Cole stood and walked to the window, gazing toward the east, toward Squirrel Island and Linda and his kids and the late morning sun. Toward this "darkness." "We have to find them," he said, his back to Mary.
"Yes we do," said Mary.
Cole stood and watched the eastern sky for the longest time. Mary, knowing that he needed her to, stayed with him while he watched.
His cell phone began to ring and Cole fished it from his pocket. "Cole Thomas," he said as he put the phone to his ear.
The voice he heard had a warbled, buzzing quality to it.
3.11
"So how long do we have to wait here?" asked Iain. He checked his watch, the face of which glowed brightly in the pitch dark. "It's been almost two hours."
Grace shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "I just know that we had to come here. That I really, really wanted to."
"Just like you really wanted to look for the key in the desk drawer in the room next door?" asked Emily.
Grace nodded, though neither her brother nor sister could see it. "I don't know how I know," she said, trying to explain. "Maybe Alice told me everything in my dream and I just don't remember."
"You know we're in big trouble if this doesn't work," said Iain.
"I guess," said Grace. "I feel bad what we did to Ness."
Emily cleared her throat. "Hopefully our note will help them to not worry," she said.
"You think they'll believe the bit about Alice coming and taking us away in a wok?" asked Iain.
"I hope so," said Grace. "We need them to think we're far away. So they don't find us here." She scrunched her shoulders back and forth, trying to get more comfortable. Iain, irritated at having to be so close to his little sister, scrunched back.
"Is there some reason we need to be crammed in here?" he asked.
"I just know that I really want to be," said Grace.
"Yeah, well, I really, really, really don't want to be," said Iain.
"It feels like a cage," said Emily, reaching up to touch the curved surface just above them. She closed her eyes, hoping to dispel the cramped, trapped feeling inside of her.
"I wish Dennis could have come," said Grace.
"Right," said Iain with a snort. "Like they'd have let him into the hospital."
Grace sighed. "I still wish it," she said.
"How long do we sit here before we go tell everybody what a bunch of idiots we are?" asked Iain.
Grace was about to answer when the entire room began to vibrate with a low, rumbling sound. It reminded her of the subway they'd taken on their last trip to New York, before the Crash. The rumbling grew in intensity, then stopped. Iain exhaled noisily beside her. Emily reached out and squeezed Grace's knee.
The curved surface overhead began to glow, a greenish-yellow light like one of those glow-sticks they used to get at Halloween. Then, like something from the movies, a small hand pushed out of the surface directly above their faces. The hand was human in every respect, smooth and graceful, strong and well-muscled, like the hand of a warrior princess. The hand emerged to the forearm. One finger curled back on itself, beckoning.
"Alice," whispered Grace, her heart pounding.
She reached up and took the strange hand in her own.
3.12
"Were we friends?" asked Ted. He rearranged the tiles in his rack but could not find a good word.
Carl brought his eyes up from the board. He stared at Ted for a long while. "I think so," he said. "Maybe." He motioned toward Ted's rack of tiles. "You gonna go, boss, or should I go take a nap?"
Ted raised an eyebrow. "You in a hurry?" he asked.
Carl stopped and pondered that for a minute. He shrugged. "I don't know," he said at last. "I can't think of anything to be in a hurry for."
"How long we been here?" said Ted.
"A couple of days, maybe?" said Carl.
"Seems like years to me," said Ted.
"Yeah, it does," said Carl.
Ted stared down at his tiles, then shuffled them around once more. He looked up at Carl. "I don't think we were friends," he said.
Carl scratched his nose. "Does it matter?" he said.
"Not sure," said Ted. He picked up four tiles and played them on the board.
"Mork?" said Carl. "Don't you know any real words?"
Chapter Four
4.1
Her father had believed he was giving her the most wonderful gift. That was the great irony of it. It was her seventeenth birthday, after all, and she was headed into her senior year at Marshall Academy in Ottawa. It was time for her to "know what was really going on," wasn't it? That’s what he was thinking. Time for her to step into her "true self," and "take her rightful place in this world, and the worlds to come." And Gabrielle would be so happy to finally understand, wouldn't she?
Gabrielle snapped her textbook shut, pushed it across the library table, and grabbed her notebook. "No," she wrote in a hurried hand. "I am not so happy!!!" The words were meant for her father, of course. She wanted to fling them at him like rocks. Like knives. Like plates and cups and vases. But he was not there. Gabrielle wouldn't let him be there. So the conversations that filled her head had nowhere to go, save, now and then, for the pages of her journal.
The guests had gone, at least. He'd waited for that. Friends from school. A few friends of her parents. That creepy Mr. Lean from the office. Mother had excused herself with a "headache" and Father had invited Gabrielle into his study to sit with him. "One last little present," he'd said with a sneaky grin. Gabrielle had expected jewelry or plane tickets or maybe even another car. What she'd gotten was a story she wished now she'd never heard.
Gabrielle noticed she was scribbling absently on her open page and her heart began to pound, afraid that once again the man known as Zacharael had taken over her body. But it was just random loops and squiggles, as if her hand were tracing her own heartbeat, or following the trail of her swirling thoughts. She closed her notebook, zipped her pen into a pouch in her backpack, grabbed her physics text, and forced herself to read. She had exams coming up covering both quantum holography and macro-wormholes. She needed to review this material.
Or maybe not. This was a Family-supported school, after all. She was studying what The Families needed her to study. But maybe she didn't have to do that anymore. Maybe it was time to quit.
That thought set her heart to hammering once again. Could she just leave? Did she dare? Did she dare not?
Her father hadn't told her everything, of course. Not at once. Not on that birthday night. He'd told her of The Families. How he and her mother and her sister (now her late sister) and she had come from illustrious bloodlines that stretched back into antiquity. How her last name was really Sinclair. How The Families were the secret overlords of the global industrial and political machines that determined the course of human history on planet Earth. And how they had a plan for humanity, a plan that would propel them through their current crop of global crises and into a grand new future. He'd told her of his decision to embed his family in what he called "the sleeping world," to take a position as an MP in the Canadian government in order to watch and listen and guide and control. He'd explained the costs to himself and her mother of leaving behind the secret enclaves of their Families in order to do their work in this "sleeping world." And he'd told her how close they now were to the fruition of their plans and preparations. Soon, they'd return to The Families. Soon, they'd be back where they belonged. And soon, very soon, they would take "the Giant Leap."
Guy Legrand had not explained what that Giant Leap was. Not on her birthday. But Gabrielle had left vaguely disturbed by the whole thing, nonetheless. There was excitement, of course, to be let in on such huge secrets. To find out she was a member of these vastly wealthy and powerful Families opened up possibilities she'd never before considered. And learning that there were people who had an actual plan to deal with the quickly unraveling world into which she'd been born was a huge relief. But there was something about her fath
er - the wary distraction in his eyes, the grim cast of his face, maybe just the tight set of his shoulders - that made Gabrielle deeply uneasy. She knew she was not being told the whole truth. And she knew, somehow, that she would not like what she was not being told.
She'd pulled away from her father during her senior year. It was easy enough to do, as he was gone so often, out "solving the problems of the world" in his play-acting role as a Canadian Minister of Parliament. There were water salinization problems in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to deal with, and a massive fish die-off in British Columbia. There were crop failures galore, old people dying in heat waves, and that crazy ice storm that shut down most of Ontario and Quebec just as the global economy was imploding. There was that typhus outbreak on PEI and lines that stretched on for blocks at gas pumps in most major cities. There were food riots and terrorist bombings and water shortages and the nuclear "accident" in Toronto. And there was the Grid, which had appeared in the sky in the fall of her senior year and thrown Guy Legrand into a rage. Gabrielle had heard him cursing on the phone and pounding the walls of his office more than once after the Grid appeared. He was a man obsessed, a man distracted, and he was extremely busy. And Gabrielle was glad to have him so. It was not until the next spring that Gabrielle heard the rest of the story. As graduation approached and she began to consider colleges - she had her eye on an art school in Vancouver - she was told that she had no real choice in the matter. As a Family member, she would attend the rightfully rich and suitably private Freemantle College in Montreal, where she would study one of "the hard sciences." End of discussion.
Gabrielle was furious at the assumption that they could tell her what to do, and demanded to know why. Her father told her why: The Families would soon be leaving Earth. "We don't need artists," Guy said with scorn. "We need physicists and engineers and surgeons and geneticists." And there would be a number of other Family members also attending Freemantle, he explained. He smiled stiffly. “You could use some time with your own kind,” he said.
"And why are we leaving Earth?" Gabrielle demanded, ignoring her father’s obvious attempt to provoke her.
Her father's eyes hardened. "Because, my precious girl, this planet is going down the shit-hole, and the Sleepers with it." With that, he'd nodded decisively and walked out of the room.
That had been the end of it. Or the beginning. Outwardly, Gabrielle had acceded to her father's demands. She'd matriculated at Freemantle and taken up a course of studies in physics. It was the only thing her father would pay for, and she hadn't been ready to strike out on her own. And her mother, drunk more often than not in the wake of her little sister's death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver, had been no help whatsoever. College was comfortable enough. Cushy, even. Supported by Family money, life on Freemantle’s campus was barely fazed by the Crash. And the other Family members she met, young people just like herself from all over the world, were nicer than she’d expected.
But over the months since she'd come to Montreal, though she hadn’t been ready to strike out on her own before, Gabrielle had slowly and quietly begun to get ready. She'd come to see the tremendous mistake her father had made in embedding them in the normal, everyday human world. Having grown up in that world, Gabrielle had come to consider herself a part of it. This world she knew, as screwed up as it was, as damaged as it felt, was her world. And these "Sleepers," as her father called them, these millions and billions of people who were now slated to go "down the shit-hole"… well, some of them were her friends. And one of them, a beautiful young man named Arthur whom she'd met in Physics I, had become much more than that.
Gabrielle glanced over at the clock and blinked, surprised at how late it was. She had a class in ten minutes and her bike had a flat. She'd have to walk, and it was sizzling hot outside. She gathered her books and shoved them into her backpack, promising herself that she'd study all night if she had to. Her notebook fell back onto the table when its spiral binding caught on the backpack’s fabric. It opened automatically to her page of scribbles and Gabrielle noticed that what had appeared before to be random scratchings had actually been nothing of the sort. It was messy, to be sure, but those scribbles clearly depicted a circle with an inverted capital L cutting through the middle of it. It was the crop circle she'd seen the night before in her “dream.” An image of her father's friend, Zacharael, came to mind: he was sobbing loudly, with his back to her, as he gazed out over the destroyed ground. Something about that confused her. It occurred to her that perhaps this Zacharael loved the planet Earth, too.
She wondered if maybe Zacharael wasn't a friend of her father's after all.
4.2
Mary sat hunched over on the edge of Grace's bed, breathing into the wave of anxiety that had come over her as she’d entered the Family Suite. After a few moments, her calm restored, she raised her head and scanned the room. Grace’s stuffed animals huddled cozily in a basket in the corner. Her books were piled on her desk. Even her clothes were put away, hung in her closet or stuffed into her hamper. When had Grace become so neat? Mary wondered. Grace’s room usually looked like a riot zone. Had she cleaned up before leaving for the hospital, knowing that she would not return?
Closing her eyes, Mary scanned the room for vibrations, memories, and wisps of thought and feeling, trusting that this physical space could retain some echo of the girl who had been here hours earlier. She hoped that it had. If life had taught Mary anything, it was this: human beings had little idea what was really possible. Most humans, anyways. And the ones who claimed to run things were especially obtuse. The ones who claimed to know and understand. Those guys. They would scoff at the notion that such things as memories and thoughts and feelings could be picked out of the air like radio waves. That they could stick to walls and beds and clothing and toys. That they had an existence outside the human mind. But Mary knew better. These walls could talk. It was simply a matter of being able to listen. The question that remained was this: did these walls have anything to say?
Mary stood, stretched her back to stand straight, and walked slowly around the room, running her fingers along the walls and over Grace's furniture. She listened for an echo of Grace's presence. But she sensed nothing. The room did not speak to her.
Inhaling deeply, she left Grace's room and repeated the process in her brother's and sister's rooms. Again, she was gifted with no new pieces of knowing or feeling. She knew that a unit of Army investigators, following the possibility that the children had actually been abducted from the hospital by hostile human forces, had already scoured these rooms for clues, and had taken the kids’ tablets and laptops, to check for any documents, messages, or emails that might help them learn what had happened. Mary wondered if that whirlwind of official, military focus, belief, and intent had blown away any lingering bits of the children’s energy. She was not at all certain how this all worked.
It was the note that stuck with her, as though fastened to her mind with refrigerator magnets. Alice has returned, they’d written, and is going to help us find Linda. She pictured them all together in a hospital hallway, the kids, the hybrid child, the small, shiny alien vehicle hovering over the tile floor and stretching from wall to wall. It was possible. The woks could appear and disappear like magic. And Mary could imagine Emily insisting that they stop and write a note. But then the wording got strange. She came in a wok and took us away, they’d written. The tense was wrong. Those weren’t the words they’d have used had they been writing the note there in the hospital hallway, with Alice and her wok waiting. Wouldn’t they have written She’s here in a wok to take us away? Something like that? And then there was the insistence that they were long gone and that Mary should not try to find us. And the fact that the note was written on the same lined stock they used for their schoolwork, rather than a piece of note paper found in the hospital, as if they'd brought paper with them. Mary shook her head as she stepped out of Emily’s room and back into the family’s common area. It just didn’t feel right.
Mary could hear Cole's muffled voice coming from his bedroom. He was still on the phone. Deciding to continue her conversation with the First Gentleman later, she made her way out of the Family Suite and into what she thought of as “the last line of defense,” the wing of the Presidential Home where Linda and Cole’s closest senior advisors and counselors had their offices, creating a wall between the President and her family and the rest of the world. Not that "the rest of the world" could get anywhere near them at this point in time. Augusta had been emptied of everyone but essential government and military personnel, and the few private citizens needed to serve their needs. Staff had been gnawed down to the barest of bones, and offices were spread around the downtown area, some here in the Presidential Home, some in the State House, others in other nearby office buildings. Surrounding the city center was a thick and fiercely protected cordon of chain link and razor wire, bristling with weapons.
The Federal government in Augusta was not what it had been in D.C. Almost three years ago, after the failed attempt to bring Linda Travis into the vast, hidden human-alien conspiracy that purported to "really run things," the aliens, the “Strangers,” as Linda's friend Obie had called them, or the “Life,” as they had called themselves, had left the planet. Their underground facilities, built directly beneath the centers of government and corporate power in countries all over the world, had simply vanished, leaving many of the District of Columbia's government buildings collapsed in heaps in a vast network of sinkholes. To President Travis, the message was implicit in those toppled buildings, the White House and Capitol Building amongst them: it was time for things to change dramatically.
Linda Travis refused to simply "rebuild America," as so many insisted she do. Now more cognizant of the confluence of global environmental and economic crises humanity was facing, Linda was unwilling to spend either the time or the money it would take to return the nation's capital to its former splendor. With U.S. debt at ever more impossible levels, with the Great Recession grinding on and on, she didn't have the money. But it went deeper than that. The aliens, the Strangers, hadn't just pulled the foundations out from under some buildings. They'd pulled the props out from underneath a vast, secretive, corrupted government machine. Linda Travis had no more interest in rebuilding that human machine than she did the buildings it has been housed in.
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