by Platt, Sean
She tried for a few extra minutes to reach back into her dream, but she couldn’t. Missing the ending was awful. The dream had felt real — more memory than fabrication. Something she’d done in a place that was mostly forgotten. Thoughts from the life of a much younger woman.
Cameron, now long dead.
Meyer, alive, though she’d once thought him gone, taken again.
The flood. The extinctions.
Stranger and Kindred, compelled together yet always apart.
Cameron, with that satchel forever by his side, which in Piper’s memories always held the Ark’s stone, like a fragile plate he’d never managed to break.
Trevor, dying to protect her, and recover that key.
Meyer, on the ship. Then and now.
Herself in that bright room, finding him alive and aboard when the mothership picked her up over Moab, leaving Cameron behind to shout as the ship took her away.
Cameron, with his satchel.
Cameron, with the key.
Cameron.
The Ark.
The key.
And herself, in the white room aboard the big Astral ship with the thrumming underfoot, imprisoned with Meyer — the energy somehow resonant even when she was back with Cameron, as if he’d been there, too.
Piper opened her eyes in surrender. The dream was gone.
She gathered her scant belongings and fluffed the sand from her hair, annoyed that she’d regrown a modern woman’s sensibilities after twenty years as a bohemian. She didn’t stink or appear unkempt any more than she had before her memories had returned, but now Piper had context enough for disgust. So before leaving the tent she used the basin to wet a rag then reach under her shirt and swab her pits. She wished the world had deodorant. She missed shampoo.
Ugh. She was so gross.
There was a piece of silvered glass in the hut. Piper looked at her reflection and sighed. She appeared old. She felt old. Fifty-six fucking years now, and with the lines to prove it. Had aesthetics really once been her business? She’d once owned a clothing line. Was sort of F-list famous for it, too: Quirky Q.
Hard to imagine there’d once been a world where “quirky” meant anything, let alone an attribute worth paying for.
Sighing, Piper stepped into the sun. It was low in the sky, but the day was already warming. In the shade, she wanted her long sleeves down, but in the sun she was almost too hot. Another damned day in rare air, and they’d spend it hiking. Lucky them.
“Sleep well?” Kamal asked, nodding hello.
“Yes. I guess I needed the rest after yesterday.”
“Morning,” Kamal said to Logan, waking up a few feet away.
“Good morning,” Piper echoed.
Logan responded with a simple, “Hey,” then he looked at Piper, holding his gaze too long.
“What?”
“Are you okay?” Logan asked. Kamal, needing to prep, turned away.
“Of course.”
Logan continued to scrutinize her, puzzling. Like he smelled something and was searching for its source.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You just seem … off.”
“Off how?” She tried to smile. “Is it my breath?”
Logan didn’t laugh, still studying her, looking as much around Piper as at her. He shook his head. “I can’t put my finger on it. It’s not really something about you. It’s in you. Almost like you’re Lightborn. Like it’s … I don’t know, in the air.”
“So it is my breath.” Again, the joke fell flat.
“I had kind of a funny dream last night. I think you were in it. I told Clara when she woke up. She had ‘a weird dream about Piper’ too. Did you have any dreams last night?”
“I did, but how is that—?”
Logan’s head ticked sideways as if he’d heard something. “Who is Cameron?”
Piper’s mouth opened. She had no idea what she planned to say, but a booming voice from behind saved her from deciding.
“Okay,” said Kamal, ending their discussion. “I think we’re about ready to head out.” He looked around the assembling group, including Piper’s party plus a few of Kamal’s people. “Everyone carries their own supplies because that’s the way we roll in this clan. We have plenty of backpacks. We thought we’d made them ourselves, but turns out it was Patagonia. Anyway, pick one, and load it up if you haven’t already. Water. Sunscreen.”
“I don’t have sunscreen in mine,” Logan said, peering into a green pack.
Kamal rolled his eyes. “Obviously there’s no sunscreen. I’ll dispense with sarcasm at this point because I guess we’re all too tired to appreciate it. Anyone going to the freighter, tour group leaves in two minutes. Can I get a break?” He put his hand in the center of the loose group of sleepy people, said “BREAK!” and shot the hand high when no one set their hand atop his. He looked around and mumbled something about this group having no team spirit and was gone.
Piper watched him go, feeling uneasy. It wasn’t the trip ahead — back to the freighter, where reminders awaited with probable death — that bothered her. The trek across the desert weighed heavy but not as much as an uneasy feeling she couldn’t shake. One that had no antecedent other than the vanished threads of her lost dream and an interrupted conversation with Logan.
Right now, talking with him was the last thing she wanted to do.
Fortunately, Logan was already packing his bag. Whatever had perplexed him about Piper was forgotten or paused — and the stirring from his question (Who is Cameron? And this from a kid Piper had met only after she’d forgotten Cameron’s name) would leave her in time.
She picked up one of the Patagonia backpacks. There was already water inside, so she plopped her own smaller bag atop it and zipped up. She even had a hat for shade, sunscreen be damned.
Clara arrived on her right. Piper gave her a thin-lipped smile, imagining her somber thoughts on their return to a place of magic and murder.
Thoughts about Clara’s mother.
About the daughter Piper had, until recently, believed was her own.
“How did you sleep?” Piper asked Clara, stuffing down her ill emotions.
Clara didn’t smile, giving Piper a look that might have been a cousin of Logan’s earlier expression. Then she said, “I had a dream about all of us … including the dead.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The dead.
Meyer saw them before him, standing, spectral, around the Astral woman. They weren’t really there. He could tell the difference, and the vision barely confused him. It didn’t unnerve him or make him feel lost like before, when he’d seemed to see things on the planet through (he now thought) Kindred’s eyes. That time he’d woken confused, seeing Carl in the real world, his attention still drawn to the swirling haze. Whatever he’d done during that first fugue — though it felt like nothing — had made the dark-haired Astral angry. It confused Meyer because the feeling was like an ayahuasca trip, and yet he hadn’t partaken.
There had been fear. And knowing and seeing and insight and horror to follow the visions. His consciousness split between awake and dreaming.
Not this time.
“What are you doing?”
Concern. From the Astral woman. The one he could see on their collective, more networked than the other: a leader in a species that wasn’t supposed to have chiefs. They called her Eternity. But she called herself something else. Something private and forbidden.
The dead stood around her. Watching.
Heather, who’d followed his call to the bunker in Vail.
Trevor, who’d gone too young, who’d fought and died.
Cameron Bannister.
Benjamin, with his stalwart companion Charlie beside him.
Nathan Andreus.
Jeanine Coffey.
And Lila.
Lila.
But he didn’t react, just like he didn’t respond to the thin, mostly transparent forms standi
ng around the Deathbringer room. It didn’t scare or sadden him now. He didn’t understand, but another part of him completely understood. It was like there were now two Meyers sharing the same skin. One knew what he was seeing. One expected it. So the other waited, knowing that answers were on their way.
“What are you—?” the blonde began.
“Shh,” Meyer stopped her.
She was sitting on a bench built into the wall. She had blood in her hair — evidence that even if she was an immortal anemone made of light somewhere on this ship, she was all too human here. Maybe the body her consciousness inhabited was only a shell. Meyer could see, through the Astral hive he seemed increasingly connected to, that it was how things usually were. But the woman had her secret. She wasn’t as connected, it seemed, as she was supposed to be. And in addition to blood from her scalp wound, she also had spatters on her dress — Carl’s blood, from the first wound he’d taken to see them safe.
Carl appeared among the ghosts.
Don’t feel bad, boss, he said, more in Meyer’s head than outside it. Bringing you here was what I was supposed to do.
The woman was staring at him. Not understanding. Not hearing or seeing any of this. Her attention, when not on Meyer, was fixed on the room’s floor. On the dark, leg-thick lines now visible beneath it as shadows against the light. It looked like something with a glow coming from below. The shadows, all different sizes, branched and forked throughout the room.
“Where do you go when you die?”
The woman looked at Meyer like he was crazy.
“I asked you a question.”
“Ask your churches,” she said, her eyes narrow.
“Why did you come to Earth? Why did you do any of this?”
“To understand.”
“To understand what?”
“Everything.”
“If you want to understand, why did you kill us off? Why the flood? Why the near extinction?”
“Humanity was not ready. So we reset your race, to try again.”
“Not ready by whose criteria? Yours?”
That wasn’t quite right. There was something the woman wasn’t saying.
She looked at the floor. Nervously. Meyer remembered her question, now asked twice.
What are you doing?
He wasn’t doing anything. He was simply sitting, same as her. Yet her eyes kept going to the floor as if uneasy. As if waiting to see what would happen.
Whatever was happening in this room — with the floor and its branching shadows, with the ghosts that Meyer could see and hear but that she apparently could not — was something she believed he was responsible for.
“What is this place?”
“It’s nothing.”
“I see people here,” he said. “People who’ve died.”
Including Lila.
He couldn’t process that now. A part of him had already known.
She didn’t scoff. Or deny it. Instead she seemed to focus, and he finally felt her touch the collective.
“Who do you see?”
He told her, looking at each and giving their names. Who they were. Who they’d been.
She watched Meyer. Then, seeming to weigh a decision, she said, “You must leave. We will let you go. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
Heather moved beside him. Meyer turned his head to her, the blonde Astral seeing his shift of attention, knowing what it must be even if she couldn’t see the ghost.
Heather leaned in and whispered, Don’t do it, studly. Not now that you’ve got their nuts in a vice.
He looked at the Astral and shook his head. Not all of the links were connecting, but some were, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The room.
The branching lines beneath the floor, lighting up, feeling to Meyer like a waking beast. He could feel their energy. Whatever was happening to this place, the ghosts were part of it.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“Then explain.”
She looked away.
“It’s your archive, isn’t it? What we called the Ark. This room is somehow part of it. And the people I see standing around you—”
She cut him off, uncertainty in her eyes.
“You have to trust me. What you’re doing? It’s as bad for you as it is for us.”
“I have no reason to trust you.”
“You wanted to leave and return to your people. Now is your chance. Leave this alone.”
“The other woman said that she’d use me to find them. I won’t go back, or help you trace them.”
“Then we have to go somewhere else. Anywhere else. What do you want? Where do you want to go? Anything. Just name it.”
“I want to know why I see my family here.” He met the woman’s eyes, anger percolating like lava. “My daughter.”
“You can’t possibly …”
Meyer settled into the energy around him. The room brightened. Contrasting against the light, roots beneath the floor seemed to darken. He saw more ghosts: Peers’s friend Aubrey; a nomad who, after Sinai, had traveled with them for a while, Captain Jons, a hero dead too soon.
The woman held up her hands and stood. When she spoke again, her voice was alarmed.
“Stop it! Stop what you’re doing!”
Calmly: “What am I doing?”
She watched him sternly. “We call this room the Nexus. It’s like a nerve center. Not for us. For you.”
“Us?”
“Any species we study. You since we’ve been on Earth. This is where we experience our subjects as a whole. The stones we laid around the cities sent information about your collective here, to a network under the floor. Signals travel through the motherships on the way in and out, but this is the center.”
“Why do I see people I know who’ve died?”
“You are different. You can control it.” She hesitated. “Like we can.”
“How am I different?”
The woman seemed to be warring with a choice of what to say and what to conceal. But like it or not, he was doing something she couldn’t control. Something that scared her, that she needed his agreement to stop.
“You’re like us. What’s in you — what’s always been in you — is like a piece of our collective. But …” She sighed, clearly unhappy unearthing the secret she wanted to bury. “You’ve changed. We don’t understand you anymore. Not entirely. There are things you can do that shouldn’t be possible. That doesn’t mean you have power over us. But it makes you like a child carrying a weapon. You don’t understand yourself, and that makes you dangerous. To yourself.”
“What do you care about us?” Meyer sneered.
“We’ve invested a lot in you. Time. Thought.”
“And yet you’re ready to kill us all.”
“Your species survives. Individuals do not matter.”
Meyer raised his weapon and aimed it at the woman, finger to trigger. She flinched. Turned her head. Cringed.
“It seems to matter to you.”
“There has been … cross-pollution. This is not how we are supposed to be. Not for either of us.”
“I see. So this is all for our best interest. You’re looking out for us. Because you’re the good guys.”
He sank into the energy. Gripped the collective. The room brightened again, new ghosts coming like an undead plague. Trevor smiled. Heather touched his shoulder, her spectral hand slipping through him, more solid-seeming than before, but not there at all.
“Stop!”
“For my own good?” Meyer said, not stopping.
“Yes!”
“For your good.”
“For yours! But …” He recognized her expression. It wasn’t fear for her species, and certainly wasn’t concern for his. He poked further into the hive, effortlessly seeing connections from Astral to Astral. They were more individual than they should be, truly ‘cross-polluted,’ one species too tightly bound to the other.
Her expression was pain.
&nb
sp; “What hurts us hurts you. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Carl said you tried to peek into his mind. He resisted. He made you push. But when you tortured his mind, that meant trauma for yours.”
Seeing no point in denial, the Astral woman said, “Yes.”
“This room. It’s a nerve center. It’s … a repository. A vast memory bank. Like a storage center.”
“It connects to a memory bank.”
“The Ark. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Each epoch,” she said, sitting again, “we reset what you call the Ark. We empty it, and the collective minds of humanity begin to refill it. What you remember goes in. And so does what you do. It’s true for all of humanity. For thousands of years between visits, the archive tracks it all so we can review your progress when we return, and see if you’re ready to evolve.”
“I guess this time, we weren’t ready.”
“No.”
“So you killed us off.”
“We reset the experiment. To let you try again.”
“How generous of you.” Meyer’s gaze was on Lila. Her presence here could only mean one thing, yet he was less mournful or angry than a part of him felt he should be. Maybe it was the difference the woman had mentioned — the way he was like them. He was at least part Astral, and as hard as it was to realize, he’d always sort of understood that deep down.
Lila’s ghost — someone’s memory of her, if Meyer understood this correctly — came forward and tried to take his hand, but of course she couldn’t. Lila smiled.
“What you’re doing right now,” the woman said, watching the floor throb light beneath its branching shadows, “threatens what remains of your species. To the new cycle of our experiment. But you must understand: The experiment is all that keeps us here. If the experiment is disturbed too much …”
“You’ll end it,” Meyer finished. The dark-haired woman had told him as much. But was it true? Based on what he’d seen in Eternity — her admission that humanity’s pain was their agony, too, thanks to the unwanted bond — it felt like a bluff to Meyer.