Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  Melanie let the image settle. Normally, they didn’t have anuses. The idea that Meyer and his pieces were up an element of a purely human body to cause them trouble was, in itself, proof how terrible things had become.

  “I’ve realized the same thing,” said Melanie. “And that’s why, if I hadn’t been blocked at every turn, we’d have already begun withdrawal prep—”

  “Withdrawal!” Divinity spit the word out as if it were sour. “Just run! Just leave the planet, with our subjects remembering everything that happened!”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Blanking them permanently is the only way,” said Divinity, calming. Her voice became eminently reasonable.

  “It would kill them.”

  “Better them than us.”

  “Leaving won’t kill us. Once we’ve left orbit, our connection to the humans through the archive will be cut. The infection will stop.”

  “But it will not reverse,” said Divinity.

  A pause. Then Melanie said, “No. It will not reverse.”

  “And that’s okay with you. The idea that we might leave this planet, and forever be infected with them. That for the rest of our existence, we will be as much human inside as we are ourselves.”

  “It’s the best option.”

  “No. This is the best option.” Divinity tapped something beside the screen, presumably indicating the virus on its way to lobotomizing the human population while it cleansed the collective above. “I have a full room of Titans and Reptars who agreed with me enough to shut you in where you are. That’s the problem with individuality. Majority tends to rule.” Divinity shrugged. “But hey. If you don’t agree, I guess that’s your choice.” A beat, then, “At least until the idea of you becomes irrelevant.”

  A cold sensation clawed at Melanie’s scalp. A shiver kissed her skin.

  “Let me out. Let me out so we can discuss this.”

  “There’s nothing more to discuss.”

  “Make it wait. Stop it.” Feeling low and knowing how Divinity would take her weakness, Melanie said, “Please. Just pull the virus back until we can figure this out.”

  “It’s too late.” Divinity tapped at something unseen, her eyes darting away. “It’s taking the archive now. They’re trying to poison it, but it won’t do them any good. The virus is in the system already. Whatever garbage they throw into the archive, Canned Heat will devour it like the rest.”

  Melanie exhaled. She didn’t mean to sit but found herself doing so anyway. “Please.”

  “Don’t beg,” Divinity said. “It’s so human.”

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Piper set her hand on the archive. Part of her expected the thing to shock her or melt her or set her arm on fire, but it was only cool metal, nothing fancy.

  When they’d entered, Piper wondered if it would be hard to reach — if they’d have to rig levers to unseat tightly packed cargo and then break open a shipping crate. Instead they found the gilded box in the container as if on display. The crate’s interior was black and charred, reeking of ancient smoke. Ashes in the corners clung to every surface. It looked like the archive had perhaps once been surrounded by other cargo and a crate, now vaporized. Piper had seen stranger things.

  Right now, the Ark didn’t feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. That honor went to Kindred and Stranger, now a handful of yards apart. The energy between them was enough to raise her hair like the Van de Graaff generator she’d touched once in a science center as a kid. Blue lightning was everywhere. A steady, rhythmic thrumming bounced about the small space like thrown super balls with a low, bass tone that hurt Piper’s bones as much as her ears.

  But the Ark itself was cool, despite the way she’d seen Clara and the others flinching, backing away as if driven.

  Her fingers made circles. She wasn’t afraid. She was supposed to be here. She and this device were kin.

  “Wait.”

  She looked up. Stranger had spoken, just inside the container’s closed door. Piper was still supporting Kindred. Stranger looked drawn and beaten, but Kindred was almost inert. Her side and his were soaked with blood from his absent arm.

  “This is wrong,” Stranger said.

  “I spoke to someone about it last night. This is what I have to do.” Her fingers lingered. Now that Piper had touched the thing, she could barely imagine removing her hand.

  “I was born of this,” Stranger said, taking a step. The power in the air seemed to double with his single pace forward, making Piper squint as if into a breeze. He held out his hand. “And I can tell it’s not right.”

  “You don’t know it anymore, Stranger.”

  “I didn’t. But I’m starting to again. Through him.” He pointed at Kindred, whose breathing was slowing. “Through us. I can see what’s coming. Can you?”

  Piper followed Stranger’s eyes, looking toward the open Ark. Had she opened it? She must have. She didn’t have a stone key as Cameron had. She hadn’t pressed any buttons or turned any knobs, as she’d always imagined Cameron doing. Even now, she felt as if he were there — a ghost over her shoulder, looking into the open top’s swirling mist. She kept looking up, where she felt him, expecting to see Cameron as she’d seen Trevor last night. But she was alone, with two halves of the man who’d damned Piper while trying to save her.

  She looked to Stranger then followed his eyes back to the Ark. This time, she let her gaze linger. And through the white mist, she saw blackness spreading like ink. Piper gasped, feeling what it was more than knowing. Death. The reaper. Nightmares and terror.

  Piper put her free hand on the side. She applied subtle pressure, like leaning out over a balcony railing to see the world below.

  “You don’t have to do this, Piper,” said Kindred, shocking her. He was so close, his breath now a whisper. He hadn’t moved in what felt like forever, save barely propelling his feet under her lead — an increasingly heavy burden.

  She gently lowered Kindred. But rather than sloughing to the ground, he staggered back to the nearest wall and remained upright, watching her. Stranger took another step. More lightning, and crackle.

  More steps. Stranger and Kindred were six feet apart when Stranger’s side met Piper’s, his hands also on the edge, looking down into the box.

  “I have to go in,” Piper said. “Like Cameron did.”

  “No.”

  “It needs a sacrifice. I saw Trevor last night, Stranger. Meyer sent him. And he told me, I’m the poison. We need a toxin to make it sick.”

  “It’s already sick.” He pointed. The black was swirling with red, like an infection.

  Piper pressed down again. Steeling herself. It would only take one good heave, and she’d be in. Forever.

  “I understand now.” Stranger’s voice was distant, full of awe. Piper looked over and saw him peering into the depths, his gaze fixed.

  Stranger looked at Piper. In his eyes, she saw so much of Meyer.

  “The Astrals thought something had gone wrong with Meyer,” he said, speaking as if someone was feeding him lines. “They tried to fix him, and created us.”

  An intense push from Piper’s side. She felt as if a gust of wind was stirring, threatening to tip her. But her hair wasn’t blowing. It was rising a bit with the charge, popping around her in the growing hum. She felt a hand near hers and saw Kindred beside her, while Stranger flanked the other side. Kindred no longer seemed ill, his face fixed in a grim expression of destiny.

  “I thought I was a remainder,” Stranger said. “I thought I was an element of chaos — something spit out of their machine when they tried to eliminate all the ‘Meyer’ that had caused them so much trouble the first time. I was leftovers. The thing that no longer fit. So I walked the Earth and sowed my disorder, trying to be a wrench in the works. I thought it was chaos for chaos’s sake, that I was staying alive by resisting order. I thought that if I could stir their equation enough, I could carve out a place for myself. It worked, and the system broke. But now I unde
rstand. I see what I was actually doing.”

  Piper looked from Stranger to Kindred. Kindred to Stranger. The air hummed. Blue lightning crashed like thunder.

  “Nothing went wrong,” said Kindred on her other side. “It was exactly as it was supposed to be.”

  An arc of energy jumped from Kindred’s chest to Stranger’s, then back.

  Piper waited for more, then finally said, “What do you mean?”

  “Meyer wasn’t a mistake—”

  “He was evolution,” Kindred finished Stranger’s thought.

  Piper looked into the Ark. Red and black were swirling faster and faster. It seemed angry. Furious, like a swarm of wasps waiting for someone to sting.

  Stranger put a gentle hand on Piper’s chest. He pushed her back two steps, where she stood without support, her hand on nothing. Then the men turned to face her. Kindred extended his remaining hand, and Stranger took it.

  “Two halves,” said Kindred.

  “Made whole,” Stranger finished.

  A pulse pounded the container’s walls, making them reverberate like a drum. Piper took an involuntary step back, streaks of light lancing between the men. At first they were only large sparks, but then they multiplied, every inch of Kindred’s left side bound by a thread to Stranger’s right. Their conjoined hands vanished behind the thousands of light threads, pulling them together. Threads became membrane. The double bodies touched, overlapping. The air shook with aural pulses, knocking Piper toward the wall. It was like hot gusts of nothing — a padded smash, forcing her away.

  Their faces were almost lost in light. They closed upon one another, becoming a Gemini silhouette, then finally only one man.

  Nothing but light.

  “You can’t contaminate what’s already poisoned,” said the new thing, reborn of the Ark. “You have to cut it open, and wash the sickness away.”

  Piper flinched forward as the merged body of Kindred and Stranger turned — away from her and toward the open Ark.

  “I hear them on the other side,” said Stranger’s voice as the being looked into the mist.

  From the same mouth came Kindred’s answer, almost a whisper: “I hear them, too.”

  Piper saw what was about to happen and lunged forward, ignoring the sparks and the heat and the light and the power, ignoring the peril and her fear and her brewing tears, ignoring everything but the certainty of what was about to happen.

  But she was too late. By the time she reached the new being, it was already toppling into the void.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Meyer was sitting beside a small fire in a room of absolute black. The fire was fresh, not mature, and burned only wood at its surface, with no hot coals beneath it. He was in a camp chair like he’d once had, back on some unknown trip between New York and LA, when they’d all still been together. He’d been a young man, married to Heather, though they were already on their way out. Trevor and Lila were still young enough to believe their dad could be a good father, well before the world had ended and he’d rediscovered the trick of fatherhood.

  A small burning log — somewhere between kindling and the bedrock of a true cook fire — rolled from the center of their new flame. It struck a pile of snapped branches, which began to burn as well.

  Meyer looked up, alarmed for some reason — something he’d forgotten. And he said to Lila, just thirteen years old in this vision, “Lila, put out the fire.”

  “You put it out, Dad. That’s your job.”

  Meyer looked around, but there was no water. No fire extinguisher.

  Another stick rolled away. This one caught a small pile of paper litter, birthing new flame.

  “Come on, Dad,” said a younger Trevor beside Lila. “Put it out before it burns down the forest.”

  “Where’s the water? Where did it go?”

  But now Lila and Trevor were yelling at him, annoyed. The fire was contained but spreading. And that’s when Meyer realized he couldn’t move. None of them could. They were rooted in place, with the tiny fire spreading among them.

  Heather arrived at his shoulder.

  She’d somehow gathered all of their gear in her arms — the tent, the sleeping bags, pillows, extra blankets. With all of it piled atop her small grip, she looked like a cartoon.

  “Smother it, dumbass,” Heather said, rolling her eyes. “Take away the oxygen, and it’ll die just fine.”

  Then she dropped all the gear atop him. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds. In a moment he was covered, unable to see, unable to breathe, unable to—

  “Meyer.”

  His eyes opened. Meyer was on the floor of an all-white room. The camping vision was gone as if it had never been there.

  But it was a beautiful blonde and not Heather above him. It took several long seconds before his brain could place her. He’d somehow ended up on his back, tipped from a bench, seeing her from below as he’d never seen her before, hair draped around her face, closing their two heads into a private space. His hands were now free whereas they’d been recently bound, and the device that had been binding them was open in her palms, which made no sense. Most importantly, her voice and manner were soft as silk atop a featherbed.

  She touched his face. A hand on his cheek. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “You were mumbling. You were in a trance. You fell.”

  “When did I fall?”

  “Minutes ago.”

  “So you woke me. Not the fall.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  Meyer was searching, prodding, following his gut. Now he remembered. He’d seen a way to reach the Reptars on the planet as the collective failed — and once their little trick ended, Meyer knew his people had dispatched them and made it to the Ark. Then he’d sent himself to Stranger and Kindred. He’d shown them the way. They’d done what needed doing. And now it was over.

  But then his mind realized why he was following his gut, in this matter of speaking to the silky Astral. He’d only been able to do what he’d done because she’d let him. She’d removed a block from his mind and built him a tunnel. Now she’d freed his hands, and woken him gently. Why?

  She didn’t answer, so Meyer asked something else: “Why did you let me contact them?” He corrected himself. “Why did you help me contact them?”

  “Because you have become the least of evils.”

  “I thought evil was a human concept,” Meyer said, still on the floor and looking straight up.

  “It has become ours as well.”

  “Because of us?”

  She nodded.

  Meyer sat halfway up, onto his elbows. The woman shifted to allow him room. She was squatting, still very close.

  “You can’t hear them anymore, can you?”

  Meyer thought of his dream, of the campfire. Had it only been a dream rather than something prescient? It had dovetailed from his psychic efforts, but now Meyer wondered if he’d simply exhausted himself and collapsed. Because no, he couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t feel Piper or Clara or Stranger or Kindred. Only a sense of foreboding remained. Of something dark just beyond the horizon that he couldn’t quite see.

  “There’s a sickness spreading through the collective. Soon it will extend through our mental junction point in the archive, to the humans on the surface. Then it will erase you. What’s left of humanity will be unable to function. You will be less than animals. You will barely know how to breathe.”

  Meyer sat up farther, alarmed, but the woman kept speaking. He got the impression these were thoughts she’d spent time curating while he’d been dozing. Something he needed to hear, that she needed to tell him.

  “It will erase you. But it will merely cleanse us. That’s why it’s happening. There are parties above this ship that believe that loosing this plague on both our races is the only chance we have to save ourselves.”

  “I thought you couldn’t disagree?” But that, Meyer knew, was wrong. Ever since he’d
come aboard, it had been clear the Astrals were different than they’d been. They acted like individuals. Like people.

  “Times have changed.”

  Meyer looked the room over. The chamber was silent. They were alone.

  “Nobody can see or hear us now,” she said, as if anticipating Meyer’s thoughts. “For a while, perhaps while it resets for the cleaning, the collective has gone dark. At first it terrified me. I had only my own thoughts. But then I realized something that scared me even more — I was hearing thoughts through the lens of this surrogate’s brain. You can’t know what it’s like to be us, to be on our own.”

  Meyer watched her, waiting, knowing he shouldn’t interrupt.

  “But after a while, I grew used to the quiet. Then something seemed to unlock inside me.”

  “Unlock?”

  “We know very little of our Founders — the first of our kind, that traveled the universe to seed populations like yours. They are to us what gods are to humans. We have no memories of them. Some believe that bank is simply fragile, and that the oldest memories will always be lost over time. But there is another school of thought, though it only surfaces in those who find ways to separate themselves from the collective for long periods of time. An alternate reason for the absence of Founder memories within us.”

  “What is it?”

  “That the Founders existed before the collective. That there was once a day when we were disconnected. When we were like you.”

  Meyer came to his knees. He moved to the bench along the wall and sat on it, silent. The woman was still on the floor, now sitting. Beneath him like a pupil, though clearly she was the teacher.