The Lifeline Signal Read online

  “At least they’re online courses?” Brianna suggested. “I would’ve done that if my dad actually let me make a decision.”

  “Yeah, they’re okay,” Shiloh mumbled.

  “Well, maybe next semester, you can take some in-person classes, get out of Meridian for a while.”

  “Maybe. But my mom needs help with her research and that’s gotta be more exciting.” Now Shiloh looked up at her. “What else is there? Drawing, that’s still fun. My rogue-mage is almost to level thirty-seven.”

  “Really? I must have missed—Oh.” Brianna’s own serious expression was reflected back in Shiloh’s dark lenses. The mirrors made anyone talking to xir look themselves in the eye as they spoke. That was about as close as most people looked. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t been around with all the field work. We’ll make time, okay?”

  “No worries.” Shiloh tried to smile. “It’s cool you’re doing more with Radiance, I’m just trying to keep busy too. Only so many Star Trek episodes I can re-watch alone without losing it a little.”

  “There are five whole series and tons of movies, that’s like a million hours,” she teased. “Sure you can’t do without me?”

  Shiloh gave a world-weary sigh. “TNG takes four seasons to grow the beard, Enterprise I’m still not sure about, and you know how I feel about Chakotay.”

  “You’ve told me a couple times, yeah.” Brianna smiled. “I’m free this weekend, you can tell me again.”

  “Thanks, Bri,” Shiloh said, but there wasn’t much hope for change behind it. The days here stretched on like lines on a highway toward a far horizon. Days spent with walls on every side and barrier up above. Shiloh felt trapped underwater. Cut off. Half-real. Half-alive. Life on pause. Frustrated, isolated, bored to tears, ready to scream, paralyzed, over-caffeinated—the list went on. Shiloh made a lot of lists. It felt productive. It wasn’t really, but somehow it helped. “So, how is the field work anyway?”

  “Awesome!” Brianna gushed. “I get to crawl around in the dirt, make sure no nasty Tartarus contamination spreads too far, watch for ghosts. It’s almost fun. And so is assisting the foremost genius in the field, while I do my field work…in an actual field. Ha! Come on, that was great, why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because you keep saying stuff like ‘foremost genius’ around my mom,” Shiloh groaned. “And I have to live with her. She already thinks her tech's gonna save the world and—okay fine, it probably is. But it really goes to her head.”

  “Sorry.” Brianna held up her hands but she was grinning. “Guess I still can’t believe she’s letting me help with her projects at all. I mean, she’s a—she’s Maureen Cole,” she corrected. “And all her designs are way over my head. But they’re gonna help in a big way, so I wanna help in a small one.”

  Unsure what to say to that, Shiloh re-opened xir sketchpad and tried to regain xir focus on the details of the two familiar faces. Inventing practical uses for advanced technology was xir mom’s expertise. Drawing was one of Shiloh’s. Maybe not as practical, but just as important. When both your parents were geniuses or revolutionary leaders, basically superheroes, it was kind of nice to have some things of your own. Even if most of them were problems.

  “Your dad still mad you joined Radiance instead of his…people?” Shiloh finally asked.

  “His little secret private army, you mean.” Brianna leaned her head back against the wall and stared straight up at the barrier.

  “There, you said it so I didn’t have to,” Shiloh said with a smile xie didn’t really feel. “And it doesn’t really look that little. Or secret.”

  She hesitated, slowly lowering her head to look Shiloh in the eye or at least in the glasses. “You ever wish you weren’t good at something you were good at?”

  Shiloh opened xir mouth but no sound came out. Xie made a conscious effort to hold still while an electric current surged inside. The pencil tip tapped against the sketchpad in an echo of fast heartbeats, fluttering wings, and running footsteps.

  “He’s not giving up on me being a sniper,” Brianna continued. “Keeps talking about me joining his corps, now more than ever. I don’t wanna join anything that makes me carry a gun, even if it didn’t have the creepiest name in the universe.” She gave a little shudder. “Eye in the Sky. No thank you.”

  “Creepy’s definitely one word for it,” Shiloh said, thinking of several stronger words and resisting saying any of them. “What do you think they’re watching?”

  “You think the Major tells me anything?” Brianna laughed; it wasn’t a happy sound. “You gotta tell me what it’s like to have a dad who actually communicates sometime. Any new music?”

  “Oh,” Shiloh hesitated while xie tried to figure out exactly what she meant, then formulate a believable response. “Nah, it’s been a couple weeks. But I told him how much you liked his and Evelyn’s last concert.”

  “Awesome.” She gave a wistful sigh. “London must be amazing. Think they’ll ever come do a tour here? I’d love to see a show live. And meet your dad! Can’t believe I’ve never met him.”

  “He’s… pretty busy. You know. London.” There was a reason Brianna had never met Shiloh’s father, Garrett, but this relatively mundane one wasn’t it. Sometimes truth really was infinitely stranger, stronger, and more powerful than fiction. “Your—I mean, the Major really doesn’t tell you what Eye in the Sky actually wants or does?”

  “I don’t even know what he’d have me do if I joined.” Brianna shook her head. “Be a sniper, okay, but where, why, shooting what? I know he wants to ship me out somewhere deep into Tartarus but not where. Just that I wouldn’t be able to help your mom with her work anymore.”

  “I kind of thought you’d jump at the chance.”

  “At what?”

  “Getting out of this bubble.” Shiloh glanced up at the wall, the barrier. “It’s just about the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Don’t wanna get out if it means I have to shoot a gun,” she shrugged, looking the wrong way to catch the relief on Shiloh’s face. “Besides, I go outside every day now. Tracking ghost movement. Search and rescue for survivors when Tartarus decides to lash out a hundred miles in a random direction and eat up some poor unsuspecting town. Picnics. You can come any time you want, you know.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Shiloh said. Xie had the feeling Brianna knew exactly what xie meant and was evading the real question. “We’ve been living in a snow globe for ten years. Doesn’t this place feel like a cage?”

  “No. It’s a shield,” she said as she scooted sideways into a small bit of shade. It sounded like she had the phrase memorized, automatic. “And almost everywhere has barriers now.”

  “That doesn’t make them good.” Shiloh didn’t have much hope of changing her, or anybody’s, mind but xie still watched her reaction carefully.

  “Out there be monsters,” Brianna said easily, not sounding very troubled about it. “Like, real, actual monsters. I’m fine right here, figuring out how to keep people safe.”

  “Without a sniper rifle?”

  “Yep. Don’t need one, not with your mom’s special projects and Radiance Technologies,” Brianna affirmed. “I like their motto, ‘be the light in the darkness.’”

  “Light hurts my eyes,” Shiloh said, only half joking as xie gestured to xir dark glasses and kept scanning the people coming and going. No familiar faces yet. No world-change.

  “You okay?” Brianna gave xir a hard look. “You seem distracted or something.”

  “What? Oh! Sorry.” Xie came back to the present. “Guess the ratio was a little off this morning.”

  “Ratio between what?”

  “Coffee and my bloodstream.” Shiloh grimaced. “Might just try injecting it next time.”

  Brianna gave xir a sympathetic look. “Can’t sleep?”

  “I’ve been having some…weird dreams,” Shiloh said in what might be the greatest understatement ever to escape xir lips. “I thought sleeping pills might ma
ke them stop but it didn’t really work.”

  Impressively, that lie managed to be the exact opposite of the truth in more than one way. The pills had been an attempt to make the disjointed dream imagery clearer. They’d worked a little too well, just not in the right way. The intensity had been off the charts. But the imagery was surreal and jumbled, nothing xie could easily make sense of. The tree was clear, but not the city. Falling. Upside-down, backwards, static, garbled sound effects, it was like watching an ancient videotape with dust and scratches. Shiloh suspected the distortion was Arnold acting up again—it almost felt like the vertigo before a blackout and the pain the back of xir head started to flare when xie tried too hard to remember.

  The only things really clear about those dreams were the faces and names in them.

  “Trade you weird dreams for insomnia.” Brianna shook her head. “I can’t turn my brain off at night at all.”

  “Running numbers?” Shiloh guessed.

  “Nah, that’d actually be productive. I’m just worrying. What I said about Tartarus eating up towns, growing in random directions—if that sounded specific, it was.” She curled her knees up to her chest and bounced her fists against them, as if unable to keep still and think about this concept at the same time. Shiloh knew the feeling. “Happened again last week. This thing’s getting meaner every day. What if its runoff reaches epidemic levels? Can’t have another Parole on our hands.”

  Shiloh kept silent for a few seconds. Everyone at least knew the word Parole, but not in xir vibrant, urgent present tense. Parole had been a great city. People’s relatives had lived in Parole. Parole was the past tense. The present was something else entirely. “You really don’t think there’s anything out there?” xie asked at last.

  “How could there be?” Brianna gave xir a confused look. “Parole was the first place Tartarus wrecked.”

  “It’s a thousand miles from the center.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve seen Tartarus branch out farther than that,” Brianna maintained. “That’s what it does, it grows out, wrecks everything, and then scoots back. Just because someplace is safe now doesn’t mean it always was. Or will be tomorrow.”

  “It’s not like Parole was blown up or anything, though,” Shiloh pointed out. “It’s gotta still be standing.”

  “Sure, standing and infected by a deadly, toxic wasteland.”

  “SkEye must think something’s still going on there or else they wouldn’t be keeping everyone away from it.”

  “Or maybe they’re keeping everyone away from the poison storms and dangerous monsters? So they don’t get wiped out just like Parole?” She dropped the sarcastic tone and shook her head. “It’s gone. Nobody could survive that.”

  “That’s what SkEye says, sure,” Shiloh countered. “But what if the answer is in Parole? And we’re all too busy dealing with this new terrible stuff to pay attention?”

  “We have to make sure the present is safe before we think about the past, or the future,” Brianna said, again sounding as if she were reciting memorized rules. “Remember, but don’t carry ghosts around with you. Don’t treat ghosts like they’re still alive. Let them go.”

  “I’ve never been very good at that,” Shiloh returned. “Especially when things won’t let me go.”

  “Parole’s gone. We have actual ghosts to worry about now and people in the Tartarus Zone need help.” Brianna jammed her hands in her pockets. “Sick and displaced because their whole cities got destroyed by monsters that shouldn’t be real, but are. Those people are the ones I’m worried about. Ones we can help, the ones who are still alive. Not Parole. Forget—”

  “But what if people are still alive there and they need help?”

  “No one is alive in there!” Brianna snapped, voice rising for the first time. She was panting as if she’d just been sprinting, staring not at Shiloh but something only she could see. Shiloh waited, recognizing the signs of hitting a nerve, setting off a flashback and knowing waiting was all there was to do. Xie’d felt that way often enough.

  “It’s been ten years,” Brianna said after several seconds. “But I still wake up thinking I smell smoke. Or hear fire. I remember how it roared. Or rushed, like a river. Sirens, screams, people trying to get away…” Brianna paused. Leaned in closer to whisper, “you know how people say it’s still there, just burning?”

  “Yes!” Shiloh whispered back, feeling hopeful in the strangest way. “That’s one of the biggest theories out there. I didn’t know you listened to that stuff, Bri.”

  “I don’t,” she said quickly. “But sometimes I just—hear things. I mean, it’s probably nothing, just because it’s on the internet doesn’t make it true, people say the same conspiracy-nut stuff about Atlantis, or Area 51, but…”

  “But you can’t get it out of your head,” Shiloh supplied. “Me neither. Not for a minute.”

  “I can’t forget about Parole just because I’m supposed to,” Brianna whispered, as if telling the most dangerous secret she knew. “It’s where we used to live.”

  “I can’t forget it either,” Shiloh said carefully, like a sudden movement might startle her out of the fragile memory. “But it’s hard to remember sometimes.”

  “I remember…” She didn’t complete the thought, eyes drifting out of focus again.

  “I’ve, uh, heard a bunch of theories too,” Shiloh said with deliberate casualness. “Like, about two years into the quarantine, everything caught fire.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brianna said noncommittally.

  One of the nice things about wearing dark shades around ninety percent of the time is that people could never tell where you were looking. When xie spoke again, the words came out light and casual. “Do you remember a kid named Gabriel?”

  She shook her head, still tugging at her sleeve. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Are you sure?” Despite the bright sun and pain that came with it, Shiloh pulled xir glasses off to look directly into her eyes. Or at least make it more obvious. “Think back to when there weren’t walls everywhere, or the big bubbles. Or Tartarus.”

  “It hurts to think about,” she said and Shiloh could feel the distance between them growing.

  “I know.” Shiloh let the memories go and focused on the present. They were very much linked, anyway. Sometimes they were even one and the same. “Listen, Bri, I didn’t come down here to people-watch, not today.” On the next street, the sound of a motorcycle engine rose and fell. “I’m waiting for some… friends.”

  “I thought I knew all your friends,” she said, sounding a little disappointed in spite of the tension rising between them.

  “I’m leaving.” Shiloh couldn’t take it anymore, xie just blurted the words out. “And I want you to come with me.”

  “Come where?” In the time it took for Shiloh to hesitate, it seemed like Brianna had already made up her mind. She stood up and took a step away. “I’m staying here. Looking for answers.”

  “You really think you’re going to find them here, stuck in a bubble?” Shiloh got up too and replaced xir sunglasses. “The answers aren’t here, Bri, they’re out there, I know it.”

  “Please, stop. I never want to think about that place ever again.” She took another step back, and Shiloh felt their connection slipping out of xir fingers like loose sand. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “To even think about?”

  “Yes!” She whirled around to face Shiloh. “I know you think I’m just being stubborn or a coward or something, but you don’t know what he’s like!”

  “Your dad?” Shiloh asked, already knowing the answer. “I mean, the Major?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Brianna stared at her pale, curving reflection in Shiloh’s sunglasses. “Just like I didn’t say—”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  The unexpected sound, like knocking on a windowpane, came from an equally strange direction: directly above their heads. Shiloh and Brianna both looked up—and immediately gasped.

  The barrier curved above t
hem like the wall of a fishbowl. And sitting on the outside, crouched like a hungry cat, staring directly at them, was a dragon.

  “What in the…” Brianna started, looking transfixed.

  Shiloh couldn’t reply, only stare at the creature overhead. Its long, curving neck, four limbs that ended in huge taloned feet, its folded wings—and most of all, its matte-black eyes, fixed on the two small humans below. To say it didn’t look like an ‘ordinary dragon’ would have been ridiculous, xie thought, overwhelmed with surreal wonder. But it was true. Shiloh wasn’t sure what xie expected of a dragon, but it wasn’t this. Instead of looking anything like a living thing, this one was…wrong. It had no color in its scales or eyes, from the tips of its pointed horns to the end of its serpentine tail. It almost looked like a computer glitch, entirely rendered in greyscale, shadows an absolute black and highlights a harsh white. Its movements were jerky, unnatural. Most of it held completely still, as if it were a freeze-frame image—except for one ‘hand.’

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Very slowly, very deliberately, the ghostly dragon—ghost, Shiloh’s brain latched onto the word, ghost was right, important, that meant something—was poking at the barrier’s iridescent surface with one long black claw. As it moved, it left behind trails of smoke; black vapor so thick and solid that it moved like ink in water. Then, as they watched, paralyzed, it slowly began tracing a circle. The energetic barrier fizzled and disappeared where it touched. It peered through the impossible hole it had made in the barrier, staring at Shiloh and Brianna unceasingly, its dark eyes like bottomless holes. As it slipped through, Shiloh heard a voice. It was familiar.

  (It’s finally happened, babies. Parole is burning.)

  Shiloh started to shake, and Brianna let out a small frightened noise. They didn’t hear the voice with their ears. Instead it rattled inside their skulls like a ball bearing in a can.

  (They say we started out in a blaze of glory and now we’re all going down in flames.)

  The sound was like whispers in a crowded theatre before the rise of a curtain, a hundred people hiding just out of sight, giggling at something nobody could quite see. And it wasn’t just the two of them who’d heard it—a clamor of screams and honking horns started to rise up from the people and cars on their way through the gate.