Apostles of Mercy

Book 3: Noumena

by Lindsay Ellis

Genres: Thrillers; Alien Contact; Alien Invasion

Synopsis

Apostles of Mercy is the new alternate history first contact novel from the instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal and LA Times bestselling Lindsay Ellis.

First Contact has not been going well. The nations of Earth are rapidly militarizing against the arrival of the Superorganism, an alien civilization that promises to destroy humanity before it can develop into a real threat. The Superorganism has done it before–to their distant transient relatives–and they could easily do it again. But the alien Ampersand and his human interpreter Cora Sabino are done with trying to save humanity from both the Superorganism and itself; to them, this is a civilization that does not deserve to be saved.

When a strange new form of communication between the two of them reveals to Cora how alien Ampersand truly is, she begins to question her blind devotion. But she soon learns of a danger that may force them to leave Earth before either of them are ready: a group of superorganism enemies that have been wreaking havoc on Earth for decades. Existence on the margins has made them desperate and bent on revenge against any of Ampersand's race whose path they cross. Before Cora and Ampersand can make their final escape, these hostile aliens stage an attack, and take that which is most dear to both of them.

Ampersand's enemies will not consider any form of truce; the greatest threat to them is not from the Superorganism, but from an increasingly fearful and violent human civilization newly aware of their existence. Cora and Ampersand must go to extreme measures to take back what was stolen and prevent wholesale human extermination–but in doing so they may be no better than the civilizations they are trying to escape.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

MAY 18, 2005

Lorenzo nearly tripped and fell into the mud as he tore out of his friend Jojo’s front door and into the wet street. The rain had come early this year, not that he would have stopped to grab his poncho even if he had brought it with him. He just ran, scarcely able to see in the darkness, flailing toward his house as fast as his legs would carry him. The rain was heavy, and warm, and washed his friends’ blood off him.

Philomena, he thought, feeling his pocket to make sure his rosary was still there. Lorenzo was of an age where the only reason he ever had his rosary on him was because his lola would be disappointed if he didn’t, but at this moment, it felt like the sole thread tethering him to this world. A demon had killed his friends. Now, it was coming for him. Prayer was the only thing that would save him.

“Philomena!” he cried as he ran. She was his mother’s favorite saint, and the one she prayed to most often, but that didn’t feel right. A distant bolt of lightning illuminated the street in front of him, and for an instant, it was as bright as day, showing him a clear and unobstructed path to his house. He sped toward it, not thinking about what it might mean to lead the monster right to his parents, to his lola, to his sister. But what else could he do? Had he not actually seen his friends effectively get dismembered? It all happened so quickly—before they had even known it was in the room with them, it grabbed Jojo, then Lito. He had moved to grab Jojo’s baseball bat to fend the demon back, but before he could grab it, the demon had brought Jojo’s neck to its mouth and—

Lorenzo nearly stumbled at the memory, still not truly accepting that his friends were dead. The demon only had two hands, and there had been three boys in the room; therefore, Lorenzo had gotten away, saved by virtue of not being as close to the window as his friends had been when the creature came inside, silent as a snake. It seemed almost impossible that something so big could be so quiet, that it could be on top of them the instant they even realized it was there.

Lorenzo made it to his house, slamming into his front door—locked! “Nanay, Tatay!” he cried to his parents. Why locked? They usually never locked their door, but they had heard of things, evil spirits in the woods, and started locking the door to calm his little sister’s fears. Of course—his parents didn’t know he was out. Hopeless! This was hopeless, and that’s why Saint Philomena felt wrong; she wasn’t who to pray to when things were hopeless. It hadn’t occurred to him because he had never truly experienced hopelessness in his young life. When he didn’t hear an answer from his parents, he cried to the heavens, “San Judas, San Tadeo, San Tadeo, tulong! Sagipin mo ago!” Save me, Saint Jude, save me.

He banged on the door, screaming and crying and turning his head every which way to scan for the demon. He didn’t immediately see it, and when the door didn’t open, he ran for the tree by the house that his father had nailed a couple of boards to for easier climbing. He stumbled onto the tree, climbed one step, then another. He turned around just in time to see the demon on the other side of the road, illuminated by a flash of lightning, blood still dripping from its maw.

This demon seemed more armored than the smaller one had been, which itself he and his friends had initially mistaken for a crocodile. If the bigger demon could be compared to a crocodile, it would be a saltwater one from Australia or some long-extinct giant species, nothing like the little ones found in the rivers nearby. Both of them had that grayish-black skin that looked like a wet suit, but where the smaller one had eyes that were black and empty, this one had yellow eyes that lit up like bulbs in the light of the storm.

The thing moved with supernatural speed and had traversed the distance between his neighbors’ house and his position on the tree in an instant. When he felt

it grab his leg, he lost his grip, and it was only his rib cage getting stuck in the V between two strong branches that prevented him from being torn from the tree altogether. He scrambled to hold on to the tree, and again, he felt a tug, more violent this time, then he heard a howl as the creature let him go.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that someone had attacked the demon with a baseball bat, his father had attacked it with a baseball bat. Lorenzo grabbed once more on to the bark of the tree, focusing on that as he climbed out of arm’s reach of the demon, repeating to himself, “San Tadeo, San Tadeo, sagipin mo ago, sagipin mo ago!”

The branches of the tree were slick, like climbing a giant wet noodle, and he nearly slipped a couple of times before he chanced a look at the ground. In those few seconds, half a dozen of his neighbors had come into the street, wielding whatever they had close by to take the monster down—baseball bats, axes, machetes, and even a couple of rifles. A dozen more neighbors were either getting their bearings or were on their way, flashing torches wildly into the storm, but none of them knew what they were dealing with. Lorenzo yelled at them to run, to get away, but his voice was drowned out by the rain and thunder and shouting below.

One man lunged at the creature, only to be caught in midair and thrown into a tree, his back making a horrible thud on impact. Another, whom he recognized as Jojo’s father, hacked madly at the creature. He got a few hits in, slicing into the thing like slabs of old meat before the monster grabbed him by the neck, hurled him to the ground, and tackled him, opening its jaws and taking one large, loud bite so hard Lorenzo could hear the crunching even up in the tree.

More and more men from the village attacked, which gave the monster only more and more fodder to burn through. Even a tiger the same size would have fallen several times over after the pummeling it had taken, but not this thing. It had nearly a dozen people lying at its feet, injured, dead or dying, before it finally showed some sign of slowing. Then one of the men on the ground saw an opportunity, and using his machete almost like a javelin, he skewered the monster right through its neck. It failed to grab the man as blood spurted out of the wound, illuminating the mud with red when another flash of lightning passed overhead. The man raised the machete and brought it down on the demon’s neck like an executioner—once, twice, and the third time brought it down for good.

Lorenzo wanted to stay put, away where no one could see, where no one could ask what he had done to bring this horror down on their village. His six-year-old sister, Clarinda, knew what he and his friends had done, but would she tell? Lorenzo scanned the small crowd forming a semicircle around the demon, but he didn’t see his father. He fell out of the tree, stumbling toward his neighbor, who was still hacking away at the demon’s neck. Another flash of lightning revealed how blood

blood the man was covered in—not his but the demon’s, and in the back of his mind, Lorenzo couldn’t help but wonder, What kind of demon bleeds like we do?

He saw his mother, too shocked at the situation to begin to take stock of the carnage on the road in front of their house. Others were trickling out into the rain, realizing that their family and neighbors were lying in the road, victims of the same demon that had come for him and his friends.

Then he heard his mother’s voice crying, “Rodrigo, Rodrigo!” with a level of despair that could mean only one thing. He ran toward her, hoping that perhaps this was an overreaction, that she was mistaken, that this wasn’t his father lying dead in the mud by the side of the road.

But it was. His father’s face was partially illuminated by the light coming out of their front door just a few yards away, as was the wound to his neck. The muscles in his face were slack, his eyes unfocused, and what the demon had done to his neck no person could survive.

Lorenzo wanted to say something, do something, pray for this to be undone, but he was rooted in place, still as stone and just as numb. This had to be a nightmare, because if it wasn’t, it was divine punishment, and now his father had paid the ultimate price for his sins. His, and his friends’, who had tried to fight demons. And now …

“Kasalanan namin ito,” he muttered as he watched his mother hunch over his father’s body, her back heaving with sobs. We did this.

We did this. He thought it over and over, like a prayer. We did this.

PART 1SHE’S NOT A GIRL WHO MISSES MUCH

September 23, 2009

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

—H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

 

 

TheGuardian

Kaveh Mazandarani, Political Lightning Rod and Brilliant Mind, Dead at 35

BY IJEOMA OKERE

April 20, 2008

The Iranian American journalist Kaveh Mazandarani was well known for much of his adult life—certainly to anyone following the increasingly invasive methods of U.S. intelligence gathering and the treatment of its immigrant populations in the years following 9/11. But the terrible circumstances of his death brought him instant notoriety, positioning him either as a martyr or a traitor to the human race, depending on one’s politics.

Mazandarani spent much of his career critical both of his native country and his adopted one. However, he always insisted that he did not see himself as a dissident but as a patriot—both Iranian and American.

Born in Tehran, Mazandarani fled his home with his family in 1979 when he was only five years old. “Kaveh used to talk about how the theocracy in Iran couldn’t last, because that kind of oppressive regime just isn’t sustainable in the long run,” an American friend recalled. “He often longed to return home, like any exile.”

Mazandarani studied journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, before receiving a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue his graduate studies in political science at Oxford. His collaboration with Nils Ortega exposing secret CIA black sites in the Middle East and Asia and uncovering mass human rights abuses earned him international acclaim and helped influence sweeping reforms in U.S. intelligence gathering. Like Ortega, Mazandarani was a lifelong advocate for increased government transparency, although the two drifted apart later in their careers as Ortega’s methods became more controversial and radical.

The final chapter of Mazandarani’s life began a few months before his death with a chance meeting with Cora Sabino, the eldest daughter of Mazandarani’s former collaborator, Nils Ortega. Only Sabino, the sole surviving human witness, knows exactly what happened in those seconds surrounding Mazandarani’s death, but this is what the public at large knows based on video and forensic evidence: Mazandarani and Sabino were alone in the San Bernardino County desert with two amygdaline ETIs, known to us by their “human” names, Jude Atheatos and Nikola Sassanian, who appeared to be somehow incapacitated, where they were followed by four gunmen driving two trucks. At 7:24 P.M., the two trucks suffered an electrical shortage roughly two hundred meters from Mazandarani, Sabino, and the two ETIs. What caused the shortage is still unknown, but given the circumstances (as well as the fact that the shortage occurred in the two vehicles simultaneously, an astronomically improbable occurrence), we can assume that the shortage was caused by an alien electromagnetic pulse, perhaps to stop the gunmen from advancing farther.

The gunmen, however, did not stop when their trucks did. They continued on foot and, between 7:25 P.M. and 7:27 P.M., unleashed 128 bullets between the four of them. Recently released footage taken by a U.S. Air Force helicopter shows Mazandarani trying to rouse Nikola Sassanian, the larger of the two ETIs, when one of those 128 bullets struck Mazandarani in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

Immediately after his death, there was a push for disinformation, that Sassanian acted aggressively before Mazandarani was killed or even that it was Sassanian who killed Mazandarani; it wasn’t. I illustrate this moment-by-moment recap of events first to dispel the notion that it was some sort of shoot-out, rather than the one-sided attack that it was. It is true that one or both of the amygdaline ETIs killed the gunman, but only after Mazandarani was shot and killed, and the instruments they used were, perhaps poetically, the gunmen’s own bullets.

In his brilliant final essay, published posthumously in The New Yorker, “A Fiction Agreed Upon,” Mazandarani makes a passionate plea for recognizing the personhood of ETIs while chronicling his fascinating relationship with Sassanian as his case study, arguing that humanity’s refusal to do so would only serve as the greater reason why our civilization may not survive in the long term, first contact or no.

Mazandarani lost his life because of his connection to an ETI, but his death was not at their hands; it was at our own.

 

■ 1 ■

Paris Wells looked at her watch for the third time in the last minute, her 2:00 P.M. now almost twenty minutes late. She’d made over a dozen inquiries to Cora Sabino, Cora Sabino’s people, and Cora Sabino’s people’s people before the girl finally relented and agreed to meet with her at a bar in the financial district. Not an interview, just a meeting, a conversation, a testing of the waters, but by now, she was having serious doubts Cora would show up. After all, she’d successfully avoided Paris for more than a year. Why stop now?

A no-show would almost be a relief, to be honest; Paris didn’t know if she’d be able to conceal her many and complicated feelings about Cora Sabino in the interest of unbiased journalism. When Kaveh had given Paris his essay wrapped in a neat manila package, he had told her to make sure it got delivered to his editors at The New Yorker “if anything happens.” She’d known then that whatever was in that manila folder could get him deported, imprisoned, or worse, but the danger as she understood it stemmed from the weight of his words, not the possibility that his head would take up the wrong square foot of space at the wrong instant. She never entertained the idea that “anything” could mean his death.

And now the last person who had seen him alive had agreed to meet with her. The selfish witness to a government cover-up who had a habit of fleeing when doing otherwise might reflect poorly on her. The careless accessory to murder, the reason Kaveh was dead. After all, he had abandoned his plans to skip the country for her. Because, as a ten-foot-tall space monster had told Kaveh the night before he died, she needed him.

“You who love her so dearly,” Nikola had said. “Who take care of her needs so well.”

She glanced out of the window and was surprised to see her—source? Interviewee?—her 2:00 P.M. arrive nineteen minutes late, scanning the faces inside the bar with unmasked dread. Paris stood up to make herself easier to spot—she wasn’t the only Black woman her age inside this bar, after all, and Cora may not even know what she looked like.

“Nice to finally meet you,” she said as Cora approached her, looking the part of a sleep-deprived college student played by a noticeably older actress. She shook Paris’s hand limply, took off her wool jacket and knitted red beret-looking thing, and sat in the booth.

“Can I get you a drink?” asked Paris, not taking her seat.

“Sure,” she said, eyes to the window as if she were expecting a brick to fly through it.

“What’s your poison?”

“Um, you can choose.”

“Okay—beer, wine, cocktail, tequila shots?”

“Cocktail.”

Paris ordered an IPA for herself and a whiskey sour for her 2:00 P.M.—the fancy kind made with egg whites instead of sour mix—while her guest continued holding herself like an abused circus animal relocated to a sanctuary that wasn’t itself a huge improvement. A couple of minutes later, Paris returned with their drinks, pushing the sour in front of Cora.

“You’ve been difficult to get ahold of.”

“I know,” said Cora tersely.

“So what changed your mind?”

Cora looked at the sour. “I suppose there aren’t a huge number of people in this world who deserve an explanation.”

Paris straightened. “You feel like you owe me an explanation?”

“I’m not saying I, personally, owe you anything. I don’t know you. But you deserve one, and I’m the only person who can give you one. So here I am.”

“Thank you,” said Paris, relaxing her shoulders and taking a long swig of her IPA.

“I know I cannot legally compel you to make anything we say off the record, but I would

ask that you keep this conversation off the record.”

“Of course.” Paris felt herself softening. Bleeding heart that she was, she couldn’t help but wonder what this girl had been through since Kaveh’s death to make her like this. “I had no intention of putting anything on the record.”

“So you’re working on a story for The New Yorker?”

“I hope so.”

“I thought you were an associate editor there.”

“Not at the moment. Indefinite hiatus.” Paris was unable to keep the bitterness out of that last word.

“What happened?”

“Well, sort of a one-two punch. Kaveh’s death alone I probably could have pushed through, but my dad died not two months later.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Kaveh left me some of his assets, thinking he was going into exile, not that he was going to die. But I had money, so I said screw it, I have to have some time to heal from all this before I’m able to write again.”

Cora looked at the whiskey sour she had not touched. “Who are you with?”

“Freelance Enterprises Inc.,” said Paris, pointing two finger guns at herself. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For Columbia. I was on the basketball team for a minute at NYU, although as you know, Columbia is our historical enemy.”

“NYU has a basketball team?”

Paris chuckled. “The Columbia team’s taunt for us was, ‘Safety school!’”

Cora didn’t even begin to crack a smile. “It was what Kaveh wanted,” she said mechanically, like she’d used this phrase so often it had lost all meaning.

“I hope they aren’t cutting you with tuition,” said Paris.

“I have a trust that pays my tuition.”

“Oh … does that mean—”

“My lawyers say I can’t disclose any details.”

Paris didn’t know how much of this was just natural churlishness, but her nonanswer confirmed Paris’s suspicion that the “trust” had likely been set up by Kaveh before he died. “I have to ask … I understand why you—they—chose Japan to seek asylum in, but … did you know doing that would effectively kill the Third Option?”

“No,” said Cora, almost cutting her off. Eighteen months ago, it was a practical inevitability that Congressman Jano Miranda’s Third Option, a bill that would have created a separate subcategory for “personhood” under which extraterrestrial intelligence would be classified, would become

the law of the land. Kaveh’s New Yorker essay froze it in its tracks, but Japan’s refusal to extradite any ETIs to a country that did not legally consider them “people” killed it. After all, you can’t try a nonperson for murder.

“It was purely about survival,” said Cora. “It had nothing to do with affecting policy. I just … they … Jude … neither of them were … they were both sick. I couldn’t take care of them by myself. I needed help.”

“And Japan helped?”

“A few of their eccentric billionaires did. Money can’t cure all ills, but…”

“And Jude has been doing better since—”

“Just tell me—” Cora cut her off, collected herself, and continued. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

“Well, if I’m being honest, it’s not you who I want,” said Paris coolly as she pulled out Kaveh’s journal. “Do you recognize this?”

“Yes.” Cora looked at it, seeming to be running through some interior Rolodex of what humiliatingly intimate details he might have written about her.

Paris slid the book across the table, and Cora looked at her like she’d just slid her the Necronomicon. “Aren’t you curious?”

“You said it didn’t have anything to do with me,” said Cora.

“I said it wasn’t you who I’m after. I wouldn’t be talking to you if it didn’t have anything to do with you.” Paris opened the journal to the page she had bookmarked, and Cora hesitated before looking at it. “Did you ever see this?”

“N … no,” she said. “They were his private journals. I never asked to see them.”

Paris held her gaze for a moment, and Cora quavered slightly before looking down at the pages. “It looks like a to-do list.”

“Two lists. Is there anything about this second one that you find interesting?”

“It’s just a repetition,” said Cora. “He always wrote his notes in a weird code in case they got confiscated, but he never showed me what his code was.”

“I know that,” said Paris gently. “This second list is identical, but it doesn’t have the strokes of a ballpoint. It’s almost like it came from a printer instead of a pen.” She tapped her index finger on the duplicate list. “I think Nikola wrote this.”

“Maybe. So?”

“Kaveh had this journal with him every time he was with Nikola at Los Alamitos, but he wrote his notes in his own feral-child language. It’s completely indecipherable. There’s only one person in the world who knows what these notes mean or at least what was happening when they were written.”

Cora looked at her like she’d just proposed opening a restaurant that served human flesh. “He’s hospitalized four people.”

“You mean besides the people he killed?”

“Yes,” said Cora, growing irritated. “The people he killed were killed, not hospitalized.”

“At least he hasn’t killed anyone else.”

“You want to push your luck?”

Paris leaned back against the booth and took a long draft of her beer, scrutinizing Cora, who sipped her whiskey sour like she thought it might be roofied. She was just so … sad. Not sad in a “boo-hoo” kind of way but sad in a “this is how eighteen months of international attention hailing you as a hero slash damning you as a traitor to the human race chips away at one’s psyche” kind of way. It was one thing to know that this cruel, uninvited sort of fame must wreak havoc on a body, but it was quite another to see it.

“Why did Jude turn Nikola over to the feds after Japan extradited them? They’re … space aliens. Why play by our rules?”

“Nikola killed four people. And I needed help—food, shelter, the bottom rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—I just couldn’t get those things off the grid with Jude in the condition he was in.”

“So they changed the law to extradite for a trial that didn’t even end up happening,” said Paris, chuckling dryly. It had cost the DA his job, and it was one of the most controversial decisions to come out of the whole mess. But there was footage of the killings taken by a military helicopter that showed exactly the order that the events had happened—at least one of those aliens surely had killed those men, but only after those men popped off over a hundred rounds. After they killed Kaveh. The DA knew that a trial would be a complete waste of time with such concrete evidence of self-defense, even if that self-defense had been alien telekinesis so advanced it may as well be magic. A team of lawyers had taken a plea deal on Nikola’s behalf, and he had been tucked away into a custom-made mental institution ever since.

“We didn’t know that would happen. It’s just, someone had to look after Nikola while Jude … worked on his own issues. Bella Terra takes better care of Nikola than we could. And either way, it’s a better setup for Nikola to be in an institution. Jude can’t look after him, he…” She stopped herself. “It’s good that Nikola has a facility that looks after him. Even if he’s a danger to anyone who enters it.”

“I’m not asking to help in his rehabilitation,” said Paris. “But he’s still the only person left alive who knows what was happening when these journal entries were written.”

“Okay, but … so what? In the extremely unlikely event that Nikola cooperates and tells you whatever he and Kaveh talked about—and believe me, he won’t—what good would that do?”

Paris finished her beer in two long gulps and placed it on the table in front of her, just short of a slam. “Julian hasn’t even been president for a year, and he’s already asking for a year-over-year budget increase in defense spending of 9.5 percent—that’s a bigger increase than after 9/11, a bigger increase than almost any year on record since World War II. And all this during the biggest depression since the Great One.”

She placed her elbows

on the table and leaned forward, causing Cora to stiffen. “We are living in a country where everyone is just taking it as a given that increasing our firepower will protect us in the decades to come from a hostile alien civilization, and you and I both know that’s not true. Right?”

It took several awkward seconds for Cora to give a stiff, forced nod in the affirmative.

“Kaveh wrote about a civilization that will strike first and ask questions later if they perceive a threat,” Paris continued. “But that threat may not be completely imaginary or hypothetical—if the amygdalines show up and we come out guns a-blazing, they have every right to assume the worst. Right?”

“How will talking to Nikola change any of that?”

“People are afraid to push back against what Julian is doing because they can’t offer any viable alternatives, because they don’t understand the existential threat we are facing. But Nikola does. Firepower won’t save us. I don’t know what will, but firepower ain’t it. We have nothing to lose by trying to push a more nuanced narrative. Worst-case scenario—the world burns in slightly less ignorance.”

Cora looked at the journal like she might be sick and closed it. “I imagine it would also be incredibly lucrative.”

“I imagine it would be,” said Paris, taking the journal off the table and stuffing it into her bag. “If I were planning on selling this as a book. For now, all I want is an essay, same as Kaveh did. I want to continue what he started. I think this is what he would want.”

“Well, there is no ‘what he wants,’ because he’s dead,” said Cora. Paris half expected her to walk that back, cringe, and withdraw into awkwardness, but she had turned to ice. “Any ‘what he would want’ that you decide on is just a construct you made up, because what he wants doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Actually, what he wants—what he would want—very much does matter,” said Paris, a plume of anger flaring at what she could only read as disrespect. “You just told me that the sole reason you decided to go to Columbia was because it was what Kaveh wanted. So how is this any different? Do you think we just go about our lives completely irrespective of everything that came before us? When people die, are they just forgotten?”

A glassy red film spreading over Cora’s eyes doused that plume of anger, and Paris reminded herself that even if her world had been demolished by Kaveh’s death, at least she hadn’t had to watch him die.

“There is some catharsis in honoring the wishes of the dead,” said Paris gently. “You’re right that we can’t know what those wishes would be for sure. We can only make our best guess. But we do it in good faith … because we loved them.”

Cora sat stone-still, as if any movement might unleash the wall of emotion she was holding back. Then the iPhone on the table buzzed, and her hand flew to it like a cobra. Paris didn’t catch who the message was from, but she did get a glimpse of the message itself:

Dear one, I want you to come to me.

The two looked at each other, and Paris caught more than a hint of shame. Either Cora had some new Ivy League paramour who spoke in a stilted manner that bordered on Victorian, or Jude Atheatos was feeling … better.

“I have to go,” said Cora, dabbing her eyes with the cuff of her sleeve. “I can’t help you. Sorry. You’re right about firepower doing more harm than good, but I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it. It’s just what we do. It’s what we always do.” She stood up, putting on her jacket. “Best of luck to you.”

“Wait,” said Paris, pulling out one of her business cards she always had at the ready. Cora took it and then froze as their skin made contact, and Paris couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been since she’d been touched by another human. “If you change your mind,” she said in the most compassionate tone she could muster.

Cora swallowed and nodded the nod of someone who had no intent of doing so. She put the card in her pocket and continued toward the door.

“Hey…,” said Paris.

Cora stopped but didn’t turn.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Cora’s head tilted, not quite a turn, and then she left without another word.

■ 2 ■

Cora closed her eyes at 2:30 P.M. in New York and opened them at 3:15 A.M. on the other side of the world. Ampersand never left the lights on in this upper portion of his house because he never used it, but sometimes she wished he’d leave the light on for her when he knew she was coming. When he’d asked her to come.

She sat up as the last of her semiautonomous plating slid back into the implant that hovered over her spine between her shoulder blades, unnoticeable to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. One of Ampersand’s conditions for letting her spend most of her time on the other side of the planet was a built-in system of transportation like his, which she carried with her in the form of a surgical implant. As with all her implants, it was operated by an ocular overlay controlled by her eye movements and which itself had taken months of trial and error (and many, many upgrades) before it became second nature, and even now, like everything he’d implanted in her, it was still effectively a prototype.

She felt at the incision where the billions upon billions of microscopic drones that looked like liquid metal had disappeared to—she couldn’t feel it at all. She stretched out her wings, trying to shake off the “jet lag.” The journey took about forty-five minutes, but even the ones that only took five made her feel hungover. Sometimes she had to enter Japan legally, but unless she had to deal with any humans (which wasn’t often these days), she usually came straight “home.”

Home, for now, she reminded herself. They had to leave Earth eventually. That hadn’t changed. Eighteen months ago, the two agreed that there was no saving this civilization and began to formulate a plan to save themselves in a galaxy far, far away. A major variable had been Ampersand’s “disease” (his word for his precarious mental health), as they could never leave Earth with him in such poor condition, but he had improved considerably since Nikola had nearly murdered him—enough that he was now starting to make coherent plans. They had not yet agreed to specifics, such as when and where or, most stressful to Cora, whether their plan would feature human repopulation efforts, but in the abstract, this was and always would be the plan. Japan was “home,” but only for now.

“Where are you?” she asked the house, which was dark and verging on uncomfortably warm, as per the amygdaline preference. “Are you downstairs?”

Everything upstairs looked like a normal man-made house because it was—their main angel investor, rock star Japanese billionaire Kentaro Matsuda, had gifted one of his many properties in the mountains of Fukushima Prefecture and put it in the name of a trust known only to him and his team of lawyers, but even they didn’t know about everything belowground, where Ampersand spent most of his time.

“Behind you, dear one.”

She turned and rose to her feet to greet him, lit only by the stars and the moon filtering through the giant windows of the house. Even now, he was still an intimidating presence, standing at around eight and a half feet tall and looking like a giant praying mantis wearing a mechanoid dragon costume as imagined by Steve Jobs. But it was the small details that made him intimidating: the odd placement of his shoulders, the strange joints at every junction of his limbs that screamed of wildly different evolution that arrived at some similarities of the human form—a bilaterally symmetrical creature with two arms, two legs, and a head with two eyes. She reached her hands around his neck, pulling him down toward her into an awkward embrace. Realizing what she was trying to do, he lowered his nearly nine-foot stature to her height, placing his hands on her back like a cowl.

“Are you well, my dearest?”

“I’ll live,” she said, closing her eyes and holding him tightly. “Did you message

 me to get me out of that interview?”

“No, I had some improvements I wanted to administer to your implants.”

“Oh…” She slackened her grip.

Ampersand pulled out of the embrace and regarded her. “But these upgrades are not so pressing that I cannot attend to your needs first.”

He guided her into the first-floor bedroom, and it took her a moment to see what he was getting at—no poking and prodding quite yet—they were going to have a moment to decompress. This was good. He was learning.

The “human” portion of the house was both extremely high end and extremely minimalist, consisting only of a kitchen, a living/entertaining space, a large master bedroom that opened onto its own balcony overlooking the mountains, and a smaller, presently empty office space. She’d insisted on there being an outwardly human layout to the main space because she’d assumed there would be human visitors, although by this point, only Kentaro’s people and her aunt Luciana had actually been inside it, and that had been months ago. Cora preferred the upstairs bedroom, as it felt, far less claustrophobic than his underground sleeping space that she had come to think of as the Lair. If the upstairs projected “humans live here, human human human,” everything underground projected the opposite.

Cora sat on the side of the bed, which was far bigger and lower to the ground than her twin-sized dormitory bed in New York. He placed one spiderlike finger under her chin, tilting her head up to look at him.

“Have you eaten?”

“Not tod—”

She didn’t even get the word out before he turned to leave to get whatever amount of calories he deemed necessary. Yes, he did effectively have a thermonuclear perpetual motion machine inside his torso that gave him his powers, but that power was ultimately finite. While sometimes it seemed like it would be more practical for him to use his telekinesis, most times when he needed a physical object, he got it the old-fashioned way.

Within seconds, he returned with a prepackaged protein smoothie, which she took, smiling in concession. Though her food aversion wasn’t as bad as it once was, it had never really gone away, and she usually just let him tell her when and what to eat than to stress about it herself.

As she forced the smoothie down, Ampersand positioned himself next to her, roosting in the deerlike way with his limbs tucked under him. He used to be so uncomfortable watching her eat, but now he would often stare at her

as though making sure the process was going along smoothly. It was as disconcerting as it would be if a human did it, only instead of human eyes, his were almost the size of footballs and seemed to glow amber with the light reflected in them; instead of human skin comprised of cells, his was an iridescent silvery white comprised of billions of nanites; instead of stubby human fingers, his were the length and size of the legs of those Japanese spider crabs at the aquarium.

It had taken some getting used to for both of them.

“What improvements are you working on?”

“An upgrade to protect your internal systems from energy pulses.”

He’d spent more time and energy on developing fail-safes against electromagnetic pulses than nearly any other project—not unreasonable given that it was his only major physical weakness. “Still worried about that?”

“While the upgrades I’ve added to myself should be approximately 98 percent effective against man-made electromagnetic pulses and 87 percent effective against amygdaline-made energy pulses, I need to ensure that the same fail-safes will apply to the systems I have installed into you.”

“Is this the last improvement?”

“Nikola could engineer better ones, if he were willing. I am a biologist, not an engineer.”

There that name was again—Nikola—and just as when Paris Wells had said it barely an hour ago, it sent a thrill of fear through her. Nikola, Enola, it didn’t matter what they called him—he was a problem and would be an even bigger one once they left Earth. Nikola couldn’t come with them, not as a free companion, anyway, but he could not stay here.

“I can sense you’re upset. How might I ameliorate it?”

She looked at him, impressed. It wasn’t often he put words to her emotional state before she did. “It’s just … it makes me sad, sometimes. Thinking that we have to leave.”

“Leaving one’s home civilization is a pain that few have truly experienced, but I am one of those few. The fear is valid because the pain is deep and never goes away.”

“It’s more than that, but I’m having a hard time articulating.”

“We are not yet advanced to a point in our communications where we are able to share consciousness. Regrettably, in order for me to understand what is causing you pain, you must communicate it verbally.”

She took a few deep breaths, trying to beat back the well of emotion that accompanied thoughts of Kaveh, at unhealed wounds that had been poked and prodded by talking with Paris Wells. Every waking moment the first six months after his death was a struggle to keep her head above water with Ampersand acting as a four-hundred-pound brick. Every day, a new scenario she had no idea how to navigate, and always something Kaveh would have known how to handle. “I knew talking with her would only make me confront how much I miss him, but … I really miss him.”

“You speak of your dead lover.”

“He had a name, Ampersand.” It was a linguistic quirk that amygdalines tended to address subjects by their relationship to the speaker rather than given names, but it did sometimes feel dehumanizing (for lack of

a better word).

“Kaveh Mazandarani. You rarely speak of him.”

“It’s just…” Heart ripped out at the mere mention of his name? Screaming agony medically known as survivor’s guilt? “I don’t want to bother you with it.”

“I understand why you still think of your grief as a burden to me. So many times in the past, I have failed you. I cannot promise you I will take the correct approach in addressing it, but I do empathize with your loss, and my desire to do for you what you have done for me is strong.”

She smiled; it wasn’t that him trying to comfort her was rare at this point, but expressing gratitude? Even tiptoeing up to an apology? A breakthrough.

“You are my protector and my advocate, and I am your caretaker. For now, we must make do with the limitations of human language, but soon, we will surpass those limitations. Soon, I am confident I will be able to exist inside your consciousness, and neither of us will be burdened with the need to explain ourselves through the medium of spoken language.”

She stiffened, now realizing what he was getting at. “You have another … run-through you want to do?”

“I am ready to try again, when you consent.”

He’d been frustrated by the limits of spoken language since they’d met, as he considered amygdaline “high language” far superior. At first, she had taken it for granted that their neural wiring was just too mutually alien for such a form of communication. But soon, he admitted that he thought it could be possible. Stranger still, he desired to do it with her.

She’d been terrified of the idea at first, but eventually volunteered to be his guinea pig. He’d been working at it for more than a year by now—creating digital maps of both of their neural networks, opening her up, operating on her, filling her with implants the function of which she only understood a small fraction. High-language attempts were always draining and at best left her feeling sluggish, at worst with a splitting headache. The last attempt, three weeks earlier, had been the worst one so far. She’d spent about an hour under the shower afterward crying from the pain while he seemed totally oblivious, treating what to her felt like nothing but if a migraine and a tsunami had a baby as some big success. His “successes” felt like being hit with a bigger and bigger truck each time, never like two consciousnesses melding and becoming one.

And this would be attempt number eight.

“You are anxious.”

She sighed, drawing her hands around his slender neck. The things we do for love, she thought. “It’s okay. I’ll be ready in the morning.”

She looked out the window into the night sky; the ground floor of the house was full of massive windows that took up much of the walls, out into the mountains that the nouveaux riches both of Japan and abroad paid top dollar

to enjoy. The stars were especially clear through those massive windows, but tonight they felt cold. They used to evoke a sense of awe, but now she saw an icy, empty future.

But an inevitable future because there was no saving this civilization.

---

“Well, it sure is bigger.”

Ampersand had built what was effectively a sensory-deprivation chamber, theorizing that the first several attempts failed because she was still too attuned to her own senses. The first try was a shallow pool of warm water the size of a large closet and was only big enough for her body. But in the following weeks, he’d scooped out more of the earth with whatever nuclear hellfire he used when she wasn’t there, creating a giant obsidian womb from the earth. The dim reddish lights he used down here made it feel like a darkroom.

“I’m curious why you made it big enough for both of us.”

“So I can be in it with you.”

“I can see that.”

She took off her robe and lay down in the water, exactly the temperature of the human body. It took a minute for the water to settle completely, and then for her breath to slow enough to where she didn’t really hear anything. She’d done one of the human-made sensory-deprivation chambers a couple of times for therapy, but unlike those, this silence was near total, and the first time they’d tried it, she was surprised she didn’t experience more from Ampersand than the usual splitting headache. And it was for the splitting headache that she braced as he turned off the lights.

She opens her eyes to a thin, gray fog, like it’s early morning in nineteenth-century London. Only this fog isn’t in a city, or the country, or anything familiar. She can’t see more than a few feet in any direction.

The fog begins to dissipate. The whiteness of the plane dims as the thing on the other side of the fog comes into view. It is the size of a house, now a skyscraper, now a mountain. It is looking for her, and every cell in her body electrifies with the instinct to get away from it.

She tries to run, but a tadpole could more easily outrun a speedboat. It is as if the ocean has risen from its bed to stand, only these aren’t the cool blue waters of the Pacific but a roiling, cold blackness, a strange nether region between oil and smoke, and it is reaching for her.

No, no! Help me, help me!

She tries to get away. She knows that if it touches her, even if it gets too close, it will crush her, obliterate her. This is a cold, black void that sucks the life from any and everything it touches, and it is reaching for her, close, too close, soon

it will—

She sucked in a deep breath as her limbs flailed about in the shallow, salty water. A red light came on, and she backed away from him until she slammed into the slick, black wall of the chamber, staring at the alien inside of it with her. This nine-foot grotesque that more resembled an insect than a human.

“Was that you?” she said, looking at the alien shell that stared back at her with its fiery, cold eyes. She saw not a person but a creature, a beast, something so unfathomably foreign it may as well not be made out of the matter of this universe. It had no expression, no skin, no heartbeat, no heart—it was the body of a machine that only aped the movement of a living thing. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember how she had ever anthropomorphized this thing.

“Is that what you are?” she asked. “Is that what you really are?”

 

 

THE PHILIPPINESTAR

Questions Remain After Palawan Bar Fracas Leaves 6 Dead, Injures 12

MANILA

APRIL 2, 2005

BY HAMMITHA HULSE

The sleepy fishing town of Bahura was turned upside down last month by a bar brawl that left 6 people dead and 12 injured. But given the paucity of details and relative lack of media coverage, some question if there might be more to the story.

Romeo Chavez, a journalist with Palawan Daily, first became intrigued by the fracas when he noticed that the families had not submitted any obituaries for the deceased. Last week, Chavez was denied access to the scene by local authorities. “I’ve made inquiries to all of the bereaved families, but none have responded for comment,” Chavez claims.

“Six dead at any sports-related riot would be a cause for national shame, but for it to happen in such a small, rural town is unprecedented. Why is so little light being shed on such a tragedy?

“The brawl represents the greatest loss of life at any sports-related riot in the history of the western Philippines, and yet we’ve seen hardly any national coverage,” said Chavez.

The bar at which the brawl reportedly happened is registered as having a security system in place, including security cameras, but police have not released the footage.

Local police have not not responded to requests for comment. ...