The Shibboleth (43 page)

I am stung, mortally. Blood spills out over my perfect killing fangs. I lurch away from the bloody screaming
thing
in the scrub and try to push myself up, but an absolute weakness falls upon me, and I feel tired, sleepy. Vast expanses of pain explode inside me.

I can stay here no more.

With the blood and the screams, I exit.

Rising again.

Into the ether.

Rooftops aren't the best place for a nap. Somewhere, while I've been out in Big Cat World, my body has slumped down the side of the roof and lodged—
thank God!
—on the edge of a dormer. Jack's got both his hands gripped tight to my belt buckle. If it wasn't for Jack, the original packaging Shreve came in would be one big bloody egg frittata fifty feet below.

“What happened?”

The desolation of failure sweeps over me. My tears streak in the mountain air.

“I couldn't stop them. I hijacked a mountain lion …”

“You what?”

“I took over a puma, right? I needed to move fast. But I wasn't fast enough.”

“You can do that?”

“Shut up. I followed them to the bunker. Bunker F.”

“Inside the lion?”

“Yeah. Quincrux and Ruark were talking.” My stomach twists, thinking about the reality of washing out. “There's no going home once you're here, Jack.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you don't make it, they harvest your genome.”

“What?” Outrage pours from him. His own personal Helmholtz. “What does that mean?”

“Quincrux said something about weaponizing our talents.”

“You mean, like making a gun that … reads people's minds?”

“No.” I have to think for a bit, replaying the conversation in my mind. “Quincrux said they couldn't weaponize my talent.” Something clicks. A memory. “He said there was a woman twenty years ago who could create a stasis field. And I've heard them mention a few times a stasis bomb. So I think it's only some talents. Only some powers.”

“Like Hollis's.”

I think about his ability. To speed up the perception of time.

“Yeah. I think that's exactly what they want.”

“He was never going to make it here, was he? They were always going to make him wash out.”

“I don't know.”

“So what now?”

Depression washes over me. The Helmholtz still buzzes. And I'm weak now. “He's gone.”

“No. We can do something.”

“I'm weak, man. They killed the cat I was in. I lost something when it died.”

I feel too worn out to make another trip into the ether. For a while I sob, and it's hard to tell if my tears are for myself, at what I've lost, or if they're for Hollis.
I am you and you are me.
I told him it would be all right. That we would save him. And now he's gone.

Part of my strength is gone maybe. Forever, no, I don't think so. But I'll need time before I can hazard leaving my body again. This is what happened to Quincrux when he first encountered the dragon, I think. He was weakened.

I lever myself up, phantom afterimages of the muzzle fire from Quincrux's gun flashing in my mind's eye. The shots that killed me, taking parts of me with the cat.

“Mom. Vig. Rollie. And now Hollis. The list of people I've failed grows longer every day.”

“Stop it!” Jack says. “We're in a goddamned war! People die.”

“And we can't stop it.”

Jack's face grows grim. His face becomes stern beneath the wild tangle of windblown hair. “They've lost any right to control us.”

“They never had any.”

The sky is wreathed now in clouds, the stars hidden, and the moon is just a lighter spot in the white blanket above. My fingers and toes are little blocks of ice. Jack guides me down, keeping his hand locked on my belt. It's a much darker journey back down to the patio where our folding chairs sit, and there's a moment, when my foot slips and I look down—see the edge and end of the roof—that my head swims with vertigo.

When I'm steady once more, I say, “It's more complicated than that, Jack. They're working to stop the thing in Maryland. They've sent the Orange Team to stop it.”

He purses his lips, thinking. He runs his hand through wild hair.

“They said that?”

“Yes. Remember? They sent them on a mission.”

“Yeah.”

“They sent them to stop the entity. To stop the insomnia.”

Jack begins cursing.

“They'll get what they deserve,” I send. “But right now …”

“We have to wait.”

We slip back through the window, into the warmth of the dorm.

“What happened?” Tap asks.

Jack just shakes his head. I'm too hollow to answer.

“You mean—”

“No one here gets out alive,” Jack says. “You're in the army for the duration.”

“Oh no. Oh shit no. Oh—”

“Shut up,” Jack says. “This isn't going to stand.” Such confidence from him. I can almost believe it.

The door swings open quickly, and Negata stands in the doorway, framed in light.

Maybe right now they're killing Hollis. Extracting his talent.

I move to stand directly in front of Negata, tears streaming down my cheeks. “You know what they do here, don't you?” I say. “I don't know what's going on in that head of yours, but at some point, they're gonna do something you don't like, maybe. Something in whatever shriveled part of you that cares about what's right and wrong. And when you refuse to do it? They'll harvest
you
. Whatever talent you have, invisibility, soullessness. Whatever. They'll take it for harvest. To
weaponize it
. Do you understand, Mr. Negata?”

I could give a damn if he's a ninja. He can Tase me if he wants.

My throat hurts from crying, stifling the sobs. My head pounds. I hear Jack and Tap breathing behind me. The wind outside whips over the dormers and ratchets into a howl.

Negata stands there for a long while, silhouetted by the lights beyond him in the hall. His hand rests lightly on
the doorknob, and he looks like some father putting a child to bed.

“I do understand, Shreve,” Negata says, very clearly, in a voice thick with an indefinable accent. “Go to bed. Things will look better in the morning.”

Cold rain runs in desultory rivulets down the window. A dark, mottled fog lies heavy on the valley, multiform and ever-shifting. Jack's awake now, sitting on his bed and staring into space, his long arms hanging loose between his legs. I dress. Tap's nowhere to be seen. Hollis is gone. Forever. Once again, it's just me and Jack.

As we make our way down the dorm stairs, I'm thinking about everything that has happened. I don't have a poncho, but Roberto lends me his umbrella on the way out. Jack's sunk deep into a hoodie, hands in his pockets. His face looks like grim murder.

Out and into the rain. It makes frying chicken sounds on the nylon fabric of my umbrella. The extranaturals—huddled under umbrellas and hunched in raincoats and ponchos—stand like muddy wraiths on the assembly field.

Ruark waits for us. She's supported by crutches, and her leg is wrapped in gauze. The pain is clearly etched across her features.

Glancing at Jack, I see a cruel smile growing on his face.

My old pal Davies stands with three more soldiers behind Ruark. Tanzer holds a clipboard, looking extra alert this morning.

No golf carts today, but there's a covered Jeep and three troop transports belching diesel fumes into the mountain air.

For an instant, I'm tempted to possess Davies, raise his rifle and mow down Ruark, Tanzer, and the other soldiers in a hail of furious gunfire. The only thing that stops me is the sight of Negata, staring at me with such intensity I feel frozen in place.

Negata spoke!

Ruark addresses us. “Today, the director wishes to share something with you. One and all.” She hobbles forward. A ponchoed guard accompanies her, holding an umbrella over her head, “Red Team, transport one. Green Team, transport two. The rest of you, transport three.”

Danielle, Bernard, and Casey stand huddled together, hunched in their rain jackets, hoodies drawn. They move to join us.

Casey looks at me closely. I feel her hand take mine, but when I look down, nothing is there. It's our secret, this invisible touch. There's mist caught in her eyelashes.

Bernard and Danielle are listening, I know. I gave them this gift. I know when they're dropping some eaves.

She's scared now, and I don't blame her.

The Red Team clambers into the first transport. Ember keeps glancing at Jack, but he's not paying attention to her now. He's focused on us. On Ruark. On justice. Funny, but that's my middle name. But Jack's owning it right now.

Quickly, I tell them what happened last night, what happened to Hollis.

Casey's mental voice is calm, but I can detect a fury underneath. The outrage is infectious. She squeezes my hand,
hard
. Her invisible arm, it could be deadly, I realize now.

Before anyone can respond, Davies raises his rifle and belts out, “You. Stragglers! Get your asses in that transport!” The gun's not pointed directly at me. He's got his finger outside of the trigger guard. But the look on his face makes me think he's just desperate for a reason to shoot.

We climb in the back of the transport. Two rows of extranaturals sitting knee to knee. Davies hauls himself in after us, white-knuckling his rifle, while one of his compadres ties down the canvas opening to the rear of the vehicle. Some shouts and thumps sound from without, and then the rumbling diesel engine clatters and clanks into gear. We all shift and shudder with the movement.

Traveling blind.

When the transport rumbles to a stop, the familiar sound of a blast door opening filters through the canvas covering. A pause and then another short lurch.

Down the length of the car, Bernard nods and glances at me.

The back flap opens to fluorescent brightness and the stink of exhaust and oil. Davies jumps out, whirls, gestures with the rifle barrel for us to get out as well. In Casey's, Tap's, Danielle's faces, I see the uncertainty and fear mount. Jack just looks furious. He'll go explodey soon, I think.

The soldier bulls fan out to the corners of the room. Ruark is nowhere to be seen, but Negata stands by the large, industrial elevator with Tanzer, who works the bio-scanner and keys in the code. We descend into the belly of the mountain in groups.

In the tight press of bodies, moving in, one of the bulls seems familiar to me, the slope of his shoulders, the shape of his head, but I only catch a glimpse before I'm beyond the motor pool and inside the elevator—featureless except for two posters: ALL POST-HUMANS WORK TOGETHER and a new one featuring a picture of a flyer, one arm out, rocketing through the air. SOAR, it says, and nothing else.

We move as segregated groups down a long, featureless hallway into the gymnasium-like room where, during the testing, Hollis, Galine, and I had to remove the key card from
under the bell. The bell, I notice, is hanging high above on the metal ring that Hollis wanted us to use.

Smart kid. Was a smart kid.

Whatever they did to him, I hope it was painless.

On the room's far wall, underneath the high, mirrored windows that look down on the space—those same windows that looked down on Hollis and me during the testing, those same windows that I flew behind to possess Bill Holden and hijack his power—stands a sprawl of massive flat-panel monitors set in an semicircular array. Four technicians clack and peck at keyboards beneath the video-encrusted wall, nerd-chickens pecking at the ground in a high-tech barnyard. The screens remain dark, but in their centers spin luminescent wheels turning over the words
Acquiring Signal
.