“So who is he?” Bill was asking.
Caitlin held still as he changed the dressing on her head wound. On the counter under her hand was the triskele box. “His name is Seamus, but that’s irrelevant. I just met the man.”
“I thought there weren’t very many of you left and that you knew them all.”
“I tracked the ones I could, but I’ve always known there were more out there.”
Bill made a noncommittal “huh” sound. “So how do you know when you meet one?”
“Some of us can sense each other,” Caitlin replied.
Kevin started to back away because the scene seemed somehow intimate, but he stopped when Bill asked, “Can you sense me?”
“What do you mean? Oh.”
“I didn’t get sick!” Bill finished with the bandage and placed his hands on her shoulders, sliding them down in a caress. Then he gripped her upper arms and shook ungently. “I touched the core sample. By this time, I should have been delirious like all the others, but I’m not!”
“William,” Caitlin said, “it’s not what you think.”
Kevin really began to squirm now. He did not want to stick around to see Bill’s face when he found out he hadn’t risked his life to be with the woman he loved after all. He especially didn’t want to see the accusation in Bill’s eyes when he discovered Kevin’s part in it. He took a quiet step back, but Caitlin called, “Kevin?”
Cursing himself, he realized she knew he was there all along. To his immense relief, Zach and Lizbeth arrived, cheeks pink and hair windblown.
“The rain’s stopped,” Lizbeth said. “Seamus and the others are on deck. I think they want to get started.”
Caitlin turned. “Yes, I imagine they do.”
She led the way up the stairs and waited until the others joined her. Zach and Kevin flanked her as they made their way to the forward deck, where Seamus had gathered the most powerful of the shapeshifters. Kevin noticed her knuckles go white from clutching the triskele box. There wasn’t enough room on the main deck for everyone, and the folk squeezed against the rails to make room as they passed. Many bowed and curtsied to Caitlin, and Kevin noticed some of the women had circlets of what looked like mistletoe in their hair. The atmosphere was hushed and reverent.
They joined the circle, which had four full shapeshifters other than Caitlin and Seamus, and Lizbeth, too, he supposed. He saw how tensely Zach held himself as Caitlin withdrew the crown from the box and set it on her head. The ship pitched and rolled, and his stomach clenched. Caitlin raised her voice above the wind. He expected her to give some kind of ritual speech or something, but she merely said in her ancient language, “Let us speak with the gossamer sphere.”
She didn’t ask that they all clasp hands, although many of those outside the circle had done so anyway. Her eyes began to whirl before she closed them. Kevin tried to concentrate, but he heard that annoying, buzzing dialogue in his head again. It distracted him because this time he could almost make out what was being said. His hand snaked into his pocket almost of its own accord. The nugget was in its box, but he felt a strong urge to take it out.
Unlike the others, he kept his eyes open. Caitlin’s eyebrows were scrunched together and her jaw clenched. The cords in her neck stood out. He sensed it wasn’t going well. Her hands balled into fists and she slowly dropped to her knees on the storm-dampened deck, the crown glittering like a live thing. Above them, the sky between the drifting clouds turned purple.
Kevin’s urge to touch the nugget overwhelmed him. In his pocket, his fingers flipped the tiny hook and opened the box. The nugget slipped into his hand, a familiar, comforting presence.
And the voices became clear.
It was a language never spoken on earth. Kevin heard it in his mind and understood it, although he doubted his ears would be able to pick up the frequencies or his voice box produce them. His mind had entered a place that was like a river of silver fire. It felt entirely unlike the tentative attempts he’d made thus far to probe other people’s minds. Those were like a blade of straw floating in a trickle of water, whereas this—he was an unwilling passenger clinging to a raft in a raging flood of information. At first he assumed, as Caitlin had said all along, that his mind had merged with the gossamer sphere. He thought he had accessed some central intelligence part of the grid, like a bio-software program controlling the communication system. He struggled to find the key to shutting the sphere down, but his mind was overwhelmed with incoming data, most of which was too technical for him to understand, even if he were more familiar with the language. At some point—he didn’t know how long he’d endured the torrent—comprehension dawned.
The information stream was not the sphere itself, but the messages flowing through it, and the stream did not flow one way. He immersed himself in the outgoing current, and it swept him violently away. Where he was going he did not know, but consciousness was his lifeline and he clung to it.
In a corner of his mind, he thought about what killed Wyn, and knew it was this place. Her gossamers weren’t strong enough and they’d snapped, leaving her body a mindless husk on earth. Kevin felt his own gossamers stretch as thin as a spider’s web, and as the current ripped him ever outward, he prayed they were as strong.
Finally, suddenly, he stopped. Numb to any tactile sensations of the body, his mind floated in a pool of silver for an eternity, or was it only a moment?
Identify.
Startled, he answered, Who, me?
Sector Vactile, intruder alert.
No, I’m just delivering a message!
Identify.
Kevin Guzman. From earth.
Location?
Earth! Um, I—I don’t know. Milky Way galaxy? Yellow sun, nine planets—no, wait, eight planets! We’re the blue one, third from the sun. Your sphere is destroying our world.
Initiating merge.
What? I-
Kevin felt his head explode like a thousand suns going nova. Mercifully, the pain didn’t last, but the alien presence invading his mind went on and on. Whoever or whatever was probing him seemed to have an inexhaustible curiosity. He felt the entity access his memories, each one with a different timbre, like a note plucked on a harp. Helplessness gave way to anger. Just like the flow from the sphere to this place, he suspected the contact went both ways. Drawing on the strength of the folk who unwittingly supported him back on earth with his body, he struck back, like a serpent. The presence recoiled, and Kevin struck again, this time with the intention of finding out something about the entity or entities controlling the fate of everyone on earth.
The inflectionless voice sounded in Kevin’s head.
Abort merge.
Just before his head exploded again in pain, Kevin snatched something from the entity, a fact or a memory, a glimpse of three star-rich galaxies in close proximity to each other, swirling through gaseous pink clouds against the pitch black of space.
So that’s where you are, he thought.
The entity responded immediately. Sever communication.
No! Kevin yelled.
The trip back through the silver stream was faster than before, probably because he’d gotten a boost from the entity. Kevin used up the last of his borrowed strength to mentally scream a furious final message:
There are sentient beings on this planet!
Chapter Fifty
The North Sea
The message reverberated in Zach’s skull, and even after it faded away his head felt like he’d just embraced a ten-foot-tall speaker at a rock concert. He heard excited murmurs from the crowd and opened his eyes. Above them, the sky blossomed with all the colors of the rainbow. He was horrified that he’d ever closed his eyes when he saw Caitlin lying prone on the deck. At first he didn’t know whether she’d been attacked or if the effort of contacting the sphere had been too much for her.
He crouched down next to her and she stirred. Gently, he turned her over and sighed in relief when she blinked. Lizbeth, too, knelt down beside her
as Caitlin looked silently up at the sky as if enchanted. Every once in a while she inhaled deeply and let it out in a long breath. After several minutes, she said, “Kevin.”
Kevin? Not quite what Zach expected her to say at such an auspicious moment. Maybe she simply wanted the three of them with her. A flash of fear shot through him – she wasn’t dying, was she?
He craned his neck, looking for Kevin, who had been standing right next to him but had disappeared. Then he spotted him, or what he could see of him – his backside – as he leaned over the far rail and retched. “He’s a little indisposed.”
“Did we do it?” Lizbeth asked.
Caitlin started to sit up, and Zach helped her. She took the crown from her curls and placed it back in its box. “Help me up.”
Seamus came forward and between them, they got Caitlin to her feet. Zach heard people on both sides of the ship calling to those lining the aisles, “She’s alright. She’s okay!” Some applauded.
“I think it worked,” Caitlin said with a weak smile. “I hope it worked.”
“How will we know?” Seamus asked.
She raised an arm and pointed. Kevin had just turned from the rail. His shaggy hair hung into eyes that had gone blood red again. A collective gasp rose from the people close enough to see him.
“Ask Kevin,” Caitlin said.
By now Zach was used to being confused. Why did Caitlin think Kevin had the answer? He saw Kevin shield his eyes from the brilliance of the light show above them before staggering over to Caitlin. “Ask me what?”
“You broke through. Did you receive a reply?”
Zach was flabbergasted. All that talk of da zhuang, and the dwarf with no personality had been the most powerful of them all.
“No. I’m not sure if I will,” Kevin muttered, hand still covering his eyes.
Bill Masters and the captain of the ship pushed through the crowd. Bill gave Seamus a hard look and the shapeshifter relinquished his place next to Caitlin so Bill could support her.
“USGS is reporting complete cessation of the earthquakes,” he announced. “Starting about ten minutes ago.”
Zach thrust his arms in the air and yelled, “Yeah!” as the crowd erupted in frenzied cheering. Lizbeth threw herself into his arms and he lifted her in the air. If there’d been more room, he would have spun her around, but as it was, he settled for rocking her back and forth. Her delighted laughter in his ear was quite possibly the most wonderful sound he’d ever heard.
He set her down, wide grin fading as he noticed Caitlin’s pallor. She was not laughing or crying like so many of the people surrounding her. Neither was Kevin. In fact, Kevin looked worse than he had at Felicity’s house.
“Seamus,” Zach said, catching the shapeshifter’s attention. “We need to get them inside.”
Seamus nodded. The aurora in the sky had almost faded away by the time Zach, Lizbeth, Seamus and Bill herded Caitlin and Kevin through the rambunctious throng into a lounge area Zach hadn’t seen before. They sat them on two stiff grey couches while Lizbeth ran to fetch cold drinks. Caitlin held the triskele box on her lap, looking dazed. Kevin slumped down, eyes closed, one hand in his pocket.
Zach realized that Kevin’s hand had been in his pocket throughout the entire saving-the-world undertaking.
He grabbed Kevin’s shoulder and gave him a little shake. “You have the nugget, don’t you, bro?”
Kevin sighed and pulled his hand out. The lump of metal sat in the middle of his palm.
“What is that?” Bill asked.
Caitlin said, “That is why you are not a shapeshifter.”
Bill’s frown slowly changed to a scowl. He gaze shifted from the silvery nugget to Kevin’s bright red eyes. “How stupid of me.”
“The end result is that you were protected,” Caitlin said.
“Protected from what? From you? Is that what you want, Caitlin, to stop me from becoming like you so I don’t become like you?”
“That doesn’t make sense-”
“It makes perfect sense!” Bill was practically shouting now, and Zach moved into position to intercept him should he make the bad decision to get physical. “You’ve been alive too long. You’re heartbroken a dozen times over. I get that. You wake up every morning because you have a driving purpose. Guard the crown, find the crown, use the Goddamn crown to save the world. You know what’s wrong with that picture? The crown doesn’t love you back.”
Seamus stepped closer and held out his arm, “Brother, this isn’t the time or place-”
“To be betrayed?” Bill snapped. “You got that right.”
“You would have died if Kevin hadn’t taken the iridium,” Caitlin said quietly.
Bill carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. “What are you going to do now? Now that the crown is safe and the world is safe and you have a bunch of new recruits to help you stave off the next crisis? Maybe…” his voice dropped, “…you could let yourself feel something.”
He stalked to the door, throwing over his shoulder, “We’re heading back to the coast. Have these people ready to debark as soon as we arrive.”
After he was gone, Caitlin sat staring at the carpet while everyone waited in respectful silence for the awkward moment to pass. She let out a faint sigh, opened the triskele box and said to Kevin, “Hand it over.”
He reluctantly dropped the nugget in.
Lizbeth rushed back in carrying two bottles of water. “What’d I miss?”
Chapter Fifty-one
East of England
During the entire trip back to the coast, Lizbeth stayed with Caitlin, Zach and Kevin in the lounge. Despite Caitlin’s exhaustion and the head wound that had to hurt, she spoke individually or in small groups with the men and women who’d come out of hiding to offer their services. They lined up in the corridor for the privilege. Caitlin’s rigid posture and serene countenance made her seem like a queen receiving her subjects. They certainly treated her like royalty. Caitlin calmly accepted their effusive gratitude and pointed out repeatedly that she couldn’t have done it without help.
After the dismal failure at Simon’s house, Lizbeth could attest to that. She was still in shock that their efforts had paid off this time, and it especially floored her that Kevin and his iridium nugget had been the catalyst. She kept sneaking looks his way. Since relinquishing the nugget, the redness in his eyes had faded, but he still had dark half-circles under them. He hadn’t contributed to any of the conversations unless he was asked a direct question, and even then his response was short and dull.
Zach was the one who chimed in now and then, usually with a comment designed to make everyone laugh. Kevin finally excused himself to go rest in his cabin.
News from the ship’s bridge periodically filtered down to the lounge. The world’s leading scientists, who’d been scrambling to explain the devastation, were now equally puzzled that it stopped so abruptly. They could come up with no plausible scenario that linked the different phenomena: the earthquakes, volcanoes and auroras, the magnetic field switch, and the violent subspace storm that had incinerated so many satellites in the atmosphere. Under pressure to produce a theory, some chalked the events up to “chaotic coincidence” – bad things sometimes do happen simultaneously. Lizbeth didn’t blame them. If she hadn’t been right in the thick of it, her wildest imaginings wouldn’t have conjured up the real reason.
The ship arrived off the coast of England late at night, but Bill insisted everyone disembark. Groups of sleepy people, including Seamus, were loaded into dinghies and dropped on the beach nearest the pier. Caitlin protested, but Bill informed her that if there was any chance the authorities didn’t know he’d commandeered the ship, he was going to prevent them from finding out.
“Besides,” he told her, “if they do know, or if they find out before we can get everyone off the ship, whoever is on board will be quarantined along with me and the crew. You want to spend however long it takes them to figure out what killed those scientists living on this tin can with
me?”
He said, “I thought not,” before Caitlin even answered. Lizbeth felt sorry for him. He was being a jerk, but she saw through it as a cover for the raw emotions right under the surface. Caitlin had not only rejected him, but done it in a humiliating way. Felicity said that Caitlin preferred to fight her battles alone to protect the people she loved. It looked like sometimes going it alone hurt the people she loved.
Lizbeth looked at Zach. He’d dozed off with his head bent backward on top of the couch, Adam’s apple protruding. She thought about his grandfather, who’d committed suicide after Zach’s grandmother grew old and died.
“Caitlin?”
Both Bill and Caitlin turned.
“Since I’m a – a shapeshifter now, does that mean I’m going to outlive everyone I know?”
Caitlin looked at Bill.
“We can be killed, deliberately or by accident, but we don’t grow old. We are rarely blessed with children, and the blessing is in the rarity. Our precious ones are babies one day, friends the next, and before we know it, they’re gone – just like that. Every time you lose someone, your heart shrinks a little more until it’s as small and hard as a pebble in your chest and you wonder how it could possibly keep beating.”
Lizbeth marveled that anyone could deliver such passionate words in such a dispassionate tone.
Bill touched Caitlin’s cheek. “Even the smallest heart needs love.”
“But isn’t always capable of returning it.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Caitlin closed her eyes and said softly, “Please.”
He took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
Lizbeth looked away, but heard him say, “Please what? Please leave you to wallow in your loneliness? Is that what you really want?”
“I want…to stop having to start over,” Caitlin’s voice was choked with tears. “I want it to last.”
“It will last as long as it lasts. All I can promise you is that while it lasts, it will be amazing.”
The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere Page 20