Po signed. “Or perhaps it chose you,” Ken said.
Paul wasn’t prepared to discuss what having such strength for himself might mean. He’d always survived as someone without any power, without any influence. “What about the bona fides versus the mythicals? How does that work?”
“To us, there is no distinction,” Ken said. Po nodded. “There’s a saying in your world that you are the stories you tell yourselves. We are the stories you tell, too. Whether we are born when you do so, or we already exist and connect to you at the telling, it matters little. For now, we are tied to those who dreamt of us, and we come to The Commons with them. With Brill’s controls in place, we, too, are held here.”
“I still don’t understand why he doesn’t come after you.”
“He hunts the easy game,” Rain said. She’d begun to disassemble and clean her gun again.
Paul found himself turning his ring. Why did he and Rain make each other so jumpy?
“How do you say I hate you in sign?” she asked Po. When he demonstrated, she watched with a devotion that made Paul look away.
“How about I love you?” Paul said. He didn’t know why. Maybe just for balance.
Po showed them that, too.
“Not so different, are they?” Porter said. “Do you think Mr. Brill believes them to be one and the same?”
Paul reached across Rain for more firewood, and his sleeve rode up his arm.
“Whoa,” she said. His forearm bore a deep, ugly bruise running half its length. “Does that hurt?”
Porter came over for a closer look. “From the fight?”
“The accident. It’s just the one.”
“You shouldn’t have any.” Porter gently prodded the bruise. “You didn’t answer Rain’s question. Does it hurt?”
Paul shook his head.
The Envoy pressed hard in the center of the bruise, but there was no pain. He laid the head of his staff against the bruise and shut his eyes.
“Ouch.”
“So I thought.” As the others moved in to see, Porter ran his fingers over the bruise, searching. “One of these things is not like the other. Where have I heard that before?” He pulled a small penknife from his pocket, opened it, and laid the edge of the blade against the bruise’s border. Then he dug in.
“Ow!”
“Sorry. That should be the worst of it.” He pinched at the edge of the bruise. “Paul, my ability to move things rests on knowing them—their positions, but also their nature. I can often sense when something is not as it should be.”
His tone was the same one the New Beginnings nurse used to distract little kids right before she doused a cut with antiseptic. Sure enough, he twisted the bruise and pulled.
Paul hissed as the entire thing ripped from his arm. It felt like losing a layer of skin and sounded like duct tape being pulled off the roll. He yanked his arm away. “What the hell?”
The gray man ignored him, grim now as he held the bruise to the firelight. The glow of the flames through the translucent membrane revealed fine veins within. It pulsed, hanging between Porter’s two fingers.
“What is it?” Rain said.
He held it closer to the heat. It squealed and tried to curl away.
Rain recoiled. Paul rubbed the raw skin of his arm, making sure no residue was left.
“A peeper slug,” Porter said. “Brill’s eyes and ears. It attached itself somewhere along the way. He’s been tracking us.” He threw the bruise into the center of the fire.
It cried out as it sizzled into oblivion. The shrill screams finally ceased as Paul spit on his hand and rubbed his arm harder, ignoring the sting.
Porter said nothing. He stared into the flames where the slug had gone in, thinking.
21
A Smart Boy. A Brave Boy
Tape Recorder Zach, the voice on the machine’s tiny spinning wheels, told Zach what he needed to be.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
Zach was scared now, and Zach's mother wasn't here to tell him what to do. He had only the tapes—the tapes and himself.
He’d done nothing but walk since stepping into the mirror. And it didn’t seem like anyone was following him. That was the reason he’d been picked, Tape Recorder Zach said. Something about how he was beneath the notice of the angry man in the suit and the white-haired man who worked for him. How he didn’t see the fake world they put in front of everyone else—the world everyone else believed was real.
Zach was somewhere to the side of the angry man—in the corners and in the margins. They had a hard time fooling him and tracking him. That was why he was needed.
The angry man scared Zach. Zach's mother sometimes said that being scared was all in his head. Tape Recorder Zach didn’t say anything like that. Zach thought that Tape Recorder Zach didn't want to lie to him.
The angry man in the suit was someone to be afraid of.
Tape Recorder Zach didn’t mention the white-haired man who worked for the angry man, but Zach suspected he might be even scarier. There was something more to him—something down deep and hiding.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
The more Zach believed the voice in the tape recorder, the more that voice didn’t sound like his. It became the voice of Zach’s mother.
He thought that the farther he walked and the more he listened, the less the tape recorder worried about whether or not he trusted it. They were friends.
The shift from his own voice to the voice of Zach’s mother was to get him used to the truth. The tape recorder was a stranger, and that stranger was his only guide. He’d been told over and over not to trust strangers. Now he had no choice.
Zach walked straight ahead, as the tape recorder told him to. The hallway looked just like the one in the apartment, only a lot longer.
He passed doors much like the doors to his bedroom and Zach’s mother’s room. They appeared over and over, and he knew that he could easily open them to see what was inside.
The voice told him to keep walking.
It meant it.
Whoever was inside those rooms wanted him to join them. The voice that used to be Zach’s and was now Zach’s mother’s didn’t even want him looking at the doors. The voice kept talking so he wouldn’t forget to keep going. It spoke to him to keep the voices in the rooms from talking.
The hallway went on and on. Zach did as he was told. He walked.
Finally, the hallway ended at a red metal door with a square window. The window was small and made of thick glass with wires in it. The door had a big handle with a thumb button that was almost too high for Zach to reach. The button was impossible for him to move, though he tried very hard.
Zach’s mother’s voice said something to the door that was too soft for Zach to understand. Or maybe he wasn’t supposed to hear it.
When he tried one more time, the thumb button clicked down. The door opened.
On the other side, steps descended into the dark. Zach couldn’t see anything, and he was afraid to go in.
Zach’s mother said something again. Lights in the stairwell ceiling turned on. They weren’t very bright, but they were enough for him to see where he was going.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
He grabbed the metal railing and started down. He wanted to know how far he was going, so he counted. The problem was that he could only go as high as ten. He had to start over before he even got to the bottom of the first bunch. So he decided to count bunches of steps, but again he had to stop at ten and start over.
After his first set of ten, Zach heard a baby crying from somewhere up above. Then the lights went out, and he was in the dark.
The tape recorder said something. The lights flickered but went out again.
Zach held his hand up in front of his face and moved it toward him until he touched his nose. He couldn’t see it.
Someone in the dark took his hand. The skin was as cold as Zach’s mother’s when she took him for a walk on pot-roast days, but it wasn’t as big as hers.
It was the hand of another child.
Zach tried to pull away, but the hand wouldn’t let go. The voice of Zach’s mother told him he needed to go faster. Now she sounded scared, too.
A stairway door opened and closed in the blackness way up above. It clunked as heavily as the door Zach had come through, but it sounded like it was much higher than Zach’s door.
The cold hand pulled him downward. Hard.
He hurried.
Zach counted groups of ten until he lost count. The fronts of his legs burned with the effort. The hand pulled harder.
He tripped and pitched forward into the dark but managed to grab the railing. The hand holding his kept him from falling. It was very strong and squeezed hard enough to hurt. He hung there for a second, then found his feet again.
Someone was coming down the stairs far above in big, wet thuds. Zach wasn’t moving fast enough. The hand holding his pulled, and he nearly fell again.
The tape-recorder voice started talking. Then many small, icy hands picked Zach up and carried him down.
It was too dark for him to tell how fast they were going, but it was faster than he could have gone on his own. Much faster. Like falling.
A feeling came to him, as if someone put it in his head. It came from the hands holding him—hands of cold, hard children he couldn’t see.
The cold children were afraid, too, but not for themselves. They had already faced whatever was coming for him. They hadn’t been fast enough, and now they couldn’t leave.
They were scared for Zach. They were afraid they would be too slow again. They wanted to save him because they couldn’t be saved themselves.
Zach was sad for the cold, lost children.
In the dark, he heard some of them stumble, but he never worried about falling himself. There were always more hands to catch him and hold him.
There were so many hands that the children of the dark weren’t descending the steps themselves anymore. They were passing him along.
He rolled over and over across their hands. Down.
Dizzy, he felt sick. And still the wet, heavy steps above drew closer.
Zach understood why there were more hands and more children now. This was where whatever was coming after him had caught many of them—near the bottom.
They’d almost made it out. They’d been so close. Just not close enough.
It was all he could do to hang onto the tape recorder.
He was lowered to the ground, the hands so gentle that he didn’t realize he was on his feet until he almost tumbled over.
The lights came back on. He wavered in front of another thick metal door with wired glass. It spun, as did the floor and walls. He was woozy from all of the rolling.
Zach put his hand on the door’s thumb button, knowing what would happen. The button wouldn’t budge.
The footsteps drew closer—sodden, like clods of watered earth. With each step, soft things skittered down the steps ahead of the feet and dropped down through the space in the staircase’s center to the floor near him. He didn’t look to see what the dropping things were. He knew they’d be wriggling.
Zach pushed with his thumb as hard as he could. His own yelp of distress surprised him. He was such a quiet boy—a smart boy, a brave boy—but not now.
Then the button went down. It was easy to move the door. He pushed.
The steps above grew closer still. The skittering of the falling things grew louder.
The door opened. The smell of warm, wet air greeted him—the air after a thunderstorm on a heavy summer evening. He stepped outside into nighttime.
His sense of relief didn't last long. The lights in the stairwell behind him went out as the damp slap of the footsteps sounded from only a few floors above.
He tried to push the door closed. It wouldn’t move.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
Zach pushed as hard as he could. It would not move.
Harder. It would not move.
He looked up. A folding steel closer at the door’s top was locked into place, out of reach.
The voice on the tape recorder, the voice of Zach's mother, began talking again. He still couldn’t understand her.
He didn't care. He wanted the door closed. So did she, and that scared him even more.
The footsteps drew nearer. His breathing echoed in his ears as he gave the wide-open door his all. He heard no such strain from whatever was hurrying down the stairs.
He began to cry—a rare thing for him.
The tape-recorder voice, the voice of Zach’s mother, was panicky. The door wouldn’t move. The steps were nearly upon him.
He thought about running, but knew he’d be caught. It had to be the door.
Another yelp. His tears splashed the back of his hand—one, then more. They ran down the skin there. The slapping steps reached the bottom of the stairs. His tears reached the door handle, wetting it.
The door closed fast—so fast that it almost ripped his thumbnail off. It boomed shut just as something huge launched itself from the other side.
The impact on the door was hard and loud. On the tape, Zach’s mother gasped.
Zach stepped back.
It hit again, and the door bowed outward with the power of whatever was trying to break it down. But it held.
The voice of Zach’s mother told Zach to turn around, away from the thing that wanted him. He obeyed, just as he'd listened when it told him not to open any of the hallway doors.
It was quiet, but not a good quiet. A tickle traveled up the back of his neck.
Something was looking out at him through the door’s wired-glass window. To look back and see what it was would be bad—would give it power.
Zach’s mother’s voice said to hurry. The tears on the door handle would dry soon.
Zach walked away. Fast.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
Smart enough and brave enough to never look back.
22
None More than You
Their group was getting good at the important things: fighting, traveling in silence, waiting.
At a shelter by the side of the road, Porter decided they should get on the next bus that came along. Faster progress was worth the risk of being spotted and recognized, he said.
So they killed time to make it. Porter stood in the middle of the road, gazing into the distance, as if trying to will a bus into existence. Po meditated on a nearby bench, Ken beside him. Paul and Rain shared a hillside a short distance away.
After sitting completely still for an hour, Po hopped off the bench and joined Porter. He looked down the road, then turned to sign at Ken.
"A bus is coming," the mummy told the Envoy.
“I don’t see it,” said Porter. “Do you?” he asked Po.
"He can hear it,” Ken said.
"Po can hear?” Paul asked Rain. He kept his voice lower than he might have only a moment before.
"Better than we do, according to Ken.”
“He doesn’t talk.”
"He's a mythical. He was created for some old seventies kung-fu movies. Ken says he can only speak the way he was dubbed in English—in this cheesy stereotype. He hates it. It’s undignified. So he signs.”
The bus rumbled into view. Paul stood, swept dry grass from his pants, and shouldered his pack.
“Paul?” Rain said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For what you did in the fight.”
“I had no control. I killed people.”
“You heard Porter. You freed those Ravagers—and you saved us.” She stood, too, grabbing her pack and shotgun.
“I’m afraid,” he said.
“That you won’t be able to do it again?”
“That I won’t be able to control it. And it’ll be one of you next time.”
“I don’t think so.” She reached out to place her hand on his chest, her palm over his heart. “Porter. Ken. Po. Me. Why are we with you when we know it will bring Brill down on
us?” She spread her fingers. “Because we believe.”
Then she walked down the hill, leaving Paul to ask himself if he believed, too.
And if so, in what?
The bus was of the yellow school variety, which Paul recognized from the days he’d chosen to attend. Those days were rare—just numerous enough to keep him from getting kicked out of the foster home of the day or out of New Beginnings.
A battered rear-engine model with a flat front, the bus boasted the usual safety features: no seat belts and rubber padding as hard as the steel it covered. He almost felt nostalgic, making his way to the back with the others while Porter paid the driver.
Their fellow passengers were the usual Commons types, meaning that they were highly unusual. Three men were composed of melting ice. A bride and groom were holograms projected by a small unit sitting next to them. Two seats’ worth of little girls in black had identical shag cuts and eyes that were glowing sapphires in their petite skulls.
Ken and Po led the way to the rear, where they realized that the bus was full, and they’d have to stand in the aisle. As they approached the rear gate, however, the bus stretched to accommodate them, creating two new rows of vacant seats.
On the way back, they passed a portly man whose days-old facial growth, dirty hat, and stained coat weren’t an adequate warning for the odor that assaulted them once they got close.
He looked Rain up and down without any attempt at subtlety. She pretended not to notice, but when she was right at his ear, she adjusted her hold on her shotgun and casually swung it to the side, forcing him to duck.
“Spare a bill for a fellow who’s down?” the man asked Paul.
Paul acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. Rain waited for him to take a window seat and then sat next to him. It occurred to Paul that she might want room to maneuver the gun again—just in case.
Porter finished paying and made his way back to them.
“Spare a bill for a fellow who’s down?” the dirty man asked as he passed.
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