Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

  Wick snorts and shakes his head. Perhaps Dran is a touch too much like Rone used to be. The thought warms him as much as it gives him an ache. “A date in the wild …” he murmurs thoughtfully.

  “We’ll get a good, long look beyond that rift.”

  “Yes, just to see.”

  “Just to see,” agrees Dran lightly.

  0251 Link

  Doctor Terrabeth sweats a lot as she works.

  Her work also requires a lot of lying, it turns out.

  “You’ll feel nothing,” she always assures the resident as she then gently presses the needle of a syringe into their shoulder. At first, they always relax, a look of calmness spreading about their faces.

  Then they scream.

  “It’ll only last a short time,” she assures them.

  It never does; it lasts twenty minutes. The resident can’t move their limbs for some reason, even though they aren’t restrained by any visible means. The only parts of them that move are their faces, and the tips of their fingers and toes. They scream and cry out so much, they’ve barely any voice left when the procedure is through.

  “You did a great job,” she’ll tell them afterwards.

  But for such a great job, they never realize they will be subjected to the very same torture all over again.

  Somehow, they always think it’s the first time.

  This place is so fucked up.

  But Link doesn’t want Kid to know his inner fears. He needs to preserve her peace of mind as best as he can. You’re her father. You’re her tether. You’re who she bases her sense of normalcy upon, whether you wish to admit it or not. Be her rock. Be her strength. Be her heart.

  At times, it seems an impossible thing to maintain.

  The pair of them watch from the other end of the room as the big procedure is finished up—the seventeenth that day—and the tired and trembling resident is led out of the room. Doctor Terrabeth pulls off her gloves, sets them down on the now-empty exam table, then gives a signal toward the window through which a team of doctors were watching and taking notes. They all rise from their seats and vacate their observing room. Doctor Terrabeth, all alone now, starts to head for the door, but stops halfway. She puts a hand to her brow as she bows her head and shuts her eyes, sighing, as if overcome by a headache.

  It’s been her ninth procedure today.

  Each one seems to take a worse toll on her than the last.

  The large woman pulls off the cloth cap about her head at once, as if the thing was suffocating her, revealing her short hair. She uses the thing to wipe her face of sweat.

  So much sweat. So much labor. So much fear.

  “Not now,” she mutters to herself, shakes her head, straightens her posture. “Not now. Not today.”

  Then she leaves.

  Kid sighs at his side. “We missed a chance just now. We should have confronted her.”

  Link had the same thought, but caution kept him quiet. “No. Not yet. She is meeting with the other observing doctors. They’d wonder why she’d not left this room sooner, and would come and interrupt our plan in action. We must be smarter.”

  “I’m tired of being smart,” gripes Kid.

  The two of them draw up to a small, circular table by the exam chair upon which an emptied syringe sits, the one that was used to inject a sort of chemical into each patient. “They’re developing some kind of serum to extinguish Legacies. Or numb them. Or something.”

  “Something,” agrees Link. Kid reaches to touch the syringe, and he swats her hand away. “No. Don’t.”

  She frowns. “I wasn’t going to touch the sharp part.”

  “Still. I don’t trust a bit of chemistry in this place. I don’t want a drop of that stuff on your skin, and then that very spot of your skin remains unable to become invisible with the rest of you.”

  “Oh.” Kid recoils from the table. She clearly hadn’t considered that scary prospect.

  “The purpose we have yet to deduce, even with as many of the meetings between the doctors as we’ve overheard, is why they are developing such a serum.”

  “Maybe Greymyn is trying to cure his bloody throat,” considers Kid with a shrug.

  Link nods, considering it. “They do say it’s killing him, his own Legacy. Well, that, and he’s, like, twenty thousand years old.”

  Kid laughs at that. “More like thirty!”

  “Voice down,” whispers Link with a nervous glance at the door.

  “But …” Kid bites her lip, then lifts her eyes to Link. “Why did they take Faery away, and what does she have to do with all of this?”

  Link shakes his head. He’s given that very question days upon days of thought himself.

  Though the enigmatic woman who is Link’s love and Akidra’s mother might have once seemed otherworldly and strange to him when they first met so long ago—I remember that moment in the dark, abandoned Waterways like it was just yesterday—she was nothing but another human being all the time they lived in that quaint house at the edge of the tenth near the Wall. Even he was seduced by her humanness.

  But she is the same woman who gave his Legacy back to him after he’d given it away. She is the same woman who moved water with her mind, shaping it like clay with invisible fingers. She is the same woman who was sought after by Baal, the mad man, the time-walker, the brother of Baron.

  She is not just another human being.

  And to complicate the matter worse, Link is in love with her. He keeps smelling her whenever he remembers that house on the edge of the tenth. She always had a distinctly clean, yet foreign scent to her hair. Her eyes were unlike any he ever knew, and he so loved it when he’d say something funny and they’d squish up with laughter, tearful and sparkling. How can she not be human? he asks himself. How can she truly be a Goddess or a Sister or whatever they say?

  “We need to infiltrate Sanctum.”

  Link sighs. Not this again. “Kid …”

  “It’s the only way we’ll figure out what’s happened with Faery,” Kid persists. “Like you said, my friend Aryl won’t be here for another three years or however many. We have time to figure out Faery’s whereabouts and save her.”

  Link wishes for one rueful moment that Faery had given him a new Legacy instead of his same one. There isn’t much offensively or defensively he can do by merely changing the colors of things. If only colors could be weapons …

  Yet, despite it all: “You’re right.”

  Kid looks at him, surprised.

  “We must act now,” Link decides mutedly. “We know all we can learn about this place, and we can return here if need be. What we know for certain is that Faery … is not here.”

  “Maybe the secret is in Cloud Keep.” Kid wrings her hands. “In Cloud Keep, we might learn the very things they won’t even tell the doctors here. The why.”

  Link nods. “If we’re heading off, I suggest we pack a bag for the road. We won’t necessarily have the luxury of easy food.”

  “Better stop by the resident commons on our way out, then,” Kid agrees.

  Link smiles at her. It is such a strange thing, to nearly match the height of one’s own daughter with but six or so years separating the peculiar pair of them.

  They would only get halfway there before a doctor’s words on the other side of a cracked-open door brings Kid to a complete stop, causing Link to be yanked back, their hands clasped together. Link looks about, confused, while Kid stares at the door. Then, they listen.

  “… is a very troubled child, I know, but what I’m saying is, the key ingredient you’re missing is going to come from his mother.”

  “It’s preposterous. No. The very chemistry of her Legacy is a poison to the serum you’re trying so desperately to perfect. Did you not see what it did to resident 141, 142, and 143? There is a reason we don’t—”

  “But you haven’t tried it yet this way. Look at my methods. The formula is like poetry. You extract a bit of blood, then sift it through a bione filter, then distill the gylcotes
from the mycotes, simple, red from blue, and green from blue … well, look at the diagram. Twelve, not eleven, and then after a swab, you inject directly into the neck. The nervous system responds first. Then the cardiac system. If the resident resists it, then just counteract with anti-serum, same exact principle, and the resident is spared. If the resident does not resist …”

  “Then it could … potentially reverse the growth of the Legacy.” The second voice sighs. “Even if this works, it isn’t immediate. The resident would just … slowly lose their Legacy, possibly taking their whole lifetime to ‘un-grow’ their ability into nothing. No, this won’t do. We need something instantly effective. Doctor Terrabeth won’t go for this, especially not with it dealing with Kendil’s—”

  “Stop saying his name,” hisses the first voice.

  “Sorry. She won’t accept using genes or frozen blood or what-have-you from … from the Weapon’s mother. Subject Meta. Lucida. Whatever name doesn’t scare you. It won’t happen. We’re wasting our time even considering it.”

  “This … is the answer. And you know it is. Please stop making this about your ego and saving face. Think of how Greymyn will reward us if we were to have cracked this lifelong puzzle. Think—”

  “I’ve thought enough, and so have you. Go.”

  Kid and Link flatten to the wall, invisible, as the doctor departs the room in a huff and disappears down the hall. The door is then shut and locked, and there is nothing more.

  Except the look that Link and Kid now give one another. “Were they referring to—?” starts Link.

  “Yes,” Kid answers right away. “Kendil’s mother. He told me he froze his mother. She’s here.”

  “But where?” Link wracks his brain. “There isn’t a single room we haven’t slipped into in this whole place. Well, other than the—”

  It clicks.

  The realization seems to click in Kid’s eyes, too. “The freezers.” She puts a hand over her mouth. “The freezers. We assumed it was just filled with—”

  “Chemicals and fluids and dead bodies.”

  “Dead bodies.” Kid can barely contain her excitement. “Kendil’s mother is in that freezer, and we have to find her!”

  Link’s jaw tightens. “Kid, we were only a moment ago heading off to Sanctum. You’re the one who has berated me for not having found Faery yet, and now you want to stay and play in the freezers?”

  “Just this one thing more,” she insists, inspiration in her eyes. “Then we seek out Faery. We have a responsibility, didn’t you say? Didn’t we decide that? When you and I were so certain that death was about to come to us—”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You said that it’s our responsibility—here in the past—to do all we can. To learn all we can. To see. You said no more tiptoeing.”

  “I know what I said.”

  “We are Shye.” Kid gets right in his face, refusing to be ignored. “We are Shye, the Unseen. We are Shye, the Key to All Locks.”

  “We are Shye, the One Who Talks Too Loud,” Link mumbles with a warning look at her.

  Kid eyes him. “You said all those things. Now we must live up to them. We must do our part, because literally … literally … no one else in all of existence will have the opportunity that we have.”

  “That much is true, but—”

  “Thousands of lives depend on us figuring out everything we can in this past. Even Kendil is depending on us, whether he knows it or not.” Kid’s eyes detach, as if she’s moved by her own words, memories of that Cold Boy racing forward. “And … And Kendil’s frozen mother, this Subject Meta person.”

  Link takes both her hands, about to object once more.

  But then: “Faery,” she goes on. “The Sisters. The Banshee who still screams. The missing To-Be-Queen Ruena, years from now. The Marshal of Madness and his rise to power.” Kid looks at Link. “We’re the ones that could save Atlas. We could change everything. We are Shye, the Unseen.”

  It’s been too quick that the child became a woman. It’s been too quick that the boy became a man. Link may never decide whether taking Baal’s hand that day seven years ago—three years from now—was the greatest choice, or the most miserable folly he’s ever made.

  Link stares at his daughter in wonder. “You … should have been more of a child when you were a child. You should have had more fun. Played in the streets. Met other children your age. When …?” He fights tears. “When did you become … such a grown, driven young woman before my eyes …?”

  Kid’s response is firm, yet quiet. “And if Shye fails …” She takes a breath. “… then Shye has failed all of Atlas. And if Shye succeeds … well, it may be more than just one future we’re saving.”

  To that, Link gives a rueful sigh. There’s no doubt; she is truly her father’s daughter.

  0252 Ellena

  She nearly doesn’t recognize the street when they happen upon the broken pavement painted in the setting sun’s fire. Her eyes graze the rows of houses that look like two stacked atop one another, the dead lawns with but a patch here and there of healthy grass, and the gnarled trees that randomly poke up from the earth in a few spots, some thriving and green, some dead and leafless.

  From her hand, her heavy helmet hangs. She’s sweated through her clothes underneath the armor. Hair is plastered to her face, wet.

  “Mom,” coaxes Aleks with a point of a gloved finger. “I see the Penlings.”

  “I do, too.” Her answer is devoid of all energy, standing in the middle of the intersection as they are and exhausted. She isn’t sure she’s ready to fly into her house and see her boys. Something feels wrong about this whole place. Something feels different.

  Something feels off.

  Shouts from a nearby field draw her startled attention, and she pays witness to three rows of people—men, women, boys and girls—who are training and armed with weapons, following the lead of a burly man in the front who instructs them. They’re training on the field Halvesand and Aleksand used to play games on with the other neighborhood boys, roughing around and coming home muddy with tiny scuffs on their knees for Ellena to take from them. The very sight of that joyful field being turned into a sort of training ground hurts, especially seeing innocent children among them.

  “I did warn you,” mumbles Aleks from her side. “The ninth has an alliance with Guardian, so we leave them be and allow them—”

  “I know.” Ellena looks the other way and finds two families, the Withers and Uptons, standing at tables and workstations set up on their lawn with all sorts of weapons spread across them.

  This is not the ninth I left behind.

  “The Penlings have gone inside now.” Aleks is still watching. “I think we should—”

  “I want to see my sons.”

  With that statement, Ellena takes off down the broken road. At least one thing hasn’t changed; each crack is just as I remember it. She hops over one here, keeps her balance there, and then walks the rest of the way untroubled past three houses before arriving at the front lawn of her own.

  It looks the same on the outside, despite all the differences in the neighborhood around it. The tree is the same. The windows. Perhaps the porch looks tended to a bit, swept of debris, but is otherwise just as lopsided as it was before. The sun makes the roof gleam a strange color, the part of the roof over Link’s room—formerly Halves’—that is metalwork, unlike the rest of it. His room gets so loud when it rains, she remembers as a memory returns of little Halvesand racing to her, scared because of the tinny, jarring noises. Aleks would make fun of him, but Ellena held Halves tightly to her breasts and soothed him as the rain poured and poured, unrelenting. She was pregnant and close to bursting with Lionis at the time, if she’s recalling it right.

  She might even trick herself into believing that she’d just come home right now from the Greens, if it weren’t for her lack of mud. I’m sweaty just the same, she reasons.

  She’d be fully convinced if Aleks and Gabel weren’t at he
r back, fully armored and likely intimidating the neighbors, none of whom shouted a single word of welcome at her. Even they don’t recognize me, she assumes, then glances down her body. Other than the helm, I’m fully armored and just as intimidating, likely.

  A face appears at Wick’s window.

  Ellena looks up, then her eyebrows pull together. Is that …?

  The face is gone as quickly as it came. With a sudden urgency, Ellena hurries to the front door and pushes it open with ease, the withered thing not even closed all the way or locked. At once, she doesn’t recognize the smell of her own home. The couch is totally clear of its usual mound of laundry. People can actually sit upon it, she thinks to herself, bewildered. The kitchen is sorted, not a single dirty dish or pot in the sink. One cabinet door is slightly ajar, but even that is an improvement to how messy her house used to be.

  Only one pot has been left out, strangely. It just so happens to be her favorite cooking pot, and it sits on the counter all by itself, no other purpose in the world.

  “Lionis must have cleaned,” she mutters with half a smile, her eyes wandering toward the sliding glass doors to the backyard, where an unfamiliar young man—dark of skin, short of hair, wearing a modest maroon-dyed shirt and brown linen pants—stands over the giant metal disc thing that’s lived there for a handful of years since it fell from the sky. He seems to be inspecting it closely and taking notes, a small pad of paper and a pencil in his hands.

  “E-Ellena?” comes a voice.

  She spins. For one brief, fleeting moment, she sees Anwick at the foot of her stairs. His sleeveless red hoodie. His tattered jeans that look like half the color has been washed out of its thighs and shins, a hole at one knee. But his body is far more muscular, too bulky at the arms to be her son. And his hair …

  His hair is golden blond.

  “Athan.” She can’t believe her eyes. “The Broadmore boy. In my house once again.”

  He stays glued to that bottom step for a long while, frozen. He clearly cannot believe what he sees either. He has a bruise on his cheek, a cut on his bottom lip, and a small dark gash down one of his arms—from a few weeks ago, judging by the scabbed look of it. His lips won’t close after uttering that one word: her name. He doesn’t even blink his pretty blue-grey eyes.