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All of that inner turmoil, her fragile hopes, her too-realistic fears, had been papered over by Shade’s wild ride, and by Cruz’s own decision to take the path of the rock, to become Rockborn. And the rock had messed with her. Nowhere near as bad as what Malik was dealing with, but the rock had messed with her, just the same.
How clever you are, little alien rock. How cleverly cruel.
Now, thanks to the rock, she could appear however she wished. She could be male or female. She could be Dwayne Johnson or Meryl Streep. Big, small, blond, brunette, white, black, Asian . . . and all of it false.
False.
It was margarine rather than butter, carob rather than chocolate. Near beer. An oregano joint. It was looking at photos of the aurora borealis when what you wanted was to lie beneath a real sky glowing with color.
When was she ever going to get back to those earlier dreams? When was she ever going to get a chance to actually experience the physical changes she’d half longed for, half feared?
When do I get to be me?
But self-pity, even justified self-pity, shrank when she looked at Malik. She knew—better than Malik himself—the damage that had been done to him. She’d been in the hospital room when his bandages were changed.
Malik and Cruz, both with their lives irretrievably destroyed.
By Shade.
Yes, by Shade. By her obsession. By her ambition.
And by my choice to follow her.
Malik’s eyes closed, shutting out the trees and the sky. He barely felt his own body; his skin was not true skin, his nerves not real nerves. The only true and real thing about him was his mind. It was his mind, still, but not his to control entirely. He was still himself, but he was no longer alone in his own skull.
Something Cruz had said came back to him. Something about being able to learn about the Dark Watchers. Like a bacterium on a microscope slide wanting to look up through that microscope and see the eye staring down at him.
He tried to shut out distant screams and gunfire. Tried to ignore the massacre he knew was taking place just down the hill. He breathed
deep and smelled pine needles and heard the rustle of the breeze. But the dark space inside his head spread out, widened and deepened, as if what was inside him was infinitely greater than what was outside. Darkness and more darkness, but somehow that darkness had a structure. A shape. It was real. In that darkness he sensed their gaze. They watched him. They were . . . intrigued.
Why do you watch me?
No answer, of course. No indication that his unspoken question had been heard.
Who are you?
The only response was a chill as an invisible-but-felt tendril curled around him, reached inside him, seemed almost to be leafing through his memories like someone reading a book.
What do you want?
Was that laughter? Were they laughing at him?
He knew he was weak and they were powerful. He knew that they could see what he could not. He thumbed through his own memories—or was it them making him do it? He searched for answers, explanations, theories, Malik being Malik, and he was pleased that even now under the unceasing scrutiny of the Dark Watchers, he still sought answers.
He remembered once reading the Victorian-era story called Flatland for physics class. It was a fascinating tale of life lived entirely in two dimensions, with creatures who had left and right, forward and back, but no up and down. They were as trapped as Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man. But a person in the three-dimensional world could see into those two-dimensional creatures. The 3-D man could, from the 2-D perspective, pass through impassable walls, literally see the insides and outside of a 2-D creature. To the 2-D people, the 3-D man was not visible unless he touched their flat plane, and then all they could see was a 2-D cross-section, appearing as a circle. To the residents of Flatland, the 3-D universe was impossible to imagine, let alone see.
Just as a 3-D man could not grasp, let alone see a 4-D reality.
Yet.
That word hung in Malik’s brain. It felt as if it had come to him, not from him.
Yet?
The sounds of conflict intruded on his thoughts: the sirens that had gone off right after he had hit the Ranch with a blast of pain were still sounding, gunfire, an explosion, unmuffled military engines firing up. Orders were being shouted.
Screams and pleas for mercy.
