CHAPTER 8

There was a homecoming dance that Friday night, and that was not an event that I attended. Vince and Brit went and took a myriad of couple photos that would’ve made the sweetest candy store in America look unbearably sour. Max took the homecoming crown, as I’d thought he would. Emma had been asked to the dance by, of all people, Thomas Rivera. She ended up throwing her drink in his face when he made some crack about how hot she was now that she wasn’t limping. She told me that as we ended up playing some midnight Halo. Once she was able to laugh about it, somewhere around Tsavo Highway, Em said that she had to be the only person who played Halo in a homecoming dress.

So, all in all, it wasn’t the worst night.

I woke up on Saturday with apprehension brewing in my gut. I figured if Kree was going to find us, it’d be at a time that could best be described as inconvenient. Max texted me to say he was hungover and asked if that was a problem. I told him it was probably fine. Probably.

“Caleb?” Mom called, at about 10AM. “Someone’s here to see you.”

It had to be her, I thought, and when I reached the front door, it was. Kree was there in casual clothes, with no sign of her celestial weapons or armor. “Hey, Kree,” I said.

“Greetings.”

Part of me didn’t want to introduce this strange girl to my mom, and another part of me knew it’d be weirder if I didn’t. “Mom, Kree. Kree, mom.”

“Kree?” Mom said, smiling. “That’s an interesting name.”

“I’m not from around here.” She did not smile.

“We’re meeting up with Emerson and Max,” I said, before things could get any weirder. “We might be out late.”

“Okay,” Mom replied. “Have fun, you two. If you do anything illegal, don’t get caught.”

Kree bowed her head. “We will not get caught,” she said, in a tone of voice that would’ve etched those words into glass. Mom glanced at me, eyebrows furrowed. I shrugged helplessly.

Outside, Kree moved at a crisp march, like she had somewhere to be and not enough time to get there. “Hey!” I half-called, keeping my voice down so as to not alert mom. “Kree! Do you wanna tell me just how you found my house?”

She didn’t answer immediately. We turned the corner at the end of my street, and she headed for a beige sedan that I could only describe as unremarkable. I didn’t see anyone else in it. “Are you going to answer me?” I pressed.

Finally, she turned to look at me. “I know many things,” she replied. “Some of which you will soon learn. But for now,” she said, and it was like her voice echoed through me, “sleep.” And I did.

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I awoke on a cool surface, hard and unyielding, with a single word echoing in my mind—awaken. There was no drowsiness, no confusion. I had been unconscious, but now I wasn’t. Like someone—Kree, presumably—had flipped some switch in my brain.

Max and Emma were in the same position I was in. On our backs, in the middle of a circular room that had been forged from metal or carved from stone. The pillars made me think of some of the ancient temples I’d seen in history class, but they were square and angular. I sat up and looked around. No insights came to mind. Up above, orbs of light floated through the air, bathing the room in a serene glow.

“Let me guess,” I asked. “She knocked you both out, too?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Max said.

Emma nodded. “Yeah.”

“Great,” I replied. “Good to know we’re all on the same page.”

“It’d help if we could recognize the book, though,” Max said. “What is this place?”

A section of wall slid away with an electronic sigh, and in came two figures. One of them was Kree, clad in that same odd carapace and glowing armor that we’d seen at the diner, but with her face exposed. She said nothing. Didn’t even look at us.

With her, however, was a man. As tall as her, but much older. I had the impression of old leather stretched over sharp bones. A craggy face, with deep crevices and furrowed lines that suggested he smiled only under the pain of death—and perhaps not even then. He wore a similar set of armor as Kree, but with glimmering robes of that weird solid-light, and much more ornate. Kree followed just behind him.

“Greetings,” the man said. His voice was deep, rough. As if he didn’t like or wasn’t used to using it. “I imagine you have questions.”

“Goddamn right we do,” I snapped, before I could think to stop myself. “What the fuck did you do, Kree?”

She didn’t respond. The man said, “I would suggest you alter your tone, boy.”

“Yeah? Or what?”

“Or we may just decide to regret saving your life. All of your lives.”

I pushed myself to my feet. “No,” I said. “No more! No more of this cryptic bullshit. Kree promised us answers.” I pointed to her, frowning. “So give them to us.”

The man glanced at Kree, who nodded. He turned back to us and his expression didn’t shift an inch. “Fine. Then let us start at the beginning. When did you, all of you, last eat?”

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It was an odd question, but it was odder still that I couldn’t immediately remember. I tried to remember. I’d eaten recently, hadn’t I? I’d had to. But nothing came to me. I’d picked at food now and again, but couldn’t recall a single substantial meal I’d had. Not since the night this had all begun.

“And water?” the man continued. “Your species requires that. When was the last time you hydrated yourselves?”

Again, I wasn’t sure. I’d thought I’d had. I would’ve sworn I had. But now that I was being asked directly, I couldn’t think of the last time I’d had a glass of water. Surely I’d been drinking water. How could I not?

“When did you last relieve yourselves? These simple biological processes you take for granted. Since that night one week ago, have any of you, all of you, thought to check your pulse?”

Trembling, unsure of what was happening but certain of his meaning, I raised my fingers to my neck. I felt nothing. I pressed harder. Found nothing. I realized, with a terrible sense of understanding that I couldn’t hear the blood rushing in my ears. And hadn’t for an entire week.

“I don’t—” I said, looking back to see my expression reflected on the faces of my two friends. “There’s no pulse.”

“Correct,” the man said. “Because the three of you are quite, quite dead.”

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“We can’t be,” I said, a few minutes later, once I’d recovered. “I’m standing here, talking to you. How can I be doing that if I’m dead?”

Kree’s associate stood there with his hands clasped before him, unconcerned and serene. “Not possible by your laws of physics, perhaps.”

“Our laws of physics?” Max asked.

The man ignored him. “You were, all of you, exposed to a vast amount of beyondic energies. A form of energy that pierces the psyche just as gamma radiation tears through flesh. The damage is severe and, yes, permanent. Your consciousness is already collapsing, disentangling from your physical form.”

Emma, sitting on the far side of the room with her hands wrapped around her knees, laughed hollowly. “And that’s why I’m not all fucked up anymore? Because my mind and body aren’t linked?”

“Correct. You are disconnected, unstuck. Your present interface now risks total quantum disentanglement and absolute image collapse. Total existence failure. Unless this is resolved, your consciousness will lose all coherence and you will cease to be.”

“Bullshit,” Max said. “You drugged us, or something!”

The man shook his head. “If only. The damage introduced by the exposure, the errors in your psyche, will only compound on themselves now. That is, until your consciousness is torn to pieces entirely.”

“Bullshit,” Max replied, over and over. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

“I assure you, Maxwell Cheong, it is not ‘bullshit.’”

I knew it wasn’t. I could feel it in the back of my mind, on some deep level, in the recesses and secure places that told me that I was I. Holes had been punched through my mental tapestry, and it was all fraying to pieces. Slowly, and then more quickly.

“The thing in the cave,” I began.

The man shook his head. “We shall discuss that later.”

Later? Later? What did that even mean, then and now? Later, for me, was the rest of the year. Later was asking Em to prom. Later was being supposed to graduate. Later was supposed to be going to college. Later was supposed to be having sex. Later wasn’t supposed to involve phrases like quantum disentanglement and total existence failure.

“We have more pressing issues to discuss,” he continued. “We can help you.”

“What?”

“Like most forms of sentient life, your mind has been conditioned to operate on fitness and not truth. You experience what helps you reproduce—nothing more, nothing less. You must be synchronized to something greater. Arche. And then, through that, the Pax Systematica.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“A way to connect your consciousness to a new interface. One that will nullify the beyondic damage and, more than that, allow you to control what caused it. To manipulate the underlying nature of what you have, until now, considered immutable reality. You will be, all of you, as my daughter is.”

He unclasped his hands. Floating just above his palm were a trio of black orbs, orbiting each other in a frenzied dance. The light fell into them, shadows lingering in their orbital paths, and didn’t quite return.

“Symbiotes,” he said. “Pieces of Those Beyond. Non-local acausal entities that bridge the gap between phenomenon and being, two steps below what you think of as reality. Synchronizing with a symbiote is the first step along the Path of the Incarnate. And the thing that will save your lives.”

“Incarnate?” There was power in that word.

“You will join a long line of esteemed heroes,” he said. “The first of your species to do so. Like myself and my daughter, you will become members of the Order of the Singularity Incarnate. Defenders of the Galactic Star League and adherents of the Pax Systematica. That is, if you survive.”

If I survived? I had no idea what Kree’s father was talking about. If that was even her father. It sounded like something out of Star Wars. But I’d seen Kree in action, and becoming a superpowered badass struck me as a better deal than psyche cancer. And, words came to me in the voice of my father: if you’re falling off a cliff, Caleb, you might as well try to fly, because you’ve got nothing to lose.

The three of us were falling off one hell of a cliff. I looked over at Emma and she met my eyes, nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Caleb, come on—you can’t be serious,” Max said. “This is bullshit.”

“Is it? Do you want to take that chance, Max, after everything we’ve seen so far? Do you want to put your parents through whatever losing our minds entails? What about Lisa?”

“Didn’t you hear him? We might die now—like, now.”

“We will die later! We have to roll the dice now, before we can’t. Look,” I said, stepping forward, “I’ll even go first.”

“Caleb,” Emma said.

I shook my head. “We’ll be fine.”

“Just... don’t make a girl a promise.” She smiled like it was a joke, but...

I nodded to her. If you know you can’t keep it.

Kree’s father nodded to me. “Hold out your hand.”

I did. One of the black orbs fell toward my palm. It resembled nothing more than a single drop of crude oil, thick and viscous. It dropped toward my hand slowly, too slowly, like every inch it fell took longer than the inch before. It stopped above my hand, hovering there, rippling like it was alive.

“Focus on it,” he said. “Try to touch it with your mind. Do not recoil from it. If you do, you will die.”

I focused on it. On the slowly rippling surface. The way it looked like a single droplet, suspended in the air. There was something greater there, inside of it, through it, beyond it. As if a single drop of water led to and contained an entire ocean.

Then it pulsed, rippled once. The droplet—the symbiote—unfolded from within itself like a tesseract, like liquid origami. Oily black tendrils snaked out from its mass, spasming and jerking as if puppeted by a madman. Like it was caught in stop-motion, out of sync with everything around it—somehow smooth despite the spasmodic rhythm of its movements.

I’d seen it before.

“Do not recoil,” Kree’s father was saying, rough voice calm. “Do not recoil. Let it in. Do not fight. It knows you. It has been waiting for you. Become the pattern. The end and the beginning are one and the same.”

It enfolded me, senses fading one by one, like my body was collapsing from the outside in. Those tendrils of solid shadow thrashed and stabbed, the symbiote reaching for me. Forcing its way down my throat, stabbing behind my eyes—