Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Acknowledgments
Read More from the Comet Cycle Series
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2021 by Benjamin Percy
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Percy, Benjamin, author.
Title: The ninth metal / Benjamin Percy.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Series: The comet cycle
Identifiers: LCCN 2020034167 (print) | LCCN 2020034168 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328544865 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358331537 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358450368 | ISBN 9780358450528 | ISBN 9781328544186 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification:LCC PS3616.E72 N56 2021 (print) | LCC PS3616.E72 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034167
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034168
Cover design by Mark Robinson
Author photograph © Connor Percy
Background stars image © Getty Images
v1.0521
For Lisa,
always
And for my father, Pete,
who taught me to study the night sky with wonder
Prologue
It begins with a comet.
Decades ago, an infrared telescope captured the thermal emission streaking through the solar system. Eventually it was determined to be 300.2 kilometers wide and orbiting the sun in an elongated ellipse that would bring it within five hundred thousand miles of Earth.
The moon, by comparison, is 238,900 miles away. This would be, scientists said, a beautiful light show that everyone should enjoy all the more, knowing that we’d narrowly escaped planetary annihilation.
The official name of the comet was P/2011 C9, but most people called it Cain, the surname of the astronomer who’d discovered it. Twenty years later, it burned into view and made its close pass by Earth.
People took off work. They gathered at soccer fields and in parking lots, on rooftops and along sidewalks, setting up lawn chairs and picnic blankets and grills and coolers as though readying for a fireworks display. Everyone suddenly owned a telescope. Vendors sold comet T-shirts and hats and key chains and plush stuffed toys. Surfers stacked up on beaches waiting for the big waves they believed would come from the gravitational flux. At least two cults killed themselves off, announcing this was the end of world and the comet a gateway to the vault of heaven.
Professors and scientists and religious leaders became regular guests on cable news shows, where they talked about how comets had long been associated with meteorological and human disasters—tsunamis, earthquakes, and droughts. In 44 BC, when Caesar was assassinated, his soul was said to depart the Earth and join the comet flaming overhead. In AD 79, a comet’s arrival aligned with the eruption of Vesuvius. In AD 684, when Halley’s comet passed by, the Black Death broke out, and in 1066, when it made another appearance, William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings. Celestial judgment and providence. Or an instrument of the devil, as Pope Callixtus III called it.
“Heaven knows what awaits us,” one professor said. “It is a reminder of our irrelevant smallness and accidental existence in the universe, a glimpse of something violently outside the bounds of human existence, as close as you can come to seeing God.”
Local news reporters interviewed people on the streets. “I don’t know—it’s just kind of cool,” one man said. “Special. Once-in-a-lifetime sort of deal. You want to be able to say, I was there. It’s almost like we were living this two-dimensional life, and now there’s this sense of it being three-dimensional, if you know what I mean.”
Cain looked like a roughly drawn eye, some said. Or a glowing animal track. Or a slash mark in the fabric of space. A wandering star.
For a few days, the comet made night uncertain, hued with a swampy green light. And by day, the sky appeared twinned with suns. And then—gradually—the comet trailed farther and farther away, and people forgot all about it.
Until one year passed. The planet finished its orbit of the sun and spun into the debris field left behind by the comet. The residue of Cain’s passage.
This June, the sky would fall. That’s what the newscasters said.
The meteor shower was not as long-lasting as August’s Perseids, but for several nights the sky flared and streaked and wheeled, the constellations seeming to rearrange themselves with ever-shifting tracks of light. At first hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands and finally an uncountable storm of meteors.
The ground shook. Windows shattered. Grids of electricity went dark. Satellites shredded. Radio signals scrambled. Dogs howled and people screamed their prayers. Many of the meteors dissolved in the atmosphere, but many struck the earth, sizzling into the ocean, splintering roofs, searing through ice, punching craters into fields and forests and mountainsides, like the seeds of the night.
It was then that everything changed.
1
* * *
His father came in the front door and went directly to the picture window as if he couldn’t decide whether he belonged inside or out. He stayed there a long time, studying the county highway that ran past their farm. Whenever a car grumbled by, he took a step back and tugged at the curtain, ready to drag it shut. Night was coming, but he snapped off the lamps in the living room.
He didn’t say hello to Hawkin when the boy hugged his leg but he absently patted his head. And he didn’t respond to Hawkin’s mother when she called from the kitchen, “Henry? Where in the hell have you been?”
His father locked the door and walked over to the shelving unit where his mother kept her books and teapots and porcelain figures. He dug into his pocket and then stared at something cupped in his hand. He pulled down the Bible and hurried through its pages, sometimes pausing as if to take in a certain passage. He glanced back at Hawkin, said, “What?” and then returned the Bible to its shelf. He paced in a circle and turned on the television, but with the volume down. Its shifting light and color made the room an uncertain space. The news played. Something about the historic meteor shower expected that evening, the beginning of a light show that could span several days. Hawkin’s teacher, Mrs. B., had talked about it. The fourth-graders could keep a sky journal for extra credit.
His father was balding but kept his hair long enough to comb over and spray stiffly in place. Right now several clumps of it stood upright and revealed the pale dome of his head. His eyes were red-rimmed and his cheeks unshaven and he hadn’t changed his c
lothes since yesterday, when he’d driven off in the pickup and said he was going to make them some money.
These days he was always seeing about a job, trying to catch a break. A few years ago he had sold their horses and their ATV and their fishing boat, and when Hawkin asked why, he said he was retiring. Hawkin knew he was too young for that. The only people who were retired in north-central Minnesota spent their days slumped in wheelchairs. You worked until you couldn’t. You could be white-haired and wormed with veins and still put in your ten-hour shift as a waitress or bank teller or hairdresser. Retired might as well mean near dead.
In fact, his father and hundreds of others had lost their jobs at Frontier Metals after the federal government shut down the mining lease on over a hundred thousand acres of land. Northfall was located at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and Hawkin’s parents and their friends complained constantly about the forest service and the BLM and the damned hippie vegan environmentalists who thought the land belonged to the owls and walleye. “These are the same sort of people that think you’re killing a carrot when you eat it,” his father would say. “I look at a tree, I see a house. I look at a deer, I see venison sausage. I look at a hill packed with iron, I see a skyscraper and a fleet of fighter jets and a club-cab pickup with a chrome nut sack hanging from the hitch.”
Hawkin heard his parents arguing through the walls at night. About money mostly. About his father spending it on nonsense or blowing it on pipe dreams or throwing it away at the poker table until the bank account emptied. “Why can’t you get a job?” Hawkin’s mother asked and he said, “Where? Where are the jobs? You want me to serve cheeseburgers at the McDonald’s?” There were a lot of men like him in town. Loggers and miners who didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves except crack a beer and shake their heads and lament what had become of this place, this life.
His family discussed selling the land off as well, but only lakefront property was worth anything up here, and these four hundred acres of maples had not only been in the Gunderson family for three generations but made money for them every spring as a source of syrup. Which also qualified them for the cheaper ag-land tax rate. Gunderson Woods, the locals called it. “My sweet little sugar bush,” his father called it and talked about the day he might install a pump and a web of tap lines instead of tapping over six hundred trees and hauling buckets as they dripped full.
Hawkin’s mother worked as a clerk at the Farm and Fleet and smoked menthol cigarettes and had bottle-blond hair and pink fingernails and rhinestone-butted blue jeans. She spent Wednesday nights and the whole of her Sundays at the Trinity Lutheran leading Bible studies and ushering, but she was always reading books on Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, the Rajneeshees, the Church Universal and Triumphant. She believed there was something else out there, even if she didn’t know exactly what. When Hawkin asked how she could be so certain, she pointed a lit cigarette at him and said, “Because that’s the nature of faith. Besides, this can’t be it.” Here she traced the air with her cigarette, as if drawing a smoky map of the world around her. “The thought’s just too goddamn depressing.”
She was cooking dinner now. Burgers on the range and frozen French fries in the oven. Hawkin was helping put dishes away, but only in the areas he could reach, the cabinets below and the lower shelves above. He was a whole head shorter than his classmates, smaller than he should be. Sicker too. He missed school so often that the students in the fourth grade forgot his name. He’d had pneumonia seven times and wheezed when he ran. His mother blamed it on the chemical runoff in the water and all the years of beer swirling around inside Hawkin’s father, which no doubt compromised his seed. “You’ll get stronger when you grow up and get out of this godforsaken place,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve been praying on it.”
Now Hawkin set a pan on a shelf, tucked a cutting board beneath the range, and tried to dodge out of the way of his mother, who didn’t always see him underfoot. When his father entered the kitchen and picked up the wall telephone and listened to the dial tone before setting it in its cradle and then unplugging the cord, his mother said, “What’s your deal?”
“I want quiet. That’s all.”
Hawkin’s mother swatted at the air with her spatula. “All you ever do is make noise and suddenly you’re Mr. Quiet? Something’s gotten into you.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t tell me it’s nothing when it’s obviously something.”
His father was breathing too hard and his eyes couldn’t seem to settle on anything. When he headed back into the living room, Hawkin’s mother followed, her voice rising in pitch and volume as she asked him what stupid-son-of-a-bitch thing he’d gone and done now.
“I’ve got it under control. Okay? If I play my cards right, we might come out of this with a pile of money.”
“Cards? This is about cards?”
“It was a metaphor, woman.”
“So you weren’t playing cards?”
“That’s irrelevant. What matters is, I’ve got everything under control.”
“Pfft. That’s a laugh.”
Hawkin knew that whatever happened next would probably involve something getting thrown. He turned off the range and nudged the pan off the burner. In the dinette, from the round table, he retrieved his notebook and pencil, then he headed out the sliding glass door and onto the splintery back deck.
The night was humid. Frogs drummed and crickets sawed. One side of the sky was still red with the setting sun, but the other was the purple-black of a bruise with a few stars dotting it.
He could still hear his parents, their footsteps tromping the floor as they followed each other around the house, their voices calling out sharply, as he went down the stairs and into the weed-choked yard.
There was a sandbox with rotten boards and the nails undone at one corner, but it still carried three inches of sand the consistency of wet cement. He plopped down and cringed as the water soaked through his jeans and underwear. He shouldn’t be out here, he knew. His mother would say he was liable to catch cold, but he had come to weirdly enjoy his stays at the hospital, where no one ever yelled and he could watch TV and read comic books and eat as much strawberry ice cream as he wanted.
His notebook had Superman on the cover, a montage of the Man of Steel as a baby zooming toward Earth in his Krypton rocket, hoisting a cow over his head as a teenager in Kansas, and finally soaring through the sky in his red trunks and cape. Hawkin ran his hand across the image before flopping the notebook open. He poised his pencil over the lined paper and studied the sky. Nothing yet, he wrote in slow careful letters, then paused. He was an excellent speller, a wonderful writer, Mrs. B. told him, but he wasn’t sure how to describe what he felt then. If every falling star was a wish, and if the whole sky was supposed to light up tonight, then he had a good chance of finally getting what he wanted. A kitten, for starters. And a rabbit too. And how about no more wasps or spiders or bullies? In their place he’d ask for buckets and buckets of strawberry ice cream. And a Star Wars bedspread like in the Target flyer. And a nice house that didn’t have nightmare water stains in the ceiling and paint peeling off the walls like flaps of old skin. And a truck that didn’t die in the Shopko parking lot so that they had to beg a jump-start off strangers. And parents who didn’t fight and who hugged him and kissed his forehead and called him smart and strong and handsome and awesome. And a good immune system so that he could stop burning up with fevers and coughing until his lungs ached and start going to birthday parties and playing kickball with the other kids at school.
A mosquito whined by his ear and he swatted at it. Another bit his arm, another his neck, his forehead. “Stop!” he said. His father had taught him a trick: If you tossed sand into the air, the bats would swoop through it, mistaking it for a cloud of insects. It was like a flare. A call for help. Organic repellent, his father said. Hawkin thought he would try that, try summoning the bats to him so they would eat up all the mosquitoes eating
him.
So he did. He scooped sand and tossed up smoky handfuls of it. He scrunched shut his eyes. His hair and shirt dirtied with sand that crumbled from creases when he moved. The bats came—just as his father said—wheeling and fluttering in the air around him, and he felt like a conjuring wizard.
He was so busy with his bats, he didn’t notice the last bit of sun seep from the sky as night took over. He didn’t hear the engine of the approaching vehicle. He didn’t see the headlights cutting through the pine trees and blinking out as the car parked. He didn’t hear the footsteps crunching on the gravel driveway or someone testing the locked knob of the front door. But if Hawkin had, he might have also heard his parents’ voices rising. The money. The money. That was what they were arguing about. His mother was goddamn tired of living off goddamn food stamps and goddamn handouts from their goddamn parents.
They didn’t know what was coming, and neither did Hawkin. Not until he heard the scraping charge of a shotgun shell loaded into its chamber. He spun around in time to see a figure sneaking along the edge of the house and testing a foot on the deck stairs to see if they creaked—and then creeping up them slowly, slowly. He wore a black jacket and blue jeans and his face looked like a smear, a melted nub of candle, veiled in pantyhose.
There was something off about his movement and balance. A slow, confused deliberateness, like somebody exploring the dark in a blindfold. When he stumbled on the top step and caught himself against the house, he mumbled a curse, and Hawkin recognized the slur of his voice as familiar. His father sounded like that most every night when he shut off the TV and rose unsteadily from his recliner and stumbled down the hall and said, “Had a few too many.”
His parents were visible in the windows, moving between the squares of light and gesturing wildly, like characters in a cable program Hawkin wasn’t allowed to watch. He wanted to yell something, to warn them, but his voice felt zipped up and double-knotted and shoved in the bottom drawer of his lungs.
The Ninth Metal Page 1