The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  Everything was just as he remembered it. And yet it was not exactly the same. There were no people to be found anywhere inside the room or out of it. There was no air and no warmth; it seemed to exist inside a vacuum. It was merely a model, a mirage created in his mind by the extractor. It was completely accurate down to the last detail, but it was a mental replica nonetheless.

  Will’s thoughts came to him once again, “The extractor is a copy of some of what you’d find in the esolace. If you were connected to the esolace itself, you could see the Institute the way it is at this very moment. But even with this replica, you can learn a great deal. And whatever you decide to retain is yours forever; you’ll never forget it.”

  A sort of mental thrill ran through Adan’s entire being. He had never imagined anything like this was even remotely possible.

  Will continued his thought, “The bioseine inside you is what is connected to the extractor. Now that it’s been initialized, you can connect to any other esolace device. I’ve given you access to every channel I know of, including the Developer channels. The bioseine can also teach you how to use it as you go along. It’s completely integrated into your thought processes. It can even regulate physical things, like your energy levels, and let you know if there is a problem.”

  Though most of what Will was telling him was completely new, Adan had no difficulty comprehending it. It was all inside his mind already. It felt as if Will was simply reminding him of it.

  “You can stay here and keep exploring, but I need to get things ready for the journey tomorrow,” Will said. His actual voice came as such a shock that, for a moment, Adan forgot all about the extractor and the bioseine.

  “What? What did you say about tomorrow?” Adan asked, the real world pressing in on him once again with all its cumbersome physicality.

  “The day’s almost over and I still need to load the lev for the journey tomorrow,” Will said.

  “But it was morning when we started. Did the initialization really take that long?”

  “It’s not a minor procedure. And I didn’t want to leave you alone during the process so I haven’t been able to get much done,” Will said as he picked up his case of equipment.

  “We’re going to meet the Waymen, then?” Adan tried not to sound too concerned.

  “Yes, they’re expecting us to meet them soon.”

  “All right,” Adan said. “You’re sure you don’t need my help getting things ready?”

  As Will opened the door to the shelter, a low buzzing came from inside. It kept repeating itself urgently over and over.

  “I must have broken something when I knocked over that equipment,” Adan said.

  “No, that’s not it,” Will said as he passed through the door.

  Adan headed after him, but the buzzing stopped and Will re-emerged before he ever got to the door. Will was wearing the cutter over his right arm and carrying a shovel with his other hand.

  “What do you need those for?” Adan asked, puzzled.

  “One of the perimeter sensors detected something, or maybe it’s malfunctioning again. I need to go out and check. Don’t worry, it gives off a lot of false positives. I’m just taking the cutter as a precaution.”

  “A precaution against what?”

  “Not all of the Waymen tribes believe in the same legends. If they’re not friendly, I’ll need to be ready,” Will said, as Adan followed him to the compound door.

  “But I thought the cutter couldn’t harm anyone.”

  “It has another setting,” Will explained as a searing red blade of light burst from the end of the cutter. The tapered beam was as long as the cutter itself and cast a harsh light over Will’s face and across the metal door.

  “Organic cutting,” Will added as the beam disappeared. “I’ll be fine.” And then he turned and sprinted off into the desert, leaving Adan to pull the door shut behind him.

  Twenty-One

  The Visitor

  Darkness crept in and the winds whispered discontentedly. Will had not been gone long. Something banged against the compound door. Or maybe the door was just restless on its hinges, anticipating another storm.

  The sound repeated itself several more times in quick succession. It was too intentional to be caused by the wind. Someone was knocking at the door.

  Adan’s mind flashed to the somatarchs from the Basin. What if some of them had survived and followed them to the compound? Or was it the Waymen? Maybe they had killed Will and now they were coming for him.

  Someone shouted from outside the compound, “Will, it’s me Gavin! I’m not here to change your mind. And I’m wearing an inhibitor. I just want to talk.” When no one answered, the banging on the door resumed.

  Who was Gavin? And what was an inhibitor? Adan was torn. If he kept quiet, perhaps this person would go away. But if he really did know Will, perhaps Adan should open the door.

  “Will! Please let me in. We need to talk,” the voice cried out.

  Adan knew the door could easily be opened from the outside if you knew the trick of the latch. But even without knowing about that, the door could probably have been forced if someone really wanted to get in. Whoever the stranger was, he was either too unobservant to realize this or he wasn’t trying to break in.

  “Will, I have news about the Welkin,” the voice went on. “Senya told me about your visit. I know what happened at the Basin.” This gave Adan further pause. He took a few steps towards the door, trying not to make any sound.

  The stranger knocked again. “Please, I know you don’t want to talk to me, but the Welkin are in danger. I wouldn’t have come unless—”

  Adan cracked the door open just enough to get a look at who it was. He still wasn’t entirely sure he should be doing this, but if anything happened, hopefully Will was not too far off.

  A man of average height stood just in front of the door. The innumerable folds of his battered cloak swelled in the gusting currents. The upper part of his face was lost in the shadows of his enormous hood and the lower half was concealed by a coarse-looking scarf.

  “Hello,” he said. “You must be Adan. May I come inside?”

  Although Adan wanted to see the man’s face, he couldn’t expect him to remove his scarf and hood with all the dust swirling about. Adan opened the door the rest of the way and the man passed inside.

  He immediately began removing his hood and scarf. At the sight of his face, Adan took in a sharp breath. Though the man’s skin was coated in a thin layer of grime and he wore his long hair pulled back after the manner of the Welkin, everything else about him had the look of one of the scientists from the Institute: the small eyes, the thin lips, the narrow, chiseled face.

  “You…” Adan began, but then faltered.

  The stranger gave him a warm smile. “I’m Gavin,” he said.

  His friendly tone and thoughtful look clashed with the austere composition of his face. Adan had never seen any of the scientists act in this way. He was intrigued, but he kept his distance and tried not to let the stranger’s demeanor lull him into letting his guard down prematurely.

  The visitor shook his cloak and patted it down, sending puffs of dust flying everywhere.

  “Should I know you?” Adan asked. “You seem to know my name and Will’s, but he never mentioned anyone named Gavin.” Adan kept his eyes trained on the stranger, waiting for a single threatening gesture.

  Gavin seemed not to notice his stares. He slid a large canvas bag off his shoulder onto the ground and unfastened his cloak. Underneath, he wore a patchwork tunic, much like the kind the Welkin wore.

  “Ah, well, I suppose you haven’t heard of me then—at least not by that name. But you might have heard of me by another when you were in Aldea, I think. They call me Mendigo there. Does that one sound more familiar to you?”

  “Oh, you’re Mendigo? Yes, the Welkin did mention you. I didn’t know you had another name,” Adan said, recalling to mind the things Senya had said about him. “We were in your shop.”

>   “Yes, well, Mendigo is my Welkin name. But Will never called me that. He always used my original name, Gavin.” He gazed around the compound, “So this is where Will’s been all this time? It’s pretty impressive considering he built it himself. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “No, I don’t. Soon, I hope, though.” Adan studied Gavin intently to see what kind of response he would give to this news.

  “Hmm, I see.” A worried look creased his face. “Well, I suppose I’ll just have to wait, then—for as long as I can anyway…Since I’m here, may I ask you a few questions? You might be able to tell me what I need to know.”

  Adan shifted uncomfortably on his feet, unsure of what to say.

  “You are not entirely convinced I’m a friend,” Gavin said. “That’s understandable. Well, let me see if I can change that.”

  He reached down into the shoulder bag and pulled out something Adan certainly thought he would never see again: the shifter.

  “There you go,” Gavin said, setting the black box at Adan’s feet.

  Adan’s insides quivered excitedly at the unexpected gift.

  “Oh, thank you! Is it working again?”

  Gavin nodded in reply.

  “He’ll be so glad to have this back,” Adan said, picking it up and setting it near the shelter door so Will would be sure to notice it.

  “Somehow I doubt this will mend the divide between us,” Gavin said. “ But I thought he might need it.”

  The appearance of the shifter certainly did put Adan more at ease. But somehow he doubted Gavin had come all this way just to bring it back.

  “So you came from the Welkin. Are they all right?” Adan asked.

  “No, they’re not. That’s why I’m here. Most of the ones involved in the recent battle died. Malloc and a few others were the only survivors.”

  “Oh, how terrible,” A sickening wave rolled through Adan’s stomach. Why? Why were the scientists killing these people?

  “It’s worse than that,” Gavin said gravely. “More somatarchs attacked last night. We got help from another knit, but more Welkin died. The Viscera is no longer a safe place for them.”

  Adan could not have been more struck by the news than if Gavin had told him there were somatarchs outside the compound at that very moment. He shuffled toward the canvas sacks, feeling the need to sit down.

  “Senya and the children—are they alive?”

  “They’re fine. But many others died…They always fight to the death inside the Viscera.” He paused, his lips trembling with barely contained emotion. “I still can’t believe they’re gone,” he muttered. “So much death.”

  “Does the pain ever go away?” Adan asked, his heart aching as if he were witnessing the tragedy of the Basin all over again.

  “Death never cuts clean,” Gavin said. “It always leaves little cords trailing behind which cling to the soul. I know some who are hardened to it. But those people are hard to almost everything else. You don’t want to become like them, Adan, shutting the world out, your heart encrusted with layer upon layer of indifference.”

  It had never occurred to Adan that the absence of pain could be worse than the pain itself.

  “The Welkin began evacuating the Viscera this morning,” Gavin said, regaining his composure somewhat. “But that won’t be enough. I have to go back. There must be something I missed.”

  “Go back where?”

  “To Oasis. The Remapping Initiative has been started again. You’re living proof of that.”

  “The Remapping—wait—you’re from there aren’t you?” Adan suddenly forgot all about the Welkin. The uneasiness he had felt when he’d first seen Gavin’s face returned.

  “Yes,” Gavin admitted, looking a bit uncomfortable. “But I left Oasis some time ago. I live out in the Vast now.”

  Adan was speechless for several moments as he tried to piece together the implications of what Gavin was saying. “So you’re—you’re a…”

  “Developer? Yes—I was.” Those words made Adan’s skin tingle. “But that seems like a lifetime ago. So much has happened since I met Illiud.”

  Adan gripped the canvas bag he was sitting on tightly, as if that would somehow stop his mind from reeling. “Who—who’s Illiud?” he stammered, though a part of him didn’t want to know. He was just talking in order to give himself time so he could think of what to do.

  “One of the Welkin—a maneusis, in fact. He was a great man. Unfortunately, I never knew him while he was alive.”

  “But I thought you said you met him.” Adan’s eyes wandered towards the compound door. Where was Will?

  “Well, not in the way you’re thinking. All I know are his memories,” Gavin said, staring blankly at the compound wall. “But I’ll carry those with me forever.”

  “You can read someone’s memories—even after they die?” Adan was just as distracted as Gavin. All he could think about was the compound door and when Will would be coming back.

  “Oh, yes. We can extract them into remin fluid,” Gavin replied in a faraway voice.

  “Will told me about that. But I don’t know how it works.”

  “We can extract the memories of someone with a bioseine into remin fluid using a zoelith. But for someone without one, unfortunately it requires…killing them in the process.”

  “So this other maneusis—he was killed? Just so you could examine his memories?” Adan’s mouth went dry. Had this man killed someone?

  “Yes,” Gavin nodded, a pained look on his face.

  “Who killed him?” Adan stood up, his eyes riveted on Gavin. A long silence warded off Adan’s question. But it could not resist forever.

  “I did,” Gavin said, his face looking more like a scientist’s than ever. “At least, I was the one who gave the order.”

  “Why?” The word slipped from Adan’s mouth before he could stop it.

  Gavin’s voice drifted away with his gaze. “It was part of my responsibilities with the Remapping Initiative—to build our knowledge of the thought patterns of our subjects in order to classify candidates for admission into the program.”

  “That’s what they did to me—remapping. You were part of that?” Adan stared at Gavin, unable to mask his fear.

  Gavin’s eyes became hazy and unfocused. “Yes,” he said in a low voice. “I was the lead Developer on the project.”

  Twenty-Two

  The Chronotrace

  Terror and panic swirled together inside Adan like so much sand and debris kicked up by a desert storm.

  Gavin was a Developer and a murderer. Beyond that, he had worked on the same project which had robbed Adan of his past. If he had ordered Illiud’s death, how many other deaths was he responsible for? For all Adan knew, some of them could have been his own friends and family.

  And yet, Adan’s fear was not as complete as it might have been. He could see the weight of Gavin’s past bearing down on him as he spoke. He was not the same man who had done the things he was now describing. Pity mingled with Adan’s fears.

  “But that was a long time ago, right?” Adan asked.

  Gavin replied, still in a daze, “Yes. I shut the project down—I thought forever.”

  “If you shut it down once, you can shut it down again.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. It all depends on what they know. That’s why I wanted to talk to Will. I know he went back to Oasis to free you. I wanted to see if I could find out what’s happening there now, see if he knows anything that will explain why they’re sending out harvesters again.”

  “I don’t think he really knows that much,” Adan said. He wondered if Will would even want to share anything if he did.

  “But if he used the esolace recently, there will be all kinds of residual information in his mind that might help me,” Gavin said.

  Adan wasn’t sure what Gavin meant by ‘residual information’, but he didn’t like the sound of it. “Why are they after us, anyway?” He asked, trying to change the subject.

  Gavin hesitated,
glancing towards the compound door.

  Adan did the same. What was taking Will so long, anyway?

  “I never told Will this part. I never told him much of anything, really,” Gavin said. “I wanted him to forget about Oasis. I wanted to forget about it myself. But now I’m not so sure that was the right thing to do. Maybe if he had known the truth, he would have understood why I didn’t want him going back.” Gavin’s shoulders drooped. Adan had only just met him but it was obvious this was a deeply conflicted person. Adan was desperate to find out about his past, but Gavin was trying just as hard to forget about his.

  “He said that they see us as a resource, that they need us for something,” Adan said.

  “He’s right…” Gavin’s jaw tensed in silent anger. “They want to turn you into me.”

  “What do you mean? They want to make me a Developer? I could never do that.”

  “There’s more to it than even that,” Gavin’s voice was barely audible above the incessant winds.

  “What do you mean? What do they want with me?” Adan’s heart seemed to freeze momentarily. The answer to all those days of loneliness and futility were balled up in that question.

  “I’m a memorant,” Gavin said. He spoke now with clinical precision, the same way the scientists spoke. “I have the ability to unravel thoughts and memories, probe people’s minds.”

  That couldn’t be the answer. At least not all of it. Adan’s heart beat again, but slowly, ponderously, still waiting for the truth.

  “I thought all Developers could read people’s thoughts.”

  “Yes, but only through the esolace and even then, only what someone is thinking at the moment. It’s different for a memorant. We can read surface thoughts even without the esolace, but with it, we can go even deeper, into the innermost thoughts and memories of a person. We can find out things someone may not even know about themselves. For instance, right now I can tell that you are afraid of me and that you’re hoping Will comes back soon.”