Joan looks into the face of her brother, the man whose life she’s restored. For however long that will last. His skin still glows faintly blue; slowly it takes on the color of flesh, human, alive.
He opens his eyes. Like hers.
He looks up at her and half smiles.
Perhaps he thinks he’s dreaming. Like Plato’s cave.
“Peter,” she says. His face is so familiar she almost doesn’t recognize him.
“Remember . . .” Peter says, then coughs violently. His whole body spasms and shakes. His voice sounds like old dead leaves blowing across dirt. “Remember when the sun was what we thought it was?”
Joan smiles and nods. As children, they believed what everyone had: the sun emitted energy from the inside out, that it was a limiting, self-energizing ball of gases that could burn itself up. But everyone was wrong. That’s how history works. New truths atomize old ones, endlessly. The world used to be flat, remember?
Her brother sighs the sigh of wavering life. “I don’t know why I said that just now. I don’t know why I thought it.”
“When you were very young,” Joan says quietly, “you used to think the sun was a benevolent being. You thought it was an alien watching over us and keeping us warm. Like the man in the moon, only better.” She smiles. “You also thought the sun would kill God someday. It was quite a theory. For a kid.”
Peter inhales a long, slow breath, then exhales what seems like years. “We were some weird kids,” he says.
Leone laughs under her breath.
Joan strokes his temple in response. Some of the tiny black worms she put on his forehead earlier remain. They give him a dark angel look.
“How long do I have?”
Joan closes her eyes and sucks in the air between them, holds it, and lets it loose, quiet as whisper. Wishing it could breathe years back into him. Or their whole childhood.
“Hard to say. A day? Maybe more.”
“Is there . . . pain?”
Joan considers the question. She can’t know. It has never happened to her. From what she has witnessed, people simply dropped dead, as if their power was suddenly cut. It looked . . . peaceful. Like fainting or falling asleep. Bodies going limp to dirt.
She could not perform the power on herself. The only death she’d experienced had been when they tried to burn her alive, and that was profoundly different, she surmised. The thought of it skull-shoots her memory, hard enough to make her eye twitch.
“Shhh. Save your breath,” Joan says.
He looks at her more intensely than a child. “Why?” he asks. “For what?”
Joan lowers her gaze.
He rasps another cough out. For a moment she thinks he will choke and die again right then. For a moment she almost wishes it. She does not want the responsibility of his life, or his death, or any of it.
Then Leone puts a cup of liquid to his lips. “Drink this,” she commands. “It’s got an organic stimulant and a painkiller in it. You’ll be alert and high at the same time. A liminal state that would make anyone jealous.” Leone smiles.
Joan winces.
Peter drinks. And drinks. Within twenty minutes he has regained his composure, which is unsettling for them all.
“When you died,” he says, “or when we believed you had, I felt sure you hadn’t died at all. I don’t know. I just didn’t . . . feel it. They took everything from us, you know. Everything. I’m not talking about how they slaughtered or enslaved us. I’m not talking about the rape of the earth and all that, or even about their refusal to give basic humanitarian aid—medicine, water, food. I’m talking about you. You were the only thing we had left to follow, to believe in. It was like they’d killed God. Isn’t that funny?”
Joan rests her head on her knees and holds her own shoulders.
“After a while, though, we made you undead. We re-created you.” He pushes himself up to his elbows. “We made a story of you to keep us going. So for me you never really died, do you see?” Peter touches the place on her hand where her finger used to be.
Slowly, in a voice bending back toward death or dying, he relates to Joan the story that emerged in her absence:
“In the year of the death-giving sun, as the demise of the world we knew grew ever closer—and, with it, the need to choose a destiny, to die out underground or be reintegrated into a floating consciousness under the ruling class of CIELs—a child courier emerged through a tunnel. No one knew the child. His eyes were sunken into his skull; his cheekbones revealed how long it had been since he’d eaten; his ribs were the main feature about him. He coughed, stood up straight as a dangling skeleton, and said ‘I am here.’ He closed his eyes and smiled, as if he’d arrived at the blessing of life itself. He handed us a cloth-wrapped object and dropped to the ground, dead.
“A few who were crowded around kneeled down to attend to the boy. A woman made a soft cooing sound and touched his head. I looked at the cloth-wrapped object in his hands. I carefully began to open it. The cloth was oily and filthy, as if it had passed between a thousand hands. When I finished unwrapping the thing, what emerged from the small corpse was this: a crude handwritten letter. On paper.”
Peter coughs as if his ribs are coming up. Leone shoves a cup of water to his lips. He continues. “I confess, I forgot that dead child at my feet immediately. A letter! Suddenly I was flooded with words we’d all long since forgotten, except as symbols: Paper. Writing. Books. Libraries. I started to shake. A crowd pushed in around me. I could smell human sweat, and something else—pulp, I think. I held my breath and peeled it all the way open. But you already know what was inside,” Peter says. “In place of a signature, the letter closed, ‘To you I give this Earth.’
“Some were eager to charge forgery, for anyone could be anyone at this point in history, identity being as mutable and reproducible as language or image, and everyone knew there were pits of old realities left scattered about the world in hidden and forsaken places, so it could have easily been some kind of trompe l’oeil or worse. But the letter contained things other than what may or may not have been writ in your hand.
“As I stood shaking with the thing in my hands, several of the people gathered around me saw what I saw, and gasped into the semidarkness. Inside the letter was nothing less than a human artifact: a lock of hair, so thick and black it curled like a giant ink comma before them. When I looked up, I saw one man rub his hairless head slowly and close his eyes.
“I thought for a moment I could smell the letter—something about rain. Something about sleep. We were afraid to touch it. We stared at it as if it were something sacred.
“For it was not just a thick lock of silkblack hair, miracle enough. The thick black lock of hair had a fastening of sorts. Looped around the hair to keep it intact, curled tight, as if someone had waited for the rigor to achieve perfect pliability before carefully molding it, curling it into a seashell spiral, was a pinkie finger. Only the slightest idea of life left in its grayblue skin . . .”
He pauses. He stares at Joan. “We made an acquiescent vow. We would from that day forward cease making crude, mistaken images of you. The CIEL’s plan—to ravage what was left of Earth and us—was a hair’s breadth away from success. If you were out there, you were worth finding. I’ve given this end of my life to finding you.
“When that boy arrived with your hair,” he says, winding his fingers into her long black hair, “and your finger, I was shocked, but not beyond belief. As a boy, I’d seen you walk out of fire in a wood. I’d seen you walk from the sea, glowing like the aurora borealis. I’d fought alongside you and watched you not die and not die when others—anyone else—would have. And here you are. Maybe it is enough. To see that you are still alive.”
Leone swallows. It seems the only sound for miles.
All three of them know it is not enough. Their reunion has only one aim.
Leone rises and walks a small distance away. As she cracks shrub twigs into the fire, the smell of sage and moss and peat fills the cave
rn. Peter stretches up and cranes his neck to see Leone. “I missed her,” he says. “Believe it or not.”
Joan looks up at him and almost smiles.
Above them, firelight paints the cave ceiling and walls. Some of the worms Joan placed on Peter’s forehead trickle down toward his eyes like little black tears. He brushes one away.
“It’s okay,” she says, “let them. They eat all sorts of bacteria.”
“What difference does that make?” her brother asks her.
And he is right. None. There is only one reason for him to be alive in that cave with them, and any time wasted on childhood nostalgia is wasted energy.
Joan looks over at Leone. Get his story, her face reminds Joan. Stories save lives. They give shape to action.
Joan suddenly hates herself for doing this to him. What can he possibly tell her that she doesn’t already know?
Leone brings over a cup of hot water filled with ginger root and belladonna. She pulls Peter back up onto her thighs while Joan feeds him sips of the hot liquid.
“Thank you,” he says. “There isn’t much time, apparently, and you’re still missing an important part of this story. Until now, it was a tragedy.” He pauses. “Come on now, don’t look so glum. I already died, remember? Besides. I have a present for you.” Pushing himself up to a sitting position, he buries his hand deep within the pocket of his pants, searching for something. When he brings his hand out between them, Joan sees a spider, a long-legged silvery little thing.
“What the hell is that?” Leone interjects, hovering over his hand and squinting.
“This has traveled a long way to find you,” he says. He reaches his hand out toward Joan, and she in turn opens and offers her hand, and the tiny silver spider crawls the bridge between them until it sits in her palm.
“Now let me tell you what I know,” he continues, “before my . . . what should we call this? Before my second leaving?”
Joan laughs. Laughter and tragedy, two sides to the same face.
Chapter Eighteen
Once, when they were children—maybe when Peter was seven, maybe younger—Peter had developed a fever so intense they thought he might die. When the doctors came to their home, they discovered that his brain was swelling. His skin grew covered with palm-size scarlet blotches, like red shadows of leaves. Then all of his hair fell out. Encephalitis. In the days just before his fever lifted he’d been delirious, and he told Joan that he’d seen her turn to fire and ascend into the night sky, like a long-missing star returning to its constellation.
The silver spider crawls across Joan’s palm and up her forearm. Even in the diffused light of the cave she senses that it is not entirely natural, although it looks biological enough. Its movements seem a little too well ordered; the thin needles of its legs are as weightless and delicate as a spider’s, and yet somehow mechanical. Is she overthinking things? Haven’t her own movements over the years become calculated and inhuman?
“It’s an AV recorder,” Peter says. “The spider. Mostly biological, but wet-wired. We’ve developed tens of thousands of them, in differing guises. Homebred troglodytes. Spiders, worms, salamanders. Underground creatures. The spiders seem to travel the best between worlds without deterioration of data.”
Joan’s head shoots up and Leone’s jerks toward Peter. “Between worlds?” Joan asks.
Peter inhales and holds his breath. Joan wonders how many breaths he has left. She is already thinking of where to bury him—across the wide lake in the crystal green waters reflecting the entire ceiling and opening of the cave like a moss-colored mirror, perhaps, or in a grotto where geological patterns make malachite and azure seem to shimmer alive along the walls. If she feels anything about the word brother, it is here, in this space that smells of water and dirt and living things. Her memory remains loyal to all the times they played in the woods together as children. His death, then, should bring life back into the walls and ground and water.
A faint ticking sound scatters across the walls of the cave. Water seepage, or bats, or just geology stretching.
“These troglodytes we’ve created, they can travel up and down Skylines. They can ride telluric current without a trace. We’ve been gathering tactical information about CIEL inhabitants and technologies for more than three years now. When they started sending explosives down the Skylines, it revealed that the lines could be used to transfer matter, not just energy. The more death they sent down the elevators, the more troglodytes we sent up, like invasive species. We’ve developed maps of their entire territory: their weapons systems, their food and energy supply chains, their social organization, their power center.
“And we know something else. We know they have a problem. A big one.”
“Fuck,” Leone whispers, and in her voice Joan hears the trace of the question she knows they all three share. “What about humans? Can humans travel the Skylines?”
Peter looks down at his own arms and hands. “We don’t know about humans. So far, no. At least, no humans like me.” He pauses and shifts his gaze away, then continues.
Leone makes shapes in the dirt with her foot.
“But we do know how to draw CIEL attention to a specific target. We know how to draw their energy to a source—we’ve successfully blown former ammunitions dumps or wired old technology heaps to create something interesting for them to track down here—which gets their attention, and when we do, they send a bomb exactly where we want them to. Or clusters of them. And then, when the explosives start raining down, our troglodytes are able to use fissures in the ensuing electrical storm to travel up.”
Joan and Leone exchange looks. They’d just witnessed such an attack—the sky opening up and nearly blasting them to fuck.
Peter looks back up at them. “We can’t win any wars with weapons. But we can using data. At this point there’s almost nothing we don’t know about their technologies. And something of their day-to-day life, though the images taken are blurry and static.”
His chest seems to growl . . . perhaps a cough that got stuck. But in the cough Joan hears what she already knows, that his body is rapidly decomposing, going back to dirt. He has less than half a day or night, if that. And yet he looks beautiful. His cheeks like the petals of roses, his eyes like blue-green stones. The waxen white of his hairless skin gleams like its own light source there in the cave world of her life. But the veins in his arms, climbing up from his wrists, are already turning a faint blue. When he crosses his arms and speaks again, her throat tightens.
“They can track and target certain intensities of electricity,” he says. “That’s why we thought you might still be alive. They are trying to track your energy. Though they are trying desperately to uphold the story of your execution. We were able to infiltrate enough to understand the new reality they’ve constructed up there. And what they still have planned for you. And for all of us.”
Leone stands up and adjusts Little Bee at her calf, then the Beretta holstered at her thigh, and rubs her hand over her head. “They want what they’ve always fucking wanted. Slave labor and slaughter for the rest”—Leone spits—“with a dead planet orbiting beneath them like a giant turd.”
“Yes, in general terms,” Peter answers.
“General?” Leone lashes. “There’s something specific about genocide?” Leone’s face flushes, then she turns abruptly away. Joan knows her ire is not for Peter. In fact, she knows, Leone loves Peter. At least she did the last time they’d all been together in battle, years ago. The three of them were once united in violence and blood. There was no stronger bond.
Peter’s breathing grows labored. Listening to him makes Joan’s chest hurt.
“Joan,” he says, sitting down near her now Indian-style and placing his hands palm-side up on his knees. “They don’t want to kill you anymore. They need you, Joan.”
His veins river up his arms like small blue serpentines.
The walls of the cave tick.
“Again? What the fuck for?” Leone shouts. “Exec
uting her and annihilating everyone near her the first time wasn’t enough?” Leone walks over to the side of the cavern and picks up a shoulder load of ammunition.
Joan sits silently, staring at the spider on her flesh, her thoughts between Leone’s and her brother’s words. The spider dances between her knuckles, skitters up her arm a little, then back down toward her hand. It seems . . . happy. She wonders if it wants to make a web there between her fingers. Some creatures are content in contained worlds. She looks over at Leone and feels a wave of something without a name. Leone is not like the spider. Leone isn’t content with states of being. She wants states of doing. In stasis, even Leone’s biceps and shoulders look wrong. She needs action. And what had Leone’s life with her all these years been reduced to? Killing. Survival. Pure action.
“So what’s the story?” Leone asks. “What the fuck do they need her for?”
“To reproduce,” Peter says.
Leone laughs. The echo mixes with the cave sounds and the murmuring micromovements of water in the deep underground reservoir next to them.
Joan can’t even get the word to go inside her ear. Reproduction? What on earth was he talking about?
“Joan.” Peter’s voice slices through her thoughts. “I need to explain. And I better do it quickly. I feel dizzy.” He hangs his head for a moment. Takes in a deep breath. Joan counts. Seven seconds, like their mother taught them as children. This is how to calm yourself.
“We haven’t just gained information on them. About CIEL. We know things about you,” he says, his voice sounding to her again like leaves and dirt blowing across barren land.
“What things?” is all Joan asks. Her voice sounding like a child’s. She holds her breath and counts to seven.
“Fucking spit it out, then,” Leone says.
Joan’s head fills with all the dead people she could not save. Armies. Her eyes sting. The spider in her hand tickles. The walls whisper and creak.