by Platt, Sean
But Kamal would understand. He’d already done this sort of thing once before, surrendered his spot on the Ember Flats vessel so that someone else could have it, urging Jabari to go while he stayed behind as a dying set of eyes and ears.
Piper took a long, slow breath. Then, with sluggish lips she said, “I’m the new key bearer. Trevor said I’ll be able to open the Ark.” Another breath. “And I think I need to jump into the Ark as poison, like Cameron did.”
Kamal opened his mouth for concerns and rebuttals, but Piper beat him to it. Speaking quickly, she told him all about her suppressed memories of being in the strange room aboard the Astral ship, receiving energy that resonated with the energy in Cameron, what Trevor had told her about the Astrals and their inability to touch the Ark themselves — all of it.
“But it’s already been poisoned. You said Cameron did it.”
“And that bought us twenty years. But now they’re at their wit’s end. Trevor told me Meyer thinks they don’t feel we’re worth saving. We’ve caused too much damage. But who knows what that could mean? Maybe they’ll kill us all and be done. Or maybe they just have to kill Clara, who’s been the thorn in their side. Either way, we need to push them over the edge. Meyer says they’re sick. So let’s make them sicker. Then maybe it won’t be worth their time to try and fix us. Maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll leave us alone.”
“That’s a big maybe.”
Piper’s lips pursed. She shook her head, feeling the same sensation that had been growing all morning.
“It’s right, Kamal. I know it is.”
He looked into the distance, roughly toward the freighter, and bit his lip, conflicted.
“I can’t tell anyone else. But I have to do this, Kamal. And when the moment comes, I might need help. I might lose my nerve. Someone might figure out what I’m up to and try to stop me. It’s not easy to keep secrets in this group. I’m afraid to get near Clara, sure she’ll be able to read me. But this is important, Kamal.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Meyer knows it. And you were the one who gave us all those reasons why Meyer, of all people, should know.”
Kamal silently watched the horizon. She didn’t like seeing him serious. Without his armor of sarcasm, he seemed so vulnerable.
“Kamal?”
He shook his head.
“Kamal? Can I count on you?”
After another few seconds, he nodded.
Then, without looking at her, he turned and walked away.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Enough was enough.
Melanie had been in her quarters all night, noting the destruction, increasingly sure what had caused it, taking it all far more personally than she should. But instead of picking things up, she made the mess worse. She kicked. She stalked. Thinking and growing more furious, for hours on end.
Divinity, still locked inside Control, her doings unknown, calls still unanswered.
Meyer Dempsey, similarly locked in his cell, guards kept out as if he was choosing isolation rather than having it forced upon him. All night she’d watched energy stream from Meyer to the Nexus, from the Nexus to Earth. He was up to something, too — similarly unknown, calls to or about him likewise unanswered.
Hours and hours and hours. Anger building. The body needed sleep, but Melanie refused to accept it. Instead she stalked and fumed, circling her space, stacking fury like bricks.
She opened the door and found two Titan guards. Guards she hadn’t asked for or authorized, who seemed to be watching more than protecting her.
Melanie eyed them. They came closer. But she had things to do and places to go. She shoved the Titans out of the way, wondering if that would provoke them, knowing they weren’t exactly sipping from the collective as much as they all should be — the same, of course, as she wasn’t and hadn’t been for years. She almost hoped they’d take offense the way only fragile individual minds could. She hoped they’d spin on her. Raise their weapons. Or turn to Reptars and attack one of their own. Mutiny made no sense in a species like hers. At least not until recently.
Let them try.
Let them come at her.
She needed to cross the ship to reach the place where her next steps would be most efficient, but she wasn’t so far gone — so far down the slippery slope of humanity’s disease — that she couldn’t reach through the haze if truly needed. The collective was made of minds that were equal in concept, but every wheel required a center. Divinity, as a whole, formed that nucleus. But even Divinity was merely an outer ring of Eternity: the heart of the middle.
If the Titans came at her, Melanie was fairly certain she could pinch them off, from inside, with barely a conscious thought. She’d learned anger in this surrogate body thanks to its human wiring. And she’d learned other things, too: spite, jealousy, vengeance, scorn. Volatile emotions blended with her abilities. Eternity gave her powers within the collective. And Melanie gave her reflexes, survival instinct, and a hair trigger.
She didn’t rule the hive but could purge its impurities. As long as they came at her one at a time like the malcontented individuals they’d become, she could knock them down without slowing her stride.
But the Titans didn’t try to stop her as she left the room. They simply watched her leave, like cowards.
Meyer Dempsey had somehow barred the door to his cell? He’d remotely accessed the Nexus and was using it, right now, to project the Ark’s power? He wanted to ignore everything she’d said — every warning she’d given?
Well, then fuck him.
Divinity wanted to launch little schemes? She’d found a second hybrid and meant to use it in ways unknown, without consulting the collective? Divinity, like Meyer, had barred herself in a room that shouldn’t even be lockable?
Well, then fuck her, too.
Even as Melanie stalked from one end of the ship to the other, she knew she was out of control. All that she hated in Meyer and Divinity and disobedient Titans, she saw in herself. Even now, she was learning new lessons. This time around, that lesson was hypocrisy. But if the collective wanted to individualize as poison flooded through Clara’s breach, then they’d suffer the flip side of that individualization. Yes, they could make their own choices. But the same disease that gave them options also gave her authority. What was once egalitarian could become hierarchical. What should have been a collective could become a dictatorship as complete as any the humans had shown through the archive.
Despite the press of time, Melanie refused to run. She stalked the ship, almost hoping for defiance. Her mental fists were held aloft, ready to fight. Being threatened and abducted and subjugated had raised her hackles. Meyer had made her believe she could die (though she couldn’t); Divinity had shown her she wasn’t in charge (though by new definitions, she was); Titans and Reptars were drifting about under their own direction. The archive was barely guarded while Titans took sides aboard the big ships. She couldn’t even dispatch shuttles, because none wanted to listen.
Again, fuck them.
No Titans entered the corridors. If they had, she’d have tackled them with feet and fingernails before simply pinching off the energy fueling their bodies from deep within. No Reptars came, even though she was sure they’d see her in the collective if they looked. They knew better, it seemed.
A short while later Melanie came to a double-wide door at the end of a large, utilitarian hallway. She was at the edge of the ship, not even in its middle. To her surrogate sensibilities, everything about the chamber and its lack of pomp seemed boring. It looked more like a storage room than the bed of royalty.
The door, on her subconscious command, slid open. The space beyond was larger than the door implied: at least fifty feet high, round and domed, massive in circumference. Through all her turmoil, she’d somehow kept her human shoes on. Heels clacked in the space, echoing like tiny gunshots.
She looked up at the partition. She issued a request with a thought, and the partitions flickered away as if they�
��d merely been projections.
Behind it was a thing like an enormous anemone, its skin translucent, its insides made of light.
“It’s gone too far,” Melanie said. “Open up, and let me in.”
Chapter Fifty
Lights surrounded her. To Melanie they looked like fireflies she’d never witnessed through her surrogate’s eyes but had seen over and over in memories — from the archive, pulled from the air, seen through the eyes of drug users in altered states, downloaded from observers who’d lived countless lives together with their human hosts.
A voice seemed to say, Are you sure?
But Melanie knew the trick. The voice was her own, though it sounded like a thing from the outside, pushing in, through her skull.
“What damage can it do at this point?”
The space — the fireflies, the voice, all of it — didn’t respond for a while. Melanie stood in the thing’s center, in the semi-dark, watching the pattern of lights as they floated like sparks all around her. The thing’s skin was mostly transparent, but she was in the center, seeing outward through many layers. If the body had organs, she was seeing through them as well. The effect was curious and beautiful, like standing in the aftermath of an elegant explosion, watching scraps of flame descend and swirl in the air.
Then it did respond, but again Melanie tried to see the reaction for what it was. Not that different from speaking to oneself in the mirror — something Melanie had tried, and found she liked. Humans spoke of selves within the self: multiple voices in one, ego and id. Considering where she was and what she’d seen and done, it was something Melanie could appreciate on many levels.
She was standing inside her own body, speaking to her own mind. But whereas the anemone in the room had once truly felt like “Eternity” to all on the ship, it had started to feel like something else. Melanie was the embodiment. This huge thing in the giant room, thinking in abstract and bathed in light? It was old baggage — a body Melanie knew she’d need to return to one day, but still found repugnant.
The voice in her head, as Melanie stood in her true body’s center, said, As you wish.
“As we wish,” she corrected.
But the voice did not reply.
And then it began.
Chapter Fifty-One
In Control, with Liza Knight smugly juggling the canister of Canned Heat and still infuriatingly undecided, Divinity felt the Purge creep through her like an internal hand. Walls in front of secrets she’d tried to keep — rights of a surrogate, rights of a damaged, individual mind — crumbled to dust. Eternity gripped her. The big hand rummaged through her thoughts, tweaking, nudging things into place. Mental chests opened and spilled their contents. She knew what had happened immediately. And what would happen next.
Liza’s eyes widened. For a moment, Divinity saw right through her. Liza’s head seemed to open like origami unfolding, and Divinity could read it all over her shoulder, from the big chamber, where Eternity had broken the collective covenant. It was Eternity committing this violation, forcing her way into both of their brains through brute force. But as long as Liza’s hybrid mind opened, Divinity would take her peek.
Liza was bluffing. Of course she was, and had been all night while neither slept. There was no magic to the human’s virus. It would integrate with their collective same as any human technology could be made to, simply by plugging it in. Liza was only hot air. Thanks to Eternity’s intrusive Purge, her posturing — pretending she held knowledge needed for installing Canned Heat — was as obvious as the smug look that had so recently drained from her face.
Divinity didn’t need Liza Knight — or her maddening indecision.
“Oh God,” Liza said.
“If that’s what you believe.”
Divinity crossed to Liza, lighting fast.
Took her head in the crook of her arm.
And broke her neck.
Meyer’s eyes opened in his barred cell, the haze departing as if someone had set an industrial fan beside him to waft it away. Suddenly there was no connection. He couldn’t reach Piper, to give her Trevor or any of the others as a guide. He couldn’t reach Clara, to explain what needed doing or what he had in mind — what had finally dawned on him, after Eternity ordered him dragged from the Nexus to this place, where it turned out he could still reach the Ark’s memories just fine. He couldn’t reach Stranger or Kindred; it was as if his other halves had been severed clean, snipped from existence.
He was in a white room, restrained by the arms, beaten a bit more than seemed necessary, especially by usually-stoic Titans. He’d been keeping the pain at bay, but now everything hurt. His head throbbed. He felt tiny, all that expansion he’d so recently realized gone in a blink.
A raw, red force remained in its place. Eternity, pushing through him like a battering ram.
He scrambled for the connection. The force would have to leave again eventually, withdraw the suffocating presence like a weight on his chest. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Meyer could see through their eyes now, but with the connection cut that felt like a curse. He could still see the freighter from Piper’s point of view, with Clara, Logan, Kindred, Stranger, and a Middle-Easterner who seemed vaguely familiar all around her.
Meyer strained, trying to fight the force of Eternity scraping the inside of his mind, cutting him off from Piper and the others.
They’d be at the wreck in minutes — but would now arrive without his help, without the ability to tell the real Reptars from their echoes.
On the planet below, Stranger gripped his head and fell to the sand. His knees wouldn’t hold him upright anymore — and curiously, neither could Kindred’s, just down the dune. The pain was blinding.
Piper moved in front of him, speaking, but he couldn’t hear her, or concentrate on anything at all. Someone was inside his head, pushing all the buttons that he alone should have been able to press. There was no forcing it back. He could only close his eyes and wait.
“Stranger!” Somewhere down the dune, other voices shouted Kindred’s name, somehow echoed not from outside his head but inside Stranger’s mind.
He saw a long tunnel in the darkness behind his eyelids, he at one end and Kindred at the other. When he opened his eyes, Stranger could still see Piper — except that her face had become that of a blonde woman.
“Now I understand,” said Piper/the blonde woman, a smile crawling across her features.
Inside that mental tunnel, Kindred and Stranger moved toward each other. Force built. Lightning crackled through the air with deadly potential.
It wasn’t until hands grabbed him and tried in vain to hold him back that Stranger realized his body, in the real world, had risen to walk forward as well.
Clara stood without moving, watching the two men stand and walk with their entourage, meeting an internal face eye to eye. She turned to meet its gaze without flinching, her mental body squaring mental shoulders.
You can’t stop us, Clara thought. We’re already at your Ark.
I am in control now. You cannot harm us.
But Clara knew it was a lie. Staring in those mental eyes, directly through the break she herself had made between the species, she knew that poisoning the Ark would work just fine, if they could reach it.
There are Reptars, said the other.
They will not stop us either. We can open the top. Piper knows how. She is the key. You did that to her, all those years ago.
The face inside seemed to laugh. Then it said, Piper also knows how she plans to poison it.
And then it showed Clara what Piper meant to do.
Inside the monolith, two Reptars woke. They’d moved as one, nesting together as if seeking comfort. The wounds were superficial. But now the odd thoughts each had about earning more — normally out of mind in this form but present of late — were gone.
A ghost of a handler materialized before them.
“There are five on the sand, split into two groups,” the handler said. “One group for e
ach of you. Center on the two older white men and the young woman. They are the last of the Archetypes. The others will go quickly once they are handled.”
One of the Reptars rose to its clawed feet and chattered. The other joined it, two black voices forming a chorus like swarming insects.
The handler seemed to take the chatter as language. She plucked the Reptars’ key thought — concern was too strong a word — as if spoken in the words of the higher class.
“It will be like last time,” the handler said. “Double and redouble. They are blind, and will not see the true targets until it is too late.”
The lead Titan, walking without hurry in the direction Eternity had departed, stopped as if he were an automaton with its power cut. His companion paused as well, and the two met each other’s placid eyes.
Where is she?
It does not matter.
We were pursuing, said/thought one of the Titans.
But it does not matter.
The head Titan stopped, waiting for a thought. Moments ago, his directive had been clear. He’d been going to retrieve … something. Someone. Now all he could sense from the collective was the collective itself. It felt different somehow — damaged, as if there had been discord or death. But he paid it no mind. Because Eternity’s hand was inside, holding him, ordering him to ignore it.
Where? thought the first.
One considered. As did the other. Then they seemed to realize the same answer at the same time, as it had always been within the collective.
Control. There is a threat.
Weapons up, the Titans changed direction and marched toward Control.
Divinity bore down, finding her surrogate’s head throbbing.
If she waited and kept the pressure on, she could push Eternity out of her. And as she pushed, Divinity fought a curious indignity. Eternity had initiated a Purge. It was a violation but also bad news. In a stable collective, a Purge was dicey, and the collective was far from stable now. The group mind wasn’t meant to be hijacked, but sometimes even the best-functioning group needed an administrator to force order. The ability was there as almost a janitorial concern, simple to implement and align diverging minds, but short-lived and intended to fold after a hard moment of systemwide force. She’d be able to puppet Titans and Reptars if she wanted. But Divinity had a mind of her own.