by Platt, Sean
“What was the other opinion?” Meyer asked.
“That we should consider the farm a loss, and exterminate the remaining stock.”
Meyer met her gaze, unwilling to show any fear.
Divinity stood and began to walk the room’s perimeter.
“Now that Clara has forced the human collective to backwash into ours, the need for a final decision has become much more urgent.” She shook her head, and a tiny smile found her lips. It wasn’t warm at all. “I’ll just go ahead and say it, Mr. Dempsey — we’ve lost our control of you. There was always a chance we could contain the Lightborn infection, but not anymore. Now it’s spreading. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Earth will need to be declared a loss. All that’s left is for the collective to accept it. And that’s why I’m talking to you now.”
“Okay,” said Meyer, trying and mostly failing to deliver a neutral response. He didn’t like dignifying any of this, but it all rang true. And this was something he wanted — perhaps needed — to know.
Reluctantly, he added, “Why?”
“Because Eternity insists on non-interference, there’s only so much we can do. We can force a Forgetting, but if it fails, we can’t go down there and coach you into a new government with your memories intact. We can set the Mullah as guardians, but because the last epoch’s Mullah turned on us and hid our archive, we cannot let this epoch’s Mullah know where it is. If they do, widespread knowledge of our archive might affect the experiment. And — most pertinent to where we are now — our acceptable level of interference will allow us to wipe you all from existence but will not allow us to leave orbit while Clara’s box is still open.”
“So?”
“She wouldn’t want me talking to you,” Divinity said, now almost whispering. “This right here?” She made a little back and forth gesture with one long finger, indicating their discussion. “It’s ‘muddying the data.’”
Divinity sat. Inched her chair closer. Leaned in.
“But I believe that there’s still a solution and that misunderstandings are getting in the way. If we’re honest with each other, I believe this situation can be salvaged. We won’t have to fly home and incinerate your planet. Your entire species doesn’t have to die … if we can stop pretending we don’t really know what’s happening here.”
“What is happening?”
“Your people are trying to build something that the Mullah believed might stop us. It’s absurd, and impossible — born of the same vain hopes that powered endless science fiction movies that you yourself might have made.”
“You … you know my movies?”
“We know a lot about you. More than you’d believe.” She sat back and crossed her arms, the topic wordlessly changing. “There’s nothing there for Clara and the others, though. What they’re after is based on a Mullah legend I don’t mind telling you about in the spirit of honesty — of clearing the air to save your species. It goes like this: There are seven key people who represent essential roles in the new society of any epoch. Our Forgetting erases their memories, so those people merely act as pillars during the reset. But some of your people on the planet believe that this time around, with memories intact, those Archetypes will be able to do something more. We’re already collecting them, and there’s a spy in their midst. One they’ll count as a friend, who reports to us.”
“Who?” Meyer said, somehow certain he already knew.
“Your turn.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Yes, you do, Meyer. Even if you don’t think you know it. You’re finding higher states without chemical help to get your body out of the way. You’re projecting.”
“Projecting what?”
“‘You don’t have to kill them. You can outrun them.’ One of our listening posts heard your ‘Kindred’ say that on the surface just after you said it here.”
“I … I didn’t do anything, though.”
“Then Kindred began to see. It’s obvious if you watch the stream, from a Reptar’s point of view. It confuses him, but he sees it just fine.”
“What does he see? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”
“Come on, Meyer. Tell me the truth. The longer they keep fighting, the faster Eternity’s decision will be driven home. I got this bit of human tripe from one of your infomercials: Help me help you.”
“Stop bullshitting. Stop fighting a losing battle like a fool, and tell me the truth!”
Her timbre had risen in the final sentence, and now Divinity was practically panting, shoulders broad, standing, chest heaving, color up.
He looked her over, shaking his head in puzzled amazement.
“What happened to you over the past twenty years? What’s made all of you so damn—”
She slapped the wall. The door slid open. The first Titans were back, just outside, with Carl between them, as if they’d all been waiting.
“Four people slipping through a rift doesn’t happen by accident,” she said, moving toward the door but keeping her eyes on Meyer. “If you help them again, we’ll see you do it as surely as Kindred has started to see us. We’ll intercept them, then bring them here and hook them up to see what they know. And then we’ll see how willing you are to keep arguing for your own extinction.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Nothing,” said Peers.
Stranger looked up from where he was sitting. The man’s long, weathered face seemed born for the desert. He looked like a wanderer, his thick skin beaten by dry wind. But the man was, in fact, a man. It should have contradicted what Peers was thinking now (he hadn’t aged), but somehow it didn’t. Because although Stranger then and Stranger now were mostly the same (and although the villagers had for some reason accepted his unchanging face for twenty years), there was that small difference. Something in his eyes. Uncertainty, perhaps. Mortality, maybe.
“Did you look to the north?” Stranger asked.
Peers tried to drag a desiccated piece of wood toward Stranger, found it anchored deeper than he’d thought, and gave up to sit on the sand. He waited several seconds, still inspecting the man’s suddenly oh-so-human face, before answering.
“No. I didn’t check the north.”
“Then check the north.”
“What’s on the ship, Stranger?”
The question turned the other man’s head. Blue eyes met Peers, and for the scantest of moments, seemed to see right through him.
His eyes returned to the sand. “Check the north,” he repeated.
“We don’t even know where we are. Why does it matter?”
“Because Liza must be out there somewhere.”
“How do you know she’s not still on the freighter?”
“Because I can see her. I can see her out there.”
“Using your crystal ball?”
“Whatever you say, Peers.”
“It’s not your fault, you know.”
Again, Stranger looked up. “What’s not my fault?”
“That you’ve lost your magic. That you’re more like the rest of us by the day. That’s the way it works. The King loses his kingdom. The Warrior finds himself bound. The Sage loses his wisdom and realizes his folly. And the Magician loses his magic.”
“Which one are you, Peers? You’re with us. You had the dreams that brought you to the ship, same as the rest of us. So which of the Archetypes does Sadeem’s questionably sage wisdom say you are?”
“I’m the Fool.”
Stranger poked at rocks with a stick. Piper was quiet, resting, probably crying. Kindred’s back was visible, but Peers was grateful that his front was not. Kindred’s intensity was frightening. He’d been staring at his hands ever since they’d made their first search for Liza Knight, coming up empty as if trying to make them disappear by force of will. He seemed to think that whatever had happened to bring them here from the freighter’s deck was his doing. It was absurd and impossible. Like the idea of vanishing from one place to instantly appear in another.<
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Peers thought Stranger would lash out. His demeanor was darker than Kindred’s used to be. The two now moved in tandem — one standing when the other stood, one falling silent when the other went quiet.
Curiously, Stranger laughed.
“This is funny to you?”
“No. I’m sorry. I knew it once, but something made me forget. Of course you’re the Fool. Of course you brought them to us.”
“I was only a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know there were aliens in that portal, and that I was at risk of inviting them to our planet — thousands of years too soon, based on what I got from Sadeem.”
“Does Sadeem know?”
Peers shook his head. “I don’t think so. But he’s smart.”
Stranger opened his big hand. It was empty. Empty of spark, empty of magic. Full of nothing at all.
“For now,” Stranger said.
“What’s on the ship?” Peers asked again.
“Cargo.”
“You know. I know you know. I saw the way you were looking at those boxes before we even climbed up. I could feel something there. And those Reptars didn’t come to ambush us. They were there already. Inside the shipping containers. Just waiting. Protecting something.”
Stranger looked at Peers, then he nodded as if to say, Fair enough.
“If I had to guess,” Stranger said, “I think it’s the Ark.”
“But the Astrals got rid of all of the arks. They must have broken them apart or disintegrated them or …” He trailed off. “You mean the other Ark. The archive. The one that used to sit on a dais in the middle of Ember Flats, until Cameron Bannister opened it.”
Stranger met Peers’s eyes, then looked back at the sand.
“Do you really think it’s there?” Peers asked.
“I don’t know for sure. But it’s like you said, I could feel it too.”
“Why would it be on the monolith?”
“You’d have to ask Sadeem for the lore. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But once upon a time, I understood a great deal. The world felt like a puzzle to me, and shuffling was easy. I’d find the right people and offer gifts to guide their way, shepherd those vital minds to ensure their survival. Each had a meaning and a purpose — most to help build the newest form of our collective unconscious.”
“Humans don’t have a collective unconscious.”
Stranger looked skyward. “That’s what they thought, too.”
“You talked to Piper, didn’t you? You gave her one of your gifts. Something that made the ship work and know where to go. It’s how we survived in that tiny submarine. How we managed to find everyone else, and eventually land.”
Stranger nodded.
“Did you know about the Ark back then?”
“Maybe,” Stranger said. “I have almost a ‘memory of a memory’ about many things. I remember feeling as if they created it, but then as soon as our thoughts and deeds began to fill the Ark, it became something they couldn’t touch. I remember standing beside the Ark as it opened, knowing the danger but feeling its power fill me. I think it made me what I am. Or changed me from what I used to be into what I became.”
“What they called ‘The Pall.’”
“Yes.” He took a long breath. Peers couldn’t decide if Stranger was frustrated, afraid, or worried. But then he saw: It wasn’t Liza Knight’s absence in this place that bothered him. It was Lila’s. And he understood.
“You saw Lila as a daughter. I can see it in you, as a man who lost a son.” Peers looked toward Kindred, ticked his head, indicating the intently focusing man in the distance. “You’re somehow connected to him, aren’t you?”
“I might be him. I don’t know. Sometimes I look in a mirror and expect to see that man looking back at me. I’ve woken from sleep, sure I’ve been awake, living as if inside his skin. I’ve had phantom pains from places where Kindred bears scars. I’m drawn toward him, but know better than to get close. He knows it, too. We’re like a thing that’s been split. Two explosives, safe when separate but dangerous combined.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think happened on the freighter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, dammit, do you know anything? How about a fucking guess?”
A long, slow smile crossed his lips. Stranger straightened.
“All right, Peers. I’ll guess. It’s like I said: I don’t think the Ark works much like everything here, relative to us. Humanity was an experiment. They watched and waited. Then when they came, the aliens gave us stimuli to gauge our response. There were no right or wrong answers. It only mattered that we jumped when prodded. So they’re stuck, do you see? It’s like what you told me about what Sadeem said: how they seeded us with chaos and were as afraid of that mayhem as they were in awe. I think they took the Ark when it was empty and hid it so the Mullah couldn’t. They boxed it up and shipped it to another capital, where they expected the ocean to swallow it in the floods.”
“So how did it end up here?”
“I found that ship a captain. He followed the same signal as the rest of you, and brought it here.”
“So you did know. You knew the Ark was in one of those shipping containers.”
Stranger shook his head. “I just followed my gut, telling Carl Nairobi not to board the Roman Sands vessel and find another ride instead. My instincts were fine-tuned then. I was in touch with everyone below the surface, somehow able to see everything. I visited a fisherman in China and got him onto the boat that brought him here to safety. He forgot just like the rest of them, but his mind was still there beneath it all. He wasn’t anything special. But when set beside all the other minds in the tiny new mental pool, he was a linchpin. Something Clara could cling to, and keep the door open as it grew. And grew. And grew.”
“So Carl brought the Ark to this place. And the Astrals knew it came here, but they couldn’t take it away. So instead, they left guards on board to protect it. They made it seem haunted, and let us come to fear it.”
“In another thousand years, the sand probably would have buried it again,” Stranger said. “But I guess we Archetypes had other plans.”
“What plans?”
“You felt the energy on that ship — the Ark somehow powering up, or maybe it always feels that strong to certain people. It was like a current running through my bones. At the end, just before we … before whatever happened, happened, I looked up at Kindred, and it was like we ran right toward each other even though we were both frozen. I understood something about our connection that my mind has already lost. I understood something about the Reptars there, too. Something I thought I remembered Meyer telling me, though we’ve barely ever spoken. I knew we didn’t have to kill them to escape. We could run. And that was the thought in my head — and I’d wager in Kindred’s — when we …”
Stranger trailed off, making a vague hand gesture as if to say, Well, you know the rest.
“Did you really make that happen?” The thought was frightening. Peers had been near laughing at Kindred as he focused, trying to make it happen again, but hearing the same thing from Stranger almost made it real. He wished Piper wasn’t so clearly distraught or maybe she’d mock the two men with him.
“I don’t know that anything really happened,” Stranger said, looking toward the horizon. “It’s the oddest thing in my mind. For a moment, it was like I didn’t see any difference between here and there. There was only is. It seemed so obvious. I thought of leaving, and that’s when we left. Same as how I looked at Kindred in that moment and felt as if we weren’t two people but separate instances of the same person. And the Reptars. How they were …”
“Were what?”
Stranger shook his head. “It’s gone. It made sense then, but now I can’t find it.”
Peers sat back. “So now what?”
“The energy on that ship did something to me. And I think it matters.”
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��So you want to go back. To find the Ark.”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re the Archetypes.” Stranger shrugged. “A few of them, anyway. Carl, the Warrior? They took him to the ship. Sadeem and Clara — the Sage and the Innocent — we don’t know where they are.”
But that didn’t seem right. He knew this point in the story, as told by the Mullah Legend Scroll. There was a moment of realization. The Innocent …
“The Innocent dies,” Peers finished aloud. “According to legend, the Innocent dies to force a change in the King.”
“You believe Clara will die?”
“Not in the future. It would already have needed to happen.”
“Clara’s alive. That, I can feel.”
Peers looked at Stranger. Then at Kindred. He thought of what had happened and the change now afoot. He understood.
“It was Lila. She was the Innocent.”
“Ridiculous.”
“She came, same as the rest of us.”
“She came with us. With Piper and Kindred and Meyer. Use your head, Peers. Seven or eight important people in the world, and they’re all in the same family?”
“Clara is special. Lila was her mother. And Meyer was special, too. Many say he was the first abduction. The only viceroy to have been switched with an Astral. His daughter would be special.” Peers stood. This suddenly seemed very important, though he couldn’t say why. A word on the tip of his tongue, refusing to leave his lips. “It fits. We were all called. She fell. And you …”