by Dan Krokos
And then we’re out of range, with a cloud of dust two stories high rising between the buildings, eclipsing the Verge. Gane’s scream of frustration echoes off the steel and glass, disturbing crows roosting in the broken windows. They take flight, crisscrossing over us, cawing. And I’m laughing, not because I’m happy, but because I’m out in the open, free. Wind tears at my hair and makes my eyes water. Eventually the man, with Rhys holding on behind him, takes the lead, and we follow him as he winds through the dusty paths between buildings. I’m grateful for the action, as it gives me a break from thinking, from trying to understand how this place is possible.
I see the remains of the city as we pass. An orange-brown lump of metal that used to be a car here. Broken, pebbled pieces of blacktop there. Wide gray streaks of dust border some of the buildings, the powdered remains of sidewalks. We pass the north side of the Empire State Building; fires burn within, dark shapes crouched around them. A twisted, half-rusted sign on the ground says 5 AV.
People huddle in the doorways of buildings, watching as we pound past. I’m not laughing anymore. I look at a world near death and realize this could happen to us. Nina wants to take the eyeless through the Black, and as far as I know, the Black leads to our world.
It makes me want to go back for her, but I don’t. We’re not ready. The two in red broke us out for a reason, and I assume they’re willing to help.
More people come out of their dwellings to watch.
A cry rises up, carried ahead of us. “Red riders! Red riders!”
“Don’t stop!” the man shouts next to me. “Just don’t stop!” We’re at full gallop, a storm of hooves louder than thunder, drowning out the thump of blood in my veins. I feel my gray breathing beneath me, the muscles in her back flexing each time her legs come off the ground.
“Keep going!” the man shouts.
As the arrows begin to fall.
They come from above. Ragged men lean out from the broken windows on the second and third and fourth floors of the buildings. The cry in the street is no longer “Red riders!” but “Meat!” and the arrows zip down from the left and right, cracking into the hard-packed dirt or ricocheting off chunks of blacktop. One grazes my horse’s shoulder and she jumps, almost throwing me off her back. I grasp her mane tighter, squeezing with my legs, hunching, trying to make myself two dimensions.
Another comes right at my face. No thought—I lean, and it passes through my hair, severing a lock. I feel the strands flutter down my back, then catch in the wind. My stomach clenches long after the arrow is gone, things moving too fast for me to process.
The girl in red has one in her thigh, but by the way she rides you wouldn’t know it. The red fabric of her pants is darker around the wound, and the stain is growing. I close my eyes, waiting for one to pierce my neck, wishing I had my armor. Then I open them, because wishing isn’t going to get us through this.
The men are terrible shots, but numerous. The arrows continue to whistle down, buried shafts snapping under hooves.
I see an archer aim for Peter from the second floor on the left. His neck is wrapped in a filthy towel, thin arms straining against the bow. He tracks Peter as we approach his building.
“Peter, watch out!” My voice is drowned in the roar of hooves.
The archer fires. The arrow flies down, wobbling, and sinks into the chest of Peter’s horse.
I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out. The horse collapses, head slamming the ground, legs tangled under it, skidding, churning up dirt. Peter skids with it and then tumbles.
Two more arrows stab into the dirt near his head. Somehow he turns his second tumble into a controlled forward roll. He pops to his feet and reaches up. And I’m there, leaning down off my horse at near full gallop, all my focus on his outstretched fingers, knowing I won’t get a second chance at this. Our hands collide with our forearms, and his weight almost pulls me off, but I bite down with my legs and swing him up, screaming against the pain in my shoulder.
The arrows are out of range finally. Peter’s chest heaves against my back as he takes deep gulps of air. I hear Rhys laughing from ahead. My shoulder is on fire, but intact.
“I owe you one,” Peter says in my ear.
I twist around to look at him, checking for arrows he might not be feeling yet. His eyes blaze with adrenaline.
“That’s two you owe me,” I say, and he laughs.
We ride on, deeper into the city. We pass wild dogs with stark rib cages. More cars are skewed in the road. The tires rotted away long ago. The horses stay clustered, breaking apart only to get around an obstacle. As the adrenaline fades, more of what I’m seeing makes its way to my brain. So many things made by man, long forgotten and abandoned. People walked these sidewalks, ate in these restaurants. Cabs once packed the desolate roads. And behind everything is a possible future for my world. If we don’t stop Nina, this will be our future. A world of forgotten things.
Our pace slows after ten minutes of hard riding. We turned south a while back, and the buildings became slightly shorter, but just as dense. Every few blocks the angle is right, and I can see Gane’s version of downtown in the very far distance. I can’t tell what’s different.
The girl’s leg is soaked now, but the bleeding seems to have stopped. The stain doesn’t go past her knee. Dust sticks to the wet part of her pants.
The street opens up into what was once a park. Some of the trees still stand, and one of them even looks alive. The rest sag, leafless, anchored in baked dirt. We ride the perimeter, staying clear of a hollow bus. Two buzzards perch at the front of the metal hulk, watching us.
“This is what you would know as Union Square,” the man in red says. “Here it was named Rowland Circle.” He takes the lead, guiding his horse into an enormous parking garage that has fared better than the buildings around it. We follow him inside and begin the descent, curling around pillars, heading deeper underground. The cars here are better preserved, but just barely. None of them have tires or windows. Every few feet, the man stops and holds a small remote in the air. The remote beeps, and we move on.
I count three levels down until the sounds from above are muffled and all I hear are the too-loud claps of our horses’ hooves on concrete. The bottom level is an apartment. Two cots are tucked in the far left corner, alongside a huge metal desk, cabinets, and a workbench. Various mismatched lamps hang from the supports in the ceiling, strung together with wire. Hay covers the ground right next to us, with a trough for water. In the middle of everything is a fire pit dug into the concrete.
I see it all, but I don’t understand. I already knew the two in red aren’t who they appear to be, but why bring us here? Part of me stays alert, but I release my doubt for a moment and focus instead on the warmth of Peter against my back.
“If you decide to leave, please let me know in advance so I can deactivate the security.” The man slips from his horse. He hasn’t yet removed his mask. He crosses to the girl and studies the arrow in her leg. “Ah, we should’ve stopped.”
“Too close to the Verge,” she replies, wincing as his fingers barely touch the arrow shaft.
“You said you had our armor,” Rhys says, now alone on the horse he had shared. He does something with his feet and the horse takes a few steps back. “And I hope you have answers.”
The mention of our armor and the memory of what they contain is like a soft punch to the stomach. We have to be cutting it close on our memory shots.
Peter swings his leg off our horse and stands between me and Rhys.
“I said it was taken care of,” the man says. “Patience.”
Peter takes a step forward before Rhys’s mouth can get us into more trouble. “With respect, we don’t have any patience left. We’re running out of time. If we don’t get to our armor, we’re going to lose our memories. Do you understand?”
The man sighs and looks up at the girl, who I can see clearly now that we’ve stopped moving. She’s pulled the mask down around her throat. Her dark skin is flawle
ss, which surprises me considering the world she lives in. Her face is thin and almost undernourished, and she doesn’t fill out her combat uniform. None of this keeps her from being beautiful. It’s stupid, but I immediately look at Peter to see if he’s studying her the way I am.
“Sophia, can you handle your wound?” the man says.
She nods curtly. The man helps her off the horse, then watches her limp toward the open cabinets at the other end of the apartment. “You all right?” he calls after her. She just waves a hand behind her, keeps limping.
The man turns to us and pulls down his mask.
My mouth falls open.
He’s blond like Rhys, hair growing to the base of his neck, but I already knew that. His blond beard is short but thick. His irises are red, something I didn’t notice before. His face is what Rhys’s will look like many years from now.
Rhys makes a sound I’ve never heard him make before. A soft exhale of surprise.
The man smiles up at Rhys, and his lined eyes twinkle with tears.
“Hello, son,” he says.
Rhys can’t speak.
None of us can. No one says a word for what feels like a minute. Rhys’s eyes are shiny. He never talked about his “father.” Rhys was part of the first Alpha team, the one a year ahead of ours. The creators raised and trained Rhys’s team themselves, as their children. Then one day Rhys’s father just disappeared. Rhys assumed his father had been killed. Instead he ended up here, working in the Verge.…
“Where are we?” I say. Not that it isn’t crazy to see this guy in the flesh now, but we have bigger problems. And I’m guessing he has answers.
Rhys Noble—I remember Rhys telling me his father’s name—takes a long breath. “The short answer is another universe. One of many.”
If someone tells you you’re in another universe, it’s hard to go, Oh, makes sense now. But instead of disbelief, I feel nothing. Another universe. Okay.
“My name is Rhys. You can call me Noble, to avoid confusion. As in my last name, not because I possess outstanding qualities.” He leads Sophia’s horse to the trough. I dismount, and my horse follows automatically. “The girl is Sophia,” he says. “She’s of this world.” Noble waits until Rhys robotically dismounts, then leads the last horse to the trough. “But let’s take care of your immediate situation.”
We follow Noble to one of the cabinets, where he pulls out our suits. The scaled black material is folded neatly. He hands one to each of us and says, “Leave your reserve shots in your suits, please. I have more. In the pouches you’ll find the tracking devices you had in your suits.”
On the workbench is a glass case full of syringes. Each one is filled with the lemonade-colored liquid I’m so familiar with. Noble lifts the lid.
Our memory shots, but not the ones we brought with us.
“Why do you…?” Rhys says, but he’s still stunned. His face is slack and emotionless.
“When I saw who came through the Black, I made a batch,” Noble says, opening the case and pulling out three syringes.
Behind Noble, Sophia eases the arrow out of her thigh. She bites her lip and looks at the ceiling. The bloodstain on her pants spreads past her knee.
“Where is Noah?” Noble asks me.
Suddenly he’s there at my side, in his armor. He needs to stop popping up like this; I can’t take it.
No one speaks.
“That’s too bad,” Noble says. “I’m sorry. I’d given him something to help your team.”
“What did you give him?” I ask, as Noah says, “What did he give me?”
Noble picks up a rag off the bench and wipes his hands. “Six months ago I went into your world. I came across Noah in the woods outside Tycast’s base, and I incapacitated him. Then I implanted in him a directive to stop Nina if she ever showed up, accompanied by information and history that would help him—and all of you—to complete that task. I knew it was only a matter of time.”
Noah shakes his head. “I can’t remember. Tell him I said hi, and that he’s a dick because he didn’t have to knock me out.”
“Noah says hi,” I say. “I downloaded his memories and now his consciousness is in my head. So.”
Noble actually gasps. “That’s extraordinary.” He sees my face. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But the implications…I had posited that two minds could share the same brain, but… Does he remember any of the information I gave him?”
“Bits and pieces,” I say. “He showed me what the Torch looks like.”
“Noble,” Peter says impatiently. “Let’s get to it. What are we?”
“I’m afraid we’re all the same thing,” Noble says. “Clones.”
“Explain,” Peter says.
“I’ll be fifty years old in the spring,” Noble says. “Yet the person I was cloned from looks no older than eighteen—like you, Rhys—and has lived for close to a thousand years. All of you have an Original too. The five of them make up the ruling body of the most powerful universe in the Black, called True Earth.” He looks at each of us and seems to be satisfied we’re getting it. His words are like bombs going off in my head.
“I was sent to your world decades ago, as a boy, with my team, to age, to learn the ways of your specific society, and to raise a group of soldiers—that’s you—who would become a new generation of peacekeepers in the world. Only that was a lie told to us by our creators. Instead of peace, there would be war. The teams we raised would lead the vanguard of an army when it came time to purge your world. How’s that?”
We were going to be the tip of the spear.
“Huh,” Rhys says.
Noble says, “Priority. Take your shots.”
We take them. The familiar sting in my arm is welcome. Noble studies us. It’s not a smart thing, taking drugs from a stranger, but there isn’t much choice.
“So what is the Black?” Rhys says.
Noble smiles, and it’s easy to see the scientist in him. “Think of the Black like a honeycomb, each universe cradled in a cell. It works as a lubricant, like how oil keeps two pieces of metal from grinding together.”
That should rock me, but after everything I just try to absorb it. It’s hard, because I’m stuck on this one idea. I’m thinking that if this is all there is, this endless journey of fighting and insane revelations, I’m in trouble. If the rest of my life is going to be devoted to fighting, I’m not sure I want that. No matter what I was made for.
“Let them dress, Noble,” Sophia says. She takes her vest off, then eases her pants down over her wound. She’s wearing two wide strips of cloth to cover herself. Her muscles are hard and lean, like an animal pared down to the essentials. I watch the way she moves to see if she’s dangerous, if she could take us. Rhys watches for another reason.
“Of course,” Noble says. “I’m sure you’ll feel better in your armor.”
“Sure,” Rhys says absently.
I walk up to the next level of the parking garage and take off my rags and toss them against the wall. Then I step into my armor, and I feel safe again, even if I’m not.
On the way back I see Peter and Rhys changing. Rhys still looks dazed and doesn’t notice me, but Peter does as he pulls his armor over his hips. He doesn’t slide his arms through his sleeves right away. He smiles at me, as warm as can be under the circumstances. My cheeks grow hot and so does my stomach, and it’s so good to feel something besides terror and anguish. I reach out and trail my fingers over his bare back. His skin is blazing, almost feverish. Then the moment is gone and I remember where we are.
When we get back to the living area, Noble is rummaging through a cabinet. Sophia has finished stitching the wound in her leg. She bends the limb back and forth, making sure the stitches won’t tear. Rhys watches her until she looks up and furrows her brow. Noah stands in front of Rhys, waving a hand in front of his face.
Noble stands up holding a memory band. “I thought it might be better to show you how I got here. And what we’re up against.”
/> No one speaks.
“Who wants to go first?” he says.
“Me,” I say. I’m sick of waiting for the truth.
I lie down on the nearest cot, and Noble slides the band over my head.
It doesn’t even hurt this time.
I open my eyes and find they belong to Rhys Noble, but something is different. There’s no emotion. I am not partially becoming the person, like I did with Mrs. North and Rhys and Noah. It’s like Noble removed his private thoughts and only the visuals remain.
Noble sits at a desk inside an office. Through his eyes I see him scrawling something on a notepad. Some kind of formula. The door opens, but he keeps scratching out numbers and letters.
“Thank you for knocking,” he says.
He finishes writing, then looks up. And freezes. A woman stands in front of his desk, wearing a dark hooded vest and a mask over her nose and mouth. Her face is in deep shadow.
“Can I help you?” he says.
“Rhys Noble, you are a man of reason and logic. I am short on time. Do not speak until I am done. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Noble says.
“There was another world like this,” she begins. “They had people and cars and a blue sky and vast oceans.”
Noble sits in utter silence, listening to the intruder as she tells him about a world, Gane’s world, that was a little more advanced than ours. They were on the moon in 1941, Mars in 1949. The world grew, and soon the people were living too long. Then they were living indefinitely, and the planet’s population began to grow impossibly fast. Scientists were dangerously close to discovering the Black…and the means to travel through it. Wars I’ve never heard of broke out—the Indian War, and the War at Home, which turned into the American War. It ravaged the lands and made clean water scarce.
One day a hole opened in Central Park. It was 1973.
At this point I remember something Mrs. North said to me, just seconds before I escaped her.
“There is no escaping True Earth,” she told me.
True Earth had decided that Gane’s world had grown too big, too powerful, too corrupt, too advanced. They were considered a threat. Aggressive worlds with means to travel through the Black would not be tolerated. The people still fought in wars over menial things like land or religion—something True Earth had done away with centuries ago. So True Earth sent the eyeless through and pared the world down to the basics again. The plan was to remove the humans in such a way that left the world unharmed. After all, what was the point of conquering a world if you left it in ruins? Except the humans fought back with weapons that blackened the sky and scorched the land. Then they died, and the eyeless went to the hills until they were needed for the next world.