Idols (16 page)

I wipe my face with my sleeve.

“Maybe it’s not you they can sense. Maybe it’s not even us. Maybe it’s this.” Tima reaches for my chestpack, pulling it from me, yanking it open. Inside, wrapped in a length of cloth, in the very bottom of my pack, is the shard. The one piece of the Hole’s Icon I keep with me.

Lucas and Tima and Ro stare at it as if it were a bloody knife. A murder weapon, which I guess it is.

Was.

At least, part of one.

“Why do you still have this thing?” Lucas looks at me strangely. I can feel myself getting defensive, and I don’t know why. It’s not exactly like I’ve been hiding it from them all this time.

Or have I?

“I don’t know. It’s a reminder, I guess. Of what we did, back in the Hole,” I say.

“Yeah, well, some of those things we don’t need to remember,” growls Ro.

I reach for the shard—and yank my hand away, startled.

“It’s hot.”

And not just hot, but radiating heat. As if it is lit by an inner fire. I’ve never seen it like that.

Something’s changing
, I think.

Yes
, the voice says. It startles me again—as it always does.

What do you want?
I look at the shard as I think the words.

That is ours.

To reclaim.

We move to unite ourselves.

“That’s it,” Tima says. “It has to be. They know it’s here, so they know we’re here. Like knows like.”

“She’s right,” I say. “It says the same thing. It wants all its pieces back.”

Ro looks confused. “But how? And why not earlier? Why is it only coming for the shard now?”

Tima shrugs—or shivers, it’s hard to tell. “Maybe the Icons couldn’t detect it until we brought it underground. You know, where the roots connect them all.”

She picks up the shard carefully. “If you think about it, it’s not so different from the ships being able to track Lucas’s cuff and the comlink feed. That shard is an actual piece of one of the Icons.”

“Like the severed rabbit foot,” Ro says, pulling it out.

Lucas stares from it to the shard. “Like knows like.”

I take in the scene around me, and when I do, I know Tima is right. The roots are expanding, connecting, twisting toward us. Toward the shard.

With every moment, the buzzing in my ears grows louder and the pain in my head starts to pound.

It isn’t only us. I see the Bishop turn pale, wincing with an altogether new sort of pain.

The Icon isn’t just reaching out for us, it’s gaining strength. If it keeps coming, connecting, growing—nobody here will survive.

Do you care?
the voice asks.

I shiver. The voice can now find me without my trying to connect to it. It’s like a network I can’t extricate myself from—like the comlink we so desperately tried to find and repair.

Only, now I’d give anything to disable it.

Do the lives of other creatures trouble you?

Curious.

Why?

The Bishop, sweating, looks around the room, where Belter soldiers with fear in their eyes prepare for a fight they have no chance of winning. “Then it’s settled. You’ve got to get out of here.” He offers me a shotgun, tosses another to Lucas. Ro slings his own weapon over his shoulder.

“No.” Lucas looks at the Bishop. “We can’t leave you.” He presses one palm against his ear as he speaks. The buzzing is only growing louder.

Ro steps up. “For once, I’m with Buttons. We’re getting you out of here.” He’s hurting too, but he won’t show it—except for the tight clench of his fists.

Reluctantly, I take the gun the Bishop is holding out to me.

“Now give me that thing.” The Bishop takes the shard from Tima, slipping it into his own pack. “I’m going to take this piece of No Face calamari and go deep. Try to draw this thing, whatever it is, down and away from the entrances. Away from you.”

“Are you crazy?” I can’t stand to listen.

He smiles. “Absolutely. I’ll head west to the tunnels. You head east to the exit through the mine shafts. If this works, you may still make it out.”

I don’t know what to say. “What are you going to tell your men?”

The Bishop pinches my dirty cheek. “I’m going to tell them thanks. And that it was an honor. And that we’re doing it for a good cause—and for a Grassgirl who just might save the world.”

He reaches for me and I pull him into a tight hug. “That’s you, by the way.”

“It was an honor,” I murmur into his ear. He pulls away, once again the soldier.

“Now go save the world.” And with that, the Bishop is gone.

From that moment on, everything starts to blur, though what I can see is burned in my mind, vivid as flame.

We move through the interior of the mountain in the darkness.

None of it seems real.

One minute, people are screaming, running toward the tunnels.

Then, the next—starting with the old and the young—people are dropping in place.

Silenced. Motionless. Lifeless.

The pulsing pain of the Icons grows in my mind.

I can’t help them.

I can’t stop running.

It happens in slow motion. It happens in fast motion.

It’s like I’m not really there. It’s like I’m the only one there.

I don’t know where to look. I’m too terrified to look anywhere at all.

So when the ground starts splitting all around me, I don’t see the cause.

I don’t see the blast that hits the ceiling just above me, the Icon roots penetrating, growing downward.

I don’t see the boulder-sized chunks of rock and plaster and plumbing pipes and retaining walls that smash like fireworks and rain down on me as if they’re falling from the sky.

I feel it, though.

Part of a support beam strikes me on the head and I fall in place, neatly, where I thought I was running.

Now I’m not running.

I sink and fold, like a puppet.

Not a person
, I think.

None of this seems like it is happening to real people.
To my friends. To the Bishop. To me.

As I black out, I hear the voice from my dreams. The bird with the voice.

It’s waiting for me, even now.

Curious. Probing. Present.

Will you survive this too?

Will I?

You do not fight. You save your strength. You hide.

That is wise.

I know.

I know because it is what I do.

I know because I am here for you and I have come a long, long way.

I open my eyes to see death as it is happening. I see the end of life, everywhere I look.

The tunnels are collapsing. Belters are falling all around me. So is rubble from the mountain itself.

We’re going to die here
, I think.
This is the end of our story. This is how it goes.

Not The Day. Just some day. Today.

Thick gray smoke billows and drifts in and out of my view. My ears are ringing, and I can’t seem to keep my eyes open. Everything is blurry, but even so—I see them.

I see Lucas, stumbling to his knees, holding a seeping red flower that blooms from the side of his stomach, picking a scrap of fallen metal from the soft skin of his own body.

I see a man with a tendril of black obsidian impaling his chest.

I recognize the silver marks of rank on his collar, like the Bishop’s.

The birds that I now know won’t really come back.

Not for him.

He’s already gone.

I think of the Bishop, who made his way down instead of up, running toward his own death just so he could draw this creeping black death away from us.

I wonder if it’s over for him yet.

The mountain is collapsing from the inside, the heart of the mountain being destroyed as the heart of the Bishop is stilled.

Nobody is walking out of here but us.

Not people, not birds, nothing.

Damn birds.

A pig and a Padre and now a Bishop too
, I think.
The Calderón brothers, both now as Silent as a City.

And my parents and Ro’s parents and whole Silent Cities of parents.

I want to cry but I know there is not time.

I feel like I have to die instead. Like what I have seen, what I know, is poison. It leaches into me, spreading through every cell in my body, every hair, every breath—and there is nothing I can do to get away.

To not see what I have seen.

To not know what I know.

My fingers curl around one silver bird before I know what I am doing. I tug it free from the dead man’s collar.

To remember hope, now that it is gone.

People are turning to dust and shadows and nothing, all around me. I crawl between bodies until I find an empty truck. I drag myself into the space between the car and the floor.

Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass The Lords The Hole. Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass The Lords The Hole. Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass The Lords The Hole.

It doesn’t help. Not anymore.

I curl there in a ball, shaking. I pull my hands over my ears, closing my eyes until the shaking and the noise and the Icon stop.

Waiting.

Until the pain dies down. Until the smoke clears.

Until the voices in my head quiet.

“Dol. Listen to me. Get up. Run.” It’s Ro, forcing me to go on, to do what he says. What he does. To live.

So I do. I follow Ro’s voice out of the dark.

I clutch the silver bird in my fist and follow—until my fingers bleed and my footsteps stop and the Idylls are no more.

Hope isn’t the thing with feathers.

It’s not a thing at all.

Not anymore.

GENERAL EMBASSY DISPATCH: EASTASIA SUBSTATION

MARKED URGENT

MARKED EYES ONLY

Internal Investigative Subcommittee IIS211B

RE: The Incident at SEA Colonies

Note: Contact Jasmine3k, Virt. Hybrid Human 39261.SEA, Laboratory Assistant to Dr. E. Yang, for future commentary, as necessary.

PRIVATE RESEARCH NOTES

P
AULO
F
ORTISSIMO

03/08/2048

P
ERSES’S “CARGO” IS EXTREMELY TROUBLING
. I
F MY ANALYSIS IS CORRECT (HAH!) AND
N
ULL IN FACT HAS DEVICES WITH THE ABILITY TO SHUT DOWN ALL ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY, DOWN TO THE CHEMICAL/BIOLOGICAL LEVEL, WE ARE WELL AND TRULY DOOMED
. U
NFORTUNATELY
, D
OC HAS CLEARLY ESTABLISHED THAT ON A GRAND SCALE, MANUFACTURING LARGE COUNTERMEASURES TO
N
ULL’S “DEVICES” IS NOT FEASIBLE
. T
HE ENERGY REQUIRED TOO GREAT, TOO MANY UNKNOWNS
.