Extinction (4 page)

“I think I know what’s going on here,” the human said, his manner serious. “I’m being rude, aren’t I? Expecting to get a favor without giving anything first. That’s not the way my mamma taught me. Promise. Not that my mamma was an ordinary lady. You know what I’m talking about, don’tcha?

The Titan moved slightly, blocking the courtyard from view, angling his large body between the strange human and the courtyard where the archive was still pulsing and glowing, from which shuttles had been ferrying back and forth since the city had started its dying.

The human held up a hand, fingers splayed. There were shiny black spheres the size of smallish golf balls between his index and middle fingers, between his middle and ring fingers, and between his ring finger and pinky. One big hand with three black balls, palm forward like a greeting.
 

The man moved his fingers. The balls rolled down into his palm. It happened slowly, the movement precise and controlled. The balls didn’t touch. Then he closed his palm only slightly, and they did, each one rolling against the edge of the other. Subtle shifts in his hand muscles moved in circles. Tiny chime-like sounds filled the air.
 

“I’ll bet it’s boring, being out here all by yourself,” the stranger said. “Just standing around. Gawking at nothing. They tell you to stand guard, but really it’s mostly just you being here, doing nothing. Or is it more like you’re just part of the bigger group? Not really by yourself at all, but part of that big ol’ alien
collective
. Am I right?”
 

The Titan’s eyebrows rose, curious. He watched the balls move in the human’s hand, chasing each other in circles. The movement was hypnotic. Slow. Taking its time.

“You’d think I’d know, wouldn’t you?” the man asked. “But I don’t. Just like I don’t know you, friend. But I could, if I tried. What do you think? Here. Take this.”
 

The Titan looked down. His own hand was out, powder white. One of the black balls was resting in his palm, like a diseased eye against the pale backdrop. He didn’t remember taking the ball but had apparently done so.

The air between them seemed to blur. An observer, watching the two figures from the outside, would have seen a drooping of eyelids. A sagging of heads. And then nothing, except that each looked up when the moment was over, understanding somehow clarified.

“You can keep that. I have plenty.”
 

The Titan’s eyes moved from the black sphere in his palm to the three balls still in the stranger’s hand. The stranger hadn’t gone into his pocket again. It was as if he’d summoned the new ball from nowhere.
 

The man put one hand over the other to cover the balls. When he parted his hands there were two black balls per palm. Then he did it again, and this time there were three in each hand, circling with tiny chimes. The city soundscape seemed to have gone mute. Not far off, a red beam lanced into a building, and it detonated, throwing brick like shrapnel into the air. Debris rolled between the Titan and the man, but neither looked down to see it.
 

“Thing about being me,” the man said, “is that there’s always plenty to go around. I can be where I was or I can be where I stand. I can be what I used to be or what I am now. It’s not always easy. Not like you forgetting where that gift I gave you ended up.”
 

The man nodded toward the Titan’s palm. The ball was gone.
 

He raised his right hand. Combined it with his left. There were six balls in one hand, no balls in the other. Then five, four, and the original three. Nothing hit the ground. Nothing rolled up the man’s sleeves. The balls circled fingers and thumb as if mocking gravity. He splayed his fingers with the balls between them, rolled the balls from back to front, clenched them in his fist, and made them vanish. Then he opened the opposite hand and the balls were now there, still moving.

“Funny thing about all of this,” the man said, closing his hand and opening it again to reveal four balls instead of three, then five instead of four, “is that I think we both know there’s more happening than meets the eye. The question isn’t about yes or know. It’s not really about win or lose. It’s about
how
, ain’t it? There’s what you see and what you don’t. But it’s hard for anyone to guess what’s going to happen if they don’t see the
how
and the
why
. If they only see a slice, is what I mean.”

The man pressed his hands together. The balls vanished as if they’d never been.
 

“If you thought you knew how I did that trick, friend, you’d be wrong. Just like if you think you know all that’s in play this time you came to visit your little ant farm.” He held out his large, empty hands and smiled — a strange expression on his long and leathery face, which seemed far more suited to scowling. “Now how ’bout you let me in to have a chat with the man in charge? Or the thing in charge; sorry.”
 

The man stepped forward, toward the shuttles. The Titan moved to block his way.
 

“I just want to talk. And despite how you won’t stop yammering on, I don’t think you’re the fella to talk to.”
 

He tried to move around the Titan again. Still, the alien blocked his way. So the man said, “Think you can see all that needs seeing? Think you’ve got it all figured out?”
 

The air shimmered between them. A thought, finally lubricated and frequencies duly tuned, shot from one mind to the other, handily translated by the black orb, their minds finding resonance like clacking spheres:
 

It doesn’t matter.
 

“Of course it matters.”
 

Judgment is at hand. Selection is coming. Extermination will follow.

“Same as always?”
 

Same as always.

“What about me?”
 

You don’t matter.

“What about the
kids
, fella?”
 

Nothing changes. As with earlier epochs, they will self-select, and some will remain.

“To perpetuate the species, huh?” the human said, nodding knowingly, hands on his hips.
 

Yes.

“And no other reason. No other point in considering the kids. Even those your stubborn asses can’t see?”
 

The Titan’s head cocked.

“I’m on your side, friend. Which is to say I’m on no one’s.”
 

The man tried again to circle around but this time didn’t stop when the Titan moved in front of him. He pushed against the alien’s strong arms. Fought him. Punched at him, determined to pass.
 

A rolling, gravel-filled noise percolated from the Titan’s throat. When the man looked up, he saw a blue spark blooming inside the Titan’s mouth.
 

Instead of backing away, the man pushed harder. And as he pushed, the Titan changed. Shining black carapace covered smooth white skin. Limbs elongated and cracked, becoming multi-jointed, creaking with stretching tendons. The man stepped back, seeing the half-Reptar thing, watching it shift.

“Let me through,” the stranger said, “or this time, everyone loses.”
 

The Reptar didn’t hesitate. The psychic bond had soured; the man could feel its animal cunning replacing calm Titan logic. He felt its bloodlust and primal anger. He seemed to see himself through the Reptar’s eyes as it stretched out, jaw unhinging, and bit him in half.
 

Only the man wasn’t bitten at all. He was standing, fully intact in his blue jeans and dress shirt, rolling three black balls in his big right hand.
 

The Reptar pulled back, confused. It had tasted flesh. It was still swallowing something that wasn’t precisely there when the human signaled to a pair of Titans who’d come to investigate the Reptar’s purr, to see what was at the courtyard’s perimeter. The Reptar didn’t turn to look, but both Titans trained eyes on the human, polite expressions on their faces.
 

“You there,”
the stranger called.
“Did I ever tell you about my cousin Timmy?”
 

The Reptar coiled its panther-like rear legs and leaped, but as it launched itself at the man, there was a low yet horrible popping, and it detonated in a flesh bomb of black shell and gore.
 

The stranger looked at his shirt with distaste, reaching down to flick away wet pieces of the Reptar’s body, then strolling nonchalantly forward, toward a trio of shuttles. The door of the middle one was open. The human made for it, nodding toward the two newcomers with a tip of an invisible hat.

This time, the Titans did not interfere.
 

CHAPTER 4

Clara stirred, found herself blind, then remembered that she’d fallen asleep in the tiny, cramped closet under the subterranean set of stairs in the Mullah tunnels. That realization led to a question: Why, exactly, had she fallen asleep? Sadeem had shoved her into the secret cubby, and she’d watched what looked like millions of flying Astral spy BBs swallow them whole.

Even thinking back on what she’d seen through the slit around the concealed doorjamb made Clara’s head feel garbled. The scene had been like watching swimmers in undulating metallic waves, except they never surfaced for air. There was only the slow — and yet somehow furious — ebb and flow of massing drones, moving in tandem as if they were one thing rather than untold numbers of individuals.
 

Kind of like the Astrals themselves.
 

Or
humans
. Because that’s something that had been clear to Clara from the start, though it often felt like she was the only one who truly got it. Sadeem and the others were fascinated with how she solved puzzles years too advanced for her (or perhaps years too advanced for even the wisest adults), just like how Mom and Dad and Piper and all the others had once been fascinated by how she learned anything. They seemed enthralled that Clara had walked when she had, that she’d talked when she had, that she’d spoken in full sentences from the start and understood even what her parents tried to protect her from. But how could a girl
not
know how to do all those things? It was all so obvious. She’d known most of it from the start, before she really even had a body, before she left her mother’s womb. What was the big deal? Did “normal” kids just decide not to walk and talk and be who they obviously already were? That had never struck Clara as particularly
normal.

After swarming the room for a while, the balls must have left. She could hear no commotion outside. But
that
, Clara had no memory of. Because she seemed to have fallen asleep, watching the lazy rhythms, feeling the sights and sounds of shifting silver waves working on her mind like a lullaby.
 

She put her eye to the crack, peeked out, and saw nothing but an empty room beyond.
 

“Sadeem!”
She said it in a harsh whisper.
 

There was no response.
 

Clara twisted her face all she could, shifting from one eye to the other, laying her nose to the side and pressing her cheek to the door, hoping to see more than her limited panorama. But she could only make out that tiny sliver of the room.
 

“Sadeem! Quaid! Anyone!”
 

Nothing.
 

Clara touched the knob. Turned it slowly so as not to make sound. Opened the door a hair and peeked out the new crack, still seeing and hearing nothing. She opened it farther, millimeter by millimeter, until there was enough of a gap that there was no longer any point in stealth. She opened it the rest of the way and looked out into the Mullah’s underground chamber, tunnels branching left and right.
 

The strung lights were still lit, black cords tacked to the walls and ceilings in long ribbons.
 

The rooms were utterly silent. Even when Clara had first followed the dog that wasn’t a dog to this place, they hadn’t been so still. But now, she’d be able to hear a pin drop from the complex’s other end. The echo, in all this stillness, would have seemed titanic.
 

But: nothing.
 

“Sadeem!”

Nothing.
 

Clara closed the cubby behind her, aware that if something was quietly amiss, she might still need a place to hide, and crossed into the far tunnel, then the next chamber, and beyond. There was no one around.
 

She stifled her fear. Sometimes — most times, really — Clara could sense the emotions of others around her, even if they weren’t there. That’s why she didn’t worry about the Mullah’s intentions once she’d met them, and why she didn’t fret much about her mom or the others. Clara understood that the Mullah would finish with what they needed and then send her home. Mom would get past her worry. But right now she sensed an emotional void. The ever-present knowledge— served up, it seemed, by some sort of invisible censor for Clara to sample — had gone missing. She couldn’t stretch her mind to try look. It simply wasn’t there.