They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

When the quartet arrived, Oz was out. Seth gave everyone the grand tour of the house, and then Itzy and her friends settled themselves on bar stools in the kitchen, while Seth ‘prepared dinner’.

‘May I ask you something?’ Ash said as they watched Seth’s hands fly through the air.

‘Certainly,’ said Seth.

‘If you can make anything you want in the world…why live in a little mid-terrace house in Ealing? Why not a castle on a cliff top, overlooking the sea?’

Seth shrugged. ‘There’s too much human in me to go off the scale that way. Part of me still wants to fit in. Catch,’ he said, and a great wooden bowl of salad fell out of the air and into Itzy’s hands. She almost missed, and he smirked at her.

They moved into the dining room and laid the table. Seth and Ash sat on one side, with the girls opposite. They’d nearly finished eating, when the front door opened. A moment later, Oz made his appearance.

‘Welcome home,’ Seth said. Mischief played in his cloudy eyes.

‘You’re back,’ Oz said when he saw his sister.

Seth grinned. ‘You said I could keep her, as long as I remembered to feed her. So here. I’m feeding her.’

‘I see.’ Oz threw his jacket over the spare chair and sat at the end of the table, where he could see everyone. ‘What is this?’ He gestured at the plate that had been made up for him.

‘Burritos,’ Seth told him. ‘In honour of Itzy.’ When Oz looked like he didn’t understand, Seth explained, ‘They’re Mexican. Like Itzy’s name.’

Oz rolled his eyes. ‘I seriously doubt the ancient Mayans ate burritos.’ He took a bite and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Not bad,’ he mused. He gave Devon a cursory glance over the top of the burrito in his hand. ‘You were at the funeral,’ he remembered.

She nodded. ‘I’m Devon.’

Oz turned on Ash. ‘And you are…?’

‘Ash,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. It’s good to meet you.’

Oz regarded him for a moment, and then started to eat.

Impervious to the tension in the room, Seth announced, ‘Itzy has something to show you.’ He sounded like a proud parent ready to tack his child’s finger painting on the fridge door.

‘Oh?’ Oz said around a mouthful of burrito.

Itzy shifted shyly and looked down at her nearly empty plate. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

‘How can you say that?’ said Seth. He turned back to Oz. ‘She made me kiss her.’

Oz choked on his food and dropped the burrito on his plate. ‘Please don’t show me that.’

Seth sighed dramatically and gave him a whatever will we do with you? shake of the head. ‘You don’t get it.’ He lowered his voice and said gravely, ‘She made me do it.’

Oz slowly lifted his head. ‘Oh,’ he said heavily. And then again, ‘Oh.’

He studied his sister. Itzy felt like an animal who had forgotten how to run in the face of an oncoming car. Or maybe a heavy goods vehicle. Would he swerve? Or would he gun the engine and run her down for fun?

‘That was fast,’ he finally said.

‘Unbelievably fast,’ Seth affirmed. ‘I think now’s the time I say I told you so.’

Something appeared to be happening between the two boys. They were sharing something, the memory of a private conversation. Itzy got the impression that perhaps what Oz and Seth had was like what she had with Devon.

‘I guess it is,’ Oz finally admitted. Then he resumed eating, like they hadn’t just had that bizarre exchange. ‘I take it Devon and Ash have seen your little magic tricks,’ he spoke to his plate.

‘Psh.’ Seth waved one of his painter’s hands. ‘They’re Itzy’s friends. I don’t see what’s the big deal.’

It was the wrong thing to say. Oz shot him a black look through his periphery. ‘You should do something about that memory problem.’

Seth closed his eyes and exhaled softly. When he reopened his eyes, he said, ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘No, you just think you can’t be hurt.’

Seth gawked at him. Frankly, so did the others. Oz shoved his plate aside and slunk back in his chair, making the legs creak. ‘I’ve lost my appetite.’

Seth’s right hand whipped across the air and everything on the table disappeared. Oz started, looking faintly disappointed that his dinner had vanished. Seth shot him a knowing look. ‘Don’t have a tantrum if you don’t want me to call your bluff.’

Oz jumped from his chair and huffed into the lounge to brood alone on the sofa. Itzy’s eyes followed him.

When her brother was gone, Itzy looked back at Seth. ‘What was he on about?’ she asked.

Seth pinched his forehead with his thumb and forefinger and massaged the tanned skin. ‘Oh, Oz has this idea someone’s spying on us.’

‘Why would he think that?’ Ash asked.

Seth removed his hand from his head and placed it on the table in front of him. ‘He’s worried about that message Itzy’s father wrote.’

Itzy leaned in. ‘Does he know what it means?’

Seth shook his head, his blond hair fluttering. ‘But he’s been going through your dad’s old papers – we drove over and got them this morning – and I think it’s making him paranoid.’

Itzy felt like they should be whispering. It seemed wrong to talk about someone who was in the next room. ‘How?’

‘Well,’ Seth said, ‘for one thing, he spent three hours online reading about 2012.’

Devon wrinkled her nose. ‘You mean that Mayan prophecy thing?’

‘Like father, like son,’ Itzy muttered.

Seth looked at her, interested. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh. Dad was always going on about that. He went to Mexico when I was eight and he came back with all these pictures of the pyramids.’

‘You didn’t go with him?’ Seth asked.

‘He wouldn’t let us.’

Seth’s brow lifted, but he didn’t comment.

‘I thought only nutters believed in that 2012 stuff,’ said Devon.

Seth smiled. ‘Maybe. But there’s more to it than you’d think. A lot of…us…were waiting for 2012 a long time. It was said there would be great change at the end of the year.’

‘The end of the world as we know it,’ Itzy quoted.

He nodded at her. ‘Exactly. But not for normal people.’

‘Normal?’ Ash repeated, clearly sensing he meant people like him.

‘You know.’ Seth shrugged in apology. ‘Anyway, that end of the world stuff was only meant to affect the Descendants.’

‘Of the aliens,’ Ash filled in. Seth’s head bowed in acknowledgment. ‘But the world didn’t end. 2012 came and went and everything’s fine, right?’

Seth inclined his head in Itzy’s direction, waiting for her to jump in.

She explained, ‘The world was never meant to end. Like I said, it was just supposed to be the end of the world as we know it. Everything was meant to change.’

‘But not all at once,’ Seth added. ‘It wasn’t like, snap –’ he snapped his fingers ‘– and everything’s different. It was just the end of that era and the beginning of something new.’

‘So what happens in this new era?’ asked Itzy.

‘That’s just the thing. No one knows. The Mayans disappeared – or maybe they just went home,’ he mused, ‘and no one’s been able to interpret the old prophecies properly. There are all sorts of theories, of course. That World War Three would break out and we’d all die horrible radioactive deaths like something out of On the Beach. That all the volcanoes around the globe would erupt and the Earth would be encased in ash, blocking out the sun and initiating the next ice age. You name it, they’ve thought it. There was even a theory that after 2012, the Descendants would start to think in unison.’

Devon blinked. ‘You mean, like as one organism?’

Seth’s blue eyes lit up. ‘Precisely. You get a gold star.’

Ash shuddered. ‘That’s creepy.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because it’s like losing control and becoming one of those cybermen off Doctor Who?’

Seth grew ponderous. ‘Hm. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Well, anyway. I’m sure it’s all nonsense. Whatever’s happening, it’s probably more connected to our powers.’

Devon’s eyes widened with excitement and she clasped her hands together. ‘Ooh, you mean like it’s heightening them somehow?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Seth. ‘More like…it’s causing them. Mine only started in 2012. Same as Oz.’

‘But that doesn’t work,’ Devon told him. ‘Because – ow!’ She turned to Itzy, who had kicked her under the table. ‘What’d you do that for?’

‘Yeah, Itz,’ Seth said, grinning at her. ‘What is it you don’t want me to know?’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Itzy growled at the girl who was supposed to be her best friend. She turned to Seth, who was waiting for her patiently. ‘It’s just…the first time I can remember writing one of my…stories….’ She swallowed. ‘Well, it was a long time before 2012.’

Seth folded his arms on top of each other on the table and leaned forward, exhaling. He smelled peppery. It wasn’t unpleasant. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘And might I enquire exactly what you wrote?’

Itzy felt trapped. Seth had a way of looking at her that felt like iron shackles had been clamped down on her wrists, pinning her down.

‘Leave her alone,’ Oz’s voice startled them.

Seth eased back and was all smiles. ‘The prodigal son returns.’

‘Shut up. Itzy,’ Oz said, nodding to her. ‘I have something to show you.’

‘Oh. Um…alright.’

Itzy got up and pushed her chair under the table. Devon put out her hand and held her friend back, just for a moment. There was a look in her eyes that said, Will you be okay on your own? Itzy moved her head to reassure her. Devon gave her arm a squeeze before letting go and turning back to Seth, who had taken to drawing coloured balls out of the air and catapulting them around in perpetual motion.

Itzy followed Oz up the stairs, into his room. Like his sister, Oz seemed to despise blank space. One of the pale blue walls had been covered in star charts with pins stuck in them, as if he were tracking something. Another wall was half-covered with a bed, while the top half was filled with online articles about crop circles.

The third wall framed a wide window. Under that was a large table, instead of a desk. It was heaped with thick books and the air was speckled with their dust. Papers lay strewn all over the floor. It was a disaster zone, but something about that was comforting, in an otherwise showroom-looking house.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ he threw over his shoulder as he closed the door. ‘I didn’t know we’d have guests.’

Itzy pointed to the papers. ‘What’s all this?’

He bent over and started gathering them up into a messy pile. ‘Just some bits and pieces I’ve been working on.’ When Oz had picked everything up, he dumped it on the table, along with the musty old books. ‘I was listening to you, downstairs, you know.’

He spun around and leaned back against the edge of the table, his ankles crossed over each other. His black hair brushed his sandy forehead and made his dark eyes stand out boldly.

‘I thought so,’ said Itzy. She remained standing; there was nowhere to sit down and her brother didn’t seem about to fix that. She noticed a long column of silver on the windowsill. ‘Is that a telescope?’

Oz looked in the same direction. ‘Yeah. Our dad gave it to me for my –’

‘Ninth birthday,’ she filled in.

He raised one of his dark eyebrows at her. ‘So you can’t finish your own sentences, but you can finish mine? How did you know, anyway?’

‘Because he gave me the same thing for my ninth birthday,’ she told him. ‘May I look at it?’

Oz had grown very pale. It made him look almost ghoulish, under his black hair. ‘Er…sure.’

Itzy stepped around the table, bumping her leg into one of its own and toppling a book to the floor. Oz hurried to pick it up, but didn’t remark upon it. Itzy reached the wall and ran her fingers along the spine of the telescope. The metal felt cool. Nostalgia rushed through her hands, up her arms, into her head. A solitary tear fell from her right eye, without warning.

‘I used to stay up late every night just staring up at the stars,’ she said, her gaze glued to the instrument. ‘I remember asking him if there was life on other planets.’

Oz drew up behind her. ‘And he said, What a silly question. Of course there is.’

She smiled to herself. ‘Yes. That’s exactly what he said.’

She swivelled the telescope on its base so it pointed at the moon. It was only 7pm and very bright outside, so the moon was a white array of splotches and haze in the distance. She leaned down to see through the telescope.

She expertly adjusted the focus, the zoom, until she could see the satellite clearly. Its rabbit marks jumped out at her, just a hint of the craters that marred its rocky surface. She remembered her father telling her you could never see the dark side of the moon, because its orbit was so tied with the Earth’s; the moon rotated along with the Earth, rather than spinning independently around it. And she remembered thinking her father was a little like the moon; he, too, had a dark side lurking just around the corner.

And, perhaps, so did she.

She turned and saw Oz watching her. It gave her a sudden sense of stage fright.

‘You look so much like him,’ Oz commented.

She knew who he meant. ‘So do you.’

‘Have you ever thought that was strange? That you take after him so much, but not your mum?’

Itzy shrugged. Except actually, Oz was right. She’d always thought it was weird, and frustrating. Stephen Loveguard wasn’t the sort of person she wanted to emulate, however unintentionally.

‘It’s because we’re Descendants,’ he told her. ‘It’s a dominant trait in the gene pool.’

‘Why didn’t he just find other alien spawn to marry?’ Itzy asked, unable to believe she was sort of being serious.

‘We’re hard to find,’ he said. ‘Well. We were hard to find.’

‘But now people are starting to…do things.’

Oz nodded.

‘Look,’ she began. ‘There’s something I’ve always wondered. I don’t know if it’s the right time to bring it up, but….’

‘There you go, not finishing your sentences again,’ Oz said. He smiled like he was pleased with himself for managing to identify one of his sister’s idiosyncrasies.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ She rolled her eyes at him and flicked her long ponytail over her shoulder.

‘Sorry. What did you want to know?’

Itzy frowned. ‘I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I’m just going to say it.’

‘Okay.’

She paused. ‘Did our dad ever…hit you?’ The light in Oz’s eyes went out, making them look like black pools. But Itzy caught something in them. ‘He did, didn’t he?’

Oz didn’t answer. He had a look on his face like he’d been struck by a murderous vision he wished he could block out, but couldn’t.

Then he snapped out of it. ‘Something you have to understand is that those mood swings? They’re all part of being a Descendent.’

Itzy’s brow went up. ‘What do you mean?’

Oz eased away from the table and stood straight. It made him look like a university professor.

Like our father.

He launched into his lesson. ‘Think of it like…there are two lots of DNA that make you who you are: there’s the human DNA, and then there’s the alien DNA. And sometimes, they don’t mix very well. Your brain starts splitting. It gets confused, frustrated. You lose your mind.’

‘You down a whole bottle of pills and write crazy messages to mess with your kids’ heads,’ Itzy finished in a bland voice.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that message was meant to mess with our heads. I think it was a very serious warning. He was trying to help us.’

Something inside her shattered. ‘How the hell was that helping us? Do you have any idea what I went through, growing up? Do you really?’ Itzy barked at him. When he didn’t answer, she went on. ‘Most little girls spend all their time playing with Barbies, or creepy Bratz dolls, or whatever. They dress up and do each other’s hair and ogle boy band members in magazines at slumber parties. And okay, yeah, sometimes that was me. Sometimes,’ she repeated. ‘But most of the time, do you know what I was doing? Hiding. Making up stories where things were better than they were in real life and wishing I could just run away.

‘Except I couldn’t. And do you know why? Because I was terrified if I left the house, I’d come home and my mum would be dead. Dead. Devon was the only friend I had for years because I was too scared to let anyone else in, after everything I’d been through. I was so lonely.’

She was breathing heavily. Now she’d got started, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. ‘The worst part was I couldn’t hate him. And not just because he was my dad, but because he wasn’t always like that. Sometimes he was really nice. I mean, really, really nice. Then he’d get, I dunno, possessed, and he’d lose it over something stupid. He’d be screaming, my mum would be screaming, and finally I’d be screaming and begging them to stop.

‘Then one day, he decided I was old enough to take some of the heat myself. He threw me into a table. I ripped my arm open on a loose screw. I still have the scar. See?’

Itzy twisted her arm around so Oz could see the white mark just by her elbow.

‘So I wrote a story. It…it was about a man who was married, with a little girl. But one day, they discovered the man already had a family, from years before. He had abandoned them when his first child was just a baby, and the mother had hunted him down so she could bring all the secrets of his past to light.’

She glanced at Oz, to see his reaction, but his expression was unreadable.

She swallowed. ‘I didn’t think it was any different from the stories I’d been making up all my life – but it was. I made your mother come back to find him. I literally wrote him out of our lives, because I couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. My own father. Except when he was gone, I missed him.’ She shook her head. ‘But not really. Not all of him. I missed the person he sometimes was, and what he could have been. I missed all the things I had hoped for and knew were impossible.’

‘And now,’ Oz finally spoke, ‘you’re not really mourning his death, but…the death of your dreams. If he’s gone for all time, there’s absolutely no way he can ever change. You never thought he would, but now you have no choice but to accept it. And it’s killing you.’

Itzy stared at him in disbelief. Her eyes stung with hot tears. Her heart skipped a beat and she seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. She wished there were somewhere in that messy room for her to fall.

‘How did you know that?’ she whispered.

Oz sighed and stepped toward her. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it’s how I’ve been feeling, too.’

His words exploded like a bomb in her chest. As a child, she had often wished there were someone out there who understood what she was feeling. And here he was, in the flesh, like a dream come true. Someone had answered her prayers.

Realisation struck her like lightning. ‘You don’t resent me. You’re just…worried I might be too much like him.’

He nodded.

‘Because you were scared of him.’

He nodded again.

Itzy’s mouth felt parched. She fumbled for her voice. ‘So, what…what did you want to show me?’

Oz blinked himself into remembering. ‘Oh yeah.’

He turned back to the table and dug around the books and papers, searching for something. Finally, he yanked out a notebook covered in a pattern of black and white splotches. He handed it to her.

‘What’s this?’ she asked. But as she ran her hand over the cover, she realised she recognised the book.

‘A journal,’ Oz said quietly. ‘It was our father’s. Open it.’

It was odd, but she was terrified of opening that book. It felt like an invasion of Stephen Loveguard’s privacy. It made it even realer that he was dead, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he’d been thinking in his final days.

Oz’s hands were on hers, making her open the book. The action was too easy; it didn’t match the momentousness of what they were doing. She threw her hand over the first page, hiding it, but her brother gently pried it off, revealing the blue ink strokes.

The writing didn’t make sense. Instead of words, she saw dots, lines, numbers.

‘They’re coordinates,’ Oz explained.

‘Of what?’

‘Stars.’

She looked up at him. ‘Why was he charting stars?’

Oz flipped through some of the pages until there were sentences, scrawled in that delicate cursive their father had always used. Itzy felt a stab in the heart at the sight of it. How was it possible to miss someone who’d frightened you and you’d only ever half-known anyway?

She read what it said:

Wednesday. Finally, after all these years…contact.

Itzy lifted her head to meet her brother’s eyes. ‘Contact? With who?’

‘Just keep reading.’

She did.

After all these years? What am I saying? More like millennia. They disappeared, left us behind with no guidance. The Ancients took the Wisdom to their graves and left us in an era of dark ignorance.

But surely they knew what was coming! They must have. How could they not have seen the change we would all face? How could they not have predicted what it would do to us? Even I…I’ve felt its effects for many years.

Sometimes I wake up and I’ve forgotten who or what I am. I can’t even remember my own name. It’s like being drunk all the time. When it passes, I’m racked with guilt, but I can’t think what I’ve done. All I know is people – everyone I love most – they look at me with hatred, and I know something terrible has happened. Not just happened – I caused it. I did it. I’ve done terrible things. To her. To her mother. To him. To his mother. To myself.

But I know I’m not the only one. It’s happening to all of us. One day, the Wisdom will be gone forever. I can’t let that happen.

There was a break in the writing, and then Stephen had resumed further down the page:

I just read what I wrote and it made me laugh. Here I am again, trying to justify my actions. I wonder how I’ll be judged when it’s all over.

Itzy felt faint. Her brother seemed to notice, because he placed a hand on her shoulder to steady her. Then he turned the page so she could read more.

They answered. After all our searching, we found them. We called them and they answered. I know it was them. It had to be. The pattern they left…it was just like the lines at Nazca. That was no ordinary circle. It was them.

Itzy slammed the book shut on her late father’s paranoid ramblings. She’d read enough for one night, thank you. There was just one thing.

‘What’s Nazca?’

Oz looked at her like she’d just stepped in gum. ‘He never told you about that?’

She shook her head, feeling ruffled.

‘It’s in Peru.’

‘Oh. You mean those drawings on the ground that only make sense if you look at them from the sky?’

He smiled. ‘Exactly.’

‘And they happened again, somewhere?’

Oz turned back to the table and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was a print-out of a Google Images search result. It was filled with photographs of crude drawings of animals in a field in Wiltshire.

She took the paper and examined it. ‘When did this happen?’

‘Last month.’

It was uncanny. Of course Itzy knew about the lines at Nazca. Stephen had a poster of them in his study when she was nine. There had been a large bird with its wings outspread asymmetrically; a monkey with its tail curled into a tight spiral; a spider with wiggly legs; and other mysterious geometric figures, all carved into the Peruvian soil thousands of years ago. No one knew how they had been made; one had to be flying to see the pictures. Itzy dimly recalled the ancient astronaut theories she had once discarded as absurd.

And these drawings in England were exact replicas of them, pressed into a field of leafy green maize like an enormous child had been playing with a box of stamps.

An inexplicable chill shot through her. ‘And he thought these were…a response…to what?’

Oz inhaled and exhaled deeply. ‘I’m not sure how he was doing it, but before our father died…well, earlier in the journal he says he was sending messages into space. Actually, he uses the word we, but he doesn’t specify who was helping him. In any case, they were trying to contact our ancestors.’

‘Is that bad?’

Oz looked grim. ‘I don’t know.’ He dragged his fingers through his coal-coloured hair. ‘See, no one knows why the Ancients left Earth in the end. But there are legends. Stories about how they grew disgusted with the alien-human hybrids. They thought the gene pool was being diluted and they didn’t want it to continue. They tried to kerb it, but failed, so in the end, they just left, and they took the Wisdom with them.’

Itzy’s head pounded from the onslaught of indigestible information. ‘Wait, slow down, please. What is this Wisdom, anyway?’

‘No –’

‘No one knows,’ she interrupted. ‘Okay, I see the pattern.’ She thought about it a moment, and then grinned at him conspiratorially. ‘So when are we going to see these crop circles?’