Extinction (37 page)

But Jabari looked into her sphere and rolled it across an old map of the former globe that someone of wit had included in the vessel’s onboard supplies. And if Stranger focused, he could catch the tone of her thoughts: guilt, regret, and resentment. Jabari wondered at what might happen next, more fearing that she’d remain a leader than hoping to be one.
 

I’ve failed them,
she thought.
The viceroys cannot meet. There are no hookups remaining, and the Astrals control the satellites.
 

Meyer, and all that made him special by the Da Vinci Initiate’s reckoning, would die along with everyone else. Even if he and Kindred made the Cradle, they’d starve like the rest of them, with nowhere to be and nowhere to go.
 

They might all be dead,
her mind twisted the knife.
ALL of the viceroys. I might be the only one left. This single ship might be all that’s left of mankind.
 

It wasn’t true, but Stranger couldn’t tell her.

More would perish.
Many, many
more.
 

The viceroys would not meet as planned.
 

But below the surface, something new was growing.
 

Stranger, as he sat top the big hill, looked down into the spheres. He wondered if this — all the work he’d done — made him selfish. He wanted very much to live, and it was only his own arrogant need that served the rest, purely by chance.
 

In the end he decided that there were many things that even he didn’t know or understand, and that all plans had their masters, and that the only thing more selfish than what he’d done so far would be to ignore the commands of his own plan’s master.

Then the first thing happened that Stranger hadn’t anticipated. The first of many things he hadn’t — and wouldn’t — see coming.

The first connection lit.
 

And then the next.
 

CHAPTER 44

“Did you say something?” a girl asked.
 

Clara looked over. They were in the lowest level of the Ember Flats vessel, half the ship’s kids tossed into one giant pile with only minimalist wooden bunks to tease their comfort. Clara didn’t understand any of it. If the Astrals were such magicians, how about a few mattresses? Heck, how about some
TV?
Anything to pass the time in this dank ship, so much like something from hundreds of years ago.
 

But, she thought, at least it was better than the belowdecks space they’d been in before finding a hatch leading up here. That had felt like pure luck, and thank God for it. Clara didn’t know how it had happened. She’d had this feeling that the hatch was to one side so she’d crawled there, even as other Lightborn protested in the dark.
 

“Sorry?”
 

“I said, ‘Did you say something?’” The girl stopped, realizing the absurdity of telling Clara what
she’d
said when she’d asked if
Clara
had spoken. Then she laughed. She looked maybe seven, like Clara. But this girl wasn’t Lightborn, and felt much younger.
 

“I didn’t say anything.” Clara let herself smile. She knew this wasn’t the only ship of survivors; she could still sense the other Lightborn who’d managed similarly miraculous stowaways on other ships. But Clara felt mostly alone — the simple, quiet solitude of the surviving few. Talking to anyone felt nice. To see even a ghost of humor.
 

“I thought you said something about boots,” the girl told her.

“I didn’t.”
 

“I don’t have any boots.”

“That’s okay,” Clara said, “because I didn’t ask for them.”
 

“And I especially don’t have
man’s
boots.”
 

Clara looked at the girl again, this time taking her in from head to toe. She was wearing a fine blue dress — the kind of thing Clara’s mother used to make her wear for fancy balls, back in Heaven’s Veil. A strange thing for a ride in an apocalyptic ark. Clara fought an urge to take their conversation sideways, to ask where the girl had been when the water started rising.
 

She was watching Clara right back, as if in expectation. Her skin was almost as dark as Ella’s, but her eyes were emerald green. It was a curious look, and Clara found herself spellbound.

“You heard me say something about men’s boots?”
 

“Or a man in boots,” the girl answered.
 

Clara turned in the opposite direction, finding the area behind her still empty. Some of the Lightborn, once they’d found their way out of the ship’s pitch-black underbelly, had been antsy. Logan had nodded to Clara knowingly (deferring to her as the group’s new leader, perhaps) and risen to take them away, leading them like a chaperone. Clara had felt the group’s anxiety but didn’t want to go along. And now, looking at the green-eyed girl, she wondered if there’d been a reason. Maybe she’d heard her the way the girl seemed to have heard Clara’s thoughts about the stranger with his scuffed brown boots, and she’d stuck around to have this very discussion.

“I might have been mumbling,” Clara lied. She’d been silent, but her mind had been active — yawning back to a vision of the man by the campfire, wondering if what he’d seemed to be telling them all was true. “What else did I say?”
 

“Dunno.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “Did you say you went camping or something?”
 

“You don’t know if I said it or not?”
 

Again the girl shrugged. Perhaps the oddity was dawning on her. Clara tried to sympathize but couldn’t. Ever since she’d been inside her mother, she’d heard the thoughts and feelings of others. She didn’t know what it was like to suddenly waken to a latent ability.
 

Or more accurately,
being woken
to one. By Clara’s mere presence, if she had to guess.
 

The girl seemed uncomfortable, probably trying to decide how she could think Clara had spoken without any details about what she’d said. But mental and spoken communication weren’t the same. When speaking mind to mind, answers occasionally came before the questions. You sometimes smelled aromas before knowing their source.
 

Clara turned herself around, rotating without standing. Once fully facing the girl — the two of them nearly knee to knee on shoddy wooden benches as if preparing for a game of patty-cake — Clara smiled. “What’s your name?”
 

“Zoe.”
 

“And of course you already know mine.”
 

“Clara.” The girl’s face wrinkled again as she tried to recall if Clara’s name had been said aloud before her friends had left to go exploring.
 

“That’s right. Do you want to play a game?”

“My brother has Go Fish,” Zoe said.
 

“Not like this. It’s a pretend game.”
 

“Okay.”

“We close our eyes and pretend we’re somewhere else.”
 

“Where?”
 

“Anywhere. This ship is smelly.”
 

Zoe laughed. “Okay.”
 

“What kind of a place do you want to imagine?”
 

“I don’t know.”
 

“How about if we pretend we’re camping? You said camping.”
 

“Okay.” Zoe reached for a pair of long metal rods lying along one wall, apparently as leftovers from construction that never existed. “These can be our hot dog sticks.”
 

“No, we don’t do it like that.”
 

Zoe held the rods then set them slowly back down. “Then how?”
 

“We close our eyes.” Clara closed hers, to demonstrate.
 

“Okay. Now what?”
 

“Now we take turns filling it up.”
 

Clara looked around inside her mind, watching the scene come into being like a 3-D model rendered. It was the same campsite she and the Lightborn had visited with the man in boots, but this time he hadn’t created the space. This time, Zoe was doing it.
 

“How do we fill it up?”
 

“Just put something there. In your imagination.”

A pink dinosaur, human sized and standing on two legs, more cute than menacing, popped into existence in a small green hat.

“Nice. I like his hat,” Clara said.
 

When Zoe said nothing, Clara opened her eyes. Zoe was staring at her.
 

“Whose hat?”
 

“Close your eyes,” Clara said.
 

After a second, Zoe did. Then Clara did the same.
 

“My turn.”
 

Clara pictured a dwarf with a nose so big he could barely hold it up. The nose was bright red and dripping.
 

Zoe laughed.
 

“What?”
 

“I just imagined something else. A little guy with a big nose.”
 

“Hey! It’s supposed to be my turn.”
 

“Sorry,” Zoe said.
 

Clara turned the imaginary dwarf into a troll. It growled, and leaped. Zoe gave a tiny shriek, and when Clara opened her eyes this time, Zoe gave a tiny embarrassed laugh.
 

“Something just kind of freaked me out.”
 

“In your own imagination?”

Zoe looked slightly away, frowning. The answer, from Zoe’s perspective, was probably
Sort of
. Other people’s thoughts always struck Clara as obviously foreign no matter how well they meshed with her own. Each thought had an accent, and a discerning mental ear couldn’t help but gather the accents of others. She knew something was strange but had no frame of reference.
 

But children, unlike adults, had malleable perspective. That’s the whole reason Clara had been sure, once they were aboard the ships, that this was possible.
 

Adults had to be convinced. Their minds, through the passage of years, set like concrete.
 

But not children. Children could still convince themselves to believe.
 

“It was the troll, wasn’t it?” Clara asked.
 

Zoe nodded without thinking then stopped to wonder why she was nodding.
 

“Close your eyes, Zoe. I want to show you something.”
 

Clara focused.
 

“What just popped up around the campsite, Zoe?”
 

“Dunno.”
 

“I think you know. Look behind the pile of logs.”
 

Zoe laughed again. “What are
you
doing here?” she said to something that didn’t exist.

“What do you see, Zoe?”
 

“It’s a pig. Why did I think of a
pig
around a campfire?”
 

Clara inserted a clown.
 

“Probably the same reason you’d think of a clown.” Then Clara added two elephants, a spotted leopard, and a banana tree. “Or those elephants. Or the leopard. Or even that banana tree over by the pond.”
 

When Zoe looked over, she seemed almost ready to run. This playmate was no fun after all. This playmate, Zoe seemed to have decided, could do black magic.
 

So Clara sent her emotional mind toward the girl’s, cupping it in a nonphysical palm. Her mind touched Zoe’s, and second by second the girl began to relax. It was like hypnosis. It wasn’t easy, coming psychically alive for the first time.

“What’s my mom’s name, Zoe?”
 

“L … Lila.”
 

“What about my dad?”
 

“R … ” But then rather than finishing the name, Zoe’s hand went over her mouth and she said, “Sorry.”
 

“For what?”

“He … ”
 

Clara slowly opened her mind, sending out only what Zoe needed to know. She’d picked up on the fact that Clara’s dad was dead and that had been expected, but Clara hadn’t realized Zoe would know her father’s misdeeds as well — knowledge that Clara could see on Zoe’s face even now, as the girl groped for proper expression.
 

Clara took Zoe’s hands in hers, feeling rattled. She’d had the feeling that the Lightborn would be able to rouse the dormant minds of non-Lightborn children since before the big waves — that they’d be able to “light up the connections,” to use the cowboy’s expression. But she hadn’t realized how smoothly it would happen. Zoe’s mind, as Clara peered inside, was wide open. And through that mind, Clara could see Zoe’s brother’s. And her brother’s friend. And the kids that friend had met on the vessel, all of whom were a level up, above them now.
 

In Clara’s mind, connections lit like Christmas bulbs coming alive.
 

“What’s happening?” Zoe asked.
 

And behind that first question, Clara heard a hundred others.