Before Stanhouse could answer, Jeremy Axelson stepped between them. “Look, Trey,” he said, “Governor Harrison has run on a platform of strength, of determination, and he won’t back away from that now, no matter what your fears may be.”
“He has a choice,” Trey said.
Stanhouse said, in a tone of complete disgust, “Like what? What Chapman tried? Stashing a bunch of scientists in a lab somewhere, then waiting around for them to come up with a solution? Sure.”
Again, it was Axelson who played the good cop. “You must understand that showing weakness now—or early in the first term—would send just the wrong message to the American people, to our allies, and to our enemies themselves.”
“You saw what happened in Florida,” Mary said to him.
“The president’s mistake in Florida was in thinking too small,” Stanhouse said. “I can promise you, we won’t make the same mistake.”
But Trey was barely listening to him. He’d heard this boilerplate before.
Instead, he was thinking about what Axelson had said.
Our allies.
With a growing sense of horror, he said, “You’re coordinating an attack on the thieves with other countries.”
Stanhouse smiled at him. “You know only the president is allowed to do that . . . and our man isn’t president. Yet.”
Trey ignored this. “When is it going to happen, then? The attack. On Inauguration Day?”
Stanhouse didn’t answer directly, but he didn’t need to. Inauguration Day or soon thereafter, it didn’t matter.
“Listen to me,” Trey said. “Listen. It won’t work. You’ll lose.”
We’ll lose.
But Stanhouse was flapping a hand in dismissal. “Those creatures,” he said, “will not be allowed to rule our lives.”
The meeting was over.
* * *
THE SECOND CONVERSATION, via telephone, was much shorter.
“Mr. Gilliard,” Nathan Holland, the president’s chief of staff, said. “What can I do for you?”
His voice, as gravelly as ever, echoed with exhaustion. He sounded a hundred years old.
Trey took a breath. “You need to tell President Chapman—”
“I have a better idea,” Holland said. “Tell him yourself.”
Trey said, “What?”
“Please hold,” Holland said, bitter amusement in his voice, “for the president of the United States.”
Waiting, Trey was struck by a vivid memory: sitting in various hotel rooms on his journeys into and out of the wilderness and watching repeats of The West Wing on television. How strange it always felt when the president talked to regular people.
There was a crackling over the receiver, and then a new voice, deeper than Holland’s and more polished. Familiar.
“This is Sam Chapman,” the voice said.
Trey plunged ahead. “Mr. President, you were on the right track. Your approach was on target, and it has to go on even if you lose. Somehow you need to convince Harrison of this.”
“My approach?” There was an edge of amusement in the president’s tone. “Which one?”
“The smart one. Calling together a team of scientists. Jack Parker from the American Museum, Clare Shapiro from Rockefeller—”
“I shut that effort down,” the president said.
“Yes, I know, but you shouldn’t have.”
There was a pause, and then the president said, “You’re right. It was a terrible mistake.”
Trey was silent.
Chapman’s voice was quiet. “You’re far from the first to tell me this, of course. I should have had the will to see that effort through and not worried so much about losing the election.”
His laugh was quieter than Holland’s, but just as mirthless. “The election! I couldn’t have done more to guarantee my defeat if I’d been working for the Harrison campaign myself.”
Still Trey didn’t speak.
“Be honest with me, though, Mr. Gilliard,” Chapman went on. “Would it have made a difference, leaving that initiative in place? Would all my experts have figured out a way to defeat these creatures?”
“Defeat them?” Trey said. “No. Live with them? Coexist?” He took in a breath. “Maybe not. But it was the best of a bad set of options.”
Now it was Chapman’s turn to be silent for a few moments. When he finally spoke again, his voice was very quiet. “As you may have noticed, we’re not much for ‘living with’ in this country. We don’t do coexistence well. I’m also afraid—”
He fell silent.
Trey finished the sentence. “That the next administration won’t do ‘coexistence’ at all.”
Chapman sighed. “Nor will they listen to a word I—or anyone in my administration—says. Reinventing the wheel is a longtime tradition in our political system.”
“I know,” Trey said. “But I had to call.”
To try.
The president cleared his throat. “I told Nathan I wanted to speak with you,” he said. “To thank you for everything you’ve done since this all started.”
Trey said, “Done?”
“You and Dr. Connelly. Going on television, talking to magazines. Providing real information. Trying to help people stay calm.”
Trey said, “For all the good it did.”
“Trying to do good counts.”
“Thank you.” Trey took a breath. “Mr. President?”
“Yes?”
“That secure location where you went after . . . Florida.”
“You mean where they bundled me off to after the disaster. What about it?”
“Just . . . keep it handy.”
Again the president laughed. “Thank you, Mr. Gilliard. But I’m not going to hide behind locked doors while my countrymen die around me. Not this time. Not again.”
Trey was silent.
“I’m still the captain. Win or lose, that’s how I’ll always think of myself. If the ship goes down, I’m going down with it.”
FIFTY
ELECTION DAY.
Trey woke up pouring with sweat. Sheila, beside him in the bed, held him as he fought. “Trey—” she said. Then, when he focused on her, still half trapped by his dreams, she said, “What’s it . . . saying?”
It.
Trey heard nothing but silence. It didn’t matter. He was filled with cold certainty.
“It happens today,” he said. “Not Inauguration Day. Today.”
Her hand covered her mouth. “How can you be sure?”
Trey was quiet. How to explain the voice inside?
There was no explaining it. To understand you’d have to be like him. Not completely human anymore.
Sheila, watching, believing, took a deep breath and let her hand drop back to the sheets. Her chin lifted.
“If we have time,” she said, “I still want to vote.”
* * *
THE SILENCE ECHOING inside him, Trey made a series of telephone calls.
Everyone was ready. They’d all been ready for days.
Except one. The one who mattered most.
“Still waiting on that part,” Malcolm Granger said, his voice over the phone as cheerful and easygoing as always. “You told me we had days. Weeks.”
“I was wrong. Can you get it today?”
Malcolm laughed. “Okay. Gonna take some hours, though. We got hours?”
The hive mind was as quiet as if it had fled forever, though he knew it hadn’t. Trey knew it was there, though. Hiding.
No, not hiding. Waiting.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“No worries.” Malcolm’s tone was light. “Doesn’t matter.”
Trey didn’t say anything.
“Listen,” Malcolm said. “Whatever it’s like when the time comes, we�
��ve flown through worse, you and me.”
* * *
SHEILA WANTED TO watch the news. The reporters said that voting was light across the country. This was especially true in rural areas, places that required long drives, long walks, visibility, in order to cast your vote. But in cities, too.
During these last few days, the thieves had nearly disappeared. Only a scattering of reports of new attacks had come in, and many of those were late accounts of incidents that had taken place days earlier.
An unusual number of absentee ballots had been requested and filled out, yet overall voting numbers were way down. Only a small fraction of the typical turnout for a presidential election was making it to the polls.
“Low turnout favors the challenger,” Sheila said. “It’s the people who want change who go to the polling place no matter what.”
“America, you have a choice to make,” Anthony Harrison had said in his speech on Election Eve. “A life lived in fear . . . or one filled with hope?”
Words. They were just words.
There was no longer any choice at all.
* * *
“LET’S GO.”
Trey looked at her. She returned his gaze, and color rose to her pale cheeks. Without speaking, she got to her feet and picked up her fleece jacket from the back of a chair.
“No matter where I’ve been living, I’ve stayed a citizen of this country, and I’ve always voted,” she said, slipping her arms into it. “I even changed my registration to be able to vote here. I’m not going to miss this one.”
Trey didn’t argue, just walked to the door and waited as she found her shoulder bag.
Don’t be caught too far apart when the end comes, Elena Stavros had said.
He wasn’t going to convince her to stay in the apartment.
And he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight.
* * *
A BUS WENT by down on Seventh Avenue, a flash of blue-white light, a squeal of brakes that sounded like a distress call. Trey could see a couple of dark figures inside. A few cars, windows rolled tightly up against the chill—or in a hopeless gesture at safety—followed. Other than that, the avenue was empty.
Nearly empty.
Sheila said, “Damn.”
The man walked past without seeing them. He was wearing suit pants, black socks but no shoes. No jacket or dress shirt, just a sleeveless undershirt.
His eyes gleamed silver in the streetlight.
As he passed, they could see the thief on the back of his neck, its stinger buried deep. A summoning, out in the open.
Trey caught a glimpse of the nightmare that had woken him that morning: Hundreds, thousands of people with their thief riders. Filling the streets. Filling the city.
The doomed man walked into a trash-strewn alley between a closed flower shop and an empty storefront that had once housed a pet store. Trey began to follow.
“Forget it,” Sheila said. “Let’s go.”
Then, uncharacteristically, she added, “Trey, I’ve seen enough.”
But he hadn’t. He took a few steps into the mouth of the alley. “Come here,” he said.
Still she hung back.
“Sheila.”
She came up beside him. The man they’d followed had slumped back against the flower shop’s crumbling brick wall. A few feet farther down the alley lay a second man, and at their feet a woman was flat on her back. She looked as if she were staring up through the gap between the buildings, trying to see the stars.
“Three . . .” Sheila’s voice was just a breath. “Together.”
But this was only part of it. “Look,” Trey said.
Sheila saw. These were no homeless people, no pierside prostitutes, no runaways. Not the ones so easily sacrificed while the rest stayed safe.
The second man’s coat was open, revealing a dark suit, white shirt, a tie that might have been red but looked black in the faint light. The skirt of the woman’s expensive suit was hiked up, revealing sheer hose that had run and legs bluish from the cold.
Trey raised his gaze, peering into the shadows. He knew what he was looking for, and in a few moments he found it. Two pairs of eyes. No, three, faceted gleams like green diamonds reflecting moonlight.
Darker than the shadows, the thieves moved forward to the mouth of the alley. Then stopped there, a half dozen feet from where Trey and Sheila stood. Staying far enough away to be safe from Sheila, but still sending a message as comprehensible as if they’d used words.
Don’t come any closer. We’ll sacrifice ourselves to save our young, but we’ll kill you first.
“Let’s go,” Trey said. Sheila nodded.
But then a sobbing woman pushed past them.
* * *
SHE WAS BEYOND reach and down the alley before Trey or Sheila could do a thing to stop her. He took a step to follow, but Sheila grabbed his arm, hard, and yanked him back.
“No!” she said. Then, more quietly, “Trey, it’s too late.”
She was right. He took a breath and steeled himself to watch what happened next. The inevitable.
Only it wasn’t what he expected.
He’d been sure that the thieves would make short work of the woman, but that was not what took place. Although they all rose high on their legs in the alarm posture, the wasps stayed where they were. Eyes on Trey, on Sheila, on the street beyond, as if expecting—guarding against—a further attack.
Leaving the woman down the alley . . . to what?
Half lost in the shadows, she knelt over the man Trey and Sheila had seen entering. Pulling on his arms, trying to get him to his feet, calling out to him, her voice almost drowned by her tears.
He lay there, dead weight, unresponsive. Lost to her, and even she must have known it.
But as Trey and Sheila watched, the other two hosts stirred. Stirred as if awakening, rose to their knees, and reached for the woman.
She screamed.
Even with his sharp vision, Trey could make out only a shifting in the darkness, a tangle of limbs. The blur of her face as she fell back, the white of her stretched-wide eyes. Her hands reaching up, grasping at air.
He heard a loud, dull impact, the crack of something—her skull—breaking. The woman’s second scream turned into deep-throated moans, and then silence. Yet still the two hosts worked at her body.
Trey thought about the ravening prisoner Thomas Nyramba had taken him to see in Uganda. About what that man, his brain controlled as these ones were, would have done if he’d been able to break his bonds.
“Let’s go,” Sheila said. Her voice was harsh in the silence.
Trey looked at her, and though he didn’t speak, she understood his question.
“Home,” she said.
Still he didn’t move.
She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Voting!” she said. “Now? What a ridiculous dream.”
* * *
TREY’S CELL PHONE sounded just as they walked through the apartment door. “Granger,” the caller ID read.
“We’ll be ready in an hour,” Malcolm said. “Get your butts over here.”
Trey opened his mouth to say okay, they were on their way, but he never spoke the words. At that instant, his brain filled, overflowed, burst with white light, and then the phone had fallen from his hand and he was lying on his back on the floor.
Sheila knelt over him, her eyes full of panic, but he could barely see her. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t hear anything but the sound of wings.
Information poured into him. Messages from the hive mind, a torrent of them, like frames spliced together from a thousand, a million, different movies. Overwhelming him, drowning him, even as he understood what he was seeing, what was happening right now, at this moment, all over the world.
There was just enough of his mind left to un
derstand that he and Sheila had waited too long.
FIFTY-ONE
TREY ZOOMED ABOVE a blood-tainted river, looking down at a mass of floating bodies. Every moment there were more, arms drooping and flapping in the current. Not waving, drowning. Drowned.
He flew amid a huge crowd, thousands of people, fleeing from a stadium. He saw them crushing, trampling, each other, witnessed those who escaped being picked off by the whirling cloud he was part of. One falling, then twenty, then a hundred. Clutching at their eyes, rolling on the ground, jerking and twitching.
He spun away from an oil tanker just as it broadsided a cruise ship. The resulting explosion caught him, killed him—he could feel his body shrivel in a wave of fire—but it didn’t matter. He was instantly somewhere else, still alive, still part of the greater whole.
Such scenes and a thousand more, a million, flooding his brain. His human brain, not designed or equipped to contain, to survive this flood.
His human brain. He grabbed hold of that sense of recognition and used it to unite the shattered pieces that were still him.
I’m Trey Gilliard. I exist—
His vision cleared a little. He heard screams and shouts and knew they were coming not from within him but from the street outside the apartment. Sirens blared, then were cut off by the shriek of rending metal and a shattering crash. Another scream, a high-pitched sound of despair that seemed to go on and on.
Black smoke came around the door and through the windows into the apartment.
Sheila, still kneeling above Trey, was listening on his phone. She said, “Okay,” snapped it shut, and bent close to him. Her face was bone white, but her expression was determined. Composed. Sheila the doctor, doing what had to be done.
“We have to go,” she said.
Trey said, “No.”
Or maybe he just mouthed the word. It didn’t matter. Sheila understood it. “That’s not a request,” she said. “Come on.”
Then, as his head spun from the immense keening hum, she got her shoulder under his arm and hoisted him up.
He worked, tried, to help. Somehow he got his feet under him. Not quite dead weight, though he would have fallen again if she’d let go of him.
“Where?” he managed to ask.
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