Extinction (20 page)

He hefted it. Used one finger to roll the thing, noting the way it warmed wherever it touched him. It was a pleasant feeling that made Shen’s stiff joints feel better. He moved it around more, old fingers making it roll.
 

“Like this,” said a voice.

Shen jumped. His pole stayed in the boat, but the vessel rocked, sending a radar of ripples from its hull toward the stream’s bank.
 

There was a man sitting in the boat behind him.
 

“Don’t
force
it to roll,” the man said, looking down.
“Let
it roll.”
 

The man was white with a long, weathered face, but he spoke Shen’s language perfectly, down to every nuance of the dialect. But his words weren’t what Shen noticed most, nor was it the fact that he’d simply materialized in his boat. Shen was
most
transfixed by the similar silver balls — three of them — rolling circles against each other in the man’s large right hand.

“It’s like a dance, Shen. Do you see?”
 

The stranger set a second ball in Shen’s palm.
 

“Who are you?”
 

Despite the man’s Western appearance, he showed every sign of understanding. He simply said, “I am a friend.”

“How did you get into my boat?”

“That is not important. What is important is that you take your family and cross the northern pass. There is a flat place there, with twin trees at the spot where the path emerges, then a series of pools beyond. Do you know it?”
 

Shen nodded.
 

“There you will find a boat much larger than this one. Take your family onto the boat. It is your new home.”
 

It occurred to Shen that he should have a thousand questions. He should not trust this man, or have any reason to believe him. But he looked down at the silver balls in his wrinkled palm, felt their warmth, and trusted. He felt their weight and believed. He would do as the man said without question.
 

“Why?”

“Because rains are coming. And because a ship larger than any of the others is on its way to the north. It will move south after that. Only a few will find the boat I’ve told you about in time. For the people of Loulan Mu, there will be no lottery as in the grand capitals of Earth. Nobody holds its key. You will survive if you find it. That is the nature of Loulan Mu’s test.”

“Which test?”
 

“One that you and your family will pass.”
 

The stranger raised his hand. He made the balls circle then roll along the top of his vein-strewn skin. Then he flicked his wrist, and the balls hopped into his palm, which he closed. When he opened his hand again, the balls were gone.

“If it is a test to find the boat, then are you not cheating by telling me where to find it?”
 

And the stranger said, “Yes.”
 

Shen looked to the thunderheads above the mountains. There was a flash, too far for sound. Shen could smell the moisture in the air, like fermenting leaves. It wasn’t just coming from the rain, born from the world itself.
 

“Why me? I am only a fisherman.”
 

The man in jeans said, “Because if I did not intervene, you would die.”

Again Shen found himself wondering if he should disbelieve. Again, he looked down at the balls and felt faith without question.
 

“Thank you. Thank you for saving my family’s lives.”
 

“I’m not saving your lives,” the stranger said. “I’m saving mine.”
 

In the Etemenanki Sprawl, at the lip of a crater the locals called Old Goat, two women stood looking down into the volcanic zone, squinting, shielding their eyes with their hands.
 

Over the past few days, the hotspots had returned seemingly all at once. The spring-fed pools had become so hot that nobody could go into them. The volcano coughed ash in a steady, sooty stream that was almost too subtle to be seen but that showed in the capital atop the shiny roofs of abandoned cars and Astral shuttles that parked for too long. There were hikes that the women used to take as part of their daily ritual — those who tempted open caverns where lava had once come and gone — that they could no longer take because the molten rock had returned. The ground sometimes shook. And now every time they hiked up to look down into Old Goat they were careful to watch the ways in and out. If floes crossed the wrong spots, it was possible (if unlikely) that they could find themselves surrounded. You couldn’t just walk out when lava floes crossed your path. Rescue could only come from the air, and the aliens were picky when it came to humans and flight.
 

 
But with today’s due diligence paid, the women had made their way to the crater’s lip and were looking down, toward the magma chambers, when they spied something new.

“Is it a house?” Ina asked.
 

Her friend, Maj, squinted harder. Sometimes, she hiked with binoculars. But not today.
 

“Why would someone build a house in an active volcano?” Maj answered.
 

“Maybe they want hot springs,” Ina said.

“It’s taller than a house. And the bottom is narrow, like it’s balanced and about to fall.”
 

Maj squinted harder. She’d just turned forty, but Ina was twenty-nine. The last thing Maj wanted to admit was that she could see none of the same detail, and that to her it looked more like a fortress of metal and wood atop blue scaffolding.

“Maj … ” Ina trailed off. And when Maj looked over, her friend’s eyes were wide, hand pressed to her chest.
 

“What?”
 

“I think it’s … ”
 

“What,
Ina?”

“I know how this sounds.”
 

“It sounds like you being ridiculous because you won’t finish a sentence.”
 

“Don’t you see it? Tell me I’m not crazy.”

“Maybe if you told me what you might be crazy about?”
 

“The message. From the Astrals. You know how the woman talked about ‘vessels’?”
 

Maj nodded. She’d thought of little else. It was a sticky problem. As the viceroy of Etemenanki Sprawl, her job was to protect her city, but how could she do that if her mandate said that only 1 percent would survive whatever the aliens were brewing?
 

“Of course.”
 

“Well?”

“Just spit it out, Ina. I can’t see that far because I’m too fucking old, okay? And if you keep reminding me, I won’t let you sit in on the viceroy rendezvous. I’ll kick you right the fuck out of the Cradle and you can just walk until your skin burns off.”
 

“Wow,” Ina said. “Old bitches sure do get touchy.”
 

Maj sighed. There was no help for her friend.
 

“It looks like a
boat
, okay? A big, giant boat right in the goddamned middle of the crater, surrounded by rivers of lava.”
 

Maj looked again. Now that Ina mentioned it, it
did
look sort of like a dry-docked boat. But there were no rivers or lakes, only the distant, frigid ocean riddled with icebergs this time of year. The days were already short, and would be shrinking still as winter came. Boating sounded horrible. When Maj heard that the city would be given a vessel, she’d personally been hoping for a luxury spaceship. The lucky 1 percent could tool off to Mars and live in style. That would be fine with her. If humanity had to die, she could stomach being with it but didn’t wish to see its final breaths.
 

“You can’t get to it,” said a small voice. “That’s what he told me.”
 

The women turned. There was a young boy, maybe six, standing a dozen yards away. He couldn’t possibly see the boat from where he was standing, and must have come up earlier to peek in.
 

“What who told you?” Maj said.

“The tall man in boots.”

Maj’s head spun around, searching. These near-outlands were patrolled and had few problems with raiders and gangs so near the city. But troublemakers occasionally broke through. A
man in boots
might be a hiker intent on seeing the outdoors no matter what, like Maj and Ina. Or he might be part of a larger problem.
 

“He’s not here,” the boy said. “He never was.”
 

“Then how did he — ”

The boy tapped his head and said, “Something has changed. I can hear them now.”
 

Maj resisted the urge to squat to his level. There was something in the boy’s strange manner of speech that told her he’d find it condescending — and would probably use that word to describe it, too.
 

Lightborn.
 

Maj and Viceroy Mara Jabari had talked extensively about their cities’ Lightborn, and in particular how the Astrals had ignored them entirely. The Lightborn in Ember Flats had formed a sort of commune, whereas here they’d spread out. There were few common denominators except that they all seemed able to predict the near future and read one another’s minds within a small, contained radius.
 

The gifted children both fascinated and frustrated Jabari — one more thing her Initiate had failed to anticipate, and Jabari didn’t like loose ends in her research.
 

The boy came closer. “You’re Viceroy Anders.” It wasn’t a question.
 

“Yes. And who are you?”
 

“He says it’s a puzzle. That there’s nothing keeping anyone from reaching the boat, except their lack of ingenuity.”

“Ingenuity, huh?” Maj said.
 

“In Loulan Mu the test is opportunity. In Hanging Pillars it is bravery. In Ember Flats it is morality. But ours is about solving puzzles. If you can reach it in plain sight, you can board. That is what the man told me.”
 

Maj fought the feeling of unease threatening to surround her. The boy’s voice was even, unconcerned, almost prophetic. His mention of Ember Flats knocked loose a bevy of worries Maj had thought she’d shelved — but now, as the sky dimmed with what looked like distant rain, she found herself thinking of Jabari, who’d set their next virtual meeting. Jabari and her select few were supposed to flee before then, anticipating particularly strong trouble in the Astral’s Capital of Capitals. And whereas Maj, Ina, and the others were supposed to wait, Jabari was the one who’d run the gauntlet to her Cradle first.
 

But Ember Flats, since then, had gone darker than dark.
 

What makes you feel you can believe this man?” Maj said.
 

“Because well before I could see the cloud, he told me it was coming.”
 

Maj looked at Ina. They both looked around.
 

“Cloud?”
 

The boy pointed. The women turned to see the largest of the storm clouds in the horizon’s dark heart. Maj saw nothing unusual. It was simply dusk approaching in the shortening autumn days, blurring the horizon from end to end.
 

Except that the horizon seemed darker and longer than usual. And the sunset seemed a bit early, even with the storms on their way.
 

Suddenly Ina gasped, as she’d done earlier. Hearing it, watching the horizon and its strange, overly dark shape, ice wrapped Maj’s heart.
 

“I swear, Ina, if you make me force it out of you this time … ”
 

“It’s not a cloud,” Ina said. “It’s a black ship, big as Iceland.”
 

In a small, original construction one-bedroom house in the rundown section of Roman Sands (a place that hadn’t been nice before the Astrals, when it was a South African armpit, and still wasn’t nice now) a thirty-one-year old man named Carl Nairobi squeezed his enormous frame through the doorway to find an unauthorized white man sitting behind his grandma’s shitty old chairs in his crappy little kitchen.

“Hello, Carl,” said the man.
 

“The fuck are you?”
 

“You’re looking well.”
 

“Maybe you didn’t hear me say, ‘What the fuck you doing in my house?’”
 

Carl didn’t smash one fist into the opposite palm to punctuate his question. His broad shoulders, six-four height, and thigh-sized arms did it for him. Every inch of Carl was earned muscle. You didn’t have to have a job in Roman Sands. The government took care of everyone. It was part of what made the place so horrible. So Carl moved bricks. All day, every day. Sometimes he moved them for people who needed bricks moved because ever since Astral Day, Roman Sands had been the kind of place where things were always being knocked down. When nobody needed bricks moved, Carl went across the street to what had once been a park and moved the pile of bricks there from one side to the other. The next day, he’d move them back. It was mind-numbing. But books were scarce, and all but propaganda broadcasts were nonexistent. For Carl, who’d been incarcerated before the bugs and ghosts had plopped their asses on his town and changed its name, moving bricks was the equivalent of doing pushups or pacing a cell. While he worked, he played the golf course he used to work at in his head, imagining walking the links and keeping score. He’d never done it in life — wasn’t right for a black kid to play golf when football made people respect him — but he’d steadily improved inside his mind. The whole thing, body and mind, kept a man sharp. It kept a man sane.

“That’s
not
what you said the first time.”
 

Carl lunged at the man. He must have blinked when he did so, because by the time he reached the chair, the guy had somehow leaped behind him.
 

“I’m not a vampire, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said the man from near his right ear.
 

Carl spun. It was half turn, half punch. He had no qualms about killing the guy, and he’d ended one unlucky fellow with his fists before. That had felt terrible; Carl had only been a kid himself at the time, and the guy had been an asshole, undeserving of death. The cops hadn’t arrived in time, and Carl had never been punished. It would have felt so much better if he had.