Annex

by Rich Larson

  Violet walked a tight circle around the room as she thought, trailing her hand on the wall, looking for an exit but not finding one. The ship was massive, and she didn’t have Mr. Gloomy to guide her around, but she reasoned she couldn’t be far from the room with the tanks. If this was where they worked on tuning the Parasites, it would only make sense to keep the kids somewhere nearby. She didn’t know if she would be able to find the tanks on her own, but she could try.

  If Bo was alive, and if him and Gloom had found a way back aboard the ship—both were big ifs—they would head for the same place. To his sister and the other kids. And if Bo wasn’t coming, then Violet would have to save the world herself.

  Her Parasite wriggled and she gave up on finding an exit. She was tuned. Maybe even better than Bo was, because the Parasite was ready for action again. Static crackled up through her belly and she unleashed it at the smooth wall, ripping a chunk of it away and opening onto a corridor. The tiny hairs on her arms shivered. Her jaw was clenched tight, but she could feel a fierce kind of smile tugging at her lips as she set off down the corridor.

  Bo was up on the theater roof. Night had already fallen, and without the ship drifting overhead there was no light to illuminate the city. No streetlamps, no lit windows. He could picture the wasters all staggering through the dark, banging into doorways and corners, but it didn’t seem funny how it might have once.

  He was sitting in the dent of the electrical box, swinging his legs so the heels of his sneakers thudded against the metal in rhythm. A cold night breeze slipped over his shaved skull and ruffled his clothes, but he didn’t feel the chill. He was wired. Everyone was. The air inside the theater seemed to buzz from all the preparation, the anticipation. He’d disinfected all the small cuts he’d sustained with rubbing alcohol, taken a few Tylenol for his head. Then he’d come up to keep watch with Gloom, who was standing very still and very straight in the middle of the rooftop, neck craned back, eyes on the sky.

  “What’ll it look like?” Bo asked. “The test.”

  “I do not know,” Gloom said. “But I will know it when I see it.”

  Bo nodded. He thought about the kids bobbing in the tanks and how one of the tanks was maybe empty by now. Maybe one of the kids was already in the machine.

  “It’s going to be Lia,” he said, without thinking. “Isn’t it?”

  Gloom looked over at him.

  “You said it was in the genes,” Bo said. “To be compatible, or whatever. She has the same genes as I do.”

  “Compatibility with the key is not entirely based on genetics,” Gloom said. “But it is likely that they will use her. Yes.”

  Bo thought the words would hit him harder. Maybe he’d known it all along, in the back of his head. Lia had always been bigger than him. Smarter. No way would she end up with a worse Parasite than his.

  But Bo had been luckier. He’d gotten out of the warehouse. He’d met Violet. He’d jumped off the ship and survived.

  Now he only needed to be lucky one last time.

  “Do you have a family, Gloom?” Bo asked, looking at the sky. “I didn’t think about it before. Should’ve asked you.”

  “In a way,” Gloom said. “Do you know about cells, Bo?”

  “Sort of,” Bo said. “We did diagrams last year.”

  “My motes are like my cells,” Gloom said. “And I am like a cell of a larger Gloom. Larger than you can understand. Stretching through space. Burrowing into asteroids. Feeding off the stars.” His face contorted, looking pained. “It is very beautiful, Bo,” he said. “More beautiful than you can understand. But I am not a part of it anymore.”

  Bo tried to imagine it, but kept seeing Gloom in his human shape curling up around the sun, hanging his hat on the moon. He didn’t think it looked like that. It would have to be more like a dark, living cloud so big it covered up the stars. Bo wondered what kind of war you could have against a cloud.

  “You got sent away to sabotage the ship,” he said. “Yeah?”

  “I was cut off long before that,” Gloom said sadly. “I was a deviation. My motes are corrupted. Mutated. Mutation is our greatest fear. So, I was cut away. They altered my replication drives, so I cannot create new motes on my own either.” His lips formed a melancholy smile. “I was a deviation. Now I am a saboteur. They sent me away to be useful.”

  “Will they let you back?” Bo asked. “If we win, I mean. If you finish your mission.”

  “No,” Gloom said. “I am too corrupted. I have become unique.” His voice was still heavy, but Bo thought he detected a bit of pride in the last word. “Now I have only my own motes, and I will never connect to the whole again.” Gloom paused. “But I will finish my mission. I am a saboteur.”

  Bo felt a spark of anger at the unfairness, at Gloom being cut off and sent away on a mission he wasn’t supposed to come back from.

  “You’ve got me now,” he said fiercely. “And the other Lost Boys too, when they’re not spooked of you anymore. Violet. Lia. If you can’t go back to yours, you can be one of us.”

  Gloom stared at him for a long moment. “Thank you, Bo.”

  Bo shrugged. Gloom turned his attention back toward the dark sky, and Bo did the same. They watched in silence. Now that the ship was floating in the water off the docks, the sky seemed twice as big, a vast black dome. Even without the ship’s pale yellow lights, and without the lights of the city, Bo couldn’t see any stars. They were hidden the same way the sun was hidden during the day, cloaked by the thick banks of cloud.

  Bo thought about Gloom’s people, whatever they looked like, stretched far out in space. And there was a fleet of black ships waiting somewhere out there too, waiting for the door to open. It made him feel smaller than he’d ever felt. He didn’t like it. He was about to go back down the stairs when the sky split in two.

  At first he thought it was lightning, but no lightning had ever looked like this, a twisting pillar of violent greens and electric purples, so bright it stung his eyes as it streamed up into the darkness. Bo felt the hum of it in his jawbone, in his clenched teeth. Every hair on his body lifted at once; the fabric of his shirt rustled like a living thing. His Parasite crackled. Bo looked wide-eyed over at Gloom. His gaunt face seemed hollow in the stark light and his mouth was set, grim.

  Then the pillar was gone, plunging them back into blackness. Bo blinked hard at the spots swimming past his eyes. The static slowly settled. He breathed in. Out.

  Gloom was right. It didn’t look anything like a door. Bo glanced over to him for confirmation. Gloom nodded his head. Adjusted his bowler hat.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  28

  Down in the theater lobby, everyone was gearing up, already dressed in their darkest clothes. Bo saw the old homemade blackjacks and police batons and some of the hooks they’d used on the pod. Elliot was passing out chunky neon water guns to the under-tens, canisters already sloshing full. Jon was pulling a camping backpack onto his broad shoulders to carry the other supplies. Nobody spoke. Everyone was focused and grim-faced.

  Bo picked a collapsible baton and hooked it into the elastic of his waistband. His Parasite was on the move again, and he thought he could feel static off everyone else’s too, even the inactive ones. His eyes trailed over the other Lost Boys. Gilly and Saif were helping Alberto fit a black bag over his water gun to hide the color. Bree was slapping a baton rhythmically into her palm, staring off into space. Elliot was testing his rigged lighters now with a click-hiss, click-hiss.

  It seemed impossible that it was only a few days ago they’d set out like this to kill othermothers, to catch the pod. It felt like a lifetime.

  Things would be different tonight. More dangerous. And he knew now that he couldn’t trust Wyatt. He liked to think he could trust the other kids, but if it came down to picking Bo or picking the boy who’d cut out his own Parasite, the boy who’d been waiting for them with open arms when they escaped the warehouses, he didn’t know what would happen.

  His gaze
fell on a familiar black duffel bag, sitting untouched in the corner of the lobby. Violet would pick him over Wyatt. He knew that. Once they found Violet, he would have someone he trusted with his life. Bo went over to the corner and unzipped the duffel. A few of the Lost Boys glanced over at the noise, but nobody said anything as he pulled the chrome baseball bat out.

  “Ready, Bo?”

  Bo flipped the bat up onto his shoulder and turned. Wyatt was dressed all in black, with his injured hand wrapped tight in sports tape and a crowbar clutched in the other. If he noticed Violet’s bat he didn’t show it. His gray eyes glinted and it looked like he was clamping down a grin.

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “Ready.”

  “Do or die,” Wyatt said firmly, and clapped him on his arm, just above the elbow. He circulated through the others, doing the same thing, sometimes leaning in close to whisper a few words, sometimes just looking them in the eye. Gloom had slithered down the stairwell and was waiting by the door now, watching.

  When Wyatt was finished, he walked past Gloom, out of the theater, and the Lost Boys all followed behind him for what Bo knew was maybe the last time. He brought up the rear with Gloom, last one out. When the doors screeched and thumped shut behind him, he swung the two-by-four back into place to keep them that way. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though they might never come back.

  With no ship in the sky, the night was black as pitch. Wyatt and Jon led the way with their flashlights, carving up the dark. Normally the younger kids might have skipped ahead, chasing the beams of light, but not tonight. Tonight they marched. It was cold enough now that Bo could see the plumes of Jon’s breath. The flashlight played over the husks of cars, the cracked tarmac, once a wandering waster, illuminating them for brief instants before the dark sucked them back again. The route back to the warehouses was dreamily familiar.

  Bo couldn’t help but think back to the night he’d escaped, how he ran and ran with no destination, feeling an increasing dread at the ruined buildings and the gaunt staggering adults who could no longer see him. They’d looked like something out of a nightmare then.

  Now Gloom was stepping soundlessly beside him, his eyes turned to dark hollows under the brim of his hat, and Wyatt was leading the way with that feral grin on his face. Bo didn’t know what nightmares were meant to look like anymore.

  There was a click as Wyatt switched off his flashlight for the last stretch, and another when Jon followed suit. Bo blinked in the sudden dark. They were at the corner of a blackened apartment building.

  “Hold up for a second,” Wyatt’s voice came, low but clear. “Let our eyes adjust.”

  They stayed for a ten-count, until Bo could mostly make out Gilly’s grave face across from him, then Wyatt motioned them on. As they rounded the corner, the jagged shifting silhouette of the wormy wall came into view. It wasn’t as high as Bo remembered it.

  The others stopped and Bo stepped forward. The hole he’d ripped in it so long ago, back before he’d known what his Parasite was even capable of, was gone. He hadn’t really expected it to still be there. If he’d left a mark or scar, it was invisible in the dark.

  Wyatt gave a curt nod. Bo’s Parasite was already turning, twisting, ready. The static crackled, enough so sparks ran up his body and one leapt to Wyatt. Wyatt didn’t flinch. He had the greedy look on his face again, the same he’d had when he tried to take Bo’s Parasite for his own. Bo was glad to see Gloom lurking behind him.

  The wormy wall had noticed them, reaching out with its tendrils like a squid. Bo let the static go. It rippled the air and ripped a swathe out of the wall. A shudder went through the intact part of it, all the tendrils flailing madly. Bo looked through the hole he’d made and saw the bare black tarmac of the parking lot he’d sprinted through the night he escaped. Beyond it, the hulking outlines of the warehouses.

  He’d daydreamed this, coming back to the warehouses to free everybody, coming back strong and sure. He knew it wasn’t going to be like the daydreams, but he let the adrenaline carry him along with the other Lost Boys as they streamed through the shattered wormy wall. The nearest warehouse was Bo’s. His legs carried him down the alley to the fire door almost on autopilot, remembering the mad chase, the pod huffing behind him.

  At the fire door, Gilly screwed up her face and shifted the locking bar just long enough for Jenna and Elliot to haul the door open. She’d been practicing, and Wyatt thought it was better to conserve Bo’s Parasite for the big vanishes. For a moment everyone stood still around the dark mouth of the warehouse door, all remembering the time they’d spent inside, the smelly cots and the whirlybirds and the needles.

  Wyatt went first. But then, he’d never spent time in the warehouses—Bo knew that now. He followed a few steps behind. The familiar smell of dust and chemicals filled his nose. Wyatt’s flashlight clicked to life and its beam raked over the stalled forklift, the piled crates, the powerjack, the high metal shelves and stacks of splintery wood pallets. The kids would all be in their beds by now. The whirlybirds would be drifting over them, watching them.

  Bree found the light switches on the wall and toggled them up and down, but nothing happened. Maybe they were disconnected, or maybe the aliens had never bothered to get the electricity running again. Maybe the kids had been living in the dark ever since it went out. Bo grimaced at the thought. The rest of the Lost Boys were inside now, fingering their weapons, looking around. Gloom came in last, ducking to fit under the doorframe. The top of his hat splattered against it and re-formed on the other side.

  “The diagnostic drones know we are here,” he said tersely. “They are coming toward us from that direction.” He pointed with one long finger, and a second later Bo could hear it too: the familiar high-pitched whine that still made him shiver.

  “How many whirlys were in this building?” Wyatt asked, handing his flashlight off to Elliot and taking out the crowbar he’d tucked under his armpit. Bo racked his memory. He had never seen all the whirlybirds in one place, and it was impossible to tell them apart.

  “Maybe ten, maybe twelve,” he said.

  Wyatt only grinned, spinning and catching the crowbar in his good hand, as the whine intensified. Everyone tensed, readied themselves. Jon turned his flashlight back on and pointed it toward the direction of the noise. Elliot’s beam joined it just as the first whirlybirds appeared, humming forward, claws extended. Bo tightened his grip on Violet’s bat.

  Maybe it was the one that had done his Parasite. It didn’t matter. Bo took a running start and swung as hard as he could. The impact jarred all the way to his shoulder, but he felt something crack apart inside the whirlybird and it dropped like a stone. Wyatt had the next one, the edge of his crowbar whistling as it came down, and then Bree was in the fray, and Jon swinging his blackjack. It was chaos. Elliot’s roving flashlight put it into stop motion, all jerky silhouettes and faces frozen in frenzy. Gloom was threading through it all like a living shadow.

  The whine had filled Bo’s ears, rising and falling, and then all at once he couldn’t hear it anymore. All he could hear was heavy breathing, Bree cursing, someone stomping on a fallen whirlybird over and over again, crunching it into the concrete.

  “Everyone good?” Wyatt panted. “Bring the light, El.”

  Bo doubled over with the bat on his knees, breathing hard, then straightened. He wasn’t sure how many he’d gotten. Maybe three. He wasn’t sure how many were smashed onto the floor and how many might still be waiting in the sleeping rooms. Elliot shone the light around. Some scratches on Jon’s arm that he only shrugged at, a swelling bruise where Alberto had accidentally elbowed Saif in the face. Nothing serious.

  Everyone stood, collecting their breath, ears keen for the sound of more whirlybirds. Elliot was trying to take a count from the wreckage, but they were all tangled together or ripped apart and it was hard to tell. When he brought the light back up, pointing toward the other side of the room, Bo gave a start. Caught in the beam, blinking, wearing sleepy-curious expressions,
were a handful of kids from the sleeping rooms. They were all soft and pale and wore the rags of the clothes they’d been captured in. He recognized a few of them.

  “Are there any more whirlys back there?” Bo asked.

  The kids stared. Bo could tell from their glazed eyes that they’d been drinking the water for a long time. Then one girl cut through from the back, pulling stringy blonde hair out of her face, and Bo recognized Ferris immediately. She wasn’t dull or smiling.

  “We trapped one in a closet,” she said. “You got the rest. Is that you, Bo?”

  Bo didn’t have time to answer before Bree’s baton clattered to the floor and she flew past him, wrapping up her cousin in a fierce hug. Ferris’s eyes went wide, then she realized who it was and hugged back. Bree was sobbing, louder than Bo had ever heard her in the night, and Gilly was scampering around her anxiously, patting her back. Bree didn’t push her away. She dragged her in too, holding her against her hip with one arm.

  Bo looked away, feeling like he was watching something private and feeling a hard lump in his throat too. He wished Elliot would move the beam again. The other Lost Boys had a variety of expressions, from shocked to happy to jealous, but only Gloom and Wyatt were blank-faced, unmoved. Bo knew they were thinking of the time they didn’t have to waste.

  “Ferris, right?” Wyatt said loudly.

  Bree’s cousin disentangled herself, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Yeah.”

  “I need you to get the other kids out of bed,” Wyatt said. “All of them. Bree, go with her.”

  Bo didn’t think Wyatt could have kept them separate if he tried. They hurried away into the dark, leaving Gilly looking a little lost. Bo put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. All the Lost Boys stood in taut silence, waiting. Bo noticed the smashed whirlybirds had left some of their black fluids spattered on the chrome of Violet’s baseball bat. He wiped it down with his sleeve, thinking, vaguely, that she would want it to be clean when he gave it back to her.