THE EARTH TURNS EAST. But beneath the surface, there are different movements. Earth’s molten rivers flow on strange whims, sometimes counter to the crust, and as we float deep in its near-solar heat, we feel a shift. We are a prominence pushing up through the fabric of everything, and the earth responds to our pressure. The heart of the earth begins to flow west.
Thousands of human beings are flowing the same way. Some are fleeing a disaster. Some are obeying a voice they heard on a TV or a radio. Others, like the boy and his three friends, have no choice in the matter. They are sitting in the back of a bus, wrists cuffed in their laps, wondering where they’re going and what will happen to them when they get there. But these questions are low on the boy’s list. The more urgent ones are the ones he directs to us:
Can we change this?
His body is restrained but he runs free in the Library. He races down our halls and digs through our shelves, skimming pages of paper and crystal and warm living skin, the memories of countless lives throughout time.
What can we do while we’re young and small? How can we grow bigger?
He climbs our ladder of living bones, each rung a generation, and pulls out Higher books. He strains to read them but not even the authors know the language of these glossolalic poems, these sigils and hieroglyphs scrawled in strange ink, visible only to a rare kind of eye.
What can we become?
Packed into the back of a cargo trailer, cold and gray and confused, a woman in a dirty lab coat is asking similar questions, and she is not alone in her turmoil. She is surrounded by others like her, in this trailer and elsewhere, all across the unstable landmass once known as America. They gather in the streets of forgotten cities, in forests and in caves, standing motionless to suspend their hunger while they wait for the answers to come.
And how we wish we could give those answers. How we long to emerge from the hush of memory and shout into the present. To reveal our secrets to all these desperate searchers and finally tear the veil. But though a library brims with a thousand eloquent voices, it can’t speak a word until the world learns to read.
So we wait.
We wait with the Dead, moving through their ranks like spies or maybe allies, and we share their mood: restless, hungry, ready to go to war. It’s been years since any attempt to count them, and this is good, because the Living are fearful enough without knowing they’re outnumbered.
The Dead are a larger army than any ever assembled, and they follow no leader, fear no threat, and accept no bribe or compromise. The Dead are the silent majority, and should they ever decide to say something, it will be the new law of the land.
The mantle flows beneath their feet like the nudge of a warm hand, and one by one, they begin to wander west.