The truck was rocking now, but the winds didn’t blow it away. We were still driving forward. It was made to endure the Red Eye. I hoped it was well made. The headlights switched to floodlight mode. They were solid beams of light in the dark chaos. In the back, Carpe Diem and GPS moaned softly, but they seemed okay. The truck remained relatively dust-tight. We wouldn’t need to use the anti-aejej. I tapped the dashboard, which was all touch screen. I ran my hand over it and was able to do what I needed to do. “So easy,” I whispered.
“You can keep controlling the truck?”
I nodded. “I just shut off the tracking that would tell them where we are.” I touched the screen again and worked my hand in a circle. The satellite GPS was useless, but I still had one other tool. Up came a rudimentary thermal and motion scan of the area. The Red Eye’s air currents showed as blue constantly moving lines. For miles around us was nothing that produced heat. Literally nothing. The land was windswept cracked earth.
“There,” DNA said, pointing at the bottom of the dashboard.
“What is that?” I asked. The red shape was pretty big, miles long and wide and it was laid out in the strangest shape. “It almost looks like an infinity symbol.”
“Not infinity,” he whispered. “I know what that is.” He grinned. “It has to be!” He looked at me. “If that’s what I think it is, a lot of people actually do think that place is infinity, that it’s everything. I think that’s the Hour Glass! The anti-aejej protecting it must give off heat, that’s why we see the shape so clearly.”
“Wait, what? There’s an anti-aejej that huge?! What for? Why’s it in the middle of one of the planet’s greatest disaster areas?”
“It’s the biggest anti-aejej in the world and its wind powered,” he said, almost proudly. “Ultimate Corp isn’t the only one who knows how to harness the Red Eye’s wind.”
I squinted at the screen, noting just how big it was. Miles wide and two miles long. “There’s no other way an anti-aejej could be that huge and maintain power. Has to be wind power here, yeah. But why?”
“The Hour Glass is the greatest city of Non-Issues the world has ever seen,” DNA said. “It is legend. It’s where people go to be found, to disappear, or to just be. There’s law and order but there is no Ultimate Corp or Nigerian government.”
“You sound like you really want to see this place,” I said. “Why haven’t you gone?”
“Look around,” he said. “You think I’d travel into this on purpose?”
“Good point.”
I sat back on the chair and just shook my head. I had never in a million years heard of such a place. “This is too much.”
“Oh now you say that?” he laughed. “I was thinking the same thing a few minutes ago when you were using your mind to stop government weapons from executing us.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. But when I did this, I saw a billion eyes looking back. I opened my eyes. How the hell am I ever going to sleep, I wondered.
“The Hour Glass isn’t just named for its shape,” he continued. “It’s also protected by a strong digital net that scrambles any sense of its location every hour on the hour.”
“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 . . .