They became a dull buzz in my thrumming ears after the first sentence or two. I wanted to scream. To cry. To beat my fists bloody against the temple wall. But none of that would hurt Kublich. And that bastard needed to pay.
So instead, I killed the feed and set the tablet aside. I drew my legs in tight, closed my eyes, and focused on the one thing I could control in that moment—the one tool I could harness against him when the time came.
Quiet your mind, Carlisle had said. Until you forget that it’s there. Until you can simply let go.
Let go.
A kind of violent calm settled over me as I began repeating those words in my head, over and over. This was it. I could feel it deep down, beyond the realm of conscious understanding—an ethereal flutter in my gut, a silent promise from the spirit of justice itself that Kublich would pay.
All I had to do was let go, starting with Carlisle’s cloaking pendant.
I barely hesitated. Carlisle had explicitly told me to keep it on anytime I left the cloaked hideout, but this was more important. I knew where Kublich was right now. I knew what had to happen. Demons to the wind with everything else.
I slipped the pendant off and dropped it to the ground beside me. The calm was deepening, seeping through me like a living thing, loosening my limbs with that silent promise.
He was going to pay.
I acknowledged my body once last time, relishing the pleasant soreness of the past days’ exertions. Then I sank deeper, melting into my breathing, each exhalation draining the extraneous thoughts from my body, pulling me in further, further. Again. And again. Breathing until I forgot about my body. Breathing until I was barely aware of the ground I sat on.
In and out.
Over and over.
I’m not sure if it took me five minutes or fifty. Time ceased to register. I breathed until everything in my world was condensed down to that singular rise and fall. Until, somewhere deep in my trance, it simply came to me out of nothingness, like a first waking thought.
Let go.
It nearly snapped me out of the trance completely. I teetered there on the edge between my worldly senses and everything else. Then the balance tipped, and my world disintegrated.
Calling it an out-of-body experience wouldn’t do it justice. Everything I was simply blurred into my surroundings like an expanding ball of gas, and for the briefest moment, I could feel everything that it touched—could feel it in overwhelming detail. My mind reeled at the colossal influx of information. It was too much.
Hot and cold. Light. Darkness. Crushing imprisonment. Boundless openness. Musty dirt, and porous stone, and—
I hit the grass with a strangled yelp, head spinning with all the sensations that… weren’t there anymore? I patted dumbly at my body, reassuring myself I was still whole. I felt weak. Cold sweat plastered my face. For a second, I lay there, too disoriented to move. Then I lurched to my feet, did a double-take to grab my pendant and the tablet, and set off for the hideout at a run.
Carlisle shot to his feet when I burst in, but I was too overwhelmed to care.
“Uncomfortable my ass!” I snapped. “I felt like I was gonna evaporate out of existence!”
He searched my face, surprise flashing in his eyes, shortly followed by something like awe. “Well I believe I did use the word extremely at some point,” he finally said. “How do you feel?”
I wiped cold sweat from my forehead. “Kind of sick. I didn’t realize it was gonna be like… well, like that. And after… after everything else, I just…”
He waited to see if I’d say more, his gaze tracing suspiciously down to the pendant I’d slipped back on. He looked worried. About the pendant? No. About me. I saw it in his eyes when he met my gaze again. He was worried I was about to crack.
“I think maybe you should rest,” he said slowly.
Grop that. I shook my head and went to sit on the mat. I wasn’t going to back off now. Not when I was finally starting to get somewhere.
“It’s going to take an enormous amount of practice,” Carlisle said, though I hadn’t asked. “Acclimating yourself to your extended senses is one thing. Learning to focus them enough to begin Shaping will be another. I’ve seen some take to it in a few seasons. A few cycles, even, once. But most take years to develop any appreciable mastery.”
“How long did it take you?”
He didn’t answer.
“Cycles, huh?” I said. “Guess I have an easy target in sight, then.”
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, preparing to start.
“Haldin.”
I opened my eyes to find Carlisle watching me, his expression torn.
“If you’d like to talk about the funeral… about any of it…”
My jaw tightened against the confused swirl of emotions rushing through me. For a second, I even thought about telling him—about the things Kublich had said, about how damned deflated Johnny had looked. About the way I’d felt, seeing my parents’ urns being honored less than ten feet away from the monster who’d murdered them. But I couldn’t. Not now.
So I closed my eyes instead, reaching for that place of calm again, determined to keep honing this new ability of mine until I couldn’t anymore.
Carlisle didn’t try to stop me.
11
Memento
“So why Vantage?” I asked the following night as we supped on fabbed meat and potatoes. Whether out of pity over the funeral or the fact that I’d been up most of the previous night practicing opening my senses, Carlisle had let me sleep the morning away. The rest of the day had fallen quickly to training. “You think they’re trying to poison us all in one fell swoop or something?”
Carlisle shook his head and patiently finished chewing his food. “Not particularly. If the raknoth wanted to simply kill us all, I imagine they would have done it by now. There are any number of ways they might pull it off. No, I think they intend to use our kind for something more.”
I chewed on that for a while.
As the producer of probably at least half the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment on Enochia, Vantage was unsettlingly well-positioned for working any number of insidious misdeeds on the population. Which was probably why Carlisle had spent so many hours studying them in the reels the past few days. The possibilities were endless—and most of them horrifying.
I idly skewered a bit of potato on my fork. “So we’re still at paranoid suspicion, then?”
“My specialty,” Carlisle said with a faint smile. “But it is interesting that both Andre Kovaks and my contact in Divinity seemed to reach similar conclusions.”
A contact in Divinity? So Carlisle did talk to someone, at least.
How many more were out there, circling the impossible truth of the raknoth?
Probably not that many. And I was guessing the others couldn’t move things with their minds, either.
“How did you even get pulled into this thing to start with?” The question fell out of my mouth almost before I knew it. I’d hesitated to ask Carlisle much in the way of personal questions since we’d met, which I suppose was a bit ridiculous considering he’d literally been inside my mind. But maybe it was for good reason.
He was staring off now, spoon forgotten in his hand, the silence lingering too long.
“If I’m, uh, prying, you don’t have to…”
“No, no.” He shook his head and composed himself. “Parts of the story may be useful. I’m just wondering where to begin. Like you, I lost what family I had at the hands of the raknoth. I was brought into the world of Shaping when I was young. Ten or eleven, maybe. My teacher, Cassius, found me living on the streets when… well, at a time when I truly needed to be found. He was a strange man, to say the least. But he saved my life, in more ways than one. It wasn’t a hard decision to follow him across Enochia. I had nothing to lose and a world to learn.”
“Sounds kind of familiar.”
Carlisle smiled, but it was a pained thing.
“The raknoth�
�� took him from you? Cassius?”
He gave a tired nod. “Along with the few other friends I had in this world.”
“What happened?”
He idly fingered the cloaking pendant at his breast. “We made these.”
At my frown, he pushed on.
“The notion of hiding one’s mind from other telepaths had been a problem for Shapers ever since the Sanctum came to power and started indoctrinating its Seeker core to secretly hunt their own kind. All it took was a few whispers, or some unfortunate timing. A Seeker would be sent to confirm, and suddenly a Shaper would have half the Sanctum Guard bearing down on them.”
“I don’t understand. Do the Sanctum Guard all know what’s going on, then? Those soldiers back in the alley must’ve known what Smirks was, right?”
Carlisle tilted his head in a mini shrug. “Difficult to say who knows what.”
“Well it’d be pretty hard for them not to notice when they try to bring in some harmless-looking civilian type”—I waved at him—“and the guy starts flinging things around with his mind, right? People must ask questions. Even Sanctum Guard.”
“Perhaps. But few Shapers are actually that adept at using their skills in combat. Most go down without much commotion. It’s possible the higher tiers of Legion command have some inkling of the Seekers’ existence and function, but you’d know better than I do.”
I shook my head. “The tyros sure as scud aren’t hearing anything about it.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Legion command wasn’t either. People tend to believe what’s comfortable to believe, and sparse as our kind have become, the Shaper hunt would hardly be the largest operation the Sanctum’s ever obfuscated from the eye of the Alpha-loving public.”
It all sounded a bit like the gossip of madmen and old crones who swore their felines talked to them, but then again, what didn’t these days? Kovaks had sure sounded like a madman, after all, and here I was following in his footsteps. Was it possible the Sanctum had been bending the word of Alpha even before the raknoth came to Enochia?
I kind of wanted to ask. But, then again, I kind of didn’t.
“So these cloaking pendants, then,” I said. “How’d they lead you to trouble with the raknoth?”
“That was dramatically ambiguous of me to say,” Carlisle admitted. “It wasn’t the pendants themselves, but rather what happened after we succeeded in crafting them. We knew immediately we had to share our discovery. Cassius and I had lost multiple friends to the Seekers over the years, and those Shapers weren’t the only ones.”
“How many Shapers are there?”
“Precious few these days. And most live on the run, with their ties loose and their heads down.”
I frowned. “And no one else managed to make one of these cloaks in the past thousand years?”
“Not that we knew of. Though Cassius believed we’d only rediscovered a lost art of the Emmútari.”
“The Emmútari?”
A soft smile touched Carlisle’s mouth. “They were a powerful order of Shapers, back before the Sanctum’s rise. A long story, and one for another time, I think, if we want to finish our current one.”
I reluctantly nodded my agreement.
“Suffice it to say,” Carlisle continued, “our breakthrough with creating long-lasting runes was unheard of in our circles. To put it into perspective, it was something like the Shaper’s equivalent of shifting from hand arithmetic to node programming.”
He thoughtfully rubbed his pendant between thumb and forefinger.
“At any rate, as dangerous as it was to assemble multiple gifted minds in one place, the rune technique, and its application for mind cloaking, was important enough to risk it. Once we were all together, we knew we could cloak our collective presence anyway. We were careful. We had everything planned. The only thing we didn’t account for was the arrival of the raknoth.”
“They found the gathering?”
From the distant look on his face, I wasn’t sure he even heard me.
“The raknoth are far more skilled at hunting than any Seeker, you see. Powerful telepaths, yes. But their other senses are preternaturally sharp as well.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if they scented in on one of the others, or… I suppose it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that they found us, five of them, and that it was a slaughter. Eighteen Shapers gathered. I was the only one who made it out.”
I sat tense and quiet, waiting. I hadn’t been expecting a war story.
“How did you get away?” I finally asked, softly as I could.
“Cassius told me to run.” His gaze dropped to the floor. “I wasn’t nearly as skilled then, and once the fighting started and it became clear how outmatched we were… Well, Cassius ordered me to run. And I listened.”
I wanted to say something. That there was no shame in a wise retreat. That he’d done the right thing. But it wasn’t my turn to speak—I could feel it. Not quite yet.
“Three of the younger Shapers tried to run as well,” he said quietly. “They didn’t make it far…” He straightened in his seat, visibly pulling himself from his memories. “And so I’ve trained on ever since, nearly twelve years now, hunting them just as they’ve continued to hunt me.”
Alpha, had he been alone all that time? Even if he did have occasional communication with his contacts… what did that do to a person?
“Thank you for telling me.” It was the only thing I knew he might hear, but I couldn’t help saying the rest anyway—the stuff the survivors always seemed to brush aside. “I’m sorry about your friends, Carlisle. About Cassius. But I’m sure there’s nothing more you could have done.”
Carlisle showed me a polite smile, dismissive and only surface deep. “Thank you, Haldin, but I’ll be quite fine.” He rose to collect our bowls. “And now you know.”
Somehow, his response comforted me. Maybe because it assured me he was human after all.
“I still can’t believe I’ve never heard a whisper about this stuff…” I said, moving to help him clean up. “I’m still not sure I even understand what Shaping is, exactly.”
That seemed to amuse Carlisle. “I’m sure I don’t either. But I can tell you with some certainty that, in the end, it all comes down to channeling energy from one place or form to another. For instance…” He filled a glass less than halfway with cold water and gestured for me to step back from the counter.
“Watch closely,” he said when I was in position.
Something as invisible as thin air but as tangible as the arms of a pro smashballer wrapped me tight and lifted me from the floor. Carlisle smiled at my startled curse and waved my attention to the water in the glass.
I rose further, and the water turned icy.
“Do you see?” Carlisle asked.
He waved to the floor as if in invitation, and the invisible force floated me gently back down.
In the glass, the ice had thawed.
“I… definitely see. I’m just not sure I understand. You lifted me because the water froze?”
“I would put it the other way around, but yes. Energy reshaped to a new purpose. In this case, thermal energy”—he waved the glass of icy water—“into kinetic energy.”
“Right… I guess that…”
That what? Alpha, was I about to say that that made sense?
Red-eyed monsters. Voices beamed straight from one mind to another. And now freezing water to lift unsuspecting tyros. Sure, why not?
It was starting to feel like my bar to the impossible had been permanently damaged.
“I guess I get it in theory. Maybe. But…”
“You have a few questions?” Carlisle said, offering me the perspiring glass I was still staring at.
I laughed. It was too much. Mind boggling. I didn’t even know where to start.
“A few,” I agreed, taking the glass.
Carlisle dried his hands and retired to his desk. “Perhaps we should come at it tomorrow with fresh minds. You’ll be needin
g more practice with your extended senses before you attempt any energy channeling anyway.”
He probably had a point. I’d made some progress over the past day—each time, finding my way to the quiet place a little more quickly, keeping my senses extended just a little longer.
For a few moments, I’d feel it all—my very sense of being intertwining with the pores of the cool stone floor, the fibers of the sparring mat straining under my weight, the tiny swirls of air dancing about the room, so gentle I couldn’t have possibly felt them. Except I did—for those few moments, at least.
Then I’d drift too far, my sense of self blurring, too diluted for comfort, and I’d fall back to the safety of my body with a shudder and a rush of nausea.
It was definitely going to take some getting used to. And as incredible as the experience was, it also wasn’t particularly fun, repeatedly meditating until I could open myself to a sensation of disembodiment that quickly became unbearable. But I’d done it again and again. For hours. And now it was time to do it some more.
There was just one question lingering in the dark corner of my mind.
“Carlisle?”
He turned from his displays.
“If eighteen Shapers weren’t enough to take five raknoth,” I said slowly, “what in demon’s depths are two of us supposed to do?”
He gave a grave nod, like he’d been waiting for that very question. “I don’t have a good answer for you, Haldin, aside from that we’ll do whatever we can. I’ve trained hard these years, strengthening my abilities, learning to fight with them. You have a tremendous amount to learn, and I wager time is on our side about as much as the odds are in our favor. But we’ll try.”
As pep talks went, it wasn’t much. In fact, it was pretty damn scuddy. But it was a solemn promise I could get behind. So I nodded my agreement, letting him return to his work, and I dropped back to the mat with the steady burning resolve to do the same.
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