“I hate to say it, Zira, but none of us are sound of mind. You can’t be, in this line of work. We all have dark shit buried in our subconscious—I’d like to wager that I’d be more of a risk than Qaira.”
Zira frowned. “Your crazy is different than Qaira’s crazy.”
“Is it?”
He hesitated, as if giving that question real thought. Then his gaze lowered in defeat. “The best solution here is for TCS to launch every nuclear missile they have at this thing. Close it.” He brushed his hands. “The end.”
“That’ll destroy this planet.”
“It’s already being destroyed in slow-motion.”
I sighed, and stood. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but what about Cassima? What about the threat he said was coming from the shards?”
“It was all very vague.”
“It keeps happening. I don’t know why but the shard activity is starting to ramp up across the multiverse. We know experimentation with it led to the creation of the Framers. It precedes the Framers. How could it be here, in a simulated universe they created?”
“No idea, but we’ll never find out if we go in there, lose our minds and never come out again.”
“Then we just watch the multiverse fall?”
“Who said it’s falling?” snapped Zira. “Things change. It’s never static. We’re observers. Let this happen, if it must.”
“We protect the multiversal civilizations,” I said, the tone of my voice relaying Zira was straying into the territory of insubordination.
“We barter with them, and only the useful ones,” retorted Zira, eyes narrowed.
“And what should happen to us, without them?”
Zira seemed ready with a response, but his expression changed in a split-second from anger to confusion. Attica warned of an unfamiliar energy pattern, and then I felt it: a grip so icy that it burned, tugging me backward too quickly for me to register what was happening. Zira’s image—hand outstretched, his mouth opening in a shout—faded beneath a crushing pressure, darkness and smoke.
III
ZIRA
IT WAS PROBABLY ONLY A FEW SECONDS that I’d stood there trying to register what had just happened, but it felt like an hour. Everything moved in slow motion, including my thoughts. The anomaly field was less a field and more an organism, wasn’t it? It’d just sprouted arms and snatched Leid while she was completely unaware. It’d happened in a blink. A heartbeat. Less than that, and Leid was the fastest thing in the multiverse.
Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit—
These thoughts swirled in repeat as reality returned to real time. I was typically more eloquent than that, but poetry wasn’t possible right now. All I could think was what would happen when I returned to Enigmus without Leid.
Should I go after her?
I thought about this, lowering to a crouch, massaging my jaw as I realized I’d been clenching it.
No, I didn’t see how that would help. Not yet. Not with what little we knew, regarding this thing.
“I told you to stand back!” I shouted, at no one. I’d called to Leid twice already through telepathy but there was no response. She wasn’t even in attica. No stasis, just nothing. By now the others surely had felt the vacancy; surprisingly there was not a peep from their end. They were probably waiting for me to explain, but I wouldn’t. I just turned and walked to camp, fumbling with an exit strategy, the roar of the angry field getting quieter at my back. Well, Leid was going to get her way after all.
One way or another, we were going into that thing.
*
I could see Qaira waiting for me at the Enigmus gates when I climbed across the Kel’Hanna Scar. Since I’d made it back to Poekka’s camp, he’d pinged me about fourteen times demanding an update. I’d ignored him. Obviously he was going to make that impossible now.
Yahweh was with him, but he stayed back as Qaira met me halfway. I could already tell by the look in his eyes that this was not going to be a pleasant exchange.
Multiverse, please give me strength so that I don’t make him wear his lungs as a necklace.
“Where is she?” demanded Qaira when we met at the gate entrance, his gaze drifting behind me.
“It grabbed her,” was all I said.
“It?”
“The field.”
Qaira said nothing, looking back at Yahweh. “So, she’s inside.”
“Yes.”
“And you came back without her.”
“You’re damn right I did. Going in there wouldn’t have done us any good.”
“You were supposed to protect her!” exclaimed Qaira. “That was the whole point of you going! Why are you so fucking worthless?!”
“I’m not a babysitter, and Leid can take care of herself. Wait, let me rephrase that—she should be able to take care of herself, but when I have to tell her to stand away from the expanding field and she tells me to jump off a cliff, then she needs more than a babysitter, doesn’t she?”
Qaira stared me down, and I returned the stare with equal fire. Yahweh appeared behind him then, sensing the impending explosion. “This is just wasting time,” he said, the voice of reason as always. “We need to call Adrial back. There’s no workaround anymore. Zira, were you able to gather any information?”
I nodded.
“Then let’s try to piece together what we have and go from there.” He turned, hurrying back through the courtyard. When neither of us moved, only continued to stare at each other, he shouted, “Come on, now!”
“Saved by your boyfriend,” muttered Qaira with a mean grin, turning on his heels and following Yahweh into Enigmus.
I stood there, opening and closing my fist, wondering what he looked like turned inside out.
When I got inside, Pariah was standing in the middle of the dining hall, looking at Yahweh and Qaira as they went back and forth on what they should tell Adrial. From Pariah’s expression, he’d just arrived from his contract and clearly wished he hadn’t.
“Leave that part out,” said Qaira. “He doesn’t need to know we weren’t planning on telling him about this.”
Yahweh seemed confused. “But it wasn’t meant as any ill-intent. We just didn’t want him to worry.”
“Yes, I know, but leave that out. He’ll never go on vacation again.”
“He’s going to figure it out within minutes of hearing our story.”
Qaira raised his hands. “And by then it’s on Leid, not us.”
“What is happening?” demanded Pariah.
I pinged him the anomaly thread. He rifled through it, eyes glazing over.
“Good god,” he sighed. “Someone find me another contract.”
We all watched him quizzically as he wandered out of the room.
“Where are you going?” barked Qaira. “We need all hands on deck!”
“I’m coming back,” Pariah called at the staircase. “I just need to find some… drugs, or something.”
“Are you sending this, or am I?” Qaira asked Yahweh.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“Don’t mention anything about—”
“Yeah, I got it.” I dropped a very vague message in Adrial’s stream, asking him to contact us. A few minutes later, he did.
—What did you all do now?
…Nothing, just uh, wondering how your trip is going.
—Zira, for fuck’s sake. Why can’t I feel Leid?
She got sucked into a dimensional rift on Poekka.
Adrial never responded. We all looked at each other.
“What does this mean?” asked Yahweh. “Does it mean he’s coming?”
“Yeah, he’s coming. Let’s go figure this shit out in the meantime,” said Qaira, heading for the reliquary. “He’ll be less pissy if we’re ready with some answers.”
*
“The rift was said to have been created a week and a half ago on Poekka, TriColony Sigma’s Research and Development world,” informed Yahweh, in front of the podium as vis-captures o
f the field swirled between him and the table in what looked like cosmic dust. “TCS attempted to investigate themselves for most of the first week before calling us for help, specifically when they realized the field was expanding.”
Adrial hadn’t been back for more than twenty-minutes and already looked like he was beaten down by a shovel. “TriColony Sigma created a dimensional rift. Of course they did. Why wouldn’t they? Where does it lead?”
“We… don’t know yet,” admitted Yahweh. “The signature of the rift is foreign. Zira and Leid went to Poekka to investigate and found its curvature of light signature to that of a time-continuum flux, but not anywhere we’ve been to before.”
“A privatized research company called the Committee of Esotericism is known to somehow be responsible,” I said.
“Attica flagged it as having an athanasian energy pattern when laid against the basewave algorithm,” added Qaira. “They must have been experimenting with shards.”
Adrial leaned back in his seat, sullen. Across from him, Pariah was cluing in Aela, who was set to return in several hours. The old gang would be back together again, and not a moment too soon. “So when do we get to the part about how Leid was sucked into this rift?” asked Adrial.
“It happened during the investigation,” said Yahweh. “She and Zira were supposed to surveil the rift and bring back enough data for us to surmise a plan of action.”
“But then she stood too close to the rift and it sprouted arms,” I muttered. “It grabbed her.”
“Grabbed her,” Adrial repeated, slowly. “Has it grabbed any of the locals?”
“Not according to the Operation Chief,” I said. “But they mentioned that anyone who went in never came out.”
Adrial rubbed his chin, thinking through a wince. “So is Leid in danger? It’s hard to believe even something like this would place her in danger anymore.”
“There’s more to this,” warned Qaira, shooting me a look. “Tell him.”
I raised my brows. “About..?”
“The other-place. All the factors about the rift that made you tuck your dick between your legs and run.”
Beneath the table, I opened and closed my fist. “I think that rift leads to the place where I went while Laith was under my charge. The place where she is now. The place where I saw Cassima.” The place we were warned about, I didn’t add. The place no one wanted to look into, because making the contractors happy was more important at the time.
“That’s a strong deduction,” said Adrial. “Based on what evidence?”
“None, really, except how it…sounds and feels. The energy pattern of the rift matches the other-place, from the capture my visor took whenever Laith made it bleed into reality.”
“It’s still reality,” cemented Yahweh, looking annoyed. “It’s just another facet of the multiverse we haven’t been to.”
“Yeah, because there are so many of those,” I snapped. “A whole universe full of our worst nightmares. You weren’t there. You don’t know.”
“Okay, let’s stay on point here,” said Adrial, waving a hand. “Pariah, have you heard the energy pattern?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m hearing this for the first time, like you.”
“Get him a recording so he can see if it’s anything interpretable. Whether we want to or not, it’s clear we have to go in now. Zira mentioned there are no abilities in that other-place, so Leid’s presumably in there as a lesser.”
“We had a plan for going in,” said Qaira. “We’ll stick to it. Zira and I, with you all as a back-up in case no one hears from us again.”
“The objective was to find a work-around for the no-abilities situation,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, well that’s out the window now,” said Qaira. “We don’t have a week to strangle out calculations anymore.”
“Give it a day,” said Adrial after the room was silent for a moment. “Spend the rest of today interpreting the results of the data you collected. If we can find out what this place is, we’ve won half the battle.”
“A day?” balked Qaira. “What if one day here is like a thousand years in there? We can’t sit on this for a day, we have to go now.”
“We’ll be of no help to Leid if we’re walking around in there just as blind and clueless as her,” said Adrial.
“She got herself into this mess,” I said, fearlessly. “We’re sticking to her plan. She’s a resourceful woman; I’m sure she’ll be fine for a while.”
Qaira looked at me with an expression that suggested he might flip the table. I waited, staring back at him. Eventually the anger cooled from his face. “Alright, fine, but we leave first thing tomorrow, whether we’ve found anything or not.”
“Someone needs to write a contract for TriColony Sigma,” I said. “We were supposed to deliver terms after the investigation but…then all that other stuff happened.”
“I’ll handle that,” sighed Adrial. “Let me review the request. Does everyone know what they’re supposed to be doing?”
It was obvious we didn’t, but no one said anything. Unlike Leid, Adrial micromanaged nothing and trusted that we’d sort ourselves out, for better or worse. But having him around was like a security blanket, and he was good at making decisions whenever hands started flailing. I’d never tell him that, but there it was. And if I was being honest, I thought Leid was a terrible leader, yet was exceptionally good at choosing her guardians. Well, all for one, but even he proved useful sometimes.
Except right now.
As everyone filtered out, I lingered back with Adrial. When alone, I said, “I don’t want him coming with me.”
Adrial studied me with an amused grin. Frankly I was insulted by his reaction. “From the notes, it appears you didn’t want to go at all.”
“And I still don’t, but I’ll do it if it means getting Leid out of there. He will be a hindrance.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Are you serious? He’s unhinged already. I can’t guarantee he won’t try to…”
Adrial leaned forward, a brow raised. “You think Qaira would sabotage the operation to get back at you? He’s hotheaded, but not petty. Leid is the most important thing to him.”
“I’m not saying he’d even do it on purpose. Just him being him might sabotage the operation. I don’t need to be watching my back with everything else going on.”
“I think you two need to sort out your differences once and for all,” said Adrial. “This might be a good bonding experience. Both of you are highly skilled at combat and have waded out of shit-storms more times than I can count. I don’t disagree with Leid’s choice but if you want, I’ll have a word with him.”
“No,” I said, horrified. “Do not.”
“Very well.” He slipped a malay cigarette from the pack inside his breast pocket, handing it to me. “Take a minute; have a smoke, collect yourself, and then go help your team uncover something.”
All I could do was scoff in disbelief at the level of dismissal he’d just given me. A bonding experience, hm? There was only so much tolerance in my being for Qaira’s mouth, before I’d have to remind him exactly where on Enigmus’s totem pole he was. I’d tried to warn somebody; but here I was, being dismissed. Hopefully the same olive branch would be extended to me when he came out of that rift with both of his eyes welted shut.
Wow, I was starting to sound like him.
I did need a smoke.
IV
NIBLI
THERE WERE QUITE A FEW THINGS I’D LEARNED while stuck in this dream for such an extended amount of time. I didn’t know how long I’d been here—days, weeks, seasons. The sky never changed and time sort of blended together. A different me might have thought this was bad, but it wasn’t so different than the eight by ten cell I’d been shoved into for a year, all because the directors had found something shiny and new.
As a matter of fact, this was better because it wasn’t pitch black anymore. Dark, yes, but my eyes had grown used to the shadows. I was
made to adapt. I was made to survive.
Was this some kind of test? It had to be, right? I was on an examination table in the central basement lab, my head cut open or strapped to wires as they analyzed my thoughts for whatever secrets they needed to uncover. They must have dragged me out when I fell asleep—but I didn’t really sleep, so that theory posed a problem.
Maybe I was dead, having run my course like the rest of the line, and those prophets everyone talked about had been right all along. Not exactly a paradisiacal place, but who was I to judge? A wraith like me wouldn’t know anything about that.
Once I’d realized someone had unlocked the cell, I stood in the open door for a while, wondering why everything was dark in the ward too. No one was around; the entire place was empty. Eventually I grew curious enough to climb the stairs and breach the main level, just in time to see a lone guard make off into the trees. I thought about following him, but in my short life I’d learned guards were the enemy, so I sifted around the empty building some more, trying to figure everything out. I didn’t figure anything out, and then I got hungry.
Getting hungry in a dream seems silly, doesn’t it? It made me think this wasn’t a dream, or an after-life. I didn’t have the capacity to think abstractly. If headquarters had done something, I wouldn’t have known how, or what. All I knew was that I was out of my cell, no one was around, and the world looked strange.
And I was hungry.
The only bad thing about this place was that, unlike the cell, my food didn’t just appear through a hole in the door, shivering and frightened. Fearful food was the sweetest kind. Other times I didn’t know where they got my food, all dead-eyed and still, even when I started feeding on them.
Following that guard suddenly felt like a good idea. It’d been a while since he’d fled but I remembered the direction, and hunting wasn’t of any deficit in my design. If this was a dream, then eating a guard had no consequences. Might as well enjoy myself.
When I took my first steps outside, I thought the air felt different. Better. I was in no way savant at anything beyond the facility gates, having only been outside perhaps twice in my short lifespan, but even so… It was like I suddenly belonged.
Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 4