by Sean Platt
Why wouldn’t they be guilty?
This iteration of humanity was a failed experiment.
How many people would die because Peers told the Horsemen to saddle up and ride?
He’d earned his role. Ravi thought Peers was “the Fool” the scrolls talked about, and Peers had to agree. Fool indeed.
Saving this group was the only road to redemption. To get them out. And not just Meyer and Kindred. His actions had killed Cameron, Charlie, Jeanine, maybe even Clara. If he couldn’t save every one of the people in this basement, they wouldn’t need to string him up. He’d do it himself.
Peers ran his hands through his hair, elbows on his knees. When he looked up, Piper was looking directly at him.
“Peers?” she said. “You okay?”
He shook his head — not that he wasn’t okay but that he didn’t need her attention.
She came closer. Meyer saw her move and raised an eyebrow. Kindred, watching Meyer, saw his head turn and turned his own: a chain reaction of attention, headed right where Peers didn’t want it.
Piper looked back at Meyer and Kindred. Then, glaring until they looked back at their own business, she settled in and spoke more softly.
“You can tell me,” Piper said.
That’s when Lila, in the bathroom, started to shriek.
CHAPTER 11
“You have something I want, and I have something you want. That’s the way this works.”
“Unacceptable,” the woman said to Stranger.
“Were you not listening? About the Internet?”
“It’s meaningless.”
Stranger laughed. Astrals were, in the end, like people. You could separate beings into three classes, and the highest could be a giant anemone creature that called itself Divinity — but rules were still the same in the end. There was still posturing. There was still pride. And even though Divinity in its normal form didn’t carry weapons or have a torso, there was still a lot of saber-rattling and chest-pounding.
“Listen to you,” Stranger said, leaning back on a thing that, here in the new section of the ship, looked like a giant white lozenge. “You brought me to White Castle. Unless you’re stupider than any human, you know you need to at least hear what I have to say. But now we’re here, and you’ve got to put up the same front as any man or woman Unacceptable. Meaningless. Irrelevant. Everything is beneath you, ain’t it? I could psychoanalyze the shit out of that. Would you like to have your matter-transporters or whatever manifest you a couch to lie back on?”
“We do not understand the need for a couch.”
Stranger waved his hand dismissively. “Let me see it. Let me see the stream.”
“Tell us more about the blind spot.”
“So you are interested? I do matter?”
“The Mullah. Tell us what they were hiding. Tell us what you believe our drones missed.”
“Not until I see what I want to,” Stranger countered, becoming serious.
“You would not understand it.”
“Then there’s no reason not to show me.”
The woman seemed to freeze. Her eyes moved in small ticks, and Stranger took this to mean she was discussing something with the hive mind. Or perhaps the big lit-up anemone thing using her like a puppet was having trouble working her controls. He wished they could have done this in person, Stranger and this ship’s Divinity. But nope — even intergalactic visitors had their gatekeepers.
“A window will open to your side,” Divinity said through the woman’s mouth.
“I’m afraid of heights.”
“It is not a hole in the ship. It is a window based on a human display screen. The same hybrid technology used to communicate with the viceroys.”
“I know. I was kidding.”
The woman stared at him.
“Open your window.” Then, because he knew she wouldn’t understand: “I’ll try not to jump through it.”
A panel slid open. The large lozenge thing he’d been perched on began to hum. Maybe it was some kind of computer or database; Stranger didn’t know. He was more human than Astral and — almost by definition — always had been.
The panel filled with squiggling lines, white on blue.
“I don’t understand this,” he said.
“Put your hand on its surface.”
Stranger did, and for the first seconds he was sure he’d made a stupid move — the Astrals were about to trick him. But that was pesky human insecurity, which Stranger wasn’t immune to. If Divinity wanted him dead, there were easier ways to do it. And what he knew was more valuable to them than whatever they had to offer. He was mainly curious. But for the Astrals, this was a matter of success and failure, of cost and consequence. They didn’t understand the Internet thing, for sure. But that was the point — and the fact that they didn’t get it was, interestingly enough, something Divinity did seem to understand.
With his palm to the glass, Stranger found his vision blurring. The room dissolved and became like mist. He could move his focus around if he tried: reaching out with his mind to see the woman’s face, the smooth white surface of the Titan-sized door where they’d entered, the presence of his own boot-clad feet. But unless he directed his attention, Stranger saw nothing beyond the haze.
It was as if he were smoke again. Just the Pall, free to roam and meddle and become — free to urge the Ark open, because opening a wound was the only way to see it clean.
“Do you see what you seek?” said the woman’s disembodied voice.
Stranger couldn’t find his mouth. He thought his answer instead. But since he was in the Astral memory stream — the source of spheres like Peers Basara had found, containing a vision of his unfortunate secret — his mind seemed to touch the Astral mind again. He was back to the Pall, able to communicate without any words.
I don’t see it.
“Recall the donor.”
You mean Meyer Dempsey, Stranger thought/said.
“Turn your mind toward his vibration node.”
He wanted to make a sexual joke — Stranger had inherited plenty of lust from Meyer — but he refrained, instead expressing his continued lack of understanding.
“Stop thinking like a human.”
Kind of tricky .
“Stop looking for an individual. All individuals are peaks in the species’ vibration. Individuals do not normally matter. We direct you to one peak or node because of your fixation on a specific individual, but to us the differentiation is meaningless.”
Meaningless, huh? So is it also irrelevant?
“Yes,” the woman answered, not getting it.
He thought of Meyer Dempsey, who’d been an unwitting part of the alien collective for two years. He’d never been Astral, but they’d still managed to suck most of his personality out like milkshake through a straw and implant it into a pair of Titan clones. The feeling of Meyer was still here somewhere, like a copied file. The Astrals wouldn’t understand that metaphor (ironic, really, considering the circumstances), but it was true enough for Stranger.
Okay, he thought/said. I think I found Meyer’s brain in here.
“Move out one node.”
Then I’ll put my right leg in and shake it all about.
“One node to the first iteration,” the woman clarified, ignoring him. “The iteration flagged as an imperfection.”
All right.
He didn’t know what it meant until he tried. But once he did it was simple. There was a blob of energy in the stream that seemed like a backup of the original Meyer Dempsey, but just past it Stranger could feel something that qualified as a “node,” all right. Like a lump in space.
Now what?
“Enter it.”
Stranger focused. He felt himself putting this new node on like a jacket. Meyer without being Meyer. And that made sense, because the node just past the Dempsey file was logically Kindred’s predecessor — the nameless Meyer who’d lived between the true man and the one who named himself Kindred. The man who’d never r
ealized he wasn’t a copy, even after being killed by Raj Gupta.
Stranger didn’t bother to ask Divinity anything more. He hadn’t told them what he was looking for because he didn’t really know. Part of this was sheer human curiosity: the need to know where he, when he’d been the Pall, had come from. But another part of this seemed essential for a reason Stranger felt but couldn’t quite articulate.
He knew the Pall had come into being when the Astral collective had done their psychic autopsy on the first Meyer clone and determined that he’d been somehow “infected” with too much of Meyer’s raw humanity. But the issue wasn’t just academic to Stranger. The question of how and why the Pall had been born was central to all of this — to what was happening with Clara and the way the Astrals couldn’t see her without their BB drones, to the ant farm experiments the Astrals were performing while pretending to be doing something entirely different, to the way the Internet had changed everything for everyone.
It mattered.
He shook mental arms and legs, feeling the first Astral Meyer’s psyche settle on his mental shoulders.
What had gone wrong with this first clone? What had the Astrals found so threatening that they’d cut it away before making Kindred — then flushed it out so it could coalesce, roam free, and return in boots?
Through the old Meyer’s memories, Stranger saw conflict in duties. Saw family. Saw Trevor, and the news of his death. He saw Raj and Heather and Lila and Piper.
Heather.
And Trevor.
Heather.
And Trevor.
Those two mattered most. And as Stranger rolled the old memories back and forth, examining what had been cut out, he began to understand. Maybe he could even comprehend it in a way Divinity couldn’t.
Because after all, he was in a unique position to understand. He’d been the Pall. He was what had been cut out from this man and discarded.
Heather.
And Trevor.
Something began to transpire that hadn’t precisely happened to Stranger before.
He began to get angry.
But not just angry. It was a righteous sort of rage. Desperate. An itch that couldn’t be scratched, because what made him angry was long since finished. There was no making things right. Only loss. Fear. Fury. And love.
Love.
The difference between this first copy of Meyer and Kindred — that’s what seemed to matter most.
Stranger looked around with mental eyes. Tried to remember all he could. Then he realized that, with some effort, he didn’t just need to remember; he could actually take it in. These were records, after all. They were files, in a sense, that could always be copied.
He pulled back once finished and found himself standing in his old body, boots firmly on the floor, head now decidedly out of the clouds. He felt a bit dizzy, but otherwise fine.
“Satisfied?”
“Not at all,” Stranger said.
The woman acted as if he’d given an affirmative, nodding as if she understood humans. But she didn’t. The woman couldn’t see the change on Stranger’s face. She couldn’t tell read his red-hot fury, or see how this time, when he said Not at all, he wasn’t joking.
Heather.
His fists in balls at his sides, fingertips turning white from the pressure.
And Trevor.
“Now,” Divinity said, “tell us why the Lightborn matter.”
Stranger opened his hands. Made himself breathe.
“Because what you’re doing down there right now, they’ll see right through it.”
“What is there to see?”
“That’s it’s not a plague,” Stranger said. “It’s kabuki.”
CHAPTER 12
Lila ran out with hands that looked dipped in dark red paint. She was screaming, waving them around, spattering the floors and furniture and walls. Meyer stood and rushed over, and when he reached his daughter found that she’d dripped onto her feet as well, and was leaving prints. Her chest was spattered with thick droplets. Her pants were half-covered. Her neck looked like it had broken out in new red pimples.
She was screaming. Shrieking. Out of her mind. And that’s when Meyer’s nose recognized the smell in the air — dank, coppery, heavy like mildew, thick and rotten like meat.
It wasn’t paint or dye on her hands. It was blood.
“What happened?” Meyer demanded, taking Lila’s wrists and eyeing her thrashing body, resisting an impatient urge to shake her back to sense. “Where are you cut? What happened?”
“The bathroom! The bathroom!”
Piper had rushed over, but already Meyer knew he wasn’t seeing things quite right. Lila’s head was dry, and a scalp wound was the only thing other than a chest shot that might bleed anywhere near this much. She looked like she’d assisted in impromptu heart surgery, massaging someone’s heart to get it beating.
“LILA! What happened?”
Behind them, something fell to the floor and detonated like a bomb. Meyer could hear shuffling and waited, still trying to calm Lila, for the others to finish their scrambling and rush over. But whatever was happening back there apparently wasn’t about Lila and all this blood. Meyer could hear Jabari, Peers, and Kindred — he thought he could hear the television Jabari had left on to watch the city, no longer muted. Why? Why now?
“Lila!” Piper said. “Hold still!”
Checking her scalp, even though there was no blood in her hair. Checking her wrists for signs of desperate escape, but the blood mostly stopped above her palms, except for spatters. It didn’t look like she’d hurt herself; it looked like she’d been in front of someone when they’d exploded.
“Check the bathroom, Piper.”
“Lila? Where are you cut?” Piper’s head ticked around, and she seemed to count, as if sure another member of their party had met their doom. But all six were accounted for, including the dog. Other mini-bunkers throughout the palace might be occupied, but even aides and employees hadn’t come down here with them.
“Piper! The bathroom!”
Piper rushed around the corner, and there was another scream. Meyer decided that his daughter would remain upright without him and that whatever was in the bathroom required his attention more than Lila did. So he went, distantly sure that both Jabari and Peers had shouted urgently at his retreating back, fear as present behind him as it was in front.
Piper was in the bathroom doorway. Beyond her, a horror show. Blood wasn’t coming from a person or a some macabre aftermath. It was coming from the shower head, which Lila must have turned on and then left running.
The tub was draining but still heavy with an inch or more of red syrup. Tiles were covered from shoulderheight down on the far side, and the curtain, which hadn’t been tucked in, was soaking from the other side. Blood from the curtain spatter had dribbled to the floor, leaving a puddle like a murder scene. There was no drain outside the tub, so the gore had already made it nearly to Piper’s feet, inching toward the threshold.
The sink was dotted. So was the mirror. The walls had long streaks where Lila must have brushed them with her red fingers on the way out. The room wasn’t tiny, but the spray had made its way to half the nooks and crannies. It looked like someone had walked to the middle, swallowed a stick of dynamite, and let fly.
“What the hell is going on, Meyer?” Piper yelled.
“Meyer!” came a voice from outside. From Jabari, he thought. “Get in here!”
Then Lila: “Dad! Dad?”
Meyer forced himself into motion. Moving slowly across the slick tile, he made his way to the spigot and turned it, suddenly irrationally sure that the flow would refuse to shut off. But it did, and the noise of the clotting surge (coagulating in the nozzle, fanning the spray even farther out) ceased, and the shouting and yammering and general freaking out continued from all sides as Meyer stood with his hand on the switch, heaving breath, his fine suit and shirt — and, he was sure, his face — wet with gore.
“Done,” he said.
“Done?” Piper said, as if she didn’t understand the word.
“MEYER!” came Jabari’s voice.
There was a stomping of feet, then a slamming as if someone had struck the wall. Then Peers’s voice: “What happened?”
“Dad?”
“Meyer!”
“Just a goddamned second!” Then to Piper: “I have to see what’s happening out there.”
“What about what’s happening in here?”
“It’s off now, Piper. It’s not going anywhere.”
“THE GODDAMNED SHOWER WAS SPRAYING BLOOD!”
Meyer pushed past her, fighting an uncharacteristic wave of nausea. His sinuses felt packed with meat. He could feel the greasy, organic slick of blood on his neck and hands and cheek, crawling across his skin, trying to cover him, filling his world with its rotting, suffocating reek.
“Meyer!” Piper shouted from behind.
He saw Lila, stock still and wet with more of the disgusting, stinking flow. It was easier and more useful to be annoyed than sympathetic, so he moved her aside, his eyes telling her that now wasn’t the time, blood shower or no. He’d come back. In ten seconds, after he was done with the squeakiest wheel.
Peers wasn’t far from Lila, looking at her with shock, somewhere between concerned and disgusted. Everyone heard her scream, but something on the TV seemed to have grabbed the others’ attention while Meyer and Piper reacted. Now Peers was seeing what had caused Lila’s commotion, but it was clear by Kindred and Jabari’s echoing stares that whatever had happened on the television must be more pressing than the screams.
“What is it, Peers?”
He didn’t answer, but Jabari said, “Meyer. Come here.”
She didn’t add hurry, but it was implied. Meyer crossed the room, dimly aware that he was leaving his own awful trail of red footprints, and faced the television.
On the screen were shots from cameras in the city above — fixed-position feeds. A corded phone was lying beside it, as if someone had called Jabari on the antiquated hotline.