his head.

  I’m not saving your life, he’d said. I’m saving mine.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For a moment, there was nothing but blackness. Clara saw the network against its usual ebony backdrop, cycling up as it always did. She saw the connecting lines, the nodes, the brighter spots already brighter. She could see the broken wall and the Astral mind recovering beyond, repressed memories streaming forth like water from a shattered dam. It all happened in a second, eclipsing everything.

  The front part of Clara’s mind was frenzied, scrabbling to regain control. Something was happening that demanded her attention. Behind it were the glimpses through other eyes — knowledge she could only experience in flashes like the second of a wave’s breaking. They meant little to Clara, but the collective network — not just her node upon it — knew those moments were important and pressed them to the front.

  Clara saw Peers and Stranger, oddly together, closing on a woman they both knew but didn’t expect. She was telling them a story she herself didn’t trust and that Clara knew hadn’t happened. There was something beneath the woman’s locked-down secret, fighting to be seen. It mattered. And it would tell them all where to go.

  We know it’s not meaningless.

  Why don’t you tell me the story of the Archetypes, if you don’t mind.

  A box.

  Something forgotten.

  Two halves of a w
hole.

  Then the vision was gone, and Clara saw Kindred with Piper and Lila, not in their home but in the open sand, their emotions complex and hard to untangle like a knot of wires, Kindred with a black beard and his hair out of order, glances traded between them and their destination unknown, or hidden, or suspected but unclear.

  And behind it all, something powering up like a gathering storm, pregnant with lightning.

  Your kind. They’re like ghosts.

  But Clara knew it wasn’t just the Lightborn this time. It was the children who were no longer children. Pieces of the puzzle that the man in blue jeans had ever-so-carefully assembled.

  A whisper from somewhere, maybe another mind, in the voice of Astral Divinity … or higher.

  In each epoch, there has been an element of uncertainty. A tool that was useful on one hand, but dangerous on the other.

  Your mind calls it chaos.

  Chaos.

  “Down! Get down!”

  Clara hit the ground, racking her skull against something hard and unyielding, inviting stars. She was suddenly on her back with Logan above her, his shoving hand still extended, crouching and looking out at something she couldn’t see. It took her three seconds to greet reality as her fugue ended, and in those few blinks she imbibed an eternity of new inputs, each as unexpected as it was terrifying:

  Sadeem toward the cave’s mouth remembered exiting but not returning, the rock chipping around him as if erupting in little explosions.

  Logan too high, ripe as a target for something Clara’s reeling mind hadn’t yet cottoned to.

  On the sand twenty feet ahead, a Titan, bleeding, its blood red as any human’s.

  The Reptars who’d been with them before Clara’s world had gone black now blurred as they savaged something unseen. Not two Reptars as Clara remembered, but three rushing around with things in their mouths that flapped red like sides of masticated beef and—

  (Three because the other Titan became a Reptar. They’re shape-shifters, remember?)

  and the most incongruous thing, which Clara’s mind took two full extra seconds to fathom: tiny, echoing bangs and the assault of rock chips amid whizzing projectiles.

  Gunshots?

  But that didn’t make sense. There hadn’t been guns since old humanity was abandoned twenty years in the past.

  “What’s happening?” Clara raised her head.

  Logan swung with alarm, pushing her down, eyes everywhere at once. But even Clara, as she fought for her bearings, could see the patterns emerging beyond the stone apron. The dark-haired woman, Divinity, had already made it to the shuttle. Reptars were feasting on something, but the gunshots had taken one of them down. Where Clara, Logan, Sadeem, and a few of the other Mullah had hidden themselves was entirely safe from gunfire. A stray bullet or two may have made their way into the area, but the people with the guns were shooting at the Astrals. Not even to kill them, but to clear the way.

  From the right.

  From the left.

  And with Divinity now entering the shuttle alone, there was only a pair of Reptars left to threaten them — or there would be, if they weren’t terrorizing their barely seen assailants. Or their barely seen rescuers.

  More shots. More fire. Then there was just the one Reptar left.

  “I don’t know.”

  But Clara knew Logan was answering a question she hadn’t asked. He thought she wanted to know who was shooting and why. But because her awareness had been hijacked at the worst time by the aftershocks of her recent psychic coma, she’d meant the question literally: What’s happening?

  Or more accurately, What happened?

  “Sadeem,” she said as Logan peeked out and ducked back in — as useless in battle, even if he’d been armed, as a man holding only a towel.

  “Someone just started shooting the minute we came out. They hit one of the Titans right away. Then the other became a Reptar, and they scattered, headed that way.” He pointed where most of the shooting, duly under cover over the dunes’ edges, seemed to be coming from. Clara turned her head as the remaining Reptar wrenched around, throwing something bloody to land on the ground and roll downhill. “Did something happen?” Sadeem’s eyes added, With you, just now?

  “What did she mean, Sadeem? About the Archetypes?”

  A bullet chipped rock, and they all ducked. Someone out there was hardly a crack shot.

  The shuttle lifted from the sand, apparently content to leave the Reptar behind. It disappeared in a streak toward the sky, but already Clara could feel an electric buzz — more from her internal compass, which seemed to have bled into the Astral consciousness as well as that of her species — than from the world around her. More would arrive, if they didn’t leave. Whatever the Astrals had come for

  (and gone to other places for; they’ve already taken some to their ships)

  was important enough to kill

  (and die)

  for.

  “Sadeem?”

  “I don’t know, Clara! I’ll be happy to just—”

  “More are coming,” Logan interrupted. “We have to get out of here.”

  The Reptar had turned and was creeping forward. Unseen hands fired more shots, but that was something Clara remembered the rebels discovering quickly during the occupation: Reptar carapaces were like armor. You could shatter them with bullets and hit the softer spots near the joints, but it wasn’t easy. That’s why people like Terrence had built bigger guns. If only they had one of those now.

  “Clara? Do you hear me?”

  “The portal,” Sadeem said, looking back into the cave’s mouth. “We’re supposed to protect the portal.”

  “Then you go right ahead and stay. Clara, you have to come with me.”

  “I’m not leaving Sadeem!”

  Something snapped inside Logan. Clara had met him as the Lightborn’s leader in Ember Flats, before her apparent pedigree had slowly and silently usurped him, and he’d always led with kid gloves rather than the strong arm that was more Clara’s style. He was brave but not foolhardy; he was noble but never really fought. During their brief time as a couple, before it became obvious how impossible a situation it was destined to be, he’d never raised his voice even though Clara had raised hers plenty.

  But now he did, grabbing her by the wrist like a possession.

  He turned on Sadden, moving too close, his composure gone as the gunshots focused on the coming Reptar.

  “Fuck your portal! You want to talk to the Astrals? Talk to that one!” He jabbed a finger at the Reptar as it turned, homed in on its oncoming fire. “I’m taking her away from here. It’s over. Do you hear me? You wanted people to remember? Now they do. But you’ve kicked the nest and pissed them off — now they’ll never leave the planet and let us be. All bets are off. There’s nothing left to do, okay? The days of meditating and taking drugs and trying to poke whatever they use for brains is over!”

  Logan’s grip tightened, pulling Clara to her feet. “You’re coming with me if I have to knock you out and drag you.”

  “Goddammit, Logan, you can’t—”

  “They’re not going to let you stay here, Clara! They came to take you to their ship, and they’ll come again and again until they succeed. Are you really too fucking blind to see that?”

  “Stop telling me what to do! You can’t tell me what—”

  A hum from above. A static charge. The Reptar turned, and although the sky was still clear, Clara could feel black thoughts screaming from it as its hideous alien face turned toward her.

  Someone was at their right. Someone in a white desert robe who seemed … familiar.

  “K—” But it couldn’t be. “Kamal?”

  He wasn’t on a horse, but was leading one. It had a saddle made of tanned hide, its remaining tacks of braided fiber. Maybe wherever he’d come from, they had a Lightborn to show them how to do things.

  “Long-time listener, first-time rescuer. Get on.” Kamal jerked his head toward the horse.

  “Bu
t how are you … Where did you come from?”

  “My mother’s uterus.” He shook the reins. “Please.”

  Clara looked at Logan, then Sadeem.

  Kamal glanced over when two tribesmen, dressed in white robes similar to Kamal’s, led another two mounts beside his. He turned to Clara, Logan, and Sadeem with an expression like pleading.

  “Please don’t tell me to leave and save myself. I’m scared out of my mind and will totally do it.”

  A volley of shots rang from the other side. There was a groaning, dying noise, and Clara looked over to see that the Reptar had finally fallen, a line of white-robed women and men rising slowly from their hiding spots like groundhogs greeting the day.

  “Hurry. Before they send reinforcements.”

  Clara looked at Logan. At Sadeem, whose eyes still strayed toward stubborn duty at the Astral portal behind him.

  Sadeem took the reins with a slight nod and a heavy sigh.

  They climbed on.

  And they rode.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Melanie stood in the white room, staring into the mirror. She’d seen so many people do something similar, always when alone. They’d face a mirror and eye their own reflection as if it were another person. As if the reflection might do something they hadn’t. Sometimes, those people would lean forward and gaze into their own eyes. Not like they’d gaze into a lover’s and not precisely to inspect sagging skin or bloodshot whites but more as if to say, Are you in there? Is there really someone under the flesh, or is it all just … chemistry?

  Melanie knew the answer but mimicked the actions anyway.

  Hands on the countertop, palms turned forward so her fingers could hang over the front with the heels on the surface. Leaning forward. Long nails — reinforced, with plenty of glue — making tiny noises on the sides. And she met her own eyes, just to see who was inside.

  Are you there?

  But of course she was. In this particular instance, she was more accurately “there” beneath the skin than she was while standing with her heeled shoes on the all-white floor. Or was she? Melanie didn’t need to be here. At least not like this. She was mostly in the other place in the most literal of senses, and being in front of the mirror — checking the mascara around her blue eyes as much as the metaphysical meaning behind the eyes themselves — wasn’t much more than a game, like playing dress-up.