Shadows of Divinity

by Luke Mitchell

  My fork paused in the bowl at the reminder of his extraterrestrial theory—or insanity, rather. I still wasn’t sure he wasn’t just screwing with me. Theories about life elsewhere in the universe had come and gone in the past, but the results were in, and the ruling of the Sanctum was clear. Enochia was Alpha’s chosen planet—the one place in the universe he’d deigned to create life. We were it.

  And even if these raknoth creatures were real, why reach beyond our planet for an explanation? They might simply be an undiscovered species. Or, Alpha be sweet, they might well be genuine demons. I’d always taken the Sanctum’s tales mostly as metaphor, but maybe this was exactly what they’d feared. Maybe that explained why the Sanctum Guard were shooting first and asking questions later. Demons were not to be suffered.

  It actually made a certain amount of sense. More than Carlisle’s wild story, at least. Still, I knew what I’d seen. I’d never forget Kublich’s beastly visage—the unholy fire in those eyes. And that wasn’t to mention the things Carlisle could do, and the things he seemed to think I could do as well. I swallowed an enormous mouthful of cheesy foodstuff and decided to dig further.

  “Let’s say I choose to believe the whole alien thing for a minute. Where did these raknoth things come from? How did they get here?”

  Carlisle took his time finishing his own bite. “I don’t know. I only inferred their origin from something they said the first time I encountered their kind. Although it seems others have reached the same conclusion.”

  My eyes widened as his words kicked a thought loose. “Kovaks. Sweet Alpha, was this what he was talking about all along?”

  Carlisle tilted his head as if to say maybe, maybe not. “I didn’t know Andre Kovaks. But, judging by the nature of the allegations against him and the content of his journals, I’d guess that, yes, he might’ve pieced together at least some of the raknoth puzzle.”

  I frowned. “But why would the Sanctum make a spectacle of that? They had to think he was a madman. Why not just take care of him quietly?”

  Carlisle raised his brows, inviting me to answer my own question.

  “Unless…” I said slowly, working through the pieces, the food forgotten in my hands, along with my appetite. “No…”

  “Because the raknoth wanted to put the very real fear of death into whoever else might be on their trail,” Carlisle said. “That was my thought as well.”

  “That’s—”

  “Not possible? But why not? They knew it was no risk to them. Who would actually listen to what no doubt sounded like the ramblings of a madman?”

  “But that would mean…” I felt hollow. “They’ve infiltrated the Sanctum as well?”

  Kublich was the High General. If the raknoth controlled him, they effectively controlled the Legion. And if they could do that…

  To my horror, Carlisle nodded. “I believe so. It’s nearly impossible for me to identify human from raknoth without getting close to them, but I’m afraid the raknoth have delved their way quite deeply into Enochia’s infrastructure, which likely means they hold at least one high position within the Sanctum. Maybe more.”

  I stared at the remnants of my cooling food with unseeing eyes.

  I wanted to call Johnny, to see a familiar face.

  I wanted my parents.

  A dull ache spread through my insides. A powerful longing for my mom’s smile and her warm hands on my face. For my dad’s unshakable faith and resolve. A powerful longing I’d never see fulfilled again.

  Because I was alone now.

  I’d never be able to turn to them for comfort or security again. Kublich had seen to that. And after tonight, I was pretty damn sure he had every intention of finishing the job with me.

  No Mom. No Dad. No Legion at my back.

  I was all alone.

  “Why my parents?” I finally asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

  The question had been burning through my mind all night, over and over. But I’d held back, afraid of the answer. Or maybe just afraid there was no answer at all.

  Carlisle dropped my gaze, as if to pay respect to the aching in my chest. “I can’t say for certain, but I imagine Kublich must have suspected they knew too much. I doubt he would have acted so openly unless they were a tangible threat to his position.”

  I’d already figured as much, I realized. Ever since I’d first stumbled into the living room and seen those fiery red eyes. Some part of me had just been hoping Carlisle would have another answer. A better one. One that would’ve been easier than the truth.

  “My dad. He was onto Kublich. He knew.”

  It explained everything—my dad’s behavior over the past cycles, his unusual reaction to Kovaks’ execution. He’d known about Kublich. Maybe not everything, but enough to realize that something wasn’t right with the High General.

  “Your father was a more clever man than his colleagues, it seems.”

  And here I’d spent the past days questioning his activities, doubting his loyalty to my mom. I felt ill. Even more so, when I recognized the anger rising in my gut. Because if Johnny and I had spotted him with Kublich’s servitor, how many others had? How could he have been so careless?

  As repugnant as the thought was, I found myself wishing it had simply been adultery. At least then my parents would still be alive.

  Carlisle’s pitying eyes seemed to see right through me. “He couldn’t have known what he was exposing your family to. I’d wager he suspected Kublich of something much less sinister. Abusing his command, or trading Legion secrets, for instance. If he’d realized the true gravity of the situation…” He dropped his gaze to the floor. “I clearly didn’t know him, Haldin, but it seems to me that your father was a good man, just trying to do the right thing. I’m sorry I couldn’t save your parents.”

  I said nothing. Some part of me wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. The rest was stuck watching the scene unfold on repeat, recalling the way Carlisle had become the monster in my nightmare after the fact.

  He took my dish and set to cleaning them in the small sink, the hydrocycler unit kicking on with a low hum. I watched in numb silence, my thoughts spiraling nowhere but downward.

  “Why were you at my house?” I was almost surprised at the strength of the accusation in my tone. “Why did you know my name?”

  Carlisle shut off the water and turned to face me as he toweled his hands dry. “I snuck into Sanctuary to confirm my suspicions about Kublich. I had to confer with a few of Sanctuary’s inhabitants to figure out when and where I might track him down in relative privacy. Your name arose from those questions.” He frowned. “It wasn’t a good plan. But”—he waved a hand at me—“at least some good came of my presence this evening.”

  I studied him closely, looking for any hint of deceit. The way he’d chosen the word, confer, made me wonder exactly how he’d extracted the information.

  “I didn’t hurt anyone,” Carlisle said, seeming to catch my train of thought. “And they won’t remember me.”

  That raised a few more questions, but my head was spinning too much to press the matter. I leaned back against the wall, fatigue weighing nearly as heavily in my limbs as it did on my mind. “I guess I probably should have thanked you by now.”

  “A forgivable oversight, I think, all things considered.” He searched my face, then glanced at his palmlight. “You should try to get some sleep. You must be exhausted.”

  I glanced at my own palm only to be reminded my device was gone. It was an odd feeling, being without it. Almost like I’d left one of my appendages behind. But how could I really lament the loss of a communications device when I would’ve given all four of my limbs right then and there to get my parents back?

  “Apologies about your palmlight,” Carlisle said, apparently having noticed my fixation on my blank palm. “They would have tracked it far too easily.”

  I dropped my hand and shrugged, too occupied with thoughts of my parents now to care. The fabbed food settling in my stomach onl
y deepened my exhaustion. There were no windows in the room, but I knew it must be somewhere around midnight, if not later.

  “One more thing,” Carlisle said, moving over to rummage through a set of drawers on the workbench. A few moments later, he turned and offered me a thin necklace, complete with a pendant similar to the one at his own breast.

  “I think it would be prudent for you to get used to wearing one of these.”

  I took the pendant and turned the small disk over in my hands, tracing my fingers over its two concentric circles, the smaller of which was able to turn like a dial between two positions. A symbol had been etched into the disk with red lines, it’s meaning completely foreign to me.

  “And this is?”

  “A precaution,” Carlisle said. “Like I said, your mind is a bit of a spotlight to people like us right now, and the raknoth are particularly powerful telepaths. I imagine Kublich caught your mental scent, so to speak, and then there are the Seekers like the one you met back in the alley.”

  Powerful telepaths.

  I wanted to laugh at the notion. But I couldn’t. Not after the way Smirks and Kublich had each made a helpless puppet of me, or the way Smirks had whispered his thoughts straight into my head.

  My heart picked up just thinking about it.

  “They can’t, uh, sense me right now, can they?”

  Carlisle patted the air in a pacifying gesture. “We’re safe for now. Even strong telepaths couldn’t hope to consciously reach this far. Even a mile would be unheard of. But sleep has a way of opening the mind and amplifying one’s telepathic sensitivity, especially in those new to their gifts and unlearned in shielding their minds. Hence”—he patted at his own pendant—“precautions. We don’t want them tracking and influencing you while you sleep.”

  I nodded slowly, still staring at the odd pendant.

  It occurred to me it might be wise to tell Carlisle about my nightmare, where the attack had been twisted so that he’d been the monster who’d taken my parents. Could Kublich have had something to do with planting those seeds of doubt in my head? I didn’t know, and I didn’t really want to broach the topic right then either.

  Instead, I turned the pendant dial so the odd red etchings all lined up, assuming that was the on position, and slipped the necklace over my head, not bothering to reflect on how utterly ridiculous this all should’ve sounded. As soon as the cord settled on my neck, the pendant grew cool to the touch.

  “What the scud?” I whispered, half to myself. “How does this thing work, exactly?” I looked up at Carlisle, remembering his cryptic remark from earlier. “And what in demon’s depths are Shapers?”

  Carlisle gave me a tired smile. “I was under the impression asking questions was against Legion tenets.”

  The reminder of my home was a bitter ache in the back of my throat. It must’ve showed on my face, because Carlisle’s expression immediately softened.

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. You’re liable to die of exhaustion if I try to answer all your questions before you sleep.” He pointed at the pendant on my chest. “For now, just know that as long as the lines of that rune are unbroken, your mind will essentially be closed off to the outside world.”

  With that, he dimmed the lights and settled to work at his desk node, flicking through newsreels on the central of the three displays.

  I wanted to protest—to demand he keep explaining until neither of us could keep our eyes open any longer. But my eyelids were feeling awfully heavy now that we’d paused, and my mouth expelled a yawn instead of words when I tried. So I lay there in a stupor, studying the strange man who’d probably saved my life and trying my best not to think about everything I’d seen that night.

  What would the reels have to say about my parents’ murders? About my disappearance?

  It was too much to think about right now. And I’d probably find out tomorrow anyway. The thought deepened the pit in my stomach. It exhausted me.

  Yet sleep wouldn’t come. Not for a long while. I couldn’t have said how long, only that I seemed to be caught somewhere between—not quite awake but certainly not asleep either, terrible fragments of half-thoughts ripping their frantic ways through my mind. And through the swells and troughs of chaotic noise, three thoughts rose above all others.

  My parents were dead.

  I was alone.

  And, as harrowing as the night had been, I was certain the scud was only just getting started.

  8

  Cold Truth

  I was surprised to wake the next morning, given that it meant I’d somehow fallen asleep the night before. Surprised, groggy, and more than a little disoriented. Everything came back all too fast, though, when I looked around the quaint stone room and saw Carlisle sitting cross-legged on a spacious blue sparring mat, his back turned to me.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, not turning. “How did you sleep?”

  Afternoon?

  In futility, I glanced at my lightless palm. “Okay, I guess.” I must have if it was afternoon already. I sat up, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Three past midday.”

  Scud.

  The thought of even sleeping in past sunrise was like a stun prod to the Legion tyro inside me. But it wasn’t like that mattered now. There were no doceres here to chastise me. No Mathis to scornfully point out that my captain daddy had never been late a day in his Alpha-blessed life.

  No Dad to tell me to believe in myself and in Alpha above all else, no matter what opinions others may hold. No Mom to laughingly tell him to stop being so serious for a minute every once in a while, lest he make a severe old man of me before I’d even made legionnaire.

  The pain couldn’t have been any more real if my stomach had actually cramped up and folded in on itself.

  Carlisle rose smoothly from the mat and turned to look at me. “You can rest more if you’d like.”

  I shook my head, trying to push the pain down. “I need to figure out my next move.”

  I made it as far as my feet before it properly dawned on me that I had no idea where to go from there.

  “I’ve been thinking about that as well. What did you have in mind?”

  I just stared at him, utterly lost for words, the weight of how screwed I was cascading down on me like a bottomless bucket of ice water. No matter what I did—who I turned to—Kublich could be watching. Every direction my thoughts turned, the way was untenable. Blocked.

  I was trapped.

  Sure, maybe if I was really clever about it, I could find a way to sneak a message to someone I knew forward and backward, which at this point pretty much meant Johnny.

  But what then?

  It wasn’t like I could tell him to come pick me up and bring me back to Sanctuary. If Kublich wanted me found, the only place I’d be safe was under a very well-hidden rock. Leave that rock, and he would find me. Reach out to anyone I knew, and he’d find me. Do anything. He’d find me.

  I sank back to the cot, burying my head in my hands. “I need to tell someone what happened. If I can convince one of the other Generals…”

  The Generals who all answered to Kublich.

  “… Or I could turn to the Sanctum.”

  The Sanctum whose elite Guard had tried to kill me.

  If I could just get my story to the right ears, I wanted to say. But how by the light of Alpha was I even supposed to know which ears were the right ones? And if I made one wrong move…

  The image of Kovaks’ body swaying limply from the gallows came to mind, unbidden. This must’ve been exactly how he’d felt when he’d realized something was horribly wrong on Enochia.

  And now I was the madman no one would be willing to listen to.

  Of course, some part of me protested, I also still couldn’t be sure Carlisle’s story was true—or that anything I’d seen was even real. Alpha be damned, for all I knew, Carlisle could’ve dosed me with a hard hit of alussein vine and kidnapped me from my house. I could have hallucinated all of it. Bu
t that thought was every bit as crazy as the truth I was trying to avoid.

  I knew what I’d seen last night. What I needed to do was make sure I wasn’t the only one, which meant finding hard proof that Kublich had murdered my parents. That was the only place to start.

  But Kublich had already had the entire night. He would’ve tried to cover up his crime, right? Probably. But there’d been screams. Gunshots. It couldn’t have all gone unnoticed. Not in Sanctuary, of all places. Right?

  “We need to see what they’re saying on the reels,” I finally said.

  A tangible place to start. That was good. And, whatever happened, it’d be a valuable test of just how wide and powerful Kublich’s influence actually was. I started to stand.

  Carlisle ghosted forward and pressed a hand to my shoulder. “Haldin.” He looked concerned. “You won’t like what you see. I’m not sure you’re ready to—”

  “I need to know,” I said, shrugging his hand aside and pushing past him to the displays above his desk.

  I waved one to life, navigated through the menu to Divinity’s local WAN reel, and scanned headlines and images, an odd mixture of eagerness and dread swirling through me.

  There. It was timestamped from the previous night, maybe two hours after the attack. An image of me and my parents from the Legion promotion ceremony we’d all attended a few cycles ago. Seeing their faces, alive and happy… it was like a knife twisting in my gut.

  Then I read the headline beside the image.

  Tragedy Strikes: Legion Officer and Family Killed in Accidental House Fire.

  Carlisle had appeared beside me like an apparition. “You don’t have to watch it.”

  I ignored him and played the story.

  “And now,” the caster was saying where the vid picked up, “grim news from Sanctuary, where what currently appears to have been a faulty energy cell led to tragedy for a loyal Legion officer and his family.”

  The caster’s voice blurred to a background buzz as I numbly gaped at the bold, white letters of the banner across the bottom of the feed.