by Sean Platt
CHAPTER 26
“Nothing,” said Peers.
Stranger looked up from where he was sitting. The man’s long, weathered face seemed born for the desert. He looked like a wanderer, his thick skin beaten by dry wind. But the man was, in fact, a man. It should have contradicted what Peers was thinking now (he hadn’t aged), but somehow it didn’t. Because although Stranger then and Stranger now were mostly the same (and although the villagers had for some reason accepted his unchanging face for twenty years), there was that small difference. Something in his eyes. Uncertainty, perhaps. Mortality, maybe.
“Did you look to the north?” Stranger asked.
Peers tried to drag a desiccated piece of wood toward Stranger, found it anchored deeper than he’d thought, and gave up to sit on the sand. He waited several seconds, still inspecting the man’s suddenly oh-so-human face, before answering.
“No. I didn’t check the north.”
“Then check the north.”
“What’s on the ship, Stranger?”
The question turned the other man’s head. Blue eyes met Peers, and for the scantest of moments, seemed to see right through him.
His eyes returned to the sand. “Check the north,” he repeated.
“We don’t even know where we are. Why does it matter?”
“Because Liza must be out there somewhere.”
“How do you know she’s not still on the freighter?”
“Because I can see her. I can see her out there.”
“Using your crystal ball?”
“Whatever you say, Peers.”
“It’s not your fault, you know.”
Again, Stranger looked up. “What’s not my fault?”
“That you’ve lost your magic. That you’re more like the rest of us by the day. That’s the way it works. The King loses his kingdom. The Warrior finds himself bound. The Sage loses his wisdom and realizes his folly. And the Magician loses his magic.”
“Which one are you, Peers? You’re with us. You had the dreams that brought you to the ship, same as the rest of us. So which of the Archetypes does Sadeem’s questionably sage wisdom say you are?”
“I’m the Fool.”
Stranger poked at rocks with a stick. Piper was quiet, resting, probably crying. Kindred’s back was visible, but Peers was grateful that his front was not. Kindred’s intensity was frightening. He’d been staring at his hands ever since they’d made their first search for Liza Knight, coming up empty as if trying to make them disappear by force of will. He seemed to think that whatever had happened to bring them here from the freighter’s deck was his doing. It was absurd and impossible. Like the idea of vanishing from one place to instantly appear in another.
Peers thought Stranger would lash out. His demeanor was darker than Kindred’s used to be. The two now moved in tandem — one standing when the other stood, one falling silent when the other went quiet.
Curiously, Stranger laughed.
“This is funny to you?”
“No. I’m sorry. I knew it once, but something made me forget. Of course you’re the Fool. Of course you brought them to us.”
“I was only a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know there were aliens in that portal, and that I was at risk of inviting them to our planet — thousands of years too soon, based on what I got from Sadeem.”
“Does Sadeem know?”
Peers shook his head. “I don’t think so. But he’s smart.”
Stranger opened his big hand. It was empty. Empty of spark, empty of magic. Full of nothing at all.
“For now,” Stranger said.
“What’s on the ship?” Peers asked again.
“Cargo.”
“You know. I know you know. I saw the way you were looking at those boxes before we even climbed up. I could feel something there. And those Reptars didn’t come to ambush us. They were there already. Inside the shipping containers. Just waiting. Protecting something.”
Stranger looked at Peers, then he nodded as if to say, Fair enough.
“If I had to guess,” Stranger said, “I think it’s the Ark.”
“But the Astrals got rid of all of the arks. They must have broken them apart or disintegrated them or …” He trailed off. “You mean the other Ark. The archive. The one that used to sit on a dais in the middle of Ember Flats, until Cameron Bannister opened it.”
Stranger met Peers’s eyes, then looked back at the sand.
“Do you really think it’s there?” Peers asked.
“I don’t know for sure. But it’s like you said, I could feel it too.”
“Why would it be on the monolith?”
“You’d have to ask Sadeem for the lore. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But once upon a time, I understood a great deal. The world felt like a puzzle to me, and shuffling was easy. I’d find the right people and offer gifts to guide their way, shepherd those vital minds to ensure their survival. Each had a meaning and a purpose — most to help build the newest form of our collective unconscious.”
“Humans don’t have a collective unconscious.”
Stranger looked skyward. “That’s what they thought, too.”
“You talked to Piper, didn’t you? You gave her one of your gifts. Something that made the ship work and know where to go. It’s how we survived in that tiny submarine. How we managed to find everyone else, and eventually land.”
Stranger nodded.
“Did you know about the Ark back then?”
“Maybe,” Stranger said. “I have almost a ‘memory of a memory’ about many things. I remember feeling as if they created it, but then as soon as our thoughts and deeds began to fill the Ark, it became something they couldn’t touch. I remember standing beside the Ark as it opened, knowing the danger but feeling its power fill me. I think it made me what I am. Or changed me from what I used to be into what I became.”
“What they called ‘The Pall.’”
“Yes.” He took a long breath. Peers couldn’t decide if Stranger was frustrated, afraid, or worried. But then he saw: It wasn’t Liza Knight’s absence in this place that bothered him. It was Lila’s. And he understood.
“You saw Lila as a daughter. I can see it in you, as a man who lost a son.” Peers looked toward Kindred, ticked his head, indicating the intently focusing man in the distance. “You’re somehow connected to him, aren’t you?”
“I might be him. I don’t know. Sometimes I look in a mirror and expect to see that man looking back at me. I’ve woken from sleep, sure I’ve been awake, living as if inside his skin. I’ve had phantom pains from places where Kindred bears scars. I’m drawn toward him, but know better than to get close. He knows it, too. We’re like a thing that’s been split. Two explosives, safe when separate but dangerous combined.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think happened on the freighter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, dammit, do you know anything? How about a fucking guess?”
A long, slow smile crossed his lips. Stranger straightened.
“All right, Peers. I’ll guess. It’s like I said: I don’t think the Ark works much like everything here, relative to us. Humanity was an experiment. They watched and waited. Then when they came, the aliens gave us stimuli to gauge our response. There were no right or wrong answers. It only mattered that we jumped when prodded. So they’re stuck, do you see? It’s like what you told me about what Sadeem said: how they seeded us with chaos and were as afraid of that mayhem as they were in awe. I think they took the Ark when it was empty and hid it so the Mullah couldn’t. They boxed it up and shipped it to another capital, where they expected the ocean to swallow it in the floods.”
“So how did it end up here?”
“I found that ship a captain. He followed the same signal as the rest of you, and brought it here.”
“So you did know. You knew the Ark was in one of those shipping containers.”
Stranger shook his head. “I just followed my gut, telling Carl Nairobi not to board the Roman Sands vessel and find another ride instead. My instincts were fine-tuned then. I was in touch with everyone below the surface, somehow able to see everything. I visited a fisherman in China and got him onto the boat that brought him here to safety. He forgot just like the rest of them, but his mind was still there beneath it all. He wasn’t anything special. But when set beside all the other minds in the tiny new mental pool, he was a linchpin. Something Clara could cling to, and keep the door open as it grew. And grew. And grew.”
“So Carl brought the Ark to this place. And the Astrals knew it came here, but they couldn’t take it away. So instead, they left guards on board to protect it. They made it seem haunted, and let us come to fear it.”
“In another thousand years, the sand probably would have buried it again,” Stranger said. “But I guess we Archetypes had other plans.”
“What plans?”
“You felt the energy on that ship — the Ark somehow powering up, or maybe it always feels that strong to certain people. It was like a current running through my bones. At the end, just before we … before whatever happened, happened, I looked up at Kindred, and it was like we ran right toward each other even though we were both frozen. I understood something about our connection that my mind has already lost. I understood something about the Reptars there, too. Something I thought I remembered Meyer telling me, though we’ve barely ever spoken. I knew we didn’t have to kill them to escape. We could run. And that was the thought in my head — and I’d wager in Kindred’s — when we …”
Stranger trailed off, making a vague hand gesture as if to say, Well, you know the rest.
“Did you really make that happen?” The thought was frightening. Peers had been near laughing at Kindred as he focused, trying to make it happen again, but hearing the same thing from Stranger almost made it real. He wished Piper wasn’t so clearly distraught or maybe she’d mock the two men with him.
“I don’t know that anything really happened,” Stranger said, looking toward the horizon. “It’s the oddest thing in my mind. For a moment, it was like I didn’t see any difference between here and there. There was only is. It seemed so obvious. I thought of leaving, and that’s when we left. Same as how I looked at Kindred in that moment and felt as if we weren’t two people but separate instances of the same person. And the Reptars. How they were …”
“Were what?”
Stranger shook his head. “It’s gone. It made sense then, but now I can’t find it.”
Peers sat back. “So now what?”
“The energy on that ship did something to me. And I think it matters.”
“So you want to go back. To find the Ark.”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re the Archetypes.” Stranger shrugged. “A few of them, anyway. Carl, the Warrior? They took him to the ship. Sadeem and Clara — the Sage and the Innocent — we don’t know where they are.”
But that didn’t seem right. He knew this point in the story, as told by the Mullah Legend Scroll. There was a moment of realization. The Innocent …
“The Innocent dies,” Peers finished aloud. “According to legend, the Innocent dies to force a change in the King.”
“You believe Clara will die?”
“Not in the future. It would already have needed to happen.”
“Clara’s alive. That, I can feel.”
Peers looked at Stranger. Then at Kindred. He thought of what had happened and the change now afoot. He understood.
“It was Lila. She was the Innocent.”
“Ridiculous.”
“She came, same as the rest of us.”
“She came with us. With Piper and Kindred and Meyer. Use your head, Peers. Seven or eight important people in the world, and they’re all in the same family?”
“Clara is special. Lila was her mother. And Meyer was special, too. Many say he was the first abduction. The only viceroy to have been switched with an Astral. His daughter would be special.” Peers stood. This suddenly seemed very important, though he couldn’t say why. A word on the tip of his tongue, refusing to leave his lips. “It fits. We were all called. She fell. And you …”
“Meyer isn’t even here,” Stranger said as Peers trailed off. “How could any of this ‘force a change in the King?’”
“The King has two heads.” Peers wasn’t just speaking. He was reading from a book inside his brain.”
“Kindred and Meyer,” said Stranger.
“Kindred and you.”
Stranger shook his head. Peers was thinking, barely seeing.
“If I’m not the Magician …”
“Clara is the Magician.”
Stranger was looking at Peers in disbelief, but Peers had never been more certain of anything. The Fool lost his foolishness. In time, even a jester could become a sage.
“All that’s left is the Villain,” said Stranger. “Are you trying to say that Meyer is the Villain?”
Movement in the distance caught Peers’s eye. He looked past Stranger and saw four people rise to peek above the dune. Two were men with dark skin — one older, another near Peers’s age. The third and fourth, close enough to be holding hands, almost looked like a young couple, their pigment too pale for the beating sun. The woman was tall and lean, the man taller but broad. Behind the front four was a small group of robed desert dwellers, but even from a distance Peers knew this was a reunion rather than a raid.
“No,” Peers said, feeling déjà vu as Clara recognized their group from the dune and began to jog forward. “Meyer is something else.”
CHAPTER 27
By the time Divinity reached the storage room where Eternity kept its surrogate, she was in a foul temper. Her mood wasn’t just unpleasant; it also made the need for a quick solution that much more obvious. Divinity tried to focus on that — the evidence this anger gave her to do what had to be done — but it was impossible. She kept thinking of how Eternity would look at the evidence and declare that the anger, rather than justifying Divinity more, made her irrational. Then maybe she’d roll her eyes like so many of the human men in the human media they’d processed and say, Women.
She pressed the wall panel. The door did not open. She tried again, and the organized collective monitoring ship security informed her that the door had been secured and would only open for Eternity’s surrogate.
At first, Divinity couldn’t believe it. She pressed again, ignoring the unmistakable fact that the collective had already placed into her own mind as if the thought had originated inside herself … ahem, inside the node of the collective responding to her true form, which definitely was not this hunk of flesh she’d been wearing for twenty trips around this planet’s star.
The door would only open for Eternity’s surrogate? That was like a broom closet only opening for the broom.
She projected: Override.
Was it sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed? Eternity didn’t need to sleep any more than Divinity, but the animated bodies sure did. It was one of the things she hated about being so damn corporeal. You lost a third of every day to unconsciousness. And in that insentience — more and more often now that the wall had been breached — strange, otherworldly visions came to haunt her.
The door opened. Of course. Because even though Eternity organized the ship’s local collective, Divinity and Eternity were as much “one” as Divinity and Titans. Or Eternity and Reptars. They were all the same thing, sharing a single consciousness. Only their temporary bodies made the difference.
But still, she hadn’t liked Meyer’s idle threat, about killing the body. Hated it more than she cared to admit.
Divinity entered the storage room as the hallway door closed behind her. It had been expanded. The collective had shifted the build matrix, pushing walls back and making new divisions. Whereas a surrogate’s storage room was usually a small thing meant for recharging the body through the loathsome process of sleep, this one was
as large as the apartment they’d seen Meyer Dempsey living in during their trip to Earth from the Jupiter rift.
This much space? For a surrogate? And locking the door, even though Eternity’s surrogate was obviously somewhere else on the ship?
It was ridiculous. Seeing the way Eternity had enlarged her surrogate’s space made Divinity’s temper ratchet up a notch. This was supposed to be a utilitarian space, no more. But Eternity had turned it into a palace. She’d had furniture made. She’d had decorations made. The space had white walls like the rest of the ship’s spaces, but it was filled with fabrics — including hanging ones that gave the illusion of veiling windows — in all colors of the human visual spectrum.
She’d enlarged her bed. She’d had the machines make her at least eight large soft-looking pillows, one of them the size of a surrogate body.
The space was, in fact, bigger than Divinity’s own storage room on her own ship. She hadn’t expanded or decorated her own surrogate’s space nearly this much, and her own colors didn’t harmonize nearly this well.
She walked through what seemed an expansive living room, floored with a parody of hardwoods over the white base. There was a rug in the middle that the fabricator had done a superb job of replicating. Eternity had put paintings on her walls — recreations, Divinity seemed to recall, of famous human art. She’d had lamps made. Modern-looking, jet black and accented with chrome.
The waste was extraordinary.
The oddity of it all was troublesome. As troublesome, in fact, as the anger percolating still unquenched in Divinity’s center.
Something had gone terribly wrong, the species irretrievably tangled.
At first, the leak of human pollution into the collective had been a minor issue. The collective managed to purge it, the way it had purged the offal from the Meyer Dempsey stream when it created the one they called Kindred. Upon his making, he had none of the first substitute’s pollution. The rebelliousness and attachment to Meyer’s old mate had been purged away — along with whatever had bubbled up when that first Meyer had learned of Trevor Dempsey’s death. That was the way it used to be with the rest of the collective. The filter between it and the humans was once enough to catch any junk trying to seep in.