“So it’ll disappear from the GPS in an hour?”
“Maybe less,” he said. “I don’t know what time it is right now, but it’s always at 1:11 in the Hour Glass, and then the count starts again .”
“So their time is always between 12:11 and 1:11?”
“Correct,” he said. “But I don’t even know why it’s showing up on this GPS.”
“Might be me,” I said. “I was searching for any place in the storm we could run to.”
He nodded. “I think we should try and make it there. It’s six miles away.”
I checked the time. It said 3:23 pm. So that gave us 48 minutes before the next wipe and it disappeared from the GPS.
“If this truck can follow the GPS, we can make it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
The front seats of the truck were made for humans, so they were at least cushioned. I made sure the truck didn’t drive over twenty miles per hour, to stay on the safe side and give us a chance to rest for about a half hour. DNA napped, but I was afraid to even close my eyes. What am I now? I kept wondering. I could connect to all things online by wifi without an electronic mediator. Was I an experiment? To follow that theory meant going to some ideas I didn’t want to approach. Maybe I’m an accident. I thought. Or a glitch or a mutation. Whatever I was, the whole world knew it now. No, I couldn’t sleep a wink.
CHAPTER 14
Do Not Speak Its Name
I felt it before we saw anything. It certainly wasn’t as enormous as the storm, but it was huge and was abuzz with life I could sense. It was like being in the presence of a whale who was the size of a city. No living thing should be so enormous, but the city was just that. I rubbed my forehead. “What is this?” I whispered.
“What?” DNA said, his eyes still closed.
“I think we’re getting close.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “The Hour Glass is surrounded by a firewall. The Red Eye isn’t the only way it stays hidden. I hope it doesn’t do to you what the firewall around my village did. It’s much bigger and stronger.” He looked at the GPS and frowned. I looked too and groaned. The hour was almost up. We had three minutes before the Hour Glass became undetectable to our GPS.
“I hate to say it, AO, but you might be the only way we can find it.”
“I’m not even sure I want to find it anyway,” I said. “What if they don’t want us? What if they know who we are and they think we’ll just bring trouble?”
We stared at each other. Where else could we go? If we turned around and went back, it wouldn’t be robots and drones waiting for us, it would be human government soldiers. We’d just escaped execution; I just wanted to flee.
“What is it you feel?” he asked.
“Drums,” I said.
“You hear drumbeats?”
“Sort of. I hear them, but also feel them. Like the beat is trying to smash my brains. And there’s pressure, too.” I suddenly wanted to stop the truck, but one look out the window and I was reminded of where we were and what awaited us on the way back. I let the truck keep going and the clock kept counting down. “My brother used to play the drums. They gather people.”
Three minutes, the drum beat its rhythm.
Two minutes, the sound bloomed and I could no longer hear the howl of the window outside.
One minute, oh the pressure, and what was I seeing when I closed my eyes? I could not open my eyes.
“It’s gone,” I heard DNA say.
“I know,” I whispered. My ears were blocked with pressure, the pounding in my head was so loud that I wasn’t sure if DNA could hear me. But I was seeing things behind my eyes. There was chaos outside and chaos inside my head. Yes, like when I’d arrived at DNA’s village. The sensation was so overwhelming that I decided to just fall into it. Let it take me, I thought. Anything was better than this. If I die, I finally die.
One moment, I was there with DNA, sensing his worry and helplessness, the next, I was swept into blackness. I was falling, though I had no body. I was warm, as if I were falling into something alive. But I had no body. I was not my body. I was . . .
And there were the eyes. Red. So much like the inside of a pomegranate. I don’t know when it happened. I began the process long ago. Maybe it started the day I murdered those men. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I knew everything in that moment. And I knew it before them all. I laughed. I had no body but I laughed.
When I opened my eyes, I tasted blood. And blood was running down my nose. I felt it dribbling from my ears. My head was on DNA’s lap and he was using his shirt to dab at my wet ears as he wept and said my name over and over, “AO, AO, AO, AO.” I lay there for a bit listening to him, my eyes itchy with sweat, my head still pounding, my body aching. His voice was bringing me back. “AO, AO, AO, AO.”