Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3) (13 page)

Chapter 15

“Shh!” Sarah pressed
her fingers to her lips and waved her hand for me to quit dismantling the tripod.

I froze, and the ruckus of clinks went silent.

Her gaze darted around the room.

“What?” I whispered.

She shook her head, hushing me again. I listened too, straining to hear past the silence. I’d only just begun to process what it meant to be in orbit around a black hole. Would we fall in and be crushed by the gravity? I shuddered at the thought.

Slowly, Sarah lowered her finger. “Never mind. I just . . . I thought I heard something.”

“What? Where?”

“It was nothing. Let’s just get down to the shelter.”

“Okay.” I finished packing up the telescope, quieter this time.

Together, we tiptoed to the door and slunk down the stairs to the first floor, the stairs squeaking under our feet. The lantern flung our shadows across the ceiling.

Sarah threw out an arm, halting me at the bottom step. The tripod legs clanged into the wall.

“
Shh
,” she hissed, clicking off the lantern.

“What is it?”

She threw back a glare and jabbed her finger to her lips.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered.

She leaned back and whispered in my ear, “I think . . . there’s something . . . in the house.”

A terrified tremor shot through my heart. “What do we do?” I mouthed.

“Follow me,” she said. “To the shelter. Quickly.” She spun and darted into the foyer, leaving me choking on fear.
Wait!
I ran after her, adrenaline buzzing in my ears.

We cut through the dining room into the kitchen, swimming in near pitch black, then slunk down the stairs to the subterranean level. Groping along walls, we crept down the corridor. A dim rectangle loomed ahead of us, the shelter—

A small, humanoid figure stood in the rectangle.

My heart clawed into my throat. “Sarah!” I squeaked, grabbing her arm. She hadn’t seen it. “Sarah,” I wheezed, too terrified to speak, “
look
 . . .”

She froze, limbs tensed.

Sarah fumbled with the lantern and clicked it on again. Blinding light filled the corridor, but if anything, the tiny humanoid figure became harder to see, its limbs scarcely blurs, its torso only vague lumps.

Its fuzzy head held no features, yet I got the sense it was staring at us.

Watching
us
.

A petrifying chill crawled down my spine. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

Beyond the open blast door glinted the food pallets, the jugs of water, the propane tank. All our supplies. Our beds.

The creature floated through the blast door into our shelter.

“No . . .
NO!
” Sarah screamed, lunging forward. “Don’t let it go in there!”

Her yells startled me into action, and I ran after her, pulled ahead, somehow knowing I had to beat the creature inside—

The blast door slammed shut in my face, and my body crunched into the steel, Sarah smashed into my back.

Beyond thinking, I wrestled the door open again and darted inside—only to trip on the bottom riser of a concrete staircase, scraping my palms. A rectangle of starry sky floated at the top, which I already knew led to the backyard.

This was the rear exit out of the bomb shelter.

I turned and looked behind me, pulse drumming in my ears. Sarah stood in the entrance, face ashen.

Where was the shelter?

The entrance led straight to the exit, no shelter in between.

I looked around again. “Where’d it go?”

“It’s gone,” Sarah said softly.

“What do you mean,
gone?
” I repeated.

“That was everything,” she said. “All our food, all our water. That was everything we had.”

“No, it can’t just be gone,” I said, an ache forming deep in my throat. “It can’t just be gone. There was a whole room here, all our stuff, my cell phone . . .
her diary
—” I choked on the words. “It can’t just be gone.”

But it was gone.

Five seconds ago, the first blast door had opened into a cavernous chamber filled with a year’s worth of supplies. The second blast door, at the back of the chamber, had led out into the backyard.

Now the first blast door and the second blast door had become the same door. The entire room in between—along with all our food and water—was gone.

At the top of the stairs, the blurry humanoid shape shifted against the stars and moved out of view.

“It’s still here,”
I whispered, needles pricking my back. “It’s right there, I can just see it. It’s leaving . . .”

“Get back inside,” said Sarah.

“We could follow it,” I said, my heart thudding at the prospect. “We could see where it goes . . . try to get our stuff back.”

“Not a good idea.”

“It can’t just erase our food like that,” I growled.

“Leona, get back inside before it erases you too,” she said.

“No, I’m following it,” I announced, and before I could change my mind, I charged up the stairs into starlight.

It had vanished.

Nothing moved in the backyard but the shadow of a tree branch swaying gently in the wind. Except there was no wind.

As I strained to make sense of the movement, something clicked in my brain and the creepy human shape materialized against the backdrop of grass, slithering away from me.

It drifted around the edge of the building, heading toward the street.

“Leona!” Sarah hissed behind me.

I ignored her, darted to the side of the house and crouched behind a bush, then darted out to the next in line, keeping out of sight.

My lungs bristled with electric adrenaline. The creature slipped out of view, and I sprinted around the corner in hot pursuit and flattened myself against the wood paneling.

Against the pale street, its smoky silhouette stood out more clearly, and I edged along the side yard after it.

It began walking down the road, limbs blurring in and out of focus. Where was it going?

Skirting along the neighbor’s hedge, I kept it in my sights, my pulse getting louder and louder. As I watched, the creature drifted toward the opposite curb and slithered into a storm drain.

I blinked at the empty street.

It goes into the sewers.

“No, you’re not following it down there,” Sarah breathed in my ear, nearly making me jump out of my skin. She’d appeared right next to me. “We need to get back inside. Next time, you need to listen to me.”

“What
is
that thing?” I asked, peeling my eyes off the storm drain and letting out a shiver.

“It’s been following me since I got here,” she said, turning back to Major Connor’s house. “It’s been trying to eat my soul so it can take over my body on Earth.”

“All I know
is it’s some kind of life form.” Hands shaking, Sarah sealed the remaining blast door behind us—fat lot of good it had done us last time—and leaned her forehead against it. “Meaning it’s alive . . . at least, I
think
it’s alive. I have no idea
what
that thing is.”

“Is that . . . was that the voice?” I said quietly, chilled by her words. “The thing that talks to us in our heads . . . was that it? That little shadow person, that was dark matter?”

“It goes by the name of Dark.”

“What?”

“The voice . . . the being that brought us here . . . it calls itself Dark. And that shadow thing we just saw, it’s more like a
part
of it, like a limb, or a puppet. Or a pet. I don’t really know. When you have a naked singularity—dark matter—it’s nonlocal, it doesn’t exist in a single place. It’s everywhere at once and nowhere at once. It’s weird.”

“Wait, so there’s
Dark
—the voice—and then there’s dark
matter
—the invisible stuff. And they’re the same thing, right? I mean, any time you have dark matter, you have the voice too, right?”

Gently, Sarah banged her head against the blast door. “If my understanding is correct, dark matter should be nothing more than a naturally occurring naked singularity—a substance of infinite density that bends the laws of physics a little. In and of itself, there’s nothing inherently conscious
or living
about it, just like there’s nothing inherently conscious or living about the organic molecules that make up our brains. Yet, we are conscious. Likewise, dark matter is just a medium. It’s not living. But there’s something living
in
it.”

“And it wants to eat our souls,” I breathed.

She nodded, banging the door again. “It brought us here to feed. It’s like a spider. Once it snares its prey, it wraps us in silk and digests us from the inside out.”

“That’s why it targeted me and Ashley first,” I said, piecing together what I already knew. “Because we were the ones it could manipulate, our souls were the most vulnerable.”

“I think it’s weak right now,” said Sarah. “But as it feeds, it’s getting stronger. It’s been wearing me down, trying to get to me. It can’t yet, but . . . the water. It’s turning the water. Oh God.” She rubbed her temple. “ The food, the water, everything here, I get it now, it’s all digestive enzymes . . . meant to digest us, make us easier to eat. This whole planet is a giant
digestive
system.”

I stared at her. “So let’s get out of here. Let’s go. Let’s just leave.”

“We’re trying, Leona. We’re trying.”

“No, now. Right now. We have to leave right now.”

She glanced up at me, eyes red. “Where are we going to go, huh? There’s nothing else out there. Just darkness, just fake food, just that
thing
.”

“Wait—dark matter, you said it’s not conscious itself, it’s just a medium, like it’s the ocean, and whatever’s living in it is just a fish, right?” I snapped my fingers, suddenly breathless. “Which means we could use it too, right? We could be another fish . . . we could make our own wormhole!”

“I do not possess the technology to harness a naked singularity,” she said.

“You don’t need technology,” I said. “You just put it on, and you end up right back on Earth.”

She shook her head. “I tried that, Leona. I told you. It just spits you right back out here. You need an opening on the other end.”

“So how do we make an opening on the other end?”

“You need a volume of dark matter large enough for a person to fit through, otherwise it’s a dead end and it spits you right back here. But that’s the brilliance of it. On Earth when you put the stuff on, it literally molded to your skin and created a hole in spacetime sized perfectly for your body. You fell through that hole and ended up here, and then what happened? That dark matter you were wearing shriveled back into a little ball, resealing the hole. It’s like a monkey trap. We only ever used a drop of it. You had it in a contact lens case. Ashley had it in a nail polish bottle. I had it in a tiny vial. There was never enough for a return trip. From this side, it’s like trying to squeeze yourself through a pinhole.”

I chewed my fingernail. “If I could get Megan to stretch it around something . . .”

“Stretch it around what?
Herself?
That’d be a cute mess to clean up, having your body teleported inside her body. It can’t just be a surface, either, like a balloon. It has to be a three dimensional
volume
. But last I checked, your cell phone—which
might
have been able to make a call to Earth—was in the room that just vanished. Not to mention the fact that we were guided here. We had help from Dark. I have no idea what kind of nightmare it would be navigating a wormhole. You might end up on Earth. Maybe. More likely, you’d end up in the center of a black hole, where there’s plenty—I repeat,
plenty
—of dark matter to fall through.”

“You’re not helping,” I said. “Just FYI.”

“Oh, boo hoo.” She slapped the blast door, making a clang, and pushed off back toward the stairs into the kitchen.

“It’s
not
over,” I spat, following her. “We still have your water extractor. When the sun rises, we can make water.”

“What about food?” she said. “I can’t exactly electrolyze a loaf of bread.”

“Gandhi lived for forty days without food. We can survive. One day at a time. Your words, remember?”

“It was twenty-one days. He fasted for twenty-one days. Get your facts right.” Swinging the lantern, she barged through the kitchen, checking all the blinds again—too little, too late.

I chased her. “Look, all I’m saying is let’s not give up yet. We still have water. And water’s the most important thing, right? You were the one who said that. We can find more food. Ashley had a stash, maybe she had more. We can find more food.”

“
We’re
the food, Leona.

“I don’t care,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “I don’t care if my soul gets eaten, or if it already got eaten, I need to get back to Earth.”

“Yeah, me too.” She finished her inspection of the kitchen.

“Sarah, I
need
to go back.”

“Why don’t we step back and look at the facts?” she said, heading into the dining room. “We’re stuck on a dead planet with a hostile alien life form orbiting a black hole fifty quadrillion miles from Earth—”

Sarah halted, and I ran into her back.

She raised the lantern and let out a low whistle.

I stepped out from behind her. The lantern’s white glow fell across the dining room table, and my jaw went slack.

We’d been downstairs for five minutes. In that time, the dining room table had been set for a feast—twinkling silver, glinting china, neatly folded linen napkins. My eyes gravitated to the platters stacked in the center of the table, and I stifled a gasp.

A turkey the size of a beach ball bubbled in a porcelain dish of juices, golden skin braised to perfection. Next to it, butter ran in yellow rivulets down a steaming mountain of mashed potatoes. And it all smelled amazing. One breath left my head spinning, like I’d inhaled a drug. Wisps of heavenly scents steamed from the flaky crusts of a dozen fresh baked pies. At the back, countless pumpkins and ears of corn overflowed from a cornucopia and spilled onto the floor.