by Devon Taylor
Mak found what she was looking for, shouting “Ah-ha!” when she did, and yanked open the driver’s-side door of a big SUV. “Get in!” she yelled at Theo and Rhett and Treeny.
Rhett and Treeny were neck and neck with the psychon as it moved down the cable, preparing itself to lunge at the SUV. They rounded the other side of the car, hearing the engine turn over as they went. Treeny pulled open the backseat door on one side while Theo opened it on the other. They jumped inside together. Rhett hopped into the passenger seat. In some recessed part of his mind, he realized that this was the first time he’d been in a car since his own accident.
He pulled the door shut and said to Mak, “Can you drive this thing?”
She eyed his mangled leg. “Can you?” she said.
The psychon smashed onto the roof then, crushing most of it in on top of them, digging its claws into the metal. One talon stopped just short of gouging Rhett’s eyeball.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled.
Mak threw the car in reverse and slammed on the gas. The tires spun and screeched and protested, spewing smoke. But they found purchase. The car launched backward. The psychon fell over, crashing onto the hood and rolling off onto the street.
There was only one car behind theirs, and Mak swerved the SUV around it, squeezing between two lanes with a shower of sparks and a squawk of collapsing metal. Once they had backed off the bridge, Mak swung the car around, put it in drive, and pushed the pedal down to the floor.
They screeched away, zigzagging between other cars, narrowly missing pedestrians who were still clustered near the bay, watching to see if the bridge was going to collapse. Mak avoided streets that looked crowded with morning commuters, and Rhett kept checking the rearview mirror, trying to see if the psychon had followed them. But there was no sign of it.
He glanced over at Mak. She stared ahead, face blank, betraying nothing of whatever torment was going on inside her.
Basil was missing. They’d all just gotten their asses handed to them by a pack of monstrous beings. And the soul of the dead woman was still inside Mak. They had no way of knowing if there would be more psychons coming after it, especially with one of them left alive.
That was Rhett’s fault, along with the fact that he’d lost his knuckle blade back there. He thought of something else. He shifted in his seat so he could look back at Treeny. Theo was holding her hand, tilting his head so he could fit under the crushed-in roof. His face was a disaster of scratches and bruises, but he was watching Rhett, waiting for what he had to say, ready to keep fighting if he had to. Rhett suddenly had a newfound respect for the big lug.
“Treeny, do you have your tablet?” he asked.
She waited a moment before shaking her head. “I lost it back there,” she said.
“Shouldn’t we go back and get it? I mean, what if one of those things gets a hold of it?”
“It’ll destroy itself,” Mak said quietly. “And even if it didn’t, the psychons aren’t smart enough to figure out how to use it. Right now we just need to find a way back to the Harbinger.”
“What about Basil?” Rhett protested.
“You said it yourself.” Her eyes shifted just slightly. “He’s gone.”
They drove on, the city scrolling by around them. Rhett didn’t have time to admire it. His thoughts were back on the Golden Gate, with Basil, with the psychons, with the thing that looked like a girl but was clearly something else. These are your last days, she had said. Find your power. Then I will come for it. For you.
* * *
Even without her tablet, Treeny knew where a door that led back to the Harbinger would be. It was one the team had used on a previous outing to San Francisco not long before Rhett had arrived.
They dumped the car where Treeny directed, in a tiny lot on the corner of Mission Street and Eighth. Rhett wondered briefly about what it must have looked like to see a big SUV driving itself. But nobody seemed to notice. The major news, according to the TV that hung just inside the window of a corner deli, was the cable break on the bridge and the damage that was done to hundreds of vehicles (including the one that had inexplicably fallen into the bay). They kept saying it was an earthquake, lacking any better explanation for what had happened.
After they left the car behind, it was slow going for Rhett. He hobbled along in the comforting brilliance of daylight with Theo’s arm around him. It almost would have been better if he could feel the pain of his injury. At least then he wouldn’t have felt so pathetic.
Treeny led them a block or so up to an abandoned laundromat. The windows were dusty and edged with cobwebs. There was a crooked CLOSED sign that hung against the inside of the door. Through the grimy windows Rhett could see an expanse of dirty blue and white linoleum, broken occasionally by weedy nests of electrical cords and tunnels of vacant pipe that jutted out of the floor and walls.
“This is the place,” Treeny said. “Remember, Mak?” Her tone was fraught with sweet, ignorant innocence, like a child looking for the pride of their parents.
Mak nodded. “Yeah. We go inside, right?”
“Yes. It’s the supply closet.”
Mak pulled the door, and even though Rhett expected it to be locked tight, it opened just as smoothly as if the place had never been closed. Rhett had another one of those mind-warping moments of debate with himself, considering the idea that the door wasn’t actually opening at all, that when Mak stepped inside the laundromat, she was passing through the door in a splash of ghostly mist. He preferred the alternative reality, where things appeared as they should.
The four of them stepped inside, into a different, dimmer light that gave Rhett the heebie-jeebies. He half expected another psychon to come stepping out of the gloom. Or worse … the she-thing.
But there was nothing except the dingy aftermath of a doomed business venture: crumpled receipts, empty soda cans, tiny boxes of detergent, a lone folding cart. There was a mouse nibbling on the bulbous end of a stale Cheeto.
Mak and Rhett and Theo followed Treeny to the back, where two doors faced each other in a cramped nook. One was marked RESTROOM, the other was marked EMPLOYEES. Treeny pointed to the latter.
“That one,” she said.
Mak took hold of the doorknob, leaned into the splintered surface, listening. She jiggled the doorknob a couple of times. The sound was enormous in the empty space, like gunfire. Then she finally turned the knob and pushed the door open.
It swung away, revealing the room of doors on the Harbinger, but the room was not the quiet, solitary place it normally was. Rhett had originally thought of the room as Grand Central Station but had come to think of it more as a library, with syllektors passing through mostly silently, taking a moment to find what they needed but ultimately minding their own business. It was a library that literally allowed them to travel the world.
Now, though, the room was more like his original comparison, crammed with people all trying to be heard over one another. Doors on the other side of the room opened onto streets that looked weirdly familiar. And then Rhett caught a glimpse of a cable car jingling past one of the thresholds. The other syllektors were searching San Francisco, for them.
Captain Trier was there, too, bending at the waist to give orders into a young girl’s ear. She was nodding, mouth open and eyebrows knitted together in concentration. When the captain was finished, he stood back up and the girl ran off, disappearing through another door. That was when Trier spotted Rhett and the others.
“Everybody hold it!” he bellowed, and it was loud enough to come rolling into the laundromat and rattle the front windows. “They’re here,” Trier said when the noise had faded.
The other syllektors looked in the direction the captain was staring. Then Mak and Treeny and Theo and Rhett were swept through the door. Once on the other side, Rhett allowed himself to fall to the ground, giving in to his mutilated leg and his overwrought mind. Somebody he’d never seen before started examining his injuries.
Mak asked, “How did you
know where to look?”
“Treeny’s tablet,” the captain replied. “It gave off a distress beacon.”
“Not bad technology for a ship that’s as old as dirt,” Rhett said from the floor.
The captain grinned crookedly, but the grin quickly faded. “Basil?” he said.
“Missing,” Mak replied, folding her arms, looking away. “He went over the side of the bridge.” Then she turned and tried to disappear into the crowd of syllektors that were making their way out of the room.
“Mak,” Trier called after her. “Mak! Makayla!”
Mak stopped.
Rhett found Treeny and held her gaze. He mouthed a single word at her. Makayla? Treeny only shook her head, as if to say that further investigation into the matter was a cautionary tale waiting to happen.
“I know you’re hurting, even if your face doesn’t show it,” the captain said gently. By now the room had mostly cleared. The mumbled conversations of syllektors either going back to other parts of the ship or following the push out through the doors was dying away.
Mak stood with her head down. Her shoulders were hitching, and her hands were balled into tight fists, quietly in need of something to obliterate.
“Blimey, what’s all the bloody fuss about?” a voice said from the far corner of the room, where a door was just snapping shut. He came limping out of the shadows, dripping water into huge puddles that he left in his wake. “That damn bay is a disgusting moat of a thing.”
Basil had one scythe in his hand, lathered with black pus. His clothes had been clawed into strips, with long scrapes and slices in his flesh underneath. His left leg hadn’t been gouged at all, but it was cocked from the knee at an unpleasant angle. And yet his grin was unaffected, still tilting across his face as if it had been permanently fixed that way.
Mak spun around and found his eyes. Rhett saw her face crumple, the barriers of her bitter facade coming down, her emotions finally allowed to roam free across the landscape they were best suited to exist upon. She ran to him, and they collapsed together in a heap on the floor, her face buried in his shoulder.
The captain looked genuinely relieved. He turned to Treeny. “Very good work setting off the distress signal, Treeny,” he said.
Treeny nodded with a thin smile. She still looked shaken, but she exchanged a quick wave with Basil, who gave her a thumbs-up, then she turned and practically ran out of the room.
Theo cocked his finger in Basil’s direction, his own crooked grin carving its way across his brutalized face. He took a few steps in Treeny’s direction—probably wanting to go after her and make sure she was okay—before losing his balance and sitting down hard, with his arms resting on top of his knees.
Rhett wanted to worry about Treeny. He really wanted to worry about Theo. Instead he lay back on the floor, staring up at the high ceiling, at the ornate woodwork that curled like smoke across it. The image of the she-thing’s eyes invaded his view. Those black holes with only the tiny specks of light in the middle.
“I don’t mean to be a pain,” he eventually said. “But can someone get me off the floor?”
TEN
The medical bay was as cold and uninviting as it sounded, coated in that fluorescent, medicinal glow that always meant you were among the sick and dying. In this case, it was just Rhett, Basil, and Theo, all three technically dead already.
The whole place looked overly sterile, without a single smudge on any of the shining steel. But then again, Rhett didn’t figure the place got much use. There were glass cabinets with bottles of actual medicine in them—bandages, syringes, slings, empty vials. Plastic curtains hung around empty beds. There was one nice feature: a wall that had three large portholes set into it, giving a spectacular view of the very unspectacular world outside.
Rhett also couldn’t help but note the wide glass tube that stood in the very center of the room, connecting the floor to the ceiling like a support column. The tube was filled with souls. They glowed and ebbed and pressed up against the glass, their whispering voices blessedly unheard from the outside.
The boys were all given beds, Rhett and Basil across from each other, Theo near the portholes next to Rhett. Other syllektors, ones who had obviously brought some sort of medical training with them when they died, set Basil’s leg and wrapped Rhett’s. They did as much as they could for Theo—bandages and gauze and tape—and when they were done, he looked like a horrifying cross between the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster. The poor guy fell asleep almost instantly.
Once all the bandaging and casting were done, they were left to themselves, with Mak sitting next to Basil’s bed, holding his hand, resting her face on his chest. Rhett watched them, listened to them.
“I thought we were goners back there,” he murmured to her. “Thought we might lose each other.”
Rhett was somehow comforted. He thought of his parents, of their beautiful, untarnished love for each other. He thought of how the world seemed to rotate around them, how it could pummel them with constant obstacles and how they always, always overcame them together, as one, holding each other and comforting each other and each of them feeding off the other’s optimism, like Mak and Basil were doing now. And when, one year on his parents’ anniversary, Rhett had asked his father what made their relationship so strong, so impenetrable, his father had told him that there’s no such thing as having to work at a marriage, that life might be hard, but love is easy.
Watching Mak and Basil, Rhett heard those words play over and over in his head. That had been one of the best conversations he’d had with his dad. He was glad for it.
He looked out at the churning gray sky and wondered again about the night of the crash. He thought about losing it and swerving the car, yanking the steering wheel, trying to make a scene, to get his dad’s attention. He thought about the road in front of the car and how empty it had seemed. He could never have seen the truck behind them when he swerved, but the stretch of highway in front of the car had been completely devoid of traffic, of anything. It had been totally empty.
Hadn’t it?
* * *
Days went by. The boys healed together. Basil called it “a never-ending bro-down” in his ridiculous college-jock American accent. Treeny came by every now and then, mostly to check up on Theo, who had been her first savior back on the Golden Gate.
Mak was there often, visiting with Basil and mostly ignoring Rhett, which was as it should be. She quickly hardened back into her old prickly self, losing the cuddly nature that had overcome her when Basil turned up alive. Sometimes they nagged at each other, but it was usually in fun, and Rhett loved to listen to them. If the mood was just right, it really was like being in the room with his parents again.
Not long after they’d first been brought down to the medical bay, Basil had told them the story of how he’d survived the psychon and the drop into the bay.
“The bastard broke my fall,” he said. “We hit the water and it might as well have been a brick wall. If my scythes didn’t kill the damn thing, the hit from that water sure bloody did. And I still managed to break my leg.”
Then it was just a matter of getting back to shore, he told them. He had sunk with the psychon, trying to free his blades in case there were more that might come after him but only managed to get the one.
“I took it and doggy-paddled my way to one of the beaches. It was pathetic. After that, I had to limp through half the city to find a door that would get me back aboard the ship.”
Basil told the story with the same cocky air of indifference with which he told pretty much any story about himself. But Rhett sensed an underlying tone, something in the neighborhood of uneasiness. Basil had been afraid. Maybe as much for himself as he had been for Mak. It had certainly been a close call. And if Rhett understood anything about what Captain Trier had told him, about the existence of a syllektor after the destruction of their heart, it was that “ghosting out” was the worst possible thing that could happen. An eternity surrounded by memories
that you can’t touch, can’t feel, can’t enjoy, haunting the hollow shell of your lost life. It was worse than a horror story. Because it could happen for real.
At night Rhett and Basil would alternate between playing chess and playing Scrabble. Theo tried to play (according to Basil, Theo was actually a fantastic chess player), but his hands and face were too bandaged up. He was content to just sit and watch, though, usually falling asleep halfway through a game.
Chess had been Basil’s game of choice. “Back when I was a young little mouthbreather,” he said, “I’d play with my sister on a set that we made out of an old crate and some bottlecaps.” Scrabble had been a staple in the Snyder household while Rhett and his parents were alive. His parents even began implementing “Tequila Scrabble” on Saturday nights. Sometimes they’d even let Rhett join in … but with club soda instead of tequila.
Over those games, Rhett told Basil and Theo about his parents, about the accident, about how guilty he felt for causing it. About how he sometimes hated himself, both for the accident and for the guilt, not knowing which was the right way to feel.
Basil nodded. “The hating yourself part is the hardest thing to get over, isn’t it?” he said. “You just feel like you could have been so much better. Ha-ha! Triple Word Score!” And he went on as if he hadn’t said anything at all.
* * *
One night Mak poked her head through the door, eyebrows raised in question. She found Rhett and held his gaze.
“Basil’s asleep,” Rhett said quietly. “Although what we’re listening to is either his snoring or the mating call of a hippopotamus. It’s hard to tell the difference.”
She stepped into the room with a tiny smile on her face, and Rhett felt a little firework of pride go off inside him—it wasn’t often that he got a smile out of any of them.