Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  Because in the end, he’d seemed to understand that Eternity’s surrogate had to live. That was more important to the long term, and justified the loss of his own life in the short term.

  She had to stand firm. They were half individuals and half collective now, and an individual stood up for what best served them all — both individual and collective.

  If I die, I die, Melanie thought. Eternity would live on, as the same dispassionate being it was before this all began.

  And as she watched Divinity stare her down, Melanie heard the thought picked up as the collective heard it, reverberating like an echo.

  If I die, I die.

  If I die,

  I die.

  Divinity’s jaw shifted, her glare intensifying as the echo rolled behind her eyes.

  She pivoted on the spot and leveled the weapon at the group of humans against the wall.

  “Maybe that’s true,” she said, answering the Melanie’s mental refrain. “But if they die, they die forever.”

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Divinity’s arms shook. Her legs had lost their bones, now uncertain and wanting to wobble. Something was wrong with her surrogate. Had to be. It was breaking down. It was falling apart, soon to drop inexplicably into pieces.

  She heard the bold, simultaneously infuriating echo as the room repeated Eternity’s mental words, trying them on, turning them over and over to see how they worked.

  If I die, I die.

  But now even Eternity’s mind — the body that controlled it still in her peripheral vision lest she get the idea to launch a sacrificial attack — had gone quiet.

  Divinity watched the four humans through her fogging vision, feeling the hammer of her surrogate’s heart, the failure of her surrogate’s sense of reason and logic. She was sweating. Her eyes wouldn’t focus — or perhaps the misalignment was happening at the cognitive level, allowing her to observe but not truly see. Either way, she felt herself coming undone, barely able to stand.

  This was the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Without interference, Canned Heat should have wiped both sides clean. The humans would have collapsed drooling. The collective would have returned to its proper state — a state in which the entity that led an entire ship wouldn’t be reduced to a quivering, emotional mass of flesh and bone.

  She could kill them. Right here and now. She wouldn’t need the collective’s permission — and, in an ironic twist, what Eternity had done to the hive would make it impossible for the other minds to stop her. Eternity was content with individuality and emotion? Fine. Divinity would show her just what individuality and emotion allowed that a saner configuration never would have.

  She looked at Piper Dempsey, the key bearer.

  She looked at Clara, who’d started it all.

  She looked at the man beside Clara, the pair in a semi-embrace. The other felt like a Lightborn, just like her. Two troublemakers for the price of one.

  And finally her eyes settled on the group’s remaining member — an unremarkable man she’d never seen before.

  She could start with him. He’d mean the least, but seeing him die would flood the others with satisfying fear. All the emotion they could handle, if that’s what they wanted. The more the merrier, Divinity thought as her own emotions gripped her.

  “You don’t need to do this.”

  Divinity’s eyes flicked to Meyer. She’d almost forgotten him. He no longer felt human to her, though he was at least half one. But she could feel his fear, too. It was strange — something Divinity hadn’t felt before. He was plenty afraid. But the fear was for the others, not for himself. It didn’t make sense.

  “We’re in orbit,” Meyer went on. “Your ships can’t be seen from the surface. I can tell just from looking inside that there are no more Astrals on the ground. Humans on the planet’s surface have already forgotten. Permanently this time.”

  “We couldn’t make you forget.” Without meaning to, Divinity had shifted the barrel toward Clara. She locked eyes with her now: Clara, who was the reason they’d never been able to effect a Forgetting.

  “This time,” Meyer said, “we chose it ourselves.”

  “Lies.”

  “We have our own collective. It’s not the same as yours, but it’s present just the same. Most people don’t even know it’s there, though it always has been. It’s where we get our intuition. Where we see things from a higher perspective. But if you look at it like humanity has, you’ll see why this was our only choice. It’s too late to go back. The old world is gone. The memories of two alternate pasts were tearing us apart. When the Ark opened and the past twenty years of memories flooded out — all there were, since the last time it was opened — it’s not entirely accurate that you judged us. This time, we judged ourselves.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Divinity, her eyes still locked on Clara’s.

  “We’re smarter than you think,” Meyer said. “And we understood, as a whole, that there’s no way to move on with one foot stuck in the past.”

  Divinity’s eyes flicked from Clara to the others. To Meyer. To Eternity beside her, still unmoving. Even to the Titans and Reptars.

  “Nobody won, but nobody lost, either. It’s a stalemate.” Meyer paused for a moment, then took a small step forward. Divinity shot him a glance but allowed it to happen. There were maybe twelve feet between the weapon and Clara, but just as many between Divinity and Meyer. If he tried for her weapon, she’d have time to shoot Clara, then Meyer. He might not die, seeing as the King was forever a part of their collective. But Clara would. Plus maybe Piper and the other two.

  “Anyone down there has already let all of this go,” Meyer said. “Even the Lightborn have let it go. Even what remained of the Mullah. There are no keepers of a portal this time. No keepers of an Ark. You can’t return to control us, but we don’t control you. I could reach the Nexus, but I can’t reach you from inside any more than you can reach me. You’re something else now. Individuals with a shared mind. You can think as a group and make choices on your own. Maybe it’s worth exploring. The best of both worlds.”

  Divinity heard Meyer’s words, knowing the effect he meant for them to have. But if there was rationale in this body and brain, Divinity had yet to find it. Raw anger reigned. Fear for what might come next — a dark step into a terrifying unknown.

  “It’s not the best.”

  Meyer subtly shook his head. “Hurting them changes nothing.”

  “I disagree. I will have to try to find out, but I think it might make me feel better.”

  “Nobody can save you from making the wrong choice. But how you choose now?” Meyer turned toward Eternity, and some unknown knowledge — the same infuriating secret that Divinity knew full well they’d exchanged behind her back earlier but refused to share — flashed between them. “It will define the way your species sees itself forever.”

  Divinity considered Meyer’s words. She could feel the twin forces within her: the collective’s intelligence urging one option in the name of logic, versus her own state urging the other choice in the name of passion.

  The weapon had sagged again, so she raised it, this time to her eye. She retrained it on Clara’s chest. Her finger moved to the trigger. She didn’t need to sight down the thing’s length, but did so anyway, squinting down to one eye the way humans did in their movies.

  If I’m to be like a human, she thought, I will be like a human.

  One eye open, Divinity zeroed in on Clara, petrified like a statue. She could sense more than feel the twin figures at her sides: Meyer on one side, calculating his odds at diving for the weapon, and Eternity at the other, probing at her from inside the collective.

  Something moved between the weapon’s sight and Clara. White like a cloud, as if the room had suddenly grown foggy.

  Divinity raised her head. She opened her other eye.

  The thing between her weapon and Clara was a Titan’s broad chest, its eyes watching hers.

  If I die, I die, it
thought.

  “Get out of the way.”

  But before Divinity could move to improve her shot, a second Titan edged forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with the first. A third blocked them in from the other side.

  She lowered the weapon, shocked.

  A fourth Titan moved in front of the humans. Then a Reptar, its head cocked toward Divinity, purring slightly. Then a second Reptar. A fifth Titan.

  If I die, I die.

  And then, a micro collective forming within the larger one:

  If we die, we die.

  Divinity’s grip slackened. Her legs shook. She felt her anger surrender to something new, and darker. Within the collective’s mind, she caught glimpses of things that all had seen and that only one of them had seen, now sharing memories like trading cards, each presenting what it had for the others to evaluate as individuals. Through Clara, human thoughts joined them. Meyer’s thoughts. Piper’s thoughts. All at once.

  Meyer’s words.

  A vision of Trevor saving Piper.

  Of Heather saving Cameron.

  Of Christopher saving the caravan outside Ember Flats.

  Of Cameron entering the Ark.

  Of Stranger and Kindred, combined into one, entering the Ark.

  Of Carl saving Eternity. Saving Melanie.

  Meyer’s words.

  And Melanie’s words.

  If we die, we die.

  Someone plucked the weapon from Divinity’s hand.

  She did not protest.

  Instead, for reasons unknown, she fell to her knees and leaked fluid from her surrogate’s eyes, lungs hitching in great sobs, as a pit of darkness claimed her.

  Epilogue

  Day One

  Two weeks later, after the Astrals had done the necessary work of cleaning up after themselves (most notably removing the Reptar bodies still on the surface and incinerating notes from the past, such as Stranger’s store of forbidden items he’d stashed in a desert cave), Meyer left the village on horseback and rode north. Two hours out — and knowing he wouldn’t be the one to decide the day’s timetable — he stopped to give the horse some water. He didn’t know it was time until he heard the hum. But by the time he’d looked up, the shuttle had already arrived.

  Meyer watched it settle. They were entirely too far from the village to be seen by the occupants, who by now had no idea what Astrals were. In addition, the mothership would have swept the area for stragglers before deciding Meyer was far enough out for neither ship nor rendezvous to be seen.

  The ship opened, and a tall blonde emerged alone.

  “You have no idea how strange it is,” Meyer said, looking the silver sphere over from top to rounded bottom, “to see one of these without being abducted.”

  “You never boarded voluntarily?” Melanie said.

  “Not unless you count the time Kindred sprang me from your space brig. But that was more a ‘flight in terror’ than a ‘cordial embarkation.’”

  She stepped aside, gesturing toward the opening like a game show host. She looked the part, too. She’d worn mostly flat sandals that the mothership’s machines had fabricated to look like something from a moderate-range women’s shop on the Old Earth in deference to the sandy terrain, but everything else about her spoke of elegance. She was immaculately groomed, her hair like anything from one of Meyer’s forever-ago films. She wore a slinky blue dress that ended a modest few inches below her knees, but Meyer was sure that the woman knew damn well how good she must look. The Astrals had mastered vanity. Good for them.

  “Would you like to try it?” she said, indicating the entrance.

  “I think my space-flying days are over.” He laughed, and she smiled. So they’d learned a bit of levity, too.

  “We’ve completed the work that remained to be done,” she said.

  “The monolith? The freighter in the sand?”

  “Reduced to component elements. But you understand, the Ark could not be destroyed.”

  Meyer nodded. It was also true that the Astrals couldn’t move it. Without their systems in place for a coming epoch, it was only a hunk of metal, but for some reason it still dogged them.

  “I know. I will send Logan and Kamal out to bury it.”

  “So they still have their memories?”

  “For now.”

  “But they will forget, same as the others?”

  “We all will.”

  “Clara?”

  “All of us,” Meyer said. “These aren’t memories I want, if I’m to live out the little of my life that remains here in the wasteland. Best not to know there was ever anything else.”

  “You will forget?” She seemed surprised.

  Meyer nodded. “I haven’t exactly gotten the hang of talking to this thing you put inside my head, but it must agree. I can’t make myself forget something. So …” He made a vague hand gesture. “I don’t know, some juju my thingie and Clara have going on. She describes it like taking a photo on a timer. You set it consciously, then the rest happens automatically. A way of distancing herself — and myself, I guess — from the process.”

  “How long until you forget?” Until all knowledge of us leaves humanity forever, she seemed to add.

  “Five days. Long enough to clean up the last loose ends. Long enough to think of anything we might have forgotten. And it’ll probably only be me and Clara who make it that long. Kamal has already started to forget.

  Melanie nodded.

  “And you? How is it on the ship?”

  “Order is still pending. But we are getting on.”

  “And Divinity?”

  “She has elected to return to her natural state.”

  Meyer suppressed a flinch. To him, it sounded like suicide. And it had probably looked a lot like suicide, too. The only way for any instance of Divinity who’d taken residence in a surrogate to return to its natural state would be to kill the surrogate.

  “What about you?”

  “Time will tell,” she said.

  Meyer nodded. It was as good an answer as any.

  “Then I guess this is goodbye.”

  The sentence was strangely sentimental for someone who’d killed seven billion people. But Meyer let it go. The baggage between races was a lot of water to force under a bridge, but he was willing to try. In five days, he wouldn’t remember anyway.

  “Do you promise?” Meyer asked.

  Day Two

  Kamal woke from his nap refreshed. He put his feet on the ground, pacing around his hut. Something was pestering him. Something he’d forgotten? It wasn’t clear. He’d had strange dreams — of another place and another time, another group of people he’d swear he’d once known but had somehow left behind.

  But the arrival of a small child in the room distracted his thoughts. The last image to go was that of an enormous round object in the sky, black as night.

  “Daddy!” the little girl said. “The sun is up! It’s time to plant!”

  “Past time, I’d imagine,” Kamal said. Soon it would be hot. And planting in the heat, while necessary at times, was never any fun.

  The child ran for the door, but a curious feeling tugged at Kamal — a sense that the girl wasn’t his. That she’d been a loose end that had somehow attached itself to him.

  “Mara,” he called.

  The girl turned. She smiled. She smiled at her daddy.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  Day Three

  “Meyer,” Piper said. “Did you have a Cousin Tim?”

  Meyer laughed. But instead of answering, he said, “You don’t remember?”

  “I’d swear you told me about him before.”

  “Okay.” Meyer sat, looking at Piper across the small village well. He didn’t use the well often. Meyer usually took a horse to gather water from an oasis. One far off but which boasted spectacular water. Although come to think of it, he hadn’t brought any water home from that oasis when he’d gone two days ago, had he? “What’s the context? Why do you want to know?”


  Piper thought. It had seemed important. Now it really didn’t.

  She shrugged. “Never mind.”

  Meyer rose as if to leave but then seemed to change his mind. He turned around and this time sat right next to her. He took her hand, and in that moment Piper felt as young as the day she’d married him.

  “I did have a brother, though. Two brothers, actually.”

  “Really?” Piper said.

  He nodded. “One was named Kindred. The other was named Stranger.”

  “Those are funny names,” Piper said.

  “We were very close. But they had to leave. There was something very important they had to do. And there was a woman, too. Kindred’s wife. She’s also gone now. Her name was Heather.”

  “Where did she go?”

  But Meyer didn’t answer. Instead, he bit his lip and looked into the distance. If Piper didn’t know better, she’d think he was holding back a wave of emotion.

  “She was called away. But she also had two amazing children. The most amazing children I’ve ever known. Their names were Lila and Trevor.”

  Piper looked up at Meyer’s profile. He was staring off into the distance, but she could see his eyes were wet.

  “Meyer? What is it?”

  “I just wanted to tell you about them, while I still can.”

  She held his hand tighter. She reached for his face, but he pulled away.

  “What’s happening, Meyer?”

  “I just want you to remember those names, Piper. Kindred. Stranger. Heather. Lila. And Trevor.”

  “Okay. I’ll remember them.” And so Piper repeated them in her mind twice, concentrating because it seemed to matter so much to Meyer all of a sudden.

  “Tell me their names again,” he said.

  “Kindred, Stranger, Heather, Lila, and Trevor.”

  Meyer nodded. “Good. Don’t forget. And don’t let me forget.”

  And Piper didn’t, through to the end.

  Day Four