by Sean Platt
A hand on Piper’s. She looked up, expecting to see Clara, but Clara was below her. It was Trevor, his eyes on hers.
“Hurry,” he said, yanking at her.
Piper felt the charge build beneath her. It was like an invisible bubble. Part of Piper told her that if she jumped, she’d bounce on an unseen skin, repelled like a same-polarity magnet.
“But …” She looked down at Stranger and Kindred. They weren’t supposed to approach each other. Ever. She wanted to listen, but the force building below claimed all her attention.
“I told you last night,” Trevor said. “This time, you have a weapon.”
The Reptar had paused its strike, head whipping around.
The air hummed. The charge built. Around Piper, between ladder and hull, small blue sparks of lightning crackled.
There was a tremendous crack, like a tree sundering in a storm. And at the same time, the Reptar between Kindred and Stranger detonated like a bomb.
Piper flinched, spattered by alien gore. Trevor pulled her hard from above.
“You still have to open the Ark. Things have changed, for good and bad. But time is short.” Trevor yanked again. “Now, Piper. It has to be now.”
CHAPTER 58
The rush of Meyer’s voice was like a shattering dam. The last of his mind returning to Stranger, now fully present.
Stranger had felt a bit of that mind released from its bondage when the Reptars had thinned to the two, all subterfuge forcibly erased in an instant. He’d felt it when he’d run after instead of away from Kindred, and he’d felt it when his hands had prickled with his memory leaking back: a distant recollection of himself standing beside a shuttle in Ember Flats soon after his birth, using mental feedback to pop a Reptar like a swollen pimple.
But now he felt it like a presence. As if instead of Reptar guts between him and Stranger, there was Meyer Dempsey, speaking to them both clear as day.
Meyer’s voice was a loudspeaker. Whatever had cut him off earlier had let him go — and to Stranger, it seemed his mind had grown in the interim.
It’s not about us versus them, the voice told Stranger’s mind. Until we break the bond, what harms one injures both.
Stranger looked at Kindred. The other man was hearing this, too. Stranger could see it on Kindred’s Meyer Dempsey face, which until now he’d never seen so close. Power still crackled between them. It’s nature had changed. The flow was deadly. They still needed to keep their distance — these halves of a larger whole, now apparent as something the Astrals never meant to create.
Something has gone very wrong. You have to reach the Ark. Do it now. It’s the only way.
An invisible hand gripped Stranger impossibly hard by the base of the skull, turning his head. From the corner of his eye, Stranger saw Kindred’s head forcibly turned in the same direction.
Protect her. At all costs.
Meyer’s voice was gone.
Stranger was left to stare where Meyer’s psychic grip had turned him: at Piper, at the ship’s railing, looking down. The looming black threat of the final Reptar behind her.
CHAPTER 59
Divinity closed her surrogate’s eyes and focused inward. Living in a surrogate body, you had to shut out the external world to truly see the one inside. It was something she’d never had to do in her true form, but something she’d grown used to.
She could still see Eternity’s Purge, presented by her surrogate’s symbolic brain as an army of red-clad soldiers at the outer edges of her internal space. Her own white force was — now that the first wave had passed — easily keeping those soldiers at bay. Divinity had regained control of her inside world and actions. The Purge wouldn’t persistently compel all the Reptars and Titans, but Divinity assumed she could bend the lessers to her will for a while.
Which was why, when the Titans broke into Control and grabbed her, Divinity didn’t try to influence them through the collective. They were Eternity’s puppets for now.
It didn’t matter. The device had already been inserted.
Divinity opened her eyes, unable to resist a peek at the silver cylinder — still rammed home in one of the consoles, exactly where she’d placed it before the Titans burst in. The thing had gone home like it had been meant for their technology rather than the humans’ — almost as if it had wanted to slip its troublemaker code into the collective all along, and that Canned Heat’s work on the human Internet had only been a warm-up.
In truth, the console had adapted itself to the device, manufacturing the required port the way it could interface with anything else required. But to Divinity, the whole thing felt meant to be — a human concept if ever there was one.
She looked at Liza Knight’s body, right where she’d dropped it. The Titans hadn’t touched it or even seemed to notice. In the end, once someone decided the corpse was in the way, Liza would be incinerated with neither pomp nor circumstance.
Poor Liza. If only the Mullah had told her that the Villain was always betrayed in the end.
Divinity was sitting on a chair they’d allowed her to call up, too busy and mentally befuddled as individuals to deem her request unacceptable. She was restrained, but the seat she’d fashioned for herself was tall-backed, with rolled arms and red velvet cushions, covered in gold leaf. A throne. The symbolism was lost on Eternity’s minions, now tugging at the Canned Heat cylinder as if removing it would do any good.
She closed her eyes. Beyond the red soldiers, she imagined a black cloud — a roiling presence disguising itself as ebony fog. The surrogate’s mind showed Canned Heat’s pollution to her as something almost liquid, crawling through the collective node by node. Filthy, coating everything, ending all that it touched.
But it wasn’t killing them. Not the superior race.
It was killing the bonds.
Erasing them.
She wasn’t sure how the virus worked, but Liza had been right. The human infection had the organization of their Internet, and Canned Heat — helped along in its thought-based adaptation by the ship’s systems — seemed to know just how to handle it.
Soon the virus would fully adapt, and become more mental than code. She could see it changing even now: unsolvable computer logic puzzles shifting into impossible mental paradoxes. She’d reviewed enough human media to know their film trope of the overloaded robot, caught in a loop until its circuits fry. Humanity, meet thy maker.
It would boil through the human collective that had so problematically braided itself into their own, destroying what the Forgetting couldn’t erase. And once the connection between the species was severed at the Nexus and the archive, the virus would do its work within all Titans, Reptars, Divinity, and Eternity. Kill what was human and leave what was not. Then the experiment would be over, and they’d never have to worry about this diseased little marble ever again.
She laughed, drawing the Titans’ attention, when she felt Eternity relax her grip on Meyer. She could hear him call out to the humans on the surface. But why were they bothering? Opening the Ark now wouldn’t help. And this little problem Eternity saw with their King Archetype being permanent? Maybe it was technically true that they couldn’t erase him — but they didn’t need to kill the Archetypes if they moved the entire operation one level up, ending the species instead.
So what if they couldn’t achieve a Forgetting and start a new epoch? With the human race obliterated, they could leave this shithole just the same.
Divinity closed her eyes again, and shut the world out. Soon, she wouldn’t need to do this sort of thing anymore. With humanity purged from their collective — and with all higher beings returned to their proper bodies instead of puppeteering surrogates looking vainly at their “selves” in mirrors — distractions would be extinct.
She watched the black cloud spread. Changing. Evolving to do its job.
Soon the infection would be burned from their minds and the diseased little planet.
And then, finally, they would know harmony again.
C
HAPTER 60
Kamal raised his handgun.
Logan saw where he was aiming and began flapping his lips, waving vaguely, apparently unable to spit anything out. Then: “Don’t you fucking dare—!”
But Kamal had already pulled the trigger. The report was deafening. The kick about slammed the heavy thing into his forehead. You had to focus when in the cavalry position, attempting an Annie Oakley shot from at least thirty yards away.
He didn’t hit the Reptar.
Nor did he hit Piper.
Judging by the bright spark that blossomed against a bulkhead on the ship’s desk, Kamal hit a spot nearly as far from his target as he was from the mark.
Logan slapped his hand down. “Are you crazy? You’ll kill her!”
But the Reptar had seen the shot’s ricochet. And more importantly, Piper had seen the Reptar. It wasn’t even ten feet away.
“I’d have to be a much better shot to kill her, even by mistake,” Kamal said, lowering his weapon. “I should be so lucky.”
CHAPTER 61
Piper’s head jerked toward the shot. The shooter seemed to be Kamal, way too far off to hit anything. Because he was far and the impact was close, the sound’s delay caused her to hear the latter before the former. The effect was dizzying: someone almost hit her, and only then was the shot fired.
But immediately Piper saw two other things — both much more important. Each like a gunshot of its own, lightning quick.
Kindred and Stranger were scrambling up the ladder so fast, they were barely managing to grasp the rungs.
And from the corner of her eye she saw a Reptar. It had approached with stealth, apparently failing to strike yet only because its hard eyes were on Clara. She was the Reptar’s true target — reaching her was important enough that it hadn’t struck Piper and revealed its location.
But now that Piper had turned to see it — and Clara, twenty feet closer to the first of the shipping containers on the freighter’s rear — all bets were off. The thing’s eyes swiveled toward Piper, its mouth opening with a percolating purr.
There was no pause. No delay. The creature leaped forward.
Piper fell away more than she dove; there was a narrow, mariner-sized hallway behind her. Like the other passages on the freighter, this one had been economized: shrunk and made wedge-tight to save valuable onboard space. She slid to its floor banging only an elbow, but the Reptar, which had to move forward and turn, didn’t enter as smoothly.
Piper was up in a second, heart racing, legs no longer remotely sluggish. The fog departed, and her focus was suddenly sharp, her world in high definition. It took ages for her to rise, to take her first running steps farther down the passage, to turn the next corner. The Reptar was too fast, but she had an ever-so-slight lead, growing narrower. Piper gained a second as she took the next corner, grabbing a pipe to spin around a bend so she wouldn’t have to slow.
She could hear shouts from ahead and behind. Clara was somewhere back there, but safe. There was only one left, assuming it didn’t pull its multiplication trick again.
The longer I distract it, the longer they have to escape.
But would they even try?
Seconds dragged for hours. Her lungs burned; her legs turned sloppy beneath her. She pumped her arms, banging fists and knees as she sprinted through the tight corridor.
She could hear the Reptar, bounding like a cat behind her.
Another corner. Into a room. A mess hall, like an onboard cafeteria, with dozens of spindly metal chairs — bunched to one side as if they’d slid down the slightly sloped floor. Somewhere along the way Piper had lost her shoes and was running barefoot, her feet getting shredded where the all-weather carpet gave way to metal.
The Reptar scrabbled behind her, crashing, failing to corner as well.
She rounded another corner, left the big room, and almost flattened Kindred. He was in the middle of a wide spot, handgun raised. He shouted for her to move around and get behind him, but what was the point? Handguns against Reptars were useless unless you got lucky and shot them in the eyes, which were near impossible to hit, or you had to find a way to shoot it in the—
Kindred shoved her down, behind him. And without hesitating, as the thing opened its mouth to strike, he did the last thing the Reptar must have expected: instead of running from that mouth, Kindred shoved a meal inside it.
The Reptar bit down hard, severing Kindred’s right arm near the shoulder.
But perhaps a tenth of a second before the thing’s jaws closed, there was a muffled pop as Kindred discharged his weapon down the monster’s throat.
CHAPTER 62
Melanie’s knees buckled. She sagged back against the bulkhead for a moment and had to push her hands against the thing to right herself. Meyer wasn’t watching. He was in his trance, head down, longish sweaty hair hanging to hide him in a curtain. His hands were still restrained, but Melanie felt an odd compulsion to free them. She’d already let him go in the only way that truly mattered. To the awakened Meyer Dempsey, hands were hardly necessary.
Feeling him working sent a shiver up her back. A subtle difference in the room’s energy, a change in its temperature. All things she wouldn’t have noticed without her body.
Now there was this fatigue. This sense of desperately wanting sleep. She felt sluggish and slow. But the torpor wasn’t Meyer’s doing. This was something else.
Melanie closed her eyes, forcing herself not to think of Meyer and what he was doing. Instead, she looked back at the collective. But the path to the core she’d so recently used to force the Purge was already foggy and indistinct. There was something wrong. And in its center, she saw Divinity.
What did you do?
But of course Divinity didn’t answer because Melanie hadn’t actually asked. Instead she’d asked herself. The question was more a moan of futility than an inquiry. The sort of thing a human would do. The kind of nonsense question Piper Dempsey might have asked when taken to the Nexus for her energy: Why, Meyer? Why you, and why me?
Because he was broken. Before Kindred had sprung him, the plan had been to keep the real Meyer Dempsey on board indefinitely. And why Piper? Because every control needed a control, and the thought at the time — though laughable now — had been that the first Titan duplicate, who was supposed to be fixed in the ways the original hybrid was broken — would keep the new key bearer safe and guide her. She’d never have children with that first copy (or with Kindred, for that matter), but she could have them with Cameron, ensuring a long line of bearers, until the time when they were finally needed.
Well. That was only one of a hundred things that hadn’t worked out as planned.
Melanie watched the disease spread like a spill, soaking into the hive. She watched the shriveling. She watched the dying. She watched Titan and Reptar minds shake themselves off and, as their own fatigue faded, wake up more their old selves than their new ones. And she watched it creep toward the bridge.
Toward the Ark.
Toward the junction between species, where it would cross into the child population to finish its ugliest deeds.
She had time to feel a flash of uncertainty and fear. The final hours played themselves out as regurgitated from the stream: Carl grabbing her in the cell; Meyer abducting her; Melanie awakening to learn that Carl had, it seemed, taken a shot meant to kill her. The strange trio of inappropriate feelings that came in its company: relief, that her surrogate’s body had survived; guilt, that Carl had died instead; awe, that even a human born to protect — as the Warrior — would put himself in harm’s way to spare an enemy.
The dark cloud came, eclipsing it all. And when it passed, there was no Divinity. No collective. All of a sudden, there was only herself.
Divinity’s bile had severed her connection to the collective.
Internal lights extinguished, one by one.
And then Melanie, for the first time in her very long life, was all alone.
CHAPTER 63
Clara shrieked. A
t first she thought it was the walking dead, but then realized she was seeing something far less theatrical and much more dire: Piper, covered in blood, supporting Kindred on her right side — her only option because Kindred no longer had an arm to support on the other. It was only a stump, ragged like a dog’s chew toy, dangling in wet flaps of sinew and blood vessels. A red-soaked spike of ivory bone protruded from the mess, its end sharp like a branch snapped in a thunderstorm.
“What happened?” Clara demanded. She couldn’t move her eyes from the wound. She’d seen worse, but this was so fresh, and gushing like a faucet. And for all intents and purposes, this was her grandfather.
Kindred’s face was white and waxy, like cheese.
“Reptar,” he said. “Dead.”
“We need to find the Ark,” Piper said, pushing past her. Clara turned, watching her skirt Kamal and Logan, their mouths both open. Stranger was at the rear of the arriving group looking nearly as waxen as Kindred. His left hand was on his right shoulder, gripping it as if he’d been shot.
“Piper?” Kamal said. “What …?”
He trailed off. Piper didn’t answer, rushing on, shouldering open a swinging door, moving out onto the deck where row upon row of stacked shipping containers waited. Clara could tell it wasn’t mere urgency compelling Piper. She was also fighting not to think. Clara could feel her worry, her terror, how close Piper was to the end of her rope. They did have to hurry. Not because of Reptars but because Piper’s mind was close to snapping.
“Where is it?” Piper asked Kindred. She turned to Stranger, yards distant, when Kindred didn’t answer. “Where is the Ark? Can you feel it?”