by Platt, Sean
I remembered something yesterday. I realized something obvious, that anyone could see.
The power was a low thrum. Something that seemed to reach out and invite him forward, its song hypnotic. They could march right in there. Sure, there was plenty to fear. But so what, when you could see all the terrible things and know precisely where the traps lay?
Kindred felt knowledge almost percolating. Threatening to rise. Below the surface and beside his resentment. He remembered things long passed. Events he wasn’t even sure he himself had participated in.
Receiving a message from Divinity when he’d been viceroy of Heaven’s Veil, Trevor in his office, claiming to search for books, Raj clattering around somewhere overhead, slowly going bad.
Hiding in the bunker under Vail, Piper in the corner, bloody spatter from the first man she’d ever killed not yet scrubbed from her neck, close to catatonic, rocking, still young enough to feel bad for a necessary murder.
Himself on the ship, kept in a cell. Piper, also aboard.
You were a Titan back then, said a voice. You did not see Piper on the ship. You were another thing, in fear of becoming me.
Meyer’s voice. From somewhere.
Focus, Kindred.
Meyer inside his mind, the sensation curiously doubled, as if he was talking to himself. Which, by a certain definition, he was.
There are only three Reptars left.
Kindred looked behind him, catching curious glances from Logan, Piper, Kamal, and the man and woman whom Kindred had met but whose names had yet to register. From Kamal’s crew — brave, selfless enough to storm a place they knew to be swarming with enemy soldiers for the greater good. But according to the voice in Kindred’s head, there were only three. And yet he knew they’d only managed to kill one of the potential hundreds they’d seen before.
Aft, amidships, and near the door to the bridge. You will know when you see them.
Kamal was slowly shaking his head, seeming to ask a question with raised eyebrows.
Clear your head. If you focus, you can see.
Kindred didn’t know what the voice meant, or where it was coming from. He didn’t know whom it belonged to. But the Ark’s power was like sweat on his brow. He could sense it calling him forward, feel his mind calming — welcome change from the cauldron, stewing with anger and resentment, plagued by jealousy and pettiness and hate. He wanted to march forward, heedless. He wanted to cross the V, to the ship’s other side. Find Stranger, and let the end come.
If you focus, you can see.
But it was hard, and Kindred didn’t want to.
Ahead, at the freighter’s towering metal side, was a tall, black-haired form, waving him forward.
His ex-wife, Heather, whom he’d already died once saving.
Chapter Forty-One
“Stranger?”
But Stranger’s eyes were on the person near the ship’s rear: Trevor. He’d never known the boy, and yet he’d raised Trevor from a baby and taught him to ride a bike, tolerated his teenage angst, as annoying as it had been. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The jeans looked clean. How long had it been since he’d seen a clean pair? Denim could last a long time — but their little village, which had thought nothing of the curious blue material in the same way they thought nothing of the other old-world items that didn’t make sense — only had a few intact pairs among them, most ripped through at the knee and converted to anachronistic shorts.
But Trevor was standing there in his jeans and tee, the way he’d looked on the last day of his life, so far as Stranger remembered of that time he’d never known or seen.
“Stranger!”
He flinched when Clara touched his shoulder. He’d been about to rise. Energy wafting from the ship was like second heat, and Stranger could think of little beyond heeding its cry. Kindred, across the dunes, was calling him. Maybe they could meet in the middle, link arms like schoolgirls, and skip the rest of the way down. It would be the end of them both, and maybe all of it. But did it matter? The Ark’s song was so alluring.
“Are you okay?”
“There are only three,” he said.
“Three what?”
He was already too distracted to answer. Movement at the ship’s other end caught his eye. There was someone there. A woman in her forties.
Lila.
“Stranger? Three what?”
Lila waved, seeing their little group where they pretended to hide. She put her hand on the ladder bolted to the monolith’s side, raised a leg, and climbed. Trevor, at the other end, began to do the same.
Stranger could hear the Reptars in his head. This wouldn’t be as hard as they’d all imagined. All puzzles were hard until you knew the trick, but once you saw it, the whole thing cracked open, so obviously simple.
Lila stopped. Then Trevor. Stranger’s children hung on their ladders, their large smiles obvious even across the distance. They waved. Beckoning.
More movement, this time across the dune. Someone shouted — a voice that was half hiss, half yell, as if the shouter was somehow trying to be quiet even while calling out. There was another shout from behind Stranger. Over his shoulder, where Clara and Peers and Sadeem and some fellow named Marcus were waiting and failing to understand how easy this whole thing actually was.
There were eleven of them, and thanks to Kamal’s group’s preparation (something Stranger got credit for arranging, despite his lack of memory), their group was armed. Bullets weren’t always efficient against Reptars, but Reptars fought with claws and teeth — and aboard that entire ship, there were only three.
Three foes between them and the Ark. Between them and the end of everything. Between the end of his and Kindred’s twenty-year tension and its final resolution. Between the anger and hatred that tore at Stranger’s gut — the guilt and pain he’d increasingly learned to feel but could no longer abide.
Three Reptars between Stranger and his vendetta.
“Kindred!” Peers whisper-shouted at the man descending the dune, headed for neither Trevor nor Lila but a space between them.
Stranger rose and started walking too.
Then all the shouts called out from behind.
Chapter Forty-Two
Peers’s eyes darted rapidly side to side. They’d discussed this, and now both Kindred and Stranger were breaking from the plan. He watched them march straight toward the freighter, in the open, shouting his petty little cries, knowing along with the others that Stranger and Kindred either couldn’t hear or would never acknowledge. There was little to do. He couldn’t raise his voice. The Reptars might hear, and Peers could see dozens of the black creatures crawling around the deck like a swarm of deadly spiders.
He looked at Sadeem, whose face promised no help. Then at Clara’s wide eyes. He peeked back at Stranger and Kindred, both sitting ducks. There were four Reptars on the sand, two flanking each man. But Stranger didn’t even look over at them, and neither did Kindred. It was as if they didn’t even know the Reptars were there.
“Trade me guns,” Peers said, his hand out toward Sadeem.
“You’re supposed to have the handgun.”
“And those two assholes were supposed to stay back until the deck was clear!” Peers hissed. “Give me the fucking rifle!”
Sadeem hesitated, his eyes ticking to the opposite dune. Probably appealing to Kamal, as if the fact that Kamal had procured the weapons meant he owned the plan. Well, fuck the plan. There’d been many plans, and they had ways of not working out. Peers and Aubrey had planned a bunker full of Astral technology before they’d met Meyer’s group all those years ago, but it turned out the cave had probably been put there by the Astrals, Peers unwittingly filling his role as a puppet. He and Aubrey had also planned to haul ass through the cannibals outside Ember Flats without casualties, but then that dumbass Christopher had careened away to blow himself up and make a hole. And let’s not forget his own plan to duck into the Mullah Elders’ temple for a bit of righteous mischief. That plan hadn’t gone too awry; he�
�d called the Astrals to Earth to end a species, seven billion strong. Yes. Plans were spectacular.
Sadeem lowered the barrel. Peers snatched it, giving the old man a warning glance, then lowered the thing, preparing to sight on the Reptar closest to Kindred when Sadeem changed his mind and grabbed the butt from behind.
Peers spun, adrenaline high, and stopped himself inches from driving his elbow back into Sadeem’s face. He found himself confronting Clara instead.
She looked at Kindred and Stranger, walking in a trance down the dunes. She looked at the Reptars on the sand, all with open mouths, menacing the two men but keeping their distance.
Clara shook her head.
“Something is wrong,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Three
Through his symbiont’s Astral mind, Meyer saw it plain as day.
There were only three Reptars on the freighter. The Astrals had left four behind as quiet guards, meant purely as a backup force, there to protect the Ark until the Forgetting could be completed. Kindred had managed to kill one of the four when he’d visited the freighter, and the Astrals hadn’t replaced it. They couldn’t. Their entire command structure was based on a lack of a command structure, and now that human thought had spread through them like a virus, they didn’t know how to function. If the Astrals had a leader, it would have been Eternity. But she was here with Meyer, and had problems of her own. They all knew the woman was a puppet, just as Eternity knew it herself. Yet he’d held her hostage all the same.
Shuttles didn’t know where to fly. Motherships could barely communicate. The Deathbringer’s orbit could decay, and they probably wouldn’t know until it crashed and knocked a chunk out of the recovering planet. They didn’t know how to function as individuals. Meyer could see them scrambling from inside the changing collective — disagreeing, arguing, feeling proud, and the infant version of arrogance. They’d adjust. But hadn’t yet.
There were only three Reptars on the ship. It might look like dozens or hundreds from the outside, but Meyer saw the trick, like wires holding up the spaceships in an old sci-fi movie. The Ark had to fold space to do its job — to see as far and wide as it needed to. Those folds were subtle. But Kindred and Stranger, who had the potential for their own power, had opened one of those folds wider, into a rip, and stepped right through it.
Four people slipping through a rift doesn’t happen by accident, Divinity had told him.
And that was true. Even the Astrals, as far as Meyer and his observer could see, couldn’t do it. The ships could, and that’s how they’d rifted from their home through the hole near Jupiter to reach Earth. But shuttles couldn’t do it, nor could individual Astrals. It took tremendous energy. Immense power, harnessed to deepen a gravity well into something local, and safe.
But Kindred and Stranger had done it. Without knowing why or how. And they’d taken passengers with them. It was like instinct, buried deep inside Meyer. Projected to the pair of half men, who used their power to take things further.
That had scared Divinity. Because Meyer Dempsey wasn’t supposed to become what he had. He wasn’t supposed to have broken in the way they saw him. And when they’d attempted repair? When they’d sent a copy to do a hybrid’s job? Well, then shit had really hit the fan.
Meyer watched the Reptars harnessing the Ark’s power as best they could, showing themselves as spooks using something called quantum entanglement — but which felt to Meyer’s mind like specialized prisms. Just as light enters and refracts into many beams, a trio of Reptars was appearing as many. They couldn’t travel like the human wild cards, or do more than this pop-up freak show, displaying their false faces to incite panic so their bodies could attack the humans by surprise.
As long as the humans knew which of the Reptars were real, this would be simple.
They’d find the Ark.
And then, as Clara planned, they’d poison it.
The thought turned Meyer’s attention toward Eternity, wanting to make sure she couldn’t tell that his mind was talking to Kindred, Stranger, and Clara. He could keep her out. It wasn’t even hard now that he was getting the trick. Eternity had showed her hand when he’d stimulated the Nexus. Once he’d gotten the feel for manipulating their energy, it wasn’t difficult. He didn’t even have to risk accessing it again to do what had to be done. Meyer could project ghosts to guide Kindred and Stranger fine without it.
He tuned to Eternity. She wasn’t even poking at his defenses. His shell was plenty intact.
Meyer nudged the ghosts further, concentrating, leading his people to the true Reptar guards, blinding their minds to the false ones so they wouldn’t panic without cause. He had to keep it up, keep them marching and hide the duplicates. It wouldn’t be long now.
But then a harsh mental whisper
(he’s at the far end and has a weapon.)
returned his attention to Eternity, just as he’d been about to shift his focus. His eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring directly at the blonde, her gaze big and full of guilt.
“What did you do? Did you just—?”
The door behind Meyer blew open. He dove toward Eternity, knocking her back, gun trained behind him, firing at everything that moved and filling the room with corpses.
Chapter Forty-Four
Kindred blinked as if leaving a trance. He didn’t precisely recall walking onto the sand, though he did remember a dream of Heather, calling him forward, beckoning with her warm and long-missed embrace. Yet here he was.
A pair of Reptars was flanking him, one on each side.
Adrenaline flooded his cortex and doubled his pulse. The bottom of Meyer’s instinct flushed through Kindred as if born there. He found himself reaching for the semiautomatic tucked into the back of his pants, seconds ticking too fast. He might have shouted; he definitely tripped and fell onto his back, seeing the first of the big black things moving over him, mouth open and spark churning, Kindred’s finger tugged uselessly on the trigger as he pointed down its throat. It was dead. The pistol was done. It had jammed, and now there was a Reptar about to rip him in half and—
Peers yanked the rifle from Clara’s grip, practically ramming its stock into her forehead in his panic as Kindred fell and began to shout. As Stranger, across the dunes, pointed at the Reptar on his right as if seeing it only now, firing over and over and over, the Reptar still coming but not overtaking him.
He rushed forward, up over the lip, raising his rifle in the clear, not worrying about cover, knowing it was blown, that something had gone terribly wrong. But then he swore; the rifle was the right choice when the scene had been quiet, but now he couldn’t get a clear shot. He’d have to run in, and that close up, the rifle was useless.
On the other side, Logan was up; Kamal was up; the man from Kamal’s village was up and running.
“Give me the handgun!”
Sadeem stammered.
“GIVE ME THE FUCKING HANDGUN!”
But Sadeem was lost; he was a thinker, not a fighter. Peers dropped the rifle and snatched it from him, Sadeem’s grip momentarily fierce. There was a frightening instant where Peers imagined the gun going off in the struggle, shooting friend while trying to end their foe.
But the gun came loose, and Peers ran.
“Come on!”
Piper shook her head. She’d almost seen something. Almost understood. Even now she kept getting a flash of a circular room with a floor that lit up, with the shadows of what appeared to be tree branches beneath it. She was there with Meyer (she’d been there with Meyer), and it was long ago, and she’d left Cameron behind, and had felt a new kinship she returned. They’d matched before, then much better later, as if they were on the same frequency after years spent slightly off.
“Piper!”
But Kamal wasn’t going to wait; he ran toward the melee, racking his weapon.
(Safety.)
The voice from Kindred’s own mind, not Meyer’s or Clara’s. Only his own internal reminder that he was being an asshole
and that as long as the Reptar continued to jaw above him, those were more seconds he could spend shooting it through the back of its throat — one of the creature’s most vulnerable spots.
(Safety!)
Not a call for Stranger to run for cover — a reminder to click the switch on his gun’s side, turning it from safe to red, for dead.
Safety off, finger on trigger. Pop, pop, pop.
But the bullets went right through the Reptar as if it wasn’t even there.
Sadeem saw the other Reptars climb the freighter’s railings from the deck and spill down its sides like bees in a swarm. The first surrounded Kindred, Logan, Kamal, and Kamal’s cohort, Danni, her posture tall and proud, firing her weapon like a pro. Reptars eclipsed Stranger, Marcus, and Peers ahead. Blocking them from view.
Clara, looking up at him in betrayed expectation, as if someone had promised her Santa before admitting the lie.
But Sadeem and Clara had weapons, same as the others. He stood, removing his, flicking the safety to off as Kamal had shown them.
“We have to help them,” Sadeem said, saying words he didn’t feel, watching as the enormous swarm churned and buried their friends from view. Had Peers and the others really only thought there were a few dozen Reptars on the freighter? There had to be hundreds, maybe more.
Clara’s eyes were scanning the melee, squinting as if to see more than what was so obviously there. Her head snapped toward a lone Reptar leaping from the ship’s side, running toward the spot where Stranger’s group had been.
“They’re not—” Clara began, her eyes more confused than terrified. She stopped, flinching as shots ripped through the purring and growling, shattering the day like something broken. It was Kamal, with one of those desert weapons the old-world warlords once carried, black and long with a banana clip.
Shots struck the sand. Kamal dove down, bullets whistling overhead. Others came. Single reports, from a handful of other shooters.