Ignis

by Tracy Korn

  “I love you,” I whisper before my throat constricts the rest of the way. “I love you, Arco.”

  His smile starts slowly, then lights his whole face like a sunrise. He winces through a deep breath and swallows, then pulls me into a hug.

  “I tried so hard to let you go,” he says quietly into my hair. “But I couldn’t. I can’t…” he adds, tightening his arms around me. “I won’t.”

  The rest of the world falls away until it’s just us. He still smells like the sea, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand how that’s possible. I grip the fabric of his open shirt and pull myself as closely to him as I can as tears run down my cheeks. I feel like I might never stop crying, but I blink until I can make out what the sudden flash through the far windows could be. Arco feels me startle and lets me go.

  “What is it?”

  “Look…”

  He turns toward the galley windows, and another flash lights up the hazy white port-cloud.

  “I guess those are the fireworks,” he says, taking my hand with a small chuckle.

  “Fireworks?”

  “The Vishan DNA we put into the Phase Three core. Yours was grafted to it when we uploaded it into the four column channels, so it will be a slower burn until it hits the port-cloud and gets direct sun,” he says, smiling proudly at the imploding bursts of light. “We were just talking about how we wouldn’t have made it out of there alive if we’d used the original Ignis Archive.”

  This makes me remember what Arco said in my channel about how Eco exposed the original DNA and ruined it.

  “What happened to Eco?” I ask hesitantly. Arco doesn’t answer for a long time.

  “Rheen sent him to the oxygen trials—they were modifying people to withstand the cold and the lack of air in space. We didn’t see him again after he sided with her.”

  Now it’s my turn to wince. “And the doctors?”

  “Our contacts at The State intercepted another Phoenix class ship that was evacuating. Rheen, Styx, and all the medical officers on staff were aboard,” Calyx says, smiling at Dr. Denison. “Thanks to Briggs…”

  Everyone turns to look at Dr. Denison, who just shakes his head and holds up his hands.

  “All I did was upload the neural thread Jack’s team coded with the lab files and authorizations.”

  “Neural thread? Like the one that was originally made for Liddick?” I ask.

  “Not quite…” my dad says. “This one functions more like an advertisement rather than a subliminal message. We programmed it so the download codes for the files could be consciously recognized,” he adds, putting an arm around my brother, who’s sitting next to him. “The State will be cleaning house once they view everything, and Reese Halliday says Admin City is being evacuated as we speak.”

  “So Phase Three is really gone? And the port-cloud?” I ask, looking again through the staggered explosions through the windows on the far side of the galley.

  “It’s a chain reaction of small disintegrations, so I imagine Phase Three itself will be completely gone in a matter of hours,” my dad says. “Once the reaction hits the port-cloud—well, if you think these are fireworks…”

  My chest swells to the point that it almost aches with happiness, but at the bottom is still a hollow feeling that I don’t even have a chance to address before Arco takes my hand and faces the rest of the group.

  “This part may be over,” he says. “But we still have people in those tunnels on Earth. Things were critical down there—did Azeris say anything else?”

  “Just that the tremors aren’t sporadic, at last report,” Dr. Denison answers, then taps the silver panel on his forearm. “Cally, Lyden…any report updates from Azeris? Did Liam’s group and the indigenous make the rally point at Phase Two?”

  “We’re actually getting something right now, but it’s coming in scrambled,” Lyden answers. “Here’s what we have so far…”

  A few seconds later, a hologram appears over the metal galley table. A beach…a mountain in the distance…

  “That’s Seaboard North,” I say, then swallow my next question when a reporter with pink hair walks in front of the scene.

  “We’re here bringing you live feed from Seaboard North,” she says, “where State officials are en route to assess the pulsing mini-quakes, which are occurring every hour on the hour with increasing severity. Gaia Sur and The State campus are undergoing evacuation procedures until more information is available. Monty?”

  The live feed cuts out, and Lyden’s voice comes over the comms again.

  “We just got more. Azeris reached Liddick. The Vishan tunnels are…flooded. Liddick said everyone made it into the tunnel. But it’s not what they thought…”

  “What?” I ask, feeling my stomach twisting. “Where are they?”

  “Azeris said Liddick’s channel showed an airlock sealing behind them once they entered. They walked about a mile to another airlock, and on the other side of that was…a ship.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say. “That far out from the Lookout Pier is just the Rush. The biomes…”

  “I know. But they’re safe. There’s life support,” he says, then exhales hard. “It’s a beast according to Azeris’s pings. Four miles long with a mile of what looks like support infrastructure at each end—there are apparently two tunnels. The other comes out under the Phase Two facility. The ship has also started emitting some kind of pulse that’s displacing the rock above the cavern. They’re moving.”

  “The Vishan prophecy…it connects their caverns with their Motherland,” I say under my breath. “Wait, did you say they’re moving? Through the cavern ceiling?”

  “Yes, and no. Azeris said the cavern ceiling just…opened. But, there’s an electromagnetic pulse emitting from the ship that seems to be trying to work on the seafloor.”

  “It’s synced now…” Arco says as a drop of blood runs over his lip.

  “Arco—“ I turn to him and gasp, but he just keeps talking.

  “That’s why there had to be four columns. That’s why they had to be aligned in that sequence,” he adds, looking straight ahead.

  Arwyn moves quickly in front of him and sprays a small, metallic cylinder into his nostrils. He waves her hand away, and the drop of blood turns into a stream.

  “Crite. Arco, look at me,” she asks, but he ignores her.

  “There were four columns on the Lookout Pier. The coordinates were for those columns…” he rambles.

  “Arco! Look at me!”

  “It was a program…a launch system…”

  “Help me with him,” Dr. Denison says to Jax. They both rush to his side and start walking back toward the med bay.

  “Arco, what’s happening? What program?” I almost shout as blood starts streaming onto the floor. “Arco!”

  He meets my eyes for a fraction of a second until his head falls forward.

  Dr. Denison swears. “I should have taken the damn thing out with that shrapnel!”

  “What’s happening to him!?” I ask again, and this time, I’m shouting.

  “It’s the surge—his brain hemispheres…” Arwyn finally explains, catching up to me.

  “What does that mean!?”

  She speeds up until she falls into line with Dr. Denison and Jax. I start to speed up too until my dad catches my arm and pulls me against him.

  “Stop, stop…” he says. “Listen, it’s a fast burn. His mind, Jazwyn. It’s evolving faster than his body can keep handle. It’s a natural process for Gaia cadets under normal circumstances, but not this fast. It happens over a lifetime…not days.”

  “Why? Why is that happening to him?”

  “He’s a hybrid—a Navigator/Coder. With the Empath Latency, it’s just the right cocktail. These traits are naturally occurring, but the nanites you all received were designed to produce growth with organic situational stimuli—even though his were wiped, the neural pathways have already been created. “

  “Dad! Just tell me!”

  “Calm dow
n. Calm down. You’ve all been through so much that the situations have triggered an advanced survival system in his brain. He can sense direction and location at what seems like a psychic level now. He can read code like a story. It’s all just survival mechanisms—“

  “Then why is he bleeding like that!?” I scream. My dad pulls me into a tight hug. I push against him until I can’t anymore. It’s all too close to the surface, and I just let the tears come. Again. I let the weight crush my chest until I collapse against him. We’ve come this far. We’ve destroyed the Phase Three labs. The port-cloud is disintegrating. We’ve won. We’re supposed to have won.

  “Listen to me, Jazwyn. He’ll be fine. This is what Briggs does, OK? Everything will be all right. He’ll be all right…”

  CHAPTER 40

  The Surge

  Arco

  Blood is in my teeth. I can taste the tinge of metal, but more compelling is the string of molecular symbols and numbers that scroll over my vision whenever I think about there being blood in my teeth.

  Oxygen.

  Iron.

  Water < 1 Hydrogen, 2 Oxygen.

  Sodium.

  Nitrogen.

  The list goes on, factoring into just numbers and random letters that I know is the chemical makeup of my own blood down to the molecule—the weight of each molecule.

  I stop thinking about the blood, and the scrolling list disappears. The image of the four pillars rising out of the Vishan Lookout Pier washes back into my line of sight. Coordinates scroll in the lower third of the image, and though I don’t read them, I know they are location points for each individual column and the platform rising up in the center.

  If I look at any one person running down the steps that have opened from the center platform, the scrolling at the bottom of my vision turns into another chemical analysis of their bone and muscle weight…their water volume…their brain chemistry… My head starts to hurt. Too much at once. Too many equations. I focus on the platform again…on the numbers and colors between it and each column. Magnetic waves. I’m looking at magnetic waves?

  The tunnel is a ship, not a tunnel. The columns are receivers. They were programmed. I did this. I launched that ship, I think, feeling like my head is flooding with water. I have to tell someone. They’re going to crack the ocean floor. They’re going to kill everyone.

  “He’s seizing!” My sister’s voice is loud and sharp. It makes the scrolling and the colors wipe away like a page turn, along with the image of the columns and the ship just below.

  My chest is tight. My fists are clenched. Am I being electrocuted?

  “Right here, son. Look right here.” Denison’s voice is quieter than my sister’s. “Look right here,” he says again just before a purple light floods my vision. My chest loosens, and my hands relax.

  “Ship…” I hear myself say.

  “What ship? What ship, Arco?” my sister asks, bringing something silver to my face. Before I can answer, a cold blast shoots up my nose and cools the heat in the back of my head. It’s the best feeling in the world.

  “The tunnel he found. It’s a ship. I launched it.”

  I can’t blink. I can’t blink my eyes.

  “Who, Azeris? The tunnel Azeris found?”

  “Yes. I launched it. The Phase Three columns…I aligned them with…the platform pillars. An old…permission relay,” I mumble, and finally, I can close my eyes.

  “A what?” my sister asks.

  “He’s talking about a clearance code,” Denison says. “Tell Lyden to run a trace for code acknowledgements coming into Phase Three before the explosions. All right. He’s stabilizing,” he says again. My eyes are closed, but I can still see the opaque purple light—no codes, no images, no more symbols or numbers. And I’m dead tired.

  ***

  The purple light is gone when I open my eyes, and my head is pounding. The first thing I see are more tubes running up my arm, but everything hurts so much, I don’t even care. Even blinking is painful. My throat feels like I’ve been chugging sand, and I try to clear it.

  “You’re awake…” Jazz says. I turn to her too fast. “Try not to move, you have a lot of…attachments.”

  “Why?” is all I can manage to say.

  “They said you surged. Denison took your tracker out while you were asleep, so it shouldn’t happen again.”

  “No!” I say as loudly as I can, which makes me cough. Pain shoots through my neck and into my chest like a spear through the back of my head.

  “It’s OK…it’s OK. You won’t lose your Nav or Coder abilities,” she says, gripping my hand. “You just won’t be able to use them at the same time anymore. At least not for a while.”

  “I need to be able to do that! We’re not finished!”

  “Arco…it’s done. The port-cloud is going to come down. Do you remember the DNA? The columns?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about—the columns I saw in your channel, Jazz. The platform. That wasn’t a tunnel underneath the Lookout Pier. It was a ship. That was the Arc Sequence…crite, I launched it when I brought you here.”

  “Arco, we know…you have to relax,” she says, shaking her head at me like I’m delusional.

  “Damn it, no! Where’s my sister? I need all this unhooked. I need to talk to Denison.”

  A blue hologram grid on the wall turns red and starts beeping.

  “Stop—Arco, stop!” Jazz says, gripping my wrists so I can’t pull out the stupid IV and taped-on monitor pads.

  “We need to warn people. The ship is unfathomably big, do you understand? It will—“

  She moves in fast and kisses me hard.

  I stop searching for tubes to pull. I stop everything. Her fingers brush my face and I find her waist, pulling her down over me. Pain shoots through my chest again and wraps around the back of my head, but I don’t care. I don’t even remember why it hurts.

  “Hey, you’re going to rip open your sutures,” my sister says, half-laughing. Crite, if one more person interrupts us, I’m going to kill them.

  Jazz pulls back abruptly and stands up next to me. Arwyn taps a bunch of things onto the holographic grid display, and it goes back to normal just as Denison walks in.

  “You have a penchant for self-destruction,” he says through a grin. “Too bad the nanites will take care of any battle scars you could tell your kids about someday after all this,” he adds. “Pretty nasty laser burn on your shoulder, we removed a shard of a neural ray that was lodged in your chest, and for at least a little while longer, you’ll have a two-inch incision at the base of your skull.”

  I look up at my sister in surprise. She raises her eyebrows and nods at me.

  “From the tracker?” is all I can say. My sister and Jazz nod while Denison turns to the holographic display on the wall and taps until a scrolling block of text appears.

  “Looks like you’ve leveled out—how do you feel?” he asks.

  “Fine,” I answer. He cocks a white eyebrow at me. I roll my eyes. “OK, sore, I guess, but not enough to stay in this bed anymore. We need to warn people on the surface. That ship is going to launch.”

  “It already has,” Denison says without hesitation. “You don’t remember Azeris’s report?”

  “What?” I press. Denison exchanges glances with my sister. “I can handle it. Just tell me.”

  “His pings are showing that the electromagnetic pulse from the ship is displacing a meter of ocean floor every twelve hours.”

  “Vox and everyone made it into the ship,” Jazz says. “They’re all safe.”

  “What are we still doing up here? We need to warn everyone on the coast. That pulse is going to cause a tsunami that will level everything. We only have so much time!”

  I try to do the math, to pull up the equations in my peripheral vision like I could before, but I just get an ice pick between my eyes. I suck in a sharp breath through my teeth and press my hands to my forehead.

  “Don’t do that,” Denison says. “That connection isn’t th
ere anymore. The nerves are going to take at least another day to rebuild even with the new nanites.”

  “Did you hear what I said!? People are going to die!”

  “No, they’re not. The displacement rate isn’t fast enough; we ran the numbers.”

  “Your numbers are wrong!”

  “Arco, listen,” Jazz says, taking my hand again. “We’re going right now to rendezvous with Ms. Reynolt, Myra, Avis, and Ellis. You can talk with Avis about it, OK?”

  “I’m not talking to anyone until they get people out of Seaboard North, “I insist.” Do they at least know what’s coming? Do people know about that ship?”

  Denison crosses to tap something into the holographic grid on the wall. The charts and monitors disappear, giving way to a reporter in the middle of a sentence.

  “—scene has been tense with what seismic experts are calling tectonic tremors, causing the rising tide to lash the shoreline. Concentrated efforts to secure the local fisher community as well as the Seaboard North residents are in effect with the Skyboard Council setting up shelters and donating food, water, clothing, and personal items to aid the effort during this very strange event, Monty.”

  “Thank you, Electra,” another reporter says as the screen flashes back to a studio with the Seaboard North coastline in the backdrop. “We have Spokesperson Cole Daniels with us in the studio now to help shed some light on what might be causing the tremors. Spokesperson, what could it be?”

  “Daniels was in the hangar! Why isn’t he locked up?” I look over at Denison, who just shakes his head.

  “We’ve been assured by several sources that it’s just a little tectonic friction,” Daniels says, “likely to subside in a few days or so, Monty. We’re evacuating the shoreland communities, as well as Gaia Sur and The State complex strictly as a precaution.”

  The reporter raises an eyebrow. “Spokesperson, we’ve received intel from our own sources that sinkholes have appeared in the ocean floor that span several miles. Can you confirm?”

  “Yes, Monty, these are occurring approximately twenty miles from The State and Gaia Sur campus. We do not expect damage to these areas, but again, we have evacuated just as a precaution. Everything is contained. No cause for worry.” Daniels smiles directly into the feed, and I suddenly feel violently ill.