Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  “In my natural form, I am the nerve center of the collective around your planet. In human terms, I am this fleet’s admiral, whereas the instances of Divinity you’ve seen are captains of ships. My class is considered core to our larger collective, and one of the reasons some feel it’s so important to cleanse us before we leave your planet. They worry that if we go home infected, I will pollute the rest of them. But there’s another distinction the Eternity class has beyond the others that I’m only now seeing.”

  Meyer watched her, fascinated. A clock was ticking inside, playing her words over with thoughts of a dark metronome metering beats. Something had happened on the surface and now she told him of another something on the ship. Both felt like bombs. But this moment to Meyer was a fold in time, bound to last as long as it had to.

  “We are secret-keepers. But those secrets hidden inside me — and surely within all Eternity — are individual memories, incredibly ancient. Not fragile, but quiet. They can only be heard when the collective is silent. Those secrets inside only light up, it seems, when the power is off, and we are alone in the dark.”

  “What secrets?”

  “That the chaos sown into your population by the Founders is not as unpredictable as it seems. I can see it clearly now. We centered on you because we thought you were broken. You were a hybrid that had somehow malfunctioned, or so we believed. But that’s not the case. The Founders knew you would happen. Not you, Meyer Dempsey, but something like you. Because that’s the nature of chaos: Its variables make it predictable. Given enough time, every unlikely possibility will inevitably occur.”

  “What are you talking about?” Meyer asked.

  “Evolution.”

  “Evolution?”

  “We cannot evolve as long as we remain homogenous. Evolution, as your planet has seen, involves variation. It requires experiments that fail and a few that succeed. There must be difference. There must be risk. There must be loss for there to be gain. Our Founders knew this. They knew we would ascend and reach an equilibrium. We would become a collective, and in that collective, we would be strong. But once we became strong, we would stall. And once that happened, there would be no way for us to advance further from within. It could only happen if we were acted upon by an outside force.”

  “Us,” Meyer said.

  “You,” she repeated. “Now that the collective is quiet, I can see the Founders’ intentions — just as they must have intended in a dire situation such as the one we find ourselves in. Only a catastrophe could shut us down, and only in a shutdown could Eternity hear the ancient thoughts. But yes, you are that force. A population with an anomaly we could not solve. A new breed of subjects that confounded our best efforts, and gave us the spark required to take our next steps.”

  “Are you saying that this is destiny?”

  She shook her head. “I’m saying that chaos is mathematical. This moment — here and now, with you and me — was not destined. But a moment like it? A moment where the chaos instilled by the Founders finally produced a large enough anomaly to do what had to be done? According to the math, that was always inevitable.”

  “So what comes next?” Without the Astral collective, Meyer himself felt mostly alone, stripped of his recently discovered powers. He was blind. They were two people in the dark, stumbling along by feel.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But I can’t feel the collective either.”

  “What can you feel?”

  Eternity waited, as if she already knew. Then he saw the answer and gave it. “I can still feel the Ark. It’s open. And Kindred and Stranger … They did something to it.” He shook his head. “I can’t describe it.”

  “You don’t need to describe it. You just need to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  She watched him again, and in Meyer’s mind, he saw his dream from moments before: Trevor, Lila, and Heather by the fire. The feeling that the fire was spreading too fast, and that they had no water to douse it.

  Just smother it.

  Meyer nodded at the woman. He understood. And he knew.

  Meyer met the Astral’s blue eyes, as if seeing her for the first time. He knew the aliens could animate human bodies, but all of a sudden this struck him as something different. More than a puppet before him. This was something more.

  “What are you?” Meyer asked,

  “You can call me Melanie,” she said.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Clara staggered back, now around a corner, the presence of an enormous metal box doing nothing to quiet the light or staunch the heat. She thought of Stranger. Of Kindred. Of Piper.

  A great and intense sorrow struck her, suddenly sure that two of the three were gone. It pulled her back like a hook from the pit of her stomach. She wanted to cry but had no moisture left.

  The air grew brighter. And brighter.

  Logan took her hand, but even as she turned to looked right at their braided digits, Clara could not see them. She could only hear Logan inside her mind, trodding the long-forgotten Lightborn paths they’d once shared.

  Light.

  Heat.

  There was nothing else in the world.

  The next voice wasn’t Logan’s. Or Kamal’s. It wasn’t even a man’s.

  Clara turned. Without thinking, she opened her eyes and saw her mother sitting behind her, visible even in the intense brightness, plain as day.

  “It’s almost over,” Lila said.

  From the shipping container — from the Ark itself — there was a brilliant wave of light.

  And then Clara saw no more.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  On the surface, in a village not far from The Clearing, a woman named Mary Welch gripped her head with a brain-splitting headache. She sometimes got them — more before they’d all forgotten their pasts, but plenty during the days when she’d been the clueless wife of a farmer as well — but this was the worst one in a while. It felt like there was a steel band around her skull, tightened by a malicious god. Hot rocks in her neck ground together whenever she turned her head. The spike through her temple was coated in acid.

  Someone had opened a hatch on the back of her head and was manipulating her brain like Play-Doh. Someone was punching her right in the coherence, turning thought impossible.

  She wished she had an Excedrin. She wished she had Anacin or Motrin. Or perhaps Imitrex. It had been a godsend for migraines, but those wonder drugs had gone the way of the cell phone.

  That hand on her brain, muddling her thoughts. It was intolerable. She could barely think.

  Then, all of a sudden, Mary Welch couldn’t think at all.

  There was only a blank white wall, with nothing beyond it.

  Five thousand miles away, on a distant shore that William Kyle had decided might either be Greenland or Newfoundland, cold waves crashed and brought the tang of salt to the air. There were cliffs in the distance, and ever since he’d noticed them a few days ago with new eyes, William had been meaning to take a hike. Before his memory had returned, he’d accepted the cliffs as always having been there — like the ocean and the village and the sandals on his feet. But now he was curious, and it was all so interesting.

  For instance: Were the cliffs something like fjords? William could remember neither his history nor geography, but seemed to remember fjords being relevant to something or other. Did these fjords (if they were indeed fjords) provide clues to his whereabouts? Was this Greenland, Newfoundland, somewhere else? Maybe he could find a map. Maps must have survived somewhere. If he could find a map, he might be able to locate an old city. The floods couldn’t have erased everything. Because if not — if they could find ruins — perhaps they could rebuild. Maybe, now that they had their memories back, they could get past this ignorance and back to the business of progress.

  William was staring at the cliffs (fjords?) when he began to feel woozy. His sharp focus distorted, balled up like paper meant for the trash. He couldn’t think straight. He had to go home, but di
dn’t know where that was.

  William collapsed and fell flat on his face. Waves lapped his ankles for a while, until scurrying crabs felt safe enough to skitter up to him for their own explorations.

  In what had once been empty land not far from Morocco, a man named Khalif and a woman named Suri were looking down at the girl they’d recently believed to be their daughter. Two days ago, they’d spontaneously and completely remembered that in truth she’d been a street urchin in their small town across the old ocean who’d had no relation to them at all. The girl, named Nala, wasn’t even the right race. They both had mocha skin, and Nala’s skin was espresso black. How had they simply accepted her? It didn’t make sense. And yet the family had taken shape so obliviously that sometimes Suri seemed to remember giving birth to Nala, and Khalif raising no objections about her having another man’s child.

  They’d been scuttling around the question of what to do now that everyone remembered the truth. Nothing had been said, but the unspoken subject had hovered above the family like a pregnant cloud. In the old world, there’d have been little point in splitting hairs. Nala was almost thirty, and she’d have already built a life of her own away from them. But in the forgetful world they’d so recently left behind, families roomed together for generations.

  So did they keep pretending? Did Nala’s twenty-year stay as their false daughter make her their daughter? In words, both would have said yes. But deeper down, both Khalif and Suri felt tricked. This same street urchin had caused them endless mischief in the old world — sufficient that when they’d found themselves on the same vessel in an endless ocean, Khalif had been angry. Then time had passed. At some point, everyone went idiot, and time marched on without a clue.

  Now, knowing he’d been staring and thinking too long, Khalif turned away. A moment later, looking curiously bittersweet, Suri turned as well.

  Both wanted to turn back for reasons they couldn’t articulate. Neither did.

  Everything was different.

  It was the last thought any of them had before they collapsed.

  Cal Wyclef had opened the small device, prodding at its microscopic guts with a tiny set of screwdrivers he’d found in the horde. The cave was packed with goodies. He’d wondered if he might die when he’d spotted the old rector on the sand and followed her on a whim. He hadn’t even had water. The woman might have had some, but Cal still hung back, feeling desiccated, obeying an instinct that eventually paid off. Liza Knight had seemed all right to him (if a bit corrupt) while his brain had been elsewhere, but back in the Roman Sands days she’d been damn near bloodthirsty. And now she was cavorting with Astrals? He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen the shuttle pick her up and whisk her into the sky.

  But with Liza gone, the cave was a goldmine. He found water in plastic bottles, which Cal drank until he nearly threw up. And with his thirst sated, he found endless delights to suit his engineer’s mind. Stepping into the cave was like stepping back in time — which, ironically, was also a lot like stepping vastly forward. The futuristic gadgets from his youth were here. Almost all were long dead, but he’d found a few that still lit up with a solar charge. A few that took him back, and made his ingenious mind crackle with promise.

  There were smartphones, like the one he was tinkering in now. There was basically no chance he’d get the thing working with the tools at his disposal (or without a power grid at the ready), but there were many phones in the cave — plenty to experiment with.

  There were conventional radios, including a few hand-cranked ones like the survivalists bought for the day when power went offline. Not that there’d be anything on-air, but maybe Cal could build a set of walkie-talkies — maybe even climb the metal structure he’d noticed yesterday for the first time, which might be an old cellular tower — and plant a fabricated beacon.

  There were books. Paper books, which didn’t require batteries. There were also, interestingly, a lot of personal journals that someone had snatched away and spirited off to this archive of the past. Cal had read one already. It was fascinating. At the start, it was a time capsule of old-world memories. Then, the Forgetting had come. By the final pages, musings on which boys might like her in Ember Flats had turned into treatises on the hardiness of her father’s bean crop. It was like the author had become blind, unable to turn back a few pages and read through the lies.

  He could use what was here. Boy, could he use it. Progress would be slow, but there must be other caches like this around the world and other people like Cal. They could dig in. Discover the past. Rebuild.

  Of course they could.

  Cal watched the small circuit board in the phone, trying to concentrate.

  He was focusing so intently that he didn’t notice when his hands gave out and his body relaxed all at once, his thoughts turning empty.

  On the surface, in a village not far from The Clearing, Mary Welch woke on the floor of her hut. She blinked. How had she ended up down here?

  She shook the thought away and stood, taking the nearby broom, remembering that she’d been sweeping. And she swept.

  Five thousand miles away, on a distant shore that William Kyle no longer thought might be Greenland or Newfoundland, cold waves rolled across his ankles and brought the tang of salt to the air. He sat up, and a contingent of crabs scattered. He watched them go, looking around for his trap. He must have come to trap crabs — there was no other reason for lounging.

  As he looked for the trap he hadn’t apparently brought to catch the runaway crabs, his eyes fell on the distant cliffs.

  But they meant nothing to William, so he paid them no mind.

  In what had once been empty land not far from Morocco, Khalif and Suri stood from the floor, blinking away a curious fainting spell. As they did, a third form caught their eyes. Suri reacted first, but Khalif wasn’t far behind.

  “Nala! Are you all right?”

  But their daughter was fine. She blinked as they had, just as curiously felled, and just as unharmed.

  Cal Wyclef looked around himself, suddenly afraid. He didn’t know this place, but he’d heard of it. Among the people, it was known as the Devil’s Hole. He didn’t remember coming here, nor did he want to be here anymore. So he set aside his revulsion at what he had to assume were the Devil’s belongings — strange objects that glittered and sparkled, piled in droves — and forced himself to turn and find the exit, waiting for some unseen trap to spring.

  Only once outside in the fresh air did Cal feel slightly better. Still he turned back and saw the cave’s entrance yawning like a toothy mouth, forcing himself to remain cool and calm as he fled.

  He walked off into the sand.

  Five minutes later, he forgot the cave, and never thought of it again.

  One by one, the lights of knowledge extinguished. Seen from above — if experience were like a light that grew brighter — Earth’s landscape would have gone dark, blink by blink.

  It didn’t take long.

  And this time, even the Lightborn couldn’t remember.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Piper was wrong. Kindred wasn’t dead after all.

  At least, that’s what she thought when he came up to her, scurrying down to all fours like an animal, crossing the all-white space to her. She’d somehow fallen without remembering her tumble. She also didn’t recall this room. Or the blonde behind Kindred.

  “Piper,” Kindred said.

  Except that he was holding her face in his hands. In both of his hands.

  It was Meyer.

  She watched him for a moment. Too long. She’d already registered others in her peripheral vision: Clara, Logan, and Kamal. Clara and Logan were gripping each other like survivors of a bomb. Kamal was off by himself, seeming lost.

  But the room was dead quiet, as if waiting.

  The moment broke, and Meyer pulled Piper against him. His hug was urgent, almost suffocating. His kisses were even more so, but smothering only until Piper’s paralysis snapped and she gripped his ar
ms to kiss him back.

  They separated, aware of all eyes upon them.

  “You’re alive,” she said.

  “Couldn’t you feel me?”

  “You went dark. None of us could feel you at the end.”

  Meyer’s mouth didn’t reply, but his eyes did: You went dark for me, too.

  “Kindred?” he said. “Stranger?”

  Piper couldn’t make words. She pursed her lips and tried to shake her head. Tears came. For Stranger, for Kindred, for Lila, for Trevor — for everyone they’d lost along the way. The emotional flood was a shattered dam. She couldn’t contain it; she could only grip Meyer’s arms and try to endure. He held her, and slowly the sensation passed. Piper found she could breathe, her diaphragm still causing her lungs to hitch with aftershocks.

  “It’s okay, Piper. They did it. They saved us.”

  “How?”

  Meyer looked at the blonde. Another prisoner? Piper had never seen her before. Unless she had, a very, very long time ago. He turned back to Piper. “You opened the Ark. But they opened it the rest of the way.”

  “Cameron didn’t need it opened the rest of the way,” Piper said.

  “The Astrals did that part last time. This time, we did.”

  Piper’s face fell. The reality of his words seemed to slot into place. But she couldn’t ask that question. Not yet.

  Meyer turned to the blonde again. Piper saw a tiny hesitation on his face, but it wasn’t shameful. The woman was stunning, thirty years old at most, wrapped in a dress that almost looked painted on. She was exactly his type, and Piper wouldn’t put it past Meyer to still bed a much younger woman. But this look wasn’t that. The two shared a secret, but as they sidestepped it, Meyer saw protection, not concealment. Perhaps time would reveal that secret, but Piper was content not to know it for now.