ONE

ON THURSDAY, WE LEAVE FOR HOME

1    There was blood on his hands, and for a moment Scopes couldn’t remember how it got there. He stumbled on his feet and then kneeled down and wiped the blood on the grass. He looked back over the Grimpen Mire. He thought maybe he wouldn’t come back this way again. He didn’t like it here.

The Hound walked past the abandoned truck Nils had left behind and climbed into his Chrysler Turbine. When he turned the key, WKNY from Poughkeepsie was just finishing a test of the Emergency Alert System. Leaning out the window, he drove in reverse until he found the main road leading down Big Indian Mountain.

He could hear his heart beating a rhythm of murder in his ears. What did I do? What did I do?

*   *   *

“You helped them!” Scopes shouted at the Maestro. He sat at the kitchen table, eating the man’s cold lasagna—which was, he had to admit, the best fucking lasagna he’d ever had. “Why are you helping them?”

“I’m only giving them a choice.”

Scopes swallowed another forkful. “Talking to you is impossible. It’s like a goddamn riddle talking to you.”

“Riddles are the best kind of stories.”

“I don’t understand your obsession with children’s stories and riddles and fairy tales. Josef never did, either.”

“There is great truth in fairy tales,” the Maestro explained. “‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ‘The Three Little Pigs,’ ‘Goldilocks.’ They are stories we never forget. We feel them, the lessons beneath them. They are reminders to us about how to live. Don’t get lost in the woods. Don’t trespass. Treat other people the way you want to be treated.”

Scopes grunted, looked at the new painting on the wall, the one that hadn’t been here the last time he’d bothered to visit. “What’s that?”

“Do you like it? We painted it ourselves.”

Scopes shrugged. “What is it?”

“It’s an aspen leaf.”

“So?”

“You ever notice the little marks the humans put on their things? The little c in a circle on books and things?”

“Yes.”

“It means ‘copyright.’ It’s a reminder to them that the thing is their creation. That’s what the aspen leaf is. Whenever I rewrite a memory, I insert the aspen leaf into it so that I’ll know it’s a story I created. There are no real aspen trees. We invented them. If someone remembers seeing an aspen leaf, it means I’ve edited that memory for one reason or another.”

“‘Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,’” said Scopes.

“Maybe.”

“What are you doing with Jack?”

“I’m just giving him a chance.”

“We want the same thing. Don’t you know that we’re on the same damn team?”

“No, we’re not,” said the Maestro. “You want to bring about the end. Help it along. Well, we think there’s another way.”

There will be no freedom for you in their world, his mother, Ambala, had told him.

“And if the world does remember everything?” said Scopes. “What will happen to us then? You and me? Have you thought of that?”

The Maestro laughed.

“What the fuck’s so funny?”

“This is not our world, Scopes. It’s theirs.”

“Goddamn it,” he said, standing up. “There should have been a place for us. The tribes got Mu. Why isn’t there a place for us?”

“They forgot to give us one,” said the Maestro. “Like you, they were too busy thinking of themselves.”

“Well, it’s not fucking fair.”

“The world is not fair, Scopes. It’s indifferent.”

“Stop calling me that. I hate that name! I hate it! It’s a joke. Don’t you think I know that?”

“But we forgot your real name.”

The Hound grabbed the knife from its place above the sink and sank it deep into the Maestro’s chest. The blade pierced the heart cleanly. “My name is Yohance!” he shouted.

The Maestro collapsed to the floor.

“You stupid monkey,” said the Maestro. “Who will update the algorithm now?”

Scopes let the knife drop to the floor, his rage dissolving into shock. “You think we can’t learn?” he said. “I learned. I had forty years to learn. I know how the code works. I can reset the algorithm. I don’t need you. You’re nothing special.”

*   *   *

There would be a place for the Hounds after the world burned, Scopes assured himself, shaking off the memory of the Maestro’s murder. He was nearly to Oneonta. He could see the lights in the distance.

This was the only way to make the world a better place: let their greed destroy them and then start fresh. And that new world would need a strong leader.

An emergency news report cut through the jazz playing on the radio. Scopes’s hair bristled. It was another school shooting. This time in Newtown, in an elementary school called Sandy Hook. See. They couldn’t wait to kill themselves. Why not help them along a little?

2    On their sixth day on Mu, while they ate lunch—fresh tomatoes and greens—around a table situated on the tarmac of the Nazi airport, Jack noticed something about Sam. She had changed, a deep, elemental shift. She was radiant. She was a presence, persisting everywhere. She filled up the empty spaces with her voice and her laughter. It took Jack some time, but eventually he sussed it out. Sam was no longer afraid. He’d never known her to not be afraid of something. Kids at school. Her brother. Police. Human-ape hybrids. You know. Always something. But now. Now Sam held her own. And to say she was merely confident would be missing the point. It was more than that. There was grace in her being that belied the anger boiling deep down, and there was great beauty in that.

He stood and offered his hand. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“Is it about what Walter’s building in the hangar?”

“Yes.”

“He said we should meet him there after lunch,” said Sam.

“We’ll only be a few minutes late. He can start without us.”

Tony was waiting for them on a hover cart at the end of the runway. They climbed in behind him. Tony waved a hand over the dash and they were off. They shot past a row of German bunkers and into that old village they had spotted on the way to Peshtigo. Around a Tudor, half demolished by a fallen tree, the tram veered down an alley. The alley became a dirt road that led up a steep hill. Atop the hill sat a gigantic Colonial mansion in disrepair. The side that faced north was scraped free of paint. It was the color of storm clouds. Part of the roof had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole the size of a compact car.

“Looks like that famous house,” she said. “The one where Gatsby lived.”

“It was Hitler’s retreat,” said Tony. “He vacationed here in the summers for a couple years.”

Sam shuddered against Jack as the tram slowed to a stop outside the front doors. They stepped into knee-high crabgrass and ascended the stairs. Tony opened the great oak doors.

It was dark inside and Jack could feel the emptiness of the wide corridors along the front. In the low light from the open door, Tony found an ugly red-and-black bit of machinery that sat in the foyer collecting dust. It had a metal wheel with a knob, which Tony grabbed and cranked furiously. The machine coughed twice and then began to hum. Most generators Jack had seen had belts that grated loudly when activated, but this one just hummed like a nest of honeybees. The fixtures above, the ones that remained, came on slowly and cast a dim amber light.

A wide staircase wound round the foyer to the third floor. Thick cobwebs draped from the crystal chandelier like Spanish moss. To either side, a wide hall extended to the ends of the house. There was a crumbling plaster smell and the ghost of something else. Tobacco, maybe. Of a subgenus that didn’t exist anymore.

“This way,” said Tony, stepping over a pile of rodent scat and walking down the hall to the right. He passed several doors and then opened the one at the end and motioned for Sam to come inside.

This room had weathered the span of time. It was a high-ceilinged office, a long room stretching to the back bank of windows that looked out to the mountain. The walls of the room were tall cherry bookcases stuffed with bound tomes, unreadable to Sam because they were in German. Tony pointed at the wall behind them, through which they had passed. It was plaster, and upon it had been rendered a floor-to-ceiling mural. It showed a row of German robots, like the one that had greeted them at the hangar, advancing over a hill, the Golden Gate Bridge behind them. A blond soldier in the foreground sieg-heiled to someone beyond the borders of the painting.

Tony picked up a long metal rod that ended in a hook and used it to pull down a rolled map. It revealed Germany’s empire in sunset red. Vermilion ink covered all of Europe and the Middle East and stretched across Russia, northern China, and over the Pacific to a continent that could only be Mu, before continuing into America, all the way to the Mississippi. The map was dated 1960.

“What am I looking at?” asked Sam.

“History,” said Jack. “Real history.”

They showed her pictures from the drawers of Hitler’s desk, photographs of gas chambers in the Nevada desert. They showed her slides of Nazi soldiers posing with American prisoners of war—in one, an SS officer tortured a man who stood on a cardboard box, arms raised, wires attached to his fingertips, his head masked in a cone of black fabric.

Using a long pointer, Jack tapped the map at a dark circle in the center of Alaska. “This is HAARP. The forgetting signal originates here. It gets picked up and rebroadcast by hundreds of relay stations around the globe, most disguised inside the architecture of skyscrapers. We can’t attack HAARP directly. It’s fortified. Too secure for a nine-person team. As you know, we have to go for the relays.”

He hesitated a moment, looking at Tony. It was a crazy plan. A terribly tricky plan. “Like Tony said, you can’t take out just one relay,” said Jack. “There’s a redundancy built in so that if one fails, or even two, other relays are close enough to blanket that area with a weakened signal. We need to create a safe zone, a region completely outside the signal’s range.”

“But how?” asked Sam, looking at the map.

Jack circled an area on the eastern seaboard. New York to D.C. “We can make this entire zone safe from the signal if we take out these four relay stations. Two at the World Trade Center. And two in D.C., at the Pentagon and the Washington Monument.”

Sam shook her head. “We’re going to march down Seventh Avenue and blow up two of the world’s largest skyscrapers?”

“No,” said Tony. “We’re going to crash planes into them.”

Sam searched Tony’s eyes to see if he was joking. “You’re talking about murdering thousands of innocent Americans.”

“No, we’re not,” said Jack. “Tony got more of those belts the Hounds use. The Germans left them behind.”

“We get to the mainland,” said Tony. “To Boston. We hijack four flights. Release the passengers. Force the pilots to take off, just like Cooper did back in ’71. We send the pilots back on the belts. Then, right before impact, we use belts to come back ourselves.”

“So you can all fly jumbo jets now?”

Jack nodded. “The Captain can teach us how. Not well enough to land or take off, but enough to steer. That’s what’s happening in the hangar today.”

“And what about the people in the Twin Towers?” asked Sam. “Just collateral damage?”

“When we get back to the mainland, I’ll talk to Jean. She can call in the threat when we’re on our way. They’ll evacuate the buildings before we crash the planes. No one has to die. We’re just after the relays.”

Sam scratched her chin distractedly. “When?”

“September eleventh,” said Jack. “Early morning. We’ve got about a month to train.”

“Do we have enough volunteers? Did you find nine?”

Jack nodded. “Two pilots for each plane: me and you, Nils and Tony, the Captain and Cole, and then Zaharie and D.B. They both stepped up.”

“And the ninth?”

“Becky,” said Tony, his voice gruff, assured.

“Becky?” said Sam. “She’s thirteen.”

“She doesn’t have to do much,” Jack said. “Her part’s easy.”

3    Inside the German hangar, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra sat like the main attraction of the Smithsonian, reflecting the rays of sunshine slanting through the high windows. The volunteers had all gathered below it, behind makeshift consoles constructed from pieces of what was left of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. The Captain leaned over Cole, who sat at a row of toggles and switches.

Cole put a hand on a lever and pushed forward.

“No!” shouted the Captain. “You need to pull the yoke above the horizon before you open the throttle. And you forgot about the transponder again.”

Sam leaned against the wall behind Cole, watching Jack and Tony dick around with those things the Hounds called boomerang belts. Jack removed the buckle from his belt, turned it around in his hands, and pushed the red button on the back. Then he placed it in the air and walked away. The detached buckle hovered, defying gravity, three feet off the ground, spinning ever so slowly. A light pulsed inside it, radiating along its edge. As Jack walked away, that pulse flickered faster. And faster. Jack stopped halfway across the hangar, turned, and waited. He cringed, half shut his eyes.

“Ahhhhhh,” he said. “I don’t like this!”

And then suddenly he was on the other side of the room and the buckle clicked audibly into his belt again. Jack collapsed to his knees. “I’m okay!” he shouted. Then he puked.

It wasn’t teleportation. Not really. It was all about perception, Tony had explained. The belt and buckle were always connected. By pushing the button, you only resolved the distance. Whatever. It looked like teleportation to Sam.

Tony pushed the button on the back of another buckle and then tossed it in the air over a thick mat. Sam watched him evaporate and then appear midair and bellyflop onto the mat.

“Woo-hoo!” he shouted.

“Show-off,” the Captain mumbled beside her.

Sam smiled. Then she tilted her head toward Earhart’s plane, where Zaharie was hammering at a patch of aluminum. “We’re really leaving in that?” she asked.

“She only has to get us to Sea-Tac,” the Captain said.

Through the open hangar doors, Sam could see an army of disposal bots clearing a new path through the park. The statue had been temporarily relocated to the city. The bots were repairing the runway, getting ready for the big day.

Sam sighed. “We’re all going to die,” she said. “You know that, right? That’s probably how this ends.”