Rush (31 page)

“You are intuitive, Miki Jones. That will stand you in good stead. And you are correct. We ceased to exist in a physical reality centuries ago. We are the memory and the intelligence of those who came before, stored by artificial means, here to protect our adopted planet from the Drau. You, and those like you, are our progeny.”

I glance at Jackson. His jaw is tense, his posture stiff. He’s too still, like the air before a winter storm. Something’s wrong. He doesn’t want to be here, but so far, I don’t see the threat.

Abruptly, he seems to come to some sort of decision. Reaching up with his free hand to tip his glasses high on his forehead like he did back at the bleachers, he angles a glance at the three figures floating on the shelf. Then he rests both hands on my shoulders and turns me to face him.

“A moment,” he says, and though he’s looking at me, he’s speaking to the Committee.

He stares down at me as if we are alone in this massive, echoing place, eyes crystal gray, swirling and bright, but cold like an endless winter lake. He’s locking himself behind his wall. I’m losing him before I ever really had him, and I don’t understand.

“Jackson,” I whisper, confused and afraid. “What—” My words die. I don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what’s wrong.

But I know with horrible certainty that everything is about to change.

He doesn’t take his hands from my shoulders as he leans close so his lips are against my ear.

“Miki,” he breathes, my name so soft I barely hear it. He draws me closer, until I’m pressed against him, the warmth and strength of his body flush against mine. “I need you to know something. Listen to me, Miki, and
believe
what I say.” His tone is low and intense, his words coming fast and hard, vibrating with tension. “When I saw you that first time . . . your eyes. I knew. You’re not like Luka or Tyrone. You’re like me. Seeing you, seeing that, it gave me the first hope I’d had in a long time.”

Part of me wants to interrupt with a flood of questions. Part of me wants to stay quiet and just listen.

“That hope . . . I had to find you,” he says. “And when I did, I made decisions based on what I knew at the time, not what I know now. Not what I
feel
now. I need you to know that. And I need you to know I’m sorry, even though you won’t forgive me.”

The Committee is silent, giving him the moment he asked for.

I stare at him as he draws back.

“Promise me you’ll remember that,” he says, his eyes holding mine.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I know,” he says, leaving me zero doubt that whatever this is about, it isn’t going to end with sunshine and unicorns. He doesn’t tell me not to be afraid. He only says, “Promise.”

All I can do is nod.

“Now ask them your questions.” He lets me go. He steps away. I look back at the three figures on the shelf who wait, patient and silent, for Jackson and me to finish our exchange.

I’ve had endless hours of lying awake at night, questions running the wheel of my thoughts, so although I have had no notice, no time to prepare for this meeting, I have so many things to ask.

“I can ask you anything? And you’ll answer?” I cut a sidelong glance at Jackson. He’s rigid as stone.

“To the best of our ability.”

I don’t bother with any specific order. I just start asking, figuring I’ll shoot the questions out as they come to me. “I want to see what you look like. Can you show me your faces?”

Light comes up like the rising sun, falling across their legs, their torsos, their faces. I gasp. The one on the far right is clearly female. Her hair is dark, as is her skin. She’s wearing some sort of white tunic and a heavy gold necklace that lies across her collarbone and upper chest. The only things about her that look anything other than human are her eyes. They’re luminescent, as if lit from behind, and I don’t have a word for the color—not blue or gray or brown or green, but an incredible mixture of all and none.

Beside her is a man with long, graying blond hair and a thick beard. His shoulders and chest are muscled and broad, his arms enormous. He’s draped in shaggy furs. I half expect him to raise a massive hammer and roar that he is Thor, god of thunder. His eyes, like hers, are an eerie color I can’t identify. Too bright. Too deep.

On the far left is a thin, bent form wearing a dark robe with a cowl that’s pulled up over his head, the edges falling forward to hide his face. At least, I think it’s a him. . . .

I glance at Jackson. He’s staring at them, his expression giving nothing away.

“What do you see?” I ask, not sure why I do. I just get the feeling that the figures I’m seeing can’t be real. They’re too convenient, too much like something out of a movie.

“I see three women. One’s holding a spindle, one a measuring rod, and one a pair of shears.”

“Wha—” I look back toward the three figures and see nothing but the shadowy forms that first appeared on the shelf. “You saw the three Fates,” I say to Jackson.

“Because Mr. Shomper was talking about them in English.” He shrugs. “Last time, I saw three characters from a game I was playing. What do you see?”

“Cleopatra, Thor, and a monk.” I turn back to the three figures, anger and frustration making my tone sharp when I ask, “Why pretend to show me your faces? Why not just say no? How am I supposed to trust any answers you give me now?”

“You saw what you expected to see. We have already told you that we are the collective consciousness of those who came before. We have no true form now.”

“What did you look like when you were alive?”

“We looked like you.”

“Like me specifically?” Of course not. I hope they’ll miss the pinch of sarcasm in my tone.

“Like you. Like humans.”

Which explains why the hazy forms on the shelf and those in the endless rows of the stadium appear to have human forms, even though I can’t make out details of their features.

“Why teenagers? Why summon a bunch of unskilled kids to fight? To die? Why not adults? Why humans? Why not whatever”—I wave my hand, not sure how to express it—“whatever you are?”

“You are what we are. Our progeny, our hope. There are no others. We were the last of our kind, and you are what we salvaged, the promise for the future.”

There are no others
. The horror of that assaults me. Complete genocide at the hands of the Drau. I say nothing because there’s nothing to say.

“Teenagers are ideal,” the Committee continues, smooth and unemotional, oblivious to the magnitude of what they have just imparted. Or maybe not oblivious. Maybe just accepting because there is no changing what has already been.

“Wait,” I jump in, my pulse too fast, my palms slick. “You can make us jump through time, forward and back. Why don’t you just go back and stop the Drau before they ever came to your planet?”

“You are here. You exist. We do not. We are gone.”

I try to understand that. I try to get how they can go back and have Richelle die seven months before she actually died, how they can make her live and fight for seven months after she was killed, but they can’t go back and fix things before the Drau destroyed their planet. I shake my head. My brain hurts. It’s impossible to make sense of this. But maybe that’s the answer. Maybe this whole getting pulled, jumping through time and space thing is so complicated that despite its advantages it has huge limitations as well. Or maybe their simple explanation, the statement that they are gone, is all it takes. They’re
gone
. They don’t technically exist. They can’t go back.

“Okay,” I say, holding up a hand, palm forward. I angle another glance at Jackson, wondering if he’s asked all these questions in the past, when he was first pulled, if he understood the answers any better than I do. He’s frozen in place, completely unmoving, not looking at me. Why won’t he look at me?

I swallow and go back to my original question. “Why teenagers?”

“Children are too young, too small, too weak. Adults have brains that exhibit fully formed neural connections. What you call
getting pulled
is far more difficult for them. Teenagers have valuable adult characteristics, but their brains are not yet fully wired in a set pattern. Adolescence is a time of profound growth and change for the human brain. The prefrontal cortex does not reach maturity until the middle of the third decade of human life.”

“You’re saying that a teenager’s brain is better than an adult’s? Don’t hear that often.”

“For the task at hand, yes. The adult response to a specific stimulus is generally more intellectual, more of a learned response. The teenager’s is more instinctual, and that is your strength.”

I turn to Jackson. He’s watching me, his expression taut and edgy. “On the last mission, you told me to close my eyes right before the flash, but I already knew to do that. You told me to get down, but I was already dropping. I have the same instincts you do.”

He nods, and I wonder why he doesn’t look happy about it.

“But Luka and Tyrone? They don’t have those same instincts?”

I’m asking Jackson, not the Committee. For some reason, I feel like it’s essential to hear the answers from him.

“No,” he says softly. His answer is enormously important. I’ve figured out that much, but I haven’t figured out
why
.

“Jackson . . .” I want to tell him that whatever it is, I’ll forgive him. But I can’t make myself say that. The last person I promised to forgive was Mom, and I lied. If there’s anything that I’ve figured out since the first time I got pulled, it’s that I’m still angry at her for dying, for leaving me. I haven’t forgiven her, and that makes the last thing I ever said to her a lie. I’m not going to lie to Jackson, too.

His lips draw tight at the corners. His eyes swirl, mercury gray. “Ask your questions,” he orders. “You might never get this chance again. The Committee isn’t always this amenable.”

I whirl back to face the three figures on the shelf, silent and patient because they aren’t really here. They’re the remnants of long-dead ancestors stored in some sort of database. Even though there’s only one voice, it isn’t only one of them talking in my head. It’s a combination of all their thoughts and ideas poured into that one voice.

“Why a game? A deadly game?” I ask, buried emotions bubbling to the surface. I feel cold, then hot, the burn of anger singeing me. “We
die
out there. We don’t all come back. What’s with the scores and the points? A game trivializes the loss of life.” It trivializes Richelle and any others who gave up their lives fighting to keep humanity safe.

“We meant no disrespect. We needed something accessible, something those your age could understand. We frame the battle in terms of a game to help those who are pulled acclimate and quickly come to terms with expectations.”

“But there’s no training. No buildup. You just throw us out there to die!”

“Not to die. To fight. The more you play, the more adept you become. And you were born knowing how to battle the Drau, part of our legacy to you. It is only a question of you accessing the information.”

I think of Richelle, a bubbly cheerleader who was badass, taking top place in all the scores. I think of myself, figuring everything out when I had to, even though guidance was limited. But I’m not convinced.

“You could still train us, do something to offer explanation, have some sort of proper chain of command.”

“Because humans do it that way? Does that make it the only way? The best way?”

I don’t know what to say to that. It just seems the commonsense way to me. Train new recruits. Offer information. . . .

Then I remember that Jackson and the others did exactly that when I was first pulled. They told me things. I didn’t believe them. Not until I saw it for myself.

As if aware of the turn of my thoughts, the Committee says, “There is no time to convince every human who is pulled, to argue and cajole. Better to show. The Drau have sent reconnaissance teams, the teams you face in the game. We have a few short years at most before they come en masse to strip the planet bare. To annihilate the entire population.”

“The entire human population?”

“All humans on the planet will be eradicated or harvested as a food source. Along with all other living species.”

My breath leaves me in a rush. “They see us as cattle.”

“You are flesh. Muscle and bone. To them you are no different than any other animal on this planet. You are meat. As we were.”

I shake my head, thinking it might be time to go vegetarian.

“You said we have a few short years at most. But you think we have even less time than that?”

“Yes. That is why you are training in the field. We send those with special skills to aid those who are new. You have been aided. Now your skills are needed.”

I press my fingertips to my temples. “Special skills . . . you mean leaders? Like Jackson?”

“Among others.”

The others being those in the other parts of the lobby, the ones Luka and Tyrone can’t see.

Could this be any more complicated?

Or any simpler . . .

The game, like any war game, has a hierarchy. There are leaders, who clearly have access to the most information. There are soldiers, who obey orders and are told things on a need-to-know basis. Then there is the Committee, the highest commanders with the most information, shut behind closed doors. How is that any different than any human army?

I glance at Jackson. He’s watching me, his expression smooth as stone. That only makes me more afraid. They’re giving me information that they don’t offer to every soldier. I’ve wanted answers so badly, and now that I’m getting them, I have the feeling that the price is one I’m going to find too high to pay.

I almost ask what that price is. But then, just in case I’m wrong, I decide not to. Instead, I ask, “But why a video game? I mean, what did you do thirty years ago? Send the troops in to play Pong?”

They’re silent. I think I’ve offended them, stepped over the line. Then the voice says, “A moment, Miki Jones. We are trying to access the answer.” A pause. “Ah. Pong. Your question is clear now. There were no Drau here thirty years ago. The first reconnaissance drones came eight years past. They will come in droves within five years at most. And Earth will be no more within a decade of that.”