I suspected we were double-crossed, but then I saw Unga’s lifeless body splayed across the walkway’s entrance, near the block-building where we had first met her. Now I was forced to make a split-second decision: keep the menacing group from reaching the launch pad, leaving Laith alone with OSC soldiers who potentially meant to do her arm, or letting it all bubble to a head right here.
Two of the soldiers were down already; they wouldn’t be able to take a dozen more armed threats. Laith’s life would be significantly more threatened with the latter decision.
And so I moved for the walkway, unleashing a scythe.
The newcomers dropped like flies. I’d left them in a pile of oozing body parts within minutes. Looking back at the pad, only two soldiers were left, battling two remaining turrets.
And Laith was no longer under the craft. Superb.
She’d made her way toward the other side of the launch pad, her energy pattern now strong enough to throttle the inside of my head. The translucent tentacles drifted from her back through the holes in the spine of her armor, quivering as they hovered twelve feet in the air, like a spider about to strike. Smokey, serrated black vines coiled around the gun towers and slithered across the launch pad, carving impossible indentions wherever they touched.
Oh, no.
***
The gunfire, screams and blood all faded away.
I’d curled into a fetal position beneath the craft, trying my best to breathe against the throbbing in my back from colliding with the wheels.
Everything had gone from a thunderous roar to dead silence, save for a flash of light and a ring in my ears. My armor pinched my skin—the only way I could describe it was a thousand little needles sticking me all at once—and then I uncurled, finding myself standing next to Cass in the temple.
The twisted, bloody creature was only several feet away, reaching toward me. I stumbled back, still disoriented, nearly tripping over the seat at the cauldron. Cass watched on, somber.
“Restraint,” he said, barely more than a whisper.
Restraint.
The fog unclouded, and my eyes rose to the open, cosmic ceiling. Everything suddenly seemed harmonious—as one, synchronized. My body thrummed with its energy, I too a part of this harmony; the chorus of the mind.
The collective subconscious.
The quantum gateway.
These thoughts were not my own. They were its thoughts. I was just a vessel, finding my place. Finding my purpose.
I clenched my fists and rose them high above my head, opening my hands, reaching for the cosmos. The vines snaked up the creature’s legs and then around its torso, stopping its advance. It screeched and thrashed, until the vines wrapped it in a cocoon. My mind was emptied of all its memories.
My father.
Akani.
Zira.
My life before this.
The entire history and future of the cosmos replaced them; filling me up, until it felt like I would burst.
The cocoon split, regurgitating the creature wrapped in sparkling twine and blood-soaked bandages. The vines receded through the gate, disappearing into the mist as the creature got to its feet, seemingly being pushed backward by an invisible force. The edges of the twine danced in the air until it found the two geodic pillars at the gateway entrance. As the twine wrapped around the glowing geodes the creature gave up its fight, falling slack against its bounds.
And then, it began to dance.
I watched it gyrate in awe, until Cass turned to me with a smile.
“Welcome, Quantum Sorcerer. My post here is complete.”
Without another word he stepped around the dancing creature and through the gate, disappearing into the cloudy abyss.
I should have felt saddened by this—deserted, even—but instead I simply turned and moved to the bubbling cauldron, reticent. Grabbing the warm ladle resting at the side of the pot, I began to stir.
***
The vines were cutting off the circulation in my legs and waist. They’d wrapped around my scythe as I’d tried to slash at them. I was stuck.
Despite screaming her name repeatedly, Laith only stood there, listless, several meters away as the vines wreaked havoc around her. They’d claimed another soldier’s life. Only two remained. The turrets had all been taken care of—partly thanks to her—but she didn’t stop. She’d lost control again.
A boom shattered the air as a large projectile shot from the open door of the freighter. It made contact with Laith, impacting her so hard that the helmet was knocked from her head. A rectangular device had attached itself to her back, its length comparable to that of her spine. The box was connected to a coil of cables leading back inside the craft.
Instantly the vines vanished, and I hit the ground on my side. Laith’s face, now visible, was twisted into one of shock. Her empty, white eyes bulged from her head, her mouth shaped in an O. She sank to her knees, her expression frozen in terror.
A ferocious tingling sensation plagued my extremities as my circulation began to return. I fought the feeling, moving toward her, catching her as she careened forward. Her expression didn’t change.
I shook her shoulders.
Nothing.
“Laith,” I whispered through gritted teeth.
To my surprise her lips twitched, and then she rasped, “Don’t worry; I’m already gone.”
Startled, I let go of her and she fell face-first on the launch pad. The coil attached to the box on her spine began to reel her in, and she was dragged like a lifeless doll up into the craft, disappearing into the darkness.
I remained on my knees amid the fallen bodies and broken turrets, completely numb. One of the two soldiers approached me but I kept my eyes ahead, at the freighter door through which Laith was dragged.
“She’s not dead,” he assured me. “Just incapacitated. We’ll take it from here. Thank you for your service, Scholar.”
I licked my dry, blood-stained lips. “What… What will happen to her?”
The soldier gave me a look of pity. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
I closed my eyes, and hung my head.
O
“I’M SURPRISED,” ADRIAL STATED AFTER I’D TAKEN a seat opposite his desk. “I chose you for your lack of empathy, yet here we are.”
I didn’t respond, only stared coolly at him. He sighed, sifting through the threads of attica’s stream. Debriefing was a typical procedure, although right now I wished it wasn’t.
“They use gifted individuals in the OSC militia,” he commented, reading my most recent updates—the ones I’d made after sleeping a dozen hours upon the subsequent return home. “That’s…”
“Dangerous,” I finished. “They don’t know where their abilities come from.”
“According to the initiation procedures handed over by O-1 Headquarters—;”
The ones that we’d demanded they hand over due to their obfuscation of the real intent behind their contract, mind you.
“—they are essentially stripped of all cognitive functioning, save for taking orders and limited reasoning. They’re not even given language.”
Sort of reminded me of Feelers; and we all knew how well that had gone for the Framers. “They’re existing as walking portals harboring shard activity. They might not know, but we do. I don’t believe this is entirely safe.”
“We can’t divulge this to them,” said Adrial, stroking his chin in thought. “Lessers always walk toward the cliff, just to see what’s over it. Telling them of an obscure realm lying just within their reach would make them want to explore it, not avoid it.”
“But the gifted aren’t people anymore. They’re machines. That’s hardly humane.”
Adrial nodded, solemnly. “The affairs of a system are their own. We are a neutral third party, Zira.”
“You’re telling me, then, that had you known the true reasoning behind their interest in Laith, you would have agreed to the contract regardless?”
Adrial’s eyes narrowed
. Our King, whimsical as he normally was, occasionally wore this particular look whenever he deemed his authority questioned. It didn’t faze me. “You’re absolutely right I would. We just discovered the first instance of athanasian shard activity outside of alpha-Insipia. That means more to us than the fate of a few lessers, or even a system.”
I was a little taken aback by his callousness. He noticed my expression and sighed.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be sending someone else to investigate the abdaekka forest. Discreetly. We need samples. The historical surveyor logs attica queried stated strange crystals beneath the ground there.”
“The afflicted bleed nanotech, as well,” I added. “We need to take samples of the trees.”
Adrial nodded. We sat in silence for over a minute, reflecting.
“I don’t understand how the shards reached the outside Multiverse,” I thought aloud. “The Codemaker’s Law ensured they would not.”
“The Framers may not have been at fault. They may have breached the Multiverse by another external force.”
“But the Multiverse was created by them. The shards would have had to breach the other universes after their law was put into place.”
“We don’t even know what they are, Zira.”
“Yet we let Qaira use them to upgrade our conscious stream.”
Adrial raised his brows. “Had he not—”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“Take the rest of the day off,” advised Adrial with a weak smile. “But I’ll need an exit summary report that consolidates all the threads by tomorrow afternoon. Yahweh is repairing your uniform; it looked like it went through a cheese grater.”
I smirked, saying nothing else and dismissed myself from the King’s office.
*
Yahweh was running diagnostics on my uniform when I entered Q4. Diagnostics involved hitting it with as many lethal forces as possible; the elements, toxins, corrosives, atomic radiation, high frequency nuclear radiation, sonic blasts, crushing pressure, you name it. Unsurprisingly this was his favorite activity at Enigmus, having assumed the role of mad scientist. That is, when he wasn’t passing out mind-altering substances that made existing a little less painful.
“Not done,” he stated, tossing me a side-glance. “I still need to synch the suit with your optics.”
I shrugged, taking a seat at the desk beside the calibrator apparatus. “Not here for that. Hopefully I won’t need it again for a while.”
“Surprising to hear you say that,” murmured Yahweh, tapping away at the console with his visor down. “You were itching for a contract before this one.” Before I could respond, he pointed to the desk I was at. “I found that in your suit, by the way.”
A warped metallic clump was placed at the far end of the desk, currently functioning as a paperweight. I plucked it off the desk, trying to identify it. And then I did.
The lighter from the outpost. Here it had lost most of its composition; but not its meaning.
I was suddenly overrun with sadness. Rapid-fire memories of Laith shot through my mind faster than I could regulate. Guilt, so sharp that it made me gasp, overcame my motor-functioning and I dropped the lighter with a trembling hand. The noise it made when colliding to the quadrant floor caught Yahweh’s attention. He watched me curl forward, hands encasing my face.
“Zira?”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond, because I could barely breathe. All I could see was Laith’s terrified, contorted face as she was dragged into the freighter, never to be seen again.
The contract was deemed successful.
But I had failed.
Such was the life of a scholar.
There was a yank on my arm, and then Yahweh pulled me from the seat.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s get some air.”
He led me out of the quadrant, down the steps and into the courtyard. The Exo’daius sun was a deep scarlet, signifying the end of a day. It hung over the hill-rimmed horizon as dusk cast shadows across the courtyard, muting Yahweh’s blue-crystal eyes and white hair to varying shades of pink. I was still trying to shake everything off when he handed me a malay cigarette, with one already pressed between his lips as he wore a sympathetic smile.
I stared at the offering in his outstretched hand, hesitating to react. Any time prior to this I’d have taken it without question. The recent consequences of using mind-altering substances—no matter how mild—were still fresh in my memory. I didn’t ever want to see that place again.
Yahweh’s smile faded as I continued to stare at the cigarette. “Everything okay?”
His inquiry snapped me out of it, and I grabbed it from him. “Sure.”
We smoked in silence for a minute, leant against the side of the wall facing Enigmus’s courtyard. Then I heard him say, “Any theories as to where that athanasian realm leads?”
Of course; ever the dutiful scientist. “Not anywhere in the Multiverse.”
Yahweh lifted a brow. “That isn’t plausible.”
“It is when none of my abilities work there,” I said. “Not to mention the phenomena I still can’t explain.” Like that cave tunnel, having digressed me all the way to my miserable childhood.
Yahweh shrugged. “So it’s another place we haven’t discovered. Half a century ago we couldn’t use our abilities here, either.”
He was wrong about this, but I didn’t have enough information to argue a point either way. That place wasn’t physical, but metaphysical. That thought alone made me feel like an idiot, however. Scholars knew better than to believe in any metaphysical planes. But I knew it to be true in my bones. No scientific discovery had ever been more reliable than my gut.
“Have you spoken to Qaira about any of this?” asked Yahweh.
“No, why would I?”
“He’s the one assigned to follow up on the forest phenomena. I think he leaves after evening meal. Your concerns might help him have an idea of what to look for.”
Him?
I did my very best to hide my annoyance at this piece of information. But then a thought crossed my mind, and my aggravation evaporated like the smoke leaving my lungs. I finished the cigarette and absorbed the waste. “Where is he right now?”
“Not sure. Probably the reliquary.”
I nodded, heading back inside. “I’ll see you later.”
Qaira wasn’t in the reliquary, but I found him soon after in Q5 reviewing my threads in the attica stream. He acknowledged my entrance with a brief side-glance, his visor swirling over his face, accentuating the mask of condescension he perpetually wore. He relaxed further in his seat at the console desk as I approached him.
“Are you ever going to complete the thread cursory? It’d be awesome if I didn’t have to wade through all this shit just to catch a lead,” he muttered.
Qaira always had a way of making me want to punch him within moments of being in his presence. Instead I swallowed my disdain just this once.
“I need you to do something for me.”
Qaira turned in his seat to face me, the visor vanishing to reveal a glint of curiosity in his silver, red-rimmed eyes. I would never ask him for a favor, and he knew it. “Yeah? What’s that?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, quietly, “it’s something you’ll enjoy, being who you are.”
“How much trouble am I going to get in?”
“Do you care?”
Qaira smirked. “Not really.”
With that I sat down across from him, and told him everything he needed to know. Adrial didn’t think we should intervene on a system’s barbaric practice? Alright, fine.
But no one was getting off easy for what they did to her.
*
I awoke with a gasp, feeling the warmth of my bed replaced by cold, damp ground. Rain pattered on the side of my face before I rose to sit along the riverbank of luminescent geodes. Deflated, my eyes rested on the bridge directly to my right. I’d been certain I was done with this place.
Evidentl
y it was not done with me.
I lingered on the bank, hoping to wait out whatever had brought me here. I would wake up (for real, this time) eventually.
But then the rain turned into glittery ash, peppering my clothes and hair. Curiously I held out the palm of my hand to collect a few; and that’s when I envisioned Laith at the hub, her armored form teetering as she asked, bewildered:
“Do… do you see it?”
And then my eyes moved to the pagoda, across the bridge.
A figure stood in the doorway, outlined by the bonfire alit inside. Despite their features obscured by shadow, I felt them looking at me. Waiting for me.
I knew now that I wasn’t going anywhere; not until I faced them.
With a sigh I left my post at the bank and walked slowly across the bridge. In my approach the figure retreated from the door, anticipating my arrival. Climbing the steps, I wondered what nightmare this place had in store for me this time.
To my surprise a calming ambiance hit me when I crossed the threshold. The Evgan woman was at the cauldron, stirring the bubbling pot of moss-flavored tea. She smiled and ladled me a cup. I didn’t want it, but knew better than to object. I took the mug and leaned on a pillar framing the entrance, watching her with caution.
“You can come and sit,” she said, frowning at me in hurt. “I don’t bite.”
“Liar.”
The woman gave a soft laugh, as if I’d been joking. My eyes swept to the other side of the cistern, toward the gateway in which I’d nearly been dragged on my last visit. The disfigured creature wasn’t there; the geodic pillars weren’t blinking. All that lay beyond the gate was a thick layer of fog, curtaining any true details beyond its threshold.
“What am I doing here?” I asked, my impatience rising.
“You tell me.”
Oh, so this again. I didn’t know why I was here. I still didn’t even know what or where this place was. Since returning to Enigmus, all of my time had been spent researching anything I could find regarding what here might be. There was nothing. Nothing that didn’t take me to an uncomfortable level of suspended disbelief. Nothing that didn’t leave me with more questions than answers. As other scholars might have eloquently put it: fuck this place.
Covenants: Elegy (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 8) Page 19