by Sean Platt
“Why here?”
Piper stopped wondering by the end of her question — by then she’d noticed that there were already people aboard the ghost vessel, plain as day.
CHAPTER 20
Meyer woke.
Although, he realized, he’d never precisely been asleep.
There was a man beside him. From the outside, Meyer recognized the man as Carl the blacksmith, whom Kindred knew better than Meyer did. He was broad and tall, looking ten years younger than he must be. From the inside, Meyer could see the man’s true identity as if he were wearing a name tag. Carl Nairobi, from Cape Town, South Africa — more recently known as Roman Sands. Meyer had once sat with this man in his kitchen, told him not to board the vessel that would protect others from the flood, and follow the silver ball to find another way.
Or was that someone else?
Meyer’s head was swimming. He wasn’t thinking straight. It was the drugs. The medicine. But how was that possible? He hadn’t taken any since he’d last seen Juha, the shaman, at the old house in Los Angeles, with Heather. He’d talked to her recently, too. And that was strange because he was entirely certain that Heather was dead. Except that nobody was ever really dead, were they?
Beside him in the white holding room, Carl said, “You okay, man?”
“I know you.”
“I know you know me. We been here long enough by now.”
How long was long enough? Meyer sent his mind back. Reality stretched like taffy. He saw colors. Everything seemed clear. The universe was a jigsaw puzzle. He’d noticed that before when high, and Heather had always laughed at him because Meyer became wise when taking his medicine. But after a session with Juha, the aftereffects of ayahuasca always led to decisions he’d never seen as obviously correct before. After sessions, he tended to meet the right people at the right time. It gave him clarity. It showed him that one day visitors would come — and that when they did, he needed to be at his Axis Mundi in Vail. He wasn’t sure how he’d get there; he kept meaning to research apocalyptic prepping to make sure he didn’t conduct his eventual business like an idiot. He’d known only the mandate: Get to Vail when the ships arrive. Even his family hadn’t needed to go, according to the visions. Only Meyer had to reach Vail before the Astrals entered the atmosphere all those years ago. Because Meyer had a date with abduction, though he hadn’t figured it out at the time.
Now it seemed as obvious as the swirling and shifting nose on Carl Nairobi’s face.
“What did they do to you?” Carl was peering into Meyer’s eyes, and only once he saw that Carl was above rather than in front of him did he realize that he was lying down. “They give you drugs or something?”
“No.”
“When that hot blonde found me on the ship, they put some weird helmet on me and tried to fuck the thoughts right out of my head. They do that to you? With the hat with the wires down the back?”
“No.”
But Meyer could see that Carl was believing none of it. As far as he was concerned, Meyer was stoned out of his gourd. In Carl’s mind, the only way to explain Meyer’s transcendental state was drugs, alien mind-rape, or both. They’d been in this white room on the ship together for a few hours after Meyer had been shoved into it, then he’d been taken for questioning by the tall blonde — or rather, the Astral pretending to be one. She’d had a wire helmet like Carl described but had never put it on Meyer’s head. The room seemed prepped for her to do so, but she’d appeared hesitant, and Meyer felt like they’d been two awkward kids in his youth, killing time in a closet while waiting for Seven Minutes in Heaven to end without touching.
Carl figured there’d been some mind-screwing going on in that room, before the Titans returned Meyer to their shared cell. But in reality, Meyer and the Astral woman had stayed chaste: her wary and him getting into these altered states apparently all on his own.
Meyer saw himself crossing the river as the flooding came, getting trapped, and eventually saved by … Meyer?
He saw himself chasing Cameron, Piper, Charlie Cooke, and one or two others through Benjamin’s raided Utah lab. Every time one of them turned to look, Meyer ducked out of sight, and their minds wouldn’t let them see him.
Although that was strange because Meyer was sure he’d still been in captivity on the Vail mothership at the time.
He remembered leading the city of Heaven’s Veil, even though he’d been on the mothership then as well, and had never actually been viceroy.
He remembered persuading Christopher to ride away from the RV in the escape vehicle when they’d been storming through cannibal tribes on the outskirts of Ember Flats. Christopher would get away and then set off a bomb. The distraction would give the others enough time to escape.
But hadn’t Meyer been at the front of the RV at the time, standing beside Aubrey? And also beside … himself?
“Man, what did they do to you?” Carl had asked that before. He was being repetitive. But that was the world. The same things happened over and over, in a loop, until the right things changed and someone finally got the lesson.
The Astrals hadn’t done this to him — this curious feeling of a drug trip without any drugs.
Something else had.
Meyer, as part of his mind floated away, could see into the whole of consciousness. He understood, the way he always used to understand when taking the medicine with Heather. But there wasn’t just one consciousness this time. Now there were two, connected by a bridge. And it was strange that Meyer realized that both collective unconsciousnesses — not just the human side — felt more familiar than his own skin.
Carl was still watching Meyer. Not precisely because he cared about him per se but because they were the only two humans here. The Astrals had snatched Carl from the monolith before grabbing Meyer from the desert during his trip to the Mullah caves. If Meyer went as nuts as Carl seemed to think he was, Carl would be alone. No one liked to be alone. So it was a good thing that from Meyer’s currently enhanced perspective, nobody ever was alone.
He saw the monolith, the freighter. He saw it through Kindred’s eyes and Stranger’s. He saw the invisible thread connecting the men as they kept themselves carefully distant, though they were of course not seeing that filament themselves.
He saw Piper.
Lila.
Peers Basara.
And the former viceroy of Roman Sands, who had a secret that even she didn’t know.
And he saw what was waiting, hidden among the cargo, ready to spring like a box full of snakes.
Meyer ducked beneath his surface reality. One dimension deeper. When he and the Astrals had first seen each other, this was where they’d connected. Nothing could travel faster than light. Bannister’s team had known that, and so had the rebel monks in Heaven’s Veil. The only way to travel as far as these ships was to squeeze through the layer beneath. Traveling without traveling. Thinking across light years in seconds.
The Astrals had watched the world through Meyer’s eyes. They’d used the drug visions to see the human world.
But the street went both ways, and now Meyer could see it plain as day. Ever since whatever Clara had been trying to do with the Astral mind had succeeded and the artificial divisions had fallen.
There was a dimension beneath the three most people knew. Several hidden dimensions, in fact.
Meyer saw the Astrals’ secret.
“You don’t have to kill them,” Meyer said. “You can outrun them.”
Carl stepped away, shaking his head, and Meyer saw only the naked white ceiling.
CHAPTER 21
You don’t have to kill them. You can outrun them, said Kindred’s own voice inside his head.
And then there was a vision. A sense that was more a wave of understanding than a set of step-by-step instructions. They needed to search the cargo. That, they’d all agreed on. But now he had a new sense of peril (unsure exactly what it was) and knew they had to search anyway.
You don’t have to kill them.
“Kill what?” Piper asked.
He’d spoken aloud without knowing or meaning to. For a flicker, Kindred had the sense of being somewhere else. As if he had two set of eyes — well, not just eyes but all of his senses — and one had been here on the freighter while the other had been in another place. An all-white place. And he’d been with … Carl? Yes, Carl. But when had that been?
“Kill what, Kindred?” Piper repeated.
Kindred looked over his shoulder. They’d moved down from the bridge and were about to enter the ship’s massive rear, where cargo boxes were stacked like God’s LEGOs, but Kindred couldn’t shake the feeling of being followed, or watched. Both. The feeling hadn’t been there a moment before, appearing about the time he’d been talking to Carl — except that he hadn’t talked to Carl; he’d been here on the freighter the entire time. So where had that creeping feeling come from? It felt like it was right here and now, urgent. But it must have been a while ago. Because Carl wasn’t here. According to Peers, he’d been carried into a shuttle and presumably taken to an orbiting mothership. Stranger would tell him the same thing, except that Kindred wouldn’t go near him. That was a terrible idea, same as always.
“Are you all right?” Piper asked.
And Carl’s voice: Man, what did they do to you?
“I’m fine.”
“What’s between you and Stranger?” Piper asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“When our group came across the dunes, I thought you’d recognized them on the deck. I thought you knew it was him.”
“I did.” They all had. It was easy. The group didn’t make a damned bit of sense, at least not to anyone without Kindred’s dreams, where eight people were standing beside the ship: himself, Stranger, Peers, Liza Knight (because that wasn’t crazy), Clara, Meyer, Carl, and the old Mullah wise man whose name Kindred didn’t know. He hadn’t been surprised to see them, even with Lila and Piper to muddy the waking dream’s waters beside him.
“But you wouldn’t shout. I had to do it.”
“And?”
“And then you stayed back when they came down.”
“Liza Knight makes me nervous. You remember who she was, right? Roman Sands?”
“It’s not Liza you’re clearly staying away from. There was always something between you and him. We just accepted it when we didn’t have our memories, but it always felt strange. I remember sensing that you really wanted to meet him, but refused to. So what’s between you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Piper.”
She watched him for a long second, obviously not believing. But then, she’d been looking at him that way ever since he’d run up to them on the sand. She’d never believed him. Wasn’t that why they’d gone after Clara without telling him? They shouldn’t have done that. Hadn’t Clara been his granddaughter once, too? Arguably, Clara was more Kindred’s kin than Piper’s. At least they shared memories and genetics, borrowed or not.
She looked like she might keep prodding — to ask why everyone was simply accepting the old viceroy’s presence in a group with the town mystic and a Mullah black sheep, perhaps — but instead she met his eyes with silence, then turned back to the narrow hallway. After a handful of steps, she turned. Kindred’s feet seemed anchored. He hadn’t moved an inch.
“What’s with you?”
“I get this feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“There’s something out there.”
“On the ship?”
He nodded.
“So now you believe in ghost stories?”
“Why did they leave this ship where it was, Piper? Why not destroy it?”
“They left a lot of artifacts. Maybe they wanted us to wonder, thousands of years in the future, the way Benjamin wondered about ancient aliens.”
“I don’t like it. We all knew it was here, but nobody had the guts to explore it. People who did said they saw things aboard. Heard things.”
“We didn’t know it was a ship back then. Now we do. It’s an old, abandoned place.” Her forehead bunched. “What’s going on with you, Kindred?”
What did they do to you?
And the other voice, which at first Kindred mistook for his own: You don’t have to kill them. You can outrun them.
Kindred looked ahead, through the door with a porthole, closed because the ship had canted enough to let gravity close it. He could see Liza Knight moving between rows of containers, touching them, rapping the sides, seemingly unsure where to start or what, exactly, they were doing. Stranger was out there somewhere, too. Probably hearing the same voices as Kindred.
Why would that be?
But he sort of knew, beneath it all.
“You were the one who made us come here. It’s the only way to maybe get Meyer back, remember?”
“We need to be careful. There’s something out there.”
“There’s nothing out there.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“What’s out there, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Piper moved to the door and opened it. “Oh, for fuck’s sa—”
From the deck, there was a bang.
A noise like nails across metal.
A scream.
Kindred felt like someone had kicked a hole in his middle.
And he knew that Lila was dead.
CHAPTER 22
Stranger fell to his knees. Even with the adrenaline flooding his increasingly human body and the fear that came with it, the loss was hobbling. He struck the deck with his hand on a metal latch, stumbling, knees sending signals of pain, his palm gashed. A flash of red from the corner of his eye told him it was bleeding. He’d probably get tetanus. Born like a god, dead of lockjaw at the dawn of a diseased Earth.
When the worst of the feeling passed, Stranger raised his head.
She was gone.
His daughter — not his daughter at all — was gone.
He hadn’t known it was coming. There’d been no time to prepare. He hadn’t been able to say goodbye. Hell, there hadn’t even been time for her to be his daughter. Lila had been too busy being Meyer’s child, and in her spare time she’d been Kindred’s. But Stranger couldn’t help wondering if he, of the three, was hurting most. Trevor’s death had broken something inside the first duplicate Meyer, and when Kindred was created, that fractured thing had been forced out of the Astral collective.
Became the Pall.
Became Kindred, when the recipe called for the addition of one Cameron Bannister, dropping himself into the Ark’s maw to turn the black smoke into a thing with a body and diminishing magic, as his cells began, finally, to age.
He should run. He should hide. At the very least, he should find Piper, then maybe the others, and see them to safety. But Stranger didn’t want to. Twenty years of being human had made him mostly that. It was something he could see in the joined collectives of both species, as dirty water from one spilled into the pristine blue of the other.
I’ll kill it.
Stranger’s fists clenched. It didn’t matter what had taken her down, though the sounds suggested a Reptar. A thing like that couldn’t be fought hand to hand, and the Astrals had seen to it that the people had only blades and arrows for weapons. But he’d take it on anyway, throw himself upon it, pry his fingers beneath its scales, rip them away like fingernails from the quick, like needles under skin, like slowly pressing eyes with thumbs until they— Something hit Stranger, hard. His side struck the shipping container. He came up swinging, landing a few good strikes in the meat of something’s body before hands pinned his wrists and he found himself looking up at a freely bleeding nose.
Peers.
“Don’t,” Peers said.
“Get off me!”
“Sadeem and I talked about this. We thought this day might come.”
“What day?” Red suffused his vision. He barely felt in control of his still-thrashing arms and legs. He wanted to annihilate something, ca
use anything half the pain he felt inside. Like a rapid cancer. Acid, burning him from the center outward.
“You came from the Ark.”
“I came from your mother!”
Peers let Stranger raise his hand just enough that, with reapplied force, Peers managed to slam it back down on the ship’s metal deck.
“No,” Peers said, his voice a reasonable but harsh whisper, “you did not. Nobody knew where you were from. Before the Forgetting was complete, they were close to declaring you a god. I remember trying hard to solve the mystery before my mind finally faded for good. I ran around asking everyone about you. People had dreamed about you. Many said they seemed to remember you visiting them before the floods, all over the world. They said you gave them special trinkets. Small metal balls that seemed to have minds of their own.”
“Get off me, Peers!” Stranger was pinned down by the man’s crotch, unable to struggle free. Each fresh second left them in danger. With every new moment, the monster that had ended his daughter’s life — same as another had ended his son’s — drew another breath.
“Listen to me. The Mullah knew about you. Not by name but by concept: a man who walked the land without boundaries, able to bend magic to his will. Sadeem’s memory did not fade. He’s spent all this time putting it together, and in that time you haven’t aged.”
“I know who I am,” Stranger growled. He’d kept his memories, too.
“You’re one of the seven. Or eight, if the King truly has two heads.”
“GET OFF ME!”
“But you’re not like that anymore, are you, Stranger?”
Stranger thrashed. Tried to connect with Peers’s testicles, coming up empty.
“You’re becoming more human. Because once upon a time, you were taken out of Meyer Dempsey.”
Stranger stilled. “How can you know that?”
“The Mullah always knew about the Archetypes. Each time, the cycle repeats. But each time, it’s been arrested before the Archetypes can become who they’re supposed to be.” He looked meaningfully into Stranger’s eyes. “Each time but this one.”