فصل 47

47

Sound and Silence

As Endura plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic, as its enduring heart that had beat for two hundred and fifty years ceased to endure, and as the lights went out in the chamber within a chamber . . .

. . . the Thunderhead screamed.

It began with alarms everywhere in the world. Just a few at first, but more joined in the cacophony. Fire alarms, tornado sirens, buzzers, whistles, and millions upon millions of horns, all blaring a singular, anguished wail—and still it was not enough. Now every speaker on every electronic device in the world came to life, letting off a shrill feedback shriek, and around the world people fell to their knees, hands over their ears to shield themselves from the deafening din, but nothing could assuage the Thunderhead’s fury and despair.

For ten minutes, the Thunderhead’s ear-rending squall filled the world. Echoing in the Grand Canyon; resounding in Antarctic ice shelves, causing glaciers to calve. It bellowed up the slopes of Mount Everest, and scattered herds on the Serengeti. There was not a being on Earth that did not hear it.

And when it was done, and silence returned, everyone knew that something had changed.

“What was that?” people asked. “What could cause such a thing?”

No one knew for sure. No one but the Tonists. They knew exactly what it was. They knew because they had been waiting for it their whole lives.

It was the Great Resonance.

• • •

In a cloister in a small city in MidMerica, Greyson Tolliver took his hands away from his ears. There were shouts outside his window in the garden below. Cries. Were they cries of pain? He hurried out of his Spartan room to find the Tonists not wailing in agony, but rejoicing.

“Did you hear it?” they asked. “Wasn’t it wonderful? Wasn’t it everything we were told it would be?” Greyson, a bit shell-shocked from the resonance still buzzing in his head, wandered from the cloister out into the street. There was commotion there, but of a different kind. People were panicked—and not just because of the noise that had pierced their lives, but something else. Everyone seemed to be looking at their tablets and phones in confusion.

“This can’t be!” he heard someone say. “This must be a mistake!”

“But the Thunderhead doesn’t make mistakes,” someone else said.

Greyson went up to them. “What is it? What’s happened?”

The man showed Greyson his phone. The screen was blinking with an ugly red U.

“It says I’m unsavory!”

“Me too,” said someone else, and as Greyson looked around him, everyone was filled with the same brand of uncomprehending confusion.

But it wasn’t just here. In every city, in every town, in every home around the world, the scene was being repeated. For the Thunderhead had, in its infinite wisdom, decided that all of humanity was complicit in its actions, large and small . . . and all of humanity had to face the consequences.

Everyone, everywhere was now designated unsavory.

A panicked populace began to desperately ask the Thunderhead for guidance.

“What should I do?”

“Please tell me what to do!”

“How do I make this right?”

“Talk to me! Please, talk to me!”

But the Thunderhead was silent. It had to be.  The Thunderhead did not speak to unsavories.

Greyson Tolliver left the confused and confounded mobs, returning to the relative safety of the cloister, where the Tonists still rejoiced, in spite of the fact that they were all now unsavory—because what did that matter when the Resonance had spoken to their souls? But unlike them, Greyson didn’t rejoice—nor did he despair. He wasn’t sure how to feel about this strange turn of events. Nor did he know what it would mean for him.

Greyson no longer had his own tablet. As Curate Mendoza had told him, their sect didn’t shun technology, but they chose not to rely on it, either.

So there was a computer room at the end of a long hallway. The door was always closed, but it was never locked. Greyson opened the door, and sat before the computer.

The computer’s camera scanned him. And his profile automatically came up on the screen.

It read “Greyson Tolliver.”

Not Slayd Bridger, but Greyson Tolliver! And unlike the others—unlike every other living soul on the planet Earth—he was not marked “unsavory.” He had served his time. His status had been lifted. His, and his alone.

“Th . . . Th . . . Thunderhead?” he said, his voice trembling and unsure.

And a voice spoke back to him with the same loving kindness and warmth that he remembered. The voice of the benevolent force that had raised him, and helped make him everything that he was.

“Hello, Greyson,” said the Thunderhead. “We need to talk.”