Chapter 61
“NO ONE WILL GO INSIDE,” POP SAYS THE NEXT morning, as we trudge back to the rock with the Sky. “He just wants to see.”
“Then show him in your Noise.”
“Sometimes it’s gotta be the real thing, kiddo.”
It’s the morning after Granddad died, and honestly, it feels like that’s the dividing point my life now has.
Before Granddad died, and after. The Sky sent two of his guards with Granddad’s body back to what’s left of our farm, where we’ll bury him, but the rest of us are going straight to the place where the god did all the killing, which is the worst idea anyone’s ever had in the history of anything.
“I’ll keep you safe,” Pop says.
“You’re acting like I wasn’t there and didn’t see all the totally unstoppable parts where the god killed everybody, including Granddad.”
He’s stung at that, but he knows I’m right. “We gotta find out what’s happening,” he says. “We have to. If something’s invading and killing people and stealing anyone young, then we need to know.”
“That’s what Granddad said about the Land just before the god attacked.”
But no one listens to me, so we cross the river at a much easier spot the Sky knows (upriver rather than down, where Pop went), and much sooner than I’d like, we’re passing bodies of the Land.
The Sky’s guard go to each one in turn, arranging them respectfully, using cloth after cloth to cover them and wrap them.
They’ll take them to their burial swamps later.
Meanwhile, the Sky, me, and Pop just march steadily on, right to the source of the terror.
The Sky stops us all at a distance that will honestly never feel far enough.
There’s no fire on the rock face now, just burnt plants and lichen, and the hole isn’t screaming, though I realize you can hear it, just quiet, if you listen, which the Sky does.
He sends a message to one of his guard, who nods and scrambles up a tree near the rock, which seems like madness to me, but I guess it’s not the rock itself.
The guard gets to the very top of the tree, much more nimbly than I crossed the river, then he sends what he sees back to the Sky.
The Sky looks back to Pop. His Noise starts the fast exchange of info, but then Pop tells him something and the Sky does an unexpected thing. He looks at me, slowing down his Noise and showing me what the Land on the tree sees.
It’s the rock from above. You can’t see from the ground, but the rock is a kind of spiral. It looks like a rock from almost every angle, but when looked at from the right angle, it–
“It’s the Glyph,” I say. “I saw it in the telescope.”
The Sky nods. This rock is old, he says. But it is not old enough.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s younger than any of the other rocks around here,” Pop says. “And it’s not the same in terms of, what’s the word–”
“Geology?” I suggest.
“Yeah,” Pop says to the Sky, “it’s not the same geology as the ground and bedrock around here, is it?”
It is not, the Sky says.
“So what is it?” I say.
It is . . . The Sky searches for the word. Grown.
“What?” I say, at the exact same time Pop says it.
“What do you mean, grown?” Pop adds.
The Sky opens his Noise and shows us a seed dropping into the soil and growing a plant.
“It’s a plant?” I say.
No, says the Sky, but it is grown nonetheless.
“What grew it?” Pop asks.
The Sky just looks up, eyes to the heavens above us.
“So it came from the Glyph?” I ask Pop later, after he and the Sky have had a long conversation in their Noise, though the Sky still has his guards investigating it very, very carefully.
“Not this Glyph,” Pop says. “Or maybe it is the same one and it’s just come back after a thousand years.
But either way, he thinks they sent some kind of seed or whatever out in front of them first, too small to be seen by telescopes or noticed by any of the monitoring equipment we’ve got here, and even if we did notice, we’d probably figure they were meteorites or something.
He thinks whatever it was somehow grew into this rock. ”
“They wouldn’t just send just one seed, though. When we plant on the farm, we use thousands of them.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s probably doing the same thing. It sends out thousands, hoping that one or two find the perfect spot to take root.”
“And grow into a rock that spits out gods?”
Pop shrugs. This makes as little sense to him as it does to me.
“But that one spit out a Land god. What me and Ben and Arrow have seen are human-shaped. And that was ruddy miles from here.”
“I know,” Pop says, taking a deep breath. “That’s why the Sky thinks there’s at least one more out there. Closer to where we live. Planted by the new Glyph that’s coming. He’s asking his people to look everywhere for this particular kind of rock.”
“That god wasn’t stopped by anything the Land had,” I say, “and you know their weapons are better than ours. It came out of that rock, it killed everyone here, grabbed Ess, and left. What are we supposed to do? How did this all end the first time?”
“That,” Pop says, “is a very good question.”
The Sky turns his head, like he’s heard us, and in a way, of course he has. Pop has Noise, and even if he’s not a main part of the Conversation like Granddad is–
Was.
Then at least it’s in the same room. The Sky starts walking over to us, his Noise working the entire time. It’s so weird, I can see him thinking, see him reaching into his own memories and those of his people. All too fast to really see clearly, but the process is obvious.
We do not know, he says when he reaches us, as if we’d asked him the question directly. There is no answer in the histories as to how this ended.
“Great,” I say.
But it did end.
“It ended after the town that used to be here was destroyed, though, right?”
That, unfortunately, seems correct.
“So we don’t know if you stopped it or if it just stopped itself after the whole town was gone.”
There has been a . . . he searches for the human word again . . . forbiddance around this place. We always traveled around it and left it unsettled. But there is nothing in the histories that tells us why.
“You treated it like a black spot,” Pop says.
“Or a haunted house,” I say.
The Sky doesn’t understand that phrase, so Pop explains it to him in his Noise.
Yes, the Sky says, a place of the dead. That we left alone without knowing we were doing it. He glances back at the rock. This is all very strange.
“No shit,” I say.
“Max,” Pop warns.
But I do have this to share. The Conversation tells me that there are no more of these rocks to be found the world over. Except one by your city.
“Which is what we thought,” Pop says. “They’re coming after us this time.”
“But wait,” I say. “If the only one they found is near the city and these things are back and this time they’ve grown human gods”–I gesture around us–“and the way it all ended was that the town was completely destroyed and everyone avoids it like a nuclear waste dump now . . . Pop, humans only have one town.”
Pop stands. “And your mother and brother are there.” He immediately starts gathering his stuff. “This is the invasion,” he says to the Sky. “This is the one you were worried about. It’s just not in the shape we thought.”
What do you mean?
“I mean,” Pop says, “they’re already here.”
We walk fast through the day and the night and into the next day.
Pop wants to get to the city as fast as possible, so we’re trying to do a four-day march in two.
The Sky and his guard come with us, but nothing seems to tire them out.
At some point, though, I think I actually fall asleep while walking, because the next thing I remember, I’m surrounded by Noise.
Not the Noise of the Land, but the ugly Noise. The Noise of the dream.
You’re nothing, it tells me. Everyone laughs at you.
No one thinks you’re really a boy. They all think you’re a freak.
And you’ve abandoned your family. Abandoned your mother and your brother.
And they hate that you’ve left them. And they’re in danger and you can’t protect them.
And they’re going to die and it’s your fault–
“Max.” Pop puts a hand under my arm and lifts me from the ground. I forget now and then how strong he is.
“What happened?” I ask.
“You fell asleep while walking and didn’t even wake up when you hit the ground.”
“Well,” I say, “it’s been a hard week.”
He chuckles a little. “That’s certainly true.” He calls out to the Sky and the rest of the Land around us. “We have to rest.”
The Sky flashes Noise to Pop.
“I know,” Pop says, “but we can’t keep up with this pace. We just can’t.”
The Sky thinks for a minute, then he sends Noise to a few of his guard. Three of them nod and keep on going. Pop reads what’s happening.
“They’ll scout,” Pop says, “and send back anything important we need to know before we get there.”
“The Sky is staying with us? I thought he’d go back to the Land.”
“You don’t know him. You don’t know what happened to him.
All that power he has, it’s anger, but anger is a sour kind of majesty.
You’ve got to watch it, or it’ll burn you and your whole world to the ground.
So he’s constantly on balance, trying to keep himself in check while still leading his people. ”
I blink. “You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I have. He’s important to us. Important to me. He’s the key to peace on this world. Not Burly.”
“A blind man could see that.”
“You rest. We’ll go again in an hour.”
I sit back down, against a tree. “I don’t want to sleep, though.”
Three seconds later, I’m asleep.
We start walking again when I wake up, even though it’s night now, even though I only slept an hour.
As we walk, I think about what they said to me the night before, all that stuff about being special.
It’s like they were telling me I’ve got a huge responsibility somewhere down the line or like they were sending me on a quest but didn’t tell me what it was.