Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  The wolves were gone. Liza was certain.

  She walked outside. The moon was full.

  Her ride, however, was right there with the door open in the pale white light, silently inviting Liza and her backpack to step inside and take a trip.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  For a long and quiet time, Eternity thought she’d returned to her old form. It wasn’t quite right because she couldn’t sense her native body. That old body — full of dislocated sensation, as much responding to vibrations as touch or the human-detectable visible spectrum, focused to understand this planet’s seeded species — would have felt as unfamiliar now as familiar. But she wasn’t in her surrogate. This was more like the hive. She could sense the energetics. She could see the high-energy doubling around the archive, made possible by its energy. From inside the collective, the few guards they’d left on the ship appeared as nodes in the larger pool. It was clear there was only a handful of Reptars instead the many they’d appear to be from a human perspective, that close to such a strong source of power.

  And as the whole thing started to fade, she could almost see the humans on the other side, across the bridge that had formed between the species’ minds — forged by the hybrid, cracked open by the anomaly. She could almost see the rift inside the energetics. But it was minuscule — nearly as small as the rolled-up dimensions usually were. Had they really slipped through to leave the freighter? How had they managed, even with the Ark’s energy? There simply wasn’t enough to power such a thing.

  But then the fading accelerated, and Eternity found herself seeing a white expanse instead of still feeling/seeing the collective inside. Her eyelids could blink. She had a head that ached as if being stabbed with a red-hot poker and choked with a tight metal band. She had a human(ish) brain, foggy as she rolled from the unconscious world to the conscious one, not all that different than her surrogate waking from sleep.

  She waited for cognition to slowly return, then realized that the white expanse was a wall and that she was lying on the floor in a corner. Her throbbing head refused to abate. Her arm hurt, as did her side.

  You’d have been better off having returned to your native form, she thought. Human pain isn’t a price worth paying.

  But no, she hadn’t again become the anemone shape she’d been used to being, insofar as any pseudo-individual could be anything in the collective. She was still in the surrogate body — a tall blonde whose head hurt, who had all those conflicting emotions she hated and resented but never quite summoned the nerve to shed like the dead skin it should have been so long ago.

  She rolled. A groan escaped her. Once half-upright and reversed, she found herself facing a handsome man with blood on his chin, sitting on a soft-looking chair upholstered in fabric as red as the blood. They were in Nexus, and the Nexus was normally bare. That meant he’d had the machines fashion his chair. A human shouldn’t be able to do that.

  But of course Meyer Dempsey wasn’t exactly human, which explained his presence on the ship. It was why he’d been on the first mothership, and why he’d returned. Not that they had any idea how to solve him as a problem now. Not that things with Meyer hadn’t become a lot more complicated even before …

  Before …

  It took a half minute of focus before Eternity (Melanie? Yes, that’s who she was now) found the answer. She hadn’t brought him here to interrogate and initiate a probe before deciding to lie down and stare into the corner where wall met floor for a nap. He’d brought her. He and Carl the Warrior had tricked her into coming close enough for Carl to grab, then they’d hauled her across the ship. And rather than simply letting her surrogate go so the Titans could take the prisoners back to where they belonged, she’d panicked and cried, letting them upset the entire ship’s balance. And for what? One lousy human body?

  She sat up fully. Rubbed her head. Rubbed her face below her eyes, and found that her thumb and forefinger came away wearing a shade of very deep blue. Her eye shadow. More evidence of how far down the tubes she’d gone.

  “Don’t.”

  Meyer raised a weapon he must have stolen from a Titan somewhere along the way. He met her eyes, staring hard. His face crossed neutrality to become its own seething expression. She saw accusation. Hate. And maybe, concealed below it all, fear and loss.

  “I’m just sitting up.”

  Meyer’s jaw slid sideways. He seemed to search for a reason to shoot her for daring to sit up, but must have found none because he lowered the weapon enough to rest it on his lap.

  “My head hurts.”

  “I know,” he said.

  She almost flinched as her internal eyes focused and saw him watching her from inside, too. From inside the collective.

  “I don’t remember why.”

  Because she was human. A flawed, horribly limited, futile human. Because she could stop being a hand inside a surrogate at any time, and yet she refused. Because she was Melanie, and doggedly gripped idiocy, determined to stay that way.

  “You hit the wall when I knocked you off of Carl. After you bit him.”

  Her tongue moved along her teeth. She tasted a copper tang, revolted.

  “Where is Carl?”

  “Dead.”

  They locked eyes. She looked away first.

  “There’s no point in this, you know,” Melanie said.

  “In what?”

  “In holding me here. They won’t let you escape.”

  “You assume I want to escape.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “But you don’t now?”

  Meyer inhaled. Exhaled. He closed his eyes, but that second internal set kept staring at Melanie from inside the collective. He seemed to be considering something, but she could only read it from his body language. Maybe her connection to the collective had been damaged, but for some reason she couldn’t hear his thoughts despite his being right there behind her eyelids, visible as another bright node in their shared mental landscape.

  His eyes opened. “No. I don’t think I want to escape. Not anymore.”

  Melanie tried to probe deeper. To touch Meyer from the hive side. He was supposed to be accessible, but wasn’t. Meyer Dempsey, unfortunately, was a product of chaos. The Founders had wanted uncertainty, and this time it had come in spades. His turnabout had been apparent since they’d reestablished contact. From inside Meyer, the Seed energy could barely observe. Every time they’d tried to access this man, they’d come up empty. The synergy was gone. Two failed Titan duplicates had resulted from attempts to bridge the gap. Plus some sort of ghostly wildcard that, frankly, scared her a little.

  They’d thought they could fix what had been marred with Meyer. But in the case of this particular hybrid, the fixing refused to take. Or even begin.

  Melanie didn’t like that she felt the need to ask questions. Before Earth, she’d never cared much for questions. Questions didn’t truly exist in a hive. Whatever needed knowing was known, simply by being in the collective. Too many years in this surrogate had changed that. Melanie had the habit of not knowing. But not knowing in the face of her own hybrid? That felt inexcusable.

  Saving her, Meyer asked his question first. Melanie didn’t see it coming from the collective before it left his lips. If he was hooked into the others, his connection was one-sided: able to receive without the need to broadcast. It made him a black box and a spy. She didn’t like the implication.

  “What did the other woman mean, when she came to interrogate me earlier?”

  “I don’t know what you discussed.”

  Meyer closed his eyes again. She felt his node churning.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Meyer chuckled. “She said something about ‘what I am.’ She was mad because of something that happened to me, where I sort of slipped into a haze. I didn’t know what I was saying in the haze, but she did, and was clearly bothered. She made it sound like I was communicating with Kindred and the others. Like I was leaking information to them.”r />
  “I don’t know what she meant.”

  Meyer studied her. Melanie felt him study her from the inside, too, but individualism had its benefits. She kept her wall up, refusing to share. It was translucent, like a window. But he was outside; she was inside, and without her permission, he couldn’t enter to steal her secrets. She was still Eternity here. And he was still a glorified probe, no matter how awry it had gone.

  “What does it mean to ‘see’?”

  “To use your eyes.”

  “What is a ‘rift’?”

  “You’d have to ask Divinity.”

  He continued to study her. But then he seemed to surrender, perhaps to decide she was telling the truth. He sat back in the big, red chair a human would have no way of conjuring and said nothing more.

  “They won’t let you go.” Then, because it gave away nothing new and helped make her point, Melanie added, “You’re too important.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Do you just plan to sit there?”

  “Maybe. Something led me here. There must be a reason.”

  “Titans led you here.”

  Meyer shook his head slowly. “Carl and I led the Titans. I came here.”

  “It wasn’t well thought out. Carl is dead.”

  “Yes, he is. And do you know why? He might have been fine, but he got between us and a Reptar.”

  “He saved you.”

  “Actually, I think he saved you.”

  Melanie stopped. She searched for context, but the blow to her head had knocked those moments blank. Only the stream would show her for sure, and although she didn’t want him to know, Melanie was needing an access point more and more often. It should have been available from anywhere at any time. But it wasn’t — not from this body.

  “Reptars wouldn’t harm me.”

  “There was a Titan, too. It fired at me as the Reptar came. See?” He pointed. A subtle burn mark marred the otherwise pristine wall. “I can’t say for sure, but I think it might have hit you if Carl hadn’t shoved me away.”

  “He shoved you.”

  “And you were already knocked out. The shot went there because Carl got in the way. It didn’t hit him either. The Reptar got him. But that doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t get shot because he intervened.”

  Melanie waited a beat, processing.

  “Absurd.”

  “You were already knocked out. I was there.”

  “There’s no reason to ‘save’ this body. It’s a puppet.”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “And you reached an incorrect conclusion.”

  Meyer shook his head, saying nothing.

  “Why would he try to protect me? He had me by the neck, ready to kill me.”

  “Instinct. Maybe it was his nature.”

  Melanie huffed. He was wrong. On so many levels and for so many clearly obvious reasons, he was wrong.

  “Tell me something,” Meyer said. “You brought me aboard. You brought Carl. But then you held us in a cell. Carl said you hooked him into some sort of fancy electronic hat, but that didn’t seem to go well on the surface. Yet you didn’t try again up here. You haven’t tried with me. It wasn’t like last time, when you hooked me up and drained me dry. You let me starve. There were two times — once at the start and once what must have been years later — where it felt like my mind was combed down to nothing, like I spent several days inches from death. I assume the second round was when you made Kindred. But this time? Nothing. Why?”

  “Would you rather be set up as a donor again?”

  “I get the feeling we were in purgatory. Waiting. But what for?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “You took me, but not Piper or Lila. And you took Carl, but you haven’t gone into the village to take anyone else. You’re not killing us; you’re collecting us, and being particular about it. You didn’t show yourselves in ships; you came on the sly, in shuttles. It’s almost like you don’t want the folks who are still alive to know you’re orbiting our planet. I’ve been sitting here while you’ve been sleeping, trying to figure out what you’re up to. Why you haven’t come in force like before. What makes me and Carl so goddamn special? I started to get this feeling that you’re up to something. Your girlfriend? She made it sound like you’d nuke the planet if I didn’t play along, but it’s not just about me if Carl was here. And it’s not even just the two of us, is it?”

  Melanie didn’t respond.

  “Who else were we waiting for? Who else were you bringing aboard?”

  Still, she said nothing.

  Meyer slid the weapon forward and leaned toward her in his big red chair.

  “You say what I’m doing is pointless, but nobody’s so much as knocked on that door since I dragged you in here and threatened to kill you.” He nodded toward the closed entrance. “Your girlfriend said you were prepared to nuke the planet if I didn’t play along, but I haven’t played along, and the planet remains un-nuked. She got all mad about me talking to Kindred, but I didn’t talk to Kindred. And when she mentioned Clara and how she’s been a constant thorn in your side, I got the impression there was a specific reason you haven’t gone right at the problem and pulled out that thorn.”

  “We incapacitated Clara once she became a problem.”

  “I know. That’s where I was headed when you picked me up. But it’s clear you didn’t do a good job because I know she’s far from ‘incapacitated’ now. You’re supposed to have all this power over us, but your actions don’t back it up. So do you know what I’ve decided, while I’ve been sitting here, thinking?”

  Melanie couldn’t keep herself from answering his rhetorical question.

  “What?”

  “Either there’s a reason you haven’t used that power you’re not sharing — something you still hope to get from us — or do to us — without awareness, and that has you sneaking around keeping secrets. Or …”

  Something snagged Meyer’s attention. His head jerked away. Melanie felt a surge through the hive. Right through the Nexus under their feet. Maybe Meyer could feel it too, but she hoped not. It might give him ideas about uncomfortable options. About acceptable risks and losses that even she, as Eternity, was unwilling to take.

  “Or what?” she said, luring his attention back to center.

  Meyer finished. “Or you no longer have any power over us at all.”

  His words gave her a chill. She didn’t even know why, but the fact that Meyer Dempsey had become so impossible to read or predict unsettled her deeply. He’d started out as a their tool and became a wild card. And now that the Forgetting had lifted and the observer within him was awakening, the man was becoming something else — something worse. He could see beyond the veil, if he knew where and how to look. He had allowed both Stranger and Kindred, according to outbound energetics visible in the stream, to do the same thing. The Ark had responded to them, and they’d responded right back. Chaos had sifted to one place and formed a knot. There was no telling what Meyer might become next.

  “Release me,” she said, seized by a sudden urgency, “and they’ll let you go free.”

  “You said they wouldn’t.”

  “They will do as I say.”

  Meyer watched Melanie. He seemed to consider. She kept her face straight, feeling transparent under his assessing gaze. Truth was, keeping him no longer felt like an option. It almost felt necessary. Not because she wanted to be free from his captivity but because the alternative was having him here in the Nexus, his hybrid hands practically gripping the Earth experiment’s controls.

  He couldn’t know that, could he?

  The few random thoughts she could sense coming out of Meyer and spilling into the collective like explorers in search of an answer … Those were indeed random, weren’t they?

  His thought of Cameron Bannister — just a stray recollection, correct?

  And his thought — almost an inspiration — about Piper Dempsey. There couldn’t be any reason he�
�d been thinking about her, as if part of a plan.

  She felt him push something out. It didn’t go to the collective. It went somewhere else. He probably didn’t even know he’d sent anything off the ship. Like his haze-addled mumbling into Kindred’s and Stranger’s ears while on the freighter, Meyer likely didn’t even know he was communicating with someone else. Yet.

  But Melanie felt the thought as it left. She couldn’t see its content, only that he’d sent it. And as it went, her surrogate’s skin crawled, recalling the human notion of the devil you don’t know.

  Meyer shook his head.

  “Go to the panel, and call for Divinity,” Melanie said, fighting a creeping sensation without any source. “Call for her, and I’ll command that they let you leave the ship and go home.”

  But Meyer’s head never stopped shaking. Perhaps subconsciously, his eyes went to the dead center of the room, and the heart of the Nexus.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I think, instead, you and I will stay here a while.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Grandma Piper.”

  Piper heard the voice but tried to ignore it. Walls of sleep were already crumbling as she clung to her dream.

  “Grandma. Wake up. We need to get going.”

  Piper kept her eyes closed, no longer asleep but vainly pretending, for herself rather than Clara. She’d been in a painfully bright room long, long ago. A feeling of nascent betrayal had lurked in her chest — the sense that she’d turned her back on one person and was now turning it on another. She couldn’t have both — something a less time-bound part of herself knew she’d attempted and failed. Many times. She was thinking about Meyer, and … the one she’d left behind.

  “Five minutes, okay?” Clara said.

  Piper’s eyes still hadn’t opened. She listened as Clara padded away, now clearly feeling the grit of sand shift beneath her blanket. Time and place were returning, leaving the bright dream shared with Meyer behind.

  Piper remembered Kamal’s camp, the sand, and Lila’s death. Particularly the last. But strangely, the moment turned her mind back to Clara. Another of her unearned links to the Dempsey family had departed with Meyer’s daughter, but it made her cry that Clara, fully grown, would always call her Grandma Piper.