Extinction (7 page)

“Did I ever tell you about my cousin Timmy?” Stranger asked the woman.
 

“We do not understand.”

“Well, actually, he was
Meyer’s
cousin Timmy. He wanted to be a musician. Everyone was supportive.
Really
supportive. Like,
too
supportive. You know how everyone supports a retard? That’s about how everyone supported Timmy. Folks in the family told Cousin Timmy how good he did in everything having to do with his music. They went to all his shows. They wore shirts he made for shitty gigs in pissant little clubs. You know why? Because they didn’t really believe in him. They faked enthusiasm because they felt they had to, and when you fake it, you don’t need to believe. And do you know who Timmy became?”

“No,” the woman said.
 

“He became Tim Whitney.”
 

The woman just stared.
 

“Not a country music fan, I see.”
 

“Why are you here?” To Stranger, the woman sounded stuck in a loop.
 

“Tim wasn’t the biggest name, but he definitely made it on the professional music scene. Pretty big time, and he made a great living as a semi-famous singer until you killed him along with most of the planet. But his family couldn’t see his fame even when he had it because to them he was their stupid Cousin Timmy, who thought he could play guitar. ‘Good for poor, dumb Timmy,’ they said. You get me?”
 

“What is your intention? What do you want?”

“Friend, it’s not a matter of what I want. It’s a matter of what I can give you.”
 

“How did you destroy the Reptar?”
 

Stranger held up his hand. He pinched a silver ball between thumb and forefinger and ring finger. He made it dance, put his other hand to it, and suddenly had a pair rolling across the backs of two hands. Then three, then four.
 

He waved his hands theatrically, and all the balls were gone.
 

“I have many tricks I’d rather not share.”
 

“Then what do you have to give?”
 

“Let’s start,” Stranger said, “by discussing the Internet.”

CHAPTER 7

The knock repeated.
 

Clara waited, knees to her chest, arms around them, pulling herself into a ball. The sound beyond the home’s walls was
loud
, both inside and out of her head. Inside, she heard fear and begging and bargaining, soul searching and loss and abject panic. Outside, she heard screams and pops and bangs, crashes and Reptar purrs.
 

And yet the knock, when it came a third time, was soft and polite. Respectful. As if the person on the other side hadn’t noticed all that was happening at the end of the world and was doing her best to not wake the home’s occupant from a nap.
 

“Clara?” It was a young voice, but she couldn’t tell how young because the door muffled it. “Clara, open up.”
 

Clara crawled forward. She tried to peek through the window near the door but couldn’t see the porch. Then she crawled to the other side and managed a glance — two kids on the steps: a boy and a girl. The boy looked about twelve or thirteen with hawklike features and a lock of hair that wouldn’t stay off his forehead. The girl was maybe ten, black-skinned, strong-looking and tall, her hair a messy halo around her head.

His name is Nick. Her name is Ella.

[We know you’re in there. Don’t be afraid.]

Clara recoiled, looking around as if someone had shouted. And someone had, outside near the home’s rear. While the main part of Clara’s attention had been on the visitors at her front door, part of her had been listening all around. A Reptar purr had preceded a shout of pain and surprise. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what had happened.
 

(Maybe she can’t hear us.)

[Of course she can hear us.]

(I didn’t mean your out-loud voice.)

[I know what you meant. But she talked to us, too, didn’t she?]

Clara ducked, feeling watched. She hadn’t spoken, but the sense that she knew these kids — specifically, that the boy was Nick and the girl was Ella — had been like her own voice speaking inside her mind. It had been stronger and somehow different from her normal internal voice — almost as if it were somehow coming both from within
and
from the kids themselves.
 

“Clara? We’re friends, okay?” came the boy’s

(Nick’s)

voice. “Let us in, will you? Nobody seems to want to eat us, but I get a bad feeling about those little flying balls.”
 

“Who are you?” Clara said.
 

“We’re like you.”
 

“Like me how?”

And then it was like someone had shut off Clara’s sense of vision. For a split second she saw only blackness, then in the dark, a sort of mental video show began to play. Whoever had spliced this particular film had been manic and low on attention; it was composed of second-long clips, possibly images, that seemed to fly toward her, like a rush of speeding traffic: an Astral ship above a city, a baby cradled in its mother’s arms, a hive filled with swarming honeybees, a series of beams of light in a web that seemed to be streaking toward each other like contrails of jets, only much faster, a chasm opening in the earth to expose a pit like Hell come topside, a group that seemed to be family, a wad of garbage washed from dishes and sliding down the dark maw of a running sink.
 

Images blasted into Clara like a strong wind, and then, when it was over, she felt their residue: the meaning behind all that had at first seemed only visual.
 

The children were Lightborn, same as her.
 

Clara turned the deadbolt and opened the door.

“How did you know I was in here? How did you know my name?”
 

The boy shoved past her, followed by the girl, who turned to shut the door and re-lock it. He was taller than Clara had imagined, and perhaps a bit younger. Eleven instead of twelve or thirteen.

“You know what you are, right?” the girl asked.

Of course she knows,
the boy said without opening his mouth.
 

“You don’t know that,” the girl said, turning to the boy with juvenile disdain. A snippy response that said that he should have known better.
 

“Clara,” the boy said. “What’s my name?”
 

“Nick.”
 

“And her?”
 

“Ella.”
 

“That’s how I know your name. That’s how I knew you were in here.”
 

“I knew, too,” the girl said self-importantly.
 

“How long you been in Ember Flats?” the boy asked.
 

“Few days?” And then an out-of-control addition blurted from Clara’s mind:
We’ve been in the palace
.

The girl nodded at the boy, hands on her hips and mouth pursed, as if she’d won a point in an argument.
“That’s
why.”
 

“Why what?” Clara asked.
 

Still speaking to the boy, the girl said, “I told you so.”
 

“You didn’t tell me so. Winnie said it first.”
 

“Winnie and me.” The girl raised a finger in victory. With her finger still up, she said, “There. Did you hear that?”
 

“Hear what?” Clara asked.
 

From Nick, Clara heard a mental voice say (to someone apparently not present),
Stop encouraging her, Win
.

“What are you guys talking about?” Clara asked.
 

“Hang on,” Nick said.
 

Clara heard chatter, like people arguing, barely there. Like something coming through on a fuzzy station, a fraction from being on frequency. Nick and Ella — neither of whom had introduced themselves, Clara realized — didn’t seem to be having trouble. Both had their heads cocked as if listening to an inaudible argument. Like crazy people.
 

“Hey!” Clara said, waving a hand.
“You
came to
me.”
 

Ella broke from whatever was happening and turned to Clara. “You’re related to someone, aren’t you?”
 

“Aren’t
you?”
Clara replied, her patience wearing thin.
 

“No — I mean you’re really close to things up here somehow.” The girl tapped her head, managing to find it through all her black hair. “Like, you’re close with an alien. Or your mom is part of a hive or something.”

“What’s a hive?”

“When you were still in your mom’s stomach, you were near one of the ships. Is that it?”
 

“Is that
what?”
Clara felt lost in this discussion yet sure that Ella was also involved in several other conversations and effortlessly managing them all. Nick, who was now paying attention to Clara and Ella, was clearly doing the same. Although based on mental fragments that Clara seemed to smell wafting off of Nick, she was somehow certain that he wasn’t just conversing but figuring something out as well. Each was doing five other things at once, and Clara was only doing one, and yet she was the one having problems following along.
 

“Let’s spell it out,” Nick said, half to Ella and half to her. Clara, sure she was about to be condescended to, tried not to be insulted. “You know what you are, right? In the city, they call kids like us ‘Lightborn.’”
 

“Of course,” Clara said, keeping her shoulders back and proud.
 

“We can do all these mind tricks. Like talking without really talking. Like having a really good feeling about what’s happening even if nobody tells us. Sorta-kinda predicting the future.”
 

“Sorta,”
Ella added. “Maybe.”
 

“I was reading adult books when I was three. I guess that’s not normal. My mom was funny; she tried to keep me from knowing about Hell’s Corridor. But I knew who was there, and what they did. I knew what a cannibal was without ever having to learn. It didn’t scare me. It just made me want to stay inside the walls. You know what I mean?”
 

“I can do all of that stuff, too,” Clara said.
 

“Yeah, but I can barely hear you. And now you say you’ve been in the palace since you’ve been here.”
 

“Are you deaf? And why does it matter that I was in the palace?”
 

“I mean,
I can barely hear you.
”
Then Nick tapped his head like Ella already had. “In
here
. You’re part of that group that came in a while ago, right? So you were out in the desert. Is that where you were born?”
 

“Why does that matter?” Clara fought frustration, still sure that each of her new companions were doing ten other things while speaking to her, handling each effortlessly while watching her flounder.
 

“You’re not used to being around other Lightborn, is all. Right?”
 

“No.”
 

“And the palace shields everything. They know some of what we can do, and they don’t want us peeking. The Astrals, I mean. So the palace walls are made of that same rock that dark minds use.”
 

“Dark minds?”
 

“Sorry. I mean normal people. That’s what we call them, since we’re
light
. It’s not like they’re bad people.” Nick looked for a moment like he thought he might have offended her, then pressed on. “They need the rocks to hook their minds up, and we don’t, but the same rocks can keep us out. Sorta.”
 

“What do you mean,
sorta?”
 

“If you haven’t been around a bunch more of us Lightborn kids, that’s probably why you’re bad at this. It’s okay; you’ll get better.” Ella said it as if offering Clara a gift.

“I’ve been around plenty.”
 

“In an outpost or something?” Then, speaking to Nick out loud for what was clearly Dumb Old Clara’s benefit, she added, “You know many Lightborn in outposts? I thought they were mostly in capitals.”
 

“I grew up in Heaven’s Veil,” Clara said, trying to gain any credibility she could muster. She felt like a yokel: a poor country cousin who knows nothing of the civilized world.
 

“Really?”
 

“Yeah. In the mansion there, too.”
 

“Your dad an ambassador or something?”
 

“No, but my grandpa was the viceroy.”
 

Nick and Ella looked at each other. Finally, Clara had drawn an ace.

“That’s
why she stuck out so much,” Nick said.
 

(She’s lying.)

[No she’s not. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?]

(She’s just saying it because he did that whole speech. It’s crap.)

[Why would anyone claim to be related to Viceroy Dempsey who wasn’t?]