As her mother spoke, Anna closed her eyes. She saw herself as a baby, dressed in a pink sleeper, big-cheeked and sleeping in a bassinet of deep blue. Anna touched the center of her chest as she saw Jack’s hand touch the baby she’d once been.
“With experience, you tend to begin to believe that things work out as planned.”
“Even after all this?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“I’m not your father, Anna. To me, a universe without a plan is too scary.” Jack looked at the ocean a long time. “I have to believe in something. Even if that’s wrong, it’s right for me.
“Our lives are divided by big events: first job, worst job, leaving home and not coming back, best job, the vacation of a lifetime, a wedding, births, and deaths. My great divide came with your birth, Anna. Thank you for that. Thanks for being you.”
Anna held her mother and they gave themselves over to the psychic link. That exchange in words and pictures was faster and deeper than any talk. They traded stories of teachers they’d liked and why. They shared funny things Jaimie had said or done. They told about having babies. They thought of the men they loved.
As the air chilled, they both knew they were putting off the inevitable. Anna and Jack held each other, wept and wiped each other’s tears. It was a good, last goodbye between friends.
“Are you going to give your brother a kiss goodbye?”
“No. I don’t want to risk waking the sleeping prince.”
“Probably best. He’d have a hard time with so big a change.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He’s changed a lot, Mom, and I think he already said goodbye.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the seconds after I shot Carron…killed him…I got a message from Jaimie, just before he did his Sleeping Beauty thing.”
“Well? What did he say?”
“It wasn’t that kind of message. I saw Trent. He was sitting by a pond fishing and he was thinking of me. It was like being in two places at once. I felt dizzy. It was so confusing at first, I couldn’t move. I thought I was going to fall on top of Carron’s corpse. Then I saw Trent and I knew where I had to go. I’m sure it was Jaimie who showed Trent to me. I can’t see him now, but I know he’s waiting. It felt like…”
“Like a parting gift?”
“Yeah, more like an order.”
“You’ve given your little brother plenty of orders in your life. I guess you'd better follow his one request.”
“He did give me one of his Latin phrases, too.”
“Oh?”
“Vivere disce, cogita mori. I’m not into that, but I got the gist.”
“Learn to live, remember Death.”
Anna turned to go, but Jack caught her sleeve. Jack dug to the bottom of her backpack and pulled out the battered cookie tin. She unsealed it carefully.“I used to keep your father’s love letters in here,” she said. "I'll take care of the tin but…take a little with you, okay? Close to your heart?"
When Anna left, she took Dahlia’s hand as they walked back down the long dock toward shore. Anna looked back at Jack with a brave smile. Tears glistened on her cheeks. Anna held her free hand high, then shoved her small keepsake in a vest pocket. She took the remembrance of her old life West to her new life.
Anna didn’t go alone. The Army of the Word followed her.
The battle ahead was not for humans. It fell to Jaimie alone to lead the Army of Light against Misericordia.
Ignoring pain and making others pay
The eastern sky turned to orange paint as Jaimie remained in the comfort of black oblivion, immune to the thrum of life.
His body was jostled as the boat raced South. Ever so slowly, he began to allow dim awareness in, a little at a time. He had to be careful to block out the din of all those at play in the Mindfield.
He could feel the distant movement of sea life beneath him, lurking under the waves. He knew the stars would be out soon.
The boy’s mind was blissfully free of the thoughts of others. The hive mind was a great, clattering machine and Jaimie had to concentrate on his own thoughts. That could surely prove a terrible disadvantage now, but he had to face Misericordia without the muddled clamor of the many.
Clatter, chatter, patter, clamor, shatter, splatter, cacophony. He missed the insular comforts of his big dictionary.
Jaimie didn’t want to wake up at all. For the first time in a long time, he had dreamt of nothing. The blackness and quiet had been a relief and now that solace receded, slipping away from him.
Too soon, a light shone in his eyes, as if reaching down to him at the bottom of a well. Through slitted eyes, the boy saw his father’s silhouette. He sat on the narrow bed.
Something had changed.
Changed, chanced, clanged, clashed…
Jaimie could feel Theo’s body heat at his side. He’d hoped he was still safe, waking into another dream, but this was real.
In each upturned palm, he felt a small hand clutching his own. As he opened his eyes blearily, to his left sat Aasa, smiling warmly. To his right, little Aastha squeezed his hand. Behind Aastha, jaw tight and frowning, stood Dayo Dabiri.
“You’re at your grandfather’s farm in the Corners, Jaimie,” Dayo said. “You made it to Maine.”
“At least until Misericordia comes,” Aasa said. “He’s on his way. I can feel him coming.”
On a pale horse, Jaimie thought. Death rides a pale horse.
Jaimie closed his eyes, willing himself to fall asleep again but he found no retreat. He still could, however, block out everyone’s thoughts. It wasn’t just information that had overwhelmed him. He’d received too much emotion at once, from everywhere. If he’d let it all in a moment longer, he was sure he’d have lost himself to mind-crushing pain. Individuals felt pain. Together, what was left of the human race roared.
However, at the mention of Misericordia’s name, Jaimie couldn’t block out the fear crawling over his heart. He squeezed his eyes shut and, tentatively, reached out with his mind. Dad? Do the glabella trick, please. I need it.
But Theo did not place a gentle finger in the space between his eyes and make slow soothing circles to take the headache away. Instead, Jaimie felt rough fingers at his neck, searching for his carotid pulse.
“How long has he been sleeping? How did you know it wasn’t a coma?”
“I told them not to worry,” Aasa said. “We know all kinds of things now and Jaimie needed the rest. People always thought he didn’t feel anything. The opposite is true. He felt too much. He says an honest, deep look into another person is a well of pain.”
Aasa sounded less like a girl and more like a precocious young woman. Plugging directly into the database of all human experience would do that, Jaimie knew. Aasa knew The Way of Things in a way he did not, could not. Jaimie was not jealous. He was already overwhelmed by people, let alone the Dark Matter that made the universe move.
But something else was very wrong. His father’s touch felt like that of a stranger.
Jaimie’s eyes widened as he looked up into his father’s face.
Theo Spencer’s face was different. He wore a scruffy beard. There were more lines around his eyes, as if he never slept. Jaimie pressed his head back into the pillow hard.
“Jaimie? You’re okay. I’m your uncle. Uncle Cliff.”
Dr. Cliff Spencer, Theo’s twin brother, had made it back to Papa Spence’s farm, too.
“I’m glad your parents took my warning seriously. Your mother said if not for all the scouting and hoarding, you might not have survived the first wave of Sutr.”
Jaimie could see why his father hadn’t liked his brother. Uncle Cliff’s tone was self-congratulatory. He wasn’t asking his mute nephew for a thank you. He was telling Dayo and Aasa and Aastha what a clever and important person he was.
Jaimie looked to Dayo. Her arms were crossed. Her aura had turned rosewood red. Dayo knew what he knew about Cliff. T
he age of lies was over.
When Jaimie turned back to his uncle, he saw the lines around his mouth had hardened and deepened. The man’s aura was a slick amber that tasted of aluminum. Embarrassment.
Before Sutr had devastated the world’s population, people had been a mystery to Jaimie. The changes The Way of Things had wrought made him wish he could go back to innocence. No one was innocent anymore.
Jaimie reached past the little room on Papa Spence’s farmhouse, searching. His sister, he knew, was traveling again, away and safe from the battle to come. His mother was outside, behind the house in a field.
Jaimie could see his parents clearly, as if from a high height. They were at the crest of the hill. A bright oil lantern illuminated a twisted old tree by a boulder.
They stood under a bright Milky Way, looking at a simple stone marker. It was a grave.
Jaimie pushed his uncle out of the way and jumped up from the bed to race outside.
Theo stood at the edge of the Gateway to the Spirit World without him.
* * *
Jaimie ran past a pen filled with goats and up the long hill toward the center of the field. He arrived breathless to find his mother, stooped and crying. At her feet lay the cookie tin.
The battered circular container had been hidden and sealed with thick tape in the back of his closet at home. Since it wasn’t his, Jaimie had never touched it.
His mother had asked him never to open it. “You’re the family’s secret keeper,” Jack had said. “Anna will never look in your closet. It’s just some very personal letters between your father and me. I know you’ll leave them alone, Jaimie. If I try to hide them from your sister in my closet, Anna will read them. I can’t even keep her out of my shoes.”
Jaimie had thought everything they’d owned was destroyed in the explosion that took their home. The whole neighborhood had burned to the ground. However, before they left Kansas City, Jack had disappeared and, later, showed up carrying the tin, rescuing her memories from the ashes of their destroyed home.
Jaimie had expected the gravestone to mark the place where D’Arcy “Kenny” Kennigan died of a gunshot wound. The place at the top of the hill, under the tree and by the boulder, was exactly as Theo had described it.
The grave marker read: Patrick Elgin Spencer, taken in his 85th year by the Sutr Flu Pandemic.
Papa Spence was dead. Papa Spence had gone through the gateway.
Getaway.
Gateway.
Getaway.
Gateway.
“Jaimie, you always knew,” Theo said. “Eram quod es, eris quod sum. I was what you are, you will be what I am. You didn’t want to see. The most powerful lies are those we tell ourselves.”
“Papa Spence died early in the first wave,” Jack said. “Cliff got back too late to say goodbye.”
“Jaimie!” Dayo called from the farmhouse’s back doorstep. “We have to go soon! Aasa says he’s coming by helicopter and Poeticule Bay is a few miles away! The truck’s ready!”
Jaimie looked to Theo. He found he could not read his father’s thoughts. Theo didn’t have an aura to read, either.
He looked to his mother. Jack bent to pick up a shovel. Crying quietly, she made a hole beside her father-in-law’s grave, just big enough for the battered cookie tin.
Jaimie looked at the tin. “Phoenix,” he said.
Jack turned to her son. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “I wish.”
Jaimie felt heat rising through his scalp as he fell to his knees and tore at the tin. The yellowed Scotch tape was gone. It had been sealed and resealed with duct tape. Jaimie pulled it open and gasped.
The lies we tell ourselves….
Ashes filled the old cookie tin.
Debt, death, dearth. A terrible, horrific dearth…
Jaimie closed his eyes. When he opened them, he stood again in the birch forest.
In the Corners, Maine, the clock neared midnight under cool stars, but here the forest stood bathed in bright warmth under a sun that did not move.
For our ticket to the circus, circles and cycles
The last time he stood in this place, the Shakespearian trees were burned and screamed. Now, no trace of the fire remained. Chickadees sang sweetly through the woods, leading him forward.
In a clearing, Jaimie was startled to find a long-haired boy with a pellet gun. Clad in a plaid shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers, the boy lay on his stomach. He ignored Jaimie and instead, aimed down the barrel. He plinked away at a line of small Coke bottles on a log until all the bottles shattered.
When Jaimie stepped near, the boy rolled on his side to squint up at him. “Hi.” He smiled wide.
“Hello.”
“Looking for your dad?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“D’Arcy Kennigan. Pleased to meet you, Jaimie.”
“My father told me about you. Don’t you prefer to be called ‘Kenny?’”
“Dude. People grow. You sure have, right?”
“I suppose.”
The boy pointed down a path lined with saffron moss. “Follow the yellow brick road.”
“How far?”
“It’s only as far as you want it to be.”
“I didn’t expect to find you here. Something feels different.”
“He came out of the trees.”
“I beg your pardon?”
D’Arcy shrugged. “This was your place. He came out of the trees. It’s his now.”
“I call this the Nexus.”
“Cool name.”
“What does he call it?”
“Ask him.” The boy smiled and rolled back onto his stomach. D’Arcy Kennigan didn’t have to reload his pellet gun and the line of Coke bottles had reappeared on the log, placed exactly as they had been.
Jaimie followed the path. Warm breezes sighed and rustled the leaves. The colors on either side of the path were all vibrant greens. There were so many shades of green, Jaimie wondered if each variation had a name. He could spend many pleasurable days here, just coming up with new names for the greens alone.
There was garter snake scale, tree frog green, wasabi, relish, Kermit…it was overwhelming, but in a pleasant, oxygen-rich way that didn’t give Jaimie a headache. He felt giddy and his steps were light.
The shimmering forest vibrating around him was a wind instrument playing a melody of life. Soon the birch trees gave way to bamboo. Around another curve, he came upon a cabin constructed from huge redwood logs. It reminded him of the Lincoln Logs set his father had given him for Christmas.
“Just like the set I had when I was a kid,” Theo had said.
Behind the cabin, three waterfalls from a high cliff met in a blue, tropical lagoon. Beneath the surface, huge gold and orange fish basked in the warm water and swam in calm, lazy circles, a living lesson in meditation. The boy wanted to stay and listen to the water. If he concentrated, he was sure he could almost hear rippling poems in the gentle laughter among the fall of water. Only his curiosity was strong enough to pull him from the water’s edge.
Despite the sun’s heat, the cabin’s chimney billowed a straight column of white smoke into the azure sky.
The cabin’s front door was painted red. A brass dragon’s head door knocker hung in the middle. There was no doorknob.
Jaimie lifted the heavy knocker and banged twice. The hollow sound seemed to echo into a deep granite cavern.
“Come on in, Jaimie!”
The door opened on its own and Jaimie stepped into the cool, dim light. The door closed behind him.
Though he was sure he had only taken three steps, Jaimie found himself in the center of a huge library. Between floor to ceiling windows, rows upon rows of books — rose upon rose, Jaimie thought — stood across three levels of shelving connected with gold ladders with silver rungs.
Through tall windows, Jaimie saw that the lagoon and the bamboo forest had disappeared. From inside the library, the landscape
swirled with blowing snow. Tiny cyclones of snow chased each other in a whirling devil dance. What had been tropical from the outside was stark, pure, cold and white from the inside.
The forest was all birch and pine now, layered in deep snow. The lagoon was clear ice under which the colorful fish still swam, undisturbed by winter. The waterfalls had become solid towers of sculpture. Sunlight made the snowscape’s white blanket twinkle.
“Welcome, Jaimie.”
At the center of the library, Theo Spencer sat on a circular couch. Beside him a fire blazed in a potbelly wood stove. He toasted Jaimie with a steaming mug of cocoa.
No treacle in Gilead? Only creatures primal?
Jaimie sat on the couch opposite his father. “Hi.”
“Hi! It’s good to talk to you like this. No more silly sub vocalizations and whispers and thought transference.”
“What would you call this conversation now?” Jaimie asked.
“Quiet reflection.”
Jaimie surveyed the vast room. “A library, a roaring fire and nowhere to go. This is heaven isn’t it?”
“It’s wonderful. So many books I’ve always wanted to read and they’re all here. In fact, every book is here. I’ve got Atwood’s Year of the Flood, of course, but also nine books of her poetry I never got around to. Hemingway’s short stories await. I always preferred his short stories to the novels. Alex Kimmell’s The Key to Everything is here. I can read all of Vonnegut again and take my time. I have eternity, so who knows? I might even give Ulysses another day in court. I didn’t have the patience for it the first time, but now? Why not?”
“Is all this…real?”
“Is anything?”
“I called this the Nexus. I’m curious what you call it. It feels very different now.”
Theo pointed behind Jaimie. It hadn’t been there before (the boy was almost sure) but a corner of the library looked like a coffee shop. All the coffee making equipment was there, but there were no customers. Instead of the expected chairs and tables, the furniture comprised a scattering of overstuffed leather chairs and recliners, each equipped with a reading lamp and lap desk.
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