The Elders (27 page)

Shit.

Even if Eugene manages to restart the machine, I’m not hooked up to it anymore.

“Dude,” I yell. “My helmet.”

A shot rings out. My ears feel as if someone smacked each eardrum with a baseball bat.

My stunned brain comes up with an explanation: Eugene found the gun I’d thrown at the wall. He’s insane to have used
it, though.

There’s blood everywhere.

Thomas keeps attempting to choke me. I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or panicked that he’s alive.

“I shot him,” Eugene says, sounding panicked himself. “Why is he still fighting?”

“Eugene, focus on the machine,” I manage to croak, and then hit Thomas with an elbow. “If you kill him, you’ll make him Inert and that will ruin everything.”

My
move with the elbow does nothing other than position me in a way that allows Thomas to twist his body. He uses his momentum to execute a head-spinning maneuver—a Hapkido-style throw that, from my vantage point, feels like I just executed a perfect somersault. In the next moment, I’m on my back, with Thomas’s knees on my biceps and his full weight pinning me down. The nasty gun wound on his thigh might
as well be a mosquito bite for all the attention he’s giving it. His calloused hands wrap around my throat again.

I try to move, to buck him off me—to do something, anything—but he has me thoroughly trapped.

I keep twisting every which way, but all it accomplishes is creating a wave of tiredness that spreads through my body like the aftereffects of twenty shots of tequila. The lack of oxygen
must already be taking its toll.

Apparently emboldened by my weakening struggles, Thomas tightens his grip.

I begin to see a matrix of white afterglow and try to tell Eugene, “Now would be a good time to help me,” but what comes out is a hiss that sounds like a broken vacuum cleaner.

Fleetingly, I wonder why the world isn’t slowing down.

The last time I was on the brink of death, I phased
into Level 2 on my own—no machine required. Am I really not as scared right now as I was back then? Am I not as desperate? If I survive today, I’ll need to rethink my newfound bravery, if that’s what’s behind my Level 2 dysfunction.

I struggle to stop my body from convulsing, as every movement saps more energy from me.

My mind is slipping. Almost as if I’m in a dream, I feel a pressure around
my skull. It takes me a few moments to understand what it means. Eugene must’ve fastened the helmet back onto my head.

Eugene’s voice is right next to my ear. “I’m pressing it again.”

A strange noise follows his words—a noise that sounds like humming.

The external humming is followed by the strangest feeling—a series of uncomfortable taps against the front of my head. I vaguely recall reading
about this effect of TMS therapy.

Then I’m out.

* * *

I never thought I’d be this glad to have all my senses go away. I never thought I’d welcome the blackness and the lack of everything that is Level 2. If I had a heart in this state, joy would be welling up there right about now. As is, joy wells up in a part of my mind instead.

Hell, I’m so relieved that I’ll call this place Nirvana
for the time being. As unpleasant as it is being a naked mind afloat in this ether, it sure beats the alternative. If Thomas had beaten Eugene to it, if he had killed me, I’d be back in the forest, Inert and powerless to stop Thomas from choking Mira to death.

Some of my enthusiasm ebbs when I look around.

‘Looking’ is what I call the foreign sense that allows me to ‘see’ the starry entities—the
representations of other minds. It’s not truly vision, but I don’t have a better word for it.

After I intently focus on seeing, I make out three patterns that appear ‘nearby’—another verbal nicety.

I assume those patterns are myself, Thomas, and Eugene. Mira wouldn’t be there, as she’s not in the Quiet.

I look around some more.

Nothing.

What about the patterns representing Kate’s team, Rose,
and Caleb? Maybe they’re too far for me to be aware of them in this state, but what does distance even mean in this place?

In any case, the most important thing for me to do is save Mira, and for that, all I need is Thomas’s pattern.

I examine the three patterns. Though they’re as different from each other as constellations, the hundred-dollar question is: which one is Thomas?

They’re pretty
close to each other, so I can’t orient myself based on their positions.
Worst-case scenario is that I accidentally interact with my own pattern, because I would then phase out.

That I can’t recognize myself is frustrating, to say the least.

Reminding myself that I have no clue how much time I can spend in this realm, I decide to simply go with my intuition. Maybe intuition is what serves as
recognition in this place.

I let my intuition settle on the pattern I think is Thomas.

At first, nothing happens, but then, after a little bit of concentration, I’m halfway to it, without having traversed the intermediate distance.

When in Nirvana, even
I
can teleport like the Elders. Hey, maybe that’s how they got so good at teleporting? Maybe practicing it here will allow me to master it
in the simpler world of the Quiet? I decide to focus on these teleporting movements as I make them. Unbidden, a dark thought comes:
if there is a later
. After all, there is a chance Eugene’s machine will take my powers away
.

Anxiety overwhelms me. The emptiness of Level 2 amplifies it to the point that I don’t know whether I can take it. If I had eyes, tears would be running down my cheeks. If
I had a mouth, I might’ve yelled in frustration. Because all of this suffering doesn’t have an outlet, it’s made that much more painful.

Then I recall why I’m here. Thomas is about to kill Mira. I can’t fall apart.

Getting my turbulent thoughts under control, I will myself closer to the pattern that is, hopefully, Thomas. And then I’m there and ready to surround it.

As soon as I make contact,
I’m in.

* * *

“I shot him,” we say. “Why is he still fighting?”

“Eugene, focus on the machine,” Darren says, his half-choked voice full of terror. “If you kill him, he’ll be Inert, and that will ruin everything.”

Self-loathing over our stupidity overwhelms us. We throw the gun we found back on the floor. We almost killed our sister by aiding the Pusher in control of Thomas’s mind. There’s
no way Darren can override Thomas if Thomas is Inert.

That is, if Darren gets to override anyone,
we think, but swiftly dispel that treacherous thought. Of course Darren will succeed—even if this is the last time he ever uses his powers. We didn’t have the guts to tell him how precise Dad’s math is.

We decide to follow our friend’s advice and focus on getting him to Level 2. We rush back to
the machine and act quickly. Like a juggler, we push the device toward our fighting friends and, at the same time, begin reconnecting the wires we hope are causing the delay.

First the red one, then the blue one. Our heart is pounding painfully fast. This is what those guys who disarm bombs must feel like.

We finish with a couple of cables that only instinct tells us might be loose.
 

It has
to work, we half hope and half pray.

We’re about to turn on the machine when we notice something terribly wrong: the helmet fell off Darren’s head, and what’s worse, Thomas is choking the life out of him.

We reach for the helmet.

Darren’s face is purple. He has seconds, if that.

We grab the helmet and push it on his head.

Thomas is so focused on his murderous task that he ignores us as we
adjust the helmet’s strap under Darren’s chin.

Glad the machine is close by, we press the
on
button.

* * *

Okay, that was Eugene’s mind, not Thomas’s, which means trusting my intuition was as good as choosing at random. And that means I just took a one-in-three chance on Mira’s life. Damn. It also means my next choice has a fifty-fifty chance of being right (or wrong), unless I can think
of a way to distinguish the patterns. What makes it worse is that I need to choose quickly, since my Depth is running out at an unknown rate; not choosing will also result in Mira’s death.

I waver between choosing at random and strategizing. I spend what feels like an hour flip-flopping, with only a headache as my reward, proving that even a head can suffer from phantom limb syndrome.

Fine,
I’ll chose one at random then,
I think into the ether and choose the rightmost pattern as my next target.

“Please, Darren, not that one,” a familiar-sounding ‘voice’ states from inside my head. “That one is your slowed-down self.”

“Mimir,” I reply, relieved. “Nice of you to show up. You’re getting a knack for doing so when I least expect it.”

“You seemed on the cusp of learning how to identify
the patterns on your own”—Mimir’s thought arrives with a hint of caring and innocence that I suspect he’s faking—“until you almost exited
Nirvana.”

Mimir’s thought manages to convey a sense of relish for the new term for Level 2. He clearly likes it.

“So you let me agonize over this choice for my own education, is that it?” I send my thought angrily. “Is watching me squirm something you enjoy?”

“I did not have any evil intentions. You should be able to recognize patterns you’ve Read before,” Mimir replies. “And since you Read Thomas the last time, I thought you’d know him.”

“In that case, how do
you
know which one Thomas is?” I send. “You’ve never Read him, have you? Can you even do that? Read anyone, I mean?”

“I didn’t need to know which pattern was his, not when there were two choices
left and I knew which one was
yours
,” Mimir thinks. “Yours I know as well as I know myself, you see.”

“Is that why you didn’t stop me when I Read Eugene by mistake?” I notice he never answered my question about him being able to Read. I don’t bother pointing it out since I know he knows (by reading my mind right now) that I know he dodged the question.

“Exactly,” Mimir replies. “Until you Read
Eugene, I didn’t know which pattern was his. Unlike the last time we met, the location of the patterns couldn’t help me, due to the three of you being very near each other in the Quiet.”

I ignore him continuing to pretend as if we’re just talking about Eugene’s pattern and reply, “Fine, whatever. We can chat about this and the cryptic message you gave me on the Island later. Now that I know which
one of these patterns is Thomas, I need to focus on preventing Mira’s death.”

“I wholeheartedly agree.” Mimir’s response feels pleased. “You’ve learned a lot about patience, time management, and priorities since we last communicated.”

Allowing him to have the last word, I focus on Thomas’s pattern and teleport to him in two jumps, as I did with the others.

When I’m there, right before I enter
into the Coherence state, I decide to spare a fraction of a second to see whether I can tell this is Thomas.

I focus. Though my pattern is not enveloping his yet, it’s on the verge of doing so.

Sometimes knowing something can
be done goes a long way toward actually accomplishing it. That’s the only way I can explain it, because now that I try it, I
can
tell that this is Thomas, although explaining
how
I can tell is tricky. If ‘seeing’ is the approximation for the sense that lets me experience the starry neural networks, then ‘smelling’ is the best way to explain this new sense that tells me, unequivocally, that this is Thomas. Of course, I’m stretching the definition of the word ‘smell’ here, even more so than the word ‘see.’

Thomas smells of honor, integrity, and patriotism. How can those
abstractions have a smell? I don’t know, but those are the ideas that spring to mind when I register it all. The closest mundane approximations would probably be the musky scent of sweat from hard work, with a hint of mountain air, and a whiff of that new-paint smell from a newly unpacked flag.

Without any further hesitation, I evoke the state of Coherence. I must say, I’m extra glad I was able
to confirm that this is Thomas before I took the plunge. Not that I didn’t trust Mimir, but my new motto is quickly becoming ‘trust but verify.’

The familiar state overcomes me, and Thomas’s experiences come flooding in.

Chapter 24

W
e look over all the people who showed up at Kyle’s funeral, our thoughts a jumbled mess. To a very large degree, most of these people knew Kyle as little as we did, and maybe less so. We know enough about him to not mourn his passing. If we’re mourning anything, it’s our chance to learn a little more about him, good or bad; he
was
our biological father, and only a single person
in the whole world will ever get that honor. Not that this title is all that special. What really matters is the person you call ‘Dad,’ and for us, that person lives in Queens. That person may not be our flesh and blood, but he’s a million times more of a real father than Kyle could have ever been. He and Mom, our adoptive mom, are the best parents we could’ve wished for. Our longing for knowledge
about our biological parents didn’t stem from any sort of dissatisfaction with Mom and Dad.

Thinking of Mom pulls our gaze toward someone else—a woman who, if it weren’t for Kyle, would’ve gladly taken her place. How different would our life have been, growing up under Lucy and Sara’s roof? Growing up alongside Darren? Would we have been more like him? Or are we the product of our genes, as Liz
insists? That’s a frightening thought, given how much of a bastard our father was. Are we capable of the same evil as Kyle?

There it is—the crux of our turmoil. That and regret. We really wish we hadn’t made such a big deal of Kyle’s passing when Darren was telling us about the whole conference debacle. He probably thinks we harbor him ill will for killing our biological father. Truth be told,
at the moment when we realized why Kyle got himself killed, we experienced some instinctual negativity. Shortly after, though, during our drive back to the hospital, we understood that Darren had done the right thing. But since we said, “I don’t want to hear more,” we’ve felt a wedge come between us—a wedge that will hopefully dissipate soon. The good news is that Darren doesn’t seem like the type
to hold grudges, so with time, things between us should return to normal, as if Kyle never existed. This funeral is a good start, and we’re here in support of Darren and Lucy as much as for ourselves—possibly more for them.