“For all we know, it orchestrated that sandstorm in the first place,” Tommy said, frowning. The mood in the car was darkening with each passing second.
“I guess there’s no way of knowing for sure. What we do know is that the tablet is giving us what we’ve been wanting for a long time. I think it brought my parents back together.”
The moment I said that, I thought of all the other times I suspected the tablet showed its power by bending the reality around us. It seemed to work as some kind of magnet, pulling our unarticulated, deepest wants and desires out of us and, in the process, shaving away at our very beings until our cores were exposed. But was any of it truly real—these wishes the tablet granted? I thought I had wanted my parents’ reunion and my acceptance into USM, but now with both those things coming true, my new and improved reality felt shallow, undeserved. And by extension, I also felt shallow and undeserved, less than a whole person.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that, actually,” Tommy said as we left the city limits and merged on to a coastal highway. The view’s beauty was lost to a wall of rain. My clothes and hair and shoes were damp, but I could barely feel it.
Tommy continued, “Perhaps the tablet knows what’s on our minds better than we ever will. Maybe it burns through our obvious wishes and desires first, like fixing your broken family and … making me feel like I at last belong, and then it gets to your deepest core, and that’s when it becomes really interesting.”
“And it devours us in the process,” I said darkly, unable to dismiss Minh’s concern.
“But are we really sure of that? Maybe we’re just adjusting to having all our dreams come true.”
I didn’t say anything to that. It was a lot to take in. And the only thing that could give us answers was currently broken into two pieces. At least the piece in the bag at my feet was no longer transmitting anxiety. The tablet’s presence had taken a different form though, and it was intensifying, making the air inside the car heady. I wondered if Tommy could hear the tablet’s steady heartbeat. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Through the window I could barely see the ocean, but what I could see was disturbed, waves high and frenetic. Even with the car’s windows rolled up and the rain drumming up against the roof and sides, I imagined I could hear the ocean complaining. My own insides were in turmoil too, and it was growing.
“This is a bad idea.” I edged to the end of my seat. The closer we got to Silver Crescent, the stronger the tablet’s waves became and the more my concern grew.
“What is?” Tommy asked.
A wave of irrational fear, the strongest I’d ever felt, surged through me, filling me with suspicion and dread. Lori was my friend, and though we needed to stick together right now more than ever, I didn’t think her judgment could be trusted where the tablet was concerned.
“Alif?” Tommy’s voice was clouded with worry. “Are you feeling okay? You’re turning pale. Do you want me to stop the car?”
“I’m okay,” I said, though I didn’t feel okay. “I know we need to meet with Lori and everyone, but maybe it’s a bad idea to bring my tablet’s piece there.”
“It’ll be all right,” he said.
“You can’t know that.”
Tommy just shrugged in response, but I could tell he was as tense as I was.
* * *
“As a kid I used to play on these cliffs with some of my foster siblings. We didn’t have a lot of adult supervision,” Tommy said. We’d parked not far from Lori’s summer place in Silver Crescent.
I’d never been here, never even been invited for a visit, though I’d heard a lot about the house from Lori. The rain had turned into a drizzle, making the landscape—the ocean beach, dark waves encroaching on the shore, rocky sand dunes towering over it all—moody and foreboding. The house was seated on an elevation, not far from the cliffs, where the dunes plunged into the water, rocks sticking out at random from the ocean froth.
We walked toward the house, while Tommy kept on reminiscing. “My very first host family used to own a house out here. More of a shack, really. But they had a boat, this ancient paddleboat that my foster dad improved by attaching a motor to it. I wonder if it’s still in its boathouse down there … There are caves out there too, you know.” He was looking in the direction of the cliffs almost wistfully. But it was the tablet piece in my bag, awake and demanding, that dominated my attention.
“I’ve had enough of caves to last me for the rest of my life,” I said. I’d used caves automatically, though it still pained me to think of the temple as a mere cave. “However long that is,” I added as I took Tommy’s hand and led him toward the house. One car was already parked there—Rowen’s. Or Rowen’s mom’s, rather. I wondered what lies he and Lori and Luke fed to their families about coming out here. I was hoping my own parents weren’t going to the hospital to check on Minh, only to find out my visit didn’t last as long as they’d thought it would.
I rang the old-fashioned brass doorbell. There were muffled voices coming from inside the house, which we took as an invitation to come in; the door wasn’t locked.
Lori and Rowen looked like a prim and proper couple, waiting on their poorly behaved children and ready to discipline them. They were seated at the far end of a long table in the dining room. The half of the tablet in Lori’s possession was placed on the table before her, while her right hand and Rowen’s left were intertwined and resting on it. The pupils of their eyes were large, making me think of addicts or adrenaline junkies. Acknowledging its other half, the tablet piece in my bag pinged in excitement, or anticipation. I could swear Lori’s piece pinged in response.
“Your text from the hospital sounded like Minh was on the attack,” Lori said, not quite sounding like herself. As usual, her makeup was well done and her hair flawless, but something about her posture or maybe the angle of her mouth brought the sense of possession to my mind. Like she was being inhabited by some force that was still learning how to properly move her body and manipulate her vocal cords, still working out the kinks. Was this the tablet’s influence? Did I look and behave this way too, without realizing it?
“She’s doing worse than I thought,” I replied, struggling not to come off as alarmed. “I feel terrible for leaving her, but I don’t think my presence was helping her heal.”
“We’ve got bigger problems than Minh. Way bigger.” Lori fidgeted in her chair.
“Take a seat.” Rowen nodded at the chairs by the table. His even tone was a counterweight to Lori’s anxious one.
Tommy took a seat on Rowen’s right side, and I perched on the edge of the chair next to Tommy. My tablet piece was now full-on crying, moaning, just like the powerful wind outside. The tablet wanted to be whole again.
“Should we wait for Luke?” Tommy asked. I doubted he cared that much about including Luke in whatever this gathering was; maybe he was just stalling for time.
“Luke’s not here. I haven’t heard from him,” Lori said angrily. “Maybe he’s dead in a ditch somewhere. He’s not the one with a fragment, so I can’t see how he matters to us if he doesn’t seem to matter to her.”
Up until that last word, Lori was starting to sound like her normal self again—impatient, a little obnoxious, ready to pounce. But the way she ended with her was a wake-up call. It couldn’t be coincidental that both Lori and I had gendered the tablet as female. If I thought of the entity that toyed with me on the sands as the Queen of Giants, how did the lonely spark appear to Lori? And what about the rest of our group? It was time we found out. We needed to put an end to this. The uncertainty was crushing, suffocating.
“Fine,” I said, connecting with the tablet fragment in my bag, running my fingers against its jagged line as if to pacify its incessant pinging and pulsing. Could Tommy feel it too? As if reading my mind, Tommy brought his chair a little closer to me.
“You must have something to say, so let’s hear it,” Tommy addressed Lori.
It was Rowen who answered, slurring words a little, like he
was powering through a sudden drug haze. “Noam Delamer, or whoever that man really was, has died. He had a seizure and collapsed in his apartment.” Rowen was stating the facts, no emotions involved. “Or maybe he was dead all along and that was some kind of illusion of a man walking around, running on fumes. But the thing is, he could’ve lived on and had a great life, with everything he’s ever wanted, if only he listened to her. If only he took her heart out of the desert, if only he cherished her and her gifts.”
If I didn’t know better, didn’t know exactly what Rowen meant, he’d sound like he was saying nonsense. But I knew. So Noam Delamer was no more. The man who walked into my father’s dig camp what felt like years ago didn’t get to enjoy his good fortune after all. This is what happened to those who rejected the gifts of the oasis.
“This is what’s going to happen to Minh too. She had seizures on the plane, and she seems to be getting worse,” I said out loud.
“Yes, and it’s going to happen to all of us if we don’t do something.” Rowen exchanged looks with Lori. “We’re all connected. We’re all her children now, in a way, because she created us—and we her. But she needs to be made whole again.”
His words were turning my blood cold. And now the tablet piece in my bag and the one on the table were vibrating, filling the air with mechanical buzzing. I looked at Tommy, seeking reassurance or advice or anything, but he was nodding, as if whatever Rowen was saying didn’t weird him out at all.
I studied my friends’ faces, our group fractured, incomplete. But we were all looking for answers. Only the tablet could tell us what was really going on, what was happening to us. There was only one way to resolve this. We had to finally meet our maker, the Queen of Giants herself, head-on.
I pulled my tablet piece from the bag and gingerly placed it on the table in front of me. It was strange to remember how not that long ago touching the tablet knocked me into visions. Now that the tablet had already stripped away those exterior layers of my being, it was attempting to connect with the very core of me. It promised to be a mirror to my soul, an answer to the question—what was my deepest wish? But before I could see the answer in its heady emanations, my tablet fragment vibrated and lifted off the table. Lori’s fragment mirrored mine, levitating, vibrating, buzzing.
Then, as if magnetized, the two pieces rushed toward each other. They collided in the middle of the table with a bang that deafened and blinded me. Everything was fiery white, the color of cosmic matter crashing and burning, sending its pain out as far as it could reach.
COMMUNION BY THE CLIFFS
The four of us, acting as one, stood up, hands reaching for the tablet that was now whole again. There was nothing, not even a faint seam, to indicate that it was ever broken.
When my fingers reached its surface, an electrical discharge went through me. Instead of pulling away, I held on. We were all holding on. If my friends’ dazed faces were any indication, they were as out of it as I was. The house, its walls, its windows, all of it was the same and not the same. It had transformed into a better version of itself—too real, colors saturated, sounds enhanced. Everything, from a lonely fly buzzing in the corner to the roaring of the distant waves on the beach, was magnified to the max and then some. What are you really? My mind formed the question, my intent spreading to the rest of our group, as we were all connected.
Suddenly, while I was still present here, in the company of Tommy, Lori, and Rowen, I was also up there, in the vacuum of space. I was the lonely spark as well as something else. Something bigger, infinitely more complex. And I was moving. Fast. Through space. But then I was dragged off course by the gravity of a strange world, which I knew could mean death, but also the opposite of death. I couldn’t die. There was no death. I was death. There was nothing but death, and in this dying, there was life. As I approached this alien world, it welcomed and rejected me at once. It hurt so much, the pain of entering this unfamiliar atmosphere eating me up whole. Though infinitely diminished, I was still alive, my entire essence now packed into this one little piece. And I fell and I fellandIfellandIfell. The only thing I knew for sure was that I still existed. Reduced to a little fragment of the former whole, one out of thousands of plates covering my outer body, each hexagonal form green with life and breathing and thinking. I was now my own prison. But I learned to exist—by shaping this foreign world to my specifications. I found a way to sustain myself.
The longer the moment lasted, the more I let go, allowing the tablet’s essence to merge with my bloodstream, my cells, the very core of my being. Now that we knew the tablet’s past, our hive mind was complexifying, growing layers upon layers upon layers. I could recognize individual thought patterns in the way different ideas formed in my head. There was Lori, her brain waves punctuated by impatience, by her urgent need to have things go her way—and also by her fear of loneliness. There was Rowen, self-satisfied but also, surprisingly, hiding some feelings of inadequacy behind his easygoing facade. And there was Tommy, his brightest light being his hunger to belong, to be needed, to be a part of something bigger. Torn between these three, I tried to focus on my own consciousness, to know myself. And what I saw there, deep inside of me, was that I strived to make my own meaning, to create, to breathe life into things, be it a friendship between people who were seemingly too different to be friends or a blank page begging for words. I thrived on that, but it could also be my undoing, broken relationships leaving me alienated from the people who cared about me, and from myself.
It dawned on me then that the tablet, this alien mind that thrived on human interactions, did so because it couldn’t create anything new. Rather, it made things clearer for its host while it fed on the host’s thoughts and feelings.
And so in our moment of communion, we knew everything about ourselves and about one another. We knew every possibility. Every deep secret. This everything included the lonely spark and her secrets. But as its dark doings were revealed to us all in one infinite instant, we felt no anger. She was our tablet, our oasis, but also the Queen of Giants to me, a monstrous shadow to Lori, a dark pair of angelic wings moving in the wind to Tommy, and a sentient tree to Rowen. She appeared to us all, filtered through our perception, our experiences. As she took many shapes, she kept whispering into the ears of those willing to listen. She made me poison our only water source in the oasis because she wanted us to fight over it and for me to torment myself with shame. She showered Rowen with food because she wanted him to feel guilt—and for us to judge him. And she tormented Tommy with an impossible choice—to sacrifice Rowen or to watch Lori do it to me instead. Perhaps, in an alternate reality, Lori succeeded in saving Rowen from the pit. But it didn’t matter now. We felt no vengefulness toward our queen. She was our lonely spark, just trying to survive. Weren’t we all?
Lost to our shared trance, time became twisted and turned inside out. We floated together, and in this moment everything was right in our closed-circuit world. But then … something else pushed in, forcing itself into the mix of our combined thoughts. A burning desire to be important, to matter, to lead, and to be respected. A desire so strong, it was violent in its velocity. And then there was another something—a yearning to make a difference, to do the right thing, even if the thing in question was going to break you. Neither of these felt like evil aspirations, but nonetheless the tablet didn’t react well to these new additions to our hive mind. My fingers were burning against the cold as my stomach coiled. The tablet was resisting—buzzing in protest and lifting off the table again.
No, not lifting—being taken away!
The tablet’s abrupt absence was like a vicious attack on my body. My skin, joints and muscles, rib cage wrestled wide open, exposing my heart to the world. I heard the others crying out and realized I was whimpering in pain and loss as well. I could no longer hear and see everything at once. I was deprived. Empty. Inadequate.
“It’s Minh and Luke! They took the tablet!” Lori croaked amid violent coughs.
She didn’t hav
e to say what the four of us already knew from the brief moment Luke and Minh joined our hive mind while scrambling to tear the tablet out of our combined grip: their plan to destroy it. Or at least, that’s what Minh planned to do. Luke? I wasn’t so sure …
I was still reeling from the shock of separation when there came the unmistakable bang of the front door swinging shut. Everything wavered around me. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows and, like in a fever dream, through the glass I followed the movement of Luke’s athletic shape as it rushed by outside. The tablet was in his hands. Minh was lagging behind him. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn on the plane when she collapsed, her hair was a mess, and her legs were thin and wobbly. And yet she was strong enough—or determined enough—to conspire with Luke, to come here and take our lonely spark.
Moving as one organism, the four of us left the table and ran after the thieves. As our weirdly coordinated group exited the house, Lori yelled after Luke and Minh, “You’re going to kill us all!” followed by a string of profanities.
I found myself at the forefront of our pursuit, my legs hurrying over the grass in long strides, practically flying, like in a dream. The wind was helping me one moment, pushing me back the next. When I saw Luke reach his car—parked a block away from the house—I knew I wasn’t going to get to him in time to free the tablet. But unexpected help came from Minh, who was near Luke. She surprised him with a kick in the knee and latched onto the tablet, grabbing it for herself. Luke’s cry of pain was swallowed by the wind. I guessed Minh’s unlikely partnership with Luke was over now.
I switched the trajectory of my pursuit as Minh raced away from Luke and toward the cliffs, her intent painfully clear: She was going to destroy the tablet. Whatever empty fumes her frail body was running on would expire soon. She was weak when I last saw her. It was a miracle she was even moving.
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