False Future (2 page)

T
he flames disperse into smoke and wreckage that tumbles down from the sky. I hear glass breaking, metal popping, people screaming.

True Earth is here. That’s why I’m back. I died to stop their war against us, but clearly it wasn’t enough. And my team needs me.

I run to the bench and grab the towel and drag it over my skin. The fluid soaks up easily, leaving my skin feeling fresh and clean and new, which it is. I wrap the towel around my hair to dry it, then unfold my suit of armor with a snap. Putting it on is familiar and calming. I’m not freaking out. I’m not crying. I just know I’m back for a reason, and here are my only possessions in the world.

The armor slides over my damp skin. I push my hands into the attached gloves, wiggle my feet into the socklike bottoms, then shrug into the shoulders. With a little coaxing, the seam in the back seals up to the top of my neck. I feel the suit shifting and contracting, hugging me in places, tightening just a bit around my joints for extra support. When it’s over I’m wearing a second skin of black scales.

I grab Beacon off the table. The grip feels different where it melted a little. I swing a practice cut. The balance feels the same, which is all that matters as long as the blade still has its integrity. How embarrassing would it be to get in a sword fight and have my blade snap off? The thought makes me laugh, until I clap my hand over my mouth and tears leak from my eyes.

Don’t lose it. You just got back.

And you’re needed.

I put Beacon against my spine, and it sticks to the magnetic scales of my armor, the hilt poking above my right shoulder. I open the bedroom door—the frame of which is cracked, most likely from when they brought my tank in—and step into the main room of a musty-smelling apartment. There are two bottles of water on a table in the kitchenette, with a note in Peter’s handwriting.
Drink these.
I slam them both. Also on the table is a pair of jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. A note says—
Wear this, it’s cold and your armor is conspicuous. I love you.
Reading his words has me crying again, but the good kind. Peter loves me. How about that?

I pull the clothes on over my armor. And how thoughtful is this—the sweatshirt even has a hole in the back for Beacon.

A rumble outside rattles the glassware in the cupboards. There are two more things on the table—a syringe filled with a lemonade-colored liquid and yet another note. The note says—
Take this, so you don’t forget me.
The shot will keep my memories intact for a while. I ease the needle into my neck, and the blooming heat is familiar, comforting even. Now I’m ready.

I open the apartment door half expecting to see Peter waiting for me. The hallway is jammed with six terrified-looking people talking over one another about the cause of the noise. Two old ladies in nightgowns are holding hands. Everyone freezes when they see me step into the hallway. Maybe it’s that they don’t recognize me as one of their neighbors. Or maybe it’s that I have a sword hilt poking above my shoulder.

“Stay inside,” I tell them. “Fill up as many containers as you can with water.”

They stay frozen, even though I just gave them really good advice. Another explosion shakes dust from the ceiling.

“Move!” I charge down the hallway to the stairwell, burst through the door, and jump from landing to landing. I’m through the front door five seconds later.

Bitter-cold air hits me in the face, bringing with it the smell of smoke. Snowflakes melt on my cheeks. The explosions are ten times as loud now, rattling my eardrums, and I can see columns of smoke rising all around the city. People are running in all directions, and strange jets zoom between the buildings above us, heating the air as they pass. I don’t understand; it wasn’t supposed to be like this. True Earth wanted to preserve our world for resettlement, but now they’re here with bombs. It’s like they’ve decided that blowing us all to hell is the easy way. A missile hits a building to my left, blowing a cloud of glass onto the people in the street.

The eyeless are something I can fight. But how do we stop this?

I jog down the sidewalk with no real plan—I don’t know how to find my team unless they find me first. There are people everywhere, slipping and sliding in the snow. Clearly they don’t have a plan; they’re just running. Running home maybe, though they must know they won’t be safe there, either. The chaos is everywhere. The street is clogged with wrecked cars all jammed together. People are standing on their hoods, looking up at the smoky sky with wide eyes. The scene reminds me of last summer, when a handful of Roses brought Cleveland to its knees. I just stand there for a moment, stunned. I died for nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe I even drove them to this by destroying the eyeless.

A honking horn pulls my attention to the right. Coming toward me on the sidewalk is a blacked-out Taurus with a light bar on top and antennae sticking up from the trunk—a government car. It slows to a stop on the sidewalk and people rush past it on both sides. A man’s hip knocks off the passenger mirror.

Rhys is behind the wheel. His blond hair is hidden inside a hooded sweatshirt, but his face is clear. We stare at each other for a beat. I’m so happy to see him, but terrified at the same time. Peter said he was coming to get me, so why is Rhys here? Rhys gets out of the car and we rush each other. He hugs me and lifts me up and spins us around. When he puts me down there are tears in his eyes.

“You’re back,” he says.

“Just in time for the party.” I mean to say it lightly, but it comes out dark. “Peter?”

Rhys gives a short laugh. “What, I’m not good enough?” He smiles. “Pete’s busy. You’ll see him soon.” He shakes his head and the smile falls. “I’m so sorry.”

“Save it for later. We have work to do.” I head for the driver’s door—I want to drive, not sit—but someone slips behind the wheel first. Some random guy in a red flannel jacket and chunky black glasses. He looks up at me and tries to pull the door shut, but I hold it fast. It doesn’t even budge. He yanks on it twice more, saying, “Let go! Jesus, girl,
let go
.”

“You really picked the wrong car.”

He holds eye contact with me for about one second, then decides I’m right.

I can tell Rhys thought a lot about what to say next. He starts with, “So…” followed by, “how are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about you coming back.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. And I don’t want you to feel like you’re not real again. Like you’re less of a person.”

I don’t feel like less of a person, exactly. I don’t know what I feel. I do know that you can’t be dead for weeks, or months, and then come back in a new body and be the same. You just can’t.

“Okay.”

“I mean, all people are basically clones of themselves. As we grow, our cells are constantly replaced by new cells. Eventually there isn’t an atom inside of us that was there at the start. But we’re still ourselves. You know? I think that’s really cool.”

The snowy road blurs until I blink away the tears. I put my hand on Rhys’s knee. “Thank you,” I say. It’s a nice idea, and I appreciate him saying it, but it’s not quite the same. I died. And now I’m back. Inside, I can still see the eyeless. How they encircled me, came at me with their claws and teeth. How it feels like just minutes ago they tore holes in my flesh. I thought I was doing some great thing by sacrificing myself, but it doesn’t feel that way now. It feels pointless.

The plan was to stop an invasion of our planet. A parallel universe had released monsters that were meant to systematically kill us one by one, leaving our world intact. I led the monsters into a different world, gathered them up, and exploded them. And myself. Yet the other universe is back. I didn’t stop them at all.

Rhys smiles. “No problem.”

A loud roar from the front—I look forward in time to see a tank coming right for us. I assess the threat—it’s an M1 Abrams. Our guys.

“Please maneuver,” Rhys says calmly, and I swing the car up onto the sidewalk, knocking over a mailbox that trips two running people. That’s when I see it’s not just one tank but a whole line of them. Five in all, roaring right up Broadway. They crunch past any cars in the way, pushing them aside like they’re nothing, even running over a few, smashing them down into the snow. Glass explodes from the windows—
pop pop pop!

“Keep going!” Rhys says.

“That isn’t going to be enough, Rhys,” I say, panic creeping into my voice. “A few tanks? Against True Earth?”

“There’s more—tanks and troops all over the city. But even so…I don’t know if it’s enough. They opened a hole in Central Park, and it’s big.”

“Is the military organizing?”

I swing back onto the road, my right wheels down in a rut created by the tank treads.

“I don’t know,” Rhys says. “Noble tried to make contact, but the phone is dead. I’m sure they’re not sitting on their asses at this point. We’ll try to rendezvous with the military after meeting up with Noble and Sophia.”

“How are they? Noble, Sophia?”

“Great. Noble has been swamped with preparations, and I think he’d be dead without Sophia.”

As we zip down Broadway I see people coming out of stores, their arms full of stuff. Looters. As I watch, two men carry a sofa through the front door of a furniture store. The attack has just started, and people have already succumbed to their baser desires. For the briefest second, I see True Earth’s point of view. We really can be animals.

A spinning chunk of building falls from the sky and crashes in the intersection just ahead of us. “Whoa!” Rhys screams as it bounces once and begins to roll toward us. I grab the door handle and prepare to dive out, but Rhys reaches across and jerks the wheel sideways, saying, “Hold on!” We keep sliding toward the tumbling chunk, but the front tires catch in time, and the debris smashes into the rear fender. The impact spins us sideways into a light pole. My head smacks against the side window hard enough to make me see stars. “Sorry, sorry,” Rhys says. “I didn’t want you to jump out and get crushed.”

I hit the gas, but there’s a terrible grinding sound from the front, and we don’t go anywhere.

Just ahead there’s a subway stop with the numbers 1 2 3 centered in red circles.

“The subway,” I say, pointing.

Rhys is already getting out of the car. We jog over to the stairs. “Good idea. There’s a stop right outside our building. Even if the trains aren’t running we can move through the tunnels and avoid the mob.”

Right before we reach the station a car zooms through the intersection, heading west from Central Park. It’s unlike any car I’ve ever seen. An armored Corvette is the closest description, with huge knobby tires in the front and back. It emits a high-pitched whine.

“What the hell is that?” Rhys says as we watch it go. It slams nose-first into a taxi but doesn’t slow down; the ramp-like front end just flips the taxi out of the way. It swings around a corner and is gone.

“C’mon,” I say, jogging down the steps into the subway.

We hop the turnstile and jog onto the platform, which somehow feels colder than outside. It’s crowded with people. Five cops try to maintain order, telling people to stay calm, to stay put, that a train will be along shortly. The little booth that sells candy and pop is shuttered, but that doesn’t keep two men from working on the lock with a couple screwdrivers. The cops don’t seem to notice or care.

“Should we just jog the tunnel?” I ask. Better to move independently than get stuck in a metal tube with terrified citizens.

“Let’s wait a minute,” Rhys says, eyeing the cops and the anxious crowd. “They might need our help.”

Just then I feel a push of air coming down the tunnel and hear a high whistle that grows louder by the second. A train is coming. People immediately crowd on the yellow line, jostling to be first. A young girl almost falls onto the tracks, but her father snatches her puffy jacket in time.

One of the cops steps forward, waving his baton and flashlight. “Everybody get back! Stand
BACK
!”

The train is still thirty seconds away, so I ask Rhys, “What’d I miss while I was out?”

“A lot. Noble talked to the president after you…did your thing.”

“Blew myself up.”

He touches my arm, then lets his hand fall away, averting his eyes. I guess talking about my death so bluntly makes him uncomfortable. “Yes. The government put us up in New York, since Noble said they’d strike here first. Looks like the old man was right.”

The train is still coming. I can see the headlights now, far back in the tunnel.

“Noble found your memory disk thing in the wreckage of the Verge, but Peter argued against bringing you back. He said it wasn’t right, since we could never know what
you
wanted. But they came to an agreement—you would only be brought back if True Earth returned.”

“Because you’d need all the help you can get.”