“What’d you do?”
“Everything I could. I preached to whoever would listen, and trained whoever would learn. I traveled the system for eight years trying to build some kind of defense, until the Nefrem advance fleet finally arrived. The Oikeyans greeted them with open arms and paid dearly for the mistake. Millions died before my forces were able to turn the fleet away.”
“But they came back?”
“Of course. The destroyers returned in numbers that made a mockery of their assault on my homeworld, and they brought their living planet this time. The war was over before it ever began.”
“How many died?”
“Forty billion, Jack. Slaughtered, eaten and churned out into more Nefrem. The sixty million refugees here on Earth… they are all that remains.”
“But why come here, Kai? Why like this? You could’ve asked us for help.”
Kai looked him dead in the eyes. “Because you are Nefrem.”
“We look like them?”
“No, Jack. You are them, and there can be no mistake in this. You’re genetically identical. We only learned of this world from them. The location of your system was cleverly hidden in their databanks. It was heavily encrypted and obscured behind falsified information, and I believed the secrecy was to prevent enemies from discovering the location of their homeworld.”
“So you brought the Oikeyans here to strike back.”
“Yes. We came prepared to wage the final battle. To tear out the weed at its root. The plan was to take the Nefrem by surprise and wipe out their civilization before they could mount a counter-offensive, and in that, we were fairly successful.”
“Except we’re not the Nefrem,” Jack said while shaking his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. We’ve always been here. We evolved here, and until you arrived, we were pretty sure there wasn’t life out there at all. I mean, we’ve only just taken our first baby steps out onto other planets, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know that now. In fact, your people survived precisely because you’re not the Nefrem. They live in hives the size of your largest cities. They have no farmland or suburbs. If you lived like that, you would have already been destroyed.”
“I’m so glad this has been a learning experience for you, Kai. Really. I mean that.”
“Sarcasm aside, the truth is that I can’t turn back time, and I can’t undo what I’ve done, but we still have a choice about who to become in the wake of this.”
“Yeah, I know the guy who said that.”
“I do too, and he’s an amazing creature. After everything that’s been done to him… everything he’s seen and been through, he still refuses to kill innocents. He could have destroyed the entire city in a flash of light, but he chose not to. I subjected him to more pain than any living thing could be expected to endure, and yet he spared my life.”
“He must be a God damned idiot.”
“Not at all. You’re a better man than even you realize, Jack Hernandez, and there’s something noble inside of you that I don’t understand. Something luminous that I couldn’t snuff out no matter how hard I tried. I will never cultivate a soul like yours, but I can become a weapon of your will, and perhaps atone for some of my mistakes.”
“And if I prefer you dead?”
“Then I’ll die. I deserve no less, and I know it… but I don’t think you’ll make that decision. You know that I can do more good alive than dead.”
“We’ll see,” Jack said. “No offense, but this all seems a little too convenient. You’ll excuse me if I don’t lead you straight back to the resistance.”
“I understand your apprehension, but I’ve no reason to deceive you. Your people have gotten sloppy in recent months. Your primary installations have already been located and dealt with, and all that remains are the fortified shelters… Arks, I believe you call them. The Oikeyans are mounting a final offensive as we speak, with the intent of finishing the fight once and for all. Humanity doesn’t have much time left.”
They both sat there and listened to the falling rain. Then a motion in the distance caught Jack’s eye, and he struggled to focus. Months of captivity had left his vision less sharp than it once was, and with some effort, he made out a rhino and two jackrabbits moving down the hillside. His first instinct was panic. “We’ve got company!” he shouted and scrambled up from the ground.
“Relax,” Kai said. “They’re friends.”
“What?”
“There are objectors among the Oikeyans that still believe life is sacred above all else. They want to end the war. When I informed them I was going to free you, these three volunteered to accompany us.”
Every muscle in Jack’s body was rigid and his heart was racing. Kai might have spent months torturing Jack, but at least he looked human. The exterminators were a different story. They still had a profound effect on him, and the sight alone sent adrenaline surging through his blood.
“Fuck me. Okay. I can handle this. Accompany us where exactly, Kai?”
“Up to you.”
“Figures,” Jack said. With that, he dropped back down and laid himself out in the ground cover. The rain fell harder every minute, and he was wet like a river. “For the time being, can I just lie here? I just want to lie here in the rain for a while.”
“If that’s what you wish. Should I… go somewhere else?”
Jack thought about it for a second and then said, “No. I may not like you, but you’re all I have. I’ve already had my share of solitude.”
“As you wish.”
Chapter 44:
Dead Sea
All told, fourteen months had passed since the beginning of the invasion, and Jack had spent four of them in captivity. Four months without sunshine. One hundred and eighteen days locked in a box, tortured and left to stew in his own despair while the world outside shambled on without him.
Now he was free. His flyer sliced through the air at more than two hundred kilometers an hour, racing northward over the vibrant green jungle.
Jack and the strange vehicle were intimately connected, but at the same time separate in a way that baffled him. The feeling of sheer, unbridled speed reminded him of riding a motorcycle, but taken to an unimaginable extreme, while the play between mount and master was more like riding a horse. Not that he’d ever ridden a horse, but he’d heard stories.
As they traveled, he was taken aback by how quickly nature had reclaimed her world. Jack had always heard that the Earth abides, but the swiftness of it disturbed him. The ashen cities were already grown over with fresh vegetation, and only the twisted metal spires hinted that anything had been there at all. Human civilization had been erased and forgotten. It left him feeling like civilization hadn’t been an integral part of the world, but had rather existed in spite of it. Mankind had been bailing water from a leaky ship, and in the absence of his attention, the tides rose up and swept it all away.
Jack and his companions stopped every few hours so the flyer could rest and graze. It wasn’t like the larger cuttlefish in this regard, which were self-sufficient and capable of space travel. This flyer was a commuter, and the city was its natural habitat. It was less than ideal outside of the city, and its reliance on external energy made it essentially useless after nightfall.
By the end of the first day, they reached the shores of the Red Sea where they camped for the night. Although Jack logically understood that the others could kill him at any time, the danger felt doubled once the sun went down. It bothered him so much that he hardly slept.