Global Awakening The Hollow Saga Book 2

The dream always started the same way: with the ground breathing.

Elena Vance felt it beneath her before she saw anything, a slow swell and release, like something enormous had inhaled far below Baldwin Ridge and was holding its breath. Then the light came, white and endless, pouring up through the drill shaft in a column that turned the pines to black paper cutouts against the sky. She was running toward the noise instead of away from it, because somewhere inside that light was her brother, and his name kept leaving her mouth without sound attached to it, over and over, like a word stuck in a groove.

The plate in his skull went first. She always felt that part clearest, a small metallic pop somewhere behind her own ear, as if the sound had happened to her instead of him. Then the light became a wall, and the wall became a wave, and Elena woke up gasping with her hand pressed flat against the side of her neck, feeling for something that wasn't supposed to be there.

It was there anyway. It was always there now.

She lay still for a moment, waiting for her heartbeat to catch up with the rest of her, listening to the room around her settle into its usual shapes. Rain ticked against the window in an uneven rhythm, not quite a pattern, and somewhere out on the highway a truck downshifted with a long mechanical groan. The motel sign outside her window buzzed and stuttered, throwing pink light across the popcorn ceiling in slow pulses, off, on, off, like something trying to remember how to breathe.

Six months. She still counted them sometimes, though she'd stopped believing the number meant anything. Six months since Baldwin Ridge folded in on itself and swallowed everyone who'd been standing too close to the truth. Six months of motels with names like the Sunset Vista or the Evergreen Lodge, places that promised a view of something and delivered only parking lots and vending machines that ate your last five dollars.

She sat up slowly, careful of the headache that lived behind her eyes now, a constant low pressure that never quite broke into pain and never quite let her forget it was there either. Her fingers found the skin along her collarbone and traced upward, following the raised lines she knew by feel better than by sight. They branched like the veins of a leaf pressed into her skin, cold to the touch even through her own hand, running from the base of her throat up behind her left ear. Some mornings they seemed a little wider than the night before. She'd stopped checking the mirror as often as she used to. There was only so much a person could stare at before staring stopped being useful and started being something else.

The room was the kind of small that made her feel like she was living inside a shipping container someone had bothered to wallpaper. A queen bed with a comforter the color of weak coffee. A dresser missing one drawer pull. A television bolted to the wall on a metal arm, the screen thick and curved, the kind of ancient CRT set that hadn't been manufactured in decades and that she'd chosen for that exact reason. No smart chip. No network card. Nothing that could reach out and touch anything, or be touched back.

She had learned to be careful about what touched her.

Elena swung her legs over the side of the bed and pressed her bare feet against the carpet, feeling the grit of it, the small unglamorous solidity of a floor that didn't ask anything of her. For a moment that was enough. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she used to teach rookies to do before a call went sideways, and reminded herself that she was still a person sitting in a room, not a signal traveling through wires.

The hum started before she was ready for it.

It always did, that thin electric whine just under the threshold of hearing, more felt than heard, vibrating somewhere behind her sternum like a phone left on silent in another room. She used to think it came from outside her, from power lines or old wiring or the refrigerator hum of somebody else's life. Now she knew better. It came from her. It had come from her for six months, and some mornings it was so soft she could almost convince herself it was gone, and other mornings it filled her skull until she had to grip the edge of whatever surface was closest and wait for the world to stop tilting.

Tonight it was somewhere in the middle. Loud enough to notice. Not loud enough to fear.

She reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and drank half of it in one motion, focusing on the taste, cheap plastic and chlorine, something ordinary to hold onto. Her eyes drifted, without permission, to the television across the room.

The screen was dark. It was supposed to be dark. She hadn't turned it on in three days, not since the last town, not since she'd learned that even old televisions could catch a whisper of the signal if she stayed too long in one place and let the frequency inside her build up like static electricity looking for a ground.

The screen flickered.

Just once, a soft gray pulse across the black glass, gone before she could be sure she'd seen it. She went still, the way she used to go still in the doorway of a house on a domestic call, every sense pointed at a single dark room. She counted three seconds. Five. Ten.

It flickered again, and this time it stayed.

Lines bled up from the bottom of the screen, not the ordinary static snow of a dead channel but something with intention behind it, hexagons folding into themselves and then into triangles, then into shapes that didn't have names in any geometry she'd learned in school, patterns that seemed to fold backward into the screen instead of sitting on top of it. She had seen this before. She hated that she had seen this before, that some small ruined part of her recognized it the way you recognize a smell you can't place until it's already made you sick.

"No," she said quietly, to the empty room, to the television, to whatever was on the other side of it. "Not tonight."

The patterns pulsed faster, gray to white to a color that wasn't quite blue, matching, she realized with a cold drop in her stomach, the same rhythm as the hum inside her chest. As if the television had found the frequency of her own blood and decided to sing along with it.

She stood up too fast and the room swayed, black creeping into the edges of her vision for a heartbeat before steadying. She'd learned the trick of it by now, breathe slow, keep your knees soft, let the vertigo pass through you instead of fighting it. She crossed the room in four steps and reached for the television's power knob, an old-fashioned dial that clicked when you turned it, satisfying in a way modern buttons never were.

Her hand stopped an inch from the dial.

The shapes on the screen had stopped shifting. They held still, arranged into something almost recognizable, a lattice of thin white lines crossing and recrossing like a spiderweb built by something with too many legs and too much patience. It looked, she thought with a lurch of nausea, uncomfortably like the pattern spreading across her own collarbone.

Then, from the nightstand behind her, the radio came on by itself.

She spun toward the sound, heart slamming so hard she felt it in her jaw. It was a small hand-cranked emergency radio, army surplus green, the kind of thing you bought at a hardware store for hurricane season, the kind of thing that had no business turning itself on because it had no battery to speak of, only the little crank handle on its side that she hadn't touched since she'd wound it two days ago to catch a weather report.

Static poured out of the tiny speaker, rising and falling, and underneath the static, buried in it the way a voice is buried under running water, something moved.

Elena's hand went to the small revolver she kept under the pillow, an old habit from a life that felt increasingly like it belonged to someone else, and then she made herself let go of it. A gun wasn't going to help with this. Nothing with a trigger had ever helped with this.

She crossed to the nightstand and knelt beside it, bringing her ear close to the speaker the way you'd lean toward someone whispering in a crowded room. The static crackled, thinned, crackled again, and then, faint and warped, stretched thin like a tape played at the wrong speed, a voice came through.

"... Lena... can you... hear... the pattern's shifting, it's... oh, it's beautiful, God help me, it's beautiful and it's..."

She sat back on her heels. Her mouth had gone dry.

"Finch," she whispered.

The static answered her first, three seconds of pure hiss, and then the voice came back, closer this time, more solid, though it still had that quality of a signal being dragged through miles of bad wire, stretching and snapping and stretching again.

"Elena. Elena, you're there. I can feel you're there, I can feel the, the shape of you through the, through the band, it's not supposed to work like this, radios aren't supposed to, but nothing's supposed to work like this anymore, is it."

She reached out and touched the radio's plastic casing, an absurd instinct, as if contact might steady the signal the way you'd steady an old antenna by holding it. The metal was cold. The static hissed and dropped and rose again, and Finch's voice came through it in pieces, a man speaking underwater, a man speaking from very far away and getting farther.

"You're supposed to be dead," she said, and hated how flat it sounded, how little comfort was left in her voice for a man who had once tried, in his broken way, to save her. "I saw it happen. I saw the light take you apart at Baldwin Ridge. There wasn't anything left. There wasn't a body."

"There wasn't," Finch agreed, and there was something in the way he said it, some thin thread of old, dry humor buried under six months of degradation, that made her throat tighten unexpectedly. "No body. No, no, nothing so simple as a body. I'm not, I'm not dead, Elena, I'm not alive either, I'm, I think the closest word is caught. I'm caught in the loop the way a fly gets caught in, in amber, except the amber keeps moving, keeps humming, and I move with it."

The television behind her flickered brighter, throwing pale light across the wall, and she glanced at it without meaning to. The lattice pattern had begun to rotate, slow and deliberate, like a wheel someone was turning from the other side of the glass.

"It's talking to me too," she said. "The TV. It's doing the same thing it did in the cabin. The patterns."

"Yes." The static swallowed the word and spat it back distorted, ess drawn long and hissing. "Yes, it would, it would be drawn to you the same way I am, the same frequency, the same, the same carrier wave. You're not receiving a broadcast anymore, Elena, you understand that, don't you? You haven't been simply receiving for some time now. You're a, a node. A relay point. Anything tuned close enough to your frequency will find you the way water finds the low ground."

She swallowed hard, throat clicking, and made herself keep her voice steady. "How long have you been trying to reach me?"

"Trying." The word came out as a short, unhappy laugh, chopped in half by static. "Trying is, is generous. I've been shouting into a hurricane, Elena, for months, every time the pattern lines up right, every time the loop brings me close enough to the surface to, to push a word through, and most of the time it's gone before I can finish a sentence, most of the time you don't even, don't even hear the start of it."

"I've heard things," she admitted. "In my sleep. Half-words. I thought I was losing what's left of my mind."

"You're not," Finch said, and for a moment his voice steadied, came through almost clean, almost like the man she remembered from before all of this, before the drilling and the frequency and the light that peeled him out of his own body. "You're not losing your mind, you're simply, you're simply hearing more than a person is built to hear, and your mind is doing what minds do with input it can't categorize, it's calling it dream, it's calling it nightmare, because the alternative is admitting that the wall between you and me has gotten very, very thin."

Elena sat down on the floor with her back against the bed frame, the radio cradled in both hands like something that might shatter if she moved too fast. Outside, a car passed on the wet road, tires hissing, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling and gone. She watched the light travel and disappear, and for a moment she let herself hate how normal it looked, other people driving somewhere, other people with somewhere to be that wasn't a locked room with a dying radio and a haunted television.

"Why now," she said. "Why tonight. I've been running for six months, Finch. Different city every few weeks, cash only, no phone, nothing that pings anywhere. If you could reach me any time you wanted, why did you wait until now?"

The static thickened, and for a few seconds she thought she'd lost him entirely, thought the connection had snapped the way it always eventually snapped, leaving her alone in a quiet room with her own hum for company. Then his voice returned, lower, more urgent, stripped of the wandering, half-mad cadence it usually carried.

"Because it's changing, Elena. The network. I feel it the way you feel weather coming, the way your knee aches before rain. It's been quiet for months, sluggish, the way something is sluggish right after it, it wakes from a long sleep, and I thought, God help me, I let myself think that meant it was dying. That Baldwin Ridge had hurt it enough to put it back to sleep. But it isn't dying. It's stretching. It's waking up properly now, and it's doing it everywhere at once."

The lattice on the screen behind her rotated faster, the hexagons folding into themselves with a speed that made her stomach drop, and the hum in her chest rose with it, a physical thing now, pressing against her ribs from the inside.

"What does that mean," she said, though some cold, exhausted part of her already suspected the answer.

"It means Apex never stopped," Finch said, and his voice cracked on the name the way it always used to, an old wound reopening. "It means while you were running from motel to motel trying to stay one frequency ahead of them, they were building. New sites, Elena. New drilling operations, deeper this time, better shielded, better funded, and I don't think funded is even the right word anymore, I think funded implies choice, and I don't think there's much choice left in that organization, not from the top down."

She thought of the woman whose face she'd seen only twice, once on a corporate broadcast and once, briefly, in person, at a distance, across a compound she'd barely escaped alive. Meredith Vance-Apex. No relation, despite the name, a coincidence that had felt like a cruel joke the first time she'd heard it and now felt like something worse, something almost deliberate, as if the universe wanted her tied to that woman by more than blood could ever explain.

"She's still running the company," Elena said. It wasn't a question.

"She's running considerably more than the company," Finch said. "I don't have all of it, the picture keeps sliding away from me the way everything keeps sliding away from me, but I've felt the shape of it in the network, the outline of something enormous being assembled underground, site after site, region after region, and every one of them tied back to a signal that keeps getting stronger, keeps getting more, more coherent, more like a single voice instead of noise."

"A single voice saying what?"

The static roared for a moment, drowning him out entirely, and Elena pressed her palm flat against the radio's casing as if she could hold the signal in place by force. When his voice came back it was thin, stretched, like a recording slowing down before it died.

"Saying come home," he said. "Saying it's time. Saying, and this is the part that, that keeps me up, if a man in my condition can be said to sleep at all, saying that the door isn't the frequency itself. The frequency is only the knock. Something is listening on the other side of it, Elena, and I don't think it's been listening idly. I think it's been listening for an invitation."

Elena closed her eyes. The hum in her chest matched the rhythm of the television's pulsing light now, in and out, in and out, and for one disorienting second she felt as if the two of them, her body and the machine across the room, were breathing together.

"They're tracking you," Finch said, more urgent now, his words tumbling faster, less careful of the gaps the static kept eating out of his sentences. "Your broadcast, Elena, you have to understand, every time you use it, every time you push back against the pattern even a little, even just to keep from drowning in it, you light up like a flare on their instruments. They have towers now. New towers, better ones, tuned to your specific signature, not the general frequency anymore, yours specifically, the way a hunting dog is trained on one particular scent."

"I haven't used it," she said quickly, too quickly, the words coming out sharp with something close to fear. "Not since the cabin. I've been careful. I don't touch it."

"You touch it every time you dream," Finch said, and his voice, for one terrible moment, went almost gentle, almost kind, the way a doctor's voice goes gentle right before delivering the worst possible news. "You touch it every night, Elena, whether you mean to or not, because it isn't a door you can simply choose not to open anymore. It's grown into the house."

She looked down at her own hands, resting on her knees, ordinary hands, chipped nails, a thin white scar across one knuckle from some minor mistake in a life that felt like it belonged to a different person. She turned them over, half expecting to see the lattice pattern creeping down from her wrists, and was almost disappointed when she didn't. Almost, because some small, exhausted part of her had started to feel that seeing it would at least be honest, at least be a straight answer instead of this slow, patient erosion she couldn't watch happen in real time.

"How close are they," she asked. "Right now. Tonight."

The static cracked, hissed, cracked again, and this time when Finch's voice returned it was quieter, and something in its quiet frightened her more than any shouting could have.

"Close," he said. "Closer than you'd like. I can't give you a distance, Elena, I don't have distance the way you have distance, I only have the shape of the signal, and the shape of it says they've narrowed the search radius considerably in the last forty-eight hours. Something about your pattern spiked. Something you did, or something that simply happened to you, made you brighter for a few minutes, and they caught it."

She thought back through the last two days, searching for anything that might qualify, a moment of panic in a grocery store parking lot when she'd thought she recognized a car, a flash of dizziness on the bus that had made her grip the seat in front of her hard enough to leave marks in the vinyl. Nothing that felt significant. Everything felt significant now, that was the trouble, every small ordinary discomfort had become a possible symptom, every headache a countdown clock she couldn't read.

"The colonel," she said. "Is he part of this. Is he coming."

The name alone seemed to disturb the signal, the static thickening around it like something recoiling. When Finch spoke again his voice had lost its shape almost entirely, words bleeding into one another, vowels stretching long and wrong.

"He doesn't come the way a man comes, Elena, you know that by now, he comes the way weather comes, all at once and from every direction, and I feel him in the network sometimes the way you'd feel a a cold spot in a warm room, and lately, lately that cold spot has been, has been moving, has been active in a way it wasn't a month ago. I can't tell you where. I wish to God I could tell you where."

Elena's eyes went to the window, to the thin gap in the curtains where the pink neon light bled through in stuttering pulses, off, on, off. She thought of parking lots and highway cameras and the long anonymous stretch of interstate she'd used to get here, and wondered, not for the first time, whether anonymous had ever really meant anything at all, or whether she'd simply been lucky, and luck, unlike caution, always eventually ran out.

"What do I do," she said, and hated the small, cracked thing her voice had become, hated that after everything, after six months of learning to survive on nothing but instinct and stubbornness, she still sometimes sounded like a woman asking a stranger for directions in the dark.

"You move," Finch said, and for a moment the static cleared enough that his voice came through almost whole, almost like the scientist she remembered from before all of this, precise and urgent and utterly certain of at least one thing. "Tonight. Now, if you can manage it. Don't wait for morning, don't wait for a better plan, the network doesn't wait, and neither can you. Get out of this room, get away from anything with a screen or a speaker or a signal, and keep moving until you've put real distance behind you."

"Distance from what," she said. "You just told me they can track me no matter where I am."

"Distance buys you time," Finch said. "Time isn't nothing, Elena, time is the only currency either of us has left to spend. And there's, there's someone. North of here. Someone who might, who might actually be able to help you in a way I can't, a way that isn't just, just warnings shouted through a dying radio."

Her pulse quickened, not with hope exactly, hope had gotten expensive over the last six months and she'd learned to spend it carefully, but with something adjacent to it, something that felt like the first crack of light under a door she'd stopped expecting to open.

"Who," she said.

The static swelled, a wave of white noise that swallowed his answer whole, and she leaned closer to the little speaker, gripping it so hard her knuckles ached, willing the signal to hold, willing him to finish the sentence he'd started.

"A name," she said, louder now, urgency breaking through the careful control she'd been holding onto since she first opened her eyes tonight. "Finch, give me a name."

The static thinned, just enough, and a fragment came through, warped and stretched but recognizable, a single word riding the top of the noise like a bird skimming a wave. It sounded like a place more than a person, something that started with an S, swallowed almost immediately by the hiss.

"...ling... British Columbia... the old research... he'll know you by the... by the pattern, he built the, he built the probes, Elena, he'll know what you are before you say a word, just, just get there, get away from Seattle, get away from anything that can see you..."

The television behind her let out a sharp electronic whine, and the lattice pattern on the screen flared white, bright enough to throw hard shadows across the room, bright enough that she flinched and threw an arm up over her eyes. When she lowered it, the screen had gone dark again, utterly dark, the ordinary dead black of a television that had never once turned on.

The radio in her hands crackled, hissed, and fell silent.

"Finch," she said. Nothing answered but the low hush of static, empty now, uninhabited, the sound of a room with no one else in it.

"Finch," she said again, quieter, and heard how much she sounded like a woman talking to herself in a rented room in the middle of the night, and didn't care.

The static held for a long moment, empty, and then, so faint she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it, one last fragment bled through, barely a whisper, barely a voice at all.

"...run..."

And then nothing. Just the small tinny hiss of a dead channel, and beyond it, the ordinary sounds of the night reasserting themselves, rain against glass, a truck grinding through its gears somewhere out on the highway, the motel sign buzzing through its tired, stuttering rhythm.

Elena sat on the floor for a long time after that, the radio still cradled in her hands, listening to her own heartbeat slow by degrees, feeling the hum in her chest settle back down to its low, constant murmur. The hexagon patterns were gone from the television screen. The room looked, for all the world, like any other cheap motel room off any other stretch of highway, water-stained ceiling, coffee-colored comforter, a dresser missing one drawer pull. Nothing about it suggested that the walls had briefly become thin enough to let a dead man's voice bleed through.

But she knew better now. She had known better for six months, ever since the ground had opened at Baldwin Ridge and rearranged the architecture of what was possible.

She set the radio down carefully on the nightstand, as if it might still be listening, and pushed herself up onto unsteady legs. Her reflection caught in the dark television screen as she crossed the room, a pale smear of a woman with tangled hair and hollow eyes, and just below her jaw, faint in the dim light but unmistakable if she let herself look, the first thin branch of the lattice creeping up toward her ear. She didn't let herself look for long. Instead she crossed to the small dresser and began pulling out the few things she owned, a change of clothes, a roll of cash rubber-banded thick, a folding knife, the revolver from under the pillow. Her hands moved fast and sure, the old muscle memory of a woman who had once cleared houses for a living taking over where her mind had gone thin and frightened. Pack light. Pack fast. Don't stop to think about how impossible the last six months have been, because thinking about it won't get you out the door any faster.

British Columbia. North. A man who'd built the probes, whoever he was, whatever that meant. A stranger's name half-swallowed by static, the only lead she had, the only door left cracked open in a hallway that seemed to be running out of doors.

She thought of Finch's voice cutting out, that single fading word, run, and felt something twist hard and cold behind her ribs. Six months of running had taught her exactly how much distance a person could put between themselves and the thing hunting them before the thing hunting them simply adjusted its stride. Not much. Never quite enough.

But not moving at all had never once been an option, and it wasn't one now.

She zipped the bag, killed the room's single lamp, and stood for a moment in the dark, letting her eyes adjust, listening to the rain and the trucks and the stuttering neon glow bleeding faintly through the curtains. The hum in her chest pulsed once, twice, steady as a second heartbeat, patient in a way that made her skin crawl.

Somewhere out there, towers were listening for her. Somewhere out there, a woman with her same last name was building something vast and hungry beneath the surface of the world, and a hollowed-out colonel with glass for eyes was turning his silent, precise attention toward whatever cold spot in the network told him where to look.

Elena Vance slung the bag over her shoulder, checked the parking lot through a narrow gap in the curtain, and slipped out into the rain.