“You’ve more than redeemed yourself, Professor,” Marsh told him, hitting END on his phone so he could call Rathman.
82
THE CAROUSEL HOUSE
“THIS USED TO BE storage?” Sam said, running her gaze along the sprawl of Raiff’s lair and his mismatched furnishings.
“For what, I can’t say. It was probably emptied out as soon as the site cooled enough after the fire.”
“And you turned it into a home,” Alex said, as he followed Sam’s visual sweep.
“It can never be home,” Raiff told them both flatly. “I’ll never see home again, Alex. Neither will you.”
“This is my home.”
“I was talking about where you were born.”
“Same place as you, right?”
“Same planet, yes.”
“Sure. Because that would explain why we both have the same, or pretty similar, DNA to humans, right, Sam?”
“Right,” she affirmed. “Almost exactly.”
“So how can that be, Raiff?” Alex asked him, his tone making it sound more like a demand. “If we’re from another planet, if we’re not human.”
“Because we are.”
“Are what?”
“Human, Alex. We’re human too. In every way, shape, and, especially, form.”
* * *
“With some slight deviations, of course,” Raiff continued, making Alex and Sam think of Dr. Chu’s analysis of infant Alex’s blood work.
“What,” Sam began, “like a parallel world, as in string theory—something like that?”
“No, a parallel world would suggest independent development based on the same environment and conditions, the product of coincidence as much as anything. But there’s nothing coincidental about the fact that our species are identical in virtually all respects.”
“How’s that?” Alex asked him.
“Because millions of years ago this planet was seeded by travelers from mine—ours.”
“Seeded?”
“He means they’re responsible for our very existence,” Sam told Alex, her gaze fastened on Raiff. “Right?”
Raiff nodded, the gesture reluctant, regretful, almost sad. “This planet was a virtual match for ours, the most suitable by far of any of those tried.”
“There were more?”
“Dozens. The seeds didn’t always take; they usually didn’t. And this was going on millions of years before we found Earth and has continued in the millions of years since.”
“You used wormholes,” Alex concluded, recalling the professor’s assertions.
“Or something closely aligned with the same technology, yes. The voyage through space, even for ships capable of traveling at light speed, proved untenable. And the side effects of such travel, well, let’s just say it became impossible to find volunteers.”
Sam advanced ahead of them deeper into Raiff’s lair. She thought she heard music playing softly in the background, something classical. “So you appropriated this for your digs. Nice.”
“It seemed to make the most sense.”
“I’ll tell you,” Alex said, “what doesn’t make any sense at all. What all this crap is about. Why take over a planet you basically created in the first place?”
“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Raiff countered. “And it was the point all along, explaining what you’re doing here.” Then, after the briefest of pauses, “What I’m doing here.”
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Alex told him. “Why didn’t those drones just kill me? I mean, they had their chance.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then help me to understand. You call yourself a Guardian, right? Well, do your job and tell me why they didn’t just kill me.”
“Because they need to know what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” Alex said, studying the way Raiff was looking at him, evasive and uncertain at the same time. “Do I?”
“You know how to defeat them.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s why you were brought here, why people—good people—on the other side risked their lives to send you through.”
“I was an infant at that time. What do infants know?”
“Plenty, in your case. No one, none of them, was allowed to know all the details, to make sure they remained secret, to be revealed at the proper time.”
Alex glanced toward Sam, who spoke before he had a chance to. “I think this qualifies as the proper time. So tell us.”
“I can’t. It was never explained to me. There wasn’t time. We were caught breaching the facility back on our side. Everything had to be accelerated. More of us were supposed to go through to join the others already here. But they were on to us and the channel had to be closed to stop them from following us over. At all costs.”
“The people who sent you here blew it up,” Sam said, realizing now the truth of what had happened. “That’s what caused the explosion that destroyed Laboratory Z. It originated on the other side of the field, the other side of the space bridge.”
“I was just able to make it through with you in my arms, Dancer, and I mean barely. The wormhole was already closing when we reached the end of the tunnel.”
“Tunnel?”
“What we called the route created by the fold in space. We’d just reached the end when it started to close. I honestly didn’t think we’d make it. And even when we did, the energy disruption, kind of a shock wave, threatened to tear a hole in the fabric of this world and almost killed us.” Raiff’s gaze deepened, boring into Alex. “We were trapped in some kind of bubble. Moving felt like trying to fight a rip current. The best I could do was shove you out of it, right into the arms of a woman who happened to be standing there.”
“Oh, my God…”
“Your mother, Alex,” Raiff finished.
83
SHOCK WAVE
“I WAS SUPPOSED TO stay with you until the others arrived,” Raiff resumed, when he felt Alex was ready. “They’re the ones behind whatever it is you don’t realize you know.”
“Because I don’t. I was an infant at the time. It’s not like they could teach me anything.”
“Since it was clear they weren’t coming,” Raiff said, not bothering to break his train of thought to respond to Alex’s assertion, “all bets were off, and you were better off with the Chins.”
“My parents, you mean,” Alex said, not bothering to hide the indignation in his voice.
Raiff took a deep breath and framed Alex in his stare, seeming to forget Sam was even there. “I reacquired you shortly after—it wasn’t hard once I had a list of facility personnel and connected the dots after learning about your mother. I counted my blessings, knowing this was the perfect scenario to keep you safe, better than any I could possibly have planned. But I never lost track of you and enlisted other refugees from our planet to serve as Watchers, keeping an eye on you as much as possible, Dancer—”
“Alex. Please call me Alex.”
“Alex,” Raiff tried. “We never let you out of our sight, knowing this day would come. Knowing the future depended on it.”
“Refugees?” Sam posed.
“I’m getting to that. Suffice it to say for now that we knew what those who control our planet were going to do to you because they’d already done it to us.”
“Get back to what you said about what I know,” Alex prompted. “About how to defeat whoever killed my parents.”
But before Raiff could, a bell began to jangle.
* * *
“My early detection system,” he said, leading them through the sprawl of what felt like a grand loft-style apartment, albeit one that came without windows.
“What,” Alex began, “a bunch of tin cans tied on a string?”
“The bells are just the sound I programmed. The system itself is a bit more sophisticated.”
The jangling sounded again.
“We need to get out of here,” Raiff said, leading them straight toward a wall p
aneled in rich, dark wood.
Some sort of sensor must have picked him up because the wall slid open. They continued on through it, finding themselves in another cavernous space, blackout dark until Raiff flipped a switch somewhere.
Sam screamed.
* * *
It was a dragon. Red and real and fiery with flames shooting out its mouth. As Alex clutched her, she realized it wasn’t moving and smelled vaguely of sawdust—and that the flames weren’t at all real, but carved out of wood as well.
“Sorry about that,” said Raiff. “I should have warned you.”
Sam nodded, sucking in big deep breaths to settle herself. Here she was, eighteen years old, and she’d just been scared out of her wits by a wooden dragon perched atop a carousel—called Dragon Wheel, according to the sign she could just glimpse upon a flag-topped cover—and featuring all manner of comparable creatures.
These days, though, who could tell what was real and what wasn’t?
Laboratory Z, Sam now remembered the professor had mentioned outside, had been built on the ruins of an old amusement park in the time before Bishop Ranch. Hence the Dragon Wheel and another dozen vintage carousels battling for space, each looking freshly carved and painted.
“Hobby of mine,” Raiff explained briefly. “I restore them to working order. Come on, we need to hurry.”
But before leading them on, Raiff threw a long series of switches that looked like circuit breakers. Instantly the restored carousels whirled into motion, their horses, dragons, and assorted other creatures bobbing up and down with a chorus of instrumentals dueling to be the loudest and most annoying.
“If it’s androids that are coming,” Raiff said, “this will throw off their tracking. If it’s Trackers, it’ll provide cover.”
And with that gunshots rang out, echoing amid the spinning thunder of wooden creatures gaining speed with each twirl of their respective circular homes. Raiff pushed Alex and Sam down low, even with the carousel bases, making them almost impossible to spot, as the hundreds of beautifully restored empty mounts sprang back to life.
More shots resounded as Raiff pulled them on.
“Stay low!” he ordered. “See the carousel way off to the right?”
“Painted Ponies?” Alex asked.
“No, the White Castle. There’s a door just beyond it. That’s our target, an extension of the original escape tunnel. Hope you’re not afraid of the dark.”
And with a pistol that had suddenly appeared in his grasp, Raiff fired two shots at the bank of switches he’d flipped moments before. Sparks fizzled on the first shot, and on the second the lights in his carousel house died altogether. It was pitch black now except for the eyes of the hundreds of bobbing creatures, all of which were luminescent, providing plenty of light for someone already familiar with the cluttered terrain.
Raiff stuffed his gun back in his belt and led them on through the maze-like confines. Dipping and darting, twisting and turning, and never letting go of either Alex or Sam, as if the three of them were dancing together through the glowing eyes that looked like monsters ready to swallow them.
But these weren’t the real monsters, Sam reminded herself. The real monsters were already here, with more on the way.
Raiff found the door, shouldered it ajar, and they slid through as it sealed as quickly as it had opened. They found themselves dashing down a long winding hall that seemed identical in every way to the one that had brought Alex and Sam to Raiff’s lair.
“As for where we go from here—” he started, when they reached a ladder at the end leading up to a hatch.
“I already know where we go from here,” Sam said, between pounding breaths, before he could finish. “The professor pretty much told me.”
84
WAITING
FOR DR. THOMAS DONATI, EVERYTHING was on hold, including, it seemed, the world itself. He felt as if he’d been frozen in a form of suspended animation, waiting for the phone to ring, buzzer to chime, or team to show up. Of course, he more than anyone should’ve known this day was coming; its inevitability, he supposed, had been sealed eighteen years before in Bishop Ranch.
He hadn’t told the faceless voice grids he’d been speaking with over the course of the past day the entire truth, not even most of it. And now he was left to wonder how much of what was happening, and about to happen, was his fault. Because if the wormhole was about to open again …
Donati didn’t complete the thought; he couldn’t. The prospects were just too real and terrifying. He imagined that’s why he’d missed the warning signs a high school student, a NASA intern, had found. He missed them because he’d wanted to, unable to bear the thought that the inevitable was upon him, perhaps ultimately of his own making from trying to reach what no man was ever meant to touch.
He was glad the faceless voice grids couldn’t read his mind, couldn’t see into his memory to the moments that had followed the first shrill emergency alarm sounding before the destruction of Laboratory Z. How’d he raced down to the basement sublevel containing the massive tubular chamber he and Orson Wilder had constructed, essentially a particle accelerator and mini-supercollider that formed a potential doorway to other worlds. The testing had only been in the most rudimentary and fundamental stages. Expectations were low; in point of fact, nobody knew what to expect and most familiar with the project expected nothing at all.
As a boy, Donati had been obsessed with model trains and, later, with the transcontinental railroad’s construction. Even then, before his interest in space exploration had turned obsessively into his life’s work, he’d been fascinated by the idea of all that wilderness, all that untamed frontier, being linked together. Worlds connected. Impossible journeys made possible.
For Donati, Laboratory Z was an extension of that same romantic adventure where man expanded his horizons by forging routes between worlds. Back then it had merely been east and west, north and south, while today it involved roads built to connect planets and galaxies. His and Orson Wilder’s early work trying to theoretically construct a transworld was similarly about creating connections that just a decade or so before had been unthinkable. And they’d been wrong and right at the same time.
Right, because they had indeed opened the door.
Wrong, because something was waiting on the other side.
And now the day of reckoning for their oversight and myopic vision had come. Ever since that day eighteen years ago, he had ceased seeking other life forms in order to build bridges; he sought them instead to prevent those bridges from ever being built. The very real danger the prospects of such contact created had already been demonstrated, proof enough for him.
But that wasn’t the problem at this point. The problem at this point was that the signs, the pattern, were reoccurring, which could only mean one thing.
They were coming back, perhaps through a wormhole entirely of their own creation. And right now he had to find Samantha Dixon before someone else did.
Or some thing.
But her phone was going straight to voicemail and she’d returned none of his e-mails or texts, the latter being a practice Donati utterly deplored but knew teenagers these days normally preferred.
Donati’s phone rang and he jerked it to his ear, answering it quickly.
“Yes. Donati here.”
“It’s Samantha, Dr. Donati.”
“Who?”
“Dixon, Samantha Dixon, Doctor. I think we need to talk.”
ELEVEN
REBELS
Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
85
PLAYGROUND
“WE CAN WAIT FOR the girl to get back if you want,” Raiff said, uneasily taking the swing next to Alex in the Live Oaks Elementary School playground, just a few miles from Bishop Ranch.
Alex rocked slightly in his swing, legs scrunched up to compensate for being so close to the ground. “She has a name. It’s Sam.”
“We can wait for Sam
to get back,” Raiff corrected, having lent her his phone so she could make a call to someone she thought might be the only person, on this planet anyway, who could help them.
Alex steepened his rock. “No, talk. Just know that whatever you tell me, I’m telling Sam. I’m sick of secrets, starting with the fact that I’m not human.”
“You are human.”
“But I come from another planet. Through a wormhole in space. And a doctor didn’t deliver me; you did, to my mother.”
“I’m human too, Alex, both of us as much as anybody here.”
Alex pushed harder, riding a swing for the first time in longer than he could remember. It seemed to him that Raiff was moving and he wasn’t. Raiff had the hard look of a soldier mixed somewhat with the hardscrabble appearance of a fisherman. His face, even in the sunlight, seemed bathed in shadows, all angles and ridges. His wavy hair was untamed, his eyes big and set far back in his face. The kind of guy who didn’t care what he looked like and didn’t care what other people thought, either.
“So even though I come from another planet,” Alex continued, forcing himself to focus, “I’m human because your people seeded Earth millions of years ago to create another version of the human race.”
“Remarkable experiment. The most successful the minds behind such pursuits ever encountered by far.”
“Okay, Raiff, why? Why bother seeding the planet in the first place? I mean, for what?”
“Go back to your original question.”
“I don’t remember what my original question was.”
“How can you be human and come from another planet? The human race on this planet was created directly from DNA that came from ours and allowed to develop organically, without intrusion or interference. Totally independent of us, which was deemed crucial by those who devised the project.”
“What’s all that got to do with me, with why those androids and the ash man—Shadow or whatever—killed my parents?”
“They weren’t your parents.”
“Don’t say that. The ash man said that and I cut him in half.”