42

“No one in sight here either,” Gene spoke softly, looking out the window.

Nick, Gene and Olive were exasperated. They found themselves in Nick’s black sedan scouting the area. The tactical gear and the weapons they had been carrying had slowed them down. To expand their radius they had dumped most of it back at the mansion and had taken one of the cars. That had been about an hour ago. They were now heading towards Spectre Lake, leaving the eerily quiet Sound Lake in their rear view mirror.

They were driving over the sloping road that Nick knew would eventually lead to the high school Lieke attended. Each side of the road was engirded by big stand-alone houses with little turrets and driveways. They were definitely in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods of Spectre Lake. Some of the yards were decorated with Christmas lights, but most of the houses appeared to be dark inside, apart from shining Christmas trees. Nick and Gene figured most of people’s decorations were on time clocks. This was also how they knew there wasn’t a general black out going on.

“How is this possible?” Nick wondered, with growing astonishment, now that they were driving through the third dark and desolate town of the tri-lake area.

Gene didn’t answer. They both had ideas in their heads about what was going on, but neither of them had the guts, or the energy, to verbalize their theories.

Olive roamed freely around the back seat. The dog had been restless, since she had returned alone from her walk with Marith. Nick knew that was nothing like her. He wasn’t sure what was going on and what was happening to the girls, but he knew without the slightest sliver of a doubt that it was about that group of unhinged and maladjusted people Marith had been hanging with, since she had arrived in Sweet Lake.

They rolled up to the high school. The big, brick building appeared to be empty and dark as well, which was not surprising during the Holidays. No lights were escaping any of the windows and the lawn and the walkway were covered in a fresh layer of snow.

They came to a halt next to the building. Nick turned the lights and the engine off so they could perceive their surroundings with more accuracy, like they were at a stake out.

The only light around them originated from the streetlights and the snow they illuminated was untouched. No footprints, pawprints or tracks from tires or sleds. The air seemed to stand still as well, no soundwaves travelled towards them.

Olive marched from one window to the other, her ears standing up, but not registering anything. Her eyes were better adjusted to the darkness than those of a human, yet they found no sign of life outside the vehicle. Even the local wildlife had decided to avoid the area apparently.

Nick had hoped he would find all the missing people, the children and the adults, here. He had told himself that he had missed flyers and posters about a Christmas market or a charity thing at the school and that everything was alright. Everybody was here. He would make a big donation to whatever the fundraiser was for and they could all go home afterwards to celebrate Christmas. He was the crazy one. It was all him. It was all in his head.

He knew better, of course. This had everything to do with Marith and her group of special individuals, his brother being one of them.

The temperature in the car was dropping fast. The three of them were breathing little clouds of condense. Gene shuddered and stuck his gloved hands in his coat.

“Let’s go,” Nick sighed.

They rolled away from the empty school with the same speed they had arrived at, which wasn’t much. Nick was hesitant to switch the lights back on. For some reason drawing attention to the only moving vehicle in the village seemed like a bad idea.

“Look,” Gene almost hissed, pointing at the snow in front of them.

Tire tracks led from behind the maintenance building on their left to the road they were on. Nick immediately switched the headlights back on.

Several rows of school busses were waiting behind steel picket fencing for the new year in order to be put to use again.

“Must have been a school bus,” Nick mumbled, all sorts of new scenarios going through his head.

The size of the tire tracks and the location gave them no other options.

The slightest glimmer of hope filled Nick’s mind with possibilities, until they drove by the entrance to the parking lot.

The gates were blown off their hinges, now laying in the snow, several metres away from where they should have been attached to the fences. One of the busses had left in a haste, so much was clear.

Nick picked up some speed and followed the clues the snow provided them with. The abandoned houses around them got smaller and were situated further and further apart. Soon they left the habited parts of the area behind them entirely.

Right before the sparsely placed lampposts gave in to the emptiness Olive’s intermittent barking turned into howling. Something Nick had never heard her do before.

Gene tried to shush the dog, while Nick switched on the high beam. He was getting agitated, but kept following the bus’s tracks, until the snow made way for another substance.

It seemed dirty and dark, like the brown slush the roads around town were often covered in during winter season. The tracks of the bus were swallowed by the drab. Olive’s behaviour told them they were about to be swallowed by the darkness.

“What the hell?” Nick wondered, with a frown.

Gene rolled open his window and stuck his head out, which he immediately realized was a huge mistake.

“God,” he said, making a disgusted face.

He rolled the window back up and looked at Nick, who had pulled his scarf over his nose and was now shutting off the climate control to avoid outside air from entering the car.

Olive finally stopped barking to save her breath.

“Must be a chemical spilling somewhere close,” Nick mumbled.

His stomach turned. He knew it wasn’t.

The thick liquid on the road wasn’t brown slush. A primal part of his brain, the part that was usually right under pressure, screamed at him it was blood. It was the blood of Lieke and the blood of many other teenagers whose faces he knew, but whose names he had forgotten, because he was an adult with a busy job. Those were the children of the men and women he employed, the kids from high school that Lieke occasionally brought home to do homework with.

Dark silhouettes crowned the horizon.

“Shit!”

As soon as the headlights illuminated the disordered figures Nick stomped the brake pedal. The car slipped and skidded, before he regained control over the steering wheel.

“Take your foot off the pedal,” Gene instructed curtly.

Nick obliged and the car rolled to a halt.

Green blots had appeared on the windshield when Nick had hit the brakes. That wasn’t blood. Not all of it at least.

He turned the wipers on, only for them to smear the goo all around, until their view was almost blocked. The anti-freeze fluid that the sprinklers sprayed over the disgusting mess brought some of the creatures in front of them back into view.

Lots of thoughts crossed the minds of Gene and Nick. None of them were spoken out loud. Most of them were about all the life decisions they had made leading up to that moment. What had they done to deserve to witness hell on Earth?

Other questions they wanted to ask, but couldn’t were along the lines of “why is that Gremlin having a seizure?”, “what kind of forest creature is covered in snot and wears pearls around its neck?” and “why is that demon wearing a navy two-piece crawling?”

More creatures felt free to slither out of the forest onto the road, because they could. Who was going to stop them? The tri-lake area had been turning itself into a disaster zone for a while. Apart from the occasional ‘calamity tourists’ from the city that would either disappear in the mountains, due to a lack of survival skills, or travel back home disappointed, not having found anything suspicious in any of the three villages, there was nobody there.

Human-like, no, human-adjacent creatures that existed in various states of decomposing flopped, crawled and slithered around on the road before them, pursuing a goal that neither of the men could fathom.

Tentacles, snakes and other disgusting, un-Earthly reptiles protruded from openings and crevices that didn’t need specification. That’s how they moved. That’s how the bodies were being transported to the place where Nick and Gene were trying to get to as well.

“I feel like the school bus is on the other side of whatever this is…” Nick spoke breathlessly, referring to the throbbing plague.

A dull thud made them jump. A tentacle, seemingly belonging to a dying squid, had slapped against the window to Nick’s left. It was entirely unclear what it was attached to and if Nick was really honest with himself he didn’t care to find out either. The trail of slime it left behind was telling.

Olive’s manic barking morphed into a bone chilling sound that seemed to attract more of the monsters.

“Just plough through them!” Gene instructed, before Nick could pop the question about their next step.

Nick slammed his supercar into reverse, while making some quick prayers to the God he hadn’t been close to for over six years. When the distance between them and hell seemed decent enough he switched into first gear.

“Let’s go,” he whispered.

Gene grabbed Olive from the backseat and braced himself, while Nick kept speeding up, skidding and sliding through the snot.

Once they hit the rotting mass the vehicle slowed down, as if they had catapulted themselves into a large body of water.

Gold necklaces, diamond wedding rings and expensive watches flew all around, scarring the shiny paint. One heavy piece of jewellery cracked the windshield, making the glass vulnerable.

The engine roared, the tires spun around with very little traction. Nick kept going. He couldn’t stop now.

Each and every one of the windows was now covered in snot. The mirrors had broken off and tiny holes started to appear in the windshield.

Even though the car was still moving it was slowing down significantly and Nick started to wonder when they would escape this roadblock devised by Satan.

He didn’t have to ponder his worries for long. The windshield was introduced to one very fat chunk of monster. With a final blow the glass completely caved in, covering the passengers and the leather interior in blood, blubber and intestines. Everything smelled like rotting meat.

The men and the dog crawled out of the totalled vehicle and wobbled to the side of the road. Nick threw up. Gene looked at the heaving mass of degeneracy behind them. He couldn’t believe they had actually survived that sea of misery.

When Nick was done hurling he straightened his back, cracked his neck and turned around to take in the damage. He took a deep breath, despite the odour, and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your car,” Gene said, patting Nick on the shoulder.

“They’re not exactly speedy are they?” Nick said, refusing to talk, or think, about the financial damage that was just done.

“We can probably stay ahead of them if we walk.”

“If we crawl.”

The men turned around and started following the tire tracks again. On this side of the zombie apocalypse the snow was untouched once more, apart from the route the bus had taken.

Their footsteps made disgusting wet sounds. Nick wondered how much time they had before the goo they were covered in would freeze over and they would die of hypothermia.

“I thought I got rid of you,” Samuel spoke with wide eyes.

His shock appeared to be genuine. His oligarch persona left his body for a few moments.

Samuel pushed the Runners aside. The Pupils stepped away, opening up like the Red Sea, so Samuel could take a good look at the Mage being alive and well… sort of.

“The Dutch sure are special people,” he spat at the sight of Marith. “Your family is hard to get rid of. Your father kept hanging in there for the longest time, you just jumped back to life… like it’sss nothing.”

The Chain now stood around the Kid in a crescent shape. Marith found herself in the middle of the half-moon they had formed around the immortal Runner. She wanted to do many things in that moment, but someone had nailed her boots to the asphalt.

He angled his head like a cat curious about a flame. His eyes trailed her body and rested on the healed skin behind her ragged sweater.

Marith swallowed. Were his irises completely white now?

“It almost as if I might have to try another one,” he said teasingly.

The Mage’s eyes widened with terror.

Keep calm, the orbs shared, guiding the Chain.

As if pre-arranged Lieke descended from the steps of the yellow bus with a glary look in her eyes. She was still wearing her apron. Marith detected no make up on her face. There were house slippers on her feet and her hair was in a messy bun.

She didn’t acknowledge any of the Pupils standing around her. She appeared to be under some sort of hypnosis.

“Good girl,” Samuel spoke softly, turning around.

They made eye-contact and she put her hand in his, as if they were about to dance in a ballroom.

“Lieke!” Marith screamed for her attention.

“You shouldn’t have messed with things you don’t understand, Marisshj. You think things will get better,” the Kid scorned, “but I don’t need an army of Prophets to predict you it won’t. The ultimate truth of the Universe is that there will always be evil and there will always be good. It doesn’t matter where you put me.”

“Oh, it matters, alright!” Meriyem spat.

Remember the keeping calm part?

Who said that? Joshua wondered, sensing it didn’t come from the orbs.

Me, James thought, looking around the group.

A quiet understanding washed over them. They had just accumulated a new power, as if they had reached another level in a computer game.

“You neeeeed meee!” Samuel screeched frustrated.

For a few moments the Chain hadn’t been focused on their mortal enemy and that irked him. His mastermind deserved their full attention.

“Do we really?” Juliette wondered.

“Not in this shape or form, Samuel,” Vanessa stated.

That appeared to piss him off. He looked like he was about to rip someone’s head off.

“I stand at the cradle of human civilization. Ending me means ending it all. I am the bakermat of your eternity,” he explained warningly.

The Kid had positioned Lieke between himself and the Chain. He held both her arms behind her back.

Hovering over her he looked rapacious. Marith could see the reflection

of the Birdman in his eyes. The beady stare of his ravenous anchor could freeze an ocean over.

What followed was the last thing Marith would have expected that day, but Murphy’s law dictated that if anything can go wrong, it will. She for sure knew that this idiom was applicable to any situation the Kid was involved in, so she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to be surprised at all.

Samuel grabbed both Lieke’s wrists behind her back with his left hand. With his right hand he felt his way over her torso towards her lower abdomen.

The group stood by, repulsed. The orbs made it absolutely clear the opportunity for a unified attack was not presenting itself yet.

Samuel’s hand hovered in the air, over her belly. Blood permeated through her skin and her clothes around her womb.

“Marith?! What is happening?” Lieke cried in a moment of clarity, too weak in the clutch of the Kid to put up much of a struggle.

His leeching appeared to have awakened Lieke from her state of trance somewhat.

All sounds fell away. Except for one… or two actually. Two heartbeats in one body. One slow and mature, two quick and fluttering, like the wings of a Kingfisher.

She could see it, the heart. She couldn’t see much with the blots of adrenaline-induced hatred dancing before her eyes, but she saw the heart. Its strength, its power, its electrical currency, its light. The rest wasn’t relevant. She could even sense the organ with her eyes closed, if she wanted to.

Samuel saw the look on her face. “Remember?” He asked.

He cackled a soulless laughter. “In this Web it’s survival of the fittest… and I will not apologize for being the fittest!”

The Chain witnessed the proceedings in horror. They looked upon an empty, greedy shell searching for a host to suck on. In this case he had found a whole battery of hosts.

Ice water ran through Marith’s veins and the colourful stains continued to tamper with her vision as she slowly started to comprehend what was happening. The rest wasn’t that far along yet, but Lieke must have been… impregnated the night of his awakening, weeks before the others.

Marith didn’t want to be the one that eventually killed the Kid. She really didn’t, but when she saw the life being sucked out of her sister and her unborn child she knew she couldn’t not do it.

“Enough food for a month, I reckon,” he breathed, with a blood stained mouth. He licked his pale lips and let his tongue glide past his horrific teeth, colouring them with the essence of Lieke’s child.

Marith had sensed the heartbeat of the baby fade away, from about 150 beats per minute to below a 100 beats per minute. When the Kid removed his hand the heartrate recovered fully. To Marith’s relief it went up slowly. That meant he hadn’t killed the child… yet.

She’s pregnant, right? Jonathan asked in their private speech bubble.

Yes, Meriyem answered curt and anxious, trying to refrain from rolling her eyes.

Who’s the father? Jonathan whispered.

That’s what I want to know, Pedro answered.

It’s him, guys, Marith informed, after a short silence.

A wave of defeat rolled through their cloud of thoughts.

Samuel was clearly getting high. He stuck his tongue out, like he was trying to catch snowflakes with it, but it just filled his mouth with more red liquid.

“I am the sum of all Runners. You little weasels can’t beat me!” He screamed at the sky.

As the other victims - young women, school girls, even some members of the female homeless population - stepped out of the school bus, Marith could hear their double heartbeats as well.

She also knew she wasn’t the only one that noticed them anymore. The Chain was connected without touching. The other Pupils could sense what she sensed and their sense of defeat started to make place for a much more useful sense of rage.

Not yet, the Elders dictated.

There was no margin for error when dealing with this cretin.

A ghastly silence hung in their midst. It seemed as if time had stopped ticking for a few moments. The Chain, the Kid, the girls, the road and the woods, none of it was alive.

It wasn’t just an absence of sound. Nothing was disturbing the air, as if Sweet Lake was holding its breath.

That was until Kyle recognized his sisters amongst the women that had stepped out of the bus.

“Charlotte?!” He yelled. “Charlotte, it’s me!”

Meriyem prevented him from leaving their line and running to his sister.

“Why?!” The Prophet demanded in horror.

“To gain the strength of a thousand souls,” the Kid lisped.

“There were like sixty people in that bus,” James commented, with a frown.

“I don’t think he’s done accumulating the souls yet,” Alexander whispered.

Brad snorted.

“Was that supposed to be funny?” Samuel demanded.

“No, no, not at all,” Alexander shook his head in an attempt to de-escalate.

“Why are you doing this?” Marith demanded.

“Your tragic inability to grasp the obvious has driven me to carry out heinous acts,” Samuel informed dryly.

“No, you were evil and insane before,” Vanessa scampered.

He tried to stare her down and was unsuccessful.

“These are your new energy sources, aren’t they?” Juliette asked.

The group of girls that had been seated in the bus was done assembling behind him. Some were wearing shoes, most were on slippers, but a few of them stood barefoot in the snow. They didn’t respond to the cold or the Chain or Lieke’s state of being at all.

You decrepit shell of a human being, Marith thought.

“Let me ask for the third time now… why are you doing any of this?” Vanessa wondered, a lot more calm than she gave herself credit for.

The Kid looked her straight in the eye and swallowed, as if he was debating with himself how to respond, what information he could afford to lose.

“You killed Harold!” Samuel then suddenly cried with the emotional maturity of a toddler.

Silence fell over the group. The subtle movements of the floating orbs overhead stopped mid-air. Surprised glances were exchanged.

“Who?” Amber finally wondered, with genuine interest.

“My anchor. You called him… the Birdman.”

His mask slipped again.

If Marith wasn’t mistaken he actually missed his monstrous bird-eating inter-dimensional source of misery and death. Sadness and frustration swept across his face, before he composed himself again.

“Aw, cute. He gave the monster a name,” Amber said mockingly.

Marith saw Samuel shiver. Ever so briefly it seemed as if his lip trembled and he had to suppress breaking out in tears. There was that young, sad man again, that just wanted a companion and a normal human experience, which just didn’t seem to be in the cards for him. And, ever so briefly, Marith felt sorry for him once more. Until he opened his mouth again, that was.

“With my own spawn I don’t require an anchor to keep me grounded in this dimension… I just feed off them,” he said in a quiet, patient and informative tone of voice. “I wouldn’t have made it without your heartbeat, Marith,” he shared. “This body was decaying at an incredible rate, after you killed my Harold. I only needed some help closing the gap between Harold and the growth of the little onesss.” His awful lisp was back. It kept hitting their ears wrong.

You did what you had to, Vanessa thought encouragingly, to save Etienne. It was the right thing, she added, hastily.

She knew about Marith’s sensitivities. They had been entwined for a while, when the Mage had saved her life, after all.

“They are teenagers,” Samuel hissed. “Parents don’t like pregnant teens. They’re going to get abortions anyways. You can let me have the babies and the girls survive. I’ll send them home after a while. I promise. I know where they live,” he finished with an insufferable smirk.

It was at that moment that the Chain and the Elders realized he existed in a different reality than they did and that he probably would never land in theirs. Samuel was living in his own delusional, parallel world that none of the Pupils would be able to pull him out off.

“What even is your plan here?” Amber asked condescending. She possessed a mean streak that didn’t come out often. She reserved that energy for special people. “Did you really think you could just drive out of town with a bus full of girls?”

“No,” he started with an evil smile, revealing his crooked, yellow teeth. “Don’t think for a second I didn’t make sure of a backup plan. And don’t think for a second that any of the Pupils in the past were too pure to be persuaded or bought into becoming an ally. I’ve had two thousand years to cook up a plan and run it all the way through, time and time again.”

Something passed between the Pupils. A message from Anica. She addressed the whole Chain. This time Samuel caught it. The spirit of the unborn life had made him sharp again.

“Maybe you should go… and check that out,” Samuel said, devilishly. He smiled a wicked smile.

“Oh, we will,” Kyle said, trying to sound unbothered.

He was still carrying the bow and the quiver with arrows he had snatched from the bed of Brad’s truck. Nobody had ever taught him how to shoot a firearm. The practice by the creek with the other Pupils was all he got, so he decided to stick by that.

Amber, armed with a rifle and several magazines filled with bullets, stomped off with him. Meriyem, Theresa, Pedro and An, remembering the message the owl had brought to the van, joined the two Prophets.

Don’t forget your Runners, Brad reminded them.

Yeah, two of us should go with you guys, Anton agreed.

You and Alexander should stay together, James said, I will go check it out with them.

Marith suspected this act of selflessness had something to do with the fact that Theresa had joined Kyle’s little mission.

I’m with you, brother, Joshua said, offering himself as the second Runner.

Brad showed them the location at which he saw the horde of former humans, forced into submission, proceeding towards them.

“Enjoy the Empty,” Kyle told Samuel, before they left the group.

The young Prophet wanted this to be out of the way, just to emphasise that they would in fact win, not him. He sounded more empty than Marith had ever heard him before.

“I wonder what it could be,” Samuel said, subtly glancing at the young woman in his arms.

“You can’t hurt us,” Marith said, somehow making her voice sound flat and threateningly at the same time.

“I know, but I can hurt this community... and I know how much that pains you guys. So I wrote another neat little computer program.”

Another? William wondered.

I am guessing the first one was what triggered the pilgrimage to the lake, Marith thought.

Right.

“We know about your back up plan,” Vanessa said flatly. “Those women won’t give you energy… and you sure do need it.”

“I have an energy supply now. Don’t you worry about that,” she said, gesturing to the girls behind him with a wink. “I just need to break you up and slow you down, until I can get out of here.”

“Where were you even taking them?” Brad wanted to know.

His casual tone of voice told Marith he was buying time by making idle conversation. Nobody really cared where he was taking the girls. All that mattered was that they stayed at home, where they belonged.

“A special place.”

“Where?” The Mage asked again.

“In California.”

“To do what, exactly?” Juliette demanded, crossing her arms.

“I will allow the girls to transcend the physical,” he spoke, showcasing his grandiosity again.

“Right,” Jonathan scoffed.

“Did you honestly think you were going to make it all the way there?” Brad wanted to know.

“Sure, my simpleton friend,” Samuel replied the Mage. “The same energies that led you all here are leading me to Los Angeles. I am guided and protected.”

“The same energies, though? Are you sure?” Marith asked.

“Well, the opposite energies actually,” he admitted with a dark smile.

“What’s in Los Angeles?”

“Another tomb,” he spoke softly, hoping for a shocked reaction.

Why do I feel like an even less pleasant creature than Samuel is kept there? Jonathan thought.

Because there probably is, Nate muttered.

He sounded worried.

Was Samuel embarking on this journey willingly?

Why would you ask that? Nate wanted to know.

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies, the orbs spoke in unison.

That came from my grandmother. I am absolutely sure of it, Jonathan said.

What is she saying though? Juliette wanted to know.

Is she saying that the Kid is the child of the devil? Marith asked with a mental frown.

Well, he is lying for sure, Brad concluded.

Then she could have just said that, Jonathan thought. The Elders are trying to say something more.

“There can only be freedom in chaos,” Samuel interrupted their mental deliberations.

“I agree,” Marith said.

“That is my purpose,” Samuel clarified in what sounded like a whisper and a scream at the same time.

“The world is made up out of brotherhoods for a reason, Samuel,” Marith spoke. “You cannot be an island and not make any bridges. No system can function like that.”

Of course Marith understood that it wasn’t by choice that Samuel wasn’t a part of any group, but as long as he was holding her sister she was willing to extend an olive branch in an attempt to break their stalemate apart.

He was still holding Lieke. Marith was surprised he hadn’t tossed her to the side yet. Maybe he had feelings for her, she thought. She decided she didn’t care as long as he didn’t harm her any further.

Marith just hoped her little sister would wake up soon. Until then she monitored her heartrate and that of the baby religiously.

“My system functions greatly,” he said, no doubt referring to his nymphs.

“The very least you need in order to control humans is human connections,” Vanessa said.

“I don’t need them and I don’t need you… As if I don’t understand the human experience,” he scoffed. “The Universe will crumble and die before I am bothered by the fate of a bunch of teenage girls. You thought you could exclude me from the Web, from your society, but I hacked my way in.”

This was the millionth time he was not making sense and also the second time he mentioned working with computers to make the world march to the beat of his drum. Had he found a cheat code to the Web? How would that even work? Had he merged with the internet? Were his neural pathways interwoven with the wiring of computers?

Marith supressed a sigh. This was not a scenario that had crossed her mind, at all. She knew embarrassingly little about computers and she had barely been involved in the digital era she was living in.

If the reality that the Web provided for them was somehow merging with the digital reality that existed on motherboards and hard drives they had way bigger problems than Marith ever thought they had.

If the Kid could built systems to influence, or maybe even bypass, the Web to fight the Pupils and oppress humans then he wouldn’t even need his powers as an immortal Runner. At least not to the extend the Chain thought he did.

Marith wondered if Samuel invented computers at some point in history or if he was just using them like he was using the young women of Sweet Lake.

He had to be removed from this segment of the Web as soon as possible, that much was for sure.

Right now he didn’t have to be removed to prevent his ink black soul from spreading darkness, but more so to make sure he would never have access to a laptop anymore, or a smartphone or a raspberry PI or anything that had an electrical pulse for that matter.

Marith was pretty sure Brad and Will were the only members of their Chain that knew their way around electronics. Could Etienne somehow built a Faraday cage around his tomb?

Her thoughts were racing. She was going mad in a matter of minutes. Nate interrupted the train of worries thundering through her mind laying his hand on her arm.

The moment she fought herself free from all the scenarios and eventualities that were thrusting themselves onto her to look at her boyfriend the orbs spoke again.

Your thoughts are magnetic. Neurons generate electricity for the brain to function. Your brain is the most complex phenomenon in the Universe. Use that power, the Elders corrected Marith’s thinking to remind the Chain that they were potentially stronger and smarter than the Kid, even if he was an evil programming genius.

What do we do now? Will asked the Chain and the Elders.

Samuel arched his neck again and looked at him. “Now we wait,” he answered the question.