Chapter 24 — The Break.138
@solena.rising
“I think I’m ready. ??”
That was the whole post. I know because it was up on the third monitor in the booth, the one Don had patched to her account so we could watch the numbers, and I read it about forty times while we waited for the thing to start.
Four words and a wave. My mother, who had never in her life met a feeling she couldn’t turn into three paragraphs and a product link, had stood backstage on the biggest night anyone had ever offered her and managed four words, and the I think in the middle of them was the truest thing she had posted in a month.
A hundred thousand people read it as humility.
I read it as a woman who could not write the essay because the essay would have cracked her open, and I sat in a dark room full of somebody else’s god and loved her so much I could not breathe.
“Here we go,” said Don.
On the monitors, the Calling began. That was the cult’s word for it, which I only learned that night and have never since been able to say without my jaw tightening.
The rite where they take their newest Diver and stand her in the light and broadcast her calling the rest of the world down into the water.
Solena’s honoring, they called it. A recruitment ad with a person where the product goes.
In theory, the cult’s greed had handed me the knife.
To make the Calling big enough to matter they had to run it live, and to run it live they had to run it through the room I was sitting in, so the whole thing, the wall and the stream and the dead man’s face, came through machines I had my hands on. In theory I owned it.
In practice I had spent the better part of an hour learning that owning a thing and being able to use it are different countries.
I cut wedding videos in a spare bedroom.
This was a live broadcast rig built by people who had specifically not wanted a man like me anywhere near it, and it knew the difference.
I could see all of it. I had loaded everything, the whole grid of Caspians off the drives, the polished one and the half-built ones and the ones still in raw wireframe, forty of him cued and primed on the screen in front of me, ready to go the instant I had anywhere to send them.
What I could not do was get a single frame onto the line that actually went out.
The output ran itself, a locked automated playlist marching through the Calling beat by beat, and every way I knew to take it, every button and menu and password-shaped thing Don and I had tried for an hour, the rig met with the same serene electronic no.
The god was easy. The god was sitting right there in pieces.
It was the last six inches, from my screen to the air, that would not give.
And on the monitors, the Calling went on without me.
They walked her out onto the deck into a thing half stage and half altar, white and flowers and the seafoam everywhere, and the basin made the sound a crowd makes when it has agreed in advance to weep.
Coral was up there in her best white, the MC of the apocalypse, telling them what a tide it was, what a night.
Above all of it, filling the wall, Caspian blessed her in that warm typed voice, and the stream counter in the corner of my screen climbed like a fever. Three hundred thousand. Four.
I tried the take again. No. I tried the thing Don suggested, which was worse. The little green SIGNAL on the master sat there smug and entirely out of my reach.
“Beloved,” Coral told the basin and the half a million, glowing, “tonight Solena calls you home. Every one of you out there in the cold of the surface world. She’s going to open the door and let the tide reach you where you are.”
They settled the deepwater blue around my mother’s shoulders and put a microphone in her hand, and the counter rolled past five hundred thousand, and I finally understood the shape of the clock.
She was the call. In a minute, less, they were going to have her look down the lens and reel in every lonely person who had ever scrolled past her, live, the best bait they had ever grown, and the second she did it the night was theirs and she was theirs and there would be no untangling her from it again.
I had forty gods cued and ready and not one inch of wire to send them down.
And then she didn’t say it.
The whole machine was waiting on her, the basin and the half a million and the dead man on the wall, and my mother stood there with the microphone an inch from her mouth and did not say the words.
I had the cult’s own lens on her face, close, and I watched the thing from the Turning happen again, the serene surface flickering at the edges, something under it not sure.
Not sure she could. Not sure she wanted to.
Not sure, for one held second on the biggest stage of her life, of any of it.
Her eyes came up off the crowd and found the camera.
Found, through it, without knowing it, me.
It was the same bare question she’d asked me from the dais and I’d stood there with no answer for, except this time I had one, cued and ready and trapped six inches from the air, and I could not get it to her.
“Sean.” Don’s hand was on my shoulder, his eyes already on the door, because the door had started to move. “Whatever it is, do it now. I can give you maybe thirty seconds of being a door.”
Then the door took its first real hit, a shoulder, and another, and then a lot of them at once, the whole serene weight of the basin having finally done the arithmetic on which room the wrongness was leaking from and remembering, all at once, that it had a body.
Don jammed his back against the door and his feet against the leg of the desk and held, and the frame jumped, and the hinges started saying things hinges should not, and through three inches of driftwood the warm voice on the other side never once stopped being warm.
“You’re safe. There’s no need for any of this. We know how frightened you are. Just open the door and let us hold you. Nobody in here is ever going to hurt you.”
“Any time,” Don said through his teeth. “Genuinely. Whenever suits.”
“Get the sledgehammer,” someone said, out in the bright, in the warm even voice you’d use to ask for more lemon water.
The next hit bent the door in its frame and opened a seam of light down the edge of it. Don took the whole of it through his spine and stayed standing.
“Don’t we have a bigger one?” said somebody else, helpfully.
So I stopped trying to be clever. I had spent the whole hour treating it like an edit, a problem with a right button somewhere, and it was not that.
It was a machine a company had sold a cult, and the one thing I actually know in my hands, the thing you learn crawling around four hundred weddings’ worth of other people’s rented gear, is that everything that goes out goes out down a wire.
I went under the desk.
Don’s thirty seconds turned out to be about nine.
The door gave with a crack, the bright came pouring in, and then there were hands on me, a lot of them, and they were not gentle now.
A fist closed on my ankle. Another got my waistband.
They hauled, hard, all at once, and the serene faces never slipped and the warm voices never stopped, you’re safe, you’re held, come back to us, come back, while they dragged me toward the light and I clawed the other way, down into the dark and the cables, because the only thing left in the world that mattered was six inches further under that desk and getting further from me by the second.
It was a forest under there, warm and humming, forty cables that all looked like brothers, and I went up the bundle on my elbows with a grown man towing me backward by the shins, feeling for the one fat line carrying the whole island’s god out to the world.
I found it by the heat. I do not have a better method to report.
The warmest, busiest cable in the dark, and I got both hands around it as my knees came off the floor, and I pulled it with everything I had and the last of my dignity.
I got my own line into the still warm socket and felt it seat and hold, and that was as much as my hands were going to be allowed.
The ones around my ankles won. They hauled me up and out from under the desk and onto my feet, caught and turned around in the grip of four serene people, and from there, upright and breathing like a landed fish, I finally got to see what I’d done.
On the deck, in the dark under the dead wall, Solena had lifted the microphone to her mouth to call the world down.
The wall came back on.
And I gave them their god. All of him.
Forty of him at once, the whole grid, polished and raw and wireframe, forty mouths running twenty different gorgeous nonsense blessings in that same warm typed voice.
And every one of them blinked the identical blink at the identical instant, because it was the same blink, because there was only ever one blink, copied into a dead man’s eyes a hundred thousand times.
On a single screen, in a misty hall, you could have called it the tide moving through him strangely.
Forty of him at once, blinking in lockstep on the great bright wall in front of the whole basin and half a million phones, you could call it exactly one thing.
The basin made a different sound then. I had never heard them make it before. It was the sound of a room full of people watching the thing they had given everything to turn into a screensaver in real time.
Solena turned and looked up at the wall, at the forty stuttering Caspians, and I watched her face on the monitor try to hold its shape and fail.
That should have been enough. It was not what I had come to do.