Extinction (41 page)

Liza picked up the small bag she kept tucked under her chair, its long strap always securely around her arm. She removed the silver ball, looked at her reflection in its mirrored surface, then set it aside.
 

The small metal canister was still in the bag’s bottom. She sighed, looking at it. So much for Canned Heat. So much for cracking open the rebel viceroy’s secret little club, letting the Astrals listen in on their whispers, paving the path for her competition’s elimination and ensuring Liza’s place at the head of the post-apocalypse pack.

If the viceroys couldn’t meet, that chance to find Astral grace was out the window.
 

She set the canister aside and again held the ball.

If she did what it told her, there were many more chances to come.
 

Liza closed her eyes. Tried to imagine the dream the others were having, wondering if she could force herself to join. But instead of seeing people in a desert like Mick described, she saw a stark white room. She saw a woman with a backbone as rigid as a steel rod. She remembered distant, unarticulated pain. She remembered a far-off, vaguely troubling sense of isolation.
 

Liza’s eyes opened. She went to the vessel’s navigation system, glancing over her shoulder for watchers as she went, then made a tiny adjustment.
 

She didn’t know where the ship was going any more than the others did.

Liza gripped the ball, feeling its intelligence, knowing only that no matter what, they had to get there.

CHAPTER 49

There was no way to track time in the mammoth ship’s all-white room, so Sadeem metered moments by the cycles that seemed part of his routine, then used a sharp edge on his zipper to score a line into a discrete spot on his arm. By this count, twenty-five days had passed since the flood.
 

There was a meal of human breakfast food, a meal of human lunch food, and a meal of human dinner-type food. Eternity came in to speak with him several times each day, at roughly the same intervals. Sometime after the dinner meal, there was a long period during which Sadeem assumed he was supposed to sleep, and did, on a large pillow left on the floor like a dog’s bed. Days passed, and he he grew increasingly used to it all.
 

Each day, Eternity would show him sights of the world below. It was never clear if the ship had hovered above the spots she showed or if they’d been broadcast, but a total lack of motion meant it could be either.
 

Sadeem saw fires, floods, and manual destruction, when the Astrals discovered a pocket of humans in one place and had a mothership handy.
 

Big waves, stirred from an otherwise calm ocean, sent to drown settlements.

Where there were still volcanoes above water, he saw eruptions. Dust clouds. Burnings.
 

There were many storms of all types. Eternity showed Sadeem visions of people swallowed by tornadoes, flattened by debris in hurricanes, drowned in flash floods in the few areas of remaining high land, even people struck by curiously abundant lightning. In areas frozen by the Astrals, blizzards froze people to death. Subzero winds suffocated the marooned, usually in warm-weather clothes.
 

Ice ages were localized, as if created by an enormous focused freeze ray.
 

Pestilence. Disease. There were illnesses on Eternity’s Death Of Humanity program that Sadeem had never seen. Which diseases made people bleed from the eyes? Made them
shit
blood as if from a faucet? It was a macabre playground where masochistic alien scientists could invent beautiful horrors that, in the pre-apocalypse world, wouldn’t even have made logical sense.
 

And each day, Eternity gave Sadeem a number.
 

Fifty million.
 

Forty-two million.
 

Thirty-seven million.
 

Each day, the number fell. Some days by a lot. On the third week Sadeem realized she’d never told him what the number was. But from context, its meaning was clear. The number never rose. That would be for after the Astrals finished their pruning and finally left the planet alone, when the time came for humans to become fruitful and multiply.

Each day, Eternity asked Sadeem about the man in boots, the man who called himself Stranger. It had become perfunctory. Sadeem had told her dozens of times that he knew nothing of the man, and it’s not like he ever left to discover more. But whoever the man was, he seemed to have stayed hidden from the Astrals, his dangerous secrets still unrevealed.
 

So afterward, Eternity would turn to ask Sadeem about the Lightborn children.
 

What are their abilities?

What caused them to form?

Why do you present them with puzzles?
 

How are their brains different from yours?

Sadeem answered for as long as he could then finally turned it back on Eternity.
 

You want to know so damn bad, why don’t you go down and grab one?

Then Eternity would ask more about puzzles. Make plans for the new Temple’s location. And she’d teach Sadeem more, and more, and more of what he’d need to know if he was to be the first new Mullah Elder.
 

His mind turned inward. Comparing new information with old. Sprinkling in what he’d learned from Clara Gupta.
 

Eternity was supposed to know everything. And yet for some reason, judging by her actions, he was the sage.
 

A scant few days following the big storms, Mara Jabari forgot they’d ever happened. Clara considered telling her, along with anyone who’d listen. It seemed wrong that all of those people — maybe a half million, she sometimes thought — should be blinked out of existence without anyone knowing. But it was like fighting the tide. No matter what she told Mara, the woman always lost it.
 

Ella understood.
 

Nick understood.
 

Logan and the rest of the Lightborn understood.
 

And what’s more, while the rest of the Ember Flats Ark was losing its sense of place and history, the Lightborn’s connection to other Lightborn on other ships was increasing. Clara found she could dip into the collective and speak with a boy from Hanging Pillars as easily as she could speak to Logan beside her. Maybe it was the lack of interference, as the rest of the world’s minds went dim. As the rest of humanity became the blank slates preferred by the Astrals.
 

Sometimes, Clara envied them. The collective remembered every bit of their shared past. Clara knew how to play video games she’d never experienced, enjoyed by teenagers before the fall. Clara knew the best place to buy a taco in New York, though she’d only been there as an embryo. She had lived the invasion and occupation from every possible angle. She’d seen them come to Iraq. The Northern Territory. She’d seen them above London and Budapest and Warsaw and Chang Mai. She’d seen Moscow destroyed from the inside, through the memories of a child who’d been there. She’d seen Black Monday’s decimation hundreds of times, when the Astrals had made their first round of human cuts, knocking the planet’s population from nearly eight billion to three. And of course she still saw Heaven’s Veil in her dreams.
 

Her father’s death.
 

Her grandmother’s death.
 

The deaths of hundreds of other kids’ fathers, other kids’ grandmothers.
 

What would it be like to forget like the others? To arrive one day on dry land, and start over without history’s agony? Without all the baggage?
 

At night, Clara let her mind drift into the collective. Into the place that seemed unable to forget. And in that space, she watched connections form — fresh meat forming beneath a diseased skin. Too late, something was happening. They were waking the other young minds, but in time it only happened below the level of consciousness. The girl she’d talked to her first day on the vessel, Zoe, could barely remember Clara’s name. But she was there in the collective, like one more node in an outward-spreading network.
 

Nodes here and there. All over the globe. The brightest were Lightborn, and the second-brightest were the non-Lightborn children they touched. But there were dimmer nodes too — more precisely wired and not as flexible or bright. To Clara, they felt like adults. With her eyes closed, the network was a thing of beauty. Ideal pieces in perfect slots in the big puzzle, each placed as if by design. The growing hive couldn’t have existed before humanity’s garbled noise had been pruned. There’d been too much distraction. Too many flimsy connections. Only now could she connect to an Indian man she felt staring out at the ocean. Only now could she hear the thoughts of an Asian fisherman, whose mind was a curious puzzle box that acted like a key the man had never known was there.
 

Usually it was too much to think about. The network — forged from genocide, invisible except to the Lightborn as the race memory of humanity melted to mush — was pointless. It helped nobody.
 

Days ticked off.
 

Clara found a node in the network that felt familiar as if from long ago. Just an ordinary mind, nothing special.

With her eyes closed, she nuzzled her mind close to the unremarkable node, wishing it could sing her to sleep like it used to.
 

On the thirty-fourth day at sea by Peers’s count, Lila spotted land and shouted down to Piper, telling her to steer toward it. But Piper didn’t hear because she was huddled over the controls, in her own little world as usual.
 

Peers caught Piper’s attention. She glared at him. Then he took the controls and tried to steer toward the land, but the ship’s rudder wouldn’t turn. Or it would, but the boat wouldn’t follow. The sub moved in the same direction it had been, and in that moment something in Peers finally broke, and he pounded on the instruments while Lila shouted from above. When she finally came down, Lila shouted at him for his obstinance. And shouted. And shouted. But this time Peers shouted back, and the fight became about something else entirely, and Lila threw a stainless steel cup at him, bouncing off his elbow. By the time the fight was behind them, so was the land.
 

Another day.
 

Another day.
 

Peers pulled out a roll of nautical maps stowed in the sub’s nose, mostly useless without land above water to use for comparison. Peers had tried to guess their position at night and came away frustrated, unable to tell anything more than that familiar constellations meant they were still in the northern hemisphere. The total lack of information was unsettling. Weather had changed, and there were no landmarks. Hot days followed frigid ones. They gutted the few fish they managed to catch and often ate them raw. They constructed rain traps on the sub’s top and caught rainwater to drink. But there was no end in sight. No place to go. Only Piper seemed to have any thoughts on their direction, but she never shared her reasoning, or used GPS to navigate. He had no idea
what
Piper was using — only that the instruments bowed to her fingers alone.
 

The little boat powered on, somehow avoiding swells and storms and ice, the engines forever spinning on tanks that never needed fuel.

Carl woke with a start when the world jarred on the thirty-eighth day, tossing its contents hither and yon. It took him a while to realize that the disturbance had been caused by the freighter grinding to a halt. He ran to the deck, looked around, and saw nothing.
 

He didn’t know how to fire the engines, because they’d come alight without human intervention. He didn’t know how to figure out where they’d become inexplicably marooned because he knew only that they’d started south and steamed north. But in the intervening five weeks, they’d taken one detour after another, filling the big ship to what had to be quarter capacity or more, moving east and west, then south again, obeying the weather and the silver ball’s whims. But now Carl was worse than lost, and there was no way to fix it.
 

Still he lowered one of the small boats stowed on deck from their massive boom arms, the motor operating as inexplicably well as the rest of the ship’s systems. While in the water, he steered the boat around and away, searching for the problem. And after much peering and staring down, he found it. Or rather, Lawrence did. The ship had run aground. On what, nobody knew.
 

They slept. And in the morning, the underwater obstruction was just visible from the freighter’s deck where it hadn’t been before.

Carl went to sleep that night wondering if what he suspected might be true.

And the next morning, the fortieth day, he felt the ship tilt as its weight betrayed it, coming to rest at a few degrees of lee.
 

Below the bow was a low rise covered in long and bedraggled green grass, now visible above the water.