Addis turns to face us. He looks exhausted, but he smiles.
“Addis?” Nora whispers, confused and afraid.
“Hi, Norwhale,” he says, and his smile turns shy.
The world dims again. Dark spots and muffled voices. I am aware of Nora lifting her brother off the ground in a crushing embrace, crying into his dusty hair, but everything is soft. I’m aware of Julie pulling on my arm, trying to stop me as I step out into the circle of dry bones, but I turn around and look into her eyes and tell her, “It’ll be okay,” with a confidence I can’t explain, and after a moment of wide-eyed uncertainty, she nods. We shove our way through the Boneys and walk to the edge of the roof.
“Tell me that again,” she says as we take in the scene below. “Tell me it’ll be okay.”
I must have been unconscious longer than I thought. The battle has escalated. Someone has cut through the stadium’s front gate—I see a rounded slab of steel lying flat on the pavement—and Axiom’s remaining troops have left their positions in the wall to fill the gap as the skeletons converge like a filthy river. Whatever force halted the group on the roof doesn’t seem to have reached the swarm on the ground; they press in on the Living with unwavering conviction, and Goldman’s rebels continue to snipe at Axiom even as the swarm surrounds them both.
I feel my confidence bleeding out. I feel dizzy and I turn away. Over my shoulder, I see M hauling Abram’s inert form out of the dome while Nora keeps a gun trained on the paralyzed Boneys. My friends are moving toward the ladder, trying to get the kids to safety, but where on Earth is that? Not at the bottom of that ladder. Citi Stadium is about to become the world’s largest tomb.
I feel surprise, but I don’t know why. What was I expecting to see when I looked down from this roof? A magic wave of peace flooding the land? The instant, compulsory end to all wars? There can be no such sweeping legislation. We all decide the shape of the world, the sum of all minds together. Change has to be chosen.
Where is it? I ask that glorious chorus. Where’s our new world?
My knees buckle and I start to sway. Julie grabs my shirt and pulls me back from the edge. I realize I haven’t given her the reassurance she begged for, but I can’t seem to find it. The wonders I experienced in that Library feel remote and abstract, even foolish in the gritty clangor of war. Did I dream the whole thing? Was it just the old near-death light and tunnel show, the desperate illusion of a blood-starved brain?
“R,” Julie says.
There’s an odd note in her voice, a sudden change of key, but I can barely hear it over the din of my thoughts. I watch men from this place killing men from that place and creatures from no place killing both, a war of all against all. And I see the Ardents through the windows of their armored trucks. They’re cheering.
“R! Do you hear—do you feel that?”
Her voice finally reaches me through the fog. What is that emotion I hear in it? Is it wonder? Is it awe? I tear myself away from the battle and look at her. Her eyes are wide. Her ear is cocked to the sky.
“Something’s different,” she whispers.
I strain to hear it. I strain to feel it. And then I stop straining and it’s simply there. It’s been there the whole time, since the moment I opened my eyes: a faint but clear chiming, like church bells on a distant hill. Now that I’m listening, I hear it through all the noise of war: a signal. A pronouncement.
A call.
My eyes drift across the city to the forest that surrounds it, thick and ancient and full of secrets.
“Julie,” I say, grabbing her hand and squeezing hard. “It’ll be okay.”
There are people walking out of the forest. Up and down the length of it, from one end of Post to the other, they emerge from highways, freeways, rural backroads, and from the trees themselves, pooling together into a crowd so vast my brain struggles to find a comparison. I flip through images of rallies, protests, festivals, and wars, but nothing comes close.
Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
Millions.
Julie once told me the entire population of America amounted to maybe three million. But whoever took that census wasn’t counting the Dead.
“What…” Julie gasps, searching for words the way I’m searching for pictures. “What is…where are…oh my God.”
Even from my rooftop perch, I recognize my people. The tattered clothing. The swaying and stumbling. The crowd doesn’t march; it doesn’t form ranks and advance in lock-step. It moves with a swirling fluidity, like a natural phenomenon, each person on their own path, wandering away and then returning but steadily moving forward. I stop picturing armies and start picturing waves and sand. Wind and clouds. A fog of quantum particles condensing into a shape.
“Is this happening?” Julie says in a wild, breathless giggle. “Did my message…are they really…is this happening?”
She’s not the only one unraveled by the sight. As the armies around the stadium become aware of their surroundings, the battle grinds to a halt. First the Living soldiers freeze, the shock overwhelming their combat instincts, and then, to my amazement, the Boneys freeze with them. They don’t take advantage of the troops’ sudden vulnerability. They wait, poised to attack but not attacking, their own instincts derailed by the unexpected behavior of their prey. They have no category for this. No prepared response. They watch the men like cats watching stunned mice, waiting for the hunt to resume.
But it doesn’t. While the Boneys wait, fixated on their targets, the Dead sweep in around them, outnumbering them on a scale so large it’s comical. More images flutter through my head—a house sucked up by a tornado, a sand castle caught in the tide—but the one I like best is a virus. Jagged, alien things invading humanity’s bloodstream, only to be surrounded and absorbed by our antibodies.
It takes only a moment. There are several dozen Fleshies for each and every Boney, pinning them in on all sides, so it happens all at once. The Dead seize their future selves and simply dismantle them. They remove limbs and toss aside heads. It’s somehow nonviolent, not so much a battle as a decision. Thousands of skulls hiss and chatter on the ground, but they have no words to express their will and no hands with which to enforce it.
Slowly, the Living soldiers thaw from their shock. The Dead watch them placidly, waiting for them to decide their response, but even the most mind-numbed Axiom soldier can see there’s only one.
Guns clatter to the ground.
Those who can still recognize absurdity put their hands up with grim smiles. A funny thing, to surrender to people without weapons, an unarmed army asserting its will through sheer presence. A silent majority that’s finally making noise.
What will it say when it finds words?
“Hey!” Nora shouts over the rising wind. “We need to go!”
I follow her gaze to the source of her concern. The skeletons around the dome are waking up. Their hum sputters and chokes like a flooded wasp nest. Their bones rattle; their jaws snap; they begin to move toward us.
Then the wind rises, and they blow away.
Despite their savage strength, despite the primal forces that drive them, they are still just hollow bones, and all it takes is a strong gust to reveal their lack of substance. They topple over the edge of the roof, carried aloft like dead leaves, and their hideous hum disappears.