The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  He was unsettled, not a state of mind that left him a great deal of cunning. The moment he thought she wasn’t watching he dropped any pretense of a phone call and left. Her brother wasn’t cut out for keeping secrets, which made her all the more worried about him.

  Rachel almost lost him. He’d moved quickly, and by the time she had circled back out of the grocery store’s door she barely caught sight of him turning into an alley across the street. She had to jaywalk quickly, but not so quickly that a horn or screeching tire would tell Peter she was tailing him.

  As she approached the opening to the alley, she overheard her brother’s voice. “I can’t be gone for long.”

  She didn’t risk exposing herself trying to peek. Instead she took out her cell and snapped a picture from around the corner. The angle of the image left a lot to be desired, but she saw who Peter was talking to. Rachel didn’t recognize the man, his face partially hidden behind the brim of a fedora. But he was tall, pale blond—towheaded. Every stitch of his clothing was black.

  “That won’t be a problem,” the stranger said.

  His accent was European, though she couldn’t place it. She might have had more luck if her ears had gotten a second sample, but she found herself waiting for dialog that never came.

  After the silence stretched on too long, she finally chanced another peek around the corner with her phone. She blinked at the images of an alley as empty as her ears told her it was. Frowning, Rachel stepped into the open. The space was long and dead-ended by a tall fence. Slowly, she walked between the buildings. There was nowhere to go. No doors to have slipped inside, nothing to hide behind. The fire escape ladders well out of reach from the ground.

  She looked at the picture on her phone—if only to confirm she hadn’t imagined her brother talking to some stranger a moment ago.

  “What the actual hell?” Rachel demanded, as though the unoccupied alley might explain itself.

  “There she is,” Peter said, as though he’d been walking down grocery aisles for some time trying to find her.

  Rachel met his eyes for a long and conflicted moment. “What did your, um… mysterious friend have to say?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “You were making a phone call,” Rachel explained.

  “Oh, right,” Peter said, and she knew he’d already forgotten his own lie after getting rid of her. “I never said he was a friend.”

  She waited, but Peter didn’t offer any more.

  They were standing in the aisle of the grocery store where there were a few small toys and cheap paperbacks, along with everything else the store carried but didn’t fit into a logical category. Her brother plucked an item off the rack and held it out. A Hot Wheels sports car, black with flames running down the sides.

  “Jack have this one?” Peter asked.

  She didn’t want to let him change the subject so easily. She wanted to ask about the man in the alley. But . . . now that she had something to confront him with, she didn’t want to do it in the middle of a grocery store. She wouldn’t start asking exactly how one goes about vanishing from an alley here. Rachel knew she would find it hard not to yell if he refused to answer her again. She’d wait until they were somewhere that they wouldn’t cause a scene.

  She shrugged at the toy car. “I don’t think he has that one.”

  “He used to drive me nuts. Constantly following me around wanting to play . . .” Peter trailed off. He looked at the car again and placed it in his basket. “Give it to him for me?”

  “You know, you could give it to him yourself?”

  He glowered at her until she sighed. “Yeah, fine.”

  That toy was the last thing Jack ever got from his older brother. That night, Rachel would go to Peter’s apartment. She would ask him about the man in the alley. He would get angry. He’d tell her to leave it alone. He would tell her she couldn’t help him.

  That night, he would disappear in front of her. But, unlike the alley, he wouldn’t come back no matter how long she waited. Rachel would remember the one thing Peter had told her about the stranger in the alley.

  I never said he was a friend.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DATE | TIME: UNKNOWN | FEROXIAN PLANE

  THIS CHANGES NOTHING . . . prophet. The memory of her words, whispered in his ear as she raked his flesh with her claws, jarred him from sleep.

  Malkier opened his eyes to a faint orange glow. The bioluminescent moss only grew on the cavern walls in the deepest tunnel of his tribe’s home—the breeding pits.

  Slowly he sat up, not yet convinced that what he saw was real. Her body lay sprawled next to his on the cave floor. As he gazed upon her, moments of the consonance trickled back to him in memory.

  For a Borealis, being taken over by the instinctual drives of his Feroxian host’s body was experienced more like a hallucinogenic vision—it was far more than a mere pairing of bodies. Rapturous lust, heightened pleasure, dimmed thought, and waves of need brought on by ever-growing hormonal surges, left him with a memory that was part reality and part fantasy. The truth was simply hard to pin down.

  Yet, this time disconnect was familiar. The strength of the physical changes that allowed the species to mate were waning, though their sway still lingered in his blood. Soon, Malkier was certain that what he remembered was not all illusion.

  There was no question who he had gone to—which of his tribe’s females had accepted his offering and lay beside him now. He knew where his heart would take him when inhibition and conscience relinquished their control. He could feel Burns the Flame’s breath against his skin as her chest rose and fell in slumber.

  How long had they been down here? How long had it taken to fully deplete his seed? These questions and many more demanded answers, and so he rose.

  He found his body sore in ways he’d not felt for over a decade. The last time he had awoken this way was after he killed Echoes the Borealis—the father. He did not remember the final moments of that confrontation either. There was the time missing completely in his memory and time that was blurred.

  He had temporarily lost control to Ends the Storm again. He did not know why this happened, but it was no coincidence, there was a pattern now. It seemed that, in both instances, when he was near to triggering the Feroxian consonance, his autonomy was lost to his body’s original owner. For a time, he became a voyeur catching incomplete glimpses of Ends the Storm’s actions. And just as before, Malkier’s will had only reasserted dominance to find he was in the middle of the consonance. The process so far along that even his Borealis consciousness lacked any will or desire to resist the influence of his host body’s instincts.

  In his last clear memory, he’d chased Brings the Rain to a rooftop. He’d been in a rage, his son’s killer having taunted him with his grief. As he thought of this, he felt his jaw clenching into a snarl only to be cut short by a sudden jolt of pain.

  His claw moved to trace the scar along his face and neck as it had a thousand times before and found an open wound. He looked in disbelief as black blood dripped from his fingertip.

  A sense of déjà vu brought doubt. Vaguely, he remembered Ends the Storm, standing on that rooftop on Earth, and reaching for this same wound. The old scar reopened. He remembered Ends the Storm’s pain, his moment of confusion and . . . though the Ferox seldom felt fear in battle . . . there had been an uncertainty of his victory.

  Malkier could see nothing of what had followed. Try as he might, what he looked for was one of Ends the Storm’s memories—but not his own. The longer he tried and failed to fill the void in his memory the more he shivered in anger. What good came of extracting vengeance if he was denied the memory of it?

  This was an injustice—the sort that left him to the suspicion that the whole of existence was spitting in his face.

  In time, he calmed himself. Shifted his focus to what he could remember.

  He’d bled on that rooftop. The next thing he knew he’d been bleeding with Burns the Flame. That had brought
pain as well—but of a different sort. His entire body was covered in the carnal scratches inflicted by his mate during the consonance.

  The defenses of the Borealis device had been offline.

  Malkier had no firsthand knowledge of the Feroxian consonance as experienced by the female of the species. But the raw state of his body led him to believe that even Burns the Flame’s unconscious animal mind had not forgotten his previous transgressions against her. Luckily for her, Malkier harbored no similar ill will toward the mother of their lost son. Had some hatred existed in him, he may well have unintentionally torn her apart when his Borealis implant returned his strength to him during the consonance. It was a strange mystery of the Ferox, only during the consonance did they ever inflict any injury on one another without consequence.

  He carefully traced the contours of the reopened wound. The father had done far worse, somehow driven that spiked tip of metal through Malkier’s armor. Down into his cheek and into an artery. The son had only managed to cut the surface of the scar.

  It would heal soon enough.

  He looked about the chamber and found what remained of the waxy purple cocoon Ends the Storm would have presented to Burns the Flame. The sack’s exterior was in shreds, its gelatinous insides had been spread vulgarly around the cave floor and dried after being ripped open so she could reach her trophy. The consonance had left her ravenous. What was left of the body that laid within was still close to her. She had pushed what remained into a small hole in the cavern’s wall to finish eating later.

  The corpse was beyond recognition. Some human clothing lay in tatters on the floor. The metal plates of armor from inside a leather coat had been cast aside as she fed.

  A shine of something small and metal caught his eye in the faint light. This was not something made of the hybrid Earth-based steel his brother had been using to equip the Earthlings. This was gold and clearly human in its construction.

  As he picked it up, the human’s blood was caked on the outer surface. Malkier’s claw traced gently over the small trinket’s curves. Eventually finding a button that flipped opened the outer face. Malkier recognized then what he held—a time keeping device, and a primitive one even by human standards.

  The Ferox, of course, wore no clothing. They brought only their bodies with them into The Arena. Humans, of course, were different. Carried all sorts of things on their person. But this was a curious and fragile thing to bother taking into battle.

  Sentimental perhaps, Malkier thought.

  His curiosity was drawn to the writing inscribed on the inner cover. He understood the spoken form of many of the human languages from the necessity of communicating with Heyer, but he couldn’t read the engraving. So, he picked up a piece of the bloodied cloth from the floor and wrapped the watch inside.

  His brother was locked inside of Cede. What better way to show his betraying sibling that the son of Echoes the Borealis was dead than to drop this trinket wrapped in the man’s bloodied clothes at his brother’s feet.

  He gazed at Burns the Flame before leaving. She would remain down here for days, in a state of temporary hibernation while his seed fertilized her many wombs. Perhaps this time she would birth a larger brood. He could be a better father this time. Give his sons and daughters everything he couldn’t give Dams the Gate. They would be born on Earth—as he would soon deliver his people to the Promised Land.

  He reached down to touch her one last time, unsure if she would allow him again once she fully awoke, but his hand never made contact. He stopped a finger’s length from her as he noticed her skin.

  She was beginning to molt. Their mating—it had done more than end their unfortunate abstinence. Burns the Flame was crossing the final threshold. Her body beginning the first stages of the change to Alpha. She would need to mate many more times before the process was completed, but the tribe would see her status elevated.

  When she woke and saw her skin, she would know the prophet had been the one to push her to the final stage of maturity. He wondered, was it wise to hope this might diminish her hatred for him?

  When he brought them to the Promised Land, proved himself the deliverer, there would no longer be need for his past decrees to remain in place.

  As he left the breeding pits and entered the higher surface tunnels, he did so with the hope that perhaps, this too, might change her feelings toward him. However, any sense of hopefulness was short lived.

  If he were a man, it would be as though Malkier had walked into Times Square to find the streets empty. The tribe’s tunnels, they lacked the usual sounds and scents of his people’s presence.

  The strangeness led to a foreboding realization.

  While he had taken care of the bonded pair inside The Never, he’d left his brother on the Feroxian Plane. He’d left Heyer imprisoned within Cede. Even if he’d somehow escaped, the dampener affixed to his brother’s arm should have rendered him harmless.

  No—he’d taken every precaution; his brother could not have gotten free. Yet, the longer he walked the uninhabited tunnels, the more his certainty wavered. The more questions he didn’t have the answer to rose to the surface.

  How long had Ends the Storm been in control?

  How long had he been in the breeding pits?

  Days could have potentially passed while his brother was alone with Cede.

  How many times had Heyer proved himself more cunning than he presumed?

  Soon, his doubts possessed his legs, and they were carrying him faster and faster to his brother’s prison.

  Finally, just before he reached Cede’s threshold—one of the locations within the tunnel system where the true stone became his vessel in camouflage—he finally encountered an adult of his tribe. Buries the Grave stood awaiting his return. The Ferox stepped forward immediately and dropped to a knee, not speaking until the prophet gave consent.

  “Speak,” Malkier said.

  “Prophet, I did not wish to disturb you below—but the tribe desperately seeks your counsel. We believe the gods have sent a sign. We do not know its meaning.”

  Malkier listened, and his fears subsided to a degree. Perhaps, his people had only been drawn from the caves by some oddity. The Ferox were not dear to his heart because of their intellect. The species was not stupid, but it was primitive, and prone to see the hands of the gods in phenomenon outside their grasp. Still, that his entire tribe had been drawn out to bear witness was troubling.

  “Where have they gathered?” Malkier asked.

  “Our gateway,” Buries the Grave said.

  “Go, tell our people I will be with them shortly,” Malkier said.

  With a nod, Buries the Grave rose from his knee and excused himself.

  As was the case with any leader, being ‘the prophet’ required performances at times. Malkier did not allow his people to see him show distress or any great hurry. Their faith in him as the instrument of their gods on The Feroxian Plane was strengthened when he showed patience with all that came to pass—it fostered the notion that he possessed a degree of omniscience.

  Malkier’s doubts surfaced on his features the moment he was alone.

  Buries the Grave was nearly an Alpha and a fervent believer. He was one of the Ferox Malkier sent on his behalf whenever he could not attend to something. As such, he knew the Ferox was not easily shaken, even by the unknown—and yet he could see that whatever troubled his tribe, Buries the Grave was not immune. Perhaps, it would not be wise to delay his presence too long. He would put his concerns regarding his brother to rest, and then attend to his tribe.

  Cede hailed him the moment he crossed the threshold. “Malkier, you’ve been beyond my ability to contact for some time. There is much to report.”

  His jaw tightened—it was unusual for Cede to address him the moment he stepped across her boundaries. For the AI, this was equivalent of Buries the Grave awaiting him at the mouth of the tunnel.

  She was troubled by something that had happened in his absence.

  “My br
other?” Malkier demanded as he walked.

  “I wished to update you sooner . . .” Cede said as Malkier came to stand before a wall inside his main chamber. The rock façade was already shimmering as Cede reshaped herself to provide him a doorway. He saw an empty chamber reveal itself.

  “Your brother escaped moments after your entry into The Never,” Cede said.

  Malkier’s disbelief pulled him into the small chamber. Circling, his eyes searched every rocky surface and shadow—as though somehow the AI might be mistaken. When his futile denial dwindled and outrage took its place, the bloody cloth holding the pocket watch dropped to Cede’s floor with a muffled clink.

  His breath hastened until his chest was heaving. Every muscle fiber in his body flexed as though he wished them to snap. He dropped to his knees, hands reaching for his skull, tortured trembling claws reaching for his face as though he’d rake the flesh of his own skin.

  Had it not been for Cede, the sound of this moment of lost control would have reached the surface—but as he erupted, she contained his volcanic roar within her boundaries.

  For some time after, he did not speak, and the only sound in the chamber was his own heavy rage-filled breaths. Finally, when he gathered enough of himself together, he asked, “How was this possible?”

  Cede began speaking before her avatar fully manifested on the chamber wall. “Your brother crossed my threshold in possession of a device. I am still working to uncover the full scope of its purpose—but of the many things it seems responsible for triggering, its activation allowed Heyer to escape my security net.”

  Malkier twitched, feeling a pulse of fresh rage passing through a body already overflowing with anger.

  The wound of his brother’s betrayals reopened. How long had Heyer been plotting? How far along? How many of his preparations remained unknown? What Cede described could not have been accomplished on any mere whim. Slipping out of a Borealis Security Net within Cede herself—his brother would have had to expect the necessity long in advance. Heyer’s AI on Earth may have taken years to find a weakness and the means to exploit it.