Probability Angels: Part 8

May 29, 2008 by josephdevon · 2 Comments

Probability Angels

Part 8: Osmosis

Joseph Devon

(Please note: This story is the eigth part of a series of stories beginning with, “Probability Angels: Part 1,” and while it is designed to stand alone it does draw heavily on the foundation of characters and events that were created in “Probability Angels: Part 1,” and continued through Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Basically, I have to highly recommend that you start at “Probability Angels: Part 1” and continue on in order. You can find them labeled and all in a row over in the categories section on the side of your screen.

Or you can go here and buy the book or go here and view the book in its entirety.)

Matthew pinched the cigar between his fingers, feeling the tacky give of the outer leaves. Bringing it to his face he breathed in through his nose and let the earthy bitterness of the tobacco fill his head, the smell always making him feel at ease and somehow calling up memories of childhood games of football in the backyard when the leaves covered the ground and winter barely hung in the air.

There was a sound, a hard thump and then the rattle of stones.

He turned and walked up the mountain.

There was a group of testers up on a rise, a lantern sat in the center of them warding off the dead of night. Matthew joined the circle, placing the cigar in his mouth, drawing air through it with a few laborious puffs before the tip burst into flames. He put his hands in his pockets and turned his attention to Mary.

She was standing in front of a dry-erase board. Her outfit consisted of a light sundress and a loose knit sweater. The wind affected her and she frequently and automatically readjusted the sweater as the gusts roaring over the mountaintop pulled it back, but she didn’t seem aware of the cold. One bare arm was crooked at her side, a hand perched on her hip while the other flicked up and tugged a thick blond curl up over her ear and out of her face. Then her hand went down and her short frame became motionless again, staring at the dry-erase board.

“It’s been almost twelve hours,” the tester standing next to Matthew said.

Matthew nodded in agreement; he had been here when Mary had set up the dry-erase board a few hours after they had fled to the mountaintop from the cathedral. Other testers had joined her, wandered off, come back, but Mary had stayed rooted in place. Likewise there had been heated conversations, strenuous debates, and great gaps of silence, and Mary had remained standing in front of the board the entire time. Written across the top in black marker were the words, “What we know for certain.” Written underneath that was precious little.

—–

Hector strode nervously across the hotel room and looked out the giant tinted window at the city of Las Vegas baking in the midmorning desert sun. He threw his arms out behind him and with a shrug of his shoulders his suit jacket slipped off. A roll of his head as he walked over to the thermostat and he had loosened his tie and popped the top button of his shirt. He turned the air conditioner on as high as it would go, then turned around and faced Nyx who was sitting on one of the beds, her hands splayed out on the comforter while she bounced up and down to test the mattress.

“Come on,” Hector barked, “get up. Vacation’s over.”

“Vacation?” Nyx asked, looking up at him upset. “You call running all over the planet for twelve hours a vacation?”

Hector snapped his fingers at her. “Up,” he said. Nyx pouted but pushed off the bed and stood up. “Get on the phone; I want to get in touch with anyone we can talk to who knows anything. I want to know what’s going on.” He reached into the air and pulled out a laptop computer. Slapping it onto the desk next to the dresser he flipped open the screen and opened up a word document. His fingers moved over the keyboard and typed, “What we know,” across the top of the monitor. He hit enter and looked back at Nyx, who was looking down at her hip where her little purse was hanging, her hands rummaging around in it for her cell phone.

Hector glared at her, opened his mouth to get her moving faster, but decided to walk into the bathroom instead. He left the door open and turned on the sink. Cupping his hands under the faucet he collected pools of water before splashing them over his face. There was a noise, like air rushing through the room. Hector, his face buried in his hands, assumed the air conditioner had finally kicked on.

He finished with the sink and stepped out of the bathroom drying his hands with a towel. Nyx was standing with her hand on her purse but her eyes locked on the window as she stared off into the western desert.

“Hector, something just went past-”

“Nyx,” Hector shouted impatiently, having fully expected her to be on the phone and getting answers by the time he came out of the bathroom. “Come on,” he ordered, walking over to the desk he sat down and pulled his computer towards him.

On the screen of the laptop the cursor blinked.

—–

“Let’s go over it again,” Mary said. Her voice was soft, her mind completely focused on the dry-erase board, but the circle of people gathered around her all heard and reacted as if she had been shouting.

“Where should we start this time?” one of them asked.

“At the beginning,” Mary said simply. “What are they?”

“They’re us, right?” Matthew asked tentatively.

“I don’t think that’s entirely right,” Mary said.

“They’re different,” a gravelly voice said, and Matthew turned to see that Kyo had joined their circle, his eyebrows pointing sharply down over dark pupils.

“Are they?” Mary asked.

“Yes,” Kyo answered. Then nobody said anything for a few seconds. Mary turned to look over her shoulder at Kyo.

“What?” he asked.

“Would you mind continuing that thought?”

“What thought?” Kyo said. His face was the opposite of Mary’s. Her’s was focused entirely on whatever she looked at, stubbornly determined to ignore all distractions, while Kyo’s focus was barely there, his mind constantly wandering to everything but the top of the mountain.

“Why are they different?” Mary asked patiently.

“I don’t know. I think once they start to rot they—”

“I mean how do you know they’re different?”

“Oh,” Kyo said. Then he turned to Matthew. “Slap me across the face,” Kyo ordered.

“What?” Matthew asked, turning to Mary for help.

Mary thought this over, then nodded. “Do it,” she said.

Matthew paused, shrugged, then wound up and slapped Kyo across the face. Kyo’s neck was muscular, giving his head a more than sturdy foundation, so Matthew’s slap didn’t look like the most powerful thing in the world, but Kyo’s head still moved and his face winced.

Kyo rubbed his cheek and turned to Mary. “When they touch me, it’s not like that. It’s like I’m made of stone or something. If Matthew had been one of them his hand would have bounced off and my skin wouldn’t even have moved. So they’re different.”

“Okay,” Mary said, conceding this point.

“I think it’s more important to know if it’s a difference of increments or of nature,” Kyo said.

Mary took a deep breath, the last twelve hours hanging heavy on her head. “I don’t…” she closed her eyes tight and went over each of Kyo’s words, struggling to translate them into something more understandable. “What you mean is, are they completely different or are you just so much more powerful than them that they can’t have an effect on you? Like, would a thousand of them be able to hurt you? Or is it not a matter of numbers because you’re two completely different things? Right?”

“Yup,” Kyo said.

“Well, they did cut you after all,” she pointed to Kyo’s jacket where some stitching had repaired a rip. “So are they completely different? Or are they just further along somewhere on the same scale that governs us all?”

Kyo looked down at the sleeve of his jacket. “Can’t we just say they’re different and leave it at that for right now? It gets so much more confusing if we acknowledge this,” he plucked at his stitched together sleeve.

“We ignore nothing,” Mary said, turning back to the dry-erase board. “Now,” she said, “what are they?”

Somewhere farther down the slope Matthew heard the now-familiar thump followed by the rattling of stones.

—–

“You’re sure?” Nyx was saying into her cell phone. She listened, then put a hand over the mouthpiece and whispered to Hector. “He’s sure.” She took her hand away and resumed listening, chirping in with affirmations and agreements as the person on the other end of the line continued talking.

“How is he sure?” Hector asked. Nyx didn’t hear him as she focused on the phone conversation. “Nyx,” Hector said, louder, making sure he got her attention. “How is he so sure?”

“Why don’t you call him?” Nyx asked Hector.

“No,” he said. “I’m not making any phone calls. Just ask him. How is he so sure?”

Nyx’s eyes rolled angrily up to the ceiling. She puffed a breath out of her nose, then took the phone from her ear and pushed the button for speaker phone.

“-are you guys?” the voice on the other end was saying.

Hector backed a step away from the bed, shaking his head and waving his hands to indicate that he wasn’t going to be part of the conversation.

“That’s not important,” Nyx said. “What’s important is how come you’re so sure?”

“Because I went back,” the voice said. “I figured I could get some free energy. But there was none to be had. There’s no energy left in him, he’s just a sack of meat on the floor. Epp is dead.”

Hector thought this over.

—–

“So why are they different?” Mary asked.

The circle was quiet. A few more testers joined the group.

“They give up,” someone said.

“They give up and they opt to wait out their days at the final resting place of their second choice,” another voice chimed in, adding to the first thought.

“They give up, start to rot, and pass a point where they get hungry enough to feed on still-working testers,” Kyo said. He looked around the circle. “Right?” he asked. “That’s not something that you can do normally, is it? They have to rot away until they cross some sort of a line,” Kyo’s hand chopped down in the air to indicate the line, “before they can feed off of other testers. Right?” his eyes continued to look around the group. Nobody answered. Kyo sighed. “You,” he pointed at a red haired man across from him, “try to feed off of Matthew.”

“What?” Matthew said.

“Go on,” Kyo said.

“No,” the redheaded man said.

Kyo’s eyes became quizzical, no concern about how his request was received was in them, instead there was pure curiosity about his question. “No you won’t do it? Or no you can’t do it?”

“Kyo,” Mary said impatiently. “Is this helping?”

Kyo looked surprised to be rebuked. “I thought we were trying to figure them out. This is a hugely important question. If you are all capable of feeding off of each other but choose not to, then they’re just the same as you. If you all are unable entirely to feed off of each other, than when they start to rot something actually changes inside of them, maybe the hunger gets too strong or the pain too much or…I don’t know…something, and they become something entirely different. They become able to feed off of other testers. So, yes, this question is helping. Do you all opt not to eat each other out of common decency? Or do you not do it because you can’t do it?”

Mary stared at Kyo, her soft face locked on his eyes. Then she turned to the redheaded tester. “What’s your name?”

“Gus,” he said.

“Gus, try to feed off of Matthew.”

“No,” Gus said. His skin was pale and his dress was drab. He was utterly devoid of inflection and seemed to exist as plainly as possible, the only accent to his appearance being his red hair.

Mary nodded, respecting his answer, and turned to face Matthew herself. Matthew looked back at her and there was an uncomfortable ripple of fear that ran up his groin as he watched her eyes on him.

Mary’s face screwed up and she frowned as she contemplated Matthew. Then she stopped. “I see no way,” she said, and she turned back to Kyo. “I don’t think we can feed on each other.”

“Okay,” Kyo said. “So they’re different.”

Matthew, his fear now dissipating into nervous energy, spoke up, “That explains Kyo then, doesn’t it?”

The circle turned to look at him. “Well he doesn’t have any energy, right?” Matthew glanced over at Kyo for confirmation. “Right?”

“Never pushed a human in my life, no,” Kyo said. “Now, from what I understand, you receive energy from the humans you push, sort of a payment for making them reach beyond themselves.”

“That sounds about right,” Matthew said.

“Right. Okay, so, no. I have none of that.”

“They lose energy and rot until they cross a line and can then eat our energy from testing,” Mary said, turning back to the dry-erase board, speaking out loud as she wrote down the last few thoughts. “Kyo has none of that, so when they try to feed on him they…they bounce off.”

“Can they come back across the line the other way?” someone asked.

“Do we care?” Kyo asked.

There was another thump in the snow further down the mountain and the sound of something scrabbling against the rock.

—–

“That’s four,” Nyx said. She looked up at Hector pleadingly, hoping that this would be enough. “That’s four of our kind who say that Epp is dead. Can we move on to something else now?”

The past few hours had been spent with Nyx tracking down anyone she could who might know anything while Hector coached her on the phone. The Las Vegas sun was turning auburn as the afternoon began to roll away.

Hector looked up from his laptop. “I want five,” he said, holding up his hand so his fingers splayed out. “I want five separate confirmations.”

The air conditioner kicked on for another cycle and Hector felt the stale, cold air pelt his shirt, felt the small of his back where sweat was forming chill over.

Nyx glowered at him, then turned back to her phone and started angrily dialing.

—–

Mary was standing in front of her dry-erase board. Her hands were at her face, her fingers pressed against her eyes right at the bridge of her nose and she groaned as she rubbed her eyes.

“So why are they so powerful?” someone asked from behind her. Mary looked tired as she brought her hands down and picked the marker up from the board again.

“Don’t know,” she said softly. She closed her eyes again and something inside of her seemed to wilt. For a moment Matthew was sure she was going to walk away but she took a deep breath, regrouped, and spoke up. “Who has any ideas?”

“I think-”

“Mary,” someone shouted. Mary looked around the dry-erase board to see someone coming over to them from another summit. “Mary,” the new tester went on, “we’ve been calling everyone we can think of and getting them up to the mountaintops but our lists are all over the place.”

“Okay,” Mary nodded. “Get word out that everyone who can needs to come around to where you’re set up and start to cross testers off that are accounted for as well as pick up a few names to start calling on their own.” She turned and faced her circle. “That means you, as well. Everyone you can think of needs to be accounted for. I want as firm a list as we can get of who is missing, who we have, who we need to find, where they were last seen, all of that.” She turned back to the tester who had interrupted. “You understand?” The tester nodded. “Good,” Mary said. The tester stayed where she was. “Well? Get going,” Mary said. The tester jumped, startled, clearly expecting to be told more, then regrouped and picked a few people out of the circle, leading them away to where she had come from.

Kyo watched them leave and then glanced restlessly around the mountaintop.

“If they feed on our energy,” someone spoke up, answering Mary’s original question, “then I’m guessing they’ll be as strong as the energy they consume. If they devour eight testers they can take on the power of eight testers. Does that sound right?”

“Nothing is right,” Mary said. “We just need to start somewhere and toss whatever gets proven wrong.” She finished writing the last thought on the board.

“Do you think it’s quality or quantity that matters?”

“Is this a philosophical point?” Mary asked. “Or is that a real question?”

“I mean if they take down a powerful tester, do they take on that tester’s brand of power, do they become experts in what that tester was an expert in, or is it just a matter of consuming enough energy to grow strong?”

“We’d better hope it’s the second,” Matthew said. Some people caught his meaning immediately and nodded, but some were puzzled. Matthew didn’t even notice these other people he was so sure his own fears were shared by everyone.

“Matthew?” Mary said, and when Matthew looked up he finally realized that not everyone knew what he meant.

“We just watched about two hundred of them feed on Epp,” his voice was bitter as he spoke. Mary’s marathon discussion had worn a lot of the past twenty hours out of his memory, had created a numbness that was welcome, but talking about the events directly caused everything to start crashing back in, so Matthew kept it brief. “If the quality of the tester matters, then we just watched two hundred of them become as powerful as Epp.”

“And we’re sure Epp is…”

“He is,” Kyo said.

“About that,” Mary said, “from now on when you leave you take a companion with you. I don’t want you getting stuck out there and I don’t want you having to count on a phone call getting through to get back up here.”

“Yes, mother,” Kyo said. His eyes were on the horizon and Matthew could tell he wasn’t listening.

“You’re sure?” someone asked Kyo.

“I went back. I wasn’t very comfortable there so I didn’t stick around, but Epp was there, and he was dead. I closed his eyes myself.”

“Oh,” the tester said, his head dropping.

“At any rate. I think I have a plan,” Kyo said. “And I’m going to go start now.”

He was already walking away when Mary shouted after him. “Kyo? Kyo!”

He turned.

“What is your plan?” she asked, astonished that anyone was thinking that far ahead.

“I’m going to track them all down and kill them.”

“That’s your plan?” Mary asked. “And just how long do you expect that to take?”

“A few hundred years.”

“Are you insane?”

Kyo thought this over.

“Kyo we won’t last that long up here. We have nobody to test. We’re going to start losing energy ourselves.”

Kyo, uncomfortable with this obvious flaw being drawn out so quickly, bobbed his head. “I was thinking, if you rationed them out, that there would probably be enough mountain climbers who made it far enough up every year for you to get by.”

There was another muffled thump somewhere down the mountain.

“I think you’re missing the point, Kyo.”

Kyo’s eyebrows arched.

“We’re all up here,” Mary said. “I’m not sure anyone is going to climb mountains anymore.”

Kyo didn’t react.

“Kyo,” Mary said, exasperated. “None of us are down there. Nobody is going to decide to climb a mountain, or do anything really, with nobody to push them. Nobody is testing.”

Kyo stared at Mary as this point sank in. Then he waved it off. “I don’t care. I’m restless. I’m going to go start on my plan. I’ll check in from time to time to see if you’ve come up with anything.”

“Go,” Mary said, dismissing him from her presence and her mind. Kyo walked away. Mary relented slightly and turned to Matthew. “You go with him,” she ordered.

“Me?!”

“He needs one of us, Matthew. He doesn’t push. That means he can’t get back up here without a guide. Go with him. You’ll be safe as long as you stick close.”

“Splendid,” Matthew said, leaving the circle and following Kyo down the mountain.

Matthew caught up to him standing at the edge of a rock outcropping.

“Kyo,” Matthew said, a little scared to be having to tell Kyo anything. “I have to go with you so-”

“I know,” Kyo said and Matthew stopped talking. “You stay close, you do what I say,” Kyo was staring intently down the mountainside as he spoke.

“Gotcha,” Matthew said.

There was another thump, much louder this time, and Kyo began to run towards the noise. Matthew followed, the sound of rattling rocks growing in volume until they caught up to its source. Matthew looked down at the half-rotted thing clinging to the side of the mountain, struggling to claw its way up to a foothold. “Are they getting closer?” he asked Kyo.

“I wouldn’t let yourself start thinking like that,” Kyo said. “You’ll get jumpy.” Kyo reached down and took hold of the thing’s hair.

It erupted in glee, grabbing onto Kyo’s wrist and turning its head to try and sink its teeth into his skin only to have one tooth break off during the attempt. Then it began to panic as Kyo lifted it up by its hair until it was face to face with him. “Where are there more of you?” Kyo asked.

The thing didn’t answer, it only scratched and pulled at Kyo’s hand to try and make him let go.

Kyo sighed, began fumbling around in the thing’s jacket pockets. He found what he was looking for, then let the thing go. Matthew watched as the mountaintop rejected it, a strange sight, the thing’s feet seeming to land on a perfectly flat piece of rock, only it immediately began slipping back towards the edge. Even Kyo stopped what he was doing to watch as all manner of gravity and balance was ignored and the thing somehow fell sideways off the mountain.

“That was odd,” Kyo said. He turned to Matthew. “I’m pretty sure you’re safe up here as long as no one invites them up.”

“No kidding,” Matthew muttered, walking over to the edge to look down as the thing fell out of sight.

Kyo flipped through the cell phone he had taken from its jacket and scanned the names. After a few moments the cell phone disappeared in his hands.

“Anything?” Matthew asked, nervous, hands slipping into the pockets of his pants.

“A few names,” Kyo said. “Although I hardly think these are the elite members of their ranks. They seem barely alive enough to know that we’re up here.” Another thump emphasized his point and they both watched a different thing land awkwardly on the side of the mountain, scrape and scrabble at the rocks and snow, then slide off into the oblivion of the Himalayan night.

“Come on,” Kyo said. “We’ve got to start somewhere.”

He wavered then disappeared off the mountaintop with Matthew shouting after him before following.

Back up the slope, Mary’s circle was falling into a bout of silence. Mary had been standing at her board for hours straight. She resolutely capped her marker and placed it in the tray at the bottom of the board. “I’m taking a break,” she said, walking away.

She made her way to the peak to the south and found a crowd of testers all milling about and talking at once with cell phones bleeping and ringing constantly. Her eyes were bleary and she had been focusing too hard since the cathedral so that everything began to swim and she found it hard to pay attention.

“Mary,” someone said, and she saw a familiar face talking to her. Mary couldn’t place the name but it was one of the testers in charge of tracking people down. “The Andes are packed,” the tester was saying, “and the Rockies are starting to fill up.”

“I can’t deal with that right now. Just let me give you the names I have in my phone. I need a rest.”

“Okay,” the tester said, and they both took out their cell phones. A few buttons pushed and Mary transferred her address book. “I had most of those already,” the tester said, looking at the soft glow of her cell phone’s screen. “Some are new, though. Like this one. Who is Bartleby? That sounds familiar.”

“Oh no,” Mary said, closing her eyes in a wince. “I forgot about Bartleby.”

—–

Bartleby stood in the morgue dressed in black all alone. He had been standing by the door for an hour or so, arms folded, back against the wall with one foot up, staring across the room at the large metal drawers. It was quiet. He couldn’t stop thinking.

Finally, mustering a brief moment of courage, he pushed off the wall and walked over to the drawer he had been eyeing. Sliding it open he was surprised at how frankly and head on he was able to unzip the body bag and stare down at what he had done, at the burnt skin of the dead body.

He couldn’t remember much of the previous afternoon, not with any clarity, but he knew he had felt good destroying a bathroom in a bar and had wanted to hear people screaming. But things had gotten out of control. He could recognize that now. This was all a mistake. Epp had really screwed up. Epp should never have put so much onto his shoulders and should never have expected him to be able to handle things. He, Bartleby, had never agreed to any of this. It was Epp’s fault that this person was dead and it was Epp’s fault that he was abandoned by his friends. There had never been any chance of him doing anything but break under the pressure. And if Epp had ever thought differently then Epp was just wrong.

Bartleby looked down at the body one last time, then zipped it up again and shut the drawer. There was an acrid taste in the back of his throat as stress seemed to be bubbling up his esophagus and there was a feeling like a steel band tightening across his chest that came and went.

Bartleby thought about Epp again and his face tightened as his jaw clenched. His fists seized up in angry balls, so tight they shook. Then his body relaxed, the spasm of anger over, and all that was left until the next one was a vague sense of nausea and a sweet slick sensation in the back of his mind that he was right and he was just dying for someone to argue against him.

—–

Matthew slumped lower on the bench. Behind him somewhere was the Sydney Opera House but he was too far gone to even pretend to notice it. He had bounced around behind Kyo for the past ten hours, feeling very much like an incidental piece of paper hurtling along in the backwash of a large tractor-trailer.

The rate of travel that Kyo had kept up over the past near half-day had worn Matthew into a stupor. It didn’t help that Kyo seemed to forget that Matthew was supposed to be following him, so Matthew had turned around mid-sentence any number of times to realize with alarm that he was alone in a crowded city or desert wasteland, an open target to any of Hector’s things that might be around. Then Matthew’s cell phone would beep and Kyo, as an afterthought, would let him know where he had gone running off to.

It was too much, the past thirty hours, the cathedral, the run, the sifting through of information on the mountaintop, manning the phones for a few hours, everyone reacting in strange ways to what nobody wanted to believe, and now running around after Kyo. Matthew slumped even lower, his feet stretched out in front of him, looking like a kid bored while waiting to go into the principal’s office. Matthew wasn’t sure at all what was going on any more and he hadn’t had a firm grasp of a thought in over a day.

There was only mild alarm when he looked around to see that Kyo wasn’t there anymore. By now this seemed normal and Matthew was beyond caring. He had his bench. He was fine.

He saw a man running up the pier towards where he was sitting. “Thank god,” the man said, and Matthew realized that he was a tester. “I haven’t seen anyone in over a day. What’s going on?”

The man was dressed in what Matthew could only describe as jungle gear. Beige shorts and thick boots with thick socks and a button down shirt that was smeared with mud. “I’ve been out of touch for awhile and there are all sorts of crazy messages on my phone. And was that Kyo I saw you come here with?”

Matthew looked up at the man. He breathed slowly in and out and refused to break eye contact. “You smell like dead leaves,” Matthew said.

The man’s manner changed instantly, his face became pointed and his tone frank. “Where is he?” the man asked. “Hector wants us to find him and watch him.”

There was a ripple in the air and two more forms appeared on either side of the man. Both were rotted, more skeleton than body.

“You found one!” the thing on the right said, and it began to walk towards Matthew with hungry eyes.

“I got this,” the man in the beige shorts said, putting a hand on the thing’s shoulder. It shrugged off his hand and then the thing on the left started advancing as well. “I said,” the man in the beige shorts spoke up, annoyed, “that I’ve got this,” and he stepped forward to stand between Matthew and the things. “Now just let me talk to him first.” The things seemed to think this over, not exactly agreeing to the new terms, but processing things too slowly to disagree.

The man turned and looked down at Matthew sitting on the bench. “We want Kyo. That’s all. Can you understand that?”

It was strange, Matthew wasn’t sure if it was the exhaustion, or if his brain was unable to process the man’s safari outfit as being in any way menacing or if he just didn’t care anymore, but Matthew wasn’t very afraid.

And when the man reached down for him Matthew reached up to meet him and, despite never having tried to use the time-tape before, he wrapped up the man’s arm in thick yellow caution tape. Which didn’t work in the slightest. Matthew was sure someone else had tried this who actually knew how to use the tape properly, but it had been his favorite trick of Epp’s and it came out without him really realizing what he was doing.

The man grabbed at the tape and there was a second where it seemed like it was almost going to be a struggle, but that might have been because Matthew had managed to tie it tightly in a quick square knot, and ripping through tape wasn’t easy when it was tied to your arm. But a few seconds was all the struggle lasted before the man managed to rip the tape off. And with that out of the way the man turned back to Matthew.

Then someone whistled a high, fast, warbling sort of whistle that got everyone’s attention and when they turned to look down the pier they saw Kyo standing there about twenty yards away.

“Ah,” the man said, “so there you–” and his voice stumbled and faltered as he watched Kyo take one step forward then leap into the air so high he disappeared. The two things on either side of the man stared up into the sky with their mouths open.

“Whichever one of us survives,” the man in beige shorts said, “has to fall on him hard and fast.”

The two things turned to look at him, their mouths still open, no sign of understanding on their decayed faces.

“Whichever one of us survives,” the man said, agitation and fear beginning to creep into his voice, his energy starting to key up so high that the only method he could think of for getting his point across was to repeat it word for word only louder, “has to fall on him hard and fast.”

The things didn’t understand.

“Whoever survives,” the man was in a blind panic now and was articulating with his hands to desperately get his point across, “has to fall-”

Kyo dropped from the sky in a warrior’s stance, sword braced with two hands, and sliced straight through one of the things, landing in a crouch. During the process of standing up his sword drew up and cut through the second thing leaving him face to face with the man in beige.

“You were saying?” Kyo asked. The man blinked.

Kyo put his sword away, the blade disappearing at his side, and grabbed the man by his shoulder. He gave the man a once over, ignoring the struggling and speaking and attempts to fight back while he judged his height and weight. The fact that the man seemed completely regrown interested Kyo, who pinned him down and took off one boot, then the other, then peeled off his socks to reveal two rotted feet. Lastly, Kyo ran his hands over the man’s arm and plucked the remains of Matthew’s time tape off of him. He held the stretched strip of tape between his fingers and watched it wave in the light harbor breeze. Behind him a pair of seagulls squawked and floated in the air.

The man was terrified and at this point even Matthew began to think that Kyo’s actions were a little odd as he watched Kyo throw the man to the ground and pin him down with one foot before staring down at the tape again, his eyes going off into nowhere.

“Kyo?” Matthew said, perking up.

Kyo looked down at him. “You know,” Kyo said slowly, “Gregor was an idiot. He was a moron. And he was incompetent. But one thing he wasn’t was stupid.”

“If you say so,” Matthew said losing interest again.

“We’re going back up to the mountains,” Kyo said. “And Jungle Jim here,” Kyo stooped down and picked the man in beige shorts up by his neck, “is coming with us.”

“You want to bring him up to a mountaintop?” Matthew asked. “You realize that-”

There was a feeling like strong wind blowing over him and Matthew stopped talking as everything around him seemed to rise up at breathtaking speed to a dizzying height before plummeting back down, leaving only his hair blowing oddly in the wind that was no longer there.

“The fuck was that?” he asked, turning, wide-eyed, to look in the direction the strange wind had gone to see something the entire length of the horizon, like a massive tidal wave, receding into the distance. “Kyo?”

Kyo didn’t answer.

“Kyo, what was that?”

“I don’t know,” Kyo said. “But we’re going to follow it. I want to see it again.” Then he walked a few feet to the north before disappearing. Matthew’s cell phone beeped and he jumped up and glanced at it before rippling and disappearing, following after Kyo.

The man in the beige shorts sat up slowly, looking around before standing up and dusting his shirt off.

“Forgot about you,” Kyo said, suddenly appearing next to him. The man jumped back before Kyo caught him by the shirt and then disappeared again, dragging the man with him.

—–

Mary walked back across the mountaintop in the sterling blue morning. She had been at the communications area trying to get a hold of Bartleby again, but she hadn’t been able to reach him. She had taken a brief rest sometime around dawn and now felt refreshed and determined as she walked back over to her dry-erase board, the conversation there still going on with an ever-changing circle of testers. There was a moment when Mary wondered what she would do if she didn’t have her dry-erase board, or phone calls to make, where her mind would go if there was nothing to occupy it, and she got a sense of something awful lurking just at the corners of her mind, but she did have things to occupy it with, so she didn’t worry about it.

The tester standing in front of the board handed over the marker without saying a word. Mary looked over the board. There was a lot more writing on it, but most of the words and sentences ended in question marks.

“What’s this mean?” she asked, pointing to the word, “Wait?” written and underlined.

“Well,” a tester began, “we’re all up here. Right? That’s bad news for us because we need humans to push or we start to…fade.” The tester chose the word carefully. “But what about them? They appear to feed on us. Are they able to feed directly on humans? Because if not then they’re just as screwed as we are. So we were wondering if we could just wait them out.”

“Not all of us.”

Mary turned and saw a tester she recognized as Gus speaking, his pale skin making his plain face shine in the wintry sunlight. Gus noticed that he had attracted a lot of attention with his comment, and he looked around, uncomfortable with everyone’s eyes on him, his short red hair glinting in the sun. “I’m not too happy with the idea that anything I do gets decided by them. Someone grabbed me off of a human I had already invested ten years in to bring me up here. And I’m not so sure I want to do anything but head back and finish what I started.”

Mary looked him over. “That’s either very brave or very stupid.”

“Not the first time I’ve been at that crossroads,” Gus said.

Mary looked back at the board. “Either way, it would be nice to know if humans mean anything to them.”

—–

Hector stood with his hands clasped behind his back and stared out the window at the lights blinking, flashing, and swirling on the Las Vegas strip.

Nyx was seated at the desk looking at the laptop, clicking the keypad every now and then as she chomped on a piece of gum. “We don’t seem to know much,” she said.

There was a knock on the door. Hector looked at her, worried.

“I ordered room service,” she said. “Remember?”

Hector’s eyes grew harder.

“I’m hungry,” she said huffily.

Hector shook his head. “But it’s a human. It’s not like you’ll fill up.”

Nyx shrugged, already hopping up and headed over to the door. “So? I just needed a snack to tide me over.”

“You’ll just be hungry again in an hour.”

Hector flexed his fingers, then tilted his head, stretching his neck. He sat down at the computer and picked up where Nyx had been reading, his eyes scanning over everything they had come up with over the past day and half of being hotel shut-ins. “If we don’t get out ahead of this mess,” he said to himself as Nyx opened the door, “it’s going to be nothing but snacks for all of us.”

“Here we are,” the waiter said, chipper and happy as he wheeled a cart into the room. “Now where would you like me to set this up?” He looked up expectantly at Nyx first, then Hector. “Ma’am?” he asked when nobody responded. “Sir?”

Nyx slipped the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside of the door, then let it slam shut.

—–

“These things aren’t exactly accurate, are they?” Kyo said, standing over a globe in a small local library.

“What are we doing here?” Matthew asked. Kyo didn’t answer, only put a finger onto a spot on the globe somewhere in Eastern Europe. Matthew found himself looking over at the man in the beige shorts to see if he had any clue.

Kyo lifted up the globe, trying to keep his first finger still, then placed the finger from his other hand awkwardly on the other side of the globe, the bronze semi-circle that rose up from the base of the globe sliding back down onto his hand making him almost lose his place. “Which way was it going?” he asked, looking at Matthew and then at the man in beige shorts.

“Northwest?” the man said, not entirely sure why he was having a normal conversation.

“Right,” Kyo said studying the globe again. “So it’s headed back.” He looked up. “And we hopped ahead of it…what…about a hundred miles before coming here? How long did it take to reach us? Ten minutes or so?”

“About that, yes,” Matthew said.

“So how fast is it going?”

“Well it’s…if that was a hundred miles and it took ten minutes then it’s going…no…wait so if we waited ten minutes and it was traveling towards us…so that’s a thousand miles in eighty minutes-”

“My god you’re terrible at math.”

“Well I don’t see you answering the question!” Matthew shouted.

“Was it moving at a constant speed?” the man in beige shorts said. “Because if its speed was changing as it moved then I think you have to use calculus.”

Kyo turned to look at him. “That’s not helping.”

“Sorry,” the man said.

“He might be right,” Matthew said, willing to believe anything at this point.

Kyo was whispering to himself, ignoring everyone now. “It was going about five hundred miles an hour,” he said after a few seconds. “And if I’m not mistaken, it was getting shorter in height.”

“Kyo, I didn’t get the greatest look at it, and I actually completely missed it the second time around. What exactly were we-”

“It was a wave. And we’re going back,” Kyo said. “Find someone to push. And you,” Kyo turned to the man in the beige shorts. He thought for a few seconds. “You’re not nearly scary enough. I have no use for you.” The man’s lips pursed in a determined effort not to show any fear on his face. “You have five seconds to get out of my sight.”

“What happens if-”

“Five,” Kyo started. “Four.”

The man disappeared.

Matthew watched all this. “You let him go?”

“He knew about calculus,” Kyo said, turning away.

“That’s where you draw the line?” Matthew spluttered.

Kyo stared at the globe. “Maybe I don’t like lines so much right now. But we do need to find another one of their kind that’s a little squishier. Then we can go back.”

—–

Nyx stared down at the hotel bed and ran a hand over the comforter, smoothing out a slight wrinkle. “We have so much stuff inside of us,” she said, a curious child.

Hector stood up from the desk and walked over to the foot of the bed, looking at her handiwork. His face was tight with stress and Nyx found herself leaning in as she looked at him to try and get a glimpse of his eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses. She gave up after a few seconds; the sunglasses never came off of Hector’s face and they were designed by him to fit perfectly so that no glimpse of what was underneath was ever seen.

“Are you done playing?” Hector asked.

“I guess,” Nyx said, looking back at the bed, moody now, “I’ve been on the phone for over a day straight, I think I deserve more of a break.”

“We can take a break when we have more answers.”

“It would help if I knew what you were most worried about.”

“I don’t even know,” Hector said. The awkwardness of answering that question honestly bowed his head and his shoulders tensed under his shirt making his body draw in upon itself. He reached a hand out and with one finger gingerly moved the knee cap of the waiter’s skeleton where Nyx had assembled it on the bed, adjusting the bone ever so slightly so that it sat perfectly square between the femur and the tibia.

“Too much happened too quickly,” he said, drawing his hand back and letting his eyes wander up until he was staring at the waiter’s grinning skull. “And everything was planned wrong. We should have had more people on Epp and Kyo and less people on the rest.” He shook his head. “Six of us to take on Epp. Gregor was way off…and I made the horrible mistake of letting an artist do my math.”

“But it worked,” Nyx said. “Epp is gone.”

“But Kyo became even more of an unknown.”

Nyx’s phone rang, buzzing across the desk as its speaker played a song by The Sounds. Nyx walked across the room and picked it up. She spoke for a few minutes then told the person on the other end that she needed a second. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece she looked up at Hector.

“This guy says he’s seen Kyo.”

“Who?” Hector said, immediately attentive.

“Jonathon,” Nyx said.

Hector shook his head as this name meant nothing to him.

“You know him,” Nyx said, her eyes casting to the ceiling as she tried to remember visual clues to help Hector out. “He’s always dressed like a…well like a dork. Shorts and boots, like he’s out hunting big game in Africa.”

“Oh,” Hector said, beginning to remember. “Right. You know I think he actually was a big game hunter.”

“That would explain a lot.”

“What’s he have to say?”

“He came in contact with Kyo and that Matthew guy down in Australia.”

“He spotted them? Is he following them?”

“No, he says Kyo killed the two guys he was down there searching with, then took him to a library or something, then let him go.”

“He said Kyo let him go?”

“Yup. And something about a wave, which, I have to tell you, Hector, sounded a lot like the thing I saw when we first-”

“Kyo let him go?” Hector thought out loud, not listening. He came to a decision. “He’s lying,” Hector said. “Get rid of him politely and then I want an eye kept on him.”

Hector turned and stared down at the bed while Nyx wrapped up the conversation, bubbly and friendly. She clicked off.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” Nyx said.

Hector stared down at the bones on the comforter. “Epp was an unknown,” he said, mostly to himself, “and he took any number of our people with him during his fall, while proving to be far more powerful than anyone ever suspected. Let’s just say I don’t like having another unknown out there.”

“But look at the bright side,” Nyx chirped. “Kyo is the only unknown. Everyone else follows the rules, right? So in the end he’s just one guy.”

A hint of a smile perked up the corners of Hector’s mouth as he let himself be placated. “I guess that’s right. As much as I hate him, there’s only one Kyo. Everyone else can be handled.”

—–

“There he is,” said the first one, pointing a rotted hand across Broadway to where Bartleby was walking along, body listless in his black coat.

“I guess I owe you a Coke,” the second one said. “I thought they were all gone up to the mountains.”

“Don’t know why he’s here, but he is.”

One of them smiled, the other one ran his tongue across his upper teeth as they watched pedestrians walk through Bartleby.

“He seems a little out of it. You sure he’s one of them?”

“What else would he be?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t look well, is all.”

“As long as he doesn’t look Japanese I’m fine with it.”

“Good point.”

“Come on.”

They walked across the street, staying south of Bartleby. They reached his side of the road and began creeping up on him from behind, their speed increasing as they drew closer and Bartleby showed no signs of hearing them.

When they were within a few steps the first one jumped, his arm wrapping around Bartleby’s neck from behind as Bartleby’s eyes flew open in shock. The first one tightened his grip as Bartleby tried to pry the arm off his neck, his throat spasming from the pressure there, while the second one grabbed his other arm and pinned it back before Bartleby’s knees gave way and he fell forward, his neck forgotten as his free hand reached out to brace his fall, his arm wobbly with the weight of two more people and doing little to stop him from landing face first on the sidewalk. He felt dust and grit stick to the inside of his upper lip as his face was pressed to the ground.

“Hold him,” one of them said, and Bartleby felt fingers dig into his upper arm.

He screamed as he felt blood running over his skin.

“Help me!” he shouted to the people walking all around him, his voice cracking. “Help me!”

“They can’t hear you,” the other one said, getting Bartleby’s wrist under his knee, pinning his other arm down.

Bartleby struggled, his muscles trying to move, his limbs trying to get free, his body writhing against the concrete while he screamed. He felt one of their hands on his back, felt the fingertips, hard like rocks, start to pierce his skin along his spine and then he tilted his head back as far as it would go and screamed as loud as he could.

And the two things on top of him started screaming as well. Shrieking, high pitched screams, like panicked animals, and suddenly they were trying to get off of Bartleby as smoke began billowing from their clothes, filling the sidewalk, the skin on their hands turning to ash instantly as flames erupted all over their bodies.

When Bartleby felt them fall off of him he scrambled up and spun around, walking backwards as his eyes took in the sight of the two burnt bodies lying on the sidewalk. His heel caught a rift in the concrete and he fell over backwards, sitting hard on the ground he kept scooting further and further back until he was pressed up against a building and he stopped moving.

A spasm shook his body, then another one and then he was sobbing, indelicate, ugly tears ripping down his face as his gut lurched again and again and his whole body shook.

—–

Matthew arrived back on the mountaintop. He turned and watched Kyo appear with one of the things over his shoulder.

“I really can’t believe you talked me into this,” Matthew said.

“I can’t believe it took you an hour to find someone to push.”

“I need sleep,” Matthew said. “Can we talk about this in a bit?”

“How tired can you be? All you did was push some kid off his skateboard and skin his knee.”

“You’ve really never pushed, have you?” Matthew said, finding a nice piece of rock and lying down. “I didn’t skin his knee and I didn’t push him. What I did was make him get back on his skateboard.”

Kyo was saying something but Matthew stopped paying attention and, his eyes closing by themselves, he fell asleep.

When he woke up he heard Mary shouting.

“I in no way see how this is helping, Kyo!”

Matthew sat up. Kyo was standing a little ways away. The thing they had brought up to the mountaintop was chained to a rock next to him. It looked angry. Stuck in the snow behind it was a digital clock that was counting down. There were about four hours left in the countdown.

Matthew stood up and groggily walked over to them.

“It’s going to be fine, Mary,” Kyo was saying.

“And you,” Mary said, wheeling on Matthew. “What were you thinking inviting that thing up here?”

Matthew rubbed his eyes sleepily and didn’t say anything. Someone called Mary’s name. “I have to go take care of some things,” Mary said. “But we will be talking about this in more detail when I’m free.”

“Absolutely,” Kyo said.

Mary looked at him, studying his face. “Something else I do need to ask you now, though, is if you saw anything strange while you were down below.”

“Like what?”

“There are all sorts of phone calls coming in from people who saw some sort of wave go past them on the mountaintops.”

Kyo shook his head. “We saw nothing like that.”

The person shouted Mary’s name again, more urgently, and although Mary clearly had more questions, she settled for a curt, “We’re going to talk later,” and then walked off.

“What is she so upset about?” Matthew asked.

“When this clock is finished counting down I’m going to let him loose,” Kyo said, looking at the half rotted thing chained to the rock.

“You’re going to what?” Matthew asked.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just like her dry-erase board only more hands on.” Kyo looked Matthew over. “That must have been some skinned knee. You’ve been out for sixteen or seventeen hours.”

Matthew looked at the digital countdown, looked at the thing in chains, shook his head, and turned back to Kyo. “Forgetting all that for a moment, why did we just lie to Mary about the wave?”

Kyo didn’t respond.

“It was him, wasn’t it? It was Epp.”

“We don’t know that. And I don’t want to get people’s hopes up.”

“But it was him. That was the same thing I saw go blasting out of the cathedral in all directions. Like a big ripple in a pond. Only, we were in Australia, and it was heading north. So it’s already gone around the world and now it’s heading back?”

Kyo didn’t answer again, he only looked around uncomfortably.

“I mean, come on, Kyo. And you even worked out how fast it’s going, right?”

“It’ll be back in Romania at around three in the morning. A few hours from now.”

“So we tell everyone, right?”

“I don’t want to get everyone’s hopes up,” Kyo said again, stubbornly.

“Why? What am I missing?”

“The wave that left the cathedral, how high was it?”

“It was huge, taller than the cathedral itself.”

“And the wave that passed us in Sydney, how high was it?”

“It was…it was much smaller.”

“He’s losing energy.”

“You don’t think he’ll make it all the way back?”

Kyo only stared for a few seconds, the darkness all around him hiding his face. “What happened to this guy, Matthew?” he asked, turning to the thing in chains next to him.

“He gave up.”

“Yes, but then what happened? Keep going.”

“He gave up. The life was too hard so he stopped testing.”

“And?”

“We went over all this,” Matthew said. “I think what we came up with was right. He stopped testing and he started rotting. And after a certain point he changed. Once he lost enough energy he crossed a line…” Matthew was making a chopping motion with his hand to indicate this line when he froze. His hand slowly lowered and he looked up at Kyo.

“He’s losing energy,” Kyo said. “Even if he makes it back…I’m not sure what side of the line he’ll be on.”

Matthew didn’t say anything.

“We wait. And in a few hours when he’s due back in Romania, we head over there and we watch from a safe distance.”

“Okay,” Matthew said. “I guess. Is that the best we’ve got?”

“You come up with anything, you let me know. But while you were napping, that’s all I thought about, and I didn’t get very much further than waiting.”

“Okay. And it’s due back in a few hours?”

“He’s due back there at three in the morning.”

“Three in the morning, right.” Mathew looked at his watch. “Wait, three in the morning here in Nepal? Or three in the morning in Romania at the cathedral?”

“There’s a difference?” Kyo asked.

—–

On the cold, damp limestone of the cathedral floor sat bodies and beams and joists. The land all around the cathedral moved as an ever shrinking circle of energy, like a reverse ripple in a pond of still water it drew tighter and tighter upon itself. One side of the circle reached the main entrance, and the rocks and steps undulated as the wave passed by, now barely three feet high.

Tighter and tighter the circle closed in, more and more of it condensing so it fit inside the great open space of the knave, old pews and rubble from the roof collapse rippling as it passed, now barely a foot high.

It converged on Epp’s body, barely six inches high when it crossed over his feet, all sides of the circle moving at once, the ripple only a few inches high traveling up his legs while the other side of the circle drew in on the top of his head.

Only half an inch high it rippled up his chest and the stones above his head rattled and jumped as the wave moved past them like a nervous cat’s tail. It was tiny, barely visible as it disappeared below his skull. Then there was silence.

Then his eyes opened.

And in the great empty space of stone and wood his chest began moving up and down, the sound of his breathing loud in the stillness, and then everything was motion as his muscles, bones, shirt and suit started trying to knit themselves back together.

—–