“IT’S TERRIFYING,” DEKKA said. “I’ve seen bad things, way too many bad, bad things, but . . .” Words failed her. She shook her head.
Francis sat silent, as usual, watching the people she irrationally thought of as “the grown-ups.” Or maybe it wasn’t so irrational; after all, they were each more “adult” than the adults in the biker gang she and her mother had lived with.
Their borrowed brownstone had a small yard, and they all felt like they’d spent way too much time in casinos and hotels and planes. They were craving fresh air and sunlight, and at the moment the sun was peeking through clouds, so four of them sat on lawn furniture while Dekka paced back and forth across the brick patio and Armo did chin-ups on a child’s rusting swing set.
“Social media is in a panic,” Cruz reported, looking up from her phone.
“Over this Pine Barrens thing?” Dekka asked, frowning.
“Someone streamed video.”
They all huddled together to watch a fifteen-second video play. It was nothing but wildly blurry images and screams, all set to the soundtrack of machine guns.
“Don’t read the comments,” Cruz warned. “Half the people are like, ‘good, kill them all.’”
Shade said, “Not that I usually follow the stock market, but they had to close it down because people are freaking out and selling everything.”
“It’s worse in some places,” Malik said. “There’s video of something that looks like a slug three miles long slowly eating Shanghai. They’re evacuating the city—twenty-four million people—because the Chinese may have to drop a nuke on their largest city to kill the thing. People in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being inverted, turned inside out, if they disobey some character who calls himself the Supreme Caliph of the Universe. They’ve stopped the London Tube because something—no one knows what—is down in the tunnels spraying sulfuric acid on anyone who comes within fifty feet. A bunch of countries have been taken over by their own armies, and Rockborn are being rounded up.” He shook his head dolefully. “I don’t see the endgame. I don’t see how we ever get back to normal.”
“Normal is dead,” Shade said harshly.
Francis liked Malik. He was always very kind to her, always deferential when he wanted her to do something. Shade Darby was a different story—she was not mean or cruel, but neither was she exactly warm and cuddly.
“The rest of the world will have to take care of itself,” Shade said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “We’ve got enough on our plates.”
Cruz sighed. “People are saying there’s someone up in Harlem who looks like some kind of human-rhinoceros hybrid who’s just destroying storefronts for no reason. They’re also saying there’s some blue girl flying around, and a woman who grew thirty feet tall and started tearing open liquor stores and drinking gallons of booze. They say she’s passed out drunk in front of the Flatiron Building. People are taking selfies.”
She turned her phone around to show Francis a picture of a massive woman’s head, easily six feet from chin to crown, eyes closed. On her forehead someone had used a thick Sharpie to write Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum. Someone else had plastered a bumper sticker over her upper lip so that it looked like a bad mustache. The bumper sticker read, I was an honor student—I don’t know what happened. And those were some of the more polite ways passersby had amused themselves.
Francis was shocked, though she knew her reaction was silly. There were about a thousand more important things than worrying about a giant unconscious woman. But the sight of a woman passed out reminded her of her mother, and of her old life. Francis missed nothing about that old life, but she’d had no time to begin to cope with the reality of her mother’s death. Her mother had once been loving and kind and concerned before the meth addiction had relentlessly stripped away so much of her humanity.
Not for the first time, but with special urgency now, Francis realized that she was alone in the world, but for the Rockborn Gang. She had nowhere else to go. No one else to be with. This gaggle of strangers was the closest thing she had to family.
Dekka said, “You know it’d be easier to think about playing superhero if people weren’t such tools. But giant naked drunk women aren’t our problem, at least not right now. We could probably take care of the crazed rhino, but the bug guy is on a different level.”
Armo sauntered over from the swing set. “I got this Rhino dude. You want to come, Cruz?”
“Me?”
Armo shrugged. “I don’t need to be here for the strategizing. I’d rather, you know, do some superheroing.”
“And you don’t think I’m really necessary for the strategizing part, either?” Cruz asked him archly, before nodding and admitting, “Actually, you may have a point.”
With Armo and Cruz gone, Dekka and Shade both looked to Malik. Shade said, “Okay, Francis tried to look at bug man’s victims Over There. There may be something to what she described, some kind of strange laser link or whatever.”
Malik shook his head. “Over There is a jumbled world I can’t make sense of with 3-D eyes and a 3-D brain, so whatever Francis saw we can’t understand it. The truth is, it might all just be some kind of sensory distortion, an illusion.”
“Great,” Dekka muttered, still pacing in her slow, deliberate way, like she’d thought carefully about each step.
“But,” Malik said with a sigh and a significant look to Francis, “I still want to explore more, if Francis is willing.”
Francis had been momentarily distracted by a crow that had landed on the garden wall, but snapped back to awareness on hearing her name. “I’ll do whatever you guys think I should do.”
Dekka stopped, turned, and made a sideways karate chopping motion. “No, no, no, Francis. We each have to decide what our limits are. You have to stand up for yourself.”
“Okay,” Francis said doubtfully. “But I want to help.”
“You have something in mind, Malik?” Shade asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. I want to go Over There while one of you is in morph. I want to see what that looks like from Over There. I saw Francis there, but she’s some kind of outlier, an exception.”
Shade shrugged. “No problem.”
“Not yet.” Malik took Francis’s hand. “Once we disappear, morph.”
Francis was more prepared for the sensory weirdness this time, but still it was like stepping inside a kaleidoscope filled with the contents of a hardware store instead of colored stones. Malik had some kind of theory, she knew, but to her it was like what she’d heard some of the bikers say about LSD: jumbled shapes and colors and things that made no sense.
But now she saw Shade in the disturbing 4-D way, a series of bits and pieces, sometimes forming a whole, sometimes a tangle of floating, inverted body parts.
“I should not have to see a deconstructed version of my ex-girlfriend’s liver,” Malik muttered in paisley balloons, while Francis wondered at the prefix “ex.”
Back in the normal world Shade began to morph. The parts began to shift and move in no discernible pattern. Then, suddenly, like a Transformers toy snapping into place, Shade appeared as a coherent whole. But a very different whole—a human, yes, but wreathed in a kind of glowing field of fireflies or charged particles. Francis saw her chitin armor and her human flesh all as the same thing.
And then . . .
“Ah!” Malik cried.
Because out of nowhere, black cables shot into Shade’s head.
Each was as thick as a thumb; there were dozens, and as Francis gazed along the length of the cables, she saw that they branched and split, like a bush, a tangled mass disappearing into distant haze.
“Take us out,” Malik said, and a moment later Francis had moved them back to regular space. They appeared before a startled Dekka and a vibrating, morphed Shade.
“Shade!” Malik yelped in excitement. “Count to ten and run back and forth real fast.” Then he reconsidered. “Wait, have Dekka count to ten, not you; your seconds are too short.”
Francis once again moved them into the Over There.
Malik waited, and then Shade moved, as fast as she could within the confines of the backyard.
Malik held his arm out. The cables passed through his arm.
“Wow,” Malik said, and asked Francis to bring them back.
Shade de-morphed and said, “So?”
“I saw them,” Malik said. “I mean, not them them, but their connection. It manifests as a series of cables that go straight into your brain. And when you move, no matter how fast you move, they stay attached.”
Shade unconsciously smoothed her hands over her head. “Cables?”
“They manifest that way, but I doubt they’re what they look like to me,” Malik added.
“Then what are they?” Dekka demanded.
Malik shrugged. “Wi-Fi?”
“Wi-Fi?” Dekka echoed skeptically.
“I just mean they have some kind of connection that probably isn’t cables or wires but looks that way to a 3-D mind. I tried interrupting one but couldn’t touch anything.”
“You’re thinking the cables are the Dark Watchers,” Dekka said, and both Shade and Malik nodded. “And the cables only appeared once Shade was morphed. Okay. So, you two are the big brains: What does that tell us?”
Malik sighed and sat down in a lawn chair. He shook his head slowly, side to side, and almost pleading, said, “Shade?”
But Shade’s face was just as bleak.
“What?” Dekka demanded.
“Look,” Malik said, “you have to bear in mind my limitations Over There. Don’t assume I’m right; all I have is a theory.”
“I’ll take a theory,” Dekka shot back, irritated now.
“Well, let’s just say that the possibility that we are living in a simulation, basically a computer program, a manufactured reality, is not just a possibility. It’s now a probability.”