Monster Planet(116)

Ayaan leaned forward and kissed Sarah on the cheek. 'I've missed you,' she said. She had a trembling smile on her lips.

'I've missed you too,' Sarah said. She wasn't crying. She thought she should be crying but the tears wouldn't come. Maybe she was just too scared.

Ayaan reached into a pocket of her jacket and took something out. Something small and silvery. It looked half melted. 'Here,' she said, and put it in Sarah's outstretched hand. Sarah closed her fingers around its sharp edges, its smooth curves. “I was supposed to give you this.”

Why, hello,someone said inside of Sarah's head. Someone pleasant and female.I've been waiting for you.





Monster Planet





Chapter Nineteen


'They're out of range,' Ayaan said, leaning over the edge of the flatbed. She had tried, with no success, to engage the army of ghouls who waited below them. Every time they made a move to come down off of the flatbed the dead men with their sharpened arm bones and their lipless grins would take a step closer. Every time Sarah moved toward the machine gun they would take a step back. 'It's a stalemate.'

Sarah clutched the half-melted nose ring in her fist.

You look scared,Nilla said.That's the first thing we need to fix.

'He's about to end the world. For real this time! Of course I'm scared.' Sarah sat down on the deck of the flatbed and watched Mael Mag Och's body vibrate on the spikes. He wasn't catching on fire, the way the Tsarevich had. Either he was stronger in some way or Nilla was acting as a transformer and stepping down the power of the Source as it flowed into his cells. It had to be the latter. 'You're part of this,' Sarah said, her voice very high. 'Without you he couldn't be doing this.'

That's true. Listen, there are better ways for us to talk. Close your eyes.

'Are you kidding?' Sarah demanded.

She wasn't.Just close your eyes. It won't make things any worse.

That was fair enough. Sarah's blood was racing too fast to let her truly relax but she leaned back against the machine gun's pintle and forcibly closed her eyes.

Instead of darkness she saw bright white light. It filled her head and stroked her brain. It calmed her down and made her breathing slow.

'You're inside the Source, sort of,' Nilla said. She came forward out of the center of things and moved toward the edge without walking or passing through any kind of space. 'Or maybe its shadow.'

The white light dimmed and she could see her surroundings. She found herself sitting on a landscape of bones. Heaps of bones, piles of them. Unlike the bones that littered the valley of the Source this bonescape went on as far as she could see. The hills and rises of bones before her were obscured by a thin brownish-red mist that flickered in the air. Sarah turned around and saw she was standing ankle-deep in a pool of bright red liquid. Blood. She looked down at her reflection and saw that she, herself, had been skeletonized. She could see her bones, picked clean of all her soft tissues. Her hands were bony claws, her body defleshed, her sweatshirt draped over her pelvis and rib cage . She looked up and saw Nilla come toward her. Nilla was nothing but a skeleton as well. A skeleton dressed all in white.

Sarah had no idea what was going on.

'When we die, our bodies decay. You've seen plenty of that,' Nilla explained. She took Sarah's humerus and lead her around the curve of the lake of blood. 'Our personalities, though, and our thoughts, our feelings, all of the electrical patterns in our brains don't just disappear. They're stored here, in what he calls the eididh. It has lots of other names too: the Book of Life, the Akashic Records, the Monobloc, the Omega Point. Gary called it the Network. He imagined it as a kind of internet with human souls instead of packeted data.'

'It's all written down and stored forever?' Sarah asked.

'Not exactly. This place is outside of time. There's no storage. Here all of your thoughts and memories and beliefs are all still happening, all at once, forever. All of them you ever had'and all of them you ever will have. If you know how you can read them.'

'What about his memories and ideas?' Sarah asked. 'The druid's, I mean.'

Nilla nodded. Her skull swayed back and forth on top of her spine. It was impossible, there were no integuments or sinews holding it on, but somehow the skull didn't fall off the vertebrae. The bones made a squeaking noise as they moved. 'Yes. His personality is here. It's what you're looking at. None of this,' she said, and waved a bony hand at the bony world, 'really exists. It's simply how he imagines the network.'