by Rich Larson
Blood was rushing in his ears; his Parasite was kicking at him. He couldn’t swim how Lia did. He was clumsy in the water. Slow. But he was going to make it to the ship. He was going to make it back inside. A swell caught him off guard and cold saltwater rushed up his nose. He choked but kept moving, stroke after stroke, dragging himself along the surface. From behind him he heard a dim splash.
“Bo!” It was Violet’s voice, garbled by water. “It’s too late, Bo. Come back.”
But Bo knew he could make it. He just had to keep pushing. Pods streamed overhead, racing back to the ship, knowing something was wrong. Bo’s muscles were screaming and his breath was ragged, his chest stitched tight. He spat out another mouthful of seawater. Static was swirling all through him. His Parasite was going mad, spasming around in his gut. The dark wall of the ship was getting closer. Closer.
A blinding burst of light, electric green shot through with purple, stamped across his eyes. The hum was back, the deep hum that he could feel in his bones. Desperate, Bo threw himself into the next stroke, thrashing his way through the freezing water, losing any shred of technique. The ship was enveloped in the dancing light. The door was open.
And just as suddenly, it was shut and the ship was gone. Bo’s anguished shout was lost in the roar of water rushing to fill the empty space. He was sucked under, tossed hard in the foam, losing up and down as he pinwheeled. Icy water filled his mouth and nose and he wondered if he was going to drown, after everything he’d survived, if he was going to drown right here in the city harbor. He was completely submerged and couldn’t tell which way was up.
A hand grabbed the back of his shirt, then his arm. He felt Violet give two powerful kicks and they broke the surface. Bo choked out a stream of water and mucus. There was a sharp ache in the center of his chest and he could hear Violet gasping for breath beside him. She was treading water, still holding onto him, keeping him afloat.
“It’s okay, Bo.” He finally realized she was speaking, saying the same thing over and over. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
But as the water turned his legs numb, as the dark shape of the boat circled back to retrieve them, he could tell from the ragged sound of her voice that she didn’t believe it either.
32
The harbor was black as pitch and the inside of the boat was silent. A few pods that hadn’t made it back to the ship before it vanished moved in the distance, making agitated circles over the water. Violet kept waiting for the door to reappear, for the green and purple light to split the sky again, but nothing happened. The ship was gone, and Bo’s sister was gone with it.
Gloom was steering them back to the docks. “I know how it feels to lose motes,” he finally said. “I know it is difficult.”
Violet braced for Bo to explode, but his voice came small and shaky. “She’s not a mote,” he said. “Lia is not a mote. She’s not a part of me.” His eyes were shot through with pink, staring down between his feet. “She was a whole other person.”
“I am sorry I deceived you,” Gloom said. “There was no other way. The key must remain in the machine for the door to open.” His expression morphed, turning from sadness to bewilderment. “I thought you would be happy, Bo. You and the other children are safe. Your world is safe. Your city is free.”
“Shut your mouth, Gloom,” Violet said.
He did, which surprised her a bit. The boat drew closer to the docks, and Violet realized the sky was clearing, the omnipresent gray clouds dissolving. Without any city lights to drown them, she could see the stars clearly for the first time since she’d gone camping as a kid. They looked like glittering glass shards strewn through the dark. It was so fucking beautiful she almost forgot to be sad.
Jon and Bree, who’d been respectively watching and trying not to watch Bo, looked up at them too. Wyatt had his eyes shut, his head tipped back, a smile curling his lips like he was basking in everything that had happened. He thought he’d saved the world. And if it really had been the only way, leaving Lia inside the machine, then maybe he and Gloom had made the right decision. In a tiny nasty part of her, Violet was even glad about it. Bo was starting over, the same way she was. Back to zero for each of them. No happy easy endings.
But she knew that Bo would never be able to look at a night sky without wondering where his sister had been disappeared to.
There was a crowd of kids waiting for them at the quay. Most of them Violet didn’t recognize—the ones freed from the warehouses, she figured—but right at the front were the last of the Lost Boys. Everyone was whooping and hollering as the boat drew in, but when the Lost Boys caught sight of Violet they stared like she was a ghost. She waved to Elliot, and after a few stunned seconds got a shy wave back.
Wyatt swung out of the boat first, raising his arms all triumphant, and the Lost Boys swarmed him, some of the new kids from the warehouses too. They stared up at him like he was a god, or maybe a dad. Violet didn’t know which was worse. Jon climbed out next, and then Bree. Gilly, followed by a blonde-haired girl Violet didn’t recognize, hurled herself onto Bree’s back, saying something about all the whirlybirds dropping dead at once.
Violet looked over at Bo, who still hadn’t budged. He didn’t look like he would ever be happy again. She thought about dragging him up into the celebration, knowing the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week, would be a whirlwind that might take Lia off his mind. If Gloom was right and the fog at the city limits was clearing the same way the sky had, the rest of the world would be clamoring to know what had been going on for the past four months.
The thought of all the news crews and cameras made her feel slightly queasy. Now was the time to get one final supply run in, get new clothes, new pills, enough cash to be exactly who she wanted—there was nobody left to report thefts—and get out of the city for good. Start over somewhere new.
Her Parasite rippled in her stomach, a reminder that starting over was tough to do. She looked at Bo again, whose face was still so lost and so shocked. She looked up at the jetty, at Wyatt, remembering the static swirling around inside her as she’d stared at him back aboard the ship, preparing to make him disappear.
Gloom clambered up into the boat now, folding his long legs underneath himself. He stared guiltily at Bo.
“Gloom,” Violet said. “What happens to a person if you vanish them?”
Bo’s head jerked up.
Gloom opened his mouth. “They are not vanishing,” he said. “They are passing through the door. Survival would depend on the conditions on the other side of the door. It would depend on if the other ships are in atmosphere or in vacuum, if they are near a gravity well or …” His face changed as he realized what she was thinking. “That is a very bad idea, Violet.”
“Why?” Bo demanded, his voice strong again. “Why couldn’t that work?”
“If you go through the door, there may not be any way of returning,” Gloom said flatly. “Your keys were grown with exact coordinates embedded in them. They are intended to move matter through the door only to those coordinates. Only in one direction. Otherwise our enemy could reopen the door from the other side using your sister’s key.”
“He’d be trapped there,” Violet surmised. “If I vanished him, he’d be trapped on the other side.”
“That is likely,” Gloom said, but she heard a bit of hesitation in his voice.
Bo had heard it too. “Likely,” he echoed. “That’s likely. So what’s unlikely?”
“The keys are alive, as you know,” Gloom said. “They can adapt. Mutate. Perhaps remember.” He paused. “And I was not lying when I told you your key would have caused interference with your sister’s. Both are powerful, both are tuned. They may interact in strange ways.”
“To send us back here?” Bo demanded.
“It is possible,” Gloom said. “But it is very unlikely.”
Violet could tell Bo was already decided. He turned to her. His eyes were dry, all the tears poured out of them, but they were wide and pleading
. “You have to try it,” he said. “Please, Violet.”
Violet realized her own eyes weren’t dry. The saline stung and she wiped hard with the back of her hand. She tried to remind herself that Bo wouldn’t be part of her fresh start anyway. That she’d known Bo for hardly any time at all. That he was just a little punk.
“If I mess it up, or if you don’t come back, that means I’m killing you,” she said. “Right now. I’d be killing you.”
“Yeah,” Bo said, with a helpless shrug. “I know.”
If he didn’t come back, she was killing him. If she didn’t try, something else would be killing him all his life. She didn’t think Bo was good at letting go. Violet remembered back to the parkade, to Bo’s first othermother. She remembered the burned-down ruin of his house. She didn’t know if he was strong enough to lose another person he loved. But Violet was.
Violet hoped she was.
“Do it now,” Bo begged. “Before I get scared.”
Violet took a deep breath, feeling the static, drawing it up. Her Parasite started to churn. She focused on the whole of Bo, on his hunched shoulders and scrawny arms and shaved head. She’d already had the gruesome cartoon in her mind of sending only half of him over.
“I advise against this, children,” Gloom said, looking from her to Bo and back. “I advise against this, Bo and Violet.”
Violet breathed again. She knew in a second the other Lost Boys would notice they hadn’t joined in, would come and pull them out of the boat. It was now or never. “Good luck, Pooh Bear,” she said, and she vanished him.
The static rippled out of her; Bo and a chunk of the wooden bench he’d been sitting on disappeared. The boat rocked. Settled. Then it was only her and Gloom staring at each other, wondering what she’d just done.
“He has been lucky before,” Gloom finally said.
“Yeah.” Violet swallowed. “He has.”
Bo was floating, with light prying at his squeezed-shut eyelids. He opened them slowly and vertigo hit him. There was no up or down or sky or ground. Everything around him was the electric green that had shot up from the center of the ship, webbed with veins of pulsating purple. His eyes rolled around for something to fix on and found a vaguely familiar shape.
It was growing larger, rippling, waving its tendrils. The section of the wormy wall he’d ripped away not so long ago. Just hours ago. And it wasn’t growing; he was moving toward it. Something like a current was carrying him along. Bo sucked in a deep breath and found he could breathe, or maybe that he didn’t need to. He remembered what Gloom had said about alive and not alive. How people had a narrow definition for it.
Still, he hoped he was alive in the narrow definition way. The section of wormy wall slid past him, wriggling its tendrils like a goodbye wave. But there were other shapes approaching. He recognized the skeletal silhouette of the othermother he’d vanished with Violet, its legs all bashed in. Its mouth was open but he couldn’t hear it, couldn’t hear anything. He slid past her too, and then past the box trailer, orbited by chunks of tarmac, that he’d vanished at the end of the world.
He realized the piece of wormy wall was the one he’d sent away the night he escaped the warehouse. He was seeing everything he’d vanished, but it hadn’t passed through the door how Gloom had said, not all the way. They were inside it still. Gloom was wrong. Bo’s Parasite wasn’t tuned all the way. Maybe Violet’s wasn’t either, and Bo wasn’t going to get all the way through the door, leaving him stuck drifting here like everything else. He kicked hard with his legs and tried to swim with his arms, but it didn’t seem to do anything. All he could do was keep floating forward and hope.
Next was a parade of little beetles, pop cans, crumpled bits of newspaper from his practicing in the theater. Then the spindly lamp he’d vanished inside the storage unit trying to get away from Wyatt’s knife. A cylindrical plug of metal and meat, leaking viscera, from when he’d vanished his way through the dying pod up on the spar. More chunks of metal from moving around inside the ship, some close enough he could reach out and touch them.
He nearly missed the tiny black mote, thinking it was another beetle. On instinct he flung out a hand and caught it. The cold smooth feel of it in his palm was oddly comforting. If he made it back, he could return it to Gloom.
Another chunk of wormy wall, and then came what he’d been dreading most: the pods, or pieces of them. Their yellow fuel drifted in globules, and ropes of flesh and wire haloed around their sliced-up body parts. A few of the pods he’d vanished whole seemed to turn toward him as he passed. One of them reached with its long mechanical arm, maybe trying to take him with them, maybe just desperate to touch something, anything, in the empty space.
But the current carried Bo out of their reach, and suddenly the green-and-purple light was bleeding away. Bo felt his jaw drop. He was drifting toward a jagged tear in the glowing fabric, and through it he could see the ship, still lit up from its pale yellow underbelly. But that wasn’t what made his mouth dry and his skin crawl all over. Beyond the ship, he could see more ships, hundreds more, how Gloom had said, drifting against the black void of space.
And they weren’t alone. Bo saw what looked like blots of living ink jetting around them, darting and weaving in a way that reminded him of something. As he watched, one sharpened itself into a lance and drove through the hull of one of the ships. Another blot tried to follow, only to be incinerated by a blast of blue fire.
Bo realized he was watching a battle. The ships were maneuvering, sliding around each other, dispersing clouds of gas—the freezing gas—and destroying incoming blots with flickers of the same blue fire he remembered burning up his city. He’d wondered what it would look like, waging war against a living cloud, and now he knew. The shifting black blots were Gloom’s people.
The light was bleeding off to gray and then black, and Bo was being pulled closer and closer to the tear. The ship was close, its hull rising up and blocking his view of everything going on behind it. Lia, inside it, was close. But between him and the ship and Lia, there was vacuum. Bo’s chest tightened as he remembered what he’d imagined for the vanished othermother, head popped from the pressure, limbs coated in ice. He hoped his momentum would carry him all the way to the hull. He hoped he could use his Parasite to get inside and somehow plug up the hole behind him.
But he didn’t know if momentum worked the same way inside the door. He didn’t know how vacuum worked. For all he knew his eyeballs would explode in his head the instant he passed through. He braced himself, angled himself, tried to make sure he was pointing straight for the hull. The cold seared his skin.
He felt the door collapse around him—no, behind him—and then he was through. His whole body tingled with it. Heat and cold raced through him; he felt sweat turning into ice, felt moisture whisking out of his mouth. Invisible hands were pressing at his head. He couldn’t hear anything, but it didn’t feel like his eardrums had ruptured. More pressure than pain.
Still moving forward. The hull was approaching, but it was farther than he’d judged. His tongue was swelling and freezing in his mouth. Blackness clamped the sides of his vision and started to squeeze. He knew his heart should be beating faster for how terrified he was, but it seemed to be doing the opposite, seemed to be slowing down.
Bo’s head swam. He remembered what Violet had said: If you don’t come back, that means I’m killing you right now. He couldn’t die. Not if it meant Violet would think she’d killed him.
Not if it meant Lia would never know how hard he’d tried, how fucking hard he’d tried. The thought was stupid and selfish but he thought it anyway as he tried to kick again. His legs weren’t listening anymore. His whole body was numb. All he managed was a twist of his head, and that set him in a lazy spin. He saw the blur of moving ships, the flickers of light, the distant stars. The door was long gone.
Then he couldn’t see anything. Something blacker than space was swelling across his vision, blooming. Dying didn’t feel so bad. Dying was like
a warm cocoon. Wrapping him up, holding him, scuttling over his skin like a million tiny insects. Bo stiffened as the motes ran across him, into his mouth, down his arm. They slipped between his clenched knuckles. He remembered the lone mote still in his fist, the one he’d wanted to give back to Gloom.
As the motes touched it, a shudder passed through the cocoon, contracting it tight around him. Suddenly he could breathe again. He could feel his limbs, and the scalding pain spreading over his skin, under his muscles. But it was good. He knew it was good, but couldn’t put his finger on why.
“Hello, Bo,” came a tinny voice in his ear canal.
33
The warm walls of motes folded around him, bringing his circulation back, putting air back into his lungs, and Bo realized he was alive.
“Have we succeeded in our plan? Have we removed all of the keys from the ship?”
Bo blinked. It was Gloom, but it wasn’t. It was the Gloom from back when he’d vanished the single mote, back in the room with the tanks. He remembered what Gloom had told him on the rooftop about being corrupted. Cut away. His single mote had taken over the others, or infected them, or something, with Gloom’s personality. Bo moved his aching tongue around his mouth and felt more motes scurrying along it.
“Just one left,” he whispered. “In the machine.” He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like they were starting to move. The motes swirled all around him, up and down his body, across his skin. The pain was slowly subsiding.
“Why are we on the other side of the door?” Gloom asked.
“Long story,” Bo coughed. “You were only one mote. A second ago. You were only one mote that got sent through the door.”