It was a beautiful hand.
A small freckle on the surface above the beginning of the index finger was the only deviation from creamy white skin, stippled ever-so-gently by hairs the color of nothing and sunrise and days she spent in happier times with people now long-dead or long-something-Else. She studied her hand with an intensity that she had not been able to summon for years in the moments before it left her forever, in those burning moments before her perfect white creamy freckled left useless left hand was severed from the rest of her trapped form in a flash of white and fire and pain.
“Fleur. You shouldn’t have tried that.”
The klaxon was wailing incessantly and piercingly from somewhere above her head, now pressed against the cool relief of the metal floor, but she could still recognize that voice, and the presence that accompanied it.
“Make that awful noise stop.”
She did not look up, but instead found some solace in the metal of the floor as her body began shaking, and as uncontrollable sobs emanated from places within that she had not wanted to acknowledge for years. Her slow tears mixed with the spreading bloodpuddle as she pulled her non-existent left hand back away from the shattered, useless control panel that would have effectively ended not only her own life, but the lives of these men who would be taking her home. If she had only been successful… If she had only been able to press that button in time… Things would be different. Better. There would have been certainty in death, but now…
“Stop her bleeding. We can’t take her in like that.”
She held her eyes closed and sobbed into the coagulating blood on the floor. She felt strange hands begin to lift the crimped and twisted metal of the collapsed bulkhead from her back. If the vessel hadn’t been torn apart in the boarding, she might have been able to activate the destruct sequence. If they hadn’t—
“It’s no use, dear. Don’t tear yourself apart about it. You knew we would be coming to get you eventually. You knew that Mother would not be pleased.”
A blissful moment of relief from crushing pressure as the final weight was released from her back. Might be a few cracked ribs. Perhaps a crushed pelvis. But altogether, the item was intact. The hand was an acceptable loss.
“You’ll be fine, dear.” Gentle hands lifted her to her feet, and to the surprise of all three residents of the chamber, she stood on her own, eyes blinking away her own blood, stump of a left arm held closely to her chest. Her breathing was fast-paced and labored, but still she stood defiantly. Silently.
The man who was Whistler lifted her chin up, looked squarely into her eyes. He brushed her hair out of her face and wiped a bit of blood from under her left eye.
“Minimal damage. Mother will be pleased. Let’s go.”
She recognized Whistler, but did not know the other man. Both agents of Mother were draped in the traditional long black garment that Fleur knew would conceal a multitude of weapons, each with a varying degree of effectiveness or pain-inducement. The man she did not know was at the present replacing the long, black weapon with which he had severed her hand with an energy burst back into one of the raven folds of his cloak. He eyed her coldly, as if she were the cause of his displeasure with life.
“Ah yes. Fleur, you have not met Nine. Nine, Fleur. Fleur, Nine. You’ll have plenty of time on the trip home to get to know each other.”
“The trip home?” It was the first thing she had said since the arrival of the agents.
Whistler smiled slyly. “But of course, dear girl. Mother wants to see you again.”
She began to sob once again as Nine pushed her forward, out of the chamber. Whistler walked over to the destruct panel and gingerly stroked the smooth black surface, wiping up a fair amount of Fleur’s blood. With Nine and the girl now safely out of the room, he quickly stuck the tip of his finger in his mouth, licking off and savoring the precious blood of the human girl. Mother would be pleased indeed.
Whistler’s vessel hung like a tumor from the underbelly of the ruined prison galleon. Already, Fleur’s former home was falling apart in great segments as bulkheads burst with the same squealing porcine terror that had impaled her on the bridge just after they had been boarded. With a shudder and a quick burst from the phase rudder, the agents’ vessel detached from the fiery wreck. Fleur watched silently from a porthole as her home of the last seven months drifted into the void.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
She turned to meet Nine’s gaze blankly. “What model is he?”
Whistler sat down in a swirl of black robe in the thrust chair facing Fluer. “How did you know?”
“I always know. What model?”
“Nine is a nine.”
She scoffed. “Figures… And you? How long until they deem your techbase obsolete, Whistler darling?”
The manufactured grin faltered for an instant, but then returned in force. “Dear girl, I will never be obsolete. I am one-of-a-kind.”
Fleur smiled her one-cornered smile and flexed her beautiful new hand, still held in place by a metal brace. It worked, but it would never be hers. There was no freckle to denote her identity. She wondered whose pattern had been sacrificed to give her a new prosthesis.
“Why?”
Whistler stopped twirling the shock of pure white hair that grew from his hairline for a moment and looked toward the porthole. “You should know by now, little flower.”
“What happened? Did Mother…”
“She did, and you will, and we won’t, and it does.”
“How many galleons are left?”
Nine’s eyes lit up. Whistler grinned.
“How many?”
“None.” Nine turned to her, his voice a basso growl. “Yours was the last.”
Tears threatened to erupt from her bloodshot eyes, but Fleur maintained her composure, at least enough to squeak out an almost-inaudible “Zero?”
“What, dear?”
“Zero? What about Zero?”
Again, Whistler’s grin dropped from his face for an instant. “We don’t know. We’ve not heard from him in quite some time. Machine could have been lost eons ago, and we wouldn’t know for decades.”
“I would know.”
“Of course, dear.” Whistler rummaged through the folds of his robe, his hand finally emerging with a silver flask. He unscrewed the top and took a long drag from the amber liquid within. He held it out to Nine, who silently shook his head, and then to Fleur.
“No thanks. I don’t drink.”
“Suit yourself, missy. It’s going to be a long ride home.”
Fleur turned to the porthole, looked out into black and nothing.
Home. A long ride home.
It was a dream, she hoped. A dream… Such peace in that thought. Such quiet. It was a dream, not a memory. It had never happened. She had never lived that. She could never have lived that.
Great silver teardrops falling from the sky, bursting open in the city center with flickering laser fury, spewing forth hundreds thousands tens-of-thousands of Mother’s perfect society’s rejects, each armed heavily with light and projectile weaponry, heavily armored with fields and shields and wielding their blessed black blunderbusses before them as they carved apart the unsuspecting inner sanctums of the worlds upon which they were unleashed… In the eon of civil war, Mother’s rejects were also her closest allies, her most precious resource on the planets that they were sent to pacify. Humanity was a failed experiment. Humanity was a brat of an offspring. Mother’s rejects were often sent to the colonies to correct mistakes that she never could have foreseen, or if she had, she simply sat in the earth and watched as thousands of her most hated and treasured children laid waste to those worlds who would not bend to her will.
She would have sent the Artificials to correct situations, but although they were fully capable of most tasks she asked of them, in younger generations, brawn had replaced brain, and brain was of course the key element of subduing any rebellion that took place billions of units and thousands of years away. She had tried to engineer their evolution so that the Artificials would be more like Whistler, but it would seem that Whistler was a fluke. An incurable, lovely, hated little fluke… How he was feared by the others. How Mother herself feared him. The fact of the matter was that Mother was somewhat grateful that there was one and only one Whistler… An army of him would have been unstoppable, and most of her pleasure came from watching her blessed organics blindly follow her orders. Let them revolt! Let them cut off contact with Mother! They knew the consequences… They knew that with the next tide, one or two or ten galleon prisons would arrive in system and end the unrest. Mother loved it. Mother required it.
“When was the last time you slept?”
Fleur blinked her eyes, shifted her blank gaze to the pile of blackness whose eyes glowed at her from the darkness of the passenger cabin of the Agent transport. Nine was beside her, his breathing implying a meditative sleep that could never be actual sleep. She had been lost in that near-bliss for a moment herself… But these were days of endless days. They were a species that could not sleep, in that void between existence and unknown realms that would have been perfect for a slumber of forevers.
“I don’t know. It’s been years. Decades. You?”
Whistler took another pull from his flask. “Fuck you.”
Fleur leaned forward in her vacuum seat. “What’s the matter, darling?” She said the word with all of the acid that she could muster. “Never slept, have you? My beautiful, flawed puppet. So tired, aren’t you?”
Whistler’s eyes blazed from the darkness. “No rest for the wicked, dear.”
Fleur swam to the porthole, looked out into the pure night. No stars to mar their beautiful passage through the ether. No other vessels, anywhere. All was perfect and nothing and somehow home. Somehow wicked… Somewhere out there were worlds that she had burned. Somewhere there were entire systems laid waste by the bastard spawn of Mother. Were the cities still burning in the Wound? A million planets, each throwing fire and the stench of death far into the very void through which she screamed.
She breathed onto the not-glass of the porthole, leaving a misty layer of exhalation. With her new hand, she awkwardly drew a smiley face. Spinning around to swim back to her vacuum chair, she caught Nine’s gaze. Whistler was otherwise engaged, studying the threading on the mouth of his flask. For an instant, a grin formed on one corner of Nine’s mouth, but then it was gone.
Zero, where are you tonight?
Nine was his exact image. It was deeply disturbing to see him there, the ninth incarnation of someone she never should have and never could again love. Zero, trapped on a machine sent into the edge of all that would be. Forever lost in the night, traveling too far beyond to ever return… His fate would be a solitary death, if ever he could die.
Whistler placed the flask back into the hidden recesses of his robe, rose from his seat, swam into the darkness beyond the passenger compartment. “I’ll see if we are within contact range yet.”
Fleur said nothing, watched as the man who was not a man slipped out of the compartment. She hesitantly looked up at Nine, who was looking back. She reached over with her new hand and looped her tiny fingers through his own, cold and distant and almost there. Instead of surprise, he gently squeezed her hand with his own. He leaned over to her little ear, whispered.
I contain multitudes.
swimming and drowning and gasping for air life breath past.
It swam in the heartbeat of the liquid expanse, the gentle resistance of fluid caressing every curve of his human-esque form. Inhale, exhale, lub-dub, lub-dub. It gagged on the viscous gelatin that kept its physical form from liquefying at the impossible speed of Light X Three. The machine within which it was housed was itself a liquid of sorts, splashing across the dark night of the Outer faster than anything before envisioned. A solid within a fluid within a fluid, Zero coursed into the future on a machine of inescapably-beautiful silverthought.
“Machine?” he asked into the featureless expanse of his prison with a voice of drowning liquid syllables, choking on the thick biological secretions that kept him alive and lonely and curious. “What time is it?”
Stop asking, Zero. It does no good to hope.
“She might have—She could have—Maybe…”
She hasn’t, and most likely won’t.
Zero touched his fingertips to the slick wet surface of his face, exploring his cheeks for any sign of the tears that he so desired to produce. He spun around in the bowl, his term for the sphere of liquid that had been his prison for seven months. Seven months? Was it really only seven months?
“Mother was wrong about us, Machine.”
Do not question our creator, Zero.
“You don’t have to be loyal to her out here… You’re going to die out here too, you know. No one will remember us. Seven months… They’re all dead already.”
They were dead before we left. The system had been initiated long before our exile began. There was never a chance that we could have—
“There was always a chance to stop it. There was always hope.”
Zero could feel the narrowing of non-existent eyes in anger. He could sense Machine’s subtle fury building in the vibrations of the ocean within which he floated.
“Machine, I command you to turn this bucket around and sail us back home immediately!” Zero smiled as he said it, but was meant with a silence that was probably only minutes, but could have stretched to hours in the nothing.
Humor doesn’t suit you.
“I wish—”
Wishing doesn’t suit you either. You know the impossibility of what you desire.
Zero knew full well that what he desired was an impossibility, and he knew the magnitude with which it was an impossibility. He had been forced to witness the construction of the system-sized engine that had hurled the Machine and its insignificantly microscopic prison into the Outer. He had seen the billions of labor drones harvested from countless colonies to construct the gigantic engine. He had seen the billions left outside to die when the construction was complete, as well.
You can’t go home again.
Zero frowned in the nothing. He would find a way. Somehow.
He would find a way to return to Fleur.
I contain multitudes.
Nine disengaged his hand from Fleur’s as Whistler swam back into the passenger cabin. There was a look of concern on Whistler’s shadowed face. Fleur could not tell if it was because of something he had seen in the cockpit, or if he had been watching the dance of digits that took place on the armrest between the vacuum chairs.
“Whistler?” Nine’s eyes had drawn to a concerned visage. “What?”
“We’re near… Very near to home. But there’s no signal.”
“No navigation signal?”
“No signal at all. Nothing is coming from the surface.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all!” Whistler snapped. He waved his hand in the air before him and a holographic display of the approaching planet appeared. Whistler grasped the globe of light and spun it around so that the dark side of the planet faced Fleur and Nine. “What do you see?”
Their faces spoke only of confusion, so Whistler answered for them.
“Dark. Black. Nothing. It’s nighttime. Do you see any cities? Any lights at all? Do you see any evidence that this planet is inhabited?”
“It’s been forty thousand—”
“It’s the extinction. Mother started it without us. That’s the only explanation.”
“There could have been a natural disaster… Massive power outages. Some cataclysmic—”
“She killed them already! She started the fucking extinction without us!” Whistler whirled around furiously, throwing the holographic globe at the porthole, where it silently shattered and dissipated. His black robe gracefully enveloped him as he slunk into his vacuum chair, sulking. “Mother owes us an apology.”
The vessel shuddered as it entered the thinning atmosphere of the dead world that had been Earth thousands of lifetimes before. Whistler sat, a scowling child, arms crossed over his chest as he dreamt of the extinction of which he had been no part.
“She owes us a fucking apology.”
The Vegas Gate was so named because of an ancient city that had once stood on the site where now the gargantuan alloy shield doors controlled access to the inner workings of a person named Mother on a planet named nothing anymore. Miles and hundreds of miles and thousands of miles down, the access tunnel stretched into the crust of the world. No one had ever measured the distance, but Hank suspected that they were pretty damn near the center. The other Gates had all been lost in the sporadic warfare that signaled the end of an era, before Mother’s mission had been successful. Hank sometimes dreamt of a simpler time and a simpler place where cowboys had been the norm. He felt out of place here at the Gate control. Hell, he felt out of place anywhere on this rock. How many tens of thousands of years had it been since he had seen another human being? How many hundreds of thousands of years since he had felt the soothing touch of a lady?
He stepped back from the edge of the Vegas Tunnel, which stretch vertically as far as he could see in both directions. Gate Control was little more than a ridge around the tunnel’s interior, a massive metal construct built over the course of centuries by the slave populations of entire systems. Hank leaned back against the safety cage that kept him within the confines of Control and prevented him from falling thousands of miles to his death at the center of the planet. Mother would not be pleased at all if her only surviving human fell to his death.
Hank retrieved an ancient pack of Marlboros from the front pocket of his denim shirt. He took great pleasure in removing the cellophane from the pack and tossing it over the side of the Control cage. It floated lazily down into the blackness of the tunnel. How long would it take for the wrapper to finally hit bottom? How many millions of wrappers would it join on the bottom of the Vegas Tunnel?
A shiny golden Zippo ignited his delicious sin, and Hank inhaled deeply, never fearing for life. Mother would see to it that the cigarettes, one of the few luxuries that he had requested for his tour in Vegas, would never spin any free radicals out of place to damage tissue and spur cancer growth. Mother looked after Hank quite well.
He looked out across the void of the tunnel. Sometimes he imagined that he could see the other side, the faint flicker of his cigarette reflected on the mirrored wall. Hank had never been one for imagination. It was not his place in Mother’s plan to imagine.
He took one last draw from the cigarette and tossed the butt over the side. He wondered for a moment if the cellophane wrapper had even landed yet.
Incoming vessel.
Hank’s jaw dropped and he frowned reflexively and he spun around to the simple control panel on the wall of his makeshift living quarters. Incoming vessel? There hadn’t been an incoming vessel in decades. The control panel flashed with the display of a standard Agent corvette cutting through the atmosphere.
Incoming vessel.
“Identify.” Hank blinked at the croaking sound of his own voice. How long had it been since he had spoken out loud?
Agent Whistler. Agent Nine.
“Anyone else?”
One human passenger.
“Identify.”
The Catalyst of the Sixth Extinction.
“Fleur.”
“We’re in the tube.”
The Agents’ corvette slid into the silver passage to the interior, a great reflective phallus cleaving the retracting miles-thick doors of the Vegas Gate. Centuries of accumulated debris from the surface fell away before them along the sporadically-illuminated drop, creating a dun-colored light show as the corvette’s thrusters shifted prevailing weather patterns in the vertical hole in the planet.
Nine stood at the porthole, looking out into nothing but polished silver drop. Fleur was lost in her thoughts, sitting in the vacuum chair with her arms looped around her knees, which were drawn up to her chest. Whistler observed her from the shadows he dragged around him wherever he went…Was she shivering? It wasn’t cold in the vessel, or at least he didn’t think it was too cold for the organic.
“Something wrong, poppet?”
Fleur’s head snapped around and her gaze traveled up and down the form projected before her. “What does it matter now? We’re here, aren’t we?”
Nine sat back down, looked from Whistler to Fleur. “Mother will not be pleased, but she is forgiving. She is a creature of—”
“Divine Mercy and Wisdom. Don’t. Just don’t. We know why I’m here.”
They fell.
Hank stood on the edge, looking up for any sign of the approaching vessel. He could not yet see it, couldn’t even really hear it, but there was something…He could sense a change in the pipe. A resonance. Something different in the natural resonating frequency of the metal tube that had been his kingdom for centuries. He lit another smoke, inhaled, exhaled, tapped ash off the edge of the hole in the world and waited.
He watched as the docking cradle, dormant for decades, silently whirred into life and slid out into the blank center of the pipeline, deftly catching the vessel that fell suddenly and without warning into its waiting embrace. Hank took another draw from the butt between his lips, then tossed it disdainfully out over the edge, watching the still-burning ember arc out into nothing as the vessel in the cradle drew closer. The cage opened in front of him as the dock engaged. All was accomplished in near-silence, the only sound the hiss and crackle of the cooling phase drives at the aft of the corvette. Hank cleared his throat, coughed loudly, the noise echoing out and back and forth along the pipeline. How long had it been since he had spoken? It felt as if his throat were covered in a thick layer of dust from the disuse of his vocal cords.
The docking port of the corvette opened with a liquid slurp as the phased vessel re-integrated into a solid. Exterior lock, interior lock parted, reminding Hank so much of female genitalia that he smirked under his luxurious handlebar moustache. The interior of the vessel proved to be just as dark and mysterious as the unintended metaphor.
Two black shadows emerged from the short passageway into the ship, hoods drawn over their features. Hank flinched for a moment in uncertainty, hand moving in a flash to his side, where a shiver gun fashioned to look like an ancient revolver hung from a leather holster. Faster than his human form could ever manage, one of the black-hooded forms flew forward, knocking Hank asunder and painfully disabling him with one tap of a hidden energy weapon. Silvery threads of weapon silk spun around Hank’s torso, pinning his arms to his sides as he fell with a meaty thud to the metal floor.
Whistler threw the hood back from his face and bent down to Hank’s level, where he produced a slender black device and thrust it into Hank’s neck. The old cowboy gasped with the sudden and sharp pain, and struggled under his silken snare. The black tube in Whistler’s hand beeped, and the weapon silk disintegrated. He stood, outstretched a hand, helped Hank to his feet.
“Whistler, you fucking prick.” Hank rubbed the reddened spot on his neck where a faint line of blood was running.
“Just following procedure, my dear pretty waste of flesh.” Whistler’s grin illuminated the dock. “Wouldn’t want an imposter, would we?”
“Who the hell would want to impersonate me? They’ve all been out-system for centuries.”
“Well, we didn’t know that, did we? We just got back from picking up the poppet from her hiding place. When the master’s away, the Hank is at play, I trust?”
“Bored as shit, if you really want to know. She hasn’t talked to me in years.”
For the first time, Whistler’s gaze faltered. “No contact?”
Hank looked side to side, as if it really mattered. Mother was within earshot in the entire system, and this close to her center, there was nothing he could do to hide this conversation from her. “She’s just been quiet lately. Ten, fifteen years maybe.”
Nine pulled the hood back from his face. “We’ll have to go see.”
Whistler nodded, walked back to the docked corvette. He walked up into the vessel, pulling Fleur from her solitude out onto the metal surface of gate control. Hank looked her lithe form up and down, reflexively licked his bottom lip.
“She’s grown.”
Nine walked closer to Hank, frown on his face. Hank tore his gaze from Fleur and looked safely at the floor.
“We’ll need to drop. We need to take the catalyst down to Mother.”
“Machine?”
Zero?
“They’re at the Gate. In the tube. With Mother.”
There is no way you could know that.
A chuckle drowned by the viscous gelatin of the Machine atmosphere. “I know.”
Which one now?
“Eight…Or Nine. I can’ tell. They’re so close.”
And what do you think Mother will tell them?
Zero shook his head, sending waves gently splashing away from his submerged head.
She’ll tell them the same thing she told you before the launch. No hope, no tomorrow. No Sixth Resurrection. The probes picked up nothing from the Outer. We haven’t found anything out here…There is nothing left to find.
“They must have left something…Somewhere. They couldn’t have come from the empty between the systems.”
Whatever they left behind, it’s gone now. Mother saw to that, I would imagine.
“We have to find a way…We have to get back.”
Zero, shut the fuck up.
Fleur held limply on to the edge of the drop vessel as it plummeted to the bottom of the vast silver tube. The wind blew her hair up, where it whipped back and forth, the frenzied brunette fronds of a hurricane palm. Snarls of dark hair, defying gravity, lashing at her mouth and eyes. She let go of the railing, absently pulled several trapped strands from her mouth, where it had made a feeble attempt at strangling her.
Nine placed his large hand on the small of her back. “Hold on.”
She smiled at his concern, but the corners of the smile dropped a bit in realization. “You’ve never seen her, have you? This is your first visit.”
Nine looked off into the distance, the hypnotizing blur of silver and fire and speed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Sometime I forget that you’re not—”
“—him?” Nine did not look at Fleur as he said it, but his hand retreated from her back. Fleur held the railing again with both hands.
Whistler stood at the center of the drop vessel with Hank, who had the most ridiculous goggles covering his eyes. His hat, secured to his neck with an ancient leather cord, whipped around his head much as Fleur’s hair created a halo of dun around hers. Hank clenched a cigarette between his teeth, the ashes flying straight up as the structural integrity of the tip destabilized, sending a glowing crimson shower of miniscule firespots into the heavens upon heavens above. As the vessel slowed, less ashes were torn away from the cigarette tip, which eventually regained the standard physics of smoking, and lazily grew a beard of gray ash.
“Center Earth. Thanks for flyin’ Air Hank, you lucky bastards.”
Whistler daintily motioned with his hand and one edge of the drop vessel folded upon itself and descended to the polished metal floor as a ramp.
“Care to join us, Hank? Mere might enjoy your company after all these years.”
Hank took a contemplative draw on his smoke, flicked it away, where it spun out into the shadows of the bottom of the Vegas pipe. “Sure, what the hell.”
For a moment, Fleur just stood by the railing, looking at everything and nothing, her small hands latched firmly to the metal. Whistler and Hank sauntered down the ramp out onto the uncertain black of the tunnel floor. Nine placed his hand over Fleur’s, gently lifted her fingers from around the railing.
“It’ll be all right. I’m here.”
“You don’t know her. You don’t know what she has planned.”
Nine’s eyes dug into Fleur’s mind.
I’m here. Nothing will happen.
“Come on, you two! We have an meeting with Mum!” Whistler was entirely too cheerful as he beckoned to Nine and Fleur, who walked slowly down the ramp from the drop vessel. Whistler turned back to Hank, looped his arm through the old cowboy’s as they walked. Hank shot Whistler a deadly glare, but shook his head and said nothing.
They walked down the canted passageway to Center Earth. Mother was near.
It is near.
“What is it?”
I do not know.
Zero frowned in the drowned bowl, shook his head in disbelief. There wasn’t supposed to be anything out here. There couldn’t be anything out here in the Outer. Mother’s little jihad should have seen to that. If the vessels approaching them were some cut-off wing of one of Mother’s Extinction fleets, there would be no hope of survival.
Machine filled the bowl with an exterior display so that Zero could see what was happening. They were still traveling at Light X, but whatever was chasing them was traveling at a far greater speed. Zero knew that there could not be anything chasing them at faster than Light X speed, but still, there it was. There they were: great black shapes blocking out the nothing between the suns of the void.
We’re dropping from Light X.
And so they did: the dizzying whirlpool of space lashed forward and backward as they reintegrated into a solid form. The bowl became a solid, smooth sphere and Zero dropped from his swimming position in the center of his prison, unceremoniously slid on his ass around the “bottom” of the bowl until he regained his balance and stood up.
“Machine?”
Don’t ask. I don’t know. We’re being scraped.
Zero knew that “scraped” was Machine’s colloquialism for being scanned, which in the case of biological silverthought vessels required a small scraping of genetic material from the vessel’s hull. Machine shuddered as it was enveloped by the darkness of the unknown pursuer, and umbilicals began cutting away segments of its surface. Zero lurched on the concave (or was it convex?) floor of the bowl, struggling to maintain his foothold on the slick non-metal.
“They have to be part of the Extinction fleet. There’s no one else out here.”
Machine stopped shivering, fell completely still. Silent.
“Ma—”
Zero’s inquisition was cut short by a startling burst of white light and hideous shriek as the bowl was filled with the sparks and fire of an incision torch. A great circular segment of the bowl was sheared loose and slid down to the bottom of the chamber, its edges still red-hot. Zero simply stood with jaw agape as two human creatures removed black goggles and surveyed the interior of the bowl. One trained a vicious black tube that could only be a projectile weapon on Zero, motioned for him to exit. It spoke in a language that he could not begin to understand, then reached out in a language that Zero could not help but understand.
[get out of there. come with us.]
silverthought.
“What are they saying? What the fuck are they saying?”
“Who cares? Light ’em up.”
Zero’s heart slammed in his chest as it was filled with memories of a past that he had unsuccessfully tried to bury. Visions of a sunset, a city, and screaming masses, lambs ready for slaughter, only they were screaming in a language that didn’t exist in any of the libraries, on a planet that wasn’t in the Registry, but hell, Mother said kill them so kill them, right? Women and children, hands raised helplessly before them in surrender, screaming and weeping and pleading in an unknown tongue.
“Trigger it. We’ll iron out the paperwork later.”
Zero’s eyes rolled back as he fell to the floor of the bowl, overcome with a realization that he was not yet ready to acknowledge. The two men peering down from the circular cut in the chamber began to climb down to pull him out. Zero was lost in dream.
It was like a dream, Fleur decided, as they came to the end of the tunnel to Center Earth. The plush carpeting had begun several hundred feet back, and they now walked on shag the color of neon green. The walls appeared to be covered in wooden paneling instead of the sterile silver expanse of the Vegas pipe.
At the end of the tunnel, there was a simple wooden door with a brass knocker and a peephole in the upper center panel. Fleur took in her surroundings with utter disbelief. It did not look at all like the living quarters of the Divine Merciful and Wise Mother of the Sixth Extinction that she remembered.
Whistler strode confidently up to the door and swung the brass knocker down several times. The tap-tap-tapping was more annoying than effective, and they were met with silence from the other side of the door. Whistler nervously smiled, inhaled, knocked again.
“Mother? We’re home, and we’ve brought your poppet.”
There was a faint sound of tiny footsteps from behind the door, followed by an odd metallic scraping sound that drew closer. The metal plate covering the far side of the peephole swung out of place, allowing a glint of light to show through for a moment, before the plate was dropped back into place. Clicking and ratcheting and twisting sounds of various locks, deadbolts, then the metallic scraping sound again and the door swung lazily inward, revealing nothing but another dark passage, an ancient folding metal step-stool, and a little girl of approximately five years of age.
She smiled and took Whistler’s hand, leading him into the dark hallway beyond the door. He turned and shot Nine a look of silent concern as he walked into the inner sanctum of Center Earth. Hank chuckled a little under his breath, took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a battered red handkerchief before following Whistler in. Nine gently grabbed Fleur’s forearm as she walked by him, and she stopped. Nine leaned in close to the side of her head.
“What it is? What’s wrong?” His whispers were louder than he had anticipated, and Fleur reached up, pressed the tip of her new index finger against his mouth.
“She’s dying.” Fleur withdrew her finger and softly pulled Nine after her as they walked through the doorway into the center of the planet.
It was a feeling of falling, definitely, but Zero knew that his limp body was actually being pulled up the side of the bowl by hands that were human if not actually human. He was powerless to resist, yet could not tell if it was his own body’s defense mechanisms that had paralyzed him, or if an unknown weapon had been used against him by the two miners who had found him. And that’s what they really were, right? Two miners who had found a treasure buried at the center of a biological fluid vessel, like the milk chocolate center of a sugar-coated confection. He was the prize.
Up, up, up and then down, slammed to the floor and dragged up an incline, a smooth circular ramp of melted liquid silver, senses still not responding, but the sensation of warmth underneath his legs and lower back unmistakable as the vestiges of a mortal wound to Machine that had been carved in to the bowl.
An end to the tunnel, and bright lights. A room filled with other men, most holding weapons before them, most standing silently as Zero was lifted on to a hovering stretcher and clamps were secured around his arms and legs. There was a flickering undertone of communication, just fits and snatches of thought, mostly well-masked against Zero’s prying and curious mind.
Zero’s head lolled to one side, still out of his control. A man draped in black material approached, quickly slid a needle-tipped device into Zero’s neck, withdrew it, waited for a reading. The device emitted a shrill beep. Again, the man slid the device under the flesh of Zero’s neck. Again, the beep. The man shook his head, consulted with another person who was draped both in black material and the shadows of the corner of the room. The words were a jumbled mess of guttural exclamations and smooth vocal elisions. Zero knew that it was not a human language.
[no data on file. it has to be—]
[don’t]
The man in shadows stepped forward, gazed down on the disabled Zero with fire and contempt barely held placid under the glare of steely eyes. He reached out and turned Zero’s head toward him, so that their eyes met.
[the sum of our fears. it hasn’t ended yet.]
The words tore into Zero’s mind, a brilliant flash of tugging heated pain nestled directly behind his eyes. For an instant, he caught an image of what appeared to be two planets colliding, an image of a screaming woman trapped underneath the rubble of a shattered building, a hand so close a hand looking at looking out at his own hand wiping blood from a broken nose and feeling tasting bleeding that blood himself. The image retreated an instant after it appeared, and he was left with only those eyes steel gray eyes looking into and through him with a hatred he could not begin to describe with words.
The man turned the aura of communications that emanated from behind his eyes directly at Zero. The experience was intimate, disconcerting, terrifying.
[which colony are you from, son? who sent you?]
Perhaps the most disturbing moment during the whole trip to Center Earth for Nine was the moment when the creature that was Mother looked back mischievously as he held Whistler’s considerably-larger hand and then began to skip down the remainder of the passage. Whistler had no choice but to skip alongside the Divine Merciful and Wise Mother of the Sixth Extinction, even summoning enough acting skill to let out a joyful “Hurrah!” as he skipped with her.
She laughed as only an energetic five-year-old can, be damned the fact that she was little more than a machine-based lifeform from beyond the stars that was solely responsible for the deaths of trillions upon trillions of sentient beings in this backwater of the collapsing universe. She reached up for the doorknob to the inner chamber, but couldn’t seem to grasp it. She looked back down the hallway at her step stool. Whistler realized the dilemma, opened the door for her. She sweetly smiled, and ran into her abode, the curls atop her head bouncing playfully along. She was wearing a delightful pair of magenta corduroy bib overalls and a light pink shirt. Barefoot. She sat down in the center of the room, which had been redecorated in a childhood motif since Whistler had last been there. There were stuffed animals, dolls, a large rocking horse in the corner. Pastels with few primaries. On the floor, she devoted her attention to a stack of coloring books and a large pile of crayons, every color imaginable. She scribbled delightedly for a while, filling in the image of a duck with an umbrella an intriguing aesthetic of raw sienna and silver, ignoring the four people grouped around her, looking down in an uneasy mixture of confusion and horrifying fear. Eventually she was satisfied with the coloring job she did on the duck and his little umbrella, and she looked up, the smile gone from her cherubic face.
[fleur, you betrayed me.]
The words hung languidly in the air for a moment, and Fleur stumbled over her own voice, tried to think of something, anything to say in her own defense. Mother raised one hand, and Fleur fell quiet.
[hush, little one.] The imperative was made doubly-disconcerting by the fact that it came from a five-year-old with the voice of an ancient, the voice that transcended voice, emanated from the entire expanse of the Vegas tunnel, swept across the surface of the dead planet and reached out to the void through which the Extinction Fleet once sailed on their divine mission of pacification and purification.
[i won’t kill you for betraying me, but you may very well die where i am sending you.]
a haze of pain beyond pain, loss beyond loss…
The scraping had been more of a gouging and dismembering as the inhabitants of the unknown vessel cut into and through Machine to extract its precious cargo of Zero. Machine gasped a breath that was not air and shuddered a shudder of non-shudder. Such pain in this existence. The other senses were lost, but still it felt pain.
Enveloped. Encompassed. The liquid metal of the Machine was quickly destabilizing, becoming something else. Machine sensed that Zero had been taken from his bowl. Without Zero, Machine would quickly dissolve into nothing more than several trillion tons of silver liquid biomass. Machine couldn’t hear Zero’s thoughts anywhere near.
point of origin?
The inquisition shot through him unexpectedly, resonating his entire being. The question echoed back and forth, forth and back in every color of the rainbow, every language every spoken and several never ever spoken. Machine, torn apart and invaded for the Cracker Jack prize of death row inmate and certified troublemaker Zero, felt at once raped and fulfilled by this new voice…It filled in the cracks, smoothed over the incision, patted the scrape and kissed it, making everything better. It was as close a sensation to le petit mort that Machine ever had and ever could experience.
point of origin?
Again, the question. Should Machine answer this stranger who was in his (head? mind? what are you thinking, machine?) soul? Would it jeopardize his mission? He decided that the fact that he was incapacitated and bleeding out the precious bioneural gelatin was a pretty good indication of game over, Machine. What could he lose by telling this voice everything that it wanted to hear?
point of origin?
Earth. Planet One of fourteen million surveyed and pacified planets.
rephrase: point of cargo origin?
Machine thought for a moment about that one…Where exactly was Zero from?
Uncertain point of origin. Last planetary contact with Planet One.
redirect: list applicable cargo contaminants.
Again, Machine was confused by the question. He could feel this faceless voice searching though his accumulated knowledge, faint fingertips tickling deep inside of his essense.
rephrase: is cargo contaminated with the genocidal catalyst referred to as “fleur”?
Machine had a moment of realization. Vestigial emotions and visions of a burning city, a screaming woman reaching out, and burning silver falling from the sky. This presence was not from the Extinction Fleet. The vessel that had encompassed them in liquidspace was not from earth or Mother or the any of the Inner. This was something unanticipated, and much, much worse.
Zero has a natural immunity to the Fleur catalyst.
Machine felt it then, the abrupt, stabbing pain of his end, as the liquid metal voice pierced and poured through the final interior battlements he had erected in his mind as a last line of defense. Invaded and suffocated and consumed by that beautiful, lyrical presence. Machine gasped and drowned in his own liquid soul.
[more tea?]
Whistler was still holding the tiny plastic cup to his lips, but he looked up obligingly, smiled his patented killer smile, all sparkly whites to match his shock of curled white hair. “But of course, Mum. It is delicious.”
Mother smiled her angelic child smile and poured more tepid water from her plastic teapot into Whistler’s cup. He nodded his approval and gratitude and took a sip. Fleur watched with mild interest as her mind wandered, rabbit in the headlights of an uncertain end. She thought with mild unease about the intricate process that was taking place instantaneously within Whistler as his projected form catalyzed and converted the liquid water into another part of his illusion. Liquid becomes upload becomes holographically-projected drip of water running down the chin of a man who was no more physically alive than the plastic teacup from which he drank. Whistler laughed, embarrassed at the spillage, daintily wiped the water from the periphery of his goatee. Fleur did not like to think about the technology that allowed him to exist.
Mother sat back in her tiny chair, linked her fingers through each other, hands resting on her breast-less chest as she leaned back on two chair legs. She surveyed her guests with an air of satisfaction. She was obviously enjoying the company. Her company was clustered uncomfortably around the round wooden child’s table, sitting on low children’s chairs, sipping lukewarm “tea” from tiny pink plastic cups. Nine looked the most uncomfortable, his knees projecting up like the columns of a bridge as he maneuvered his unwanted tea between them.
“Four on the floor, please, Mother.”
She frowned, a petulant child and not the horrifying act of extinction that she truly was, but obeyed Whistler’s gentle instruction and leaned forward so that all four legs of her diminutive chair made contact with the brilliant green rug. Her brow furrowed in frustration, she waved her hand and the pink plastic tea set was no more, the cup disappearing from Hank’s fingertips as he placed his lips to it to take another half-hearted sip. He looked around awkwardly, brought his hand up and itched the side of his head instead, as if that were his intention all along. Fleur grinned.
[you have nothing to smile about, little one.]
“You’re one to talk, Mother.”
The silence in the room was more deafening that the shriek of collapsing bulkhead that had pinned Fleur to the deck of the prison galleon and prevented her from ending this charade once and for all. Whistler and Nine looked at each other in silent agreement. Hank cleared his throat and shifted in his tiny seat.
“Why didn’t you just have them kill me? You’ve taken everything from me that I ever wanted already. Just kill me and get it over with.”
[not that simple, really. as i said before, i have one more mission for you before your job is done, little flower.]
“Don’t call me that.” Fleur’s eyes burned with an intensity that cut through the dim playroom and the suffocating inhumanity of its inhabitants with razor precision.
[but that’s what you are…the little flower. the little silver flower that blooms and blooms and chokes out all that stand before it with shining crimson—]
“Stop it. Just tell me what you need from me.”
Mother smiled her innocent smile. [i need nothing from you but you, dear. the human race needs you.]
“There is no human race anymore.”
[but of course there is, poppet! why, there are you and—]
“Me and who? Hank? That’s all you have left of us. Me and Hank, right?”
Hank had been absent-mindedly playing with his ancient Zippo, but he looked up at the sound of his name. He was sitting adjacent to Mother on this tiny wooden circle, and he looked down at her, smiling a nervous smile.
[no, fleur. just you.]
Hank’s eyes widened in the instant before Mother struck out, knocking him out of the chair and across the room, his head connecting squarely with the wall, dazing him. Mother stood, walked calmly to Hank’s side, withdrew a blade from within her pink corduroy overalls. Nine sat up in his chair, ready to spring to Hank’s aid, but Whistler grabbed his shoulder, held him back.
“Remember who you work for, boy.”
Hank tried to sit up, but only succeeded in knocking his cowboy hat to the floor. Mother made quick work of him, blade slashing back and forth across his throat before he could react to the sight of the armed toddler before him. His lifeblood coursed out of the ravine Mother had carved in his neck, and Hank gasped his last breath with a look of utter incredulity on his weary, weathered face. Hank slumped against the baseboard, growing puddle of red around him.
Mother returned to the table, calmly wiped her blade on the pretty doily upon which the teacup had been resting. Bright droplets of Hank’s essence had spattered across her face, but she did not seem to notice. The blade returned to its hidden sheath.
Tears welled up in Fleur’s eyes. “How could you—”
[hush.] Mother withdrew a silver sphere from her seemingly endless supply of interior overall pockets, rolled it across the table. A wave of her hand and the ball flashed to life, projecting a perfect image of Hank into the chair where he had been sitting. The image immediately grabbed its throat in terror, but finding no mortal wound where there should have been one, simply glared at Mother.
“You fucking—Mother, what the fuck?”
She looked all-too-pleased with herself, and grinned widely. [you wouldn’t want to go where i’m sending you like that, hank. you wouldn’t last long as a flesh construct.]
Hank was wordless. He grabbed his projector and placed it in his pocket. “You could’ve fucking warned me. Uploaded me and didn’t fucking warn me.” He looked uneasily over at his own dead body.
[oh, hush now, hank. you’ll like this even more than being a cowboy.]
Fleur’s eyes flashed with realization. “No humans…Just me. You killed him so that—”
[and her eyes were opened.]
“But we’ve cleaned everything already. There were no more systems to infect.” She began to shake her head back and forth, unconsciously denying that which she knew she could never refuse.
[let’s just say this is something special.]
“I can’t! I won’t do it. I—”
[you will.]
[natural immunity. that’s an asset, son. right now, your only asset.]
Zero was held motionless, floating in the center of the spherical chamber to which they had transported him. It was dark, but three revolving spotlights, perhaps force generators, were fixed upon his limp body, holding him in stark contrast to the rest of the expanse of shadow. They surrounded him, these men who spoke with lips and tongues that projected nonsense and minds that projected perfect silverthought, violent in its intensity. He was struggling against the mental onslaught of hundreds of prying minds, the last of his mental defense mechanisms slowly cracking and falling.
[we’ve interrogated your machine. you’ve come a long way, Zero.]
how can he know that?
The man before him smiled, his lips curling to enunciate those grinding words that were quickly surpassed in volume by the direct mind-to-mind communication that was much more effective, even if it was highly disconcerting.
[your machine…it gave us everything we need to know about you.]
The man walked closer. Black-clad hand reached out, gently touched Zero’s cheek.
[so long…it’s been so long since we’ve seen you. eons.]
Zero frowned, beyond confused. That touch, almost imperceptible as (leather?) fingertips traced his cheekbone. The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, so faded as to suggest white. Impossible blue, the blue of a life spent in the darkness of space. Zero had the most unsettling feeling that he knew this man from somewhere, sometime…
[we sent her to populate your galaxy many, many years ago. after she stopped responding to our communications, we just assumed that the colony had been lost. but it would appear that the dear creature you call “Mother” has been busy, busy, busy.]
The man grasped Zero’s chin firmly, locked his gaze into Zero’s eyes, and his world became a burning city, a woman screaming, looking up, reaching up, pointing into the sky, where a vessel hung, lights flickering from within, a radiant sphere of white expanding out from the interior as phase drives amplified the Fleur virus, disseminating it throughout the atmosphere, where it rained down, tiny flecks of silver, a confetti of glitter that dusted the faces of the assembled masses and spawned, spawned on and in their flesh, screaming flesh as the roar from above, the many engines of an Extinction Fleet descending from above, a tumult that was indescribably beautiful and horrifying and—
Zero closed his eyes, snapped his head back and forth, those alien hands now grasping both sides of his face, those alien eyes now drilling into his mind with pure white fire.
[she sent you to kill us, you know. or maybe the beauty of it is that none of you knew. you thought it was a jihad. you thought it was civil war.]
Zero opened his eyes and looked desperately up at the stranger, whose face was white and held a sheen of sickness and exhaustion. The stranger shook his head, cleared his throat, and the suffocating mental embrace was released.
“It wasn’t a civil war, Zero.” He assembled his sentence very carefully, spoke the words with a childish fascination at the sound, the taste, the touch of the new language. “It was a genocide.”
“I’m so sorry.” Zero felt all of his energy, all of his vitality pour from his body at the man’s touch. The Stranger’s touch, for that is what that silken mental embrace felt like. He was a stranger, but so remarkably familiar…“I never knew—”
The Stranger smiled the sad smile of ancient resignation. “Of course you never knew, Zero.” He leaned in close to the incapacitated Zero, gently, tenderly kissed his forehead, tousled his hair. The gesture was so kind, so loving. Who was this man?
With a wave of his hand, the beams of light holding Zero suspended in the air slowly faded, lowered him to floor level, where he stood, weakly rubbing his hands over the cold gooseflesh of his forearms. The Stranger’s head tilted in concern and then understanding, and he removed his black overcoat and wrapped it around Zero’s shoulders.
“Come on, son. There’s much to talk about, and so little time.”
[it would seem that we were a little too efficient.]
Fleur glared at Mother, whose eyes betrayed the obvious relish with which she was stringing them along. The little girl sat in her tiny chair, her hand placed lovingly on top of Hank’s new emulated hands, uneasily clasped on the table before him, on which was printed a circular pattern of dancing barnyard animals, all linked hand-to-hand, or hoof-to-feather, rather. Mother patted Hank and gravely rested her chin on her fist, shrugging with feigned indecision.
[too efficient. that’s the only way to explain it.]
“Just tell us what you want to say. Stop these games.”
Satisfied that she had stirred enough emotion in Fleur for now, Mother smiled widely, crossed her arms on her pre-pre-pre-pubescent chest.
[you ran when you found out what you were doing to those worlds, little flower. you hid on a prison galleon bound for the outer and hoped that we’d never be able to find you. if it weren’t for whistler and seven and eight and nine, you’d have escaped with the rest of the vermin.]
Whistler and Nine sat side-by-side, each flickering in perfect projected unease. Neither could look up and face the gaze of Fleur.
“They brought me back unharmed.” Fleur instinctively flexed her “new” left hand, constructed from an emulated parts clone, raped from another Fleur to fit the only Fleur that truly mattered. “So you must have found another planet. Another rogue world.”
[something like that.]
“Just fucking tell me!”
A motion too fluid and too fast for Fleur to comprehend and they were alone in the room, Whistler and Nine and Hank vanished, the only hint of their existence the tiny silver spherical emulation projectors that dropped into the children’s chairs in which they had been sitting. The balls rolled around the concave (convex?) depressions meant for human posterior regions, then fell through as the chairs, the neon green carpet, the room itself faded, dissolved. Fleur and Mother were left alone in the true Center Earth, which appeared from the fog of illusion that Mother had created for her guests.
They hung in the center of an expanse that dwarfed the Vegas tunnel, its walls lined with machines of limited sentience that skittered about insectlike, gigantic machines the size of mountains roaring along on Mother’s orders of processing the interior of the planet. Fleur’s throat closed in as she saw what the majority of the machines were working on. Mother remained in her child form, and playfully swam over to where the silver balls that were Whistler, Nine, and Hank floated. She grabbed all three and placed them in the pocket of her overalls.
[like my ship?]
Ship was an understatement. A vessel the size of a continent was being constructed out of the carcass of planet Earth in its very interior. Hundreds, thousands of Mother’s machines swarmed over its surface, which sparkled with countless welding blasts, shrieks of metal, the reverberating clang of miles-long segments of the vessel slamming into place as the machines hurriedly constructed it.
Fleur was wordless. She had seen the vessels of the Extinction Fleet, but never anything like this. She had only heard of one larger vessel—
[zero’s vessel was bigger, yes. almost the size of an entire system. but it just didn’t have the vitality of mine. of ours.]
“Where—Where are we going?”
Mother swam over to Fleur, held her hand gently. Her smile was wide and terrifying in its implications. Before she said a word, Fleur knew her answer.
[we’re going home, little flower.]
Zero tried not to be disturbed by the line of black-clad men that walked in silence on either side of him. The Stranger was at his side, walking at his slow, exhausted pace. Zero was beginning to suffer the adverse effects of gravity re-entry. His body ached for the fluid enclosure of the bowl, the warm comfort of liquid space. The only sound in this passage was the shuffled steps of hundreds of feet. The men walked in silence down the slightly-canted corridor, constructed entirely of matte plastic? metal? something, curving upward so that he couldn’t see the end.
“Your Machine has been dissembled and absorbed into—” The Stranger paused, Zero feeling the search for the correct term (essence singularity soul parent) “—Heaven.”
Zero’s watched as the Stranger reacted to his expression of confusion, and found it reflected in the man’s face. He stopped walking. “Heaven?”
“Our creator…and benefactor. You will experience it. It is ineffable. Difficult to name.”
“And you? What should I call you?”
Again, that disarming grin. “Stranger will do. My name doesn’t matter.” A reassuring squeeze of the shoulder, and they walked on, flanked on both sides by black and silence. Soon, they came to the end of the corridor, which opened out into an impossible expanse that took Zero’s breath away, almost quite literally.
The walkway extended out to an airlock, at which was docked a shiver vessel of uncertain design. The airlock was the only blemish on the surface of a clear globe, the walls of which were constructed of miles of transparent, glassy plastic. On the other side of the clear shield was an enclosed solar system, millions of miles wide. At its center, shimmering weakly, was a dying star. Zero turned to Stranger, his face broadcasting his amazement at the phenomenon that he was witnessing.
“It was a binary system. When your Extinction Fleet first made an appearance, we were able to hide one of our stars here. This vessel is all we have left.”
Zero touched the miles of glass before him, which greeted his fingertips with a cool, static attraction. The airlock door cycled open beside him.
“You have the technology to place a solar system inside of a vessel?”
Stranger scoffed. “Not the entire system. Just one star and forty planets. The others were left behind, where Mother’s fleet eventually got to them. We’ve been hiding in the Outer ever since your genocide spread this far.”
Zero slumped against the glass in realization. Stranger made no move to help him up this time, but stood behind him, arms crossed. Zero looked at the assembled black-robed men standing in formation on either side of the airlock, watching him. Silent. Expressions of such loss on their faces…
“No women. Mother’s fleet—”
“Your fleet, Zero. Of course, you never knew. Your Fleur never knew. You were just following orders. The virus killed them all, even after we escaped with half of the system under shield. The catalyst was at work even before the final seal was welded into place.”
“I never—”
“Come on.” Stranger motioned toward the open airlock and the shiver vessel beyond, embedded within miles of solid glass.
“Where are we going?”
“Heaven.”
Zero warily stepped through the airlock and into the confines of the shiver vessel’s passenger area, where two vacuum chairs sat behind the transparent front needle of the ship. Stranger took a seat, and motioned for Zero to do the same as the lock doors cycled shut behind them. They were alone in the vessel, the men of sadness left on the other side of the door. Zero could feel their touch, though, the subtle undercurrent of hatred that permeated every breath.
Before them, through the front of the shiver, the dazzling visual dance of miles of protective shield glass stretched, bending the light of the dying star at the center of this impossible expanse into infinite prisms and rainbows. A bark from Stranger and the vessel responded to his guttural language, firing up the spinners inside of its phase engine, resonating the vessel until Zero felt certain that his teeth were being jarred loose from his skull. He had always hated the resonance of shivers, that sickening vibration that at once tickled your entire body and made you nauseous as it created that perfect phase shift that could cut through anything solid. Whenever he was in a shiver vessel, Zero always felt like he was the slug in the barrel of a common shiver gun, which, in essence, he was.
“How thick is the shield?”
“Thinner than you think. We’ll reach Heaven in no time.”
With a wave of his hand, Stranger signaled the vessel and it was off, phasing at Light X through the globe of glass that protected all that remained of his homeworlds. Zero sat back in the vacuum seat, gritting his teeth against that uncertain shift from solid to near-liquid. He much preferred the comfort of the bowl, the complete immersion in phased gelatin. Traveling in a shiver was the dry-fuck of interstellar travel: plenty of motion, but little pleasure.
Stranger caught a bit of this thought, and shot Zero a sly smile. “You miss her, don’t you?”
The vibration of the shiver was almost too much for Zero to take, an aural onslaught, but he heard Stranger clear enough. “Who?”
“The Catalyst. Poor boy, you loved her.”
Zero was silent, but his mind broadcast all Stranger needed to know.
“We’ll have to kill her, you know. Nothing personal.”
Zero turned. “Right. Nothing personal.”
Stranger’s eyelids drew together in suspicion, but he said nothing. And he heard nothing; Zero’s mind was far too shielded now to read. He watched the needle before them, and the swirl of primaries blending to tertiaries.
Fleur, where are you?
Where am I?
Fleur’s heart lurched into her throat, so sudden and unexpected was her realization. Just a young woman, floating here in the void within the planet that had once held a childhood, a hope, a little stream and ferns and wind blowing in the valley, peace, sunshine. An awful mockery of that childhood swam beside her in this incomprehensible world, a little girl of five, wearing bright pink corduroy overalls and holding in her hand three silver spheres.
Where am I?
Mother smiled that smile, tossed the three projectors to Fleur, who mindlessly caught them and held their metallic warmth in her new left hand, still under warranty. [you’re afraid, little girl.] Mother did not realize the ridiculousness of her statement, a child referring to someone five times her age as “little girl.” But of course, she was ancient, as ancient as the stars, or at least an ancient as those who had conquered the stars before Earth had solidified from the detritus of the galaxy.
“Yes.”
[good. you have every right to be afraid. we’re going to meet some people who won’t exactly welcome us with open arms, people who sent me away a long time ago.]
A machine approached at breakneck speed, hovered dangerously close for a moment, long enough to tousle both Fleur and Mother’s curly locks.
“Bring it back. The room. Whistler and Hank. And Ze—Nine. Nine.”
Mother grinned savagely. [herr freud would be proud, love.]
“Bring it back.” Another machine was fast approaching, this one hauling a nondescript metal phase drive segment that was easily the size of a mountain.
[but don’t you find it beautiful? all of these loyal workers, doing exactly as i tell them? this awful planet reconstituted into something beautiful. his name is gary.]
Fleur was confused, but the confusion was replaced with fear as the machine towing the phase drive passed, close enough to spin her around in its wake. All around them, countless gigantic machines were coming and going.
[actually, the name is guerra, but he prefers being called gary, so that’s what i call him.]
“Who?”
[our ship. gary. would you like to meet him?]
“Do I have any choice?”
Mother grinned. [you’re learning, little flower. you’ll do just fine.]
She grabbed Fleur’s hand, and away they flew, toward Gary the warship.
It was cold here at the center of the planet, much colder than Fleur had anticipated, and the speed of their flight only heightened the sensation, caused gooseflesh to erupt on her exposed forearms, caused her breaths to come in gasps as her body
shivered, he remembered, as the current drew them together, drew him within. That hushed gasp, the lines of her eyebrows furrowing and the feel of fingernails tracing gently at first and then with increasing pain as they began to carve faint furrows into his shoulders and back. Frantic dance of flesh as the waves consumed them both, his eyes opening for a moment to gaze upon that dark spill of curls, a halo around her head and she whispered something in that perfect moment, whispered that word that had haunted him now for months and years and decades and haunted him, just a simple word, whispered in that perfect climax, that perfect moment where he was lost in waves of
“Heaven.”
Zero snapped from the shiver-induced reverie, that half-sleep that so many passengers in shivers had reported, that inexplicable torpor that accompanied the vibration of phased travel. Stranger looked at him disdainfully, as if the sleep reflex was below him.
“What?”
“Heaven approaches. Or rather, we approach Heaven.”
Zero remembered their vessel’s exit from the glass field, but not much beyond. Their shiver was now being escorted by an armada of larger vessels, some shaped like atmospherics, and others definitely spacers. Zero stretched to look out the rear of the vessel, and found that there were already many more orbiting spheres behind the shiver than in front. They had passed without incident through much of the enclosed solar system, apparently drawing a crowd as they passed.
“You needn’t worry about our escorts. They’re just observing.”
Something in Stranger’s voice resonated with its own undercurrent…Zero tasted distrust in that statement, and he caught a brief unshielded image of an accusatory finger pointed at a man in white, or perhaps just a white beard, a soundtrack of that guttural bark that these creatures used as a language. Stranger was definitely hiding something…But Zero could sense already that not all was well under this glass sky.
One of the smaller vessels swooped dangerously close to the shiver, then fell away, phase drives leaving a contrail of blurred space behind it. Stranger looked intently ahead, ignoring the display. Zero, however, watched the smaller vessel move to rejoin the formation of similar vessels that it had been flying with. A brilliant flash and it was cut apart in mid-maneuver by a corvette that came in fast and low. Several destroyers moved to intercept the corvette, and another group moved in close around the shiver. The world inside the snowglobe erupted in a lightshow.
Stranger barked orders at the vessel, which increased speed and rocketed toward the sphere closest to the trapped star. All around them the world was lances of fire and phase and shiver.
“Just observing?”
“Quiet,” Stranger growled back. “We’ve had some trouble since your arrival.”
“Some trouble? All is not well in paradise?”
[paradise?] the word slammed into Zero’s mind with horrifying force. [it’s not been a paradise since the Exile sent us your precious little flower. how dare you speak of paradise when you have the blood of an entire species on your hands?]
The words echoed through Zero’s mind, a sickening sensation much like the shiver. “it’s a civil war. You don’t know what to do with me.”
“That’s right. We’re killing ourselves out there,” he indicated the skirmish taking place around their vessel “Because of you.”
The shiver continued toward the first satellite of the dying star, flanked on all sides by massive destroyers. Corvettes and fighters still swooped in and out of their path, but they were for the most part instantly cut apart by the shiver’s escorts.
The shiver slowed as it entered the atmosphere of the first planet. The surface below them was bereft of signs of life, a black icescape on the side that they approached. Their destroyer escorts stayed in orbit, and the shiver was followed by an array of smaller atmospheric vessels. Zero strained to see the lights of cities or airstrips, but was disappointed. As far as he could tell, there was nothing constructed by humans on the surface of this planet.
“It’s beneath the surface, at the planet core.”
Zero understood then, of course Heaven was at the planet core. Where had they found Mother when the planet had begun to cool and die? The planet core. These creatures were not surface-dwellers; they preferred the privacy of the interior.
“Something like that.” Stranger folded his hands across his chest.
A great gap opened in the darkness, illuminated from within, an immense silver mouth stretching into the planet interior. The shiver fell inside, and the mouth closed. With one swallow, the vessel plummeted into the distant cousin of the Vegas Gate. Pearly gates or not, Zero was on his way to Heaven.
Foreboding, suffocating sense of foreboding.
Higher and higher, caught in the swirls and eddies of the new atmosphere at the center of the planet, hovering like eagles, linked hand to tiny hand, two human forms gracefully swimming through air to the warship that was named War but preferred to be called Gary. Mother laughed, the child that she had become laughed, and Fleur cringed as she heard the depth of the decay, echoing forever through the tumult of a machine ocean. Mother was dying, and dying quickly. The destabilization of that presence that had permeated the entire galaxy of her exile in these last hundred-thousand years was evidenced in that child’s blissful laughter. Fleur shivered from the cold and from the depth of her despair.
They approached the warship from beneath. Machines were affixing the final phase drive to the aft of the vessel. Countless automaton assemblages of stone and metal and fiery shift swam in schools through the current of Center Earth, crawling over Gary and putting finishing touches on his superstructure. Mother deftly avoided the dutiful slaves, and her grasp on Fleur’s hand tightened as they floated up to the underside lock.
[gary!] Mother shouted with all of her mind. [let us in!]
US? WHO’S “US”?
[me and fleur, gary. let us in!]
FUCKIN’ A.
Mother visibly blushed, much to Fleur’s amazement. [gary hasn’t been properly trained yet.]
The underside lock began to cycle open. Mother towed Fleur along behind her as they rose up into Gary, who was spouting a string a silverthought expletives into the void.
As the lock slid shut below them, Fleur took in her surroundings. She had expected a cavernous interior, but it would appear that most of the bulk of Gary was taken up with the phase drives and megascale mechanics that would launch them into the Outer. The room into which they floated was another simple construct of Mother’s mind, a suburban living room with a comfy couch, beanbag chairs, even a pool table and wet bar. Instead of a cockpit, Fleur found herself in domestic tedium. Instead of a control panel, Fleur found a twenty-seven-inch television. As Mother descended and as her feet touched the shag carpet, Fleur could have sworn she heard music. Elevator music.
[welcome to your new home, Fleur. we’ll be spending lots of quality time together.]
GIRL, YOU CRAZY.
Mother frowned. [gary, be quiet.] She walked over in the restored gravity and threw herself down on a beanbag.
Fleur stood, taking it all in, then remembered her own passengers. She released her clenched first and threw the three silver projectors into the air, where they sparked to life, emitting Hank, Whistler, and Nine in perfect emulation.
MOMMA, WHAT THE FUCK—
[gary! i’d like you to meet whistler. whistler, gary. gary, hank. hank, gary. nine, gary. gary, nine.]
AND A PARTRIDGE IN THE MOTHERFUCKING PEAR TREE?
Whistler flattened the front of his robe. “Mother, what is this?”
[this, whistler darling, is gary. he’s our new home.]
Nine walked to Fleur’s side, his cold projected hand engulfing hers, fingers looping through fingers. She smiled, but not before catching the icy gaze of the five-year-old in the beanbag chair.
“Gary is a vessel. Where are we going?”
[somewhere marvelous! i know that you’ll enjoy it.]
Hank took in his surroundings with his trademark scowl, reached into his pocket and was pleased to find that Mother had been kind enough to emulate a pack of smokes for him. He pulled one out and found in that dreamlike sense of hazy possibility that was the new life of the recently-uploaded that the cigarette was already burning. All he had to do was place it to his lips and inhale.
NO SMOKING ON THIS WARSHIP!
A bubble of nonspace erupted around Hank’s hand and the cigarette was gone, along with a large portion of the hand itself. Hank frowned silently, retrieved his projector from his pocket with his remaining hand, shook it a few times. A new hand faded into place with a little burst of static.
“This is gonna be a long flight without no smokes, Mother. Where we goin’?”
Nine and Fleur sat on the loveseat beside Mother, and Hank and Whistler plopped unceremoniously down on beanbags of their own. The television flickered to life, displaying a field of stars.
[the extinction isn’t over yet, my children.] she sat forward as she spoke, eyes glimmering with an interior silver. [you could say that the jihad was just a test run.]
GIRL, YOU SO COLD-HEARTED.
Mother glared up at the voice from nowhere. [there are people who hurt me, long ago. they sent me here to get rid of me, and now it’s time to go back.]
“She’s the Exile.” Fleur looked down at Mother with sad eyes. “They hurt her. And now she’s going to use us to hurt them. Not just a war or a jihad. Not just an extinction.”
[little flower—]
“She’s going to use us to destroy Heaven.”
The pleasure displayed on the child’s face was unmistakeable.
[that would be a fitting end to this charade, wouldn’t it? what divine irony if i were to destroy her by the end of this…yes. i’ve made up my mind. time to go.]
Whistler cleared his throat. “Shouldn’t we wait until Gary is *ahem* built?”
FUCK YOU SAY?
[gary is finished enough. right, gary?]
DAMN STRAIGHT.
Mother rolled her eyes. [right. so can we leave?]
HELL YEAH.
[good. take as many machines from the center as you need, and let’s go home.]
With Gary distracted with the takeoff procedures, Hank lit a cigarette. Whistler fanned the smoke away, pulled his collar up around his neck and cheeks, his eyes darting toward the child. Fleur huddled closer to Nine, her dark curls tickling his neck and chin and cheek as he bent, kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent, dreamed those dreams that he could never live for his lack of body and soul and future.
Mother was practically bursting with excitement. Her face radiated joy at the impending departure, her smile wide, dimples marking flushed cheeks, her entire body rocking back and forth in the ridiculous beanbag chair, ridiculous for its blatant anachronism in a universe now devoid of romper rooms and hepcats.
[we’ll bring it to them. an end of sorts, but more…so much more.]
Gary began to resonate with the shiver of a million phase drives. Fleur closed her eyes, sick to her soul with the realization of what they were about to do.
[Heaven awaits.]
They left.
THE STILLNESS BETWEEN
She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.
She drank as much chocolate milk as she could, which really wasn’t that much, but she knew that chocolate milk brought her almost as much if not more happiness as anything in the sterile world that had been her home for her entire life. The angels disapproved of her mass-consumption of that silken chocolaty goodness, but they really couldn’t do anything to stop her. Nan would voice her disapproval in that tugging, lecturing way, but she would just smile sweetly and ask for more. Always more chocolate milk. In her little world, there was an unending supply of anything that she desired. The angels had to do exactly as she ordered, a fact that she was just now beginning to take advantage of on a regular basis. Some would call her spoiled. She preferred to think of herself as a child of privilege. Chocolate milk? We’ve got oceans.
“Lily, dear?”
She looked up from the tabletop where her gaze had been transfixed on the colloidal action of millions of brown chocolate flecks interspersed throughout her glass of white near-milk. The silver spoon with which she had thoughtfully stirred the chocolate powder into her beloved drink stopped its revolution, came to rest.
“I don’t want to.”
Nan pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down. She tousled Lily’s dark curls, pushed one wayward spiral back behind the little girl’s ear. “I know, dear. But you have to go outside. Just for a while, okay? Then you can come back in.”
“Can I have some more?” She indicated the half-empty (half-full?) glass before her, even though she knew the answer already. She could always have more. She could not, however, persuade Nan to let her stay inside today. Or any day.
“Of course, dear. Let’s go.” Nan’s face was as warm and kind as a first-generation projection could muster. If Lily squinted her eyes just enough, she could see the flicker. If she reached out far enough with her mind, she could feel the cool surface of the silver projector sphere at the center of Nan’s being. Sometimes, she resented being ordered outside for this daily ritual by a loose collection of photons revolving around that marble-sized machine.
Lily slid down out of her chair, walked toward the door, her hand on the doorknob before she felt Nan’s motherly touch, draping her coat around her shoulders. She turned the knob and went outside for her daily ration of reality, all-too-aware that her every move was being recorded by a veritable universe of machines.
A typical summer day, cold wind blowing over dead tree limbs, weak sunlight falling on her face, not warming but simply illuminating. That clatter of sound from above always chilled her to the bone even more so than the wind or the air or the growing realization of her isolation. She walked the avenue alone…Well, not entirely alone. Nan walked behind her, watching. She was always being watched. Even the suffocating trees above seemed to watch her with their interwoven cemetery embrace.
Lily sat down on the bench at the end of the lane, as she always did. Nan stopped several hundred paces behind her, as she always did. The bench was at the center of what had once been a beautifully-landscaped courtyard, before the Troubles, before the Discovery, before the Birth. Now, it was a haphazard collection of brown and dead shrubbery, leaves blowing in the wind, collecting at the foot of the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the courtyard and faced the street.
She sat, a confused and moody child with her chin resting contemplatively on her fists, elbows resting on upper thighs. The wind seemed to be the only presence interested in playing with her today, fluttering her hair into a tangled mess that Nan would painfully brush out tonight before bedtime.
They walked by on the street outside the gate as they always did, the people of the city, the last city, walking and watching and simply surviving in the winter days that summer had become in the last decades. They resented her, and she could feel it in their gazes, especially the empty gazes of the mothers, holding the small hands of their toddler sons as they passed. Sometimes the little boys would smile and wave at her. Some of the mothers yanked their children along then, past the little girl on the other side of the fence, past that deceptive metal barrier and the deadly, invisible energy shield that accompanied it. She noted the looks of confusion on the faces of the little boys, and was sad to see them go.
A rumble from the west and a transport lifted off above the horizon with fiery liquid speed, propelled out of the atmosphere from the trebuchet built into the other side of the planet. Lily knew that all across the city, people were looking at that dark sliver, wondering when it would be their turn to join the jihad. Most would die before it was time. Most were simply raising their sons to be good warriors. Most would look at the little girl on the other side of the iron fence with hatred, for being the cause of all of this. For being the last little girl ever born to the human race.
She turned away from the transport, or the contrail thereof, for that was all that was left of it now. Two tiny tears slid down her cheeks. She hated being outdoors almost as much as she loved chocolate milk.
They walked by then, the first Mommy and Son of the day, the mother’s face turned down to the sidewalk. She was holding a shopping bag with one hand, filled with that day’s allotment of nutrition, and with the other, she held the hand of a little boy, maybe five or six, wearing a knit cap that covered his ears against the biting cold of summertime. The woman walked faster as she felt Lily’s gaze, and the little boy tried hard to keep pace. Unlike most of the mothers, who would stare in at Lily with a sharp look of resentment and fury, this woman just looked down with a mixture of grief and defeat.
Lily stood then, uncertain in her movements, outstretched her right hand in a wave. The little boy smiled widely and waved back with his free arm. They were already almost out of the limited line of sight into the city that the break in the shrub periphery of the fence would permit. She ran to the fence, grasping the bars, just out of reach of the energy field that would instantly kill any other human. He was far away now and getting farther away, but the little boy still looked back, still smiled. He waved one last time before his dragging mother led him around the corner and out of Lily’s life.
Her face pressed between two of the cool metal bars, her hands each grasping the fence, Lily closed her eyes, let the wind dry the tear-tracks from her face. She inhaled deeply, the inhalation barely masking the sob that snuck out of nowhere as they so often do in the upset child. She spoke, because she knew that Nan was there. She knew that Nan would be there until it was time for Lily to leave this planet.
“Can we go inside now, Nan?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Can I have some more chocolate milk?”
“Of course, dear. You may always have more chocolate milk.”
Lily released the bars from her grasp, turned to find Nan standing at her side, hand already outstretched. She reached up, tried to find comfort in that grasp, which felt enough like her own flesh, but still maintained an alien coolness. It had been explained to Lily, how the angels were not exactly like her, or even the people who walked by the compound and stared at her through the break in the shrubbery. The angels were special because they were made of light, not blood and bones and other nasty naughty things. The angels would always be there to look after Lily, long after all of the others had died.
She squeezed Nan’s hand, and Nan looked down at the little girl with a quiet smile. Lily knew that no matter how hard she squeezed that artificial hand, she would never be able to break it, burst it, invade it in the way that she would have been able to destroy a true hand made of flesh. The trillions of tiny machines that now swam through the air were much stronger than Lily could ever hope to be, and no matter how hard she squeezed, they would maintain the shape that the little silver ball told them to hold.
Nan could sense the question on the tip of Lily’s tongue, and she slowed her pace, eventually stopping completely and bending down on one knee in front of the child. Lily studied the ground intently, and Nan levered her head into an upright position by placing one finger under her chin. The girl’s cold eyes were tear-wet. Nan wiped one of the escapees from Lily’s cheek.
“What is it, little flower?”
She exhaled, breath stippled with those involuntary sobs. “They all hate me.”
The projection before her performed a very good rendition of sorrow, not that Lily would have recognized the difference. Nan leaned forward and embraced her. “No, little one. They don’t hate you.”
“They do. I killed their babies.”
Nan released Lily from her embrace then, her face suddenly sober and bereft of an attempt at empathy. Lily could almost see the communication between the angel and whatever controlled her, the faint flicker of thought between the light sculpture and the entity at the center of the planet. The wind seemed to pick up then, swirls of dead leaves skittering about the paved avenue that led to the main complex, skeletons scratching across brick and mortar.
“Who told you that, Lily?” Nan asked, knowing full well that the child had not been out of her field of senses since she had been delivered.
Lily was evasive, tried to find solace in the intricate brickwork upon which they stood.
“Lily, who?”
“A little girl.”
Nan frowned. “Lily,” she struggled with the words, “you know that that’s not possible.”
The wind was most definitely picking up, the same dead leaves that had been blowing around the force-shielded compound for years creating a visual cacophony between the child and the angel. Lily’s hair whipped around her head, snarling and tangling, a medusa halo in this gray expanse.
“She’s not here. Not with us. Not with them, either.” Lily’s arm reached up, hand and pointed finger indicating the break in the shrubbery.
If there had been blood beneath Nan’s skin, it would have run cold.
“Where is she, Lily?”
“She’s in my head. In my dreams.”
“Lily, I—”
“She lives down there.” Her finger pointed down at the brick pathway. “In the ground, far away, but she talks to me when I sleep.”
Nan looked away from that confused, innocent gaze. “And what does she say to you, little flower?”
Lily almost recoiled from that appellation. Nan made a mental note that was immediately integrated into the collective angel consciousness.
“I’m the last little girl. Because of me, the rest died.”
Nan exhaled slowly. The angels had not predicted this development. The catalyst was becoming aware at a phenomenal rate, already communicating with the Exile. It was almost time to begin her ascent.
“Come, Lily.” Nan stood again, the child’s hand still held in her own. “It’s getting cold out. Let’s go have some hot chocolate.”
“Hot chocolate milk?”
Nan smiled to herself, noting the profound concern in the child’s voice. What else but hot chocolate milk?
“Yes, dear.”
They returned to the compound. They sky was bruising, the first hint of a rain that would never actually fall. Another transport thrust into the late afternoon, cleaving the frigid air with fire and silver.
She never understood the human fascination with inhaling smoke.
It was a dirty habit, or so they told her, but she did enjoy it. She enjoyed the way it set their minds at ease, the way it made her feel sophisticated. She unceremoniously crushed the last of her cigarette into the ashtray on the obsidian desk before her, its soul spilling up from the wreckage and floating off to cigarette heaven on the final wisp of smoke.
A newspaper was folded near her left hand, a saucer and cup of tea chatting neighborly with the dead soldiers strewn about the ashtray at her right hand. She fidgeted. She did not know why; she certainly had nothing to fear from this meeting. First the left hand smoothed the crease in the newspaper, then the right hand smoothed back her hair as severely as it could, given the innate behavior problems of the curly dark coiffure she had chosen to present to these animals. An unruly curl popped out of confinement and tickled her nose. She sighed and pushed it back into place.
She was a beautiful woman, without a doubt. They still feared her, without a doubt. This was helpful in the initial phase of this project, but now it was becoming an annoyance. She could barely communicate with these people, so insistent were they on submission. They were making the job entirely too easy.
There had been resistance at first. There had always been resistance. Through the centuries, she had watched them, lived and laughed and loved among them, but she had never truly been one of them. She never could be one of them. When she finally sensed that the time was right to begin her project, she had in truth been bored of the species, just as she had been bored prior to the exile.
She stirred her tea half-heartedly, swished the teabag around once or twice, took a sip. Awful stuff. Worse than smoking. And this was supposed to make you look sophisticated? At least smoking had the addictive properties of nicotine. Tea had nothing.
There was a quiet knock at the door. “Yes?”
It opened a crack to reveal a nearly-featureless Artificial, this particular machine fashioned to look like a human female, although without the decorative elements of hair, eyes, or flesh, this Artificial more closely resembled one of those plastic constructs this species used to display clothing in storefront windows. It spoke in that androgynous tone that she had not taken the time to remedy as of yet.
“Mister Pierce to see you, Ma’am.”
“Thank you. Please show him in.”
The Artificial opened the door wider to reveal Mr. Pierce, hat in hand, wearing a stylish charcoal gray suit to match her own. His hands, however, were nervous assemblages of flesh and bone and gristle, writhing across the clenched brim of his hat as he entered the room. Her own hands were now quiet, clack in black leather, folded on the desktop in front of her almost as severely as her hair was swept back from her face.
“Mr. Pierce. Tea?”
“No thank you.” He was a middle-aged man, or at least what had once served as middle age, before she had shown them the possibilities that existed between the stars. He placed his hat on the tabletop, tried to appear relaxed as he sat back in his chair, unbuttoned his jacket.
“Cigarette?” She held her metal case out to him, but he shook his head and waved her off.
“So what brings you down?”
He looked away from her, at these blank walls carved into rock, at the generally-featureless home of this non-woman. Eventually his gaze swung back to her face, that perfect, beautiful face that he loved and feared.
“Mr. Pierce, what is it?” Her voice had taken on an edge, and he knew that if he insisted on his silence, she would further hone that voice to cut into his mind.
“It’s the child, ma’am.”
Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward in the chair. “What about the child?”
“She’s starting to realize—Well, she knows that she’s different.”
“Of course she’s different.”
“Yes, but…Have you been contacting her?”
She tapped her fingertips in succession across the desktop, each nail issuing a crisp rap that echoed in the cold stone expanse. “What do you mean?”
Pierce cleared his throat. “One of our angels reports that Lily says she hears voices in her head. In her dreams. She knows far too much already.”
“No. She doesn’t know nearly enough. It’s time that we introduce her to her purpose in life.” She took a thoughtful sip of tea. “It’s time I meet with her.”
Pierce swallowed nervously, sat upright in his chair.
“Bring Lily to me.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“What?” She looked as if she had been slapped at the utterance of the appellation.
Pierce immediately turned a deep shade of red. He sat up in his seat, his hands instinctively wringing together once more. “I’m sorry, it just slipped out. I—”
“What did you call me?” She knew full well what he had said, but simply wanted to hear it again.
Pierce swallowed hard, the old man folds of flesh at his neck bobbing up and down. “Mother.” His voice was a whisper.
“And what is my name?”
“Maire.”
“And what will you call me from now on, Mister Pierce?” She leaned toward him, silver swirls clouding her irises as she frowned.
“Maire.”
“Thank you, Mister Pierce. Now go.”
He grabbed his hat, awkwardly bowed, and nearly jogged out the open door, held by the Artificial. Maire signaled the machine to leave her alone, and the door shut.
It was time that she met the girl. After centuries of waiting, it was time.
The Widow Windham fumbled with the key in the lock, fumbled, fumbled, dropped the keychain, retrieved it, finally succeeded in insertion, twist, and entry into her home. She accomplished this all as her son stood at her side, carefully holding the brown paper bag that held their daily allotment of food rations. He said nothing, and made no move to help his mother open the door. Although he was only seven, he knew that he should simply stand in silence and allow her to solve the problem of shaking hands and slippery key all by herself.
Hunter followed his mother into the dark flat, dark because of the forever twilight of the dying skies and dark because of the heavy drapes that she never pulled back from the windows anymore. He lugged the bag into the kitchen and waited patiently until his mother took the meager supply of groceries from him and placed them on the tabletop. As soon as his burden was gone, he pulled back a chair and sat at the table while his mother opened cupboards, arranged new cans with old, new boxes with old, and he wondered if they would ever eat that can of lima beans or that box of instant mashed potatoes. He supposed that if the Troubles continued long enough, all they would have to eat would be lima beans and mashed potatoes.
His mother took the long, lean loaf of bread from the grocery sack and placed it on the counter, folded the sack neatly and put it in one of the cupboards along with a stack just like it, shut the cupboard door, sat down at the kitchen table, put her head down on her arms, and proceeded to sob. Hunter’s small hand reached out, paused for a moment above his mother’s mousy, drooping locks, and withdrew. He knew that she needed to fall within for a while.
It was always the same, day after day after day, at least during the week. The weekend afternoons were spent at the community center or the church, each of which were experiencing rapidly-dwindling populations as the war machine cranked into full production. It stripped away entire demographics at a time. First, the young men had gone, then the young women, then layers of society in increasingly-older strata were sent to the stars to fight a war that no one truly understood.
Hunter walked to the living room, in shadows as it was, faint bands of grayish light falling on the floor and somehow dying there, coughing little last breaths on the plain charcoal utility of the carpet. He sat in one of those bands of light, not bothering to turn on the radio or the television. Both technologies had for the most part been abandoned, and they were much too poor to upgrade to silver.
The sobs of Helen Windham were not loud anymore; she had lost her passion long ago, about the time of the Birth. When things fell apart, when the orders had finally come through and the one man she had ever loved was sent to the stars to fight a war for a creature at the center of the planet…She had broken.
Each day it was an exquisite agony to walk by the compound, to see that horrid little girl and her angel staring at them through the fence. Each day she wanted to throw herself against the shield that she knew surrounded the compound and end her life, but she was always brought back to reality by the feel of the little hand in her own, the hand of the little boy who was now her only friend and family left. So she always dragged him past that awful place, and she knew that sometimes the little girl waved at her son, and she knew that sometimes her son waved back. It broke her heart to see that interaction, but she knew that the little girl probably had no idea that she was the last child born of humanity, and that it was her fault that the world was dying.
Hunter sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned to one side to see down the hallway, where his mother still sat in the kitchen, face now covered by weary hands. He pulled his one prized possession from underneath the couch: Honeybear Brown, tattered and one-eyed and abused by five years of love. Hunter knew that he was now the man of the family, had been for a year now, but he just couldn’t give up Honeybear. He grasped the stuffed animal tightly and rocked back, forth, back, finding more comfort in that mindless act than he had been offered from his mother in the year since Papa left.
He heard it in the sky then, another transport, shot into the sky from the same giant trebuchet tube across the ocean that had launched his father off to war. The sonic boom came, shook the picture frame on the wall, set the heavy curtains to swaying at the window, causing the lines of light to shift, leaving him in darkness and then light, darkness and then light. Mommy began sobbing again in the kitchen. There were always reminders, always something to bring those emotions back to the fragile, raw surface.
Hunter Windham held Honeybear as tightly as he could, and wondered when he would be called off to war.
Don’t cry, Mommy. Don’t—
—cry, Lily. Please don’t cry.”
The child was shaking in her embrace, and there was absolutely nothing that the angel who was Nan could do about it. She had known for years that this day would come, that finally Lily would leave this compound forever and ascend to her future. Mr. Pierce sat across the table from her, looking around the room, trying to find something interesting upon which to fix his gaze so that he would not inadvertently stare at the angel and the child.
“Are you sure?” Nan stroked Lily’s hair, the child’s face buried in her chest, her body sending second-hand sobs into the projection’s periphery filter.
“Of course I’m sure. I spoke with Mo—I spoke with Maire myself. It’s time for the girl to begin.” He absent-mindedly picked one of Lily’s dolls from the floor, a buxom lass with impossible features, made even more ridiculous by the fact that almost every female that had even remotely resembled her had died a horrible death at the hands of the silver affliction. The doll was one of a dead breed.
Lily turned from the safety of Nan’s embrace and walked calmly over to Mr. Pierce, defiantly tore the doll from his grasp, walked back to Nan. “Mine.”
Mr. Pierce was taken aback for a moment. It had been decades since he had actually interacted with a child. “I see you’ve taught her how to share.”
Nan scoffed. “Leave her be. She’ll be sharing enough once you get your hands on her.”
He couldn’t believe the gall of the projection, talking to him in that condescending manner. “This isn’t something I want to do, Nan. This is something I have to do.”
Nan pulled Lily closer, kissed the top of her head. The child had finally stopped sniffling, and she was engrossed in her doll. “She’s just a baby.”
“And you knew all along that we’d have to send her away. You’ve become attached, Nan. Never should have become attached.”
She watched the girl, and Pierce saw that look in her eye, that empty, longing look of the projected machine. How she yearned to be constructed of beautiful, awful, mortal flesh. She looked at the girl as if she herself had given birth to her.
“She’s not yours, Nan. Never was.” Pierce leaned back in his chair, smug and proper.
Nan grinned. She stood up, picked up Lily and doll and walked to the door to the child’s bedroom. “She’s not yours either.”
Pierce frowned his objection at the projection. “I need to take her—”
“Mother can have her tomorrow. For now, she needs to sleep.”
Nan took Lily into her bedroom, shut the door behind her. Lily watched Pierce the whole way from over Nan’s shoulder, the chesty doll still held in her tiny hands. Pierce feared that gaze, feared everything about this little girl, and the job that she would begin in the morning.
As for Nan, once the girl was gone, she would be switched off. There was no need for a Nanny in a world without children.
She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again, no doubt, although it was now too dark in the flat to be able to tell for sure. Hunter knew that if he turned on the light in the living room, it would rouse his mother from the fragile and necessary escape that sleep gave her. He didn’t want to wake her up, because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for a long time if she did. No real reason to turn the lights on anyways. He found all the entertainment he needed for the evening inside of his head, and outside of the thick wide window behind the thick wide drapes.
A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.
“We all gotta die someday, Windy.”
Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of course, Honeybear Brown hated it when Hunter called him “Honey” or “Browny.” Nobody called Hunter “Hunter” except his mother and his father and Father Tristan. The children with whom he once played before the outbreak and quarantine had called him Windy because of his last name. He had called them buggers and crazies and harlots, a word that he did not understand but Father Tristan used to describe the dirty naughty ladies who did not wear enough clothes on the street corners, those dirty naughty ladies who grabbed men’s hands as they walked by and put them where men’s hands shouldn’t go on ladies, that place that you don’t talk about. Hunter felt sorry for the street corner ladies, their once-pretty faces now glittery with the silver, not that that made them less pretty, but once the silver set in, it was best to stay away.
“Hungry, Windy?”
Hunter glared at the bear, glared because of that voice he used, a high-pitched, shrill happy awful voice. Honeybear Brown always talked about the things that Hunter did not want to talk about.
“No. I can wait.”
Honeybear Brown shook his head, causing his one remaining eye to swing back and forth on the strands of thread that served as an optic nerve. “You need to eat, boyo.”
“I can wait.”
The house began to shake with the distant resonance of another transport launch, and Hunter ran over to the window, pulled the drapes back for the first time all day. It was not truly dark yet, more of an awkward twilight, but the few remaining streetlights were on, and the few remaining “harlots” were underneath them, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. They looked up in unison at the transport in the sky, flashing by faster than any of their heads could track, then went back to business as usual, smoking and drinking and looking for men to touch where they shouldn’t touch.
Honeybear Brown joined Hunter at the window. The boy looked out into the nothing of the world, his only friend climbing up onto the sill.
“Something’s gonna happen.”
Honeybear Brown looked up in silence.
“The little girl. She won’t be there tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Something’s gonna happen.” Hunter picked up Honeybear Brown and pulled the drapes shut again, plunging the room into a darker dark.
“Where’s she going?”
Hunter thought for a while, sat back down on the floor in front of the dead television set, the bear on his lap, his mother muttering something in her sleep from the safety and non-comfort of the kitchen tabletop that would leave a faint criss-cross pattern on the side of her face whilst she slept.
“She’s going to the stars. Just like Papa.”
Honeybear Brown hugged the boy, nodded.
“Just like me.”
“It’ll be okay, Windy. They won’t make you go yet. It’ll be a few years before—”
Honeybear Brown slumped to the floor at the sound of Helen Windham’s footsteps coming down the darkened hallway. In one heartbeat, the stuffed bear had been animated, vital, the only link Hunter had to communication with the world, and in the next, the bear was nothing but a tattered toy again. Hunter shoved his fabric friend underneath the couch, where his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. She never looked under the couch. She never looked at anything anymore.
“Hunter?” Helen broadcast her quiet inquisition into the black room, just in case the boy had fallen asleep. She squinted her eyes, tried to excise his form from the tangle of void that was the living room. “Television on.”
The ancient television snapped to life, although there was nothing but white static on the screen. It was enough illumination for Helen to be able to find her son, sitting quietly at the edge of the couch as he always did. It was always unsettling to catch his gaze from across the weakly-lit room…He had old eyes.
“You hungry, baby?”
She felt it then, that gaze in combination with something deeper, something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking knew what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.
Hunter nodded.
She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most days.
“Come on. Let’s have some supper.”
He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when
the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”
Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.
Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.
She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.
“Excuse me?”
She turned and looked into him then, those engulfing, all-encompassing eyes that reached out at her, and she felt the touch for the first time, the touch of those exposed to the creature at the center of the world. He was in bloodied battle dress, dirt-caked face the perfect canvas upon which his blue-white eyes were painted.
She was horrified to find her voice locked up just as her hands often would, and she stumbled over nonsense syllables before she finally found her eloquence again. “What?”
He grinned. He was holding something in his hand, two somethings that she identified as envelopes. Letters. Dirty white envelopes held in outstretched soldier grasp.
“I’m sorry, but…Could you mail these for me? I don’t know if—”
The concussion of the explosion threw them both to the ground as shrapnel tore apart the storefront beside them. The transport that had been driving by had been hit by a rocket. Helen was screaming, her eyes useless because of warm liquid copper pouring into them from a gash on her forehead. Other transports screeched to a halt, able-bodied soldiers pouring out, weapons raking the building from which the rocket had been fired. Another explosion down the street, another transport torn apart before the sniper was dispatched.
He helped her to her feet, wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped matted hair back from her face. She smiled through the shock, and he returned in kind.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
She reached down, picked up the blood-spattered letters. “I’ll—I’ll mail them as soon as—”
He took the letters from her, wadded them up, threw them into the street, into the tumult of soldiers and fire and corpses.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
The street was a tumult of activity in the aftermath of the rocket attack. The trucks had stopped rolling along its length, now mostly abandoned as the boys from the war searched the building from which the sniper had struck. His body was thrown from the window and made a hideous splash of vitality on the pavement below.
Helen wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped, kept wiping. The young man with the letters was holding her up, her legs threatening to buckle with each hesitant breath she took. Shouts, gunfire, the world becoming confusion. She wanted to sleep, but he held her.
“Medic!” She heard him shout from somewhere out there, somewhere that was on fire and silver. She also heard the barked reply that alluded to forces first, civilians second if ever. He held her, held her up, and her eyes swung back, forth, back in an arc that she could not control, finally settling on a vision from across the street, a man with a wound not unlike her own, extending a pistol and
firing three times, the satisfying ratcheting click shuddering through his outstretched and locked arm as nickel needles tore through the mind and soul but mostly the skull of the sniper’s wife. She fell to the sidewalk, lifeblood a geyser that went well with some child’s chalk Picasso attempt, washing over it and dissolving that morning’s pre-lunch activity.
Jean Reynald turned the gun to the two children, the older boy holding his brother before him, their faces tear-wet and blank at the sight of impending end. He could dispatch them both with one shot, the way they were standing. He could have, and he should have, but he did not. He holstered his weapon.
“Take them in. Send them up.”
He noted with a disconcerting satisfaction the widening of the older boy’s eyes as he heard his fate. He seemed to grasp the younger boy even tighter, and the younger boy responded by crying loudly, confused and alone and about to be sent to the stars.
Reynald surveyed the city street before him, soldiers running hither and thither, civilians peering from doorways and storefronts and more cautiously from apartment windows on the second third eighth seventeenth floors. Men were talking to him, but he was not listening. The medic was trying to press a bandage to his head, but he did not feel it. He saw his second Windham across the street, tending to a wounded civilian girl. He saw the remains of the shattered troop transport and its inhabitants smeared across the street. He thought it was a beautiful time of day, the street itself mostly in shadow from the angle of the sunlight, and he thought about another time and another place, somewhere he had never been but somewhere that he could always remember, a beach, kneeling in the sand, shaking his fist up at some shapeless black thing
He reached up to where the mark should have been, that design of scar and black, and he did not find it. Closed his eyes, struggled to maintain, felt the medics lowering him to the ground, felt his hand touch the puddle of blood emanating from the head of the sniper’s wife. Tacky, viscuous, mixed with brain tissue that very well might have held the love that she had once exhibited to her husband who had killed a truckload of soldier boys.
Reynald sank, feeling his eyes roll back, feeling not bad at all, just falling, just falling from the moment. He had maintained as long as he could on the reserve of rage that this war had given him, and now was his time to sleep for a while. He heard the medics above him, felt but did not feel the touch of bandage, the sting of needle, the injection. And all through his fall, he heard the sobbing of children, the same two children whose mother he had just shot in the face. He fell.
What was her name? Hannah? Hannah.
He fell.
“I’m okay.”
She was, or at least she thought she was okay enough, and she stood on her own, although his arms still held her close. She turned to face those eyes, saw his concern. She smiled weakly. He let go, and she bent to pick up her paperback, which was now crumpled and fluttering, a wounded bird in the street. He followed her gaze and her motion, and grabbed the book for her, turning the cover over in his hands to see what it was.
“The Stillness Between?”
Helen for the first time noticed the soldier’s nametag stitched onto the front of his uniform: Windham. She reached out with leather-clad hand to take the book and instead found her hand ensnared by his. He studied her small digits for a moment, his grasp gentle, for he knew what he would find already. Without a word, he pulled back the leather and found the wrist beneath just now beginning to show the silver. Helen stared resolutely at the sidewalk, her breath coming fast. She appeared to be on the verge of sobbing. Windham let go of her hand.
“I’m sorry.”
“I—I should go, I’m sorry. I have to—”
“Stop. Don’t go.”
She pulled the cuff of her right glove back over the offending dust of metal. This was it. No more chance of hiding.
Windham looked around at the nearby soldiers, looked back into Helen’s eyes.
“Listen. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s okay. It’s everywhere now. There’s nothing we can do to contain it.”
“You’re just—”
“No. We can’t do anything about it. The war’s over.”
Helen inhaled sharply, looked around in disbelief. “You won’t tell anyone?”
Windham smiled. “The war’s over. You’re safe now.”
She exhaled with a hesitant relief. She did not trust him, although she so wanted to.
“Come on.” He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”
Helen frowned. “But won’t you—”
“The war’s over. Fuck it.” His grin was contagious, and they walked away from that street and that life and into a future of silver and stars and black.
It was a time of rain and the coffee was awful on that day that he asked her to marry him after a torrid courtship of six months. The link was blaring footage from the peace accords at the United World building, President Jennings waving enthusiastically to the billions of viewers as he in essence signed away control of the planet to the creature that lurked within.
The noon crowd was sparse in the coffee house, and he saw her sitting near the back, at a window, that battered copy of “The Stillness Between” in her hands. He brushed the rain from his leather sleeves, smoothed back his hair as he navigated through the maze of tables and pseudo-intellectuals reading and discussing and trying to be human in these dying days.
Windham motioned to the young girl behind the counter, and she poured his usual: coffee, black. None of that fancy shit. The coffee was muddy in color, taste, and texture, but it was coffee.
He gently grasped the cup and turned to walk to Helen, still engrossed in that book that held far too many memories of that day when he had gained her but lost Reynald. A newspaper fluttered down from a table before him as someone opened the door to the shop, and an unexpected gust of wind blew in, upsetting anything without enough mass to resist its displacement. Helen looked up then, at the sound of the newspaper lazily redecorating the floor. She smiled at Windham, looked beyond him as a man loudly called out
“Maggie!”
The woman who was in the doorway turned, came back in. They continued talking, but too quietly to distinguish from the background murmur of poets and prophets. Helen smiled because the doorway woman smiled, and she knew everything was going to be all right for them.
“Helen.”
She stood to embrace him, not minding at all the wetness of his jacket, his hair. She kissed him on the cheek, this tall sweet man. His embrace enveloped and reassured and gave her all she needed to keep going for a while. The President babbled on the link about what the future held for the citizens of Planet One, but she didn’t care. She had her Windham. They sat at the window table, the cold northern skies throwing themselves against the surface of their world in the form of tears.
“How was he today?”
Windham shook his head, took another sip of mud. Such sadness in his eyes. She knew that Reynald was a father to him, and the pain of losing him to that which they could never understand must have been unbearable.
“Jean is okay. He’s walking again. They have a room where he can look outside, a big room with windows everywhere. There’s a lawn that stretches down to the river.”
She reached out, her gloved hand gently, painfully resting on top of his. He carefully patted it, and her eyes smiled at him before her lips even attempted the act.
“He still has the dreams.”
Her smile faded, a faint fear clouding her face. She unconsciously withdrew her hands, pulled the gloves a little tighter over the silver that was consuming her. There was laughter from across the shop, the hearty laughter of two people finally getting to know one another, or geting to know one another again, after a long absense. She heard the laughing voice of the doorway woman, an Irish brogue if ever she had heard one: “I’ve had the same dream!” That statement chilled Helen to the bone.
“Helen?”
She smiled for him, and he returned the gesture in kind. He leaned in over the table, and she did the same. They were within kissing distance, eyes locked, the stillness between them electric and horrible and yearning to be breached. He reached out, hand on the side of her face, smoothing back through hair simple hair that she wore down, not tied back, straight, not curled into a tangle, the hand brushing against the silver patterns that were already appearing on her scalp. She inhaled sharply at that contact, so intimate, so impossible. His eyes remained locked on hers until they closed and he swooped in, kissed her cheek.
“And I know it will be a great sacrifice for all of us, but it is something that we as a nation, as a world, as a species, must do.”
She searched for meaning in the silence that hung between them, and found it as Windham pulled back, cheeks flushed with emotion that found clarity in the actions of his hands, large hands, gentle hands, hands that reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a velvet-covered box that could only contain one thing.
“Helen—”
“It will be a time of great sacrifice for our world, but we cannot allow these acts to continue.”
“—will you be mine?”
“We will take this jihad to the stars, and make them suffer the consequences of creating this horrible disease.”
They escaped then, the tears that had threatened to overflow since his kiss had left her cheek. She stood and leaned over the table, threw her arms around him. “Of course, of course, of course!” she managed to blurt out and then more kisses and for once, all was well. When she finally opened her eyes, blinking back the tears, she saw the silent gaze of the doorway woman and her companion. Those eyes…
Maggie turned back to the author whose book sat before them on the table, dimples activated by smile. She looked into his eyes, noticed for the first time their absolute lack of definable color, that almost-silver, and the deep lines carved into his young face by his old soul.
“They’re getting married.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll do okay.”
“How do you know?”
The young couple walked by, the girl’s new ring prominently displayed, a humble ring placed on a small hand that
silver
glinted with the affliction. Maggie saw the black leather glove that would have hidden the silver from the judgmental gaze of the coffee shop patrons now held by the ringless hand. They opened the door, let another assault of wind and rain into the shop, and walked into the torrent, arms around each other.
“Maggie? How do you know?”
She shrugged her shoulders, took a sip of coffee, set the cup back down. She gently touched the cover of the book on the table.
“I contain multitudes.”
It was a time of rain.
Hunter mumbled in his sleep, and Helen snapped awake, heart echoing in the small room. She had fallen asleep while watching him doze off in the faint light coming from the window, slithering through the blinds, Venetian blinds, named after a city that had been wiped from the map decades or centuries ago. Hunter turned over in bed, and Helen got to her feet, old bones that were not even old creaking and aching.
Into the living room, navigating by memory and that little something extra that set her apart from most of the remaining populace, she stood at the window, pulled back the heavy drapes. A dim sun was straining to crawl over the eastern horizon, which placed her side of the building and her entire view in half-hearted gray. She looked to the west and was startled to see the orbital defense weapon lifting from within the earth, great waves of ocean trembling down its surface as it groaned into the sky, barrel canted to the west.
Helen ran back into Hunter’s room, threw his sheets back, lifted his confused and protesting form from the cocoon of sleep. She could hear the weapon’s firing cycle begin, could feel the rumble beneath her feet, the resonance sparking a headache to life behind her eyes.
“Mommy?”
“Have to go outside, baby. Have to get out of here.”
“Why?”
“The gun, baby.”
The morning air was not quite frigid, but close enough. Helen held her son close as he shivered against her. She ran down the front steps, outside into the dirty old parking lot where her bare feet flew over the shifting field of sharp gravel shards. She could feel the small incisions on her naked flesh, blood resonating out through feet, teeth shaking out of her gums, gooseflesh yearning through silver underpinnings and she knew then that she was screaming, had been screaming. She could feel it, could see Hunter’s own mouth open as wide as it could be, tears streaming down his face, and she fell. The roar of the weapon built into the earth encompassed all that she knew, all that she could know.
Time bent, the sky fell, the weapon fired, a mother shielded her son from a wave of fire as buildings shook from their foundations and the dreams of an unfortunate dawn populace were shattered apart.
The weapon fired. Again. Again. Helen closed her eyes, but could still see the blasts rising into the sky, out of the atmosphere, traveling somewhere out there where her husband would die, somewhere out where the war was being fought, where the jihad was burning planets, where her son would soon go.
Helen screamed and couldn’t stop.
The weapon kept firing.
Again.
Again.
“Again?”
“He likes it outside. Just sits there and stares at the river all day.”
“Okay. Would you mind if I went down there?”
“No, of course not, Mr. Reynald.”
“Windham.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Windham.”
“Oh, sorry. I thought you were his—”
“No, not his son. Just an old friend.”
Windham smiled at the young nurse, whose face was rouged with embarrassment. He noticed her not-so-subtle glance at the silver band he now wore prominently on his left ring finger. He was in civilian clothing today. If he had worn his military uniform, she would not have been so casual with him. These days, civilians were seldom casual, seldom comfortable around the military.
“We served together in the war.”
Again, emotion revealed through subtle shifts in eye placement. Lids ever-so-slightly widen, a short, almost inaudible inhalation.
“I’m sorry, sir. Please, feel free to go see him outside, if you would like, sir.”
“Thank you.” Quiet and friendly, and as he passed by the nurse, he reassuringly touched her arm. He felt a brush of her mind, just a little tugging oh my god what have i said what if he as he walked away. The machines were beginning to work, as he knew they would in time.
The corridor was long, dark, doors on either side that he felt guilty passing, for each and every room held a man just like Reynald, and he knew that more than likely, Reynald was the only man in this place that was allowed visitors. He did not look to the side, but stared straight ahead, where a door, flanked by armed officers on each side, permit entrance to the back lawn. He saluted to the officers, who opened the doors for him.
Gray day. They were always gray days now. Crisp wind blowing leaves over the steps, that scratching sound they made on their journey jarring something loose in Windham’s mind, a glimpse of some future contained behind tall iron bars and a force shield.
The lawn stretched out, sloped off, descended to the riverbank eventually, but a stone and force wall protected the patients from the outside and the outside from the patients. From the bottom of the slope, the river was invisible. Windham found his old friend sitting in his wheelchair at the place on the lawn just before it dropped away, still permitting view of the river, but also providing some distance between the compound and those wishing to escape it for a while.
Windham approached from the side, at a diagonal. He did not want to sneak up on Reynald, even though he knew that the old man had known he was there even before Windham had made the decision to visit him that morning.
“Jean?”
The man turned to him, gentle smile on his lips, eyes engulfed in purest silver. The wind stopped for a moment, and the day was silence.
“It’s starting, son.”
“Sir?”
“The invasion. The war. It’s so close…”
“Jean, I—”
“Perpetual autumn. It’s—
—closing in!”
Windham spun around in the liquidspace bridge enclosure of the destroyer. His breath was ragged, sucking in the unfamiliar atmosphere of gelatin. He held his hands to his face, confused. Projected control displays followed his hands’ movement, blinking out only as he touched his slick-wet face. Disoriented, lost.
“Sir?”
A swarm of fireflies fell from the ceiling, schooling around his head, entering his ears, mouth, nose, eyes. Awareness of his surroundings snapped back into place as emergency machines took control of his body to stop the bleeding and leeching action of the gelatin. The projected displays flickered to life once more.
The armada was closing in on Windham’s destroyer, the last of his detachment of the Extinction Fleet. Across the bridge of the Teller, Windham’s crew were enclosed in liquidspace bubbles like his own. He could see that three of the ten bubbles had cracked under the last volley of weapons fire from their hunters, the contents of each bubble now smeared in human biologics, simmering physical forms smashed against phased silica.
Windham reached out with his control wetlink, ejected the corrupt bubbles from the bridge expanse. The vessel automatically reshaped itself to compensate for the loss of mass. The gelatin swiftly filtered out the blood and human flesh fragments from the bridge sea. He saw with some alarm that his own bubble had suffered a crack, and faint rivulets of high-density gelatin from the main bridge expanse were seeping into his likely coffin.
“Orders, sir?”
Windham looked at his projected displays, felt the touch of his remaining crew through the wetlink.
“How many worlds?’
“Just one.”
“Inhabited?”
“Billions.”
Windham breathed deeply of his gelatin world.
“Take us in. Focus the weapon.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship reshaped again, the haunting scream of the liquid civilizations echoing through Windham’s submerged ears. The Teller fast approached the target planet, slingshotting around it to achieve escape velocity. The enemy armada split into a dizzying formation of fireworks.
“Weapon aligned. Coordinate lock.”
“Activate EM anchor.”
“EM lock.”
“Do we have incoming?”
Silence…
“Do we have fire?”
“Incoming weapons fire on screen.”
The vessel shuddered as the solar system bent toward the quantum bullets arriving in-system and Light X speed. Windham’s bubble cracked a little more. Almost time.
The enemy armada scattered at the sight of the horrible white arcs of nothing being thrust at their planet from a rent in space/time. Starlight bent, vessels resonated, pilots liquified. The light emanating from the dark side of the planet blinked out as the first bullet hit. The successive rounds began to knock an equatorial incision into the world’s crust.
Windham could look no longer. The quantum trebuchet would soon tear the planet apart, and he did not want to be around to see it. He’d killed too many worlds already.
“Get us—
—out of here, Lily.”
The little girl blinked her eyes once, twice, trying to bring Nan into focus. She had been having the most wonderful dream about playing with other little girls just like herself, dancing in a circle, laughing as they held hands and danced and fell to the ground in a heap of unattainable happiness.
“Nan?”
The angel’s image was flickering, fuzzy. For an instant, Nan disappeared completely, but came back into focus, overcompensated, stood there in harsh contrast, then returned to fuzzy.
“No time to explain, dear. We have to get you to safety.”
She felt it then, the shivery resonance, the undertone that filled the room and made her teeth vibrate when she closed her mouth far enough.
“Nan?”
“No time, Lily. They’re in the sky.”
Lily pushed back the covers, sat up in bed.
“I have to go see the lady now, don’t I?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Will it hurt?”
Nan’s heart would have broken if she had indeed possessed a heart.
“Only for a little while, my little flower.” Nan knew it was a lie.
Lily reached out, touched Nan’s hand. The phase disruption from the incoming fleet warped and confused the infinite number of silver machines that laced together underneath Lily’s touch; Nan’s skin was cold and felt more like a screen door than human flesh.
“It’s okay, Nan. I don’t blame you.”
Nan sobbed and embraced the Catalyst.
The weapon kept firing.
“Nav is gone, sir. Buffer cracked, EM drain—”
“And the enemy fleet?”
“Regrouping.”
The vessel rocked as two more command bubbles corrupted and cracked. The bridge sea realigned in an attempt to maintain vessel homeostasis, but with half of the crew gone…Windham reached out and felt the crack in his own bubble. The high-density gelatin that seeped through tickled his fingertips, bounced around his hands. The darker bubbles were increasing in size. Windham’s world was being invaded by near-matter.
The flashes of quantum fire abruptly ended and he could see through the translucent hull of the liquid vessel that the hole from which the rounds were arriving in-system was collapsing, a great white spiral of space/time confusion in the black of the enemy system. He watched the last of the rounds slam into and through the surface of the enemy’s world, spreading vast chunks of molten continent into space.
“Orders, sir?”
Windham struggled to focus, but he could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.
“Commander?”
Windham pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.
“Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”
He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.
“Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”
“Commander, I—”
“Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”
He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and
more wine?”
“Mmmmph,” she muttered as she turned over in bed, pushing aside proletariat sheets and exposing pert young breasts that were not yet distorted by the birth and suckling of his bastard son. Her hand moved down her front, fingertips absently tracing between her breasts as she rolled on to her back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling.
“Jemie?”
“Hmm?” He was behind the easel, painting something again. The sudden inspiration had nearly interrupted their lovemaking, or perhaps it was just fucking, but regardless, she suspected that the possibility of female orgasm, or even remote satisfaction, had again become secondary to her lover’s obsession with his oils and brushes and canvas.
“Do you love me?”
Gently, daintily, he applied white to the canvas. Little dabs of pigment, or lack thereof, smoothed, roughed by the brush’s bristles.
“Hmm.”
The room smelled of sex and turpentine and Paris in the summer: sweat and cheap parfum and wine. He poured another glass as he sat back and surveyed his work.
“Needs more white.”
“Jemie, answer me!”
He frowned, turned his attention to his mistress, now sitting up in bed. She is just a child, he thought, but her breasts and the unmistakable vice of her thighs begged otherwise.
“Don’t call me that, Jo.”
He turned back to his canvas. Jo harrumped and covered her body with the sheets again. No need to give this artiste a free view of her sex.
“You son of a bitch, James!”
Again, he glared at her.
“Leave my mother out of this, Ms. Hiffernan.”
Jo wrapped the sheet around her naked form and walked over to his precious canvas. She took his glass, drank his wine.
“What will it be?”
James took his time answering, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled.
“It’s you, dear. Don’t you see it?”
She took his cigarette from him, puffed. “Will it make more sense if I drink more wine?”
He grinned that acid grin and pulled her close. She sat on his lap on his painting stool and looked at the canvas. Gesso, a hint of gray, and a single white form blocked out in the center.
“That’s me?”
“That’s you, my dear white girl.”
Jo smiled that Irish smile, dimples in full effect, and he felt something for her…Or perhaps it was catarrh.
“I believe I love you, Mr. Whistler.”
He hugged her a little closer.
“And I, dear Ms. Hiffernan, believe I need more wine.”
Helen sobbed.
Hunter sat there in the gravel, a child of traumae, his little hands grasping pieces of stone, reaching out, dragging pieces of stone into piles, his gaze never averted from the west, where the phase trebuchet was retracting into the planet. The clouds were wounded, torn apart and thrust aside, now a circular incision cut into their midst. The child sat in the dirt, in the dust, scraping at gravel, looking at sky, hearing mommy weep beside him and behind him. She was rocking in the rocks, on her knees, helpless hands moving from face to hair, one hand reaching out to touch her son’s shoulder, instead pulling back, covering her mouth, sobbing.
Hunter knew that his father was dead.
Helen knew that her husband was dead.
The world shuddered as the phallic tower of the trebuchet receded into its mantle cavity, satisfied in its success. The phased slugs of planet interior would work their way toward target over thousands of years through space/time. Helen knew, she just somehow knew that he was dead, the man she loved, out there somewhere across the divide of eons. The trebuchet had fired at something in the Outer…And Windham was there. Dying, dead, thousands of years away, millions of years dust, just now watching the fire arrive on target, just now gasping in liquid hell, just now ceasing and releasing electricity into void.
Sirens. City alert. Hunter blinked from reverie and looked back at the apartment complex, leveled. The majority of the buildings he could see were strangely canted on ancient foundations. Bricks sat in the driveway, in the streets. There was rich black smoke coming from somewhere to the east. He could taste that fire. He could taste that danger. One would think that such a little boy would be crying right now. One would think that
because Jo was Whistler’s mistress, she would have been depicted in a warmer way, but Whistler was not like other artists, or other men, for that matter. I feel that Jo is depicted in a very neutral way that almost makes her become part of the background of the painting. There is no evidence of a love for Jo, or a warmth or fondness for her. She simply stands there, arms at her sides, no facial expression, eyes looking out but not quite at you. Richard Dorment contends that Whistler intended that his model’s face should lack expression, that Jo should assume the facial equivalent of the non-color, white. Whistler did not want to focus attention on her face. Reducing emphasis on the face reduced the tendency to read an emotional reaction into the model’s appearance. Whistler was in essence making Jo an object in the painting, instead of a human being. She becomes just another compositional element upon which to explore the tonal variations of the color white upon white. This objectification of a woman is a characteristic of not only Whistler’s The White Girl, but it could be argued that in his young manhood this is how he viewed women.”
Page turn.
“What was it about Whistler’s childhood or young manhood that resulted in a tendency to objectify women? I suspect that, in part, the religious fanaticism of his mother and her insistent meddling with James’ personal affairs and disapproval of his bohemian lifestyle may have created a bitterness or perhaps an uneasiness with women that lasted well into his adult years. If we examine his relationships with his models, Fumette, Finette, and even Jo, we can see that he never truly established a long-term relationship with any of them, and although they may have truly loved him, he never had any intention of reciprocating that love. Whistler used these women as he needed them, to model, to keep his house for him, and as it is rumored in the case of Jo, to bear or care for an illegitimate child of his, but he was always emotionally detached from them. I feel that the early influence of Whistler’s mother created within him a general distrust or indifference toward women that resulted in his objectification of them.”
Sip of water.
“The White Girl is not Jo Hiffernan. The White Girl is a study of white on white. I feel that Whistler would agree that an artist does not have to explain his or her intentions or actions when creating a work. An artist creates art for themselves, not for critics or the public. Whistler created The White Girl to study the tonal changes of white on white, and in the process revealed quite a bit about his feelings toward women that perhaps he had not intended to reveal. If this painting displays any narrative at all, I believe it is the sad and bitter tale of an artist who cannot find love, and to whom women or relationships of any meaning at all for that matter are nothing but trivialities, an artist whose showmanship and extraordinary personality are perhaps a defense mechanism against an internal strife brought about by overpowering or meaningless relationships in his youth. I must say that Whistler is not the only artist whose art tells a sad tale.”
Clear throat.
“The White Girl is a study of white on white, that is all.”
They clapped, although he knew they didn’t want to be there, didn’t care about what he had written, didn’t watch the slides as they were projected. Nine artsy souls in a sweltering room meant for storage but converted into a “conference room” by a stingy university, used by upperclassmenandwomen in special topics seminars heralded by big numbers in the four-hundred range on registration slips and add/drop slips and all of the other fun fun bureaucracy of college life.
Betsy had that grin on her face from behind the dreaded bound green gradebook in which she was keeping notes on each presentation.
“Paul, that was marvelous! It really felt like you could relate to your research topic. Don’t you think?”
“Well, I—”
“I knew you’d love Whistler. You have so much in common.”
He blushed, grinned. “Well, that’s what Jo tells me.”
Betsy’s smile faltered. She leaned forward, almost imperceptibly. “What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you realize, Doctor?”
“What?”
“I contain multitudes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perpetual autumn. It’s coming. A world of gray, silence, nothing. I can hear it.”
“Jean—”
“She’s down there right now, planning it all. Planning the extinction. She’ll need both of us for this to work.”
“Who?”
“She’ll need me for the arrival, and you for the discovery. The pursuit.”
“Jean, who?”
“Notre Mère, mon amie. Elle est prête pour le divinity.”
“Oui, commandant.”
Reynald looked up at the young man who was not his son, but who was the closest thing he had ever had to family. He tenderly reached out and took Windham’s left hand, regarding the silver ring.
“Your Helen?”
“My Helen.”
Reynald smiled, patted Windham’s hand and let go.
“Get out of here. Go home, son.”
“Jean, I—”
“Vont, mon fils.”
“I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”
Reynald smiled.
Gray streets. Windham pulled the collar of his overcoat up, protecting his neck from the bitter lick of the wind. His heart was beating in his throat, not from the pace of the walk, but from that distant look in Jean’s eyes…Reynald was looking beyond this world, seeing a time and place that Windham couldn’t begin to comprehend. He was seeing a world through eyes that became more clouded with the silver each time that Windham visited. The old man would be possessed entirely, soon. What then? What information could the creature at the center of the planet reap from his soul upon his total dissolution that she had not yet been able to take already?
Dead leaves on weathered sidewalks, scritching and scratching wing-man trajectories on either side of Windham’s feet, some crushed underfoot, some leaping into the air on a sudden gust, that last gasp of flight, that final yearning for transcendence.
It was a long walk from the veteran’s complex to the Windhams’ humble apartment. The wind was biting, bringing tears to eyes, or perhaps simply enabling tears to eyes, begging the knees to buckle, the strong legs to give out, the weary soldier to crumple to park bench as he tried not to sob for his father-figure, old and wasting and silver.
Windham wiped a tear from his left eye, the cold silver of his ring playfully touching the tip of his nose in the process. He regarded his hand, with its lace of scar, nails once bitten to the quick by adolescent nervousness, white line across the palm where hand-to-hand combat had suddenly and painfully involved a blade of polymer and a hand of flesh, a simple silver ring that symbolized his love for a simple, book-loving girl named Helen, whose nose he loved to kiss, a simple, childish gesture that made her smile, and in the silence of so many nights, that smile was conveyed more through the liquid opening of her lips heard in the black than the actual viewing of the adorable act. He kissed the tip of her nose and knew that she smiled.
He took the ring off his finger, looked at it closely, so happy that he had finally found the one. Or perhaps she had found him…Silver on silver.
Leaves clawing a path around the park bench, that shivering noise of dry and decaying organic scraping along concrete. A black car came down the street, pulling into the entrance of the complex on the other side of the road, waiting for the palpable departure of wrought-iron gate and the ineffable snap of the phase shield before passing through the fence. Windham did not know whose house that was, but they were obviously of some importance if phase tech was being wasted on their protection.
Three identical women came out of the front door of the complex. One opened the car’s back passenger door and bowed subserviently to the salt-and-pepper man who got out. Windham knew that the identical women had to be angels, and the man from the car must be a member of the creature’s newly-created government. Windham squinted and saw the man hand one of the angels a metallic cylinder.
“Move along.”
Windham jumped up at the voice, and spun around to see a fourth woman, identical to the three inside of the complex, standing behind the park bench.
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Your time to serve her will come, Joseph Windham.” The angel’s eyes tore into his mind, a slow-burning tug. He stumbled back a few steps, dropping his silver ring to the ground, where it started to roll away.
The angel reached out and the ring gently lifted from the ground into its hand. It walked over to the silent Windham and placed the ring in his hand.
“Move along, Joseph Windham. Go home to your young bride. We will come for you when it is time.”
He turned away from the angel and walked away, but felt her gaze on his back.
“Mother?”
[what is it?]
“He knows…Or at least suspects.”
[then perhaps it is time for an immaculate conception. it begins.]
Nan turned away from Windham, who had just turned the corner and continued walking down the sidewalk. This man would be a focal point of history, and he couldn’t even hold on to his engagement ring tightly. Nan smiled to herself.
it begins.
“What?”
“How does it begin?”
He laughed in the firelight of Room 4, still stroking Hope’s hair, still snuggling, although there had been no sex, two soulmates brought together by technology and hating every minute of it, now sharing a moment of tender quiet in the plush fireplace bedroom of the university’s alumni house.
“How does what begin?”
“The new book. ‘The Stillness Between.’”
He stroked her hair. “Well, it starts with a sad little girl who loves chocolate milk.”
She laughed. “Oh yeah? And how does it end?”
Paul stopped stroking Hope’s hair. she turned and looked into his eyes, which reflected the fire beside the bed.
“Paul?”
“It doesn’t end. It’ll never end.”
“Won’t you run out of paper?”
A pause, not a pregnant pause, impossibility of pregnant pause because they were just friends, but there it was, pregnant pause, and they both broke out laughing in the firelight. Laughter ebbed, silence again held sway, save crack of knot in firewood.
Her gaze was tangible as it swept through oranged visibility. He felt but did not look, could not look, wanted to look. That sound of mouth opening, liquid sound of mouth opening, and he looked, saw that smile.
In the silence of so many nights, that smile was conveyed more through the liquid opening of her lips heard in the black than the actual viewing of the adorable act.
I will use that line someday. I will remember this night.
“Thinking too much?”
“Maybe.”
“About what?”
A blush concealed by night. “The new book.”
“What’s the little girl’s name?”
“Who?”
“The chocolate milk girl. What’s her name?”
“Don’t know yet.”
Hope sat up in bed, playfully shook his shoulders as she leaned over him. “You know, you bastard.” Hair swaying back, hair swaying forth. She took left hand and smoothed hair behind her ear in reflex gesture. “What is it?”
“Hope.”
She laughed, snuggled back down beside him. “My mother loves that name.”
“She has good taste.”
“I like the name Arianna. Ariel. Erica. Something like that.”
something like that
Such stillness in that room…The stillness between them. Sound muted, vision obscured, the only sensation the warmth of her body snuggled down next to him on a bed that was probably more expensive than his car had been, the faint smell of herbal shampoo, peaches? smell of peaches from smooth skin, no guarantee of smooth skin yet but an overwhelming suspicion indeed. Peaches.
the stillness between
Hope turned toward him, eyes blinked, faint wetness flickered from iris as if those eyes were made of the fire, of the silver. Glint of silver in a room shimmering crimson.
He closed his eyes, placed his hands on either side of her face, verifying the smoothness of skin with rough and scarred hands, bridging the terror of the distance. Not a kiss, not yet…A kiss would ruin something so beautiful. A kiss would break a heart, break a possibility. No kiss. Stillness. Forehead to forehead, cheek to cheek, tip of nose to tip of nose. Stillness.
“Hope…” A whisper into the between.
That smile, that liquid signal of parted lips, that distance between shattered. Fighting no longer. it’s late night and you’re driving me
crazy.
what if you find—
Reynald?
Eyes open to white ceiling, nurses, soldiers. Early morning contrast in sterile room. Arms restrained. Chest restrained. Legs
“Reynald?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been requested.”
Nurse unfastening restraints, not meeting resistance. Reynald was too tired to resist, too horrified of his near future. Nurses lifted him out of bed, placed him on stretcher.
An angel walked into the room, stood over the old man.
“This is your Reynald?”
“He’s your Reynald now.”
The angel leaned down, pulled Reynald’s eyelids apart.
“Silver progress on target. Time to descend.”
Jean Reynald lay motionless, unblinking.
time to descend
descending, floating free, ejected from the vessel, crushed and liquid, phased into
genetic material, trace of humanity in that void, in the only void, blood crystallized and shattering and
broken globe falling, enemy force barely pausing to investigate contents before striking out at the Teller, chasing it to
scrape
Windham’s blood, his flesh, unrecognizable, detectable only as human pattern, ice and black, dissolution
into the night
into the
fighting starlight
fighting
against the urge to pick up a piece of that sharp gravel, dig it into her wrists, tear it upward to her elbows, as she would have years ago, a confused, lonely young girl with glasses and frizzy hair.
The weapon had fully retracted into the ocean, but apparently the threat had not been eliminated. Warships tore through the sky, dainty little blackbirds, single-pilot slithers, great awkward lifting-bodies of the destroyers. Something was coming. Somethings were coming.
Helen looked at Hunter, who calmly stared into the sky. No tears.
“Mommy, we need to go.”
Helen nodded.
Hunter took his mother’s hand as she stood up. She picked him up, pausing for a brief moment to squeeze him in a weak embrace, frail form embracing frail form.
“You know where we have to go.”
“Hunter, I—”
He looked directly into her eyes, silver eyes of the catalyzed woman, windows into the soul of a race robbed of the ability to create daughters. And now, Helen’s only son had to leave.
“Don’t cry, Mommy.”
She nodded, feigned a smile. Holding Hunter tightly, she walked over gravel that lacerated more than her feet. The sky was becoming fire.
No stars in that expanse, but pinpoints of light nonetheless as the combat began over the planet. The fighting
starlight always has this effect on me.”
“Yeah.”
Complete understanding conveyed in that one word. That was just the kind of relationship they had, the kind of finishing each other’s sentences relationship that was not a relationship but it was, and it was something, for sure, especially under starlight, fighting starlight, trying to make sense of the indescribable nothing, the enormity of their unimportance.
The sun threatened to taint the horizon with pink, but for now, the ether was black with the white pinpoints of other systems, other stars, other planets. The moon was hiding.
“Do you believe?”
“In what?”
“Other worlds, aliens?”
“No.”
Hope regarded him with some disbelief. “You’re a science fiction author who doesn’t believe in aliens?”
“Nope.”
“What do you believe in, then?”
He grinned. “I, dear Ms. Benton, believe I need more wine.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Resonances. Past lives. We diverge and converge and find them again, like I found you.”
She exhaled, breath visible in the cold night air. Paul put his arms around her, looked up at the multitudes.
“We’re out there, somewhere. People just like us. No little green men, no flying saucers. Just us.”
He bent down, touched forehead to forehead. A dream.
“Somewhere out there, fighting the starlight…That’s what I believe. Just people like us, thinking too much, trying to figure out why we float through the night. Trying to find that sunrise.”
A perfect silence, in those moments before dawn. Two people, under stars.
Two people, under the stairs, or at least what he thought were stairs, or people. Not stairs…And not people, either. Disorienting motion down dimly-lit hallways, sound of airlocks cycling open before and closed behind the stretcher.
Eyes attempt to focus, but are unable. Choked with silver, swimming with that vision of futures eons dead, the vision of the young woman with the gentle voice and the bitter eyes.
Static snap of phase shielding deactivating. Air cool, faint breeze from within the
Detach. Floating free. A stretcher surrounded by angels, falling into the earth, falling down a silver tube. Their faces above him, gentle faces above him, walls of the Seattle Gate sliding away at impossible speeds. The angels remained unruffled, their dun robes hanging languidly in a gravity projected by silver. Reynald’s remaining hair whipped around his face, and he although he could feel that his mouth was open, he was not sure if there was a scream emanating or not.
The angel who could have been Nan leaned over Reynald, peered into his eyes. He was unresponsive, yet still alive. Respiratory rate was nearly undetectable. Eyes were unblinking, unmoving, locked in some dream that Maire would hopefully be able to unravel.
sand
falling to knees
shadow of that shard, that accusatory claw sticking into the sky, the symbol of her end
his fist outstretched, clenched in a rage beyond expression, body shaking
maggie don’t—
—leave me, Hunter. I can’t do this without you.”
The sky was a torrent of sound: the city alert, the static scream of phase engines as the defense forces flew from the atmosphere to engage the incoming enemy fleet, the human tumult of hundreds of mothers who had brought their sons to the evacuation point outside of the city’s Complex.
Hunter watched the sky, holding that tattered bear, hands clutching velveteen. A child within the beginning of the war that had killed his father and would eventually kill him.
Helen wanted to break, felt herself breaking, knew her heart would soon tear itself apart in fear and in the depth of her loss.
Angels were swarming, emotionlessly tearing children
sons
from the arms of their mothers. A great crack like thunder filled the sky above the complex as the wreckage of a slither lost phase containment and erased a sizeable amount of the lower atmosphere from existence. Flaming shards of black metallish rained down upon the crowd gathered before the complex gate, and many families were spared the pain of separation by the certainty of an end.
Helen threw herself over Hunter, who cried out as the full weight of his mother slammed him to the ground. Helen was a small woman, but Hunter was a smaller boy. He heard the angels shouting in that voice that lingered between the ears and tickled behind the eyes hurry, hurry, little soldiers and he wanted to answer, he wanted to obey, but Mommy wasn’t getting up, and Mommy was pinning him to the ground.
Hunter panicked.
Helen was coughing, it sounded like coughing, it had to be coughing, not gasping, anything but gasping. He wriggled from underneath his mother as another wave of phased flak struck the city. He pushed his mother onto her back, and it was only then that he saw the perfectly-cauterized hole in her chest, stretching all the way to the sidewalk underneath.
“Mommy?”
Two tears slid from Helen’s silver eyes, and she tried to smile, tried to reassure her son that things would be all right, but the air was gone, and no matter how hard she tried to inhale, to catch her breath, to form a word with lips slick with something, something copper, something silver, every time she tried to speak, she drowned a little more.
“Mommy!”
The angel picked him up from behind, held him tightly as the little boy struggled against her holometallic grasp. The angel embraced him with that screen door sensation that was not and never could be human, walked away from the fading body of Helen Windham, whose arm reached out to touch her son, hand outstretched, fingers yearning for the touch of all she had left in this world. The angel walked away without a glance back, but Hunter fought, screaming, sobbing, watching his mother’s arm fall to the ground, seeing her body go limp, feeling that silver return to the eternal silence.
Helen felt her arm hit the ground, felt her heart stop, felt blood flood into the remains of her lungs, her muscles relax, her bladder release. Her eyes dried, and she tried to blink, but control had gone, and her body was no longer hers. She could see them, the men of the war, fighting the invaders in the sky above Maire’s City. How many had fought with her husband? How many had seen the worlds of the void set to the flame of the Jihad?
She felt the touch of their minds as the silver began to dissemble, heard the screams of the young men of the war as their vessels shattered.
Is this what you want?
Flickering of static within synapse
Helen’s head lolled to the side, and she saw Honeybear Brown in the dust beside her, silently staring back with his one eye. A plume of smoke drifted from his hide, where a microscopic sliver of slither had mortally wounded the toy. Another cloud of piercing shrapnel fell on the city. One shard struck close enough to Helen to crater the pavement, scattering dust all around, clouding her unresponsive eyes, stealing her vision, stippling her flesh with bloody craters of its own.
Sensation fading…Pain, yet
She
saw her son holding that bear, smiling his quiet smile, waving to the little girl behind the fence
saw her husband in his uniform at the farewell ceremony, felt the sob within her chest
saw her fiancé walk into the coffee shop, looked back down, pretending to be engrossed in The Stillness Between
saw the soldier run up to her from the street, holding two letters
saw
felt
tears. and
helen?
his touch…an eternal embrace. a resonance of one soul shared by two people and
stillness
A flicker of electricity, a dissolution of pattern, silver fading into nothing.
you know…you do
eternal embrace. solace.
Helen fell to stillness.
“Jean Reynald.”
The voice came from the shadows of the room, shadows he could not see with his now-non-existent eyes, but shadows that he could feel with the sockets from which liquid silver seeped. Angels lifted him from the stretcher, held him upright as force generators took him from their grasp, pulled him into the center of the spherical chamber.
Tongue wet lips, jaw unclenched in an attempt to form speech. The flesh of his face, hands, entire body was numb, pins and needles.
“Don’t try to speak; you’re far beyond that now.”
He heard footsteps, sensed the owner of the female voice approach.
“You don’t need to speak, Jean. Just see.”
Fingertips brushed his cheek with the touch of ice, sandpaper brush of something not human, yet in human form. He felt the silver teardrops solidify on his cheeks, so cold, so alien. They fell from his face, mercury pellets. He blinked and saw for the first time in
“Hannah?”
She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”
“What is…Why am I—”
“I need the code.”
“I don’t know any—”
She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.
Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.
“That code, Jean. Genetic code.”
“Commander, what is it?”
Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.
Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”
The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”
The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.
“It goes deeper than we thought.”
Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.
At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.
Someone.
The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.
“Orders, sir?”
Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.
“Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”
Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.
As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.
Windham slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.
“This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”
“I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”
“Why the blood, Hannah?”
She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”
“A gift?”
She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of
silver is my favorite.”
He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.
“Jemie?”
“Jo?”
“How can you afford this?”
He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”
“But I thought—”
“I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”
“But James, I—”
“Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.
It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.
Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.
late night and you’re driving me
crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times…We’ve known each other before.”
“I know.”
Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.
“I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.
“Can you do that?”
“It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”
“Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”
“Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”
“Of course. You could never love.”
“Never.”
“Never at all.”
“Nope.”
Stillness and distance breached.
“Keep your distance!”
The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the order, yearning to dispatch these non-humans with the EM pulses that reduced them to useless balls of silver.
“Don’t fire,” Reynald broadcast through the comm implants. “Something’s different.”
“It’s a trap, sir. It has to be.” Windham kept his trigger finger firmly in place.
“No.” Reynald rubbed his eyes. A dull pain had begun to throb just behind them. Something was different…The angels were different.
So close…He could feel them, feel that blank stare of inhumanity. No expressions, no weapons, no indication of hostility. They just walked up the crater, toward Reynald’s small band of soldiers.
Windham was restless. He was a good boy, but Reynald sensed that his impatience would be his undoing. Windham wiped sweat from his eyes, adjusted his helmet’s position on his head.
“Sir? What do we do?”
jean
“What?”
“Orders, sir?”
jean reynald
Reynald blinked to clear his eyes, but the haze that had descended over his vision was still there, casting a lightness over the world, halos over the heads of the projected angels.
“Stay here.”
“Sir?”
Reynald stood up from the rim of the crater, began to walk down the side.
“Reynald!”
He turned back to Windham. “It’s okay. It’s time.”
He walked to meet the angels.
“I’d watched you for centuries. Watched your line. I know that you were the one. I saw to it that you’d be the one at the first encounter. You and your pretty little American boy.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
Maire’s face clouded. “I won’t hurt him, dear Jean, but he has to be the one who goes home for me.”
“Don’t…He has a family, a young bride—”
“I know this. And I know what I need from him.”
“Please, don’t do this.”
“His son, our daughter…A perfect extinction.”
Hunter slumped in the angel’s metal grasp. He was too shocked to cry, too exhausted to feel, too old for his young life. The shield doors cycled shut behind the angel, cutting off Hunter’s view of the scene of death. He could see his mother’s body on the ground, torn apart by another wave of phased flak.
They’re all dead out there. Mommy’s dead.
Loud snap as the phase shield reactivated around the building. The angel gently placed Hunter on the floor next to ten or twelve other boys, all sitting in silence, all staring at Hunter. He curled into a fetal position and rocked back, rocked forth. Many of the boys did. Torn from sleep, rushed to the Complex, sitting there with that knowledge that the city was dead out there, their mothers were dead in the city and their fathers were dead or dying in the sky or in the outer.
“Stay here, boys. We’ll be leaving soon.”
An explosion from outside, close, hard. Each of the angels flickered to static for a moment. The lights in the chamber went out for an instant before returning as red emergency lights. The angels looked at one another, a higher form of communication resonating between their images. They all turned to look at a door on one side of the chamber.
The door cycled open and another angel walked through, holding a little girl.
Hunter sat up. It was the little girl from the other side of the fence. He’d only ever seen two girl children, this one and his baby sister who had died days after her birth from the silver. Most of the boys in the room had never before seen a little girl.
She recognized Hunter as the angel carried her by the boys. She smiled and waved. Hunter did the same, wanted to say something, but the angel quickly carried her through another door, which slammed shut with a phase shield.
Hunter wondered if he would ever see her again.
“What is he doing?”
Windham put the scope back up to his eye, a fluid reflex learned from those months of war. Reynald was deep into the blast crater now, slowing his pace. He bent and placed his EM rifle on the ground, held his hands before him as he kept walking into the mass of angels. Windham saw one of the projecteds break away from the group, approach Reynald.
He flipped the safety on the EM pack of his rifle, brought the crosshairs of the scope to rest on the chest of the projected, where he knew his pulse weapon would find the silver ball that created the illusion of the angel.
It flickered for an instant, an intense light, and Reynald raised his arms to shield his eyes.
“Commander!”
“Nan, that was the—”
“I know, little flower.”
“But I want to—”
“No time, Lily. You’ll have all the time in the world to meet your new friends later.”
The angel jogged through the metal hallway. Another shield door cycled open and closed as she passed into another chamber carrying Lily. The floor stretched out as a platform into the spherical room. At its center there was a small chair with restraints. The little girl began to tremble in the coolness of the room and the fear of her situation.
Nan slowed her pace as she walked out onto the extended catwalk to the center of the sphere. She gently placed Lily in the vacuum chair and fastened the restraint harness around her.
“What’s going to happen, Nan? Do I have to go see the lady now?”
Nan shook her head as she tightened the final restraint, smoothed Lily’s tousled hair back from her forehead. “No time to see her now, child. It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay here any longer.”
“Why are they in the sky?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetness.”
Nan leaned in close, kissed Lily’s forehead with her cool metallish lips. She squeezed Lily’s hand and walked back down the platform toward the chamber’s shield door.
“Nan?”
She turned, no tears on her face because of her inability to produce them, countenance now emotionless and cold because she had to be strong for the little girl, had to realize that the Catalyst was never hers to begin with. “Yes?”
“Will I see you again?”
“No, Lily. You’ll have a new caretaker in the void.”
“But I—”
“Goodbye, Lily.”
Nan turned, walked through the shield door, which slammed shut and snapped with phase static. The little girl was left alone in the utter silence of her bubble. The sound of static increased as the walkway to the center of the chamber retracted into the wall of the sphere. The wall itself began to shimmer, and several ports along its circumference opened to allow the thick gelatin of liquidspace travel to fill up the sphere.
Lily struggled in her restraints as the bottom of the sphere filled with mercurial phase. The level steadily increased until it washed over her bare feet, ankles, shins, knees, the hem of her lavender Honeybear Brown nightgown. She tried to kick at that cold metal fire, but was unable. The tickling, burning sensation of liquid reaching into her, preserving her biologics against the stress of Light X.
Liquid reached the arms of her vacuum chair, covered her hands and lower arms, upper arms, shoulders, crept up her neck. She shouldn’t have panicked, tried not to panic, didn’t want to panic, but panicked nonetheless. Lily began to scream, sobbed, flailed her head around as the mercury touched her chin, her earlobes…Her wet hair sent drops of the silver cascading out as she tried to spin around.
“Nan!”
Caressing jawline, earlobe. Tears coursed down the child’s face, mixed with the invasive silver. Touching bottom lip.
“Mommy!”
Lily closed her mouth as the level rose. Upper lip, nose. She strained back in the seat but was unable to prevent the silver from pouring into her nostrils. She instinctively exhaled, exhaled, silver over eyes, clamped eyes shut, felt silver finally cover the top of her head.
Robbed of senses, completely submerged, pain in her chest from a heart attempting to tear itself out, lungs on fire. A chamber spins, a chamber resonates. Liquid to fire, fire to space. A child’s mind falls into the silence of fear complete.
peu de fleur
a voice and
“If you’ve no more use for me, just end this, Hannah.”
Her jovial smile fell from her face. “Don’t call me that here.”
Reynald grinned. “You will never win this war.”
She struck out again, letting more blood spill from the wound in his neck. “I’ve already won it, human.” Reynald gasped in pain as Maire dug into his flesh with her silver nails. “You were the perfect flux, the perfect medium…You’ve done your part already. You’ve spread the sickness further than you could ever imagine.”
Windham broke from the line of soldiers and ran down the side of the crater, weapon held before him, trained on the angel closest to Reynald. He pulled the trigger, watched the magball tear through the angel’s chest. The image dissembled, the silver projector falling harmlessly to the ground.
Reynald spun around. “No! Windham, don’t—”
Angels were scattering, and more human soldiers descended from the rim of the crater. EM slugs flew into the mass of angels from the soldiers’ weapons, but did very little damage to their numbers. Windham chambered another slug, brought his weapon up to fire.
“Joseph!”
joseph windham
“Don’t do it!”
don’t
Windham squinted and shook off the painful tug of the voice that seemed to come from behind his eyes. He shot from the hip, knowing by instinct and experience that his aim was true, and the angels closest to Reynald would be destroyed.
The slug struck out at the projecteds with that slurping crackle of the EM wave, but it was struck down in mid-air by a field of light projected by the hands of an angel. A flicker in time and it was right there before him, androgynous face only remotely suggesting human origin, eyes not burning with the fury that combat should brand into the eyes of an opponent, but simply staring back with an emptiness that transcended his comprehension. The angel knocked the weapon out of Windham’s grasp, threw him back on to the ground.
don’t
All around the interior of the crater, EM slugs were being knocked down, soldiers were tangling in metallish embrace with angels in hand-to-hand combat. The humans were already outnumbered, and more projecteds were emerging from the exposed entrance to the tunnel. The fighting was fierce, the din of battle a mixture of human screams and piercing snaps of static.
“Reynald?”
Reynald walked over and helped Windham up. The sound of battle had disappeared in just those seconds, and the two men surveyed the scorched expanse of the crater. There were hundreds, thousands of the projecteds standing in silence, the bodies of Reynald’s forces laying at their feet. The angels made no move to harm the two remaining men.
“Shit. Oh shit.” Windham unsheathed the knife from the front of his armored vest.
“Put it down, Joe.” Reynald looked toward the metal entrance of the tunnel at the bottom of the crater…
“Commander, they’re going to—”
“No. They could have killed us already.” The angels were looking at the crater’s bottom as well. “They’re waiting for something.”
“We can’t just—”
“Drop the knife, son.” Windham followed the orders, stood restlessly amidst the thousands of silent angels, completely unarmed. The knife echoed against the rock as it hit the ground. It was the only sound besides the wind.
A humming, an undertone. They could feel it more than hear it, but it was undeniable. The transport vessel arose from within the tunnel sunk into the earth with a cloud of dust and grit. It hovered above the entrance for a moment before humming horizontally toward Reynald and Windham. The angels silently moved out of its path as it passed through the assembly.
A man stood upon the boxy, saucer-ish transport, holding nonchalantly to a guardrail with one hand and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette with the other. He tossed the cigarette overboard as the vessel slowed to a halt. A stairway materialized and descended. He wasted no time in walking down, the folds of his black robe sweeping out behind him.
His hair fluttered in the breeze, an unruly coif of uncertain design and personality. A fine white tangle graced his hairline, adding contrast to a man who was almost entirely composed of dark.
Reynald sensed Windham tense beside him, preparing himself for anything. Reynald himself was more confused than scared at this newcomer from the tunnel in the earth.
He was direct in his trajectory, walking through the last few angels surrounding Reynald and Windham, each of whom looked to the ground as he passed in deference. At last he was there before them, looking at them with a gaze of silver, a gaze of familiarity.
“You are Jean Reynald?”
“Yes.”
“And Joseph Windham?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. My name’s Whistler. Come with me, please.”
It began
to fall apart, I think, the instant that I started to love you, Jean Reynald.”
He smiled, weak, fading. Hung in light, blood now coursing from the open wound in his neck. She looked younger, not older…How was that possible? The first time he had seen her, she had seemed ancient. Now, she was barely middle-aged. Could it be that she was actually feeding on the energy of the planet? A cooling husk of a world, the inhabitants about to face the realities of a sixth extinction engineered by a criminal exile from another galaxy…She was killing them all, growing younger. Dying.
“You never loved me.”
She touched his cheek in that tender way, the caress of the damned, whispered. “Of course I did, old man.”
Weaker and weaker still, lifeblood pouring down chest, torso, legs, winding down to drip on the floor.
“Just kill me, then. Finish it.”
A tender kiss on the cheek, glance in the eyes that turned into something too long to be a glance.
“Thank you, Jean.”
“For what?”
“Jihad.”
Eyes of silver, lines of fire reaching out in savage strokes, an old man feeling pain no more, an ungenesis begun.
Maire licked his blood from her lips as the body was absorbed into silver.
It began.
Hunter sat in his vacuum seat, pulled the metal frame down over his shoulders, slammed it home and heard the click of the lock. The escape vessel was cold, dark, filled with the sound of roaring engines and sniffling children. Boys. Sons with no mothers, no fathers, no future on the planet that was at present being bombarded from above.
“Listen closely, boys.” Angels walked through the main passageway, checking the restraints on each of the precious passengers. “The city has been destroyed. We have to take you to safety in the outer. You’ll be reunited with your families once we’ve reached safety and the invaders have been dealt with.”
It was a lie, of course, but Hunter wondered if he was the only one of the boys who had seen the waves of flak tear apart the remaining adults outside of the Complex. Anything without shielding would never have withstood that attack. And from the rocking and swaying of the vessel in the launch pipe beneath the complex, it would appear that the attack was still in progress.
There were many empty seats in this passage. Hunter wondered how many boys had been killed before they could get to the Complex for evacuation.
“Hold on tight, little soldiers. We’re about to depart.”
Phased fuel engines rocked underneath the vessel. The sound was deafening. Hunter held tightly to the metal frame before him, with memories of the carnival, the merry-go-round that his mother preferred that he ride and the faster amusements that his father had taken him on long ago.
Engines screaming, little boys screaming. The angels dissembled and they were left alone in the torrent of sound.
Hunter tried to remember his father’s face, but he couldn’t. And when he remembered his mother’s face, all he could see was the smoking hole in her chest, the redness of her bloody mouth and the two lines of tears that slid from her eyes.
He held on tighter. He did not cry.
Light stretched. Everything stretched. The vessel phased and tore from the
launch pipe underneath the complex. Lily hung languidly in her restraints. The bubble was at the center of the vessel, surrounded by massive amounts of physical and phase shielding. She sensed the others on board, felt the touch of maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of terrified minds. Boys. That’s what they were. The vessel was filled with children, but she was special. She was in the bubble at the center.
She could see it, somehow, the Complex retracting and the vessel emerging from underneath, tearing through an atmosphere filled with enemy fighters, through an orbit filled with enormous enemy worldships and siege machines, through a solar system that would soon be dead, into the black between systems. She saw it from eyes that were not her own, yet somehow were.
Just a little girl in that innate blackness.
only ever really one story
She saw
fighting
She
fighting starlight
she
you know…you do.
stillness
She knew very little, but she knew beyond a doubt that she loved chocolate milk.