Prologue #3
You’d think he’d be handsome the way people are always going on about him, that he’d be this big hero and look like a vid star or someone you’d want to marry.
But nope, he’s kind of aggressively not that.
“Burly” is a nickname, because he is, but there’s zero problem being burly and handsome.
He just isn’t. His hair is terrible, like terrible, like he cut it at home, which I’m pretty sure is what he wants you to think.
And he’s got a terrible mustache, and he’s kind of shlumpy and messy in the way he’s dressed.
And his lips are too wet all the time and he’s constantly licking them.
And you’re pretty damn sure that underneath all that foolishness is a man who’d swindle you out of your money as soon as lick those lips.
But he speaks like the friendliest neighbor you’ve ever had. Maybe that’s all some people need.
Taper immediately looks guilty. “Nothing, Burly–”
Burly raises an eyebrow that doesn’t even shift his terrible bangs.
“Mayor Burly,” Taper corrects himself.
“Shouldn’t you all be at school?” Burly asks.
“We’re on break until fourteen hundred,” Tara says, looking him in the eye, unlike her brother. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I would hope not,” Burly says. He looks around at all the vendors at their stalls. “Respect is my watchword. I like to see it everywhere.” He looks at me. “Among all different kinds of people.”
I don’t quite know how I feel about that last one.
“I’m sure the vendors here would appreciate some of your hard-earned currency,” he continues, this time looking at the group of teens, who moan at this.
But he keeps looking at them, and since the lady I bought my blue melon from is the only one selling anything close to something they might want, they form a reluctant line at her stall, each one taking a single, cheap piece of fruit and tapping the credit machine with varying degrees of bad grace.
Taper and Tara both glare at me as they walk away, like it’s somehow my fault.
I just keep eating my melon. What are they gonna do?
I mean, they’d sure be surprised if they tried to fight me.
I’m a lot stronger than I look, farm muscles and all that.
I watch them head out the main entrance, past Burly, who’s still standing there, hands on hips, like he’s surveying a job.
He was a brickmaker before he was mayor, after all, so maybe he looks at everything that way.
“I was sorry to hear about your farm,” he says to me.
“Thank you,” I say, because Mom and Pop raised me to be polite, even to men like Burly who lied their way into office at the expense of our friend Wilf.
“And I’m sorry you don’t find our educational choices to your liking,” he adds.
It surprises me a little that he knows this, but only a little. Ten thousand people is a lot to keep track of, but he does see my mom a lot because of City Council, if only to ignore her opinions in the nicest possible way. “I’m fifteen,” I say. “I’m legally done with school if I want to be.”
“That’s true. But your brother is in the higher education classes. There’s benefits to them. There’s always benefits to learning.”
“For some people,” I say, and he laughs out loud.
“I suppose that’s true, too.” He smiles and looks around at all the vendors, then back at me. “Be careful, Max. There won’t always be someone to fight your battles for you.”
“I’m pretty good at fighting my own.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, just “Take care,” as he walks out of the market, all eyes of the Land on him. I can’t read their faces or their Noise, almost as if they’re keeping their real thoughts from me, which they almost certainly are.
That’s okay. I feel pretty ambiguous myself.
You’ll want to see it, Ben says that night, typing it so the words glow on his comm. Professor Kilfoyle’s set it up specially.
“It’s late,” I whisper. Mom’s sleeping in the only bedroom her city unit has, Pop’s staying at the Smith farm tonight, something we’re all trying not to worry about, and me and Ben are bunked up on cots in the main room. None of it’s fun. “It’s like super late,” I say.
It’s the best time to see it clearly. He doesn’t have the speaker on so as not to bother Mom.
I’m having to read the little glowing words in the dark, but even with almost no light at all, even without seeing his face, I can tell he’s a little nervous.
I can guess why. What if he’s out on some far hillside near the school annex with his fellow students and a giant burning god comes stomping out of the forest?
We haven’t seen anything like it since we came to the city, but then none of us have ventured out into the woods or back to the farm except Pop.
Right, okay, Ben is a challenging brother.
He’s hyper-detailed, fussy about everything, and have you seen how neat he is?
Like, his hair is always perfectly in place and his clothes are always clean and how can you do that every day on a farm?
But it’s his way of dealing with worry, I guess.
The fact that he wants me to come with him so he won’t have to walk there and back alone is almost sort of sweet if it didn’t involve waking me up in the middle of the night.
I don’t want to go. It’s cold out there, and my blankets are warm, but he hardly ever asks me to do anything anymore, and I was having the Noise dream, so for some stupid reason, I say, “Okay,” and somehow, without even really feeling awake, the next thing I know I’m shivering on a cold hilltop with a bunch of people I no longer go to school with.
“Try not to breathe,” Professor Kilfoyle says as I approach the telescope.
“I saw the others do it,” I say as I lower my eye down to the lens. But I breathe, of course, and then I actually bump the telescope, which is a huge no-no, and I can hear the groan from Taper and Tara, who unfortunately are here, too.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“Don’t worry,” Professor Kilfoyle says, smiling a little under his ultra-trimmed ginger beard. The exactness of the trim is enough to tell me why Ben likes him. They’re probably the same person.
I go back to the group–just five of us, it turns out, me, Ben, Tara, Taper, who are probably only here spying for their mother, and a guy called Arrow, all of them in the upper astronomy and physics class–and they’re looking at me, annoyed.
Finding one rock in space with a manual telescope on a hilltop zillions of miles away isn’t an easy thing, I guess.
“It was an accident,” I say.
“Of course it would be you,” Taper says, but Ben turns to him, looking suddenly four inches taller, and Taper shuts his mouth.
Don’t worry about it, Ben signs to me.
“I wasn’t,” I lie, because I was a little bit. It was embarrassing.
“Got it,” Professor Kilfoyle says, eye to the lens. “Want to try again, Max?”
“Are you sure?” I say. “Couldn’t someone else have a go?”
“We all have,” Tara says unhappily. “We’re waiting for you to finish so we can go home.”
Professor Kilfoyle waves me over. “Come on.”
I reluctantly walk back across the muddy grass. I definitely do not breathe as I put my eye just above the lens.
“Can you see it?” Professor Kilfoyle asks.
“No,” I say. “Yes.”
Because I do. There it is. Way, way out in space, there it is. The Glyph. The thing everyone’s been talking about for the past however many days. The thing they saw the night the Noise dreams started. The thing that showed up right before the gods did.
“It looks like a rock,” I say, kind of groaning at how dumb I sound.
“It very much does,” Professor Kilfoyle says. “In fact, so much so, there are theories it might be done purposely to camouflage it as an asteroid.”
“Camouflage it for what?” Taper asks.
“We don’t know,” Professor Kilfoyle answers. “But we’d never have seen it if the radio telescopes hadn’t picked up the signals.”
You can’t read those, though, Ben says through his comm. Our mom says it’s nothing you can translate.
“That’s correct. It’s not a language we can dissect, and it’s not compressed data, as far as we can tell. There’s nothing that indicates anything other than boring white noise.”
“But it’s causing the dreams,” Arrow says, speaking up for the first time, and you can see he’s embarrassed about it. Everyone except Ben looks away from him. Me included.
“Correlation is not causation,” Professor Kilfoyle says.
“What?” I say.
“Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean one caused the other. The signal is benign, according to every test we know. There’s nothing in it that should be affecting anyone’s dreams.” He shrugs. “And yet.”
“Our mom says it’s a disease from the Spackle,” Taper says.
“I’ve heard your mom’s theory,” Professor Kilfoyle says, his voice a little colder. “Amazing that humans have been here for over forty years and this is the first instance of it. And that it would start on the exact same day we found this object sending out its signal.”
“You just said correlation is not causation,” Tara says.
“I did,” Professor Kilfoyle smiles back. “But your mother doesn’t have either one. Just her own personal view.”
It seems like he’s going to say more. Like “And genocidal tendencies.” But he doesn’t.
“But maybe we are all overreaching,” Tara says. “Maybe it is just an asteroid with a random shape.”
“Keep looking at it, Max,” Professor Kilfoyle says. “Wait for it to turn.”
I do, and suddenly, for a shining second, it’s no longer a rock, but a kind of soft spiral, complex and designed and so clearly another language I get a little skip in my stomach. Then it turns some more and is just a rock again.
“It looks like a symbol for something,” I say.
“That’s why we call it the Glyph,” Professor Kilfoyle says.
“What does it mean, though?” I ask, though of course there’s no way of knowing, is there?
“We don’t know,” the professor says.
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Tara says. “A symbol no one knows isn’t a symbol. It’s meaningless.”