Why?
“Sprout,” she says, emerging from her shock just enough to soften her voice. “Your dad’s going away.”
Sprout is kneeling next to him. She doesn’t recoil as his blood reaches her knees and soaks into her jeans. “I know.”
“If he ever really comes back…it’ll only be for a minute. He’s hurt too bad.”
“I know.”
Julie glances at R again. The dullness in her eyes is starting to melt. She holds the gun out to Sprout.
“He’s your father. I can’t tell you what’s right.”
Sprout nods, dislodging fresh tears. She takes the gun.
“Abram,” Julie mumbles, struggling to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”
And then she’s gone. But her words ring in Abram’s head like dissonant bells. Thank you? After all this—thank you? His mind spirals back to the first day he met these people, their bizarre gratitude as they fled the smoking ruins of the home he helped destroy. No hate, no spite, just an acknowledgement of a tiny kindness.
What secret do these people know? Is it too late for him to learn it?
“Dad?”
His vision is dimming. The room is filling with black clouds.
“Do it,” he croaks.
Sprout shakes her head.
“You have to. I’ll—” He cuts off in a fit of coughing, spattering her face with blood. “I’ll hurt you.”
“But you won’t, Dad.” There’s an odd steel beneath her sniffling. A confidence that Abram doesn’t understand, the sound of hidden knowledge. “We’re going to change it.”
Abram lets out a slow, ragged sigh. He doesn’t know or care what she means. He only cares that she’s with him, and that she will get through this. Someone will take the gun from her and do what has to be done, and eventually her tears will subside. She will move on. She will weather this loss like she has so many others, and despite all he’s done to them, these strange, good people will keep her safe. Or as safe as a kid can be while climbing trees and ladders.
He feels layers of darkness splitting open as he sinks deeper. He tries to open his mouth to say one last thing, to tell his daughter something he’s always felt but never known how to say, but his lips won’t move, his breath won’t come, he can’t—
Rest, Abram, says that calm, familiar voice. This isn’t the end.
But I have to tell her.
Rest with us, says his brother, his father, his mother, and all of us. We’ll help you find the words.
-
ADDIS STANDS against the wall and watches. He sees the man-shaped thing try to eat Sprout’s father and he sees Julie shoot it. He sees its head vanish in a dry explosion, bits and pieces but no blood. And he sees the bite in Abram’s neck, the black worms wriggling toward his brain while his daughter waits with the gun. “We’re going to change it,” she tells him as he fades, and then she glances back at Addis.
Addis swallows. His hands clench. Are we? Can we?
A concussive thump jolts the floor. Not a grenade or a rocket or any of the other noises from the war outside. A resonant boom from deep underground.
Below the plastic dome, below the stadium’s sagging roof, Huntress Tomsen dances in the street in the red glare of the fireball. She leaps and laughs as Julie’s metal house collapses. She whoops and waves her fists as it sinks into the earth, burying the smoldering remains of BABL. She dances like a demon, but every nerve is singing hymns. She can feel the fog of noise evaporating. She doesn’t need her radio to know the air is clear, but she pulls it out anyway, spins the dial away from Fed FM, and cranks the volume.
Soft static. Background radiation from the birth of the universe, and nothing more. And then a click. A breath. A voice.
Hello?
“Hi!” she screams into the radio, but that’s all she can manage before it falls from her shaky hands. She’s too overwhelmed to converse right now, too jittery. It’s enough to know that she can. That everyone can.
Her legs give out. She drops to the ashy pavement. “We did it, Dad,” she whispers, making no effort to wipe the tears from her eyes or the snot from her nose. “We can finally go home.”
Addis reads all this in our fluttering pages. It joins the swirl of other moments circling his head. He has been tallying them for a long time, counting up good and bad, weighing the balance on some imaginary scale of justice, but he is suddenly ashamed of this petty bean-counting. His grand calculations shrink to a human scale as they play out on the stage in front of him. He sees people trying. He sees compassion and love and selfless sacrifice. He sees blood willingly shed and tears that are more than grief and people continuing to fight long after their strength is gone.
He sees goodness. He sees a lot of it.
He sees enough.
Addis closes his eyes. He drifts into the dim expanse of the Library, surrounded by our whispering books.
Will you do it now? he asks us.
We don’t answer.
You’ve never been so full, and we’ve never been so thirsty. Will you pour yourself out? Will you do it?
We don’t answer.
He opens his eyes. Nora is examining the hole in R’s chest. Julie and Joan and Alex are kneeling by his side, all quietly pleading.
I said will you do it? Addis shouts into our vastness, sounding much older than seven or even fourteen. Answer me!
His conviction seizes our vacillating voices. He presses them into a decision.
We won’t do it, we tell him. You will.
And then he hears the hum.
For a moment he thinks it could be the wind. Just innocent air whistling through the windows, playing the dome like an ocarina. R has everyone’s attention except Sprout’s, who remains by her father’s side. The grownups give no sign that they hear anything, but as the noise rises from a hum to a howl, Sprout looks up. She turns her head and catches Addis’s gaze. The fear in her wet eyes confirms it—this is not the wind.
Addis approaches the door. No one notices, not even Joan and Alex, and this is good. They might want him to stop, and he can’t stop. He feels something filling him, inflating him, like he’s inhaling continuously with no need to breathe out, an exhilarating absence of limit.
He opens the door and steps out into the hazy sun, the hot wind, the hammering din of war.
They’re here. One hand, then another, sharp fingers digging into the edge of the roof and dragging skulls and spines behind them. Their hum fills Addis’s mind, louder than the gunfire. He lacks the vocabulary to describe what he’s hearing, but we have all the words ever spoken, and we know this sound even better than he does. We have been enduring it for billions of years as it churns up from the Library’s sub-basement: the dissonant drone of a tone-deaf choir, the raspy chant of a thousand geriatric monks. It’s a sour chord built on an atonal root and it never pauses to retune, it just drones and drones, forever faithful to a pitch established by accident in some dark jungle swamp long before the world had heard music.
Join, it tells him as the skeletons crawl up the roof. Follow. Eat.
No, Addis says.
The hum twists into even harsher discord, tones and overtones grinding against each other. There is nothing else. Only this.
Addis’s eyes blaze like molten sulfur. How well he knows these creatures. Whether or not any of this crowd ever crossed his path in the airport, he knows them, because they are defined by their sameness. They are the toxic byproduct of unity. Cult, regime, unquestioned custom, party line, canon, convention, taboo. For the past seven years, since the day they killed him, they have been dragging him through the stations of their parodic civilization, assigning him parents and shoving him into homes, drilling him on loathsome skills and meaningless mashups of tradition, and he has followed them because he had no one else.