The Conformity (34 page)

Ember? What's wrong? Where are you?

Her mind, touching my own, is familiar as a glove. And for a moment she settles into me. I feel wind howling through her hair and tearing at her clothes. Mountains and forests and streams whip by unimaginably fast beneath her, so that it's almost too hard to focus on anything. Her head jerks around, looking down the length of her body, and there's Jack flying behind, arms outstretched.

The Liar! He's here!
There's real panic in her, surging.
And Jack—the Liar got to him! You have to come!

But there's something more there, a hissing presence. Ink in water, growing and blossoming. The pressure of an awareness that's huge. It's coming.

The Conformity.

Fixing Ember in my mind, an invisible tether stretching between us like a filament of gold, I mark her. All the old ghost habits of my mind take over, and it's like I've never left—never stopped being more and diminished into Shreve. I can feel the thousands of minds I've touched popping like kernels of corn in hot oil, growing in the hindbrain of my consciousness. I'm swelling huge, rampant.

It takes a monumental effort to disengage from the ether and go back to my body.

I've fallen from my horse, faceup, half covered in snow. Casey's above me, frantic, pawing at my face with gloved hands, trying to sweep away the frozen stuff. Her beautiful face framed by clouds. Snowflakes growing larger in my vision around her.

“It's time, Casey,” I say. The day's grown late and the light's failing now and it's time. Time to act. Time to join. Time to become more than what we are.

Maybe she's already touching me mentally, I don't know. Maybe, entering the ether, I've opened myself up. But she's with me now. She's inside me and I'm inside her and, far off, we're connected with Ember and sharing her panic.

“This is the end,” we say, together, as Negata approaches. He's dismounted and his hood is swept aside, snow nestled in the strands of his jet-black hair. He looks grim, and not a little frightened. He appears old now, wizened beyond his years. I can see them stretching away behind him like a comet's tail. So much of the world is visible to me now. I grow larger, expanding.

But Negata is sad, and frightened. So strange. I always thought Negata was beyond such feelings.

“Go,” he says, simply enough. He raises his hand, palm forward. “Go. And good-bye, Shreve.”

More should be said, but there's no time.

Together, we rise, surging into the arteries of air. Lancing forward like some falling star, burning through the atmosphere. It takes a simple adjustment to cocoon us in a shield and then move, even faster, following the golden filament east and south, so fast that the shield of air begins to glow as molecules super-heat into an oncoming wave front before us. There's a shuddering
boom
and my/our body is rocked with force. Merely a thought and we're traveling faster than sound.

The earth passes below us, too fast to see, flickering shades of blurred gray. We were going to cross all this on the backs of horses, and now it rushes by, below, blurred and dreamlike and forgotten almost as soon as it's passed. What a preposterous plan it was—and yet.

And then Ember is there and we've stopped.

We've reached density. It's just a small effort to take Jack and Tap within. Jack struggles at first but settles down, and then he's one with us and we're moving back to where we left the Liar. We settle on the earth like a fog, moving as one, all our abilities and knowledge shared.

Everything lost. Everything gained.

When our feet touch ground, I disengage.

thirty-seven

SHREVE

On the inside, I feel such joy at seeing them all again: Jack, Ember, even Tap. My emotions zip around and teeter like a drunk failing a sobriety test. Once, I might have been embarrassed by my joy. Once, I might have tried to hide it.

I grip him in a fierce hug. I think of falling. I think of Booth.

Jack stands poleaxed, whether at the sight of my mug or at the Liar's control over him, now washed away like the colors from the world—I don't know which. After a moment, he curses aloud and then looks at me closely. He grins. “Hope you had a good nap.”

I release him, stretching my arms. “I feel refreshed. How 'bout you guys?”

Ember comes close, slips between Jack and me, and throws her arms over our shoulders, squeezing. She waggles her eyebrows at Casey. “I know what you two have been up to. So naughty—”

Casey looks like she's about to belt Ember, but I hold up my hand, shushing them. The ether is in me now that I'm open to it, as if I'm pregnant with it. And the pressure, the dark, black pressure there before me grows, yawning. Huge.

“No time for shits and giggles. It's coming,” I say. “It knows we're here.”

A branch drops to the ground with a hard, brittle sound. The aspens surrounding the Liar's dwelling begin to sway and topple. Tap gives a little leap—crossing twenty feet in one bound—and looks at the gray trees lying heaped in the snow. From where we stand, the lodge is in clear view. Roofing tiles begin to slide from the roof. The woodwork surrounding the windows crumbles.

“Something's not right here,” Tap says, holding up a branch in his hand. It crumbles into dust.

From where we stand, it's easy to see the Liar, Blackwell, Galine, and the rest of their cadre bursting onto the porch.

“What the hell's going on?” Ember says.

“It's coming. And changing the universe,” I say. “Rearranging the world to suit it. Changing the rules of physics. Quantum level.”

“It's rotting away,” Tap yells, dusting his hands. “It's like it's aged five hundred years in seconds!”

By the lodge, the deck slumps to one side. Part of the lodge's roof caves in. The extranaturals there jump to the earth, rolling. Cursing.

At the far end of the valley, an echoing sound comes. The trumpeting bellow of a foghorn in the mist. The groaning, echoing sound of thousands of pained souls, screaming.

The Conformity comes. It swells like a waxing moon, a great circle of misery growing in the sky. The breath of a hundred thousand humans wreaths it, trails it like a cowl. As it crosses the landscape, passing over toppling forests and crumbling houses, it resembles a smoldering coal, the freezing water vapor pouring off.

Everything happens so fast. The limp forms of the Liar, Blackwell, Galine, and the rest of them begin rising to join with the Conformity. I feel the inexorable gravity of the entity's psychokinetic grasp tugging at my guts and howling at my mind. We Irregulars, we're connected now, joined together in fear and desperation. Together, we're strong enough to resist the Conformity's pull—strong enough to share some abilities. But to do what I must, I cannot be joined.

The ether shudders and splinters and vibrates at a frequency almost beyond my perception. It feels as poisonous as the strongest Helmholtz field. Behind the static there's pure desire, overwhelming hunger, greed so vast and unimaginable that my brain has to cobble together images to allow me to grasp it: the black, pupil-less eye of a shark rolling in bloodlust, the blank, sucking mouth of a lamprey, the towering indifference of a storm front, calving tornadoes.

The wind picks up, tearing at my face and hair. Casey's screaming, with her mouth or in my mind. I don't know. Or is that Ember? Or Jack? As the Conformity approaches, its horrible gravity deepens. And now I realize there's always been an issue of
proximity.
We're strengthened by our bodies. We're centered by them. Why would the Conformity draw flesh to itself otherwise? It seats itself in the flesh, feeds upon it. Takes strength from it. Maybe this is what it means to be incarcerado.

But there's the ether. The wild blue yonder.

We're rising in the air, all of us. I'm in them and they're in me, but I still have my own awareness—it's not muddled or indistinct. We're so loosely federated that we seem a jumble of limbs, disjointed and clumsy. Jack pinwheels away. Ember rises, screaming. Casey's ghosthand
swells and fends, palm out, trying to keep the terrible thing at bay. Tap hangs immobile, a fly trapped in amber.

Jack holds in midair, both hands outstretched, fingers splayed. A torrent of force—terrible bone-crushing force—streams away from him, slamming into the Conformity. It lurches and distends, becoming oblong. Moaning. Bellowing.

People are dying.

I know what I must do.

Jack can't help me. No one can help me.

I slip into the ether.

In the non-space between us, it truly is a star. The thousands upon thousands of points of light teeming and swirling. Shuddering. Emanating waves of anguish and pain, yet each point mindless. Subsumed. Eaten whole.

Shreve … JOIN US.

It knows me. Maybe it's always known me.

There is space within you for us all. Join us. Serve us. Worship us.

The motes of stolen light swirl like a maelstrom of sparks in an inferno. At the center of the star—the nexus of psychokinetic power—are two burning points: a tremendously powerful telekinetic and,
suprise!
a bugfuck. From them a golden filament stretches away. East. Ever eastward toward the dawn.

I feel the ether, marking everything. The thick wind of sparks coalescing, each one articulated and singular yet undulating together as a whole; the shiver and howl of the entity driving this machine of conformity; my own awareness like an arrow, lancing.

Once, I was Tased by a guard because I stepped over a line. I became the green fuse that drives the flower. I became the electricity itself.

I will always step over the line.

I've done this a thousand times before. With cashiers and murderers and teachers and inmates. I've inhabited women, men. I've stalked the forests of the night on cat feet. The millions of sparks hold nothing for me. I am interested in the center of things, in the heart. I pass through, entering the bright flesh of the etheric Conformity. Beyond the infinite motes of light, dimming now. It's as though I'm expanding and shrinking all at once. I'm the smallest particle of matter; I'm a cosmic spray of stars. And then the great mental wall of obsidian looms. The satellite mind of the Conformity itself is before me.

I'm inside it. It is unseated—suddenly on the outside looking in—like so many others before it. The tether is broken.

There's a howl of rage, echoing. The entity.

The sparks are me now. I'm the ghost in their attic. The gerbil racing at the wheel. I bloom like some fruiting body in their minds. I'm a drop of blood spreading in water. Thousands and thousands of minds held incarcerado. Thousands and thousands of bodies locked in terrible embrace. I spread myself among them. I settle upon them like a cloud.

I am them, they are me. Should we ever disagree.

One and one and one makes three.