Chapter 1
I HAVEN’T SEEN GRANDDAD FOR AT LEAST TWO years, none of us have, but it’s not that Pop and he are on the outs or there’s some dislike between him and Mom or anything like that–Ben, our granddad, is one of the most wonderful people any of us have ever met, and he adores Mom and Pop so much it’s almost embarrassing–it’s just that, like Pop, he was nearly dead once, and the Land saved him, added his voice to their Conversation, but unlike Pop, Granddad has never been able to properly find his way back out again.
More to the point, he doesn’t really want to.
The Conversation of the Land covers everything.
All history, time, current events, decisions, warnings, inventions, progress, wars, everything.
Humans weren’t built for living in it. They can live near it, like Pop, dipping in and out of the waters, or they can let themselves be swept away and swim in it like fish do.
Which I guess is what Granddad does. Pop says that over time it became harder and harder for Granddad to have regular communication with other humans.
He lives with a Land group, fishes and hunts with them, and because of the nature of the Conversation, often forgets who he is.
But Pop says there’s a reason. Granddad lost Pop’s other granddad in the wars.
He was called Cillian, with a hard k sound, and Granddad can see Cillian there, in the Conversation.
The Land don’t let their dead go in the same way we do.
They can always go back and look, if they want.
The idea is that you want to less and less over time, because you have to live in the present.
But that’s what the Land are built for. Not humans necessarily.
Granddad spends time in the Conversation with his memories of Cillian, time just letting the Conversation flow around him.
And forgetting more and more every day that he was human to start with and not just one joyous drop of water in the huge ocean that is this planet’s Noise, which is a poetic way of saying it that Pop uses, though I added the word joyous.
“Where do we start?” I ask Pop when we’ve set up our tents outside the ashes of the farmhouse. For Pop, if something’s decided, he doesn’t wait around fretting about it, so we came out to the farm as soon as I’d packed up my whole two outfits.
“I sent out a call in the Conversayshun,” Pop says, which I know. It’s why we came out here, so he could get closer to the Land, try to get them to hear him.
“Granddad will come to us?”
Pop shakes his head. “It’ll make a trail to him. Prepare yourself for a walk in the morning.”
Turns out he’s not joking–not a big joker, is Pop–and we walk nearly twelve miles the next day, heading north, away from the river and the city. To the east is a road to the ocean, but we’re staying away from anything that looks like a human path, because the Land will be avoiding those, too.
Still. Twelve effing miles. “Are you kidding me?” I say as we come down yet another hill into yet another glade of trees.
“Nope,” Pop says, not stopping. “You’re a farm kid. You should be able to do this walk in your sleep.”
“I wish I was sleeping.”
“I heard you dreaming last night,” Pop says without looking back. “Pretty bad?”
I hesitate before I answer. I don’t want to tell him I dreamed I was drowning, literally drowning in the Noise, the words and images and feelings cramming up my throat, and all around me the people I love most were laughing and doing nothing to help, and all the people I hate the most were with them, doing the same thing, and I was never going to actually drown, just suffocate forever, while every bit of love I’ve ever had was revealed as a lie.
“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty bad.”
“I always wondered . . .” Pop says, before trailing off.
“Always wondered what?”
He stops, gets his bearings, then moves to the northwest along a different heading.
“Always wondered what, Pop?”
“Oh.” He gathers his face and his Noise. I can see them both trying to figure out how to thoughtfully say what he’s thinking. “I always wondered if the cure was reversible.” He shrugs a little. “That’s all.”
“It’s not, though.”
“That’s what your mom says, but I wonder if it’s entirely true.”
“Why would anyone want to reverse it?”
He looks at me, kindly. “Why indeed, huh?”
We camp that night in the woods, the fire extra bright between us to hopefully keep rines away.
“Do you miss Granddad?” I ask over the porridge Pop’s made.
He eats a bit of porridge. “I can still talk to him. Or parts of him, at least. In the Conversayshun.”
“Not the same as seeing him.”
“No. It’s not. So, yeah. I guess I do miss him. But it’s better having him alive, isn’t it?”
And that’s something that’s always worried me, so since we’re out here in the woods all alone, I just ask. “Will the same thing happen to you? Will you disappear in the Conversation?”
“I don’t know.” His Noise says he’s telling the truth.
He really doesn’t know. “We were both near death. So close we maybe even stepped over the line before the Land drew us back. They can do that, you know, to each other. I mean, obviously, dead is dead, but sometimes, if they catch your Noise fast enough and your journey there is slow enough, then sometimes, they can bring you back. It’s in their histories.
” He shakes his head. “And some people still call them primitives.”
“I don’t.”
He chuckles a little. “No, I reckon you don’t, and I’m sorry for all the preaching.
It’s hard being in that city with all those people who think they can live their lives without being part of the world they’re living on.
” He looks up into the stars in the night sky. “How different it all could be.”
“If we hadn’t taken the cure?”
“There were good reasons for taking it,” he says, still looking up. “I don’t know if there’d be any humans left right now if there wasn’t a cure. But that’s what no one asks. What’s the cost? There it is.”
He points up. I’m not sitting near him, so basically he’s just one man gesturing toward the entire night sky. “Like I can see what you’re pointing at,” I say.
“There. Little blink of light between the two paired stars and the galaxy cloud.”
I try to find what he means. The galaxy cloud is a stripe in the sky, rough like torn bark.
It’s the galaxy where we all live, looked up at from its middle, like looking out from the center of a disc, which is what this galaxy is.
A little to the side are a pair of stars–not actually a pair, that much I remember from Professor Kilfoyle, they’re actually zillions and zillions of miles away from each other, they just look like a pair from our perspective–and between the pair of stars and the galaxy cloud–
“Is that the Glyph?”
“Yup. Getting closer every day.”
“An invasion.”
“Maybe.”
“And no one’s preparing for it.”
“I’ll bet they are.”
“What does that mean?”
“Burly will have something planned, at least enough so he won’t get blamed if it all goes wrong.”
“Who’ll be blamed?”
Pop just looks at me.
“Oh, right,” I say. “The Land.”
“Always and forever,” he says, looking back up. “As long as we’re here.”
“Where else would we go, though? There are no ships to fly us out. There are no planets we know to go to. It took years and years and years for Mom’s people to even get here–”
“I know–”
“Besides, you’re from here. You were born here. And the Land added you to their Conversation.”
He shakes his head again. “I don’t know if that matters. If you really knew the crimes we committed against them . . .”
“Crimes can’t be uncommitted, Pop. All we can do is not commit new ones.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” He rises. “The new crimes that are going to come.” He stands and starts heading to his tent.
“Is that supposed to end the conversation?”
He stops, surprised.
“You say something like that, a perfect exit line, and the conversation’s over? It’s not a vid, Pop. We were still talking.”
He stays standing, now not knowing what he should do. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Do you really want to undo the cure?”
He looks down. “Probably a pointless question.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t still wish I was some other way.”
His eyes widen. “No, that’s not what I meant. I don’t want you any other way than how you are.”
“Sounds like it,” I say. “A little bit.”
“No, Max, really no.” He comes over to me, puts his hands on my shoulders, so I can’t look anywhere but his eyes. “I want you to be happy. That’s it. That’s all. I’m not sure the cure did that for you.” He lets go. “I’m not sure it did it for any of us.”
He walks back over to his tent, then turns to me and winks. “Now that,” he says, “was an exit line.”
He goes into his tent and I’m still laughing.
The forest dries up over the next two days of walks, kind of scarily so.
What was green turns brown at an ugly rate.
Then suddenly, though there are still trees almost entirely circling the horizon–thinner than the usual forest, but definitely there–in the middle of it all is a long, large depression that’s mostly sand and a few huge, open, smoking holes.
“This looks dangerous, Pop.”
“Conversayshun says we’re between erupshuns–”
“Eruptions?”
“And this is where the trail goes.”
We make our way down the sandy hill, puffs of brown dust skipping out in front of us with each step.
“Watch out for catchers,” Pop says.
“What’s a catcher?”
He points, and like when he pointed at the sky, I don’t see anything but more sand.
“Where?”
He makes a shaping motion with his hand, like an arc–
And I see an arc in the sand.
Holy shit.
It’s twice the size of us in length, maybe more.
A long flat body with rocklike arms, four of them, coming out of a carapace, three-fingered claws on each one.
If we were standing in front of it, it might not even come up to my knees, but one of those claws would probably have already pulled that knee off my body.
“Should we run?”