Paul had nothing left. Strangely, Mr. Brill looked only mildly worse for wear—intact, uninjured, just a bit faded.
Yet Paul sensed a change in him. Something was missing—had been taken. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Paul knew he had a lethal move or two left.
The big man did the only thing the Mr. Brills of the world know how to do—assail. With a nod, he willed a crack to open in the floor and sent it Paul’s way, widening it as it approached.
Despite his exhaustion, Paul stopped the crack, closing it with an effort that traveled right back at the big man. It sealed itself as it went, but its force continued past Mr. Brill, opening again behind him, widening into a deep fissure.
Mr. Brill gathered what he had remaining and spent it on a ball of red-hot plasma that emerged from between his palms. It sizzled straight at Paul, reaching the size of a small car as it rushed toward him.
Again, Paul halted the attack. The ball hung in the air between them, hissing in yellows, oranges, and reds that undulated across it.
“I need something from you,” Rain told Paul. She spoke as if they were alone. And they were, really.
“Yes.” It was a difficult thing, but Paul understood. Forgiveness. She’d wronged him, but he could grant them another chance to know each other, whatever that knowing meant. He looked at her even as he kept the fiery ball suspended in the air. “Yes.”
She held his gaze a moment, then smiled true—grace, strength, joy without edge.
Mr. Brill met the fate of his victims. His features faded as he fragmented—blurred and wiped away by the light from the fiery ball he himself had created. His suit hung limp from his wasting form.
“Do you know why we won?” Paul said to him. “Why we’ll always win?” His opponent could not speak. “Because the exploiters are exploited in the end. I’ve taken nothing. It gave itself to me, and I released it.”
Mr. Brill still didn’t comprehend.
“No matter how much you deserve this, I feel sorry for you,” Paul said. “That’s the difference.”
He didn’t push; he simply asked the ball to go to Mr. Brill. It did.
Then came a change of heart. He stopped it just shy of destroying the former big man.
“No,” Rain said. “Free us.”
“We’re already free. And I don’t fight like that.”
The ball of plasma flared, dissipating with the sibilance of water killing fire. It vanished in a supernova spray.
Mr. Brill managed one more laugh. But it was rough, desiccated. “You don’t fight like that.”
Paul turned to leave. After a few steps, he looked up to watch what happened next flash across the floating screens as it played out behind him.
Mr. Brill cocked his arm to deliver a blow to Paul’s back. Rain raised her shotgun, nothing holding her back now. The blast roared with the power of Paul’s forgiveness within it, echoing through the chamber.
Mr. Brill tumbled back into the chasm of his own making, his own blackness. He clawed at the air and was gone from sight without a sound. The abyss snapped closed like a mouth, sealing itself over him. The floor was uniform once more, healed.
“I fight like that,” Rain said. She kept her gun trained on the now-unremarkable spot on the floor, ensuring that it remained that way. “You should learn.”
The shotgun shell. The Dinuhos Tree’s gift to her. Her wish.
“When we made our deal, he said I was buying mercy on layaway. He wouldn’t tell me the final price. So I named my own.” She swung the gun over her shoulder, dropping the weapon into its holster. “And paid it.”
Around them, Mr. Brill’s screens filled with specks of black-and-white static, noise, and snow. Their source was gone, and a brightness from outside washed the monitors out, fading them slowly like the man they’d served.
Out there, the sun ascended. With its arrival, the reign of Mr. Brill, the Nistar gone dark, came to an end.
Paul offered his hand.
Rain took it.
They went out into the light.
44
Where the Wicked Cease from Troubling
On the beach, Zach studied the spot in the water where the marble had been caught and pulled down. Something had happened.
That something was big. And he’d helped.
The little farmer whirred. He watched it go. After several revolutions, it settled on the picture of the door. It said nothing, but Zach knew he’d be leaving soon.
“You’re a bad boy,” said the lady on the beach. She wasn’t happy with the big thing that had happened. “You’re a very bad boy—and you’re mine now.”
“No, Sheila,” a woman’s voice said from the Farmer Says speaker. “He’s not.”
It was the same voice from the number-eight tape, the woman who’d left him on the rock with the mosasaurs. Zach was mad at her. She’d led him into a trap.
“He is so,” Sheila said. “Go away, Jeanne. This is my realm.”
Zach turned to face the lady on the beach. She no longer looked like Paul’s mother—the woman in the picture on the bus. Her face could have been anyone’s. This was the real Sheila—who could be whatever the person she was trying to fool wished her to be but who was also canny enough not to push too hard. She hadn’t tried to be Zach’s mother, for instance. She’d never have fooled him.
“No,” Jeanne said. Her voice was full, real—not what it should have sounded like coming from tiny holes in plastic. “He doesn’t belong to you or to us. He’s suffered enough, and he never should have been in such danger to begin with. He did what was needed—more than anyone had a right to ask of him—and now he’s leaving. His mother is coming.”
Mother. Zach knew now.
Jeanne. Paul’s mother.
Sheila said nothing. She hadn’t really believed she’d be able to keep him. He could feel that. Whatever power was hers was changing—falling back into another place, where it fit in with other strengths.
“You’ll have your chance, Sheila,” Jeanne said. “There’s a lot of work to do. But he is not a bad boy.”
She didn’t need to say the rest.
A smart boy. A brave boy.
Zach was both. So he did something he almost never did. He laughed.
Then came something he absolutely never did.
“Thank you,” he said.
She awoke to whiskers at her nose, lips sealed against hers. A kiss. No. Fingers clamped her nose shut.
Someone forced breath into her mouth. She coughed. It stopped.
When the lips left hers, Annie said, “Okay.”
And she was. She opened her eyes.
Wrangler John dropped onto his butt on the floor beside her. He crab-walked sideways a few feet as she took stock of her surroundings.
She was on the floor, on her back. The Virtual Boy stood on the table above, red glow gone, dead and dark. Its job was finished.
“I hope you know what that was,” he said as she sat up and rubbed her eyes. “It wasn’t—you know.”
Eyes shut, she massaged her temples until the images of the Virtual Boy faded from the insides of her lids. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Fifty-seventh Med. Tan Son Nhut. The Original Dustoff.” He watched her bring herself back the rest of the way. “I’m sorry. You were holding everything up. They told me to take you out of the loop. Last resort. I had no choice.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You weren’t breathing. Old training dies hard.”
“Thank you.” She pretended not to notice his embarrassment. Medics never changed. Gratitude was the worst thing you could do to them. “I’m sorry about your hand.”
He shrugged and didn’t bother to look at the bleeding scratches.
“What now?” she said.
“Everything’s realigning. No one knows where Brill is, but he’s gone. The machine’s rebooting.”
He started to get up as Annie rose to her feet, but remained on the floor when it was clear that she was used to
compensating for her knee.
“As I said, then: what now?”
He shrugged. “We didn’t think much beyond getting rid of him. Not many on our side have been around long enough to remember how it’s supposed to work.”
“The squid take it from here?” She waited for her head to finish clearing.
“They’re multiplying and leaving. Again, nobody knows where. Wherever it is they’re supposed to go. But there are way more than there were before. The rabbits and the ferrets are going, too, and I suppose I should let the bird take off. I don’t know what I’ll do. Make something up, I guess.” He shifted position. He didn’t look to be the type who was comfortable sitting on the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m a professional, but it’s been a long time. And, well—do you mind if I kind of choose to look at what just happened as about ninety-eight percent mouth-to-mouth and two percent kiss?” When she said nothing, he buried his face in his knees. “Now I’m creeping you out.”
She laughed. “That’s the closest I’ve had to action since my son was conceived.”
He wouldn’t look at her.
She oriented herself. The door was to the left. “Speaking of which, before you blew my brains out, I feel like I got a bit of a line on where he is.”
When Wrangler John didn’t say anything else, Annie headed for the exit.
“Wait.”
She did.
He stood and looked out the window at Weston’s Black Hawk. “The Dustoff. I can fly.”
Her ride was still here.
“Zach’s with our people,” he said. “He’s a little hero, your boy. He got past Shoreline Sheila. She took down a lot of Journeymen in her time, but not him. Bright kid—a kid among kids.”
“Yes,” Annie said. “He is.”
On the playa, the festival was gone. Tents, booths—all absent, with no sign left to mark any of it but for the charred framework of Gaia herself, recognizable only to those who’d seen her before the flames had their say. She would collapse to the ground in the coming weeks, months, or years and be reunited with her earth.
Paul had missed his chance.
“That’s another Journey,” Rain told him. Her hardness had left her. She’d completed a Journey of her own.
He looked out across the playa to the high sand dunes separating them from the other side—where they’d crossed over, where they needed to go. “I guess we’re walking.”
Later, they crested a tall dune, their packs a growing weight on their shoulders. The air and sky ahead wavered in the heat.
Paul had dug into his supplies and given Rain a ball cap to shield her from the sun. A wet kerchief hung down over the back of her neck.
He wore a t-shirt on his head like a proper desert nomad—or one forced to improvise. She’d only laughed at him for the first couple of miles. He loved that sound and wanted more.
Slow ups. Faster downs. All under the gaze of the withering sun. One dune was much like another, but each got harder and harder to conquer in the yellow-white rays.
They side-skidded down the slope of yet another dune.
“Aren’t you going to ask?” Rain said.
The weight of the sun on Paul’s head slowed the arrival of his answer. “No.”
“Why not?”
They rested in a valley. There was no respite from the light, which had been such a comfort at the Shrine of the Lost but was no friend now.
“Because you didn’t know me when you cut your deal. And because I’m a liar, too. When I left New Beginnings, I knew I wasn’t coming back. But that’s not what I told the man who wants to be my father. You can’t build goodbye on a lie.”
He pulled the t-shirt off his head to wring it out, but the sweat had long since evaporated. “I can’t help but think that’s what made all this happen—that I’d be in San Francisco now if I hadn’t said that to him, and everyone would be safe.” He fashioned a hat from the shirt again and started up the next dune.
“Just the one?”
He stopped to look back down at her. “What?”
She squinted up at him in the sunlight, which washed her into blinding absolution. “Just the one lie?”
He wanted to ask her how many she had to her name—and if she would cut the same deal again, given the choice.
Instead, he resumed his climb.
Finally, they topped the highest of the dunes—the one Paul had been focusing on to keep himself going.
Everything fell away when they saw what was beyond it.
People. Thousands—no, millions—covering the playa. And in the distance, past the masses, an immense columned building they all waited to enter.
A train station. The people had come for their trips—their Journeys. And the crowd grew as Paul and Rain watched.
“Wow,” she said.
Paul and Rain went down to the people—pulled, needed. Something had changed.
The two of them hurried, faster than they’d moved for hours. Sand cascaded from their boots as they descended.
At the bottom, the crowd remained focused on the horizon but parted for the newcomers. Paul and Rain were a rill making their way through. A path opened, and they allowed it to lead them.
A host of faces. Men, women, boys, girls. So many styles of dress. Hoop skirts, knickers, top hats, and other formal wear, the garb of bygone eras. How long had Mr. Brill held them?
At the crowd’s center, the throng stepped aside to let them through. There, in a circular clearing, stood Porter and Po.
The Envoy looked up from his battered Newton and grinned broadly. Happiness wasn’t at home on the gray man’s face just yet, but it was settling in. He looked to have shed twenty years.
Beside him, the little monk beamed like a child who couldn’t wait to show them the gift he’d made—the card he’d drawn himself.
“I said it some time ago. I’ll say it now.” Porter leaned on his staff more out of ceremony than necessity. “My God, boy. What have you done?”
“All these people,” Paul said.
“Yes. And more arrive by the minute. The Commons is expanding. There’s so much to do now that the most important Journeys in many lifetimes have come to an end.”
Journeys. Plural.
It didn’t seem possible for Porter’s smile to grow. Yet it did. “It seems I left the office before the other assignments came in, but they’ve finished, too.” He returned to the Newton’s screen. “Paul Benjamin Reid. Ann Elizabeth Thomas Brucker. Zachary Robert Brucker.”
Annie and Zach. Where were they?
Porter said Rain’s full name aloud. Her real name. Paul wanted to stop there, to ask this girl so much he needed to know.
“And two more on their way to whatever awaits them,” Porter said. “Gerald Truitt. James Prescott Brill.” He waited for that to sink in. “Both fates determined, destinations known only to The Commons.”
The Envoy surveyed the crowds of souls waiting silently to enter the station. “I’ve got my work cut out for me, certainly. But there’s a volunteer list for the Envoy Corps that’s as long as ten trains. And I’ve got the muscle to whip them into shape.”
Po reached into the pocket of his robe. With great solemnity, he donned Ken’s Wayfarers. The gravity of the duty and the memory of his friend kept an expression of grim formality on his face. Then he broke into another proud grin. Paul wished the mummy could be there to see it.
“And us?” Rain’s fingers entwined with Paul’s.
“Known only to The Commons.” The gray man allowed a trace of the old sadness to touch his face. “That is all I can tell you, other than the most important words I have in me.” He looked at each of them. “Thank you.”
Po removed the sunglasses and nodded at Paul, then Rain, his gratitude joining with the Envoy’s.
It was all going away so fast.
“I won’t forget,” Paul said to Rain.
She took his other hand and gave him a soft kiss. It ran all the way th
rough him. “I won’t, either.”
But they did.
45
And the Weary Are at Rest
He dreamt of walking in a desert. A man gripped his elbow and spoke softly to him. The man was close, but his voice came from a distance. It was difficult to hear him.
In the way dreams go, what he knew as truth shifted. It changed because it was no longer true—or because he’d been wrong about it all along.
The man was trying to steer him toward water. Only it wasn’t water. It was merely the way he needed to go.
He was thirsty—so thirsty that he couldn’t swallow. The dream was a white oven.
People in the distance, behind a veil of blown sand.
A woman, older—with strong but kind eyes in a ruined face of melted seams.
A flash of a second woman. Red hair.
He fought for the word. “Mom.” It wouldn’t come.
Again. It wouldn’t.
The older woman, sad, standing between him and the fiery hair.
Step into the photo. Impossible. Out of reach.
Passed. Past.
The man walked him onward. The sand became snow, the oven cold. Fires burned on a hillside but gave no warmth.
Icy water dripped from above, loosening crusted blood. A flourish of feathers and color.
He’d been in a fight. Worse than a fight, the man said.
At some point, they told each other goodbye.
He knew he’d see the man again. The man did, too. But not for a long time yet, with any luck.
The man let go of his arm. A tightness remained there.
Egress, someone said.
He’d thought the man was hanging onto him for support, but the man needed no help. He could stand on his own. And more. The look of him was misleading. The grayness, the walking staff.
He wanted to thank the man. But there was no man.
Paul could stand on his own, too.
And more.
Paul felt the burn of the IV before he saw the taped-over needle in his arm. His lids parted only with effort, as if they hadn’t been asked to reveal anything in months. The tube was slung over a stainless-steel rack on wheels, with a hanging bag of something clear on the other end.
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