Extinction (26 page)

The hologram blinked away and was gone. When Sadeem turned back to the woman, her unflappable Astral countenance seemed disturbed.

“The Mullah scrolls tell us the Horsemen lack emotion. Out of academic curiosity, is that true?”
 

The woman’s face again became wooden. “Your scrolls are accurate.”

But that wasn’t true. Intentionally or not, Eternity aboard the Dark Rider had presented itself as a sexually interesting human female sending out all the right signals. It had become angry when Sadeem appeared ignorant. And now, when the hologram had raised its hand, Eternity had grown flustered. Why?
 

“Why do you want to find this man so badly?” Sadeem asked.
 

“He has information we require. Information you have been brought here to provide.”
 

“Which information?”
 

“The children you call the Lightborn.”
 

Sadeem stifled his shock. And fear. She’d already mentioned that the Mullah were possibly hiding something. Hopefully the two weren’t connected: hiding the Lightborn from Astral eyes.
 

“What about them?”
 

“What are they?”

“They are children.”
 

“But they are different.”
 

“Many children are different.”
 

“Do not be obtuse. Our drones have observed you in safe zones, where our treaty permits. You have displayed intense interest in them. You have proposed the solution lies in puzzles.”
 

“You misunderstand. There is no
solution
. The children are merely precocious. They grow and develop early. They are highly intelligent and creative.”
 

“What causes them to?”
 

“I do not know. Perhaps they are a symptom of being raised in Astral presence, or around your impressive repeating stones.” Sadeem watched the woman, wondering if Eternity’s surprising Astral emotion was immune to flattery.

“Why do they interest you?”
 

“They simply do. What interests you?”
 

“They are an aberration. Why does your interest in them center on games and puzzles?”
 

“Why does it matter?”
 

“That is not of your concern. You will be kept here until you assist us.”
 

“Why don’t you just suck the thoughts out of my head?”
 

The woman’s face contorted slightly: another semi-emotional response, indicating that he’d inadvertently stumped her. Apparently the Astrals couldn’t just suck the information out of his head, or they’d have already done it. And whoever this man with the silver spheres was, he and whatever he’d almost told Divinity about the Lightborn before vanishing mattered a hell of a lot.
 

“The man in question told us that the Lightborn would see through a certain ruse. We presented the bloodwater out of the archive of human expectation as we’ve gathered through our repeater stones, but it was only presented to gather attention. The humans took it as a plague, but it was not. As many things are not as they seem.”
 

“What things?”
 

The woman seemed to decide she’d said enough. “That is not of your concern. The man told us that the Lightborn would not be fooled. It did not matter. We observed he was correct. There was a dangerous fault in his frequency, and so we corrected it as he exited his view into our stream. There was no reason to keep him. He was dropped off outside Ember Flats.”
 

“And?”
 

Another uncomfortable look. “It seems this man was able to open windows we did not anticipate. Windows we used to access this planet from our own.”
 

“Like the portal? The one in the Mullah Temple?”
 

“Like that window and others. There are substances that alter consciousness here and give humanity access to a connection to the collective mind that it otherwise lacks. This man can do this without those substances.”
 

“He can get high without getting high?”
 

Her features sharpened. “There is pollution in
your
stream now. At each point, around your planet, we are seeing disturbances to the expected flow that seem to have no cause. We have recursively scanned our records, including those from the past epoch from our judgment archive, and the only likely conclusion was that we have simply been unable to see the Lightborn minds except in moments of extreme signaling.”
 

Sadeem had already figured that out. It’s why he’d hidden Clara.
 

“You mean you can’t hear them unless they’re emotional?”

“So you do know of them.”
 

“Only from personal curiosity.”
 

“Because the disturbances around the globe seem to have no traceable origin, we believe they were begun by Lightborn. But our own investigations show that although your children have stronger mental gifts than the rest of you, it has a limited range.”
 

“So?”
 

“Ships that have managed to find Lightborn children since and investigate them have found that the children share something in common.
One
thing. They believe they’ve been contacted by someone from another place. Someone able to open windows.”
 

“Your man in boots.”
 

The woman nodded.
 

Sadeem waited, realizing it was apparently his turn to speak.
 

“Someone’s running amok, telling the planet’s Lightborn to … cause disturbances of some sort,” Sadeem said.
 

“In the stream,” the woman clarified. “It’s misdirected and unexpected. The only pattern seems to be an intention
to cause disturbance
. To initiate chaos.”
 

“So what do you want from me? Why don’t you poke your Horsemen heads into the portal and shut the windows for good? You have ships around the world.
You
hold the upper hand.”
 

The woman said nothing.
 

“You can’t do it, can you? Whoever this man is, he’s beating you, isn’t he?”
 

Sadeem looked up at the woman. Her fists were clenched. Her face was set. And for the fraction of a second, her eyes flashed as red as her dress.

In a blip, the floor seemed to vanish. Sadeem thought he might fall but then realized he was on something clearer than glass, looking down on an endless expanse of blank white nothingness.
 

He was seeing the ground, far below his feet. And judging by the horizon’s curvature and the black space beyond, he knew the enormous black ship must be very high up.
 

A blue glow seemed to bloom from the center of the floor — from the bottom of the ship, far below.
 

It grew.
 

And it
grew
.
 

“Where are we?” He looked at the stark white landscape below. “What happened to Ember Flats?”

“The Deathbringer is no longer above Ember Flats.”
 

He looked down. He saw nothing but white snow and ice, shrouded in the darkness of a six-month night.
 

“Let us see,” the blonde woman said, “who is beating whom.”
 

CHAPTER 29

Lila ran down the shallow embankment, heels skidding in the sandy soil. She’d left the car door open behind her. Mara’s tablet was safe from the pounding rain for now, sitting on the opposite seat. But the passenger side of the wreck, where Lila had been sitting and pretending to be staying out of the way, was getting soaked. She’d need to return for the tablet, and take pains to make sure it was stowed dry and sealed.
 

But for now there was only the panic.

“Dad! Piper!”
 

They could barely hear her. The rain’s intensity and the sound of its assault had tripled. Her father, Kindred, Piper, and Peers were being pelted with fat streams of water as they waded into the rising Nile, trying and failing to hold onto each other for support. Not long ago — about the time Lila decided the feeds weren’t going to show Clara simply walking past — there’d been hail. The others had simply stood in the open through it. Even Nocturne was helping. He was on the shore, barking at the water.
 

“Dad!”
 

Instead of turning, leaving the water, and running to help her, he dove in headfirst.
 

“DAD!”
Lila shrieked, watching him vanish, the fear over her news temporarily lost in a certainty that he wouldn’t surface, that she’d seen the real Meyer Dempsey — former movie studio mogul, father who’d wanted to ditch Raj in New Jersey, and had maybe been right all along — for the final time.
 

But then the surface broke, and she saw him paddling among the flotsam. He was more treading water sideways than swimming properly; the surface wasn’t as turbulent near the shores as it was in the middle. But then Meyer reached the current and changed to a forward crawl, kicking in what Lila was shocked to see were the same black dress shoes he’d worn for his State of the City what felt like a thousand years ago. They’d bog him down. He’d drown because he hadn’t removed his stupid shoes.

She was in water to her ankles. To her calves. To her knees. She’d waded nearly to the point where Meyer had started swimming when Kindred’s hand wrapped around her upper arm.
 

And he said, “Don’t.”
 

She wouldn’t leap into the water. She wasn’t crazy, like her father. And yet she felt Kindred gripping hard to hold her back because her muscles were fighting to go, to follow, to do something, anything.
 

“It’s okay, Lila. He’s trailing a rope.”
 

She looked and saw it, following behind him like a river anaconda.

She wanted to say something obvious. Like how a rope wouldn’t help him cross. Like how it would only snag behind and pull him under if (when) it broke, and the that other end would merely allow them to retrieve his body.
 

But Meyer swam on, arms pumping hard, legs kicking harder.
 

“There’s a rip current underneath. Feel it?”
 

Lila looked from Kindred to her own waterlogged legs. She felt it, all right. The river was moving near her knees, while flat-out trying to knock her down at the ankles.
 

She looked up, watching her father — a champion collegiate swimmer in his day, he’d often boasted — swim a full 45 degrees upstream of the submerged submersible dock. He was staying flat at the top, in the slower-moving water that still didn’t look all that slow, kicking and surging.
 

The current shoved him back toward his target. A huge sheet of torn wood and plaster, nails exposed, came rushing toward him. Lila gasped as it nearly clipped him, but he dodged, losing water to the current, struggling harder to push on. The giant piece of debris passed behind him, and for long, horrible moments Lila was positive it had missed her father only to snag his rope and drag him down to his watery grave.
 

But the flotsam passed, and the rain intensified. Evening gloom obscured her vision and blocked the sound until finally Kindred straightened and, apparently feeling Lila had found her senses, loosened his grip on her arm.
 

“What?”
Lila asked, watching him. It came out as a hysterical demand.
 

“He made it,” Piper said.
 

“I can’t see him!”
 

“He’s on the far side, Lila. It’s okay.”
 

Lila looked from Piper to Kindred, seeing relaxation she didn’t feel. The situation suddenly seemed absurdly unfair: Everyone could read minds except for her. And Peers, of course.
 

“Okay,” Kindred said. “Where’s the tablet?”
 

Lila blinked around, heart pounding, panic not nearly abated. But it wasn’t just her father she’d been afraid for when running down here. He hadn’t even gone in yet as she’d been scrabbling down the shore, an announcement on her tongue. But she couldn’t place it. Couldn’t even find her place here and now, as a person, by a river, missing a daughter, afraid for her father. It was all so terrible. But then it slowly returned, along with the fear, and she found herself staring at Kindred, more frustrated by his impatience than moved.
 

“The
tablet
, Lila. Where did you put it? I need to flood the tanks so Meyer can work. I need to— ” Kindred stopped, looking up at the stalled car. “Who left the door open? Where’s the tablet?”
 

“It’s in the car.”
 

“With the door open? In the rain? Lila, what the hell is wrong with—?”

Then it was all back. The rushing horror. The sense of doom. The feeling that time had already run out, and that every second mattered. She’d just spent a hundred or so, maybe more. And the clock was already at zero. She’d seen it with her own eyes, on the backlit screen, while poking around the feeds to find her daughter.