Chapter 1

 

Pulsing white light.

Heat.

A smell like earth, and like something burning.

Richard opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. His room was quiet in the heat of the night. A ceiling fan, clacking slightly, whirred overhead.

He didn’t know what the images meant, or the smell. He’d been awakened by them three times in one night.

He got up and stretched, staring out his window down toward the bay, sparkling in the lights of the marina. There was no moon tonight—the lights of the harbour were all that illuminated the water. The town, stretching down the slope to the bay, was mostly dark. A few lights here and there indicated that someone was up or someone was nervous, leaving lights on to discourage unwanted visitors.

The town did not often have reason to fear. But since April had caused the death of an intruder in their own house, just under Richard’s bedroom, and Chris and Tyler had come home injured, rumours had been spreading.

And something more than rumours—a feeling, an atmosphere that was instinctive, spiritual.

Defending themselves against the hive’s attacks had been nearly deadly.

Tomorrow the offensive began.

Tomorrow they split up, but not in disunity. They had a plan to carry out.

It was so hot.

The ongoing march of summer, worse inland than here in the village.

Unexpectedly, Richard found himself thinking of the hermit on Tempter’s Mountain. He had given his life for this war. Lost it to one who should have been an ally, and closer than an ally. To one who was Oneness.

Richard’s own cell had been so fortunate thus far. They were all still alive. There was no guarantee that fortune would continue.

But one thing he knew: they could not allow the wounds that David and others had pierced in the Oneness to fester. Whatever they had to do, whatever it cost, they had to heal the breach.

 

* * *

 

Reese awoke reeling still from what she knew. She had seen the exile as about herself, always—the pain of it so overwhelming that there was no option to see it as anything else.

She had not seen it for an attempt to destroy the very Oneness itself, an attempt to infiltrate and infect, to bring the darkness and the demonic into the very fabric of that which held the world together.

In all her years of chasing the hive, she had not dreamt that the hive’s target was not just the people inhabiting the world but the Oneness itself. That they weren’t just going after networks, but after The Network.

She knew it now.

She breathed in the air slowly, inhaling bay salt, humidity, a cool breeze that wouldn’t last long in this summer day. The breeze died away even as she began to appreciate it.

The sun, having risen, was already turning the day into an inferno. It fell through her window in beams that heated the bed and weighted her down.

She breathed in again, taking in the stiffness of the air, the calm before the coming storm.

Today everything would change, and this time, it would be the Oneness that changed it. Not the hive. Not David. Not even the circumstantial workings of some invisible plan.

She would get up in a few minutes and walk into that work. For now, she lay here. The day was intimidating.

She soaked up the quiet.

Despite the heat it was only, maybe, six in the morning. The house was silent. Others were awake—she could sense it. Sense them worrying, thinking, planning, praying, though no one had risen from bed. One or two dreamed. Tony, she thought, and Angelica. Young and brash and willing just to charge into whatever came, hang the consequences. She was grateful for them. Grateful they’d stuck with her, that they’d come along after her to join this tiny cell and its wild, everything-changing plans.

She smiled in the sun rays and the salty air.

A slight knock on the door. Someone was up after all. Strange that she hadn’t sensed that.

He pushed the door open, and it was Chris. Her heart beat wildly, and she sat up and pushed hair out of her face and pulled her sheet up to her neck. He was not supposed to be in her bedroom. Irregular enough that he was in the house, seeing that he was not Oneness and had no business, strictly speaking, being so in the middle of everything.

He flushed, but he didn’t move from her doorway. She noticed that he wasn’t looking at her—being a gentleman, then, even if he was standing in her room first thing in the morning.

“I thought you’d be awake,” he said.

“Well, yeah.”

“It makes sense that Richard’s splitting us up—I get it, even though I was mad at him for it last night. We both need to go where we’re going. I just want you to know . . . well, be careful, please.”

Her voice was strangely strangled in her throat. Lately his nearness did this to her. “I will.” She cleared her throat. “You do the same.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Yeah, he could—he was a big strong man, young but full of good sense and good character, just like his father. And his father had died, a long time ago, trying to protect people he loved in the attack that had birthed all of this. The attack that had started fracturing the Oneness years ago, before anyone was aware of it.

Her eyes said some of what she was thinking, and he just grunted in return.

“Listen, do you . . . uh . . . want some breakfast or something? I can bring you . . .”

She almost swung her legs out of bed and then remembered she wasn’t entirely dressed. “We can eat downstairs. Get out of here and I’ll get dressed and come join you.”

He flashed her a grin and disappeared, leaving the door slightly ajar so she could hear his retreat down the hall.

She got up, rolling into the thickness of hot air, and closed the door and pulled clothes on, difficult to do over the cast on her ankle. She grabbed her crutches and blew out a sigh as she stared at the door and the day on the other side of it.

Oh, Chris, she thought, Come in. Come into the Oneness. Come in where I can love you, and you can love me, and we don’t have to do this anymore.

But she wouldn’t say any of that.

The others joined them one by one, trickling into the kitchen over the course of an hour, putting on coffee when they finished the pot Chris made, making tea, scrambling eggs and frying bacon. No one really talked. Mary and Richard came in first, then April, then Shelley and Nick—together. Diane, who had probably been awake quite a while but didn’t want to dive into the day before she’d had more time to think and process or just avoid them all. Tyler and the twins last. Fully half of them looked like they had recently lost a fight. Chris and Reese were the worst, with their casts—Reese a snapped ankle, Chris a broken arm. The hive did not play nice.

At least they were all still alive. That was a miracle in itself.

They ate without really talking and cleaned up just as quietly. Those who were Oneness—all but Chris and Shelley and Nick—felt each other’s tension and simply shared it. The others watched them, wide-eyed, knowing that a great deal was happening beneath the surface.

They gathered in the common room when they’d all finished eating. Nick sat himself between Richard and Mary and looked up at them each in turn, his eyes wide and his expression solemn. He clutched his sketchbook and pencils, but they were shut; he’d been working on something but not showing it to anyone. April sat beside his mother.

Everyone waited.

“If anyone has more to say than we’ve already said, now’s your time,” Richard said.

“Go get them,” Nick said.

“Be careful,” Shelley put in.

Richard smiled. “Thank you. Both. You can pray for us while we’re gone.”

Shelley looked skeptical. “We ain’t like you.”

“But you can be,” Richard said. “The door is open. You only need to step through it.”

She didn’t respond. Richard looked over his people, his cell, his family, and felt a swelling of pride and the edge of concern. They had already been through so much.

But there was no turning back now. Not now that they understood what was happening. Not now that the attacks had coalesced into a coherent picture, one that called upon them to stand up and fight back.

They said their good-byes and split into teams, going their separate ways.

They did not know when they would come back together. Or if they would ever come back together.

The attack had begun. They went out to seek their targets and bring them home.

Reese and Tyler after Jacob, the community leader who had opened his trusting people up to the demonic and had in some way killed a man.

Richard, with the twins, after the children who had been set free from possession, so that he could talk to them and try to find out something about the rest of the hive: how many more there were, how many might be Oneness, how many they needed to name, recognize, and rescue.

Mary, April, and Diane after the most volatile of all, with Chris helping them.

They were going after David.

The source of it all.

The place where the wound had opened.

The first exile.

 

* * *

 

It was David that Reese thought of the entirety of the drive to the correctional facility where Jacob was being held in custody along with his wife, kept for questioning and until charges could be made. David she puzzled over, David she ached over.

David had been the head of the Lincoln cell as long as she had been there. She had known him as a leader, a father—a head. The Oneness were all connected, all becoming part of each other more tangibly the longer they lived together, and somehow, for years, he had kept it up. Kept up the connection while hiding his hatred and anger and bitterness, hiding the scheming and the demonic contacts, hiding the truth. And for all those years they had loved him and cared about him as their own souls. That he was an enemy worse than any demon or outsider was still, even after all she had seen and heard and been attacked by, almost unbelievable.

It seemed like a bad dream, one conjured by too many nights of poor sleep and bad food, that you could only wake up from and shake your head at and be glad it could never, ever be true.

She wanted to confront him herself. She wanted to be part of the team that was going after him, and perhaps to find the part of herself that was still missing and become fully Oneness again in the process.

That desire was why Richard hadn’t let her go after David. Why he had said she should focus elsewhere, and she knew he was right. It was too personal, for her. She would lose her head. She would make decisions based on her own needs and not on the needs of others. She would be a liability.

Part of her still hated David for that. She had been guilty of nothing he accused her of. The exile had been a sham, a facade, an illusion cast by his own alienation and pinned over her. And yet it had changed her. She was less than she had been; she was unreliable where once she could have been trusted to the grave. And it wasn’t her fault.

She sighed heavily and leaned her forehead against the window, hoping the glass would be cool as they drove over blazing asphalt on their way to the city.

The glass wasn’t cool. Pressing her head against it only made her feel more closed in.

Mirages rose from the road ahead of them. Diane’s air conditioning worked only intermittently. They were using her station wagon. Tyler kept casting furtive glances at her from behind the wheel.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

She knew he knew she was lying.

“You know,” he said, “I wondered why this whole story felt so much bigger than us. Like why, in the beginning, I kept seeing your old friend—Patrick—and April saw one of the cloud, too. They don’t usually come, do they?”

The cloud were those members of the Oneness who had died. Their connection was never lost, so they remained part of the family, part of the organism that now crossed heaven and earth. But no, it was not common for them to appear or participate in any way the others could see.

“No,” was all she said.

“But it makes sense now. Now that we can see David is targeting the whole Oneness—all of us, all over the world. Maybe he could even get to the cloud. Imagine what that would do to the world.”

Tyler was new to the Oneness, and things that were understood by the others still amazed and impressed him. But Reese had to admit she hadn’t thought of that one.

Could David’s hive really reach into the cloud? Start turning even the departed against those on earth? Could the infection spread that badly, that virulently?

She suspected it could.

“This Jacob,” Tyler said, continuing to talk as he barrelled down the highway, “he really confused me for a while. He’s got so much personality and power, like Richard. And his community—they are really . . . special. Just innocent and wanting to make a good life for themselves, you know? Wanting to do what’s right.”

“Lots of people have good intentions,” Reese said. “But foundations matter a whole lot. If you get those wrong, you can’t build anything good on it. Jacob should have been building on the love and unity of the Oneness, and he chose to build on fear and control instead. Nothing really healthy can come from that.”

“Do you think there’s a way back for them? His community, I mean?”

“Yes,” Reese said after a moment. “If they’re looking for Oneness, they’ll find it. Especially now that the truth is coming out. They should be able to get free of him.”

Unless the truth just destroys them, she thought, thinking of the girl Miranda and her mother, and the young men who had already been sucked into demonic practices—if Miranda’s version of events could be trusted. Could they really come out of all this unscathed?

No, she decided. Not unscathed. Never that.

But healed. Eventually, somehow, they could find healing and reality where they’d been bound by hurt and illusion.

“I didn’t tell anyone, but I think maybe I saw angels when I was at the house,” Tyler said. “They were sitting in my hospital room talking about the community and how they looked like Oneness, but they actually weren’t. And they said some things about love and what makes humans different.”

Reese looked askance at him. For someone who had hardly been Oneness for any percentage of his life, Tyler had already wracked up far more unusual experiences than was normal even for one of a long-standing cell. “Angels? Are you sure you weren’t just on drugs? Angels are not common things to see.”

“Neither is the cloud, and I’ve talked with one of them quite a bit.”

“True.” She smiled. “Tyler, do me a favour. Stay safe through all of this. They gave us the easy job—the protected one, with prison walls on all sides—so we wouldn’t get hurt. So just abide by that, okay?”

He chuckled, but she sensed something behind the laugh—memories, fear. “No worries. I’m not the one who rushes off into trouble. That’s you. Or Chris.”

“But trouble seems to have a knack for finding you,” Reese replied. She waited for him to say what was bothering him so deeply. He didn’t.

Not that she couldn’t guess. He had been there when the young man, the European one they called the Wizard, whose real name was Clint Wagner and whose background check had turned up a frightening record—had ripped two policemen apart with his own hands. He had seen it, or at least heard it. That he wasn’t a basket case was a miracle. And he had nearly been burned alive in the hive’s attempt to turn Diane.

And to turn her. Reese.

“Are you okay, Tyler?” Reese asked quietly.

He didn’t answer her right away. Outside, the world was blurry in the heat. He was sweating under the effects of the inefficient air conditioner.

“I tapped into something back there,” Tyler said, “when the hive still had us. The strength of the Oneness. I walked under that strength when I should have been paralyzed—literally got up and moved legs that should not have moved, all through the energy of people other than me. I think, right now, the Oneness is still holding me up. If I try to go under them to myself, I’m still . . . not in a good place. But I’m not alone. That’s keeping me together.”

“That’s more self-insight than most people have,” Reese commented. “Even Oneness.”

“So how about you?” The direct question caught her off guard. “You are still dealing with a lot. I know that. You lost the Oneness—lost what’s keeping me together. Do you feel like you’ve come back?”

“No,” she admitted, unable to be dishonest in the face of his honesty. “Not really.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. I just need . . . time.”

“Do you wish you were going after David instead of the others?”

That question rattled her too. Yes, she did. David was the front line. David was the prize. He was the one who mattered most, and Reese had never liked being away from the front, away from the charge. She knew that Jacob was also important, that they had to go after the hive in any incarnation where they could find it, but she also knew she was being sent to him because it wasn’t personal, and she wouldn’t be safe if she went after David. Even though Mary had her own history with him, she had been judged safe, and worthy, and able to do this, and Reese had not.

That stung.

At the same time, it was a tremendous relief.

Because she knew they were right.

“It’s best that I go where I’m going,” Reese said. “Richard is right about this. I don’t like it. It’s hard. But he’s right.”

Tyler tried a smile, but it came to more of a grimace. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

They drove on, and then he laughed.

“So we’re on the attack, and we’re starting by going to a jail and trying to talk to someone. Just talk. And hope he listens and cares enough to turn around. What in the world kind of war do you fight like that?”

Reese smiled grimly. “The only kind there really is.”

She settled back into her seat. “But you’re wrong about one detail. We’re not just going to talk.”

He looked startled. “What? What else would we do?”

“We’re going to break him out.”

“We what?” There was a squeak in his voice. She heard it in his spirit, too—a racing to try to keep up with her.

“I know Richard wants us to stay safe, but Jacob is not going to come back to us while he’s sitting in prison,” Reese said. “He needs to come out and be with us. Alongside us. Where we can reach him. So we’ll most likely have to get him out. Besides, the prison doesn’t know what they’re dealing with. It wouldn’t be safe for him to stay there.”

“Because he’s dangerous?”

“Because right now, he’s spreading a hive. And prisons are already swarming with demonic activity. If he gets in there and gets that bunch organized, things may get very, very bad.”

“Oh. Wait, we’re not going to go fight some kind of huge battle all by ourselves, are we? Why didn’t the twins come with us if things are so bad in prisons?”

“We might be. We’ll win. Keep your eyes on the road.” He was starting to swerve, clearly hugely distracted by the sudden change in how he was envisioning this battle playing out. “Trust me, Tyler, we’ll be all right.”

She tried to sound confident. A prison full of demons, she could handle.

Jacob, she wasn’t sure.