On the big screen, a few squares lit up, representing thousands of misdirected kilowatts flowing back into the city. It was a battle, and the little squares stayed illuminated only momentarily.
The system was adapting.
They watched the screen. Power flickered across the darkened squares. For the first time, the gauges in the plant moved, revving.
The supervisor smiled again. They were winning. Very gradually, kilowatt by kilowatt, they were winning. It was slow, but they were gaining the upper hand on whatever was stripping the power away.
P
EA FLICKERED
. Evan was sure of it. The puffy clouds behind him had skipped in their path across the sky while the ocean stood silent, a stiff shoulder against the shore. Even the gliders froze in their path across azure, halted in midair for a lingering moment before continuing in their slow spirals. It was a hiccup, a change, and Evan knew it for what it was, a break in the flow of power. The dark eyes now looked down at him from a pained expression.
“Time has almost run away from us,” Pea said. “They are faster than I thought.”
Evan lowered his attention back to the work in his lap, forcing himself faster. He braided the cable wires together with his bare hands, sanctifying the copper union with blood earned from his fingertips.
What God hath joined, let no man tear asunder
. Now, where had he heard that? It was funny how those old days still came back to him sometimes, as if from out of a mist, from a time when he was a different person completely. Church had been so important to Mother. He
wished she could see what he’d done, what he’d made of his life. She’d be proud, he thought.
Shortly after the state took Evan away from his mother, he’d begun asking to see her. He hadn’t liked the new rules, or the new tutors, or the cleaning lady that came in and picked up after him. He hadn’t liked the way he suddenly seemed to be so important to everybody. Eventually, he demanded to see her. The men with the smiles didn’t take him seriously until he refused to continue his studies. Then the smiles disappeared. He told them he wouldn’t work on their puzzles until they let him move back in with his mom. That was when the counselors sat him down on a couch and told him about the fire.
They said it started in a laundry room on the floor below their old apartment. His mother never felt a thing, they assured him. She died in her sleep of a combination of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.
They explained to him how lucky he was that the state had stepped in when it did, or he would have been in the apartment, too. He owed the state his life, they told him solemnly. And that was a debt he had a responsibility to repay. He didn’t know enough then to doubt them. He knew enough now, though.
Years later, when he’d learned to mistrust the system’s intentions, he used library files to search for a deadly building fire shortly after his twelfth birthday.
Somewhere at the back of his mind, he secretly believed that his mother was still living, and that she’d been told a similar sort of story about the accidental demise of her son. But they’d been more thorough than that. Buried in the middle of section B, between an article about childhood obesity and a fatal car crash, Evan found it. The fire had happened. Seven people were injured seriously. Two died. He saw his mother’s name.
He gave the wires in his hands a hard last twist. Finished. The marriage was imperfect, coaxial to copper spiral, but when he tugged, the bond held fast. It would conduct. It would do.
He grabbed the second odd end and began the slow braid. Pea took notice of what he was doing, looking down without approval.
“Do you know what will happen if you do this?” Pea asked.
“Yes.”
“And are you sure you still want to do it?”
“All for you, Pea. All for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
B
en pushed through the throng of sweating bodies that crowded at the terminal exit, pulling his single carry-on bag like a trailing toddler behind him. The crowd sucked at his black duffel, threatening to pull it from his grasp in the sway of their bodies. He yanked hard, pushed hard, and popped free into the flow of pedestrian traffic along the causeway. He didn’t bother to fight the flow; he trusted the river of people to take him where he needed to be.
Everywhere was shouting. If there had been more room to move, Ben was sure there would have been a stampede. But these people weren’t scared; they were angry. He could see it on their faces.
Along the high arch of the ceiling, every other panel of lights threw only shadows, lending a darkened, surreal aspect to the entire spectacle. Ben was careful to keep his feet moving squarely beneath him. He’d seen what crowds could do with tripped footing if given half a chance.
Up ahead he saw the reason for the turmoil. On the enormous sign showing times and destinations, not a single flight number sat adjacent to the words “on time.” The words “canceled” or “delayed” sat instead on the long flight board. He listened then, and from what he could decipher from the periodic informational blasts being pumped out of the speakers, there was some sort of problem with the power.
“There is no cause for alarm,” the speakers informed him. “Airport
emergency backup generators are now running. However, it has been necessary to shut down many of the runways. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Ben knew the runways they
were
able to keep lit were being used to land planes, not for letting them take off. Some of these people were going to be here for quite a while.
He pushed his way into an eddy that looked promising and finally wriggled free from the cloying river of people entirely. Down an escalator he went. Someone was speaking Chinese behind him. And in front of him, he recognized the rounded syllables of native New Englanders. Ben considered the tops of their heads from his perch exactly three steps behind.
A flood of voices bubbled up the escalator from the other direction, providing bits and pieces of conversation, a variety of facial expressions. Angry faces. Faces pulled taut by anxiety. Frustrated faces by the dozen. Then, inexplicably, a beaming, beautiful face. Up she went past him, bearing her smile with her.
What was she smiling about?
But then she was gone, and he had more serious issues to worry about.
Of the faces he saw—even the smiling face—he noticed that not one seemed to be lost in thought. Not one seemed pointed inward toward the happenings in Phoenix earlier tonight. It must have been on the news all over the country, yet Ben could see no evidence here. They were in the moment, living close to the surface of their eyes. The electrical problem loomed first and foremost on their individual horizons; its effect on their evening and their travels blotted out other calamities. An evening’s inconvenience was all it took. The world went on. Maybe the stain of tonight’s Olympic tragedy really
could
all go away someday. Maybe what he’d seen and been a part of would someday fade into the public’s unconscious. For the distance of the escalator, he enjoyed imagining his career wasn’t over.
Then he was off, and the baggage exchange was snaking by on his left, with its attendant crowd of travelers—the group of them straining their collective necks to see just past the next serpentine convolution of the conveyor belt. He passed by, thankful he was traveling light.
Glass doors with night in their panes stood off in the distance, teasingly close. He ground to a halt at the back of a line. The line snapped shut behind, consuming him. He pushed through.
The glass doors opened for him, and he moved into a night that was a night only in the sense of its diminished stuff to see by. In a way, it was as though he was still indoors.
Above him, gray concrete spread out in two directions. It was a road eight lanes across, topped over, he knew, with another road eight lanes across. It was an artery leading from and to the airport, but it was a special kind of artery, with bright yellow platelets. They eased along, slowing in the narrow capillaries, carrying a cargo of passengers instead of oxygen. And what did that make him, exactly? A malarial parasite, perhaps, hoping to hook its way into a blood cell.
He moved behind the shouting crowd, their arms raised and waving at the approaching taxis. The cabs came and went, and the crowd seemed not to notice for all the size it changed.
Using an old trick he’d learned in his time in New York, Ben moved to the left and walked briskly against the flow of road traffic. The crowd near the street thinned as he distanced himself from the airport doors, and then the wall pushed the sidewalk smaller and smaller until it was nothing at all, forcing him to walk on the white line. He stepped into the road.
A cab loomed, but Ben didn’t move. It stopped a few feet short of his knees, and he jumped around and opened the door, throwing himself and his bag inside before it could pull away.
“San Bernardino,” Ben said.
“Which side?”
“Technical district. Double the rate if you get me there in half an hour.”
The cabbie’s eyes found him in the rearview. “That’ll be tough.”
“You can do it.”
“I want triple if I get a speeding ticket, half hour or no.”
“Fair.”
The cab pulled forward past the shouting, outraged wall of faces.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
S
ilas gazed up at the slash of night and the gleaming shadow that spoke, and what there was left in him of reason and rationality passed out of existence. The face stared down. Silas felt the change in his head, this partial death, very clearly, and wasn’t too disturbed by it. Because he knew it was necessary. Because what now remained was hard, and cold, and believed in monsters.
He waited for the gladiator to speak again, to fill the gaps with its inhuman, rumbling voice. But the seconds ticked by with only space between them. The gray eyes looked down on him as if in expectation, the shiny backsides of its retinas glowing in the dim, faraway luminescence of his flashlight. It was waiting for him to react, he realized. It was waiting for acknowledgment. Silas had none to give. Next to him, Vidonia was climbing her own mountain back up to speech; her jaw hung open, throat working some soft sound.
“I think we need to hurry,” Silas said.
Vidonia only stared.
And then the creature’s voice did come again, scraping on his sanity, so alien it took his mind a moment to decipher the words: “I come for you, Shilash.”
It was a voice without inflection, without a trace of anything he could recognize as human. Silas could think only that the movies had
gotten it wrong for so long; when finally the monster came for Man, it would be behind a voice like growling dogs.
Silas moved first. He jumped against the wall and thrust his right arm as far back into the duct as it would go, groping blindly. His hand touched something, went through it. Warm, wet slime coated him past the wrist. He curled his fingers and tried to pull the gelatinous mass from its position against the wall of the duct, but his hand came free, fingers slipping easily through the egg mass and coming away with nothing. He looked down at his greasy fingertips for a moment, trying not to hear the sounds above him. Then he threw himself at the duct again, reaching, cupping the mass against the flat of his palm.
“Hurry up!” Vidonia shouted. “It’s coming!”
Above them, the gladiator was busy.
The ceiling meshwork buckled.
It was like the scene at the competition, except exactly backward, and much, much more personal. And this mesh was stronger, resembling rebar more than any sort of cable.
Silas scooped against the gelatinous mass, feeling the hard Ping-Pong-ball-size eggs. It oozed toward the edge of the duct, flattening out under its own weight into something like a lumpy puddle.
From high above came the sound of tortured metal, and the first rod snapped under the force of the gladiator. Steel jarred. A chunk of concrete broke free and crashed to the floor in an explosion of sound and dust. Vidonia coughed in the billowing cloud and moved closer to Silas, pulling the light from his grip where it pointed uselessly at the floor.
The slime puddle slid toward the lip of the duct, then over it, parting like water in Silas’s outstretched hand. It hit the floor in twin glops. There were now two gelatinous masses to contend with. Vidonia shone the light through the sticky crumple of straw, parting the loose heap with her other hand.
Silas stooped and tried to disengage the slime from the stalks of straw but soon found the task impossible. A slick coat of viscous sludge
spread everywhere, making the straw gleam in the close attention of the flashlight. Small black eggs appeared in the mess, and Silas plucked one from its sheath of slime and tried to crush it between his forefinger and thumb. It was solid as a marble. He dug a hole in the straw with the brush of his hand and set the egg firmly on the hard concrete floor. He raised his leg and stomped with all his force. Pain lanced through his ankle, but when he lifted his foot the egg was still intact, completely unaffected. Perhaps egg was not the right word for what these things were. They were more like hard, round seeds.
And what pestilence will sprout from them?
He’d need something stronger, he decided. Something with the force of a nutcracker, to do them damage. Silas glanced up and saw the gladiator caught halfway in the act of being born, wriggling through the narrow gap in the grating. Its inhuman cries added to the unreality.
Silas looked down at the glossy, unbreakable spheres, then at Vidonia. They were out of time. “Pick them up,” he said. “We have to pick them all up.”
He crouched and frantically began gathering the small black objects. When there were too many for him to hold in one hand, he cradled them in the front of his shirt.
Vidonia dropped her face nearly to the straw as she plucked the eggs, one by one, from their clutching pools of slime.
Silas heard noise and glanced over his shoulder.
“Run,” he told her.
She didn’t hesitate.