Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  But he was a good Astral. He’d helped them. He wasn’t Meyer’s literal brother, but they were like siblings. They’d shared a strong psychic bond — one that combined to make an uber-mind that had been damn near unstoppable. But that had gone when Kindred — quite on his own, far before the Forgetting — grew dark and angry, distancing himself from Meyer, and becoming something else.

  Still, what he’d said was true. The logic was hard to argue.

  There were no other ideas.

  Even if they didn’t seek Meyer, what else would they do? Return to the village, with their memories full? Back to a group of people who’d probably all woken up as well, all unsure of what do with their future?

  And lastly — most importantly — there was the fact that things couldn’t get much worse. Were the Astrals going to catch them? They had caught them, then left without looking at them twice.

  When Kindred made his proposal, Piper countered. They were already headed to the Mullah caves to find Clara. Kindred hadn’t known she was in trouble, and seemed to resent not being told.

  So they’d gone, toward sounds like gunshots. Toward the departure place of what seemed to have been an Astral shuttle, screaming away from the horizon as it had with Meyer in its belly.

  And the Mullah at the caves had told them, Miss Clara is gone. Sage Sadeem is gone. Astrals came, and so did gunmen. Now they are all gone.

  Which way?

  The Mullah couldn’t say.

  Up? Piper had pointed toward the sky — along the path of the departing shuttle?

  But the Mullah didn’t know.

  And Kindred had said, Here. I know the way.

  How?

  I saw it in a dream.

  Piper shifted on the sand, her eyes to the stars. Kindred was sleeping, just like her non-daughter, Lila. Finally, she slept without dreaming.

  In the morning, Kindred woke them both. Breaking camp was simple, and nobody, anticipating a quick trip, had brought food. There was a spring, and farther on they crossed the same river, though downstream, that fed the village. They passed without stopping home, knowing it wasn’t what it used to be.

  “The monolith,” Lila said to Kindred. “You’re taking us to the monolith, aren’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I never saw it while I’d forgotten. Did you?”

  Piper hadn’t. The legends scared her.

  She looked over to see Lila shaking her head.

  “I think I know what I see,” Kindred said after registering nos. “But in my head, and in my old memories, it’s one thing. And my knowledge of this land …” He shook his head, looking less sinister in the sun than he did in his shack, perhaps thanks to his Meyer-mind finding its way home. “That knowledge was built by another person.”

  It wasn’t technically accurate, but Piper knew what he meant. And so they walked, Kindred clinging to his suspicions, until Lila checked their directions, seemed to consult something inside herself, and said, “It’s the freighter, isn’t it? The one that …” But Lila trailed off, too. “Why don’t I remember?”

  “I think it’s because there were only two times you might have been able to connect ‘freighter’ to ‘monolith.’ The first was in the time after we’d arrived but before we’d totally forgotten our old memories to find this fog of new ones. The second was a few months later, when the ship returned to try and brainwash us again. Do you remember that?”

  The women nodded. Piper hadn’t remembered until now. It was a third kind of memory: belonging to the primitive she’d been for two decades, yet salted with knowledge from now of what the big black ship had been. At the time, none of them had understood. Memories came piecemeal. For the most part, until they forgot it had ever returned, they’d simply been terrified.

  “The blacksmith,” Kindred said. “Carl. Do you know him?”

  Piper said she did. But only barely; Kindred handled the horses.

  “I think he brought it here. I think he told me once, but even he could barely remember.”

  “But the monolith is in the desert.”

  “It’s closer to the sea. It grounded when the water receded. Carl told me …” He squinted. “He told me …”

  “What?” Lila asked.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s South African. From the capital there … Roman Sands?”

  “Then he’d have taken the ark,” said Piper. “Same as the one from Ember Flats.”

  All of them puzzled. Where had the arks gone? They’d vanished after dropping the people in their new homes, after they’d had room to forget why and how they’d arrived. Cleaned up, maybe. Zapped away by their alien overlords, unlike all the other relics. But hadn’t it always been that way? Piper had seen Meyer’s movies and watched proper Ancient Aliens documentaries with Cameron, at Benjamin’s ranch. Archaeologists were always digging up oddities from the past that didn’t make sense. Maybe that was the idea: to leave yesterday’s trinkets as tomorrow’s unexplainable shit.

  “No,” Kindred said. “I think he came on …”

  They crested the hill.

  “That,” he finished.

  It was enormous. Like something from another life. So incongruous, sitting nearly upright in the sand, relatively free of rust, more or less preserved. So obviously from a different time and place. No wonder the people had feared it.

  From where they stood, it looked to Piper like it might be a half mile long. It had a bridge near the front, elevated high. And the rear was mostly countless stacks of shipping crates — the kind that had once upon a time been destined to be unloaded at their destination, then heaped along an outbound train.

  “Why here?”

  Piper stopped wondering by the end of her question — by then she’d noticed that there were already people aboard the ghost vessel, plain as day.

  Chapter Twenty

  Meyer woke.

  Although, he realized, he’d never precisely been asleep.

  There was a man beside him. From the outside, Meyer recognized the man as Carl the blacksmith, whom Kindred knew better than Meyer did. He was broad and tall, looking ten years younger than he must be. From the inside, Meyer could see the man’s true identity as if he were wearing a name tag. Carl Nairobi, from Cape Town, South Africa — more recently known as Roman Sands. Meyer had once sat with this man in his kitchen, told him not to board the vessel that would protect others from the flood, and follow the silver ball to find another way.

  Or was that someone else?

  Meyer’s head was swimming. He wasn’t thinking straight. It was the drugs. The medicine. But how was that possible? He hadn’t taken any since he’d last seen Juha, the shaman, at the old house in Los Angeles, with Heather. He’d talked to her recently, too. And that was strange because he was entirely certain that Heather was dead. Except that nobody was ever really dead, were they?

  Beside him in the white holding room, Carl said, “You okay, man?”

  “I know you.”

  “I know you know me. We been here long enough by now.”

  How long was long enough? Meyer sent his mind back. Reality stretched like taffy. He saw colors. Everything seemed clear. The universe was a jigsaw puzzle. He’d noticed that before when high, and Heather had always laughed at him because Meyer became wise when taking his medicine. But after a session with Juha, the aftereffects of ayahuasca always led to decisions he’d never seen as obviously correct before. After sessions, he tended to meet the right people at the right time. It gave him clarity. It showed him that one day visitors would come — and that when they did, he needed to be at his Axis Mundi in Vail. He wasn’t sure how he’d get there; he kept meaning to research apocalyptic prepping to make sure he didn’t conduct his eventual business like an idiot. He’d known only the mandate: Get to Vail when the ships arrive. Even his family hadn’t needed to go, according to the visions. Only Meyer had to reach Vail before the Astrals entered the atmosphere all those years ago. Because Meyer ha
d a date with abduction, though he hadn’t figured it out at the time.

  Now it seemed as obvious as the swirling and shifting nose on Carl Nairobi’s face.

  “What did they do to you?” Carl was peering into Meyer’s eyes, and only once he saw that Carl was above rather than in front of him did he realize that he was lying down. “They give you drugs or something?”

  “No.”

  “When that hot blonde found me on the ship, they put some weird helmet on me and tried to fuck the thoughts right out of my head. They do that to you? With the hat with the wires down the back?”

  “No.”

  But Meyer could see that Carl was believing none of it. As far as he was concerned, Meyer was stoned out of his gourd. In Carl’s mind, the only way to explain Meyer’s transcendental state was drugs, alien mind-rape, or both. They’d been in this white room on the ship together for a few hours after Meyer had been shoved into it, then he’d been taken for questioning by the tall blonde — or rather, the Astral pretending to be one. She’d had a wire helmet like Carl described but had never put it on Meyer’s head. The room seemed prepped for her to do so, but she’d appeared hesitant, and Meyer felt like they’d been two awkward kids in his youth, killing time in a closet while waiting for Seven Minutes in Heaven to end without touching.

  Carl figured there’d been some mind-screwing going on in that room, before the Titans returned Meyer to their shared cell. But in reality, Meyer and the Astral woman had stayed chaste: her wary and him getting into these altered states apparently all on his own.

  Meyer saw himself crossing the river as the flooding came, getting trapped, and eventually saved by … Meyer?

  He saw himself chasing Cameron, Piper, Charlie Cooke, and one or two others through Benjamin’s raided Utah lab. Every time one of them turned to look, Meyer ducked out of sight, and their minds wouldn’t let them see him.

  Although that was strange because Meyer was sure he’d still been in captivity on the Vail mothership at the time.

  He remembered leading the city of Heaven’s Veil, even though he’d been on the mothership then as well, and had never actually been viceroy.

  He remembered persuading Christopher to ride away from the RV in the escape vehicle when they’d been storming through cannibal tribes on the outskirts of Ember Flats. Christopher would get away and then set off a bomb. The distraction would give the others enough time to escape.

  But hadn’t Meyer been at the front of the RV at the time, standing beside Aubrey? And also beside … himself?

  “Man, what did they do to you?” Carl had asked that before. He was being repetitive. But that was the world. The same things happened over and over, in a loop, until the right things changed and someone finally got the lesson.

  The Astrals hadn’t done this to him — this curious feeling of a drug trip without any drugs.

  Something else had.

  Meyer, as part of his mind floated away, could see into the whole of consciousness. He understood, the way he always used to understand when taking the medicine with Heather. But there wasn’t just one consciousness this time. Now there were two, connected by a bridge. And it was strange that Meyer realized that both collective unconsciousnesses — not just the human side — felt more familiar than his own skin.

  Carl was still watching Meyer. Not precisely because he cared about him per se but because they were the only two humans here. The Astrals had snatched Carl from the monolith before grabbing Meyer from the desert during his trip to the Mullah caves. If Meyer went as nuts as Carl seemed to think he was, Carl would be alone. No one liked to be alone. So it was a good thing that from Meyer’s currently enhanced perspective, nobody ever was alone.

  He saw the monolith, the freighter. He saw it through Kindred’s eyes and Stranger’s. He saw the invisible thread connecting the men as they kept themselves carefully distant, though they were of course not seeing that filament themselves.

  He saw Piper.

  Lila.

  Peers Basara.

  And the former viceroy of Roman Sands, who had a secret that even she didn’t know.

  And he saw what was waiting, hidden among the cargo, ready to spring like a box full of snakes.

  Meyer ducked beneath his surface reality. One dimension deeper. When he and the Astrals had first seen each other, this was where they’d connected. Nothing could travel faster than light. Bannister’s team had known that, and so had the rebel monks in Heaven’s Veil. The only way to travel as far as these ships was to squeeze through the layer beneath. Traveling without traveling. Thinking across light years in seconds.

  The Astrals had watched the world through Meyer’s eyes. They’d used the drug visions to see the human world.

  But the street went both ways, and now Meyer could see it plain as day. Ever since whatever Clara had been trying to do with the Astral mind had succeeded and the artificial divisions had fallen.

  There was a dimension beneath the three most people knew. Several hidden dimensions, in fact.

  Meyer saw the Astrals’ secret.

  “You don’t have to kill them,” Meyer said. “You can outrun them.”

  Carl stepped away, shaking his head, and Meyer saw only the naked white ceiling.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  You don’t have to kill them. You can outrun them, said Kindred’s own voice inside his head.

  And then there was a vision. A sense that was more a wave of understanding than a set of step-by-step instructions. They needed to search the cargo. That, they’d all agreed on. But now he had a new sense of peril (unsure exactly what it was) and knew they had to search anyway.

  You don’t have to kill them.

  “Kill what?” Piper asked.

  He’d spoken aloud without knowing or meaning to. For a flicker, Kindred had the sense of being somewhere else. As if he had two set of eyes — well, not just eyes but all of his senses — and one had been here on the freighter while the other had been in another place. An all-white place. And he’d been with … Carl? Yes, Carl. But when had that been?

  “Kill what, Kindred?” Piper repeated.

  Kindred looked over his shoulder. They’d moved down from the bridge and were about to enter the ship’s massive rear, where cargo boxes were stacked like God’s LEGOs, but Kindred couldn’t shake the feeling of being followed, or watched. Both. The feeling hadn’t been there a moment before, appearing about the time he’d been talking to Carl — except that he hadn’t talked to Carl; he’d been here on the freighter the entire time. So where had that creeping feeling come from? It felt like it was right here and now, urgent. But it must have been a while ago. Because Carl wasn’t here. According to Peers, he’d been carried into a shuttle and presumably taken to an orbiting mothership. Stranger would tell him the same thing, except that Kindred wouldn’t go near him. That was a terrible idea, same as always.

  “Are you all right?” Piper asked.

  And Carl’s voice: Man, what did they do to you?

  “I’m fine.”

  “What’s between you and Stranger?” Piper asked.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “When our group came across the dunes, I thought you’d recognized them on the deck. I thought you knew it was him.”

  “I did.” They all had. It was easy. The group didn’t make a damned bit of sense, at least not to anyone without Kindred’s dreams, where eight people were standing beside the ship: himself, Stranger, Peers, Liza Knight (because that wasn’t crazy), Clara, Meyer, Carl, and the old Mullah wise man whose name Kindred didn’t know. He hadn’t been surprised to see them, even with Lila and Piper to muddy the waking dream’s waters beside him.

  “But you wouldn’t shout. I had to do it.”

  “And?”

  “And then you stayed back when they came down.”

  “Liza Knight makes me nervous. You remember who she was, right? Roman Sands?”

  “It’s not Liza you’re clearly staying away from. There was always something between
you and him. We just accepted it when we didn’t have our memories, but it always felt strange. I remember sensing that you really wanted to meet him, but refused to. So what’s between you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Piper.”

  She watched him for a long second, obviously not believing. But then, she’d been looking at him that way ever since he’d run up to them on the sand. She’d never believed him. Wasn’t that why they’d gone after Clara without telling him? They shouldn’t have done that. Hadn’t Clara been his granddaughter once, too? Arguably, Clara was more Kindred’s kin than Piper’s. At least they shared memories and genetics, borrowed or not.

  She looked like she might keep prodding — to ask why everyone was simply accepting the old viceroy’s presence in a group with the town mystic and a Mullah black sheep, perhaps — but instead she met his eyes with silence, then turned back to the narrow hallway. After a handful of steps, she turned. Kindred’s feet seemed anchored. He hadn’t moved an inch.

  “What’s with you?”

  “I get this feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  “There’s something out there.”

  “On the ship?”

  He nodded.

  “So now you believe in ghost stories?”

  “Why did they leave this ship where it was, Piper? Why not destroy it?”

  “They left a lot of artifacts. Maybe they wanted us to wonder, thousands of years in the future, the way Benjamin wondered about ancient aliens.”

  “I don’t like it. We all knew it was here, but nobody had the guts to explore it. People who did said they saw things aboard. Heard things.”

  “We didn’t know it was a ship back then. Now we do. It’s an old, abandoned place.” Her forehead bunched. “What’s going on with you, Kindred?”

  What did they do to you?

  And the other voice, which at first Kindred mistook for his own: You don’t have to kill them. You can outrun them.