The Shibboleth (37 page)

“Screw you, Shreve,” he says. “I hate it when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say the opposite of what you mean.”

“Well, yeah, okay, that sucked. Pretty hard. When you were making that turn—”

“You mean screwing the pooch.”

“No, listen. You
are
flying better than I've ever seen you. But back then, you were the only kid I'd ever seen fly, right?”

He remains silent, but I can tell he's listening to me.

“I don't know much, but I do know that you can't fly me around up there with you if you're not rock solid. True?”

He nods. Grudging.

“It's when you've got to make the harder turns that it throws you off-kilter, right? That's because when you bank, you're pushing yourself one way with pulses,” I clap my hands together,
clap clap clap clap clap.
“Like that. But the pulses need to be less strong, but faster, got me? Otherwise, you'll get off-balance.”

His eyes widen, and he nods.

“Hey, Bernard, can you pick up Jack's rhythm?”

“Who're you talking to?” He turns to Jack. “Listen to me. Eyes right here.” He jabs two fingers at Jack's eyes and then at his own. The universal gesture for “keep looking at me.”

“Sure,” Jacks says, grinning now. It seems Bernard has that effect on people.

Bernard starts making sounds with his mouth, rhythmic plosives, bass expulsions of air, hisses. It comes out fast. Beatboxing. Like a drummer doing a sixteenth beat on a hi-hat and snare.

Jack at first seems amused, but something in Bernard solidifies, some unquantifiable something, and Jack's smile disappears, his pupils dilate, and his breath quickens.

“There you go, man,” Bernard says, snapping his fingers.

“You mind if he goes again?”

“Nah, Iggy's toast for the day. But Jack's not gonna be able to keep that up forever. He'll need to find his own rhythm.”

“I got you. Thanks.”

“No problem. We're all freaks here.” He winks at me. “Some of us,
superfreaks
.” He saunters off toward the Quonset hut.

“You ready?”

Jack, bopping his head with the internal rhythm, says, “Hell yeah.”

This time, he launches, banks smoothly around the first balloon, seems like he's going to lose balance but doesn't and sticks the rest of the course like a champ. When he touches down, he's grinning. Bernard, Iggy, Danielle, and some of the others give a smattering of applause.

“I think we're done here for the day,” I say.

Jack shakes his head. “I should go a couple more times. Muscle memory.”

“Sure.” I look around to see if there's anything else I can do. In the jet's shadow, near the guards, stands a darker shadow. Negata watches me, silent and motionless.

I give the airfield another, closer examination. At least four cameras are trained on us.

Negata makes a small and curious inclination of his head, his gaze never wavering. If I didn't know better, I'd think he was saying hello.

Jack leaps into the air again, rocketing through the course, faltering only with his descent.

When he lands, I say, “Hey, nice one. But you're stumbling on the third balloon.”

“Can't you give me one second of feeling good about myself?”

“Not really. Don't be a titty-baby about it.”

“Screw you, man.” He's thrumming, bobbing his head a little. Patting his thigh. Bernard's magic holding sway.

“No, this is good. You nailed the banking, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So that let me see what else you're screwing up.”

“Ass.”

“So, when you're descending, what are you doing?”

“Falling. I'm always falling.”

“Yeah, but when you have to lose altitude, you do what?”

“Allow myself to fall.”

“Right. You're just letting gravity take over. And it's not doing it fast enough. You've still got some forward momentum.”

He nods.

“So to drop fast enough to make the lower balloon, you're going to have to give a pulse upward. Push yourself toward the ground.”

He doesn't like the sound of that. I can tell from his expression.

“I know it goes against probably every instinct of self-preservation you have, but hell, man, if you listened to your self-preservation instincts, would you be flying to begin with?”

We laugh. “Okay, I'll try it. That doesn't mean you're not a jackass.”

“That I am, broseph. That I am.”

He nails it this time. Perfectly.

I don't tell him so, though. I complain some more, just to aggravate him.

“Better, man. You have the grace of a whale caught in a fishing net.”

He punches me in the shoulder. It's quite a blow. He meant some of it.

Good. I can still get under his skin. All of Shreve hasn't been burned away in the dark.

We watch the others finish their maneuvers until the sun passes beyond the mountain rim and casts the valley into blue-gray shadow. Strange expressions pass over the features of our group, girls and boys alike, as they come out of the golden rays of sun to land, back on Earth once more, in the shadow of mountains. They look haggard, wan. Even jovial Bernard, in this half-light, looks sallow, with deep bags under his eyes. His smile has disappeared, and I have one of those moments of clarity in which everything comes into focus and everything around me seems to go still and be revealed for what it truly is—beautiful or horrific, base or sublime.

These kids are scared.

“Something wrong?” I ask Danielle.

“No,” she says, her face a mask. “It's just …”

“Night, Mr. Shreve. Hope they turn on that buzzer for a long time.”

“That buzzer?”

“Yeah. What keeps the insomnia out.”

“The Helmholz.”

“That's right. The buzzer.”

“So you can't sleep without the Helmholtz?”

“Ain't you listening, man?”

Danielle puts her hand on Bernard's arm to quiet him and says, “It's bad now, Shreve. At first, it was just on the radio. We'd hear about it in passing. We'd see it on the television in recreation. The news. But it's here now. And we can't sleep without the Helmholtz.”

I don't know of any way to say it but just to say it. “I can help you.”

“What you talking about, man? You can't help none—”

But I'm out, beyond my body in the nonspace between souls. Between stars.

I perceive each one of them, each one of them like an ember, slumbering, unrealized. Waiting to burst into flame. The match heads of their minds.

I burn through them, every one, and where I pass, their minds burn bright.

“What the fu—” Bernard looks stunned. “What did you just do, boss?”

Danielle sinks to the ground, legs crossing under her. She puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh my god.”

Casey tugs at her bottom lip with the trembling fingers of her only hand. Bernard just stares at me silently, listening to the drumbeat of his heart. The dusk settles around us like a cloud, and there are desperate and uneasy echoes of what I've done in the ether. Something has changed.

Something has changed in us all.

I turn to look at Jack, and he's standing poleaxed in the half-light of evening.

“We have to keep this secret,” Tap mutters. “Nobody can know.”

I'm scared. Have I given them this terrible gift, or are we just bound together by some invisible tether?

Someone scratches at the back door of my mind, but that's it. Nothing more.

The five of us—Jack, Tap, Danielle, Casey, and little ole me—huddle together as the other kids walk past us, down the mountainside. We stand, looking at each other, whispering inside one another's minds.

“Hey, look at that,” Casey says, pointing into the sky.

There's a diminution from the Montana sky. I feel smaller, dwarfed by the landscape and the sky and Jack so much taller than me now. Dwarfed by the weight of the lives behind me, inside me. Dwarfed by my own fear of what is coming. Dwarfed by the gift I've given us all.

Tap looks toward the sky. “You guys hear that?”

The high-pitched whine tears a strip from the sky. It's hard to pinpoint its location.

And then the plane streaks across the vault of heaven,
screaming and trailing a tail of noxious black smoke and pitching terribly. It's not the deadly wedge of a fighter jet or the tinny buzz of a single prop airplane, no. It's long, tubular. It's a passenger jet. In seconds it passes beyond the rim of mountains in the east and disappears.

I hold my breath, waiting for the
boom
of an explosion, but it doesn't come.

“Did you see that?” Jack asks.

I'm in the ether, floating on a mountaintop, looking across the vast, soundless landscapes to the east, where the plane went. There's such a stir in the etheric heights, like ash from some psychic volcano. I can hear screaming, the echoes of terror and desperation. And beyond that? Beyond the plane coming down somewhere east of us in the wavefront of oncoming night? There's a blackness churning there, churning and fretting at the boundaries of sleep. Like some quiescent dynamo only just beginning to turn. A black thing stirring. A quick glimpse of horror in a bright, sun-kissed day.

“Yeah. The plane,” I say.

“You think it crashed,” Bernard says. He
is
a little yeasty.

“I don't know.” I say. I shake my head. “Yeah, it crashed.”

“Should I go see?” Jack asks.

“Yes,” Danielle says. “Of course
we
should.”

“What if you hit a Helmholtz? You'll crash too,” Casey says, her voice hushed.

“Not if I get high enough and then head east. Even if I hit a Helmholtz, I'll have enough momentum to push through it.”

“I'll go to Admin, let them know what happened,” Tap says.

“That's a good idea,” Jack says, taking a few quick steps away and crouching.

“Aren't they tracking us all with radar or something? There's that thing on top of the hangar. And the dishes behind it?”

“Does it matter?” Danielle's face is tense. “We have to
do something.
”

“Screw it. I'm going,” Jack says. Tap launches himself into the air, flying low, toward Administration. It's an incredibly dangerous maneuver—the chances of encountering a Helmholtz far greater that way than toward the airplane.

“Jack—”

“No time. They could be hurt.” He crouches and leaps. He launches up, peeling away from the earth in an absolute defiance of the suck of gravity, a bullet shot straight into the bosom of heaven. I try to follow him in the darkening air, and he burns bright for a moment when he rises into the last light of the setting sun. But then I lose him. He's so high and small in the sky, and it's only when he makes his move to the east—above the effects of Helmholtz fields—that I am able to pick him up again.

Danielle leaps upward too, her hair whipping in a wild fin behind her. I get the quick impression of tears streaming away from her eyes as she rises, following Jack.