by Sean Platt
“Hello, Carl,” said the man.
“The fuck are you?”
“You’re looking well.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me say, ‘What the fuck you doing in my house?’”
Carl didn’t smash one fist into the opposite palm to punctuate his question. His broad shoulders, six-four height, and thigh-sized arms did it for him. Every inch of Carl was earned muscle. You didn’t have to have a job in Roman Sands. The government took care of everyone. It was part of what made the place so horrible. So Carl moved bricks. All day, every day. Sometimes he moved them for people who needed bricks moved because ever since Astral Day, Roman Sands had been the kind of place where things were always being knocked down. When nobody needed bricks moved, Carl went across the street to what had once been a park and moved the pile of bricks there from one side to the other. The next day, he’d move them back. It was mind-numbing. But books were scarce, and all but propaganda broadcasts were nonexistent. For Carl, who’d been incarcerated before the bugs and ghosts had plopped their asses on his town and changed its name, moving bricks was the equivalent of doing pushups or pacing a cell. While he worked, he played the golf course he used to work at in his head, imagining walking the links and keeping score. He’d never done it in life — wasn’t right for a black kid to play golf when football made people respect him — but he’d steadily improved inside his mind. The whole thing, body and mind, kept a man sharp. It kept a man sane.
“That’s not what you said the first time.”
Carl lunged at the man. He must have blinked when he did so, because by the time he reached the chair, the guy had somehow leaped behind him.
“I’m not a vampire, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said the man from near his right ear.
Carl spun. It was half turn, half punch. He had no qualms about killing the guy, and he’d ended one unlucky fellow with his fists before. That had felt terrible; Carl had only been a kid himself at the time, and the guy had been an asshole, undeserving of death. The cops hadn’t arrived in time, and Carl had never been punished. It would have felt so much better if he had.
But this fucker? Well, he was in a man’s private residence. And this was the shit end of Roman Sands after a big announcement about End Times, so what the fuck ever.
But the reach-punch missed again, and this time the guy was behind Carl’s other ear.
“Admit it. You’re thinking I’m a vampire.”
Carl drove an elbow hard into the man’s sternum. Without wasting the extra time it took to rotate, the blow landed perfectly. It folded the intruder like a deck chair, and two seconds later Carl was standing above him, watching the man squirm and gasp for air.
“So this is what pain feels like.”
“Bitch, you’re lucky you’re not dead. I killed motherfuckers before for less.” He clenched his fists and took a step.
“Sure you have,” the man said, trying for breath, pressing his chest as if the feeling intrigued more than bothered him. He came up on one elbow. “But you didn’t kill the man who stole food from your refrigerator. And you had all the time in the world. That was before you broke your baseball bat. And you had all the room you needed to start swinging.”
Carl’s fists sagged. “How’d you know about that? You been spyin’ on me?”
“Yes,” the white man said, scooting back to sit up, still wincing. “I’ve been spying on you for eleven years. That’s how I know.”
Carl felt his mouth form a frown. It had been about that long, yes. He remembered it vividly. The intruder had been unarmed, and Carl had caught him holding a loaf of bread. If it had been a ham or leftover lunchmeat, things might have ended differently. But the man that day had literally been stealing bread to feed his starving family. Carl had let him leave with the loaf.
“Now, the gang of kids who came here two months ago? Them, you handled.”
“I didn’t kill nobody that day.”
“Not that you knew. But the tall one? The one with the cap you thought looked stupid? You cracked a rib into his lung. He didn’t even try getting to a hospital, and died the next day.”
“Had it coming. Those three was terrorizing this neighborhood. They wasn’t just coming to take my house. They raped like three girls I know ’round here.”
“Yes. Of course. So you kind of liked it when they came for you, didn’t you? Saved you the trouble of finding them.” The man sat up straighter. “Why did you want to go after them, Carl?”
“Don’t know. Seemed right.”
“Even in Roman Sands?”
“Maybe especially in Roman Sands.”
“They didn’t have guns. Can’t get guns here anymore, or anywhere other than the outlands. Can’t smuggle them into the city. But would it have made a difference if they came at you with guns instead of chains and bats — and you with nothing but fists?”
“Dunno. Who the fuck are you?”
The man stood. Incredibly, he extended his hand. Even more incredibly — probably because he felt a bit beaten himself with all the man’s knowledge — Carl shook it.
“You can call me Stranger.”
“Seems about right.”
“Can I sit?” Stranger gestured toward one of the kitchen chairs. There were four, despite Carl having lived alone for years. Each was made of peeling, chrome-colored piping and hard cushions embroidered in a flower print, oozing out at the seams.
“Try it and find out.”
Stranger sat. Pushed himself back and crossed his legs, making himself at home. Finally, unsure what else to do, Carl pulled out a seat and sat opposite him.
“How’d you know all that about me?”
“Same way I stayed out of your way the first two times you tried to hit me. Don’t let it bother you that it took three tries. I doubt anyone else could have hit me at all.”
“Okay. So how’d you do that, too?”
Stranger pulled a hand from his pocket. It emerged with a bright white Slazenger golf ball, marked with a 7.
“Do you know what that is?”
“It’s a golf ball. You think a black man don’t know what a golf ball is?”
“Aren’t golf balls supposed to have dimples?”
Carl held the thing up to point out its perfect number of dimples. But what was once a golf ball was now a smooth silver sphere.
“What the fuck?”
“Bet your friends wouldn’t have been supportive if you’d played golf like you wanted to.”
“Wasn’t my friends had a problem with it. Shit. You didn’t grow up where I grew up.”
“I didn’t grow up at all.”
Carl set the sphere in his grandmother’s empty fruit bowl, center stage on the vacant kitchen table.
“Why are you here?”
Stranger sat forward. “Because you’re here, Carl.”
“Who are you? Really.”
“Grit in the works. Sugar in the tank. The wooden shoe in the gears. The wrench in the big, bad machine. My nature is disruption. Chaos. If I want to keep on living, this is what I must do.”
“You an alien?”
“Maybe. Sort of. Once. But I was always more human than Astral, and now I’m almost entirely like you.” He eyed Carl’s impressive frame. “Well. Not like you.”
“What you want me for?”
“You’re the man who’d chase down a rape gang because it needs doing. You’re the man who’d watch a man steal food he can barely afford because the other person needs it more. You’re the man who knows what’s supposed to happen, even though you tell yourself you know nothing at all.”
“I sure don’t know what the fuck you talking about.”
Stranger uncrossed his legs, recrossed them in the opposite direction.
“Carl. Serious question. You heard the announcement, right? From Divinity in Ember Flats?”
Carl suspected Stranger already knew the answer, but he nodded anyway.
Stranger leaned forward. “Can you keep a secret?”
; “Try it and find out.”
“They’ve already found the vessel for Roman Sands. It was placed in a protected government area, right where Viceroy Knight would have wanted, so nobody could see it. But they’re not letting people on.”
“Story of my life, man. Think I should get a suit and change my name to Gerald Huckabee the Third?”
“They will let people on. And say what you want about Roman Sands, but everyone will get a fair shot.” Stranger leaned even farther forward. “But do you want to know more secrets?”
“Okay.”
“The broadcast came from Ember Flats because that’s where the Divinity that broadcast it was at the time. But it’s not just their ordinary mothership, like yours, that I’m talking about here. Some smart people saw this coming, and they thought the motherships might move off and form some sort of an antenna to call their buddies to Earth. That hasn’t happened. Because their buddies are already here. In a bigger mothership that settled over Ember Flats when … well, when something important was unlocked.”
“A bigger ship?”
“An enormous black ship as big as all the capitals put together.”
“What’s it doing there?”
“It’s not there anymore. It moved north.”
“To, what? Europe?”
“To the north pole.”
“Fucking with Santa ain’t smart.”
“It’s going to melt the ice caps, Carl. First the north. Then the south. There will be worldwide storms, and whatever doesn’t flood will burn. That’s why the vessels are boats. Just like Noah’s Ark.”
Carl tried to keep his face neutral, but it betrayed him. He quickly recovered. After all, he’d resolved to die a long time ago.
“The vessel for Ember Flats showed up right in the middle of their city, with a force field around it. The government there will be asked to mediate the process of deciding who boards. There might be a lottery. Nobody knows how it’ll be decided — only that it will, by humans.”
“Like with us,” Carl said. “With Roman Sands.”
“No. Each city has its own test. For Ember Flats, the Astrals want to see how morality and fairness play out. In Hanging Pillars, the vessel’s position and the challenge to reach it tests human bravery. In Canaan Plains, the viceroy can unlock a force field like in Ember Flats, but the ship is hidden, so it’s mostly about the persistence of those who seek it. And in Etemenanki Sprawl, the vessel is in the bottom of a volcano, seemingly unreachable. The Astrals won’t let people fly to it. So the test is about ingenuity, working with what’s there to be among the chosen few.”
“What about this place, if you say Knight knows where the vessel is already?”
“Roman Sands’s test is cutthroat. There will be an initial group put onto the boat, but then everyone will be given a choice. They can take a spot on the ship that’s already held by someone else, or they can pass. Pairs will be determined in advance, and from what I can tell, they’ll all be people who know one another. Friends given a chance to save themselves by dooming others to their deaths. You might be given the chance to swap places with your mother-in-law. With your childhood bully. With your spouse, even. For every trade, two things happen: you get to live, and the other person gets to die.”
“There’s not enough spots on the boat for that.”
“It’s tiered. Like a tournament. They’ve thought this out, Carl.”
“And how do you know so much about it?”
“Same way I know you used to have an invisible friend named Maurice. Same way I know your mother used to chew her nails until her own mother died, and she looked down at her gnawed-down hands across her chest in the casket.”
Carl shoved his surprise as low as it would go. “Okay. So why you tellin’ me?”
“Because the person whose spot you’ll be given the chance to take is the man who murdered your sister. And because I need you to refuse.”
CHAPTER 24
When Clara blinked and realized she’d apparently been standing in the middle of the Hideout floor in some sort of a trance, her first reaction was embarrassment. She’d already put a flag on top of her head as the resident weirdo — inside a group finally weird enough to welcome her. Now she was blacking out (and losing a decent chunk of time according to her internal clock) in the middle of a conversation with Nick while both were on their way over to speak with Logan? Not good.
But Clara wasn’t the only one blinking and looking around. Nor was she the only one wearing a half-confused, half-embarrassed look. She heard an out-loud fog of muttering alongside a subtler one in her mind.
Whatever that was, it hadn’t only happened to her.
Whatever had knocked Clara into another place (or at least out of this one), she wasn’t alone.
“Nick?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. Nick was looking at his hands as if he’d never seen them before. Looking at the floor as if grateful to find it. At the ceiling as if it might have vanished.
“Nick?”
He’d turned away, was walking off slowly, as if just waking up. Clara, unsure what else to do, followed. She couldn’t shake the not-quite-departed vision. It hadn’t been like seeing someplace else. It hadn’t even been like being someplace else. It was more like sharing space that didn’t exist. It was mind to mind, soul to soul — and yet whoever had abducted her to take her there just now, Clara could barely say.
Sort of like sharing minds with Mr. Cameron, as she’d almost done in the street on the way here — despite a certainty that he’d left the world for somewhere else.
Sort of like the other whispers she’d heard, but not really. When she’d sorta-kinda overheard the Astrals muttering their plans, that had been like unintentional eavesdropping — like overhearing conversation in a public place.
But most of all, sort of like what she’d felt when the Pall had been with them. When it had first appeared outside Benjamin Bannister’s Moab ranch. When it had followed Peers’s battle-converted bus. When it had taken the shapes of people it pretended to be.
Nick turned and looked at her.
“Were you … ?” He was beyond tentative — the way a boy who likes a girl asks if she likes him, too.
“Yes.”
“What was it? Has that happened to you before?”
“Maybe. Sort of. But not like … Nick?”
He looked beaten up. Like all of the others. They were dazed, eyeing each other while trying not to look directly. A few were leaving their hypnosis, but Clara could still feel it clinging to her like cobwebs.
“I need to talk to Logan.”
“Nick, listen.”
But he was walking away, back toward the group, headed to where he’d been when whatever-it-was had struck them all blind, just as Clara was saying she could hear the Astrals talking to each other: that the blood water was playing and that something much worse — heralded by static blasts and beeps — was surely coming.
“Nick!”
Clara followed, swatting at the vision’s final remnants. She could still see the man in her mind, still feel the rock seat beneath her, as they’d sat on opposite sides of a mental fire. In her vision, the denim-clad man had looked comfortable, leaning back on his rock in what seemed like a dark desert night. He’d pulled something from his pocket and played with it like twiddling a pen — No, no, Clara thought, it had been small silver balls. He’d told her something that her conscious mind was already losing its grip on, though her deeper mind had clung tight.
Let’s have a palaver, you and me.
And the silver balls, they’d danced in his palm and rolled across his large knuckles as he spoke, effortless, as if the man barely knew they were there.
And the man had said something. About someone. About her. About all of the Lightborn. Maybe even to all of the Lightborn, judging by the others’ behavior. Had they been there around the fire with her and the stranger?
Did I ever tell you about my cousin Timmy?
As Clara followed L
ogan to the knot of Lightborn in the middle of the Hideout, she felt a familiar feeling returning. Like déjà vu in a way: Clara plodding slowly into a situation she’d just left, like the ring of Lightborn joining the tall man around the fire.
Clara felt herself joining something bigger than herself. Uploading her consciousness the way her grandfather was always uploading reports to the network in Heaven’s Veil. Her focus stayed present in the room, and her human eyes watched the others as they assembled — but still she could feel that transfer of consciousness at the same time.
It wasn’t like the telepathy she’d felt with Nick and Ella.
This was something immersive. Something bigger than conversation.
She was joining them. They were all joining each other.
And as each of them began to understand, paralysis shattered. Clara felt the enhanced collective thinking like a single mind. Like the Astrals.
Like the Astrals expected us to think when they showed up. Only better. Newer. Version 2.0. We’re something new. Something that couldn’t have existed before.
Logan stood in the group’s center. They’d assembled into a small crowd. A group of children beginning to see the truth.
Logan looked at Clara. She hadn’t met him yet, but now, after whatever had happened, she found she didn’t need to. He knew her fully. She knew him. She knew Logan the way one arm on a body knows the other. The way a hand knows its fingers.
Her mind was still her own.
But it was theirs now, too.
“Do we stay?” Logan asked Clara. “Or do we go?”
A buzz of thoughts came from below, from all directions, every voice. And yet each struck Clara as a different version of her own.
the vessel
the lottery
the flood
Clara saw the man by the fire, in his scuffed brown boots. She saw a ship left by the Astrals — the Noah’s Ark that could save only a few. She saw the giant black Deathbringer the stranger had shown them, drifting above the polar ice. She saw death. She saw the network, knew that death no longer strictly mattered.