HOPEWELL, 2012 CE

“DESTINY? MY DESTINY IS WHAT I MAKE OF IT!” With those words, Tucker Feye stepped into the maggot and disappeared in an orange flash. Kosh Feye, holding a Lah Sept arma in one hand and a shock baton in the other, blinked back greenish afterimages.

Father September let out a despairing moan. “You have destroyed us all,” he said.

“Shut up,” Kosh said. He needed time to think. Too much had happened in the past few minutes — the fight with the priests, Tucker blowing off Ronnie Becker’s leg at the knee, the shock of seeing Adrian, his brother, transformed into an old man calling himself Father September, the girl Lia jumping into the maggot, and Tucker, who had grown half a foot since Kosh had last seen him a month ago, following her. He looked at what remained of the maggot, a sagging band of pink flesh surrounding the crackling disko.

“Curtis, you don’t realize what you’ve done,” Father September said in a shaky voice.

Master Gheen, unconscious on the floor of the tent, groaned and shifted. Kosh jabbed the baton against his neck. Gheen convulsed, then lay still. Kosh walked to the doorway and looked out of the tent at the sea of people gathered in the park waiting for the revival to begin. Some of them were seated on folding chairs; others were sitting on the grass. All of them were undoubtedly wondering what all the commotion in the tent was about. On the steps of the pyramid, the man whom Kosh had knocked senseless was stirring. Kosh closed the tent flap and looked back at his brother.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?” Father September said.

“What Tucker said. That Emily is here.”

“That is none of your concern, Curtis.”

“If you call me Curtis one more time —”

“It is your God-given name!”

“God gave me nothing. My name is Kosh. Where is she?”

Father September’s shoulders sagged; he seemed to grow smaller. “What does it matter? We are all lost.”

“You might be lost.” Kosh pointed the baton at his brother. “I know exactly where I am. What I want to know is, where is Emily?”

Father September scowled petulantly. “The woman Tucker saw is at the house where you grew up. It is where she belongs. But she is not the Emily you seek.”

Without another word, Kosh turned and triggered the arma. A jet of blue flame ripped through the back of the tent. Kosh strode through the smoking gash. A moment later the roar of his motorcycle shivered the tent fabric. Father September groaned and sank to his knees beside the unconscious Master Gheen.

“What have we done?” he asked, but there was no one to answer him.

Kosh hit the park exit at sixty miles per hour. The bike’s tires chattered on the washboard surface of the dirt road as a black cyclone of memories, hopes, and fears raged inside his head. Tucker had said that his mother, Emily, was alive, brainwashed by those strange priests. As unlikely as that sounded, Kosh believed him — it was no more insane than everything else that had happened that day, beginning with the sudden appearance of the girl on the roof of his barn that morning. The crazies in the park. Tucker, looking and acting years older. And Adrian — what had happened to him? Images flickered and whirled through Kosh’s brain: Ronnie Becker’s leg, the futuristic weapons now in his saddlebags, the disko, maggot, whatever . . . He had let Tucker follow the girl into that thing. What had he been thinking?

He downshifted as the dirt-surfaced park road curved toward the highway; his back tire skidded and he nearly lost control. Too fast. He slowed and turned onto the paved highway, then brought the bike up to a relatively sedate seventy miles per hour. As he came around the bend just north of downtown Hopewell he saw a swirling, twisting gray cloud dancing just off the highway over a field of recently harvested wheat.

Kosh backed off the accelerator. For a moment, he thought it might be smoke, but there was a deliberateness to the cloud, a sense of intelligence and purpose. As he drew nearer, the cloud resolved itself into tiny specks. Kosh laughed at himself. Birds! He was so paranoid from all that had happened, he’d let himself get freaked out by a bunch of birds!

The flock settled onto the field. What were they? Crows? They didn’t look like crows — too pale, and there was something odd about the way they flew. He slowed as he came abreast of the field. They looked like big doves, or pigeons . . .

Pigeons! Suddenly he knew what he was seeing. Passenger pigeons. He pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

Kosh had seen a recent news headline about the passenger pigeons, but he’d dismissed it as another unconfirmed sighting. There had been sporadic reports of passenger-pigeon sightings in the Hopewell area ever since Lorna Gingrass had killed those two birds with her car, back in ninety-eight. All the subsequent sightings had remained unconfirmed and, as far as Kosh was concerned, pure fantasy.

This, however, was real. The nearest bird was about fifty feet away from him — a large, blue-gray, rose-breasted creature.

“Hello there,” Kosh said.

The bird regarded him suspiciously with one red eye.

“Aren’t you supposed to be extinct?” Kosh asked, half expecting an answer. With all the other weird stuff he’d seen, a talking bird seemed perfectly reasonable.

The pigeon took flight. The rest of the flock followed as if they were all connected by invisible elastic strings. Kosh sat back and watched as the birds twisted and flowed into a bullet-shaped mass and shot off to the east. There had to be thousands of them.

Just one more impossibility piled atop all the others. Kosh wondered if the pigeons had arrived in Hopewell through the diskos. If so, what next? Dodos? Dinosaurs? He shook his head at his own foolishness and dropped the bike in gear. Maybe he was strapped to a hospital bed in some asylum and this was all happening in his head. It seemed as likely as anything. But if what Tucker had told him was true — that Emily was here — he had to see her.

Kosh pulled back onto the highway and headed for his childhood home, thinking about the last time he had seen Emily, almost fifteen years ago. The house came into view. It seemed so small now. As he approached the driveway he saw a young woman with long coppery hair and pale skin standing in the garden. Emily? Kosh’s heart filled his chest. As he slowed and began his turn, he sensed another presence and glanced at his rearview. The chrome grille of a truck filled his mirror. Time slowed. With a screech of tearing metal, his bike exploded from beneath him and he was airborne, hurtling toward a spinning sky.

I’m flying, he thought, and then all went to black.