10
CROSSES AND HEADSTONES
Darwin fell out the other side just as the hole disappeared. He lay on hard gravel that cut into his back as the filament of gray that had followed him vanished. Rough hands picked him up and stood him on his feet.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Carlos yelled into his ear.
Darwin recoiled, more at the ire the voice contained than at the volume.
“Do you have any idea how close that was? You saw firsthand what mistiming a hole can do to you. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I’d make it,” he snapped back, immediately filled with regret for doing it.
“You’re an asshole.”
Darwin followed as Carlos stormed away, another sharp retort forming on his lips. A hand on his arm turned his anger toward the person stopping him.
“Don’t, Darwin. He doesn’t need or deserve it right now,” Teresa said. “He’s already lost someone today, and doesn’t want to lose another.”
“We all lost someone we cared about today. He’s no more special than anyone else here.”
Teresa tried to take him into her arms and he pulled away. The look of anger mixed with fear and resentment on his face made her back off.
“I need to be alone,” he said, and he spun and walked away. There were too many people here, too many ghosts of the ones they had lost and left behind. They didn’t even have bodies they could bury.
A shout broke the silence behind him, followed by another and quickly escalating to many. He spun, straining to see what was happening, breaking into a run as the shouting continued. Right where he had holed in, a new hole was forming and was quickly disrupted by some of Carlos’s people before it had a chance to form. Ten more holes surrounded Darwin and were disrupted in turn. Another hole formed off to his left and Darwin spun to close it before realizing Carlos had created it and was pushing people through.
Carlos yelled, his words garbled and indistinct.
Several of the Threaders ran up the slope to him and, when they saw the hole, toward it. Darwin stayed where he was. The holes had started appearing faster, and with fewer Threaders, it was taking longer to disrupt them. One formed off to his left and threw his own Threads at it. The hole’s Threads spun off and scattered. What looked like half a hand fell to the ground. He didn’t have time to check as another hole formed beside the old.
Carlos showed up behind him, helping him close it. Someone he didn’t know sprinted up to report.
“We can’t hold them off. There’s too many of them, and they’re sending the Skends through first so none of them are hurt if we disrupt the hole. It’s like they don’t care how many of them they lose. We must have closed at least a hundred holes and almost everyone had part of a Skend on this side.”
Carlos nodded. “Have the people left throw up a net across the front and curving back here. That should disrupt enough of the holes to give us time to get out of here.”
“Someone will have to stay behind to maintain it.”
“I know. I’ll do it. I’m not losing another person on my watch.”
The woman ran back to the people disrupting holes and spread the message. To Darwin it looked like the net took forever to build, but no holes managed to form long enough to do more than spit out a partial Skend. All but the woman that came to report to Carlos dashed past Carlos and Darwin to the hole.
Darwin could See the woman was maintaining the net, moving it in waves to keep the forming holes closed. When Carlos tried to take over, his Threads were repulsed. Each time it happened, a hole stayed open longer and more of a Skend made it through.
“Carlos, enough. If you keep on trying, one of those things will make it, and then we’ll be in serious trouble.”
“I’m not leaving anyone behind.”
“I don’t think you have a choice,” Darwin said. “You leave her behind or you lose more than just one. Come on, we need to get out of here.”
“No, I’m not—”
“You are. You’ll get your chance to throw away your life another time. Now move.” Darwin pushed Carlos toward the hole. When he resisted, Darwin took two steps back and bent over, running his shoulder into Carlos’s midriff. Carlos fell back and Darwin continued his charge, pushing the both of them through the hole.
The person maintaining the hole fell out the other end right behind him and the hole closed, leaving the woman maintaining the net behind.
Another hole was only a few steps away. Darwin tripped and Carlos fell away, landing on his feet. The look of anger on his face turned into one of complete calm in the space of a single heartbeat.
“Why did you do that?” Carlos asked. His voice was as cold as the inside of a hole. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I wasn’t leaving you behind.”
“It wasn’t your choice to make.”
“Maybe not, but these people need you. I’m not going to let you throw everything away just because you’re feeling sorry for yourself.” Darwin wished he could take the words back the second they were out of his mouth.
Carlos didn’t respond, following the other Threader through the second hole. Darwin stepped in, not sure where it was leading. He came out the other side staring at a white F on the side of a hill, a mass of graves between him and a rusted wreck of a train.
Forsyth.
“They’ll find us here,” Darwin yelled above the din of voices all vying for attention. The room was filled with the occupants of Forsyth, most of them Threaders but a few who lived here because they felt it was the safest place they could raise a family. With the arrival of the group from the dam, those feelings had disappeared. Some of the families had already packed up their meager belongings and left.
Carlos turned his back on Darwin and continued to talk to the people that ran Forsyth. Normally Sandra would be here, but she hadn’t made it back. Darwin hadn’t been here when they’d found out what had happened, but he didn’t imagine it had gone that well.
Though Forsyth had a full complement of healers, Teresa had decided to join them. A sudden influx of injured could overwhelm the best of hospitals and an extra healer wouldn’t hinder them.
“Look, I’m not sure how they found us at Sunnen Lake, but they did.” As he spoke the words he remembered the Thread that had followed him through the hole. Was it possible to follow a Thread to its destination? He’d never tried to do anything like it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. “If they’re still looking for us, it won’t be long until they check here. We all know Forsyth is on their list.”
“So, the great Darwin can suddenly See again, and now he has all the answers?” The bitterness in Carlos’s voice cut the noise of the crowd even further. He didn’t seem to notice. “Your sudden abilities didn’t seem to help us much at the dam, and you’ve been out of the loop for a long time. Why don’t you be quiet and let the people that have been in this talk for a while.”
The words felt like a punch in the gut.
“We’ve been here for over an hour,” Carlos said. “If they were going to follow us, they already would have, don’t you think? It’s not that hard to figure out where we are, there’s maybe a handful of places, and any one of them would have been able to get a message to us if they were attacked.”
“Like we were able to when they attacked the dam?”
“Exactly like that. You do remember at breakfast . . .” Carlos’s voice cracked.
Breakfast had only been a couple of hours ago, the four of them sitting down, talking about finding a place for Teresa and Darwin to live. Mellisa had been alive then, and now Carlos’s whole life had been destroyed.
“You do remember someone coming to us and telling us the dam was under attack, don’t you? Or did you spend so much time trying to figure out how you could get away that you forgot?”
“That’s not—”
Carlos turned his back on Darwin. “Now, as I was saying. We need to gather the other leaders and figure out how we’re going to get control of the dam and the QPS back.”
The voices rose again as everyone tried talking at the same time. Darwin examined the faces around him. They all looked toward Carlos and the others in charge. He left. Maybe Carlos was right. He’d been gone for so long, maybe he didn’t have a say.
The air outside was warm and the sun seemed a bit too bright after the dim light of the interior. It felt like a year had passed since breakfast.
Forsyth had recovered after last year’s attack, becoming a central hub for everyone in the area. Unlike Chollas, it had grown into a true mix of the two different cultures of Threaders and normal people, proof that the two could live together in peace . . . something that he hadn’t seen on his travels. Despite the sudden appearance of everyone from the dam, the place still felt busy and full, alive.
It could all end at any time. Now that Ada had seen him, she wasn’t going to let him get away again. Not this time. He’d Seen and felt the rage that she carried with her, and for just a moment, he felt he knew her. He’d felt that same rage and hatred when his own mother had died. Those feelings had been toward himself. If he’d had someone he could point a finger at, someone that was at fault, he wasn’t sure his response would have been much different than hers. The difference was that he didn’t have the kind of power she controlled. Now, with the QPS under her control, there would be no stopping her. Carlos was right about one thing . . . they had to get control of the QPS back.
The last time she’d been in the same place, they’d gotten lucky. He’d felt the insanity that had plucked at both of them, and he’d had Baila to thank for coming out of it mostly intact. Ada didn’t get away that lightly. She’d lived on the edge of sanity since that battle, and it showed in how she’d accumulated Skends and followers.
He watched the Threads float down the street, their gray color moving through the world in seemingly random directions. By themselves, they were quiescent, just being. For all he knew, they had always been here, there just hadn’t been anyone able to See them. Sure, he watched as the QPS spewed Threads out into the world, but was that the way it actually worked? If the Threads were here all the time, and the QPS was what made them visible to some, then maybe the machine simply transformed them, shaped them into some visible spectrum. For all he knew, the mad rush of Threads out of the machine could be accompanied by a similar mad rush into the machine of Threads that hadn’t been transformed yet.
That would mean the Threads and their abilities had a quantifiable value, and one that would eventually balance out. Yet, when he had turned the machine off, the Threads had become non-responsive to Threaders, so there had to be more to it than that.
He turned at the sound of a throat clearing behind him. Several people had followed him out of the room when he’d left. Threaders who either didn’t believe Carlos, or believed in Darwin too much.
“What can I do for you?”
The lead man bowed his head, answering Darwin’s unasked question. These were true believers. “What can we do for you?”
Darwin began to turn away before changing his mind. “Do any of you know how to hole?”
Two of them raised their hands.
“Good. All of you follow me to the market. It’s got the biggest group of people in it, and is where most of the damage will occur when Salem gets here. I’ll build a hole to a place no one will think of looking for us, and take you there. Once you’ve got the place memorized, I want to start moving people. Tell them whatever they need to hear to get them through.”
“What will you be doing?”
“The same thing, at the hospital.”
It only took one trip for the first believer to build a hole. Darwin closed his and let the two work out how to get people moving through it and to show anyone else where to build a hole to. Several Forsyth Threaders surrounded them in the market, demanding to know what was going on. It seemed random holes appearing wasn’t a good thing. At least that meant they were keeping an eye open. The place wasn’t led by idiots. He left the explanations to his followers, trusting them to do what he wanted. He found out where the hospital was and headed there.
They were more difficult to convince than his believers. With Teresa’s help, he got them moving through the hole he created. She went first, preparing for the rest by making sure there was room for the cots and other supplies the healers would need. A few of them stayed behind at his request. They would be needed here.
Now that the town was starting to drain, he needed to do something for himself.
Darwin stood on the rusted buckle of the train cars running beside Forsyth, one hand gripping the ladder up to the roof. It was loose, some of its bolts long since weathered away by rain and sun and snow. Lying before him, the graveyard stretched to the left and right as far as he could see. Men, women, and children who had died in the war between Threaders and normal people.
Was it strange that he still thought of the people who couldn’t See as normal? Did that make him and most of the people he now called friends abnormal? He shook his head. That’s not the way it was . . . not for him. As far as he was concerned, the differences were the same as those between someone who could cook a masterpiece meal and someone who could fix a broken boot. It was just a different skill set. Sure, what some of the Threaders could do was almost magical, but once you knew what was behind it, it all made some sort of sense. Being a Threader didn’t make you special or better than anyone else.
The bent and broken crosses and markers in front of him were a sign of what happened when one group of people thought they were better than another, or when they coveted what another had. It was how war worked, how it had always worked, including theirs. They’d gotten lucky last year, and the casualties had been limited to those who chose to fight. He didn’t think they’d be as lucky this time. It had already started, with Ada’s crew converting anyone they chose into Skends.
Future graveyards would be the same as the one in front of him . . . filled with innocents who wanted nothing to do with what was happening. They just wanted to live.
He turned his back on the crosses and headstones and found the house Mellisa had used to train him. He couldn’t even remember what it was she’d taught him here. Was it the protection of blue Threads, or the attack of red?
In the end, it didn’t matter. She had been his first true friend here, talking and sharing meals with him because that’s what he needed, not because she needed something. Now she was gone, taken by someone on the wrong side of insane, someone who now had control of the QPS, and had access to all it could provide. His dad had made it all possible when he’d encoded his mother’s DNA in the damn thing, and Darwin had helped turn Ada into what she had become when he’d killed her mother. It didn’t matter that he was protecting Teresa.
He sat on the rotting kitchen floor of the house and closed his eyes, slowing his breath. It had been a long time since he’d meditated. Since Baila had made him what he had been for the last year, a disfigured normal man. But with the scars, she had also given him the gift of dance, and that was more than he deserved.
It was what had kept him alive.
This morning, back at Hoover Dam, he’d felt the Source come alive in his chest, the same as he had when he’d danced at San Francisco and again when he and Teresa were under attack after they’d escaped. Whatever Baila had done had only put it to sleep, and now it was time for it to wake up. It was the only way he could save the lives of the innocents.
As he sat, he went through the exercises Bill had taught him so long ago. He visualized the simple contraption Bill had made him study, worked through the breathing exercises and built them into his meditation. His body began to sway and his hands and shoulders moved in sync with his breath. The dance had become a natural part of who he was.
He felt a glimmer of movement inside of him, felt the Threads in the rotten kitchen respond to it. The Source inside of him woke to the movements and the memories and the exercises. Darwin stilled his breath and his body, waiting to see what would happen. The Source flickered, as though blinking in the bright sun after an afternoon nap, but it didn’t go out.
“Long time, no see, old friend,” Darwin muttered under his breath. “You and I have work to do. I hope you’re up to the task. I hope I am.”
The Source beat in synchronization with his heart.
The first shout pulled Darwin from his meditation, and just for a moment he worried the Source would disappear as it seemed wont to do. Even as he lurched to his feet, his knees complaining from staying still so long, it flickered again but didn’t become the lump of coal he had become used to carrying around. Like all Skend attacks, it seemed when they robbed you of your ability to See, the effect was temporary. This one had lasted a long time.
What Baila had done to him was more than a touch. She—her true self and her Skend self—had become a part of him, and it had taken time for the Skend portion to disappear. Now that it was almost gone, he was getting back to normal. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with the gifts she had given him.
Another shout pierced the air as he lurched from the house, the back door swinging on a single hinge, barely holding on to what was left of the doorframe. He ran into Forsyth, looking over his shoulder at the line of train cars before they disappeared from view. Threads flashed between them, the graveyard gaining new residents. Carlos rounded the corner and they almost ran into each other.
“Half the town is gone,” Carlos shouted as they passed.
“I know.”
The words stopped Carlos in his tracks. “What do you mean, you know?”
“I’m surprised Forsyth’s Threaders didn’t tell you. I have two men in the market holing people out of here. I moved most of the hospital. A couple of healers stayed back in case they were needed.”
The look on Carlos’s face changed from concern to fury. “I told you we had this under control. I’m getting tired of the way you work. This isn’t your world, go fuck up your own.”
“The way I work?” Darwin returned the anger. “I’ve done nothing except what you or Enton or the Qabal have wanted me to. Even when I knew better, when I knew that what you were doing wasn’t right.” He paused, not sure if what he was about to say would make things worse. “It’s time to put aside what you think I did or could have done to save Mellisa. Blame me all you want, but wait until this is over.”
Darwin didn’t see the fist that slammed into his face. He hit the ground hard, his nose leaving streaks of blood in the dirt. When he jumped to his feet, Carlos was gone. He brushed the dirt off his clothes and ran to the market.
He had lost two friends today.
The men he had left in the market still had their holes open, and a third person had joined them. Her hole looked less stable to Darwin, but it was good enough to get people through. He joined them, creating a fourth hole to Gaston, Oregon. It was the only place he could think of that Salem didn’t know about. They’d never seen him there, never heard the story of how Enton had holed them there when Chollas was under attack. Or so he hoped. It was the only safe place he could think of.
Sounds of the battle in the graveyard filled the air, and the lineup for the holes got longer. Darwin had to get someone to run down the lines and tell them to run forward and not to stop just in front of the hole, whether they could See it or not. Once they got to the other side, keep running for a bit to clear the space for the next person. The lines began to move faster and Darwin stopped his line and closed his hole, merging the people in his line with the next closest one.
The three here were moving people as fast as they could. What he needed to do was help the front line to give everyone more time. He was surprised at how short the lines were as he ran past them. Everyone would be out in a couple of minutes. His job changed to telling the ones fighting to back off and get out. Running to the market would be a bad idea, so he would have to create the hole for them.
The ragged front line had retreated to behind the train cars, as deadly fingers reached into the first row of houses behind them. One part of the line buckled and Darwin stepped in to reinforce it. His help barely made any difference, if at all. The Skends and Salem Threaders pushed ahead, breaching the train and cutting off a small group of Forsyth people.
There didn’t seem to be as many of the Salem people here as at the dam, but there was enough to keep the pressure on and push back the front line. Darwin yelled as loud as he could over the noise of the battle, walking backward toward Forsyth. The ones who heard him passed the message along, and soon there was a massive retreat, with the Skends pushing forward harder.
He built his hole, struggling to maintain it. Sweat beaded into his eyes and he could feel his grip loosening, his lack of Thread use and the oncoming horde weakening him. The first Threaders to reach him eyed the hole dubiously before one sat down beside him and strengthened it. The Forsyth Threaders ran through as the front line drew closer. Darwin knew they wouldn’t get everyone through. They would have to close the hole before the enemy got close, otherwise they ran the risk of letting some of them through, or worse, having them somehow find out where the hole led. Already, some of the Salem Threaders were trying to send Threads into the hole. Darwin wasn’t sure how it worked, but he knew the Thread that had followed him to Sunnen Lake was the reason they’d been found and followed so fast.
Only five Threaders were left guarding the hole now. Everyone else had made it to the other side. Carlos was one of the five. They blocked any Threads that tried to make it past them. Any that made it past were destroyed by the man who had helped Darwin stabilize the hole.
“Get Carlos,” the man said. “He won’t want to leave, but you do whatever you have to to get him across. I don’t care if you knock him out. His people need a leader, and losing him would be too much on top of everything else that happened today.”
“What about you guys?”
“We knew our fate when we stayed.”
Darwin gave a curt nod and pushed himself to his feet. He lost his balance and leaned into his partner, causing the hole to flicker.
As he approached Carlos, a red Thread pulsed to life, barely touching his cheek before it evaporated. The Thread had come from Carlos.
“Don’t fight it, Carlos,” Darwin said. “You know he’s right. This fight isn’t over, and the people need you.”
Another Thread reached for Darwin and disappeared before reaching him.
“Fighting me is weakening you guys. Every Thread they stop from reaching me is one from Salem they might let through. Just come with me.”
Another Thread, faster and a deeper red, lashed out. This one reached Darwin before one of Carlos’s men could stop it. The cut on Darwin’s face was deep, but he didn’t feel it. The scar tissue had taken away most of the feeling on that side of his face. He threw a blue net out, wrapping it around Carlos. A Skend reached out, trying to touch Carlos, and one of his Threaders barely stopped it in time.
Darwin reeled in Carlos. He was exhausted, and though his Thread use was rusty, he still had more strength than Carlos had. The man had been fighting for most of the day, and there wasn’t much left in him. As he got close, Darwin dropped his Threads and threw a roundhouse punch, uncontrolled and laced with desperation. It landed true and Carlos collapsed to the ground in a lump. He’d been wanting to do that since earlier that day.
Darwin pulled him through the hole and it closed behind him. Four more good people gone.