by Sean Platt
“Shit,” said Kindred.
Peers looked at Kindred. Piper and Lila looked at Meyer.
“They’re not here, are they? The subs. They all broke away.”
But Meyer didn’t need his Kindred connection to figure out this particular logical puzzle.
“At least one of them is still here, all right,” he said, “but it’s trapped under the dock.”
CHAPTER 28
Sadeem Hajjar paced the all-white room, wondering exactly where he was supposed to sit — if he was supposed to. The walls were featureless, and the space had no furniture of any sort. Ceilings and floors blended into the walls in huge, drain pipe-sized rounded corners. If the room were to roll end for end, a child could keep sliding from wall to floor, floor to wall, wall to ceiling, over and over, laughing with boundless glee.
Sadeem, on the other hand, was not feeling joyful at all. His glee had many boundaries. He’d thought more than once that he was nervous enough to shit date pits, then actually laughed aloud — something that made him all the more aware of just how nervous he truly was. Nothing bad had happened, but he almost wished something would. The waiting was so much worse. He was so nervous he couldn’t stand, and yet it felt wrong to sit cross-legged on the floor. This was its own water torture: put a man in a room, then let him be. Anticipation could kill him.
A door at the room’s far end opened. Sadeem hadn’t realized it was there. He knew there was a door in here somewhere because a Titan had ushered him through when he’d come over from the Ember Flats mothership. But he’d lost his location the moment he’d turned around. It was like being lost in the world’s easiest maze.
A woman stepped through the door. Something in her manner immediately told Sadeem that she wasn’t human, nor was she the Divinity who’d spoken with him earlier, before they’d brought him to the big black ship. The Ember Flats Divinity (and this assumed they didn’t rotate forms, which they might) was entirely different. This one — presumably head of the fleet’s biggest ship — was still a woman, but the first ship’s Divinity was brunette where this one was blonde. The first wore no-nonsense human pants and a no-nonsense human blouse. This one was in a red dress, just above the knee. It made Sadeem uncomfortable to see so much skin, but it had been a long time since he’d seen his first Western woman or been truly shocked by their immodesty.
Except that she wasn’t a Western woman, nor was she a woman at all.
“If you are fatigued, you may sit.”
Sadeem was about to ask where exactly he was supposed to do so, but then part of the floor slid slowly upward behind him, forming an all-white stool that looked like a stump blooming from the all-white floor.
“Thank you.”
“Your name is Sadeem Hajjar.”
“And you are?”
“We are Eternity.”
“I thought you called your command caste ‘Divinity.’”
“Divinity control those under a single ship. We control Divinity.”
“Where are the rest of you? The rest of Eternity?”
“Who is the Stranger?”
Sadeem blinked. It was as if she’d heard his question then decided to deliberately ignore it. To blindside him with yet another question that meant nothing.
“What stranger?”
“The one who speaks for you as we speak for us.”
The use of double plurals confused Sadeem, but he recovered, still unsure what the woman was talking about.
“Nobody speaks for all of us.”
“We sampled him. He browsed our repository, and when he was gone we had our imprint. But he is not what he claimed to be.”
“I’m sorry; I have no idea who you’re talking about.” Then, sure he was being unhelpful: “Can you describe him?”
In an instant, a tall, long-faced man wearing a plain button-up shirt, jeans, and scuffed brown boots appeared before Sadeem. He blinked so quickly into existence that Sadeem staggered backward away from him, shocked. Then a shiver of interference ran through the man, and Sadeem realized he wasn’t actually there. The man was merely a projection.
Sadeem stood. Examined the man.
“I don’t know who this is.”
“He speaks for you.”
“He doesn’t speak for me.”
“He is your nexus. We see it in his trace. Do not try and fool or deceive us. Who is he?”
The woman’s voice had become short, almost angry. Her shoulder-length blonde hair bounced as she spoke. She was slim but full in all the right places. Sadeem found himself inexplicably attracted, despite knowing what she was, despite knowing that even if she was human, he was probably thirty years too old for her.
“I … I’m sorry. I have no idea.”
She seemed to make an effort to contain herself. Sadeem wondered what her brief spat of anger might mean, and what it meant that the Astrals’ highest class — one higher than the wisest Elders even thought to exist (commanding the Dark Rider) had so accurately and completely embodied human sex appeal.
“You are Mullah.”
“Yes.”
“You keep our portal. We have always communicated.”
“Our eldest Elders have. I have never seen the portal.”
“Who among you is senior? Who would know this stranger?”
“I don’t know. We were scattered. You sent in drones. You took me away and left at least some of the others. So many of our groups have already come under attack. You probably killed our eldest. If anyone would know about us other than me, it’s whoever sent drones to invade us.”
“The drones were not invading. We have always respected peace with the portal-keepers.”
“Is that why you flooded our chambers with flying BBs?” It was Sadeem’s turn to be angry. In all the confusion and panic of abduction (and worry over Clara, who had at least blessedly seemed to stay hidden), he’d turned penitent. But Eternity was correct: The Astrals were supposed to respect the peace. On the human side, there had always been the Mullah, keepers of the portal. It wasn’t correct to say they were allies. The way Sadeem’s teacher had explained it to him had always seemed most accurate: The Mullah were mediators and mitigators. They accepted that the Astrals would eventually return, and did what they could to make sure the damage they inevitably did was as minimal — and painless — as possible.
“We were sweeping the area.”
“Then why bring me to your ship? Why did you take me from that ship onto this one?”
“The drones must have detected an anomaly. Something you were hiding. Otherwise you would not have been flagged.”
Clara? No, certainly not. Even as he’d been dragged away and losing consciousness, Sadeem had seen that the closet was still sealed, Clara almost for-sure knocked out by the incapacitating gas. The drones had moved on. There’d been nothing to alert them of a reason to return.
Clara was safe. He had to keep believing that. The Lightborn were this epoch’s wild card. Sadeem didn’t know why their puzzle-solving minds were so important or what had caused them to become as they were. He only knew that it mattered — and that the Astrals, last time he’d heard, hadn’t a clue.
“I wasn’t hiding anything.”
The woman pointed to the hologram.
“You have never seen this man?”
“No. Never.”
“He is not a leader? He does not represent humanity?”
“Not as far as I know. What makes you think he is?”
Sadeem watched the woman think, wondering distantly if she actually was thinking in a way he understood thought. Probably not. Divinity — and now Eternity — always referred to “we” instead of “I.” The Mullah knew they thought in a collective. From an Astral perspective, humans simply didn’t understand reality: that individual beings were instances of something larger, not entities in and of themselves. The thought he was seeing on the woman’s face was probably Eternity’s interpretation of modern humanity combining with Sadeem’s own prejudices. The real cogitation wa
s happening somewhere else. Maybe everywhere else.
“This man came to us. He requested an audience with Ember Flats’s Divinity. He exhibited certain … unusual mental attributes.” She took a step forward, hips swaying as if with intention. “He told us that the Mullah were hiding something. Something you have not yet admitted to.”
“Then he was lying.” Sadeem’s heart beat harder. He hoped sensors on the big black ship couldn’t see or hear it.
“He had knowledge he should not have had. Knowledge he said we did not possess, but required. He made a bargain.”
“What kind of a bargain?”
“We gave him limited access to an inconsequential data stream. We thought we pattern-tracked him but we did not and the match fell apart. By the time this was discovered and we realized a need to access the man’s mind again, we were unable to find him.”
Sadeem looked at the hologram. He’d thought it was motionless and that the small movements he could sense were merely a shimmer, but as he watched it now, the hologram reached into its pocket. The hand came out with three sliver spheres, and rolled them across its palm.
The hologram blinked away and was gone. When Sadeem turned back to the woman, her unflappable Astral countenance seemed disturbed.
“The Mullah scrolls tell us the Horsemen lack emotion. Out of academic curiosity, is that true?”
The woman’s face again became wooden. “Your scrolls are accurate.”
But that wasn’t true. Intentionally or not, Eternity aboard the Dark Rider had presented itself as a sexually interesting human female sending out all the right signals. It had become angry when Sadeem appeared ignorant. And now, when the hologram had raised its hand, Eternity had grown flustered. Why?
“Why do you want to find this man so badly?” Sadeem asked.
“He has information we require. Information you have been brought here to provide.”
“Which information?”
“The children you call the Lightborn.”
Sadeem stifled his shock. And fear. She’d already mentioned that the Mullah were possibly hiding something. Hopefully the two weren’t connected: hiding the Lightborn from Astral eyes.
“What about them?”
“What are they?”
“They are children.”
“But they are different.”
“Many children are different.”
“Do not be obtuse. Our drones have observed you in safe zones, where our treaty permits. You have displayed intense interest in them. You have proposed the solution lies in puzzles.”
“You misunderstand. There is no solution. The children are merely precocious. They grow and develop early. They are highly intelligent and creative.”
“What causes them to?”
“I do not know. Perhaps they are a symptom of being raised in Astral presence, or around your impressive repeating stones.” Sadeem watched the woman, wondering if Eternity’s surprising Astral emotion was immune to flattery.
“Why do they interest you?”
“They simply do. What interests you?”
“They are an aberration. Why does your interest in them center on games and puzzles?”
“Why does it matter?”
“That is not of your concern. You will be kept here until you assist us.”
“Why don’t you just suck the thoughts out of my head?”
The woman’s face contorted slightly: another semi-emotional response, indicating that he’d inadvertently stumped her. Apparently the Astrals couldn’t just suck the information out of his head, or they’d have already done it. And whoever this man with the silver spheres was, he and whatever he’d almost told Divinity about the Lightborn before vanishing mattered a hell of a lot.
“The man in question told us that the Lightborn would see through a certain ruse. We presented the bloodwater out of the archive of human expectation as we’ve gathered through our repeater stones, but it was only presented to gather attention. The humans took it as a plague, but it was not. As many things are not as they seem.”
“What things?”
The woman seemed to decide she’d said enough. “That is not of your concern. The man told us that the Lightborn would not be fooled. It did not matter. We observed he was correct. There was a dangerous fault in his frequency, and so we corrected it as he exited his view into our stream. There was no reason to keep him. He was dropped off outside Ember Flats.”
“And?”
Another uncomfortable look. “It seems this man was able to open windows we did not anticipate. Windows we used to access this planet from our own.”
“Like the portal? The one in the Mullah Temple?”
“Like that window and others. There are substances that alter consciousness here and give humanity access to a connection to the collective mind that it otherwise lacks. This man can do this without those substances.”
“He can get high without getting high?”
Her features sharpened. “There is pollution in your stream now. At each point, around your planet, we are seeing disturbances to the expected flow that seem to have no cause. We have recursively scanned our records, including those from the past epoch from our judgment archive, and the only likely conclusion was that we have simply been unable to see the Lightborn minds except in moments of extreme signaling.”
Sadeem had already figured that out. It’s why he’d hidden Clara.
“You mean you can’t hear them unless they’re emotional?”
“So you do know of them.”
“Only from personal curiosity.”
“Because the disturbances around the globe seem to have no traceable origin, we believe they were begun by Lightborn. But our own investigations show that although your children have stronger mental gifts than the rest of you, it has a limited range.”
“So?”
“Ships that have managed to find Lightborn children since and investigate them have found that the children share something in common. One thing. They believe they’ve been contacted by someone from another place. Someone able to open windows.”
“Your man in boots.”
The woman nodded.
Sadeem waited, realizing it was apparently his turn to speak.
“Someone’s running amok, telling the planet’s Lightborn to … cause disturbances of some sort,” Sadeem said.
“In the stream,” the woman clarified. “It’s misdirected and unexpected. The only pattern seems to be an intention to cause disturbance. To initiate chaos.”
“So what do you want from me? Why don’t you poke your Horsemen heads into the portal and shut the windows for good? You have ships around the world. You hold the upper hand.”
The woman said nothing.
“You can’t do it, can you? Whoever this man is, he’s beating you, isn’t he?”
Sadeem looked up at the woman. Her fists were clenched. Her face was set. And for the fraction of a second, her eyes flashed as red as her dress.
In a blip, the floor seemed to vanish. Sadeem thought he might fall but then realized he was on something clearer than glass, looking down on an endless expanse of blank white nothingness.
He was seeing the ground, far below his feet. And judging by the horizon’s curvature and the black space beyond, he knew the enormous black ship must be very high up.
A blue glow seemed to bloom from the center of the floor — from the bottom of the ship, far below.
It grew.
And it grew.
“Where are we?” He looked at the stark white landscape below. “What happened to Ember Flats?”
“The Deathbringer is no longer above Ember Flats.”
He looked down. He saw nothing but white snow and ice, shrouded in the darkness of a six-month night.
“Let us see,” the blonde woman said, “who is beating whom.”
CHAPTER 29
Lila ran down the shallow embankment, heels skidding in the sandy soil. She’d left the car door open behind her. Mara’s tablet
was safe from the pounding rain for now, sitting on the opposite seat. But the passenger side of the wreck, where Lila had been sitting and pretending to be staying out of the way, was getting soaked. She’d need to return for the tablet, and take pains to make sure it was stowed dry and sealed.
But for now there was only the panic.
“Dad! Piper!”
They could barely hear her. The rain’s intensity and the sound of its assault had tripled. Her father, Kindred, Piper, and Peers were being pelted with fat streams of water as they waded into the rising Nile, trying and failing to hold onto each other for support. Not long ago — about the time Lila decided the feeds weren’t going to show Clara simply walking past — there’d been hail. The others had simply stood in the open through it. Even Nocturne was helping. He was on the shore, barking at the water.
“Dad!”
Instead of turning, leaving the water, and running to help her, he dove in headfirst.
“DAD!” Lila shrieked, watching him vanish, the fear over her news temporarily lost in a certainty that he wouldn’t surface, that she’d seen the real Meyer Dempsey — former movie studio mogul, father who’d wanted to ditch Raj in New Jersey, and had maybe been right all along — for the final time.
But then the surface broke, and she saw him paddling among the flotsam. He was more treading water sideways than swimming properly; the surface wasn’t as turbulent near the shores as it was in the middle. But then Meyer reached the current and changed to a forward crawl, kicking in what Lila was shocked to see were the same black dress shoes he’d worn for his State of the City what felt like a thousand years ago. They’d bog him down. He’d drown because he hadn’t removed his stupid shoes.
She was in water to her ankles. To her calves. To her knees. She’d waded nearly to the point where Meyer had started swimming when Kindred’s hand wrapped around her upper arm.
And he said, “Don’t.”
She wouldn’t leap into the water. She wasn’t crazy, like her father. And yet she felt Kindred gripping hard to hold her back because her muscles were fighting to go, to follow, to do something, anything.