Extinction (44 page)

But when her thoughts turned to the alien ships in the sky —
 
Peers called them chariots of the gods — it was like trying to recall something from her earliest years. Much of her history was similarly foggy, as if in flux. How had she and Meyer met? What had her pregnancy been like, and what of Lila’s first years? All those things might as well have been from a hundred years ago, from another life, from a whole other world. And the Astrals, as Lila called them, seemed to be tied up in all of it.
 

“How has Clara been?” Piper asked, deciding the topic was exhausted at best, frustratingly deadlocked at least.
 

“Good. But she’s strange, Piper.”
 

“Strange how?”
 

“She doesn’t talk much. She’s not as lively as she used to be.”
 

“It’s only been a week since she came home, Lila. Give her time.”
 

Lila’s mouth opened. Her head cocked.
 

“It’s been more than a week.”
 

“No, a week. I’ve been washing her shirts. One a day. Seven shirts.”
 

“I thought she came back months ago. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Lila,” Piper laughed. “Maybe
you
should go to the medic.”
 

But Lila was shaking her head. “She came back with Mara Jabari. The same time that Gatekeeper Carl and his clan joined the village.”

“Lila, I’m positive.
One week.”
 

“But Carl, Mara, the others … the village wasn’t even
built
when they came!”
 

“I don’t know what to tell you, Lila. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we built the village in a single week and don’t remember.”
 

This time, Lila laughed.
 

“She’ll be okay. She’s a kid. Kids are resilient. Just let it pass. If she wants to talk about where they took her, let her. But if she doesn’t, don’t pry. She needs to move on, and so do you.”
 

Lila nodded.
 

But that night, Lila also brought a rock into her bedroom. She began to make marks on it, to count the days with a stick of chalk.

CHAPTER 52

And so life in the village continued.
 

The river gave them a ready supply of clean water, so they hauled buckets and used the water to drink and to bathe and to cook their meals over fires using pots that none of the citizens precisely remembered fabricating, purchasing, or trading for. They sat inside their homes (which, similarly, nobody really remembered building or even moving into) at dark, for protection, and wandered about during the day.
 

Sometimes wolves and coyotes came in the night, so villagers kept their food contained and their children inside and their small animals penned. Sometimes snakes made homes under their houses so they had to fish them out. The sun had a tendency to crisp the skin so they wore loose clothing or stayed in the shade when the sun was high. The land was fertile. And crops grew.
 

By the time the corn was knee-high, lapping up water from the river and laughing at the desolation of dry desert beyond the village, almost everyone had completely forgotten the strange visitors who’d come from the sky. There were nightmares, with black things that scuttled like bugs, purring with blue sparks in their throats. And sometimes, when a man as large as Carl came from the sun with his white covers on, those who saw his big, muscle-bound form would flinch until seeing that his skin was black, not powder white like the phantoms they remembered without recollection.
 

But for the most part nobody knew anything of the ships by then, or the catastrophe that had befallen them, or the old, distant cities, or the function of any of the strange relics people occasionally found in their belongings. When the villagers found such objects, they took them to Stranger, who pronounced them witchcraft, or to the strange desert-dwelling sage named Sadeem who made his home far away, in the hills, with a small tribe of disciples he called Mullah. Sometimes Stranger would make pronouncements about the relics, and often Sadeem told tales of a magic that once permeated the world like the very aether of existence, and how the shiny things — many of which came alive if you touched them — talked to that magic.
 

By the time two months had passed, the village was at peace. There were squabbles among the villagers, and the constant feud between Governor Dempsey and Liza Knight, who ran the rectory and seemed to know everything about everyone whether it was her business or not. But there were no outside enemies other than the wolves and coyotes and snakes, so life went on as well as it could.
 

The Dempsey family, which held esteem as the family of their fearless leader, was a mixed bunch, underpinning so much of the tribe’s day-to-day existence. There was Meyer, of course, who ran things when not bickering with Liza. There was his twin brother, Kindred, who was strange and distant and dark — a brooding, troubling figure who most knew to avoid. There was Piper, who acted as the First Lady and made clothing as her profession. There was Lila, who taught at the school. And lastly there was young Clara Dempsey, who spent much of her time with Stranger in his magician’s hut. It made Lila uneasy, but she permitted the friendship. Clara was
different
, and although Stranger was odd, he was trusted by the village and seemed to understand Clara — something Lila herself had given up on.
 

In Stranger’s hut, he and Clara discussed things they shouldn’t know but both did. Long after the Astrals were gone, Clara asked about them. Long after the ships had last graced the others’ memories, Clara and Stranger still whispered. And they spoke in hushed voices about Stranger himself, who struck Clara as instantly familiar in a way she didn’t entirely understand — and most often about Kindred, whom Stranger avoided like a plague. Many avoided Kindred, but with Stranger it was intentional — each steering clear of the other despite what both called “an intensely strong mutual attraction.” Whenever Clara spoke with Stranger or her grand uncle, the other man surfaced in conversation. Kindred wanted nothing more, it seemed, than to sit opposite Stranger for a meal. And Stranger, likewise, wanted nothing more than to visit with Kindred. Clara could feel their mutual pull, but for a reason neither would divulge they refused to meet — as if doing so was dangerous.
 

Stranger would say, “We all have our burdens to bear, Clara, just as you have the burden of knowledge and insight.” And Kindred, who knew less of Clara’s unique “insight,” would say the same. Kindred spoke of little but Stranger, using drink to still unknowable demons. Except that when he drank enough, another subject would surface. Lila heard this topic often, as the one tasked with shuttling Kindred to bed when his intoxication became too great and filled him with menace. He spoke of a woman named Heather, who seemed to haunt his past, but that Lila had never heard of.
 

In the mornings, Clara would often tell her mother that she was going to Stranger’s place then walk past it, headed to a place far in the hills — too far for anyone to walk alone. She could make it in two hours, most of that time spent crossing barren desert with no landmarks to guide her. Clara never got lost. She tuned inward to another kind of guidance, listening to whispers from her friends: a group sometimes called the Unforgotten, but which called themselves Lightborn. Clara could hear them any time she chose to tune in, same as she could still see the strange network with all its nodes with her mind’s eye. When she walked, she called on the Lightborn to guide her, to the cave where she’d find Sadeem and the Mullah. But when she realized it wasn’t just the Lightborn offering directions from afar, she chose to ask the Sage, knowing he’d have answers to questions nobody else had — that nobody else could even understand.
 

“All the time I was on the vessel,” Clara told him, “I could see this network in my head expanding. And I could mentally tap each of the bright spots, which I kind of thought of as nodes. And when I did, I’d get a sense of what that node was: not just a spot in a grid but as a person. You were one. So was Piper. All of my Lightborn friends were in there, each appearing as a node in this big, expanding grid of people. At first I thought we were connecting, the way my mind plugs into the Lightborn. But it’s still there, even after everything! I think that’s how I can see my way through the desert: Millions of people saw this piece of land before the flood. Even with all the landmarks washed away, what they know — or
knew
— seems to have made me a map.”
 

Sadeem nodded, thinking. “It makes sense. Many tiny inputs from nodes on the grid, and your mind assembles them into a picture of the whole.”
 

“But they’ve forgotten, Sadeem! Nobody remembers the old world! Nobody even remembers the flood, the Astrals, none of it! My own mom doesn’t even remember
her
mom — she thinks Piper had her!”
 

“And?”
 

Clara looked at Sadeem with disbelief. He was sitting in front of her cross-legged, peaceful like a meditating yogi.
 

“And?”
she repeated.
 

“Why would you expect it to be different? Just because they’ve forgotten doesn’t mean they don’t remember.”
 

“Stop speaking in riddles!”
 

Sadeem’s composure broke. He laughed.
 

“I suspect we’ve always been connected a little, Clara. That’s what you’re able to see. You’ve kept an eye on what humanity lost. It changes nothing, but at least offsets the burden of being how you are.”
 

“So I can remember things that everyone else has let go? How is that a benefit? I wish I’d forgotten, too!”
 

“They told me everyone would forget, Clara. But they’ve never been able to see the Lightborn. It’s one tiny piece of victory. They knocked down the buildings but left the foundation, in you.”
 

“And what good does it do me?”
 

“You won’t get lost, for one. And at least until you die, a small piece of the old world won’t be gone forever.”
 

“The same is true of you. Big whoop for being special. Even if we told people how it used to be, nobody would believe us.”
 

“Part of their plan, I suppose. The Astrals wanted us to start over, and that could only happen if we were blank slates. It had to happen before they left. But it’s good because we needed them to go. The healing had to begin, and if memory was the price, so be it. The network you see won’t last forever, Clara. It’ll wither and die. Enjoy it while you can. Your mind, my mind, the minds of other Lightborn and perhaps the one you call Stranger? That might be all that’s left of the world we knew. But like all things, it’s only for a time. I’m already forgetting things — naturally, at least. Just as your subconscious network is fading. Don’t resent it, Clara. Pity it. Don’t push those people’s remains away. Embrace and celebrate them while they’re still here.”
 

Something sighed inside her. Sadeem was speaking as if the world wasn’t dead, but dying. As if the people she already knew and loved, in the small village and the others pocked across the planet, were dying.
 

She closed her eyes, feeling exhausted. She saw the network almost immediately. And it was as he said: a still-vibrant core of bright nodes surrounded by endless acres of slaughtered chattel. Subconscious minds of the more than seven billion humans who’d died during the occupation were now husks. But the rest of what Sadeem had said wasn’t as obviously true: As those old minds shed, leaving the living to burn inside Clara’s mental network, the remaining nodes weren’t dimming. Each mind still in the grid fit perfectly —
more
perfectly than they ever could have during humanity’s populous but scattered heyday.

Clara opened her eyes.
 

“Sadeem?”
 

“Yes, Clara?”
 

“You say the nodes — this
collective network
— I see inside me … you say those are the
roots
of people before they forgot everything? So the Peers Basara node inside my head, for instance — that’s Peers as he
used to be
, not as he is now?”
 

“It’s his entry into the collective unconscious. So yes.”
 

“And because everyone
has
forgotten, that’s why the whole thing should be shutting down? Because all those old memories and thoughts are
erased
?”
 

“That’s right.”
 

“But Sadeem?”
 

“Yes, Clara?”
 

“It’s not shutting down. The network keeps growing brighter and brighter. It’s not dying. It’s almost like it’s coming alive.”

“I think you’re imagining things.”
 

“No, Sadeem, I’m
not,”
Clara insisted. “It’s been getting brighter since we boarded the vessel. Since those other, non-Lightborn kids started to light up, and even some of the adults.”