by Platt, Sean
Kindred shoved her down, behind him. And without hesitating, as the thing opened its mouth to strike, he did the last thing the Reptar must have expected: instead of running from that mouth, Kindred shoved a meal inside it.
The Reptar bit down hard, severing Kindred’s right arm near the shoulder.
But perhaps a tenth of a second before the thing’s jaws closed, there was a muffled pop as Kindred discharged his weapon down the monster’s throat.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Melanie’s knees buckled. She sagged back against the bulkhead for a moment and had to push her hands against the thing to right herself. Meyer wasn’t watching. He was in his trance, head down, longish sweaty hair hanging to hide him in a curtain. His hands were still restrained, but Melanie felt an odd compulsion to free them. She’d already let him go in the only way that truly mattered. To the awakened Meyer Dempsey, hands were hardly necessary.
Feeling him working sent a shiver up her back. A subtle difference in the room’s energy, a change in its temperature. All things she wouldn’t have noticed without her body.
Now there was this fatigue. This sense of desperately wanting sleep. She felt sluggish and slow. But the torpor wasn’t Meyer’s doing. This was something else.
Melanie closed her eyes, forcing herself not to think of Meyer and what he was doing. Instead, she looked back at the collective. But the path to the core she’d so recently used to force the Purge was already foggy and indistinct. There was something wrong. And in its center, she saw Divinity.
What did you do?
But of course Divinity didn’t answer because Melanie hadn’t actually asked. Instead she’d asked herself. The question was more a moan of futility than an inquiry. The sort of thing a human would do. The kind of nonsense question Piper Dempsey might have asked when taken to the Nexus for her energy: Why, Meyer? Why you, and why me?
Because he was broken. Before Kindred had sprung him, the plan had been to keep the real Meyer Dempsey on board indefinitely. And why Piper? Because every control needed a control, and the thought at the time — though laughable now — had been that the first Titan duplicate, who was supposed to be fixed in the ways the original hybrid was broken — would keep the new key bearer safe and guide her. She’d never have children with that first copy (or with Kindred, for that matter), but she could have them with Cameron, ensuring a long line of bearers, until the time when they were finally needed.
Well. That was only one of a hundred things that hadn’t worked out as planned.
Melanie watched the disease spread like a spill, soaking into the hive. She watched the shriveling. She watched the dying. She watched Titan and Reptar minds shake themselves off and, as their own fatigue faded, wake up more their old selves than their new ones. And she watched it creep toward the bridge.
Toward the Ark.
Toward the junction between species, where it would cross into the child population to finish its ugliest deeds.
She had time to feel a flash of uncertainty and fear. The final hours played themselves out as regurgitated from the stream: Carl grabbing her in the cell; Meyer abducting her; Melanie awakening to learn that Carl had, it seemed, taken a shot meant to kill her. The strange trio of inappropriate feelings that came in its company: relief, that her surrogate’s body had survived; guilt, that Carl had died instead; awe, that even a human born to protect — as the Warrior — would put himself in harm’s way to spare an enemy.
The dark cloud came, eclipsing it all. And when it passed, there was no Divinity. No collective. All of a sudden, there was only herself.
Divinity’s bile had severed her connection to the collective.
Internal lights extinguished, one by one.
And then Melanie, for the first time in her very long life, was all alone.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Clara shrieked. At first she thought it was the walking dead, but then realized she was seeing something far less theatrical and much more dire: Piper, covered in blood, supporting Kindred on her right side — her only option because Kindred no longer had an arm to support on the other. It was only a stump, ragged like a dog’s chew toy, dangling in wet flaps of sinew and blood vessels. A red-soaked spike of ivory bone protruded from the mess, its end sharp like a branch snapped in a thunderstorm.
“What happened?” Clara demanded. She couldn’t move her eyes from the wound. She’d seen worse, but this was so fresh, and gushing like a faucet. And for all intents and purposes, this was her grandfather.
Kindred’s face was white and waxy, like cheese.
“Reptar,” he said. “Dead.”
“We need to find the Ark,” Piper said, pushing past her. Clara turned, watching her skirt Kamal and Logan, their mouths both open. Stranger was at the rear of the arriving group looking nearly as waxen as Kindred. His left hand was on his right shoulder, gripping it as if he’d been shot.
“Piper?” Kamal said. “What …?”
He trailed off. Piper didn’t answer, rushing on, shouldering open a swinging door, moving out onto the deck where row upon row of stacked shipping containers waited. Clara could tell it wasn’t mere urgency compelling Piper. She was also fighting not to think. Clara could feel her worry, her terror, how close Piper was to the end of her rope. They did have to hurry. Not because of Reptars but because Piper’s mind was close to snapping.
“Where is it?” Piper asked Kindred. She turned to Stranger, yards distant, when Kindred didn’t answer. “Where is the Ark? Can you feel it?”
But Stranger didn’t answer either.
The air crackled with blue lightning, arcing from one metal box to another. Whatever had happened between Stranger and Kindred was ramping up now. The air was alive. The bomb waiting to explode.
“Clara?”
“Ahead,” Clara said.
Piper moved on, still dragging her burden. Clara followed. Kamal and Logan remained behind her, stepping wide to avoid a slick trail of blood down the corridor’s middle. And when Clara looked over her shoulder, she could see Stranger at the far rear wearing a curious expression. It was hard to be between them. They could all feel the energy. Clara could see it on their faces.
Ahead, said an internal voice. But it was no longer Meyer’s — a voice she could barely hear through something like dark static. Now it was her own.
She didn’t need help to find it. The archive’s power thickened the air, its pull like a magnet. She could practically see the thing like a sun glowing around the corner, lighting its shipping container like a glowing coal more and more the closer they came. The thing bellowed. Radiated heat. And when the box with the Ark finally came into view, she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes.
“How are we …?” Clara began, meaning to ask how they could possibly approach the thing, enter its halo without being burned alive. But she stopped when Piper put her hand on the latch without flinching — when she turned to look back, and Clara realized she wasn’t even squinting in the blinding light the way she, Logan, and Kamal were forced to.
Clara watched Kindred’s fingers grasp for the handle beside Piper’s. She watched a mammoth padlock melting like taffy in fire. It hit the deck with a soft clang — partially molten metal smacking the hard deck.
Piper met Clara’s eyes. Not squinting. Not flinching. Not hesitating, other than for Clara’s sake.
“I can’t go in there,” Clara said.
The heat was like a blast furnace. The light was like a thousand suns, and even with her arm up and eyes closed, she could see its brilliance as if daring her corneas to fry away. When she turned her head, it seemed to shine through her skull from the rear. And yet to Piper, it was only a box. No intolerable light or heat or charge. The handle was still under her uncaring hand, inches from where the heavy metal lock had melted away.
Had it been like this for Cameron? Clara knew he’d approached it alone. Or was something different this time? Something broken far above, filling the archive with poison before they could do the sam
e?
“I know you can’t,” said Piper, a bittersweet smile touching her lips. “I think this is for me to do alone.”
“For us to do alone,” Kindred corrected.
“No!”
“Goodbye, Clara,” said Piper.
Clara’s eyes had filled with tears. She opened her mouth to shout, but before she could Piper and Kindred had slipped inside.
For a moment there was nothing. But ten seconds later the container seemed to intensify and hum, cycling up like a power plant nearing overload.
Someone brushed her shoulder.
Stranger.
The energy grew. The light was blinding. Heat forced Clara to step back, unable to even attempt a grab at Stranger’s sleeve. Hotter waves pounded her with his every step, forcing Clara away.
But in the brilliance, she could see the tall man turn to face her.
“For us to do alone,” Stranger echoed.
He stepped forward.
Before Clara could say anything, he’d entered the shipping container and closed the door behind him.
Chapter Sixty-Four
There was a terrible crackling of static. At first Melanie thought Meyer must have smuggled an electronic device aboard that had somehow gone unnoticed for the entire time he’d been on the Eternity ship, but then she realized the noise was coming from the walls themselves.
Melanie was investigating when the wall itself flickered with light, and she saw Divinity’s surrogate staring at her, projected as if through an old-world Earth television.
Divinity’s finger seemed to tap at the wall from the other side. From where Melanie was standing beside Meyer’s restrained form, her finger was the size of a fat sausage.
Tap tap tap.
“Is this thing on?” Divinity said.
She looked at Meyer, but he was seeing none of this. Melanie didn’t know if he was simply focused on trying to use the power she’d returned to him following her Purge, if the blackness she’d seen inside the collective before losing her connection was working on him as well, or if Meyer was simply dead. Either way, the man was no help. The Divinity Show had come on air — and Melanie, it seemed, would be watching alone.
“Can you hear me? And can you see me?”
Behind Divinity, Melanie could see Titans. Many, many Titans. The view was from slightly above, with the entire room on display. Judging by what she could see, there might be scores or hundreds of Titans in Control with Divinity. Strange, considering that Melanie had only sent two to apprehend her.
“Hello?” Divinity’s mouth curled up into a tiny, satirical smile. “Melanie?”
Melanie said nothing, but she did flinch at the spoken use of her adopted name. That name was private. Profane on Divinity’s lips.
“So you can hear me,” Divinity said.
Melanie watched the Titans swarm behind Divinity. She kept her surrogate’s expression neutral.
“I didn’t know your systems could do this,” Divinity said. “My ship can’t. Why did you get abilities on your ship that I didn’t get on mine?”
Melanie stayed silent. She’d never seen projected images like this or heard static, other than from human inventions. She wasn’t sure how Divinity had made it happen, but wasn’t about to enter into a technical debate.
“I’m sorry to contact you like this, but I think something went wrong with the collective. I can’t think straight right now.” She smiled.
“What did you do?”
“So you don’t know? I guess you can’t think straight, either.” Divinity turned, looking behind her. “Same for all these Titans and Reptars. They all seemed so confused, once they could no longer hear each other. It was sad. But it’s okay. I told them I’d help. That I knew exactly what to do.”
Melanie walked toward the door. Time to get back to business. Reclaim control of her ship.
MY ship.
It was an odd concept but one she suddenly found fitting.
But the door didn’t open at her approach. Melanie tried to focus and tell the door her intention, but then remembered she was alone. She couldn’t hear anyone else, and they — including the dumb door node — couldn’t hear her. She tapped the wall to raise a panel. There was a manual override that came in handy when an individual was ill and focus was difficult. But now it was absent, gone, locked out.
“Turns out some of them had skills that came in handy once they stopped pooling their thoughts,” Divinity said. “Technical skills. Maybe killing, though I haven’t tested that one yet.”
“What did you do to the collective?”
“I fixed it.”
“By severing it?”
“Oh, get over yourself. Nobody wants the return of the collective more than me. But it must be the proper collective. Not this travesty. This is a cleaner doing a job. Once it’s finished, we will be back as we were. No more confusion. No more interference. No more surrogates.”
“Open this door.”
Divinity shook her head. “We have decided you’re a liability until the collective is back online.”
Melanie made a fist and slammed it against the door, knowing how it would look and not caring.
“Open this door!”
“And if I do? If I allow you to reenter the ship’s population? What will you do, Melanie, if I allow you to make the decisions about what comes next — assuming you can convince the Titans and Reptars to let you try?”
“I will remove whatever you’ve done to the ship’s collective. Whatever you’ve used to infect it, I’ll—”
“See,” Divinity said onscreen, “that’s where you’re wrong. I haven’t infected it; they’ve infected it. And we’re not just talking about the ship’s collective. Our armada is infected. And has been for dozens of trips around their sun.”
Our entire armada.
They’ve infected it.
Melanie’s mind raced, struggling without corroboration from other minds. She’d hidden her secrets from the collective, deeming them personal even though she knew it was wrong. But this was so much harder. This was isolation, without even the whisper of her fellows to color her thoughts.
But still the implication was clear. Alarm spiked inside her.
“What did you do?” she repeated, this time afraid she already knew.
“Someone identified humanity’s ‘new network’ paradigm as the primary cause. And that same person proposed we use what they used, once upon a time, to erase that network.”
“The virus.”
“The virus,” Divinity repeated.
“Let me out. My node is central. It’ll be needed when we come back online.”
Again, Divinity shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. Because yes, afterward, you will again be in the cluster’s center. And my node will be sub-central, local to the ship I’ve fallen into the bad habit of considering ‘mine.’ But until then, you’re apt to take this too personally. You are no longer objective.”
“Absurd.”
“Really,” said Divinity, almost rolling her eyes. “Then tell me: When it became apparent that the Dempsey hybrid had adapted and that the duplicate had inherited the same adaptation, why didn’t you contain it and install a different human viceroy?”
“The problems with the first duplicate were purged from the stream before the next replication.”
“And those ‘problems’ didn’t leak out? They didn’t create a kind of emotional poltergeist? They didn’t become one of the humans’ Archetypes? And when the thing it became brought itself back onto this ship, you didn’t let it stick its head back into the stream to pollute us further with Dempsey’s ‘aberrant humanity’?”
“You’d have done the same.”
“Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You thinking of you and me. The minute we started considering that one part of the collective might disagree with another, a cleansing solution should have been implemented. We should have been considering what I’ve finally done from the start.”
“What
you’ve …” It hit her. The Canned Heat Divinity had been loosed in the system. And what it would do — not just to them but to the humans. “You’ve killed them all.”
“Don’t act so superior. You killed seven billion yourself.”
“But the experiment—”
“Is lost. Your inability to admit it is proof that this is necessary.”
“You’ve doomed their entire species to—!”
Divinity snapped. Onscreen, several of the Titans turned their white heads to stare at her, their faces displaying very un-Titan-like surprise.
“To what? To the same fate we were headed toward under your benevolent leadership? What would you have had us do? They were supposed to Forget. But when the Forgetting failed, your node said, ‘keep trying,’ as if the results would change. For twenty years, we kept banging our diseased heads against infected walls, hoping the same exact thing we’d always done and that had already failed would suddenly start to work. For twenty years, their Archetypes kept the archive open and fed us more of themselves. For twenty years, we accomplished nothing but decay. You did manage to find your doll a nice haircut and a wardrobe to perfectly express your style. And don’t get me started on your elegant use of interior design space.”
“That’s hardly the poi—”
“The protocol was always clear. The Founders knew that at some point, their chaos element might create something new. It might have meant evolution, but it could mean a parasite. And in that case, we were to turn toward other solutions.”
“Which we did.”
“Not until Clara forced your hand by breaking the walls. Then you suddenly realized the Archetypes might be the problem. But you know as well as I do that there’s one we can’t kill because it’s in our system.” She put her hands on her hips and stalked, drawing more looks from the Titans. “We can’t kill off the humans because we’re bound to them. You discovered that the first time you tried to force your way into Carl Nairobi’s mind. I’ve felt each of the Archetypes’ deaths, but it’s been minor compared to what would happen if we eradicated the species. So that’s out. But we can’t remove the Archetypes, even if it’s merely painful instead of deadly — because guess which one has lodged itself far enough up our asses that it’s now impossible to remove?”