Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twelve

Search and Flee

Skip this part if you’re caught up!

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Finally, if you’d like a short summary of what’s happened up to this point, so you don’t have to click on a bunch of links to figure out what the hell is going on, I wrote this for you:

Earth is a protected (read: ignorant) planet nested within a galactic society known as the Fellowship. Historian/researcher Rita Freeman is also a secret ambassador of this society, who spends a lot of her time on other worlds. In an effort to help Earth become a full citizen planet of the Fellowship, and to rescue its people from total self-destruction, she is on a mission to recruit and guide talented young people to build a better society.

One of these is Jackson River, who grew up with his grandmother in Wind Valley, a tiny desert town lodged deep inside a northern Arizona reservation. His family history is tragic, and when he was 11, he also lost his best friend, Andre, after an episode of severe bullying. Shortly thereafter, he met Rita, who became a mentor.

Another is Esther Quinn, who grew up in an idyllic home in Connecticut. Both her parents are professors, and her older brother, Adam, is an impossibly gifted genius. When she was 11, he was recruited by Rita to become the founder of a new movement called Cubensia. Years later, Esther moved to Boston to join him.

In the last chapter, Jackson and Esther met for the first time, via an invitation from one of her friends, Deek, to join them for a Cubensian launch party.

But instead of a party, what they found was a terrible disaster…

NOTE: The questions in ALL CAPS indicate a written dialogue between Esther and Sky, to whom the reader has not yet been introduced.

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Search and Flee

ARE YOU READY TO CONTINUE?

No. But when will I be. 

Anyway, first I need to explain that I’d already been working with Adam on the project for a year. We were living together in an apartment in Cambridge, and I spent most of my time evangelizing Cubensia to a growing list of people. Usually one at a time. I traveled a lot. It was exciting. I was on the inside of what felt like the most important movement in human history. 

The only major frustration I had was that I couldn’t get Rita (let alone Adam) to open up about the aliens. 

Adam told me, and it made sense, that nothing more about our potential relationship with the Fellowship (whoever and whatever that was) would be revealed until after we had proven Cubensia was on a successful track. So I did my best to shelve my concerns until after we launched. 

That date was set for October 4^th, 2026. Plenty of the pieces were already in place, and everyone on the founding team knew each other. We worked together both virtually and in an old cramped office building that I acquired shortly after I arrived. Adam wanted to keep everything remote, but, as I’ve mentioned, I understood the power of physical presence. 

We planned a big party to kick off marketing and PR. Everyone who could would come, in person, to celebrate finally going public with what we’d devoted the last several years of our lives to. 

Adam and I had concocted the idea to hand everyone a clean phone, loaded with a pseudonymous identity and a crypto wallet that would not only give them VIP access to the Cubensia network, but also allow them to interact safely with third parties. We made 100 of them. Each one, with its accompanying private keys to various crypto assets, would be worth about fifty thousand dollars.

I wanted badly to have them ready to hand out on Launch Day, but getting them put together and secured turned out to be a huge hassle. One last delay in the shipping made it look like it wasn’t going to happen, so Adam and I went to the building empty-handed. 

But then, barely an hour before people started showing up, Adam got a call that the last components had been left sitting outside the front door back at our apartment. He didn’t have to convince me to go get them. 

Putting the packages together by myself would take hours, so I called Deek. He didn’t know anything about the phones, the pseudonyms, or the keys, and he had some new guy with him that apparently no one but Rita had even met. But if I was going to get back to the party in time, I needed more hands, and I trusted Deek. 

Instead of buzzing them in, I went down to get a look at the new guy, trusting my gut to tell me if I should make him wait outside.

The new guy turned out to be Jackson River. 

He gave me a look I had come to recognize. Sort of like a helpless, hungry puppy. Just smitten. That kind of thing can be cute, but it can also be a problem. Infatuation makes people stupid. I did my best to ignore his surreptitious stares, and treat him the way I’d treat any friend of a friend.

NO RECIPROCATION?

Like I said, I was used to it. I’m a good-looking girl. I know that. And I know how to carry myself, I know how to put myself together, as they say. It’s a huge advantage to be attractive. So some guys get a little doe-eyed around me. They can’t help it. They’re hardwired for it. 

But it doesn’t mean anything. What can you know about someone in the first few seconds, or even hours after you meet them? 

QUITE A LOT.

OK, look. I’ll admit he had a good thing going. The threadbare, thoughtful outsider. Long dark hair, pulled back partway into a ponytail. What seemed like an earned strength, both physically and mentally. He made a good first impression. 

But you’re not going to get me to say that there was anything more than whatever naturally occurs between a couple of teenage kids after the sun goes down. We all carry around a cloud of pheromones, and it’s no great revelation that I like a guy with some color and broad shoulders. 

YOUR INSISTENCE ON NONCHALANCE REVEALS MORE THAN YOUR WORDS.

Jesus! What do you want me to say? It was love at first sight? Because I really don’t think that’s an accurate or reasonable interpretation.

Besides, is this really the point of the story? I’m sitting here trying to work up to writing about the worst night of my life, and you’re hounding me about a meet cute for chrissake. 

YOU ASKED ME TO HELP YOU BE HONEST.

Great. Thank you. Then let me get on with it. 

So there was this gigachad friend of Deek’s, who I knew as soon as I saw him we were totally made for each other, and my womb just ached to be fertilized by his seed. But somehow we managed to finish the task at hand without succumbing to our mutual, throbbing passion, and drove back to the party with Deek.

Or, anyway, we tried to. 

A few blocks away, we got stitched up in an apocalyptic traffic jam. We all got out and walked through pouring rain and gathering crowds until it was obvious that there had been some kind of disaster. Buildings on fire everywhere. The road we needed to take was blocked with uniforms and people. Phones wouldn’t work. 

After snapping out of the initial shock of the spectacle, I grabbed Deek and Jackson and looked for another way around.

Whatever had happened had been extremely recent. There weren’t enough boys in blue on the streets yet to set up a full perimeter — or maybe we were already inside of it. Navigation through and around the surrounding streets was an extreme challenge.

The closer we got to one of the buildings still blazing despite the rain, the harder it was to see through the smoke, and we’d end up backtracking with stinging eyes and choked lungs until we could find a new path toward a different burning building, and repeat the whole process. A chorus of sirens wailed unendingly.

I kept us at a jog, dodging everyone — shell-shocked victims stumbling out of the burning buildings; people who had abandoned their cars to get a closer look, and maybe help; and an ever-increasing number of firefighters and police officers. 

I read once about the fire alarm code — a three alarm fire, for instance, might mean fifty or sixty fighters, ten trucks, six to ten commanders, a handful of air units, supply vehicles, and some staff to deal with the media. I tried to calculate how many alarms it would take to deal with what we were in the middle of.

Not that any of it registered for me in the moment. I was focused on my purpose, which manifested in my mind as an image of Adam watching over a group of our friends, shying away from the heat of a terrible conflagration, waiting for me to guide them all to safety.

Jackson and Deek followed me silent and blind. Not that I could see much either, other than my shrinking window of opportunity. With each passing minute, I feared we would be swept away from the scene by either the crowds or the people whose job it was to manage them. Before that happened, I was determined to get my eyes on the Cubensian headquarters. 

But it was impossible. Reality began to pierce my confidence. I didn’t need to look at a map to realize we were navigating a large circle. The best we got were a few glimpses of an open area in the middle, flattened and smoldering. Ground zero. The image upon which I had fixed my determination was a fantasy. The building that housed the Cubensian headquarters was not one of the ones on fire. It was one of the ones that was gone.  

“Esther,” Deek’s voice was raw from the smoke and exertion.

We stood next to a van on the other side of a street, watching firefighters swarm around trucks that had driven over sidewalks and ash-covered medians to plug huge hoses into hydrants. Both Deek and Jackson were soaked and streaked with ash and soot, and I realized that all three of us must look like we just escaped a burning building ourselves. Which, in a sense, I guess we had. 

“We’re going to have to go to the next block over,” I said.

“Esther,” Deek said again. “We need to get out of here.”

“Not until we find the others.” I hated the way those words felt in my mouth. Their bitter, obvious falseness. Their ashen hope.

“I think Deek’s right,” Jackson said. 

“We don’t know Cubensia wasn’t the target,” Deek said.

Target.

Icy clarity washed over me. 

This was an attack. 

Jackson wiped his face with the back of his arm. “Who would do this?”

I shook my head. It didn’t matter. Deek was right. We couldn’t be certain of it, but there was a firm possibility that the launch party was the focus of some kind of attack. Not that this theory made any tangible sense to me, but then, there was still so much I didn’t know about what we were doing. 

We were supposed to be in that building. It was only by chance that we weren’t.

“We can’t go back to my place,” I said, looking at Deek. “Or yours.” Deek shook his head. 

“You think someone…?” Jackson didn’t know how to finish the question.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we need to get out of here.” 

“And go where?” Deek asked.

Everything I could think of turned bad. Nowhere seemed safe to go. Nothing seemed safe to do. Whoever or whatever had done this — if Cubensia really was the target — was an overwhelming and mysterious force. Luck had saved us from annihilation, but for how long?

“We could go back to my dorm.”

Deek and I looked at Jackson. 

“If there’s some kind of a list somewhere, my name probably isn’t on it.” He gave us a brief, self-deprecating smile. “I’m the new guy.”

I nodded. We had to go somewhere, and Jackson’s logic was as good as anything I could come up with in the moment. 

“Where do you live?”

The walk was long and miserable, but there weren’t really other options. The city was chaos. Gridlocked traffic and crowds at every subway entrance. Helicopters peppered the air and we envied them. 

A few blocks before the Harvard Bridge, someone shouted my name from across the street. We looked back and saw a woman waving, holding up her phone. Then she started jogging toward us.

Deek frowned at me. “Do you know her?” 

I shook my head, goosebumps raising in the downpour. “Run,” I said. “We’re going to run.”

And so we did.

So did the woman, which seemed to ratify my decision to get the hell away from her. Thankfully, we were younger and faster, so she gave up after a block. But we kept running until we couldn’t — the bridge was jammed with people going both directions. 

Deek hunched over, wheezing, as Jackson frowned at the madness in front of us. 

My mind might have been playing tricks on me in the dark, but I thought I could see other people staring, coming toward us…

We pushed and shoved our way across the bridge. I chucked my phone and Deek’s into the river at the halfway point. On the Cambridge side, we kept to alleys and side streets, trying our best to stay out of sight. Just before we got to MacGregor Hall, where Jackson lived, the rain stopped. 

Soaked to the bone, I succumbed to fantasies of a hot shower as we rode the elevator up to the top floor. Maybe also take a goddamn beat and try to process what the hell was happening. 

Unfortunately, that was going to have to wait.

When the elevator doors opened, there was a man I’d never met waiting for us. 

“Follow me,” he said, and walked away.

What the hell? I thought. “What the hell?” I said.

“Who are you?” Deek asked.

“What are you doing here?” That was Jackson. He had already left the elevator. Deek and I stepped out after him as the elevator doors started to close again. 

“Sorry, do you know this guy?” I asked.

Whoever-he-was was holding open another door to a flight of stairs. Jackson looked at Deek and I, obviously trying to figure out how to explain himself, but just as obviously surprised by this person being here waiting for us. 

“I’m Callan,” the man said from the stairwell, still holding the door. “Rita’s upstairs. Let’s go.” 

What could we do but follow?

Callan led us through a door onto the roof of the building, where we found Rita standing on a levitating platform that descended as we approached.

My overwhelming relief at finding her alive competed with the bizarre shock of what I was seeing. Above where she stood there was a large object that was hard to fix my eyes on. 

“It’s real,” Jackson said to himself in some kind of frank amazement.

Later, of course, I would understand what he meant. We were looking at an honest-to-god spaceship. Which was just about to take us all into space. 

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