Thirty-Nine
I’m crashing through a dense forest, Robin’s arms still wrapped around me. Leaves and branches obscure my vision. We’re not in space, and judging by the strange colors and leaf shapes, we made it to Volaris.
I land face-first on the forest floor. The mask keeps buckets of dirt from being driven up my nose. Robin lands a few feet away. I took the brunt of the fall, but she looks hurt.
Wincing in pain, she gasps, “Here. Twenty-four hours.”
In the blink of an eye, she’s gone, teleported back to Earth.
I hope.
Okay, I’m here. Now what? I feel stupid that I judged Iris for jumping in without a plan now that I’ve done the same.
I might be close to the original landing point. The vegetation and terrain look familiar. Robin probably aimed for the same area, but judging by our landing, she might have miscalculated.
Teleporting under pressure is never a good idea, and that was insanely risky. Before teleporting, you have to clear your mind of anything else, especially other locations. If something pops into your head right before you trigger the teleportation, you could find yourself way off course. The fact that Robin got us here at all under stressful circumstances demonstrates just how good she is.
I don’t know which direction is a good place to start. Although it might be a bad idea, I have no choice but to gain some elevation and look around. Iris has been here alone for hours, and I need to find her as soon as possible.
Lifting slowly into the air, I scan the horizon for a recognizable landmark. About a mile away, I spot what looks like the clearing where we originally landed. Barely skimming the treetops, I propel myself through the air and set down in the clearing. I kneel to inspect the ground, hoping to find some sign of Iris. I have no idea what I’m looking for.
I’ve got twenty-four hours to find Iris before Robin returns, and I don’t know where to start.
I’m starting to accept that this will be a long process when I see what I think is a mirage: Iris.
She’s walking toward me from the outskirts of the forest. I run to meet her, but she stops abruptly.
“Stay right where you are,” she says.
“Iris, you shouldn’t have come here without help. You don’t have to do this on your own.”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s not true. We have twenty-four hours before Robin comes back for us. That’s plenty of time to figure out another way.”
“I’m sorry, Connor. There is no other way.”
“What do you—”
Iris thrusts her arms to her sides, and pools of purple electricity form around her hands. The energy intensifies until it’s almost too bright to look at.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“What I should have done a long time ago.”
She brings her hands together, and a solid blast of plasma smashes into my chest, knocking me off my feet.
I turn onto my side and look down at the nanosuit. The part where Iris hit me is gone, leaving a large portion of my chest exposed. The rest of the magtonium hurries to cover the hole, weakening the overall integrity of the suit.
Iris walks toward me confidently. Her eyes are glowing white, and purple electricity dances across her body.
“You lied to me,” she says flatly.
“What are you talking about? I never lied to you.”
“Yes, you did. You always lie to me. Midnight always lies to me. No one ever tells me the truth, but they all expect me to trust them. That’s what you expect, isn’t it, Connor?”
Another blast of plasma energy smacks me in the sternum. I tumble across the ground, a cloud of dust forming in my wake. I come to a stop and look down. Even more of the suit is missing now. The remaining nanosuit resembles mesh netting. The nanobots cover what they can, but there are few of them left.
“Iris, please, stop. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I spent my entire life not knowing who my mother was. Eventually, I gave up hope. I assumed she was dead. Maybe that makes it easier for some people, but it didn’t for me. I moved from foster home to foster home until there were no foster homes left that would have me. And this entire time, my mother was out there, looking for me, and everyone knew about it but me.”
I return to my feet and put my hands up. I’m not here to fight her, and I’m not sure how many more blasts I can take.
“I didn’t know.”
“Liar. You didn’t even look surprised when I told you.”
“Midnight told me just before I came here for you, but I didn’t believe him.”
“He must be going senile if he thinks you can take me in.”
“I didn’t come here to take you home. I came here to help you. Midnight tried to stop me from coming.”
She searches my eyes, trying to determine if I’m telling the truth.
“Please, we’re on the same side, Iris. I just want to help you. Midnight has kept secrets from me too. I know what it’s like, but I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Why do you assume we’re on the same side?”
I don’t like the sound of that.
“What are you saying, Iris?”
“She’s saying she’s had enough,” a voice announces.
A figure emerges from the forest behind Iris. April Allard, or as she’s known by her real name, Violet Jones.
She sidles up next to Iris and crosses her arms. She looks different, older and shorter than her hologram suggested, but there’s an aura of confidence surrounding her that a hologram couldn’t capture. She wears a military-style uniform of black and red. Emblazoned on her shoulder is a circular insignia that I recognize from the guards inside the city.
“Admiring my uniform, I see? I’ll take that as a compliment. You can’t start a new empire without memorable branding, after all, can you?”
I mentally check in with my nanosuit, willing it to repair itself faster. Much of my body is exposed, but the suit is working as quickly as it can. It senses danger and understands the urgency.
“It’s nice to meet you in person finally, Mr. Connolly. My name is Violet Jones. I’m sorry I couldn’t have told you that earlier, but unfortunately my name comes with some unfair baggage. I’ve heard so much about you from my daughter, as well as from my friends in Galahue. I had eyes on you from the moment you stepped inside the city walls. I have to say, you do wear that nanosuit quite well, but I’m afraid it doesn’t belong to you.”
“We know what you’re doing. We know what your plan is.”
“Do you now? You may think you know what my plan is, but I assure you, if you knew my actual plan you would not have teleported yourself to this doomed planet.”
“It doesn’t have to be doomed.”
“But it does. It’s always been doomed, and it will always be doomed. But that doesn’t mean its achievements should die with it. The advancements their culture has made will not be in vain. They will be brought to the new world and built upon, taking them to greater heights than their creators could have ever imagined.”
“All while destroying another planet in the process.”
“Earth is resilient. It will bounce back, perhaps stronger than before thanks to the technology we will leave behind.”
“I can’t let that happen.”
“You don’t have a choice, Connor. Iris, make sure he won’t be a problem for us.”
Iris turns from Violet to face me, her eyes glowing.
“Iris, don’t do this.”
“There’s no other way, Connor.”
She thrusts her hands toward me, and electricity arcs from her fingertips, but this time, I’m ready for it.
I raise my arms, and the magtonium shifts from my chest to my forearms. It instantly forms into a shield and blocks the blast. I skid backward on my heels as the energy is absorbed, but the shield holds.
The blast only lasts half a second, but that would have been more than enough time to kill me if I hadn’t blocked it. Iris didn’t i
ntentionally hold back. Three energy blasts in short succession would take a lot out of anyone, even her, and she couldn’t sustain the last blast. If I’m going to get out of here, I’ve got to strike back while she’s weakened.
I sprint toward Iris. The pupils of her eyes have returned, and they dilate in surprise. Attacking her in my state isn’t smart, but I have something else in mind.
A few steps before colliding into her, my nanosuit shifts again, reforming around my feet and hands and leaving the rest of my body exposed. Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense, or something like that.
The nanobots wrapped around my feet thrust me into the air. I raise my hands, and the remaining magtonium forms into a pair of gigantic fists, which I bring down hard on Iris’s head.
The blow knocks her to the ground. It wouldn’t have worked if she wasn’t already weakened. With Iris temporarily out of the way, Violet is my next target. She might have just found her long-lost daughter, but self-preservation comes above everything else for people like her. She’s already running back into the forest.
I move to chase her, but my right foot doesn’t listen. I look down and see Iris’s fingers gripped around my ankle. I try to kick her loose, but it’s useless. She digs her fingers into the magtonium, prying her way between it and my skin, and tears pieces of it loose. She discards them behind her as she rips away more and more.
I bring my other foot down on her forearm, and she releases me from her grip. I leap into the air, unsure if the nanobots can still help me fly.
They can’t. I crash to the ground, and Iris leaps onto my back.
“Stop, Iris, please,” I plead.
“You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t do anymore.”
She wraps her fingers around the magtonium on my hands. Her hands are a phosphorescent shade of purple. The nanosuit protects me, but soon, I’m feeling the heat.
“Stand down, Connor, and you might get out of this alive. Keep fighting and I’ll rip off this magtonium along with your hands.”
I grit my teeth and hold out against the energy she’s pumping into the magtonium. The heat is overwhelming. I try to push back.
Suddenly, the magtonium detaches. I try to will it back onto me, but it won’t listen. It’s programmed to protect me at all costs. It decided that the only way to protect me is to disengage.
Iris climbs off my back, and I take a deep breath.
“Make sure he’s secured,” Violet says.
She’s returned from her retreat now that Iris has immobilized me. A group of armored soldiers surrounds me, their rifles trained on my head, ensuring I can’t escape. Even if I was in any condition to run, I have nowhere to run to, not for another twenty-four hours.
I raise my hands to surrender. A soldier cuffs my hands behind my back.
I look at Iris.
She shakes her head in disappointment and turns her back on me.
Forty
I slowly come to on a cold, hard floor. It feels like polished concrete, or steel. I don’t remember losing consciousness. It takes a few seconds for me to remember where I am.
I have no idea where I actually am, but I remember that I’m on a different planet. It’s a strange thing to wake up and remember.
I can’t even be sure about that because it’s completely dark. I stand up and feel around for a sign of … anything. I take a few tentative steps forward and feel a smooth wall in front of me. I knock on it to see if I can tell what it’s made of. All I can tell is that it’s definitely solid enough to keep me from breaking through it.
Unsurprisingly, my nanosuit is missing.
“Ah, you’re awake,” I hear Violet say.
A spotlight illuminates on the other side of the clear partition imprisoning me. Violet stands in the beam of light. The spotlight follows her as she approaches the partition.
“That’s not really you, is it?” I ask.
She raps a knuckle on the clear wall between us. “In the flesh. I wish it didn’t have to come to this, Connor.”
“It doesn’t. Let me go and we can figure out another way together.”
“There is no other way. There never was. You’re aware that I’m not from this time, aren’t you?”
“I figured there was a good chance that was the case.”
“In the time I am from, this planet no longer exists,” she continues. “Losing an entire planet is a great tragedy, but in Earth’s case, the loss of Volaris is more than that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t expect you would. Earth faces a great threat in my time—a threat we ultimately lose to.”
“What kind of threat?”
Violet smirks.
“The kind that preventable, but not without a significant leap in Earth’s technological understanding. This leap can only take place in a timeline where Earth’s technology dramatically evolves overnight. A leap like that would be compounded over time. By the time I’m born, Earth will be hundreds of years further along its technological timeline, and a powerful empire would have already risen hundreds of years earlier. This empire will be strong enough to prevent what’s coming. The New Empire.”
“So, you want to bring Volarian technology to Earth to fight some unknown threat in the future?”
“The threat isn’t unknown to me. Nor is it unknown to your friend Simon.”
“Who?”
“He hasn’t told you his real name yet? The man was tasked with looking over you and your brother’s safety, and he couldn’t be bothered to tell you who he really is? He was always a little … different, but that’s shocking, even to me.”
Midnight’s name is Simon? Not what I expected, but I don’t know what I expected.
“Am I correct to assume that he provided some details I conveniently left out since we last met?”
“Not many. He told me you were Iris’s mother.”
“I am Iris’s mother. And did he tell you how she was ripped away from me?”
“That wasn’t how he put it.”
Violet’s jaw clenches and unclenches. Apparently, this is a sore subject.
She composes herself and settles in. “I arrived in this timeline decades ago, alongside your parents. My husband, John, was not with us when we landed. He was trapped inside an endless void, forced to spend the equivalent of hundreds of years without any stimulation. Do you know what that does to the human mind? It unravels it, thread by thread. He was a brilliant man, one of the most intelligent of our time, but the experience irrevocably damaged his mind. No one could have withstood it. Your parents and Simon barely cared.”
“From what I understand, it was his fault they were thrown into the past. Wasn’t it his tinkering with metabands that tore the space-time continuum in the first place?”
Violet smashes her fist against the glass, startling me, and I flinch back.
“John was attempting to learn, same as the rest of us. It was our mission. It was a risk everyone aboard that ship had accepted. When he failed to arrive on Earth with us, we all assumed the worst.
“Simon and your parents spent little time grieving. They quickly found the courage to move on thanks to the metabands that followed us through the rip in time. Simon was too scared to try them on again, but that didn’t stop him from dressing up and playing superhero with your mother and father.”
“And because you were too sad to help anyone but yourself that makes you better than them?”
“As far as I was concerned, everyone on Earth was already dead. They’d all died long before I was born.”
“I’m starting to understand what Jones saw in you.”
“My concerns were much larger than ferrying car-crash victims to the hospital and fetching cats out of trees. I was concerned about the future of the entire human race. The others were focused on that once as well, until they became so caught up in the minutiae of this primitive time that they lost sight of our mission.
“But then one day, the unthinkable happened. John retu
rned to me.”
“The man who came out of that void was not the man you knew.”
“You’re wrong! He was the same man I knew and loved. He had suffered greatly, but that suffering did not have to define him. I took matters into my own hands. If metabands had the power to destroy his mind, then maybe they also had the power to rebuild it. I needed to find my own to test this hypothesis—and I did.”
“The pair you said you’d found. That was the truth?”
Violet throws back her head and laughs. “You think that was my first pair? I sought additional pairs for scientific purposes. I’d had my own pair for years by then—a pair that provided the ability to control minds.”
“Impossible. Jones wasn’t susceptible to mind control. Countless metahumans tried. It never worked.”
“But I had something those other metahumans didn’t. I had his trust. I wasn’t trying to control him like a puppet. I was simply subduing the broken part of his mind. Once I learned how to do that, the true John reemerged.”
“The true John Jones never reemerged. He was a monster from the day he appeared to the day he died.”
“I understand how that might be easier for you to believe, but it’s not true. Tell me, do you know where John went between his episodes? He wasn’t on violent rampages twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, was he? In fact, sightings were extremely rare. Did you ever wonder where he was when you didn’t see him?”
Of course I had. Everyone had. He’d appear and disappear without warning. Governments around the world attempted to track him down. The prevailing thought was that he disappeared when he needed to regenerate the energy he’d expended. If true, this meant he would have been at his weakest during that time, perhaps weak enough to defeat once and for all. But he was never found. He remained hidden until he wanted to be seen.
“He was with me,” Violet explains. “I helped him.”
“Obviously not because he still killed thousands.”
“You have no idea how many deaths I prevented, but even my powers had limits and needed to recharge. During these periods, he would sometimes relapse.”
Meta (Book 5): New Empire Page 16