HARVEST · Book 2

You Were Always the Seed

Chapter 1: Landfall (Again)

The man behind the gas station had been dead for four minutes and was still being polite about it.

Will watched from the shadow of the ice cooler as the thing crouched over him finished, folding down out of the air one seam at a time, as a letter unfolds if you run the film backward. It wasn’t in a hurry. Nothing that owns the farm is ever in a hurry.

The dead man’s phone was ringing in his pocket. Somewhere out there was a wife, a shift manager, a bill. The Cull tilted its head at the sound with what Will would later swear was curiosity, and then went back to its work, and across the lot two teenagers pumping gas into a Civic did not look over. Would not. The Hush lay on them like heat off the asphalt, and they laughed at something on a screen while a person came apart nine yards away.

Will had been in this year for six hours. He was starting to understand that the worst thing about it was not the monsters.

It was that the monsters were bored.

He did not know that he had thought this exact thought before, in this exact spot, in this exact year, watching this exact death.

He did not know that the wife would never be called, because there was no wife, because there was no out there in the sense he meant it, because the phone rang a number that connected to nothing and had been ringing the same four minutes for longer than he had been alive.

He did not know that he was a copy of a man who had watched this same gas station death and gone on to break the greatest anchor in a thousand years and believe, God help him, that he had won.

He did not know that he was the favorite part.

He knew only that he had fallen out of the sky into a dead sorghum field six hours ago with his ears bleeding and his own name coming back to him in pieces, Will, then Renn, then, stupidly, the last thing to arrive, the thing his grandmother used to say: you’re the newest of us, boy. Not the last. He knew he had a coin in his pocket he couldn’t read. He knew there was a thing hunting him. He knew he’d been sent from a ruined future to a pivot where the war could still be turned, and that he was alone, and that he had to survive.

Every bit of it felt true. Every bit of it was a lie so old and so perfect that even the recording it was stamped from had believed it.

The Cull stood, that heron-wrongness resolving upward, and phased, a smear where it had been, and Will understood with the specific cold of a fact that is going to try to kill you that it was not a Cull. It was a Warden. A hunter. And it turned its head, slow, and looked directly at the ice cooler, and for the length of one heartbeat it looked pleased, as you’re pleased to find your keys where you left them, and it said, in a voice that came from no mouth and arrived somewhere deep in Will’s chest:

There you are. A pause. Something in it almost like warmth. Almost like a greeting to an old friend. There you are, again.

Will ran.

He was good at running. It was, he’d sometimes thought bitterly, the single skill the future had equipped him for, a whole childhood spent getting small and getting gone.

(He had never had a childhood. He was days old. The childhood was in the recording, printed whole, as a seed carries the memory of every tree that came before it. But it felt like his, ached like his, and when he reached for it, it was there, as real as the field he’d woken in and the coin in his pocket and the year that was not a year.)

He went over the cooler and across the lot and the two teenagers still did not look at him, their faces lit blue and empty, and he wanted to scream at them it’s behind me, and knew it would do nothing. And some part of him, some deep unfooled part that recognized the smooth rendered wrongness of the world without understanding why, noticed that the teenagers were pumping gas into a Civic, and that the pump numbers were not moving, and that they had been not-moving for six hours, and that the boys’ laughter looped, very slightly, every eleven seconds, as a thing loops when it is the idea of a thing instead of the thing.

He noticed it. He filed it. Culture shock, he told himself, running. I’m from somewhere rougher. Realer. This year just feels smooth to me. That’s all it is.

That was all it was.

(It was not all it was. The reassurance was printed in him too, so that the favorite crop would always talk itself gently past the one thing it was standing inside of.)

The air behind him made the sound of a wet sheet snapping, and the Warden was in front of him, and Will did the thing that a lifetime he’d never lived had taught him: he grabbed the heaviest thing in reach, a fire extinguisher off the wall by the propane cage, and threw it as hard as he could, not at the Warden, but at the cage.

He missed the cage. He always missed the cage. The extinguisher struck the shutoff valve, sheared it, and filled the pump island with a rushing white cloud of vented propane that did not ignite, and for four full seconds made the air itself opaque…

And the Warden lost him.

Will felt it happen: the there-you-are pressure stuttering, a where, a flicker of something almost like confusion. He did not stop to appreciate the philosophy of it. He went low, under the cloud, around the corner of the building and into the dark behind the dumpsters, and did not look back until he’d put two storefronts and a Jersey barrier between himself and the pumps.

When he looked back, the gas station sat quiet under its lights. The teenagers were gone. The Civic was gone. The propane hissed softly into a desert night that had, Will was fairly sure, the same number of stars in it as the last time he’d looked, which struck him as strange, because he did not remember having looked before.

He sat down against the Jersey barrier because his legs stopped being interested in the alternative, and looked at his shaking hands with clinical distance, and thought: it lost me in the cloud.

He thought: the cloud blinds it. Find out why. Stay alive long enough to find out why.

He did not know he had thought this before. He did not know that two hundred miles away, past a substation, there was a dispensary with a green cross that glowed all night, and a stoned budtender named Danny Reed who was going to save his life by accident, as he had the last time, and the time before that.

He did not know that everything about to happen to him had already happened to him, was happening to him, would happen to him again, the same friends, the same win, the same harvest, because he was seed stock, and this was the planting.

Above him the open sky went up and up and did not stop, and it was full of light, and Will Renn, days old, hunted by a thing that had greeted him like an old friend, forgot, in the running, to be amazed by it.

He would remember. There’d be time. That was the one thing the future had promised him.

It was, as always, the only promise it had no intention of keeping.

Two hundred miles away, patient as a field, glad it was striving, the farm watched its favorite crop begin, again, to grow, and settled in to enjoy the part it liked best.

Not the hunt. Not the fear. Not even the win.

The believing.

He always believes so beautifully.