by Platt, Sean
Melanie’s lips firmed. Her fists clenched. She wanted to know the meaning of this. She wanted someone held responsible and punished.
But she was interrupted when the opposite door to the small room opened, and a contingent of new Titans entered, apparently to deliver news in person that, if not for the Archetypes and human pollution, she should have already pulled from the hive mind at a distance.
The Nexus is activating, said the new thought. Meyer Dempsey has spooled it up from his cell.
From his cell? How could he possibly do that? It was as impossible as a hybrid going rogue and creating Palls when replicated. As impossible as a human memory cluster too redundant for the Forgetting to erase. As impossible as subject minds leaking into their own minds, turning them into individuals too unused to autonomy to so much as deploy more Reptars to the surface.
Enough was enough. Melanie, she was shocked to discover, felt more furious than afraid.
“Kill him,” she said. “Just kill Dempsey, and be done with it.”
But the Titans just looked at each other.
And the collective mind said, We can’t.
Chapter Forty-Six
“Piper. Wake up.”
Piper shook the voice away. She didn’t want to wake up, and she sure as hell didn’t want any more dreams. They’d plagued her every blink, as if just waiting for her to fall unconscious so they could move in for the kill. Her mind was full of all she’d seen only in sleep — particularly dogging her as they put enough distance between themselves and the freighter where the battle finally ended. Nobody, it seemed, had expected retreat to be possible. The Reptars would follow them until their party was dead. But Peers bought them time, and once Piper had run, she’d seen the others: Kindred, Logan, Kamal, Stranger — and blessedly, lest Piper’s heart fail, Clara. They’d crested the first dune at a sprint and the second at a run, but the Reptars stayed behind. All five hundred. Or, if Clara was to be believed, two, somehow enabled by the Ark’s power to display many faces to the world.
But Piper didn’t want this new dream. Or the thing that felt more like a memory: herself, in that round room with the lit-up, tree-branched floor, with Meyer. She’d been unable to push the last from her mind even while awake. It had the feeling of persistence — a thought demanding attention lest something important be forgotten.
“Piper.”
She pulled her thin blanket closer, fighting for slumber.
The speaker punched her hard between the shoulder blades. Piper spun, annoyed by the intrusion, and sat up.
Trevor Dempsey was kneeling behind her.
Piper looked around, certain that she was dreaming even though she knew better. She’d moved away from the group, feeling an overwhelming need to be alone. She couldn’t even see the spots where the others had bedded down without standing. She’d told them she didn’t need or want the safety of numbers. She didn’t particularly care about snakes or scorpions.
It should have been dark, and it was. But still Piper could see everything, as if the full moon was a bit too bright.
She lay back down and closed her eyes. Trevor punched her again.
“I’ll keep doing it. It doesn’t hurt my knuckles at all.”
Fighting unreality, Piper sat back up, her heart pounding. Trevor hadn’t aged a day.
“What are you?”
“Don’t do that, start blabbing on about how I’m supposed to be dead.”
“But you’re … dead.”
Trevor gave a very teenage sigh.
“Are you the Pall?”
“I wasn’t around for the Pall.”
Now she’d caught it, sussed out this strange thing’s lie. Claiming ignorance of the Pall while using its name was a bit like saying “What?” when someone asks if you’re really deaf or only playing.
“Let’s not do this. You used to be an empath. Can you really not tell it’s me?”
Piper stopped, her mouth open.
Trevor shifted on the moonlit sand. He was also glowing a bit, from the inside. Like a ghost that’s found substance enough to move sand with his feet, to punch a girl in the back to get her attention.
“I was in love with you, you know. You were too old for me, but too young for Dad. It wasn’t fair. You have no idea how hard that was, to be a teenage boy with a stepmom like you.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Piper said, looking around the quiet desert, wondering at the trickery upon her.
“Oh, it made perfect sense. You were hot. And fun. It was hard to be around you. It was the king of all crushes. I never really got over it. Not before I died.”
Piper shook her head, watching him, disbelieving her eyes but unable to ignore the feeling inside, growing where her old psychic abilities once made their home. It wasn’t the Pall, because now that was Stranger. This was something else.
Only: not something else. This was Trevor.
“How are you here?”
“Dad sent me.” Trevor gave an annoyed, eye-rolling laugh. “Poetic, right? He never understood it any more than you did. ‘Trevor, go hang out with your stepmother for the afternoon. You two can hold hands.’ ‘Trevor, take your stepmother to the mall, and help her pick out bikinis.’”
“We never did those things.”
“‘Trevor, go see your stepmother in the middle of the desert after midnight to tell her about the Ark.’ It never ends with him. And you know what? I thought it would be easier. But I guess I’m sort of frozen where I was … and you’re still beautiful.”
Piper couldn’t help herself. She’d never thought of Trevor as anything but an adopted son and never would have, but the years had beaten her badly. She was fifty-six and caked in filth. Nobody had called her beautiful in forever.
When she looked up, Trevor was giving her a bittersweet smile. She saw the sorrow. The regret. The reality. Somehow, it was him.
“What about the Ark?”
“You have to go back.”
Piper felt her head shake as if moving without her permission. “No.”
“I know you lost people.”
“No. Not again. No more. Peers, Sadeem … and the time before that, it was your sister.” She shook her head harder, trying to make this whole thing go away. Something hot and liquid trickled down her cheek. “I can’t take it anymore. I just … can’t.”
“There are only two Reptars protecting it now. And you have a weapon.”
“And a lot of good our weapons did!”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Something dawned on Piper. She sat up straighter, fixing Trevor with tear-clouded eyes.
“Stranger said he saw you. Before the attack, by the ship.”
Trevor nodded. “Me. Lila. Mom.”
“Why?”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you, Piper. Dad’s helping us. He’s … tapped into something. Tapped in on the ship, sure, but also inside himself. Don’t tell me you never sensed it.”
Piper thought. Yes, Meyer had seemed a bit more different with every passing day. But hadn’t that just been the Astral Forgetting finally going away?
“Dad asked us to show them the three ‘real’ Reptars. Because he can talk to Stranger and Kindred, too.”
“Weren’t you ‘before Stranger’ since you were ‘before the Pall’?”
“Splitting hairs. Time is different for me these days. Don’t I look good for a man in his forties?” Trevor ran a hand along the side of his head, smoothing his thick black hair in a parody of dapperness. “They both seem like Dad to me.”
“They’re not your father.”
Trevor smiled, as if maybe she’d learn better someday.
“This time you won’t be surprised. Maybe Kamal can explain how it works. I think the Da Vinci Initiate was starting to understand it. There’s no way to travel faster than light; the Astrals needed a wormhole to do what they did; yada yada. But all you really need to understand is that space is different around the Ark. The rules change. For now, only the Astra
ls know how to exploit it, confuse you with a bunch of Reptars so the only real two can get you. Tell me: How did you get away from the freighter, after Lila came to join me?”
“Came to …” Piper understood; he meant when she’d died.
“Dad understands the Ark’s energy a little. Kindred and Stranger, because of what they are, understand it a lot. They don’t know they know, but they definitely do. That’s how they were able to move you through one of those folds when they stopped thinking and reacted. Part of them, just like part of Dad, knows how to use that energy. And they’ll use it again.”
“To … what? Teleport onto the ship?”
Trevor smiled again. “You’ll see.”
Piper looked Trevor over slowly. He was real. She both believed and disbelieved it more with every passing second.
“Is it like being in Heaven?”
“It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s more like I’m with you.”
“With me?”
He shook his head. “With all of you.” He tapped his head. “Not my family. Not this group. I mean ‘with humanity.’ All of it — not just Judgment’s survivors.”
“How?”
“What am I, a philosopher?”
“I just thought …”
Trevor smiled one more time. More genuine. His truest smile so far. He put his hand on hers. It was solid and warm.
“Nobody dies, Piper. Not really.”
“Then why—”
“If everyone came back all the time,” he said, either pre-guessing her question or rummaging around inside her supposedly private thoughts, “nothing would ever move forward. We need the illusion of death. Mortality is part of what makes us, us.”
“But you’re here now.”
“We’re still near the Ark.”
“So you came from the Ark?”
Trevor raised a hand, holding it flat, tipping it back and forth like a rocking boat. “It’s complicated.”
“We can’t go back, Trevor. Or at least we can’t all go back. I’d never forgive myself if Clara—”
“Joined us where she’s already present? It’s not the horror you think it is.”
“It’s not that easy for me to just accept what you’re saying. Even if we went back, Clara couldn’t go. I won’t allow it.”
“She must. Clara’s the wedge in the door. She’s keeping the channel open. Just like how Stranger and Kindred share its energy — each other’s energy. Same as you share Cameron’s.”
“Share …?” Piper trailed off. She’d felt it, though, same as Trevor implied: a bond between her and Cameron that had always been there, drawing them together, same as Stranger and Kindred. But she and Cameron weren’t halves like they were. So what was it?
“Clara has to go like you have to go,” Trevor said, shifting again on the sand. “Because you have the key.”
“I don’t have a key.”
Trevor nodded slowly. “I’m sure it seems that way. But let me tell you something about the old key that I learned when Cameron joined us: That key chose him. Years and years ago, back when he and his father first found it, Cameron touched it first, and it became his match. And in a somewhat different way, the same is true of you.”
“But—”
“After the mothership took you aboard over Moab, then transferred you to the Eternity ship before dropping you at Vail, where we saw you outside the bunker, on the security cameras. Do you remember?”
“Sort of. I remember meeting Meyer in a round room with shadows on a backlit floor.”
Trevor nodded. “They can’t so much as touch the Ark, Piper. They made it when they seeded themselves into us, but both always had an element of chaos — us, and the Ark, tied together. They could use what stored itself inside to assess us, but the process found a life of its own. They can reset it, or hide it once empty again, but it’s always taken a human to move and open it. That’s why Cameron needed the key. Why he had to make a choice to open the Ark; It would never have opened on its own. It’s about humanity’s core. Free will, maybe. We’re a species that determines its own fate, always — even when it’s rotten.”
Trevor moved his legs, sat with them crossed.
“They’ve always needed our cooperation in this little experiment. They couldn’t do it on their own. So they had the Mullah to mind the portal connecting us. It took human minds to see where we stood along the way, through drugs that altered our states. They didn’t just leave Astrals to live with us; they needed hybrids like Dad — only half-Astral, but also half-human. Right now, as our consciousnesses mix and throw their collective into disarray, they think something went wrong — first with Dad’s connection to his observer, then to all of them at once. But the way Dad sees it, it’s not ‘something going wrong’ at all. It’s the inevitable outcome of uncertainty. After enough times through the cycle, even the least likely things are bound to occur.”
“Are you saying—?”
“It’s a little like asking patients to help run the asylum. They’ve always needed to lean on us for help, intended or not. And so far, it’s worked out for them. They’ve been able to underestimate us because we haven’t been worthy of much. But this time we used our minds to create a new kind of collective — something the Astrals never saw coming. That created the Lightborn, and kickstarted a kind of instant evolution, starting with Dad and culminating in Clara. To them, things are spiraling out of control. But within the larger system, seen from high enough up, there’s no way this couldn’t have happened eventually.”
“What does this have to do with the Ark? With the key? Or with my time with Meyer on the Astral ships?”
“Thousands of years pass between openings of the Ark,” Trevor said. “Cameron opened it last time, but once he was gone — once he turned the tables another time, polluting their ‘stream’ in the most blunt-force way he could think of — they knew they’d need someone else. You wouldn’t be alive the next time the Ark was opened, of course, but you’d be first in a line. Once they gave you the same energy that Cameron already had, you became their first ‘human control’ for the next epoch.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Whether or not you have a stone disc in your satchel, you hold a key all the same.”
Piper felt cold. She didn’t like where this seemed to be going.
“Clara wants to poison the Ark. She thinks that doing so will force more of us into their collective, and make them leave us alone, whether we’ve Forgotten their visit or not.”
Trevor nodded. “It will ruin their experiment, and they won’t be happy. Dad agrees that it will work. But it means you must return to the Ark. He will try to guide you. They’re sick right now, and there’s no way to send more Reptars in time — if you hurry.”
Piper closed her eyes. When they opened, Trevor was still there, no more a dream than the wind. “Okay.”
The ghost swallowed, as if what was coming might be more uncomfortable than the truth of his death. “There’s one more thing, if you want to finish what Cameron started when he jumped into the Ark.”
“What?”
“You know, Piper. You have to.”
“I don’t know, Trevor.” This time, she took his hand, finding it as solid as the ground beneath her. “Tell me.”
“To poison anything, you need two things. The first is a way to open the container.”
Piper nodded. “Okay. That’s me. So what else do you need?”
Trevor’s ghost looked away. Swallowed again. Then he met Piper’s eyes and in them, she saw regret, sorrow — maybe even fear.
“Poison,” he said.
Chapter Forty-Seven
The floor rocked beneath Divinity’s feet. For a moment, it felt like the entire ship might cant sideways, all the stabilization and gravitation systems failing, and tip them toward the room’s corner. Maybe then the enormous thing would fall from orbit, slicing the planet’s atmosphere like a knife, streaking from the sky and running aground like Carl Nairobi had someho
w found the Ark’s resting place and taken it across the ocean to run aground in the worst of all possible spots. If that happened, Divinity’s surrogate might not survive. Maybe that was for the best. She’d become attached enough (and she hated herself for the realization) to see Eternity’s perspective.
But no, the ship stabilized. Control seemed to flicker, the light within the surfaces going dark before coming back online. It might be the collective’s skewed energy choking the ship, or it might be some sort of elaborate sabotage. At this point, neither hardly mattered.
“What was that?” Liza asked, clearly frightened. Divinity liked seeing the woman’s emotion. It shook a bit of complacency from her. Liza was a hybrid, but the part she thought of as “herself” was more human than not. If the ship accelerated, the force would more or less liquefy them both. But whereas Divinity would survive in her native form afterward, Liza would not. The observer would move on, searching for another host who didn’t have such grand ambitions.
Divinity looked at the panel nearest her hand, considering. Control didn’t direct the ship, but the collective did. She could implant a suggestion. With all the chaos, it probably wouldn’t even be second-guessed until Liza Knight turned to pulp.
But no. For now, at least, Divinity needed her. She could deal with the way Liza kept trying to seize the upper hand later.
She told Liza the truth: “It’s Dempsey. He’s in it, too.”
“In your Nexus?”
Divinity pressed her lips flat, hearing Liza’s disbelief. Apparently she’d effectively conveyed the idea that the Nexus could only be accessed through the Nexus room itself — and remotely only through Control. They knew Dempsey had been taken to a holding room. And yet there he was, pushing bits of the Nexus around like chess pieces.
“Yes.”