“COME INSIDE,” CLARE Shapiro called from the open hatch.
Kait barely turned her head in response. Huddled against the cold, walking the deck alone, she’d been watching the ocean world swirling all around her, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of silver foam and surging blue-green waves and deep blue skies and dark, long-winged birds. Birds everywhere, albatrosses and storm petrels and ones she didn’t recognize, hovering just over the churning water or wheeling above the Trey Gilliard as it plowed through the waves.
The ship at the southernmost point of its journey, going around Cape Horn before turning north and heading up the east coast of Africa.
Not that land was anywhere in view. A three-day storm had driven the ship far to the south, easing only about twelve hours ago so they could get back on course. That was why Kait was out on deck, despite the cold—it had been either that or go insane from claustrophobia in her tiny cabin.
Claustrophobia and anticipation of what she knew she had to do. No, not anticipation: fear. After all this time, she discovered something she hadn’t expected: She was afraid.
But as long as she stayed on deck, she didn’t have to think about it. She hardly had to think at all.
* * *
SEASICKNESS HAD BEEN a problem from day one of their journey, something Malcolm and Dylan Connell had anticipated with a crew made up entirely of landlubbers. Even many of those who had thrived during the journey’s early days succumbed during the storm. Some were so wretched that they were no help at all at a time when the old phrase “all hands on deck” finally regained its original meaning.
It turned out, though, that Kait was immune to seasickness. So for three days and nights, as the ship rose on one towering wave after another and came sliding down into the troughs with an impact that seemed to foretell a final, fatal splitting into pieces—a disaster that somehow Malcolm averted, time and again—she and just a few others were everywhere. Doing everything.
Doing whatever Malcolm commanded them to do (“You effing whackas!”), whether it was lashing down supplies, raising and lowering the sails in accordance with his almost mystical understanding of the wind and the waves, even going out in the middle of the night to help repair a spar that had splintered, as a cold, violet-blue fire sprouted from the masts overhead.
But now, at last, the seas had begun to settle. A little. Enough that the ship, accompanied by its coterie of seabirds, could ride the long swells and start making up the miles it had gone off course.
And enough time for Kait to think about what she had to do, and to be afraid.
* * *
EVERY DAY, SEVERAL times a day, she checked. And every time she was sure she’d waited too long, that her fear—her cowardice—had kept her from taking the step she’d been planning for years. Ever since she learned what had happened to Trey.
And every day she found that it was still possible. Was that relief or disappointment she felt? She didn’t know.
* * *
“KAITLIN!”
This time Kait looked back. Shapiro was standing in the hatch, a tall, gaunt figure, arms akimbo. With her stiff posture and arrow-sharp bone structure, she reminded Kait of one of the albatrosses rising and swooping behind her.
Regardless of how much everyone suffered from Clare Shapiro’s uncompromising tongue and dictatorial ways, they knew what they owed her. She too had proven unstoppable during the storm, and alongside Fatou Konte had ministered to those who hadn’t been. The potion that resulted from their joint efforts—a mix of ginger, acacia, and decoctions from the bark and roots of the bakoro m’pegu, samenere, and other Senegalese trees—hadn’t proven a panacea. But it had been effective enough to keep a skeleton crew at work.
“She sure as hell knows what she’s doing,” Kait had overheard someone say on leaving Shapiro and Fatou’s laboratory/sick bay/dispensary. “Too bad she’s such a witch.”
“What was that last word?” someone else had asked.
Standing there in the hatchway, with her knotty shot-with-gray hair loose to her shoulders, Shapiro did look like a witch. Kait found herself smiling.
But the witch didn’t notice. “Have something to show you,” she said, and turned and walked away, certain that Kait would follow. Which Kait, of course, did, leaving the bright sunlight and the sliding waves and the darting birds behind.
Noticing as they went down a passage toward the sick bay/laboratory how steadily the older woman made her way. Almost as easily as Kait did. It was amazing what became normal if you lived with it for a while. That was the thing about humans, Kait thought: For better or worse, we’re adaptable.
Shapiro walked through the door, letting it swing shut behind her. Kait, still smiling, caught it and went through as well. Then, crossing her arms, she said, “Okay, here I am. So?”
But it was foolish of her to speak to Shapiro yet. Kait had spent enough time hanging around the biochemist’s lab to know the drill.
Whenever the scientist returned to her lair after being away, even for five minutes, she always ran through an inventory of her precious possessions. Making sure her antique microscope, her collection of slides, the racks holding the little bottles and tinted-glass mason jars containing the medicinal plants and other decoctions she and Fatou dispensed, were all where she’d left them.
And checking the sealed containers holding the living thieves she’d brought along as well, as if anyone would consider stealing them. The wasps were quiet, sitting still in the bottom of the jars, only their upright posture and the slightest movement of their heads in Kait’s direction showing that they were alive.
Kait had always believed that Shapiro’s laboratory was the last place a Fugian would come to steal anything, but she’d long since learned to be patient with the scientist’s eccentricities.
Finally, Shapiro looked over at her. “So tell me what you see.”
Kait didn’t reply, just raised her eyebrows.
Shapiro frowned. “You’ve been here enough. What’s different this time?”
So Kait looked around. At first glance, the cabin looked the same as always.
But inevitably, Kait’s attention turned to the thieves. From what she’d seen before, once imprisoned, they just lived on, eating the bits of meat Shapiro dropped into their containers, mating if they were kept together. Never desperately beating themselves against the glass while attempting to escape. Accepting their fate while they waited to learn what would happen next.
But was something about these ones different? Unexpected? Kait thought . . . maybe so. But she couldn’t tell what. Maybe something about their posture?
Seeking a closer look, she took a couple of steps toward the nearest jar, which contained two thieves. As she approached, the wasps tensed, their eyes focused on her. As usual.
But then, when her face was no more than three inches away, they leaped at her. Acting in concert, thumping against the glass so hard, Kait could feel the vibration of the impact in her chest.
The jar rattled in its wooden rack, and the thieves’ extruded stingers left black smears of venom on the glass.
Startled, Kait took a quick step back into the middle of the room, lifting her hands in an automatic defensive gesture. Almost instantly, the two thieves fell back to the bottom of the jar. When they regained their feet, they again seemed calm. No, more than calm. Oblivious.
Kait turned to face Shapiro. “What was that about?”
Shapiro smiled. “You tell me.”
Kait looked back at the thieves, unmoving in their prisons. “That behavior reminds me of the way they act after they’ve been decapitated,” she said, half to herself. “Yet these ones are intact.”
“Ah,” Shapiro said. “But doesn’t that depend on how you define ‘intact’?”
As she pondered this question, Kait heard Malcolm shouting at someone (“Whacka!”), the squealing cries of the seabirds, and the never-ceasing sounds of the wooden ship itself, which was always creaking and groaning like a giant, living creature.
“Connection to the hive mind,” she said at last. “That’s the only thing that matters to them. It’s what makes them whole.”
“Ah,” Shapiro said.
Kait looked again at the thieves in the jars, seeing them in a different way. They weren’t calmly awaiting orders. Instead, they were looking for the opportunity to kill. To kill even those, like Kait, who’d been vaccinated, and then to die.
Which meant they’d been severed from the hive mind.
But how?
She met Shapiro’s gaze. “What have you done to them?”
“But didn’t you just say they’re intact?” Shapiro widened her eyes. “I don’t have the ability to perform laser surgery on bugs. Not for twenty years now.”
She paused, her mouth pursing. Then she said, “I haven’t done anything to them. So phrase your question differently.”
Again Kait paused in thought, staring at the cabin floor, damp—as all the ship’s wooden surfaces were—with what she thought of as salt sweat. Nothing was ever dry on a sea voyage, especially not after a storm.
A storm.
And then Kait understood.
Raising her gaze again to meet Shapiro’s, she said, “Okay, I’ll rephrase my question: What was done to them?”
The biochemist’s eyes were bright. “You tell me, Kaitlin.”
But Kait didn’t answer, not directly. Instead, she asked another question. “How far did the storm blow us off course?”
Shapiro waited.
Kait rephrased again. “How far are we,” she asked, “from shore?”
“Ah,” Shapiro said.
* * *
THAT WAS IT.
After all this time, all her experiments, all her frustrations, circumstances had allowed Shapiro to make the most important discovery yet about the thieves: that distance could disconnect them from the hive mind.
If a healthy, intact individual, or even a few, were separated from the horde, they would behave like ones that had been decapitated, or whose heads had been severely damaged. Free of the prohibition that the vaccine caused in every thief still ruled by the hive mind, they would attack. Sacrifice themselves to kill, to breed.
“It makes all the sense in the world,” Shapiro said. “I just wasn’t smart enough to see it.”
Kait waited for her to go on.
Shapiro tilted her head. “I mean, all their power? It’s not magic. It was never magic.”
Kait felt obscurely disappointed, even resentful. She found herself saying, “Then what was it?”
“It’s always been a matter of broadcast and reception, and that has to depend on proximity.” She turned her palms up. “Kait, there was always going to be a maximum distance beyond which the individuals couldn’t stay in contact with the mind. Of course there was. We just never got far enough away to see it.”
Shapiro, noting her expression, smiled. “Did you know,” she said, “that, right near the end of the Last World, neuroscientists demonstrated ‘brain-to-brain’ communication in humans five thousand miles apart?”
Kait blinked. “Brain-to-brain?”
“It’s true, between India and France, for some reason. Neuroscientists and specialists in robotics did it, using an EEG on the sending side and TMS on the receiving, and, of course, the Internet in between.”
Kait said, “Clare—”
Shapiro scowled. Then she wriggled her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said more slowly. “A person in India would think something. If I remember right, something simple like the word hello in various languages. An EEG—an electroencephalogram, you know what those were, right?—would read that thought as changes in brain activity. Then a computer would translate it into the word and transmit it via the Internet to the receiver.”
She paused, and after a few moments, Kait said, “Didn’t they use EEG transmissions that way, like to help quadriplegics operate wheelchairs and robotic arms? They’d think a command, and the robot would obey?”
Shapiro nodded. “Sure. That was at much closer range, though. This was the first attempt at long-distance communication.”
“And . . . ?”
“As I said, the Internet transmitted the signal to a receiver attached to the scalp of the person in France. From there it was sent directly to that person’s brain by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation, via a device first designed to spur the activity of brain cells.”
After a pause, Kait said, “Okay. I get that. But the recipient, the guy in France, what did he see? The word hello in front of his eyes, like on a screen?”
“No. Code, binary code. Flashes of light. But yes, in front of his eyes—or, rather, at the periphery of his vision.”
“And it worked? He could decode it?”
Shapiro nodded. “Yes, about ninety percent of the time.”
Kait took a while before she spoke again. Finally, she said, “So that’s how you think the thieves do it. Electric pulses.”
Shapiro nodded. “Basically. Each thief inputs a mass of signals, data, from those around it, then broadcasts it—and whatever it has to add—to all the other thieves in the vicinity. Who then do the same to others, who then do the same. All while inputting.”
“And this happens instantaneously?”
Another nod. “Pretty much at the speed of thought, I’d guess.”
Then Shapiro’s mouth twisted. “Once we would have been able to test that.” She shook her head. “I miss my toys.”
“Still,” Kait said, “it’s a web of communication.”
Shapiro smiled. “But not quite a worldwide web. The hive mind doesn’t have fiber-optic cables or satellites to boost its signal.”
She gestured at the quiescent thieves in the jars on the shelf. “Just take them far enough from the hive, and they’re as isolated as an ant whose scent trail you’ve erased.”
Kait took a step closer to the jars, but not close enough to provoke the thieves. For a reason she didn’t quite understand, she felt irritation flare in her chest.
“Okay,” she said. “So now we know how they do it. Roughly, at least. Yay us. Now tell me: Have we learned anything useful?”
Behind her, Shapiro was silent.
“I mean, Clare,” she went on, “what good is your insight—however . . . insightful—if we can’t figure out a way to use it against the thieves?”
She swung around to look at the scientist, whose face had suddenly lost all its animation. For a moment Kait felt sorry for her. Poor woman, deprived of her toys, trapped in a world marching steadily back toward the Stone Age.
Finally, Shapiro stirred. “I don’t know,” she said, and she sounded unutterably weary.
But then, just like that, her eyes sparked, and she looked like herself again.
“But all insights, all data, are useful,” she said. “Now it’s my job to find out how.”
* * *
NOT JUST YOUR job.
Kait stood in her cabin, feeling the ship scudding along on the long, unthreatening swells, a stiff wind blowing them back toward the coast. Soon enough, the thieves on board would be back in contact with the hive mind.
Her conversation with Shapiro had made her realize at last that she’d delayed her actions, her intentions, long enough. It was time.
Time to learn what Trey had learned. To see what he saw.
To understand the hive mind from within, and maybe be able to find a practical application in what Shapiro had just learned. To uncover a tool, a weapon, from what for now was merely knowledge.
Leaning against the wood frame of her bunk, she reached into her jacket pocket. By now, the feel of the little bottle buried there was as familiar to her as a set of keys might have been to someone in the Last World. Only this time, instead of just holding it in her hand, she withdrew it and looked at it.
From behind the tinted glass, the thief she’d captured on the beach stared up at her. It was very thin, with ragged wings and dull eyes. Kait hadn’t fed it, and by now it was near the end of its long, slow starvation.
But its abdomen was still grossly swollen, and that was all that would matter. It would die soon, this gravid thief, but first it would fulfill its last mission.
Kait twisted the cap on the little bottle and pulled it off. Inside, the wasp’s useless wings whirred. Its mandibles twitched. It knew she was there, knew what that meant.
Kait drew in a deep breath. She was so frightened, but she knew she wouldn’t stop here. Not now.
With a sudden jerk of her hand, she dumped the thief out of the bottle and onto her bed. It fell on its back, far too weak to fly, and as it struggled to right itself, she reached down and grasped it behind its head with her thumb and forefinger.
Then, not allowing herself any second thoughts, she sat down on her bunk, leaned against the wooden wall—feeling the vibration of the ship’s beating heart—and, with her left hand, pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly.
The thief looked down at her bare skin, then up into her face. Its abdomen pulsed.