“It’s time,” Pea said. He gave Evan a last sorrowful look. “They’ll never hurt anybody again. All for you, Papa. I do this for you.”
“What are you doing?”
“The lines of power go both ways. I can follow the lines to the source. They have no defense; they never expected. Now they will pay for what they’ve done.”
And then the god closed his eyes and put his hands to his face. There was a flash of light, and the god burst out across the sea in a plume of frothy wind, and what he left behind was just Pea, collapsed at the shoreline, a boy again. Just a child.
Evan didn’t understand why it had happened, but he knew the threads of Pea’s personality had unfurled, split somehow, leaving Pea just a lonely child crouching in the sand. Out on the flat sea, the new wind raised huge gouts of water as it headed for the horizon. There was a flash of light, and the swirling wind was gone. Evan knew that the other part of Pea, the god part, had left this place forever—had traveled out through the lines of power on a final terrible errand.
He didn’t know where it went, but he knew they had run out of time. “What have you done?” he wondered aloud.
Evan looked back to the boy. He was seven years old again, and he was crying. The boy lay crumpled on the sand, barely conscious. His dark eyes rolled blindly. “Papa, are you there? Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“I can’t see you.” The boy’s voice cracked as the tears slid down his cheeks. “I’m scared, Papa. What’s happening?”
“I’m here. It’ll be okay.”
Evan picked up the headset he had assembled and adjusted it to fit around his skull. In his hands, it looked like just so much ruptured wiring twisted together at odd angles. Blood still stained the linkages. He vaguely wondered if it would electrocute him. Carefully, he stuck the leads to his temples, finding the old dish-shaped scar tissue.
There were no tetherings to hold him in an upright position this time, so he thought it best to lie on the floor. He cleared a place near the screen with his foot, wiping away the shards of wire that had accumulated.
He sat and made a final adjustment to the headset. Then he lay down. The floor was hard and flat against the roundness of the back of his head. Above him, the ceiling spread away in panels.
He placed the visor over his face and one last time willed the world away. Willed it to never come back again.
The shoddy wiring turned the trip into something he experienced rather than a simple transfer of consciousness. It was not the gentle slide into nothingness that he remembered. He felt the inward fall like a burning in his brain—a frying of neurons that he could almost smell. His soul conducted through the wiring. Eventually, black faded upward to gray, and colors swam. Night fell in his head, then out of it. He opened his eyes and looked at Pea, crouched in the sand. Recognition blossomed in the child’s dark eyes.
“Papa.”
Evan tried to move toward the boy but couldn’t. The interface was crude and uncoordinated; his legs spilled him into the sand. The boy ran to him and wrapped his thin arms around his shoulders, planting cool kisses on his cheek.
Evan’s strength gradually returned, and he rolled over and sat up on the beach. He pulled the boy into his lap and squeezed, feeling the tiny body tremble in his arms. He looked down at himself, and he wasn’t rage a hundred feet tall. He was himself. Evan. Flaws and all.
“Papa, I’m scared.”
“Shhh, Pea. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Everything has to die, Pea.”
“What’s going to happen, after?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a heaven?”
“A wise man told me that there is no heaven here.”
“Then what will happen?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll be with you.”
“You’re not going to leave me again?”
“I’ll never leave. I promise.”
“Papa, it’s coming.”
In the distance, a sound came like the emptiness between atoms. It was a sound Evan heard equally with every part of his body. Though he couldn’t see it with his eyes, his mind sensed the hole, the vast nothingness that rushed toward them from across the water.
To his left, he suddenly perceived a twist of light, and when he turned his head, he was looking out through a portal into the tech chamber. It wasn’t a screen on this side, just a rectangular gap, and through it he saw his body lying on the floor. Above his fallen shape, the ceiling lights flickered. The city power was coming back on. Which was why this place was losing the energy to exist.
The sand began to tremble under him, and the boy clung tightly to his neck. The sound in the distance grew louder, rushing toward them, sucking the sea into blackness as it approached across the water. The soft air currents reversed direction, falling back toward the black that swelled from the horizon, lifting the sand off the beach in horizontal flows that whispered past their ankles.
A glider squawked as it tumbled across the sand. The world shifted. Evan squeezed the boy harder, locking his arms around his narrow back.
The sound revved into a deafening roar, and the beach shook violently, sliding away beneath them.
Evan dug his legs into the sand, trying to hold on, but it spun past him in a swirling river, pulling them upward toward the black sky. In the last moments, the boy whispered, “Thank you for staying, Papa.”
Evan clutched at the boy’s small form as they lifted free, falling upward toward the howling darkness, and then light flashed—an afterimage like a detonating sun, illuminating the entire universe in a single glorious, scorching blast of incandescence.
Then the screen went blank.
The lights in the anteroom shined bright and strong.
Then went out again. The city went dark.
On the floor, Evan’s body forgot itself, and his heart ceased beating. Evan and Pea were no more.
THE ENGINEERS in the control room jumped to their feet and cheered at their consoles. The screen on the far wall told the story. Phoenix was alive again. The boxes were all lit, representing eleven million fully functioning units. They’d won. Whatever had been sucking away the power had been cut off.
The supervisor, Brian, smiled broadly. He looked at Mr. Sure, who was also smiling. They had managed to shunt all the power away from that thirsty grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino. Problem solved.
“What the hell do you think that was?” the supervisor said out loud to no one in particular. Already, it had moved into the past for him. His smile was straight and wide and relieved.
“I don’t know,” the technician answered.
As Brian looked at the gauges, his own smile began to fade.
The gauges were all normal, except for one. He glanced up at the cheering crowd and saw that nobody else had noticed. He considered not bothering, not saying anything. Let them cheer. Instead, he motioned to Mr. Sure, pointing to the console with his other hand.
Mr. Sure eyed the gauge. “What’s this?”
“The heat dump,” he said.
“I can see that. Why is it doing that?”
The dial continued its upward swing, climbing like the tachometer of the world’s most powerful muscle car. It climbed steadily through orange. The supervisor looked down at the men in the chamber. The cheering stopped as, one by one, they took notice of the small display in the far-right corner of the wall screen.
Whatever it was they thought they’d beaten had come back to strike a final blow. Mr. Sure thought of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. Fukushima. Precautions had been taken. It could never happen again, that’s what they’d said. What they’d promised. This would be worse. The needle climbed toward red without slowing. Nuclear cascade.