In the left screen, the camera shows many soldiers with unfamiliar markings on their gear and armor. Full battle rattle. All carrying automatic weapons, at the ready. Except for two who hold a matte-black metal box between them. The box sprouts antennae. The camera wavers, twists to scan first the left and then the right sides of the lawn immediately outside a large gray building, and I realize the camera is mounted to a soldier’s helmet. The view stabilizes, and the screen fills with the image of two grunts holding the box while an unencumbered man approaches it in the shadow of the gray building. The building I recognize now.
Scaling paint and streaked with water stains.
The Towson Veterans Hospital.
So the box must be … the stasis bomb.
In the center panel, an aerial view of Towson Veterans appears, from maybe three hundred meters of height. Too high to be another building. And that suspicion is confirmed when a figure—a flying figure—lances across the screen, bristling with weapons. I have a quick impression of orange, hunter orange. Nothing rhymes with it. Nothing matches it.
The crème de la crème. The Orange Team floats in the Maryland sky. As I watch, the cameraman of the Orange Team moves in relation to the hospital, and more floating members of the Society of Extranaturals hove into view.
I thought I knew what good flying looks like, but these guys are something else. There’s two far-off blurs circling the area, four people hovering, laden with weapons and gear. Two more pairs circle each other in what looks to be a perfect, tight figure eight. Tandem fliers. Smooth and precise.
In the third screen there’s a tarmac, a military airfield. The camera stares right down the throat of the runway. Support personnel and vehicles scurry about on obscure errands. A man in a gray poncho and navy baseball cap waves two hooded flashlights in semaphore. Looks like Orange Team has air support.
I glance over at Jack, but he’s not looking at me; he’s staring to his right. He catches my eye and points at Booth. When I pick him out—the crowd has shifted with Quincrux’s theatrics—Booth’s eyes are rolled back in his head, and he shudders once, body twitching. Closing his eyes.
When he opens them again, I don’t need to surf the ether to know he’s got a Rider.
Something’s coming through, Jack!
What?
Booth has a Rider!
Booth drops his gun with a dull plastic clatter, alerting the soldier next to him that something is up. He moves like a stone statue suddenly imbued with life, pushing the crowd apart. His gaze is fixed on Quincrux.
“Working with the US Armed Forces—and through the diligence of Amy Ruark and her team—we’ve been able to pinpoint the source of the insomnia epidemic.” Quincrux points to one of the smaller flat panels, the one showing a green-yellow map threaded with red. “There, in Maryland! It is there our Orange Team will deal with the threat. Tactically. Watch and know that you too will one day be part of such a magnificent endeavor. This is the next stage for extranaturals. The next stage for humanity.”
He pauses. Booth pushes his way closer, just two ranks of people away from Quincrux in the press of extranaturals. Something hangs over us all, a palpable miasma. The air is pregnant with tension, burning with ozone. The ether rasps and buzzes frenetically, painfully.
Quincrux turns to Ruark and says, “Tell them to begin.”
Booth steps in front of Quincrux, arm out, pointing.
“Do not. Do not! You will wake the sleeper! Do not—” Booth stumbles, shudders, and shakes his head as if waking from some long nightmare. He raises his head, and in a voice more powerful he says, “Hiram, you must not do this.”
Soldier bulls push in, rifles raised and aimed at Booth.
Quincrux’s torso jerks as if receiving invisible blows. He waves a hand frantically at the bulls. “Lower your weapons!”
I shove my way forward, trying to get nearer. To get closer. To help Booth, maybe. To help the Rider. I don’t know.
“Hiram, listen,” Booth says in a voice not his own. “This is folly. I alone know what sleeps there. And it will wake if you do this!”
“Tase that man! Subdue him!” Ruark yells.
Negata stands still, locked in indecision or isolation, I can’t tell.
“Lucius?” Quincrux asks. “Is that you?”
“Murder, Hiram? Harvesting these poor children’s talents?” Booth inclines his head in a far more regal aspect than I would have thought possible. His expression is stern, but kind and infinitely sad. “I am so ashamed of you, my pupil—” He seems to be lost in thought. The crowd remains hushed, but I have a crawling sensation on my skin, as if something terrible is about to happen. “I was scattered, Hiram. And I found vessels to seat the shards of my spirit.”
“But that is not possible. It’s been years.”
“Only now, when one of those bits of me came in proximity to you, was I able to center myself. To pour myself wholly into one vestment.” Booth—or the spirit of Armstead Lucius Priest—shakes his head. “To find you have fallen so low. There is much blood on your hands.”
Quincrux shivers. A frown comes to his bloodless face. “I only meant to—”
“You have much to atone for.”
Ruark barks “Orange Team, engage. I repeat, Orange Team engage!” into a headset she’s holding in her hand.
On the screen, the teams begin to move. For a moment everything is still while we watch the Orange Team accompany the troops into the hospital. A young man, whose face I recognize yet can’t put a name to, holds out his hand, and the matte-black stasis bomb floats in front of him as they run forward. It’s like some macabre psychic game of football, and this is the offense pushing through the defensive line.
The reception area is deserted. They take the stairs up, quickly, each soldier moving as a cog in a greater machine, the stasis bomb floating silently over stairs and down halls.
In the center screen, the flyers of Orange Team come in closer to Towson Veterans Hospital, the building swelling into view. Two super-dupers hang in the air, holding what look like the long, deadly tubes. RPGs.
Another flyer has her hands out, head bowed as if she’s sensing something. Abruptly, she spasms and drops from the sky. The crowd gasps. One of the other flyers darts like a bolt after her as she falls. Their bodies join and slow, but they both hit the ground.
“Oh no,” someone cries from the audience. Other people moan. I see pained expressions on the other teams’ faces—this is their worst fear, falling.
Yet the second camera zooms in closer on a wing of the hospital even as the farthest right plasma screen displays the plane racing down the runway and lifting off.
Pushing through the crowd, I yell, “You have to call them off—”
Before anyone can stop her, Ruark pulls a firearm from her side and shoots the computer the headset is connected to.
The crowd jumps away from the sound of the shot as one. The faces of the employees, the inductees, show confusion, fear. At any moment, they’ll become a mob.
Ruark whips around in a rage, facing Negata. “Restrain the Cannon boy.”
Quincrux looks from his lieutenant to Booth and back. “Why did you destroy the transmitter?”
She smiles, fawning. “No recall, you said. Events set into permanent motion.”
A terrible expression of confusion and loss illuminates his face, and for the first time, I think, Quincrux truly knows doubt. “Lucius, I—”
“Mr. Negata! Take this boy into custody!”
Negata glances at me and back to Ruark. For an instant I think he might speak—that he might speak and I’ll know for sure I wasn’t dreaming last night—but he simply shakes his head. Then he turns and, with the lightning grace he’s always shown, exits through the door they entered from.
Moving fast, as if he was going for something.
“Negata!” Ruark screams, dropping one of her crutches. She limps after him. Then stops. Gun still in her free hand. She catches my eye, raises the pistol. She points it
at me.
Quincrux is lost now, looking into Booth’s face. “Lucius, I did what I thought best for the Society—”
“You were always power-mad, Hiram. And now it is your downfall. All of our downfalls. Look there.” Booth extends his finger at the screen.
The stasis bomb team makes their way down a dim, tiled hall, past open doors and gurneys, down grimy tile corridors lit with lurid yellow lights. They slow, and two soldiers signal that the team is on target—a chopping motion of the hands. Soundlessly they bound into the hospital room.
The room I remember in my mind’s eye.
He’s still there, the emaciated bundle of bones wrapped in such paper-thin skin. His eyes are sunken, cheeks withdrawn, the shape of his skeleton easily visible underneath the ragged integument of flesh.
The man on the bed opens his eyes. And they are black—even in the HD video signal coming from the team member, they look as black as oil. Black and roving.
Full of darkness.
“It has awoken,” Booth says.
The body of the wasted man—Armstead Lucius Priest—rises from his bed, arms cruciform, floating into the air, trailing an IV and tubes. My skin crawls with the sight. But it’s more than that. Something is happening in the ether.
The Helmholtz field is gone.
Negata! He’s disabled it!
On the screens, the soldiers in the room yell silently to one another, clutching their heads as if in agony. The flying team falls from the sky, the camera plummeting toward the ground and going to static.
In the hospital room, the cameraman drops to his knees and crawls to one of the bomb men. Hands scrabble at the fallen Orange Team member. He grasps something and manipulates it. The screen goes to static.
“He’s triggered the stasis bomb,” Quincrux says. The crowd shifts and moans.
Ruark, looking from me to the screen, holsters her weapon and limps from the room, following Negata.
A signal is reestablished, and the aerial cameraman, obviously terribly wounded from his fall, musters the strength to raise his head. The hospital becomes visible once more. The building seems to give a silent shudder. Suddenly, the east end of the building sloughs off a shiver of dust, trembles, and cracks.
It implodes, leaving a perfectly black globe—a bubble—floating in the air, wreathed in smoke.
It rises.
High above, the black globe stops. Small figures rise up to meet it. At first they are indistinct, blurry particles rising from the earth to join with the black thing floating over the Maryland cityscape. Then more particles rise to meet it.
“Oh my God,” a girl in the crowd murmurs. “Those are people.”
And she’s right. The motes are points of flesh, human beings snatched from their lives, their yards, their streets. Rising to meet the globe.
The cameraman isn’t hurt so much that he can’t bring himself into focus. He centers his gaze upon the globe. I can’t imagine the strength he (or she, I don’t know) must have. With a decided waver, he shoves off the ground and lifts into the air. Flying again.
There are cheers from the crowd. Until the view stabilizes.
Closer now. Hundreds of people rising to join the globe. Thousands of human bodies. The surface of the globe crawls with flesh, a jumbled collage of limbs, arms, legs, torsos, heads. And more flying to join it. It’s a sun gathering star stuff to itself. It’s a black hole that exerts its pull only on the flesh of humankind. Thousands upon thousands of people rise to become one with the mass of flesh. They writhe. They squirm.
And in the ether, through it, I feel violent emanations rippling outward from the east.
And I know.
They are all alive. Each person. Man, woman, child. The thing inside the stasis field looks out upon our world with a hundred thousand eyes, each one sightless, each mouth howling in silent agony at the forced collective. It surges, this living star made from human flesh. It pulses. It throbs.
The visual on the screen wavers and then tumbles, falling into the terrible writhing flesh. Fluid and monstrous and reduced to some protoplasmic essence. The opposite of the ether. The ether of meat.
When the images stabilizes again, it shows only a seething mass of mindless, sightless body parts. A planetscape of agony.
I hear people retching in the crowd and smell their vomit. There’s sobbing and dreadful screeching hysteria, but mostly stunned silence. The guards, many of them pale and watching the crowd nervously due to the emotions the telepaths broadcast, stagger toward the exits. Employees and inductees clutch each other, terrified by their own inaction in the face of such horror.
“Look!” Someone cries. And I realize it’s Ember’s voice. “The plane!”
On the last screen, the land races beneath the jet—it moves tremendously fast. A fighter jet, I’m sure now. Water, bays, neighborhoods, open expanses of bays again, all race beneath it.
The thing—the sun made from human misery and the flesh of humankind—hoves into view. But the plane, shuddering, lurches and suddenly tumbles. The screen shows earth, sky. Earth, sky, earth, sky, earthskyearthskyearthsky. Wheeling again and again. The screen goes dark.
Silence.
But in the ether, one trumpeting message howled from a thousand mouths comes through distinct and terrible: Worship us, for we are made of your flesh. Worship us.
“It has awoken,” Booth says, shuddering, and he slumps to the ground.
Quincrux, crying, sags to the floor, holding Booth’s head. “I’m sorry, Lucius. I’m sorry.”
Ruark fled, Negata gone, Quincrux lost to remorse. Booth unconscious. There is no one left except me to say what needs to be said.
“Go, all of you. Go to your rooms. We will figure out what to do,” I say.
They look at me with open hostility.
It’s one thing to go out into the ether and settle upon the unaware, lighting the match flames of their minds, bringing sleep. It is a wholly different proposition doing that to a collective of extranaturals, some of them strong bugfucks. But they are alarmed and distracted, and I am stronger. I am large, I contain multitudes.
I settle on them like a mist, a thought. A single thought, to leave. To go back to where they feel safe and wait there.
Many shake their heads, blinking. Many nod and file out, slowly. It’s hushed, the sound of them, just the swishing of damp clothing and the soft breathing of the stricken. In the end, they leave.
Jack and I are left alone with Quincrux and Booth.
FORTY-THREE
Quincrux’s sobbing quiets. He’s lost in his own realm of pain and remorse. I shouldn’t feel this way—for everything he’s done to me, for everyone he’s killed—but I feel sadness for him. Before he was formidable. Now he has my pity.
Booth stirs.
“If there’s one thing I know, Shreve,” he says, lifting himself onto one arm, “you’re gonna be the center of a shitload of trouble.” And it’s the old Booth. My Booth.
“You can’t prove anything, Assistant Warden.” I smile at him. “Do you even remember anything? How the hell did you get here?”
“I learned I could change my appearance.”
“Your appearance was always important to you.”
He smiles, but there’s pain in it. “True. But after Quincrux—after you—that kinda turned inward, I think. And I discovered I could make myself appear as whatever I wanted. I think I went a little crazy, stopped going to work. They suspended me.”
“No,” I say. It’s hard to believe that Booth won’t be stomping the tiles at Casimir anymore.
“Yeah. And then, I got this phone call. Just a few days ago. A soldier. He didn’t know why he was calling, but he was distressed. And he gave me your message.”
“Is the Rider, uh, I mean is Lucius still in there with you?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s here. Waiting. Watching.”
“So he was the Riders? All of them?”
“Yes. Scattered among all of them. Until he came in contact with Quincrux.
That shorted him out, I think. Collected him. Suddenly, it was like a flood in my mind,” he taps his temple. “And I couldn’t keep him out.”
I nod, remembering fighting off the Witch. Fighting off Quincrux. “And now?”
“Now?”
“What do we do? That thing’s killing people,” Jack says, joining the conversation.
“I don’t think it’s killing them,” he says, looking at Jack. Taking in Jack’s height and the changes puberty has brought to his old ward. He nods, turns his gaze back to me. “I can feel it too, you know?”
“I thought you could, back at Casimir. I tried to talk to you about it.”
“I remember that. My momma always said denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
I laugh, and he shifts his body, trying to rise. Jack moves to help him.
“So what do we do now? Everything’s gone to hell.”
From the door behind us I hear Ruark say, “I know what we’re going to do.”
Before I turn, I already know what I’m going to see. She’s holding her gun in one steady hand. A cold fury making her face look immobile and waxen.
She’s got the gun on me.
“We have a whole arsenal of weaponized talent. We have an army. We will make war with that—that thing.”
“Put down the gun, miss,” Booth says, holding up his hands. “We aren’t gonna hurt you.”
She points the gun at Booth.
“Bullshit, I’m not,” I say, but as I do, the gun swings back to me. Fast.
“I can shoot you, Cannon, before you can get to me. Before you can get in my head.”
“Doubtful.”
“Don’t test me.”
It comes down to this. To give up my body to save others. Now that the moment is on me, it seems like this is the movement my whole life has had, toward this choice.
I am about to slip into the ether—and maybe she can read it on my face. She takes two quick steps forward, but not toward me. Toward Booth.
The Shibboleth Page 30