by Shaye Easton
“Maybe it’s deserted,” Caden whispers, and I let out a breath, relieved to find him near.
But now that I think about it, the air isn’t stale and cool like you’d find in a deserted building. It’s warm and swirling, as if we’re in a crowded room, everyone’s breaths intermingling. It smells like people, like presence, like tension. Hint number three.
“Caden,” I breathe, fear shaking the name from my throat.
When the lights come on, it’s like a gunshot. I recoil, blinded, the stark white light sizzling my retinas.
Out of the dark blurry splotches on my vision, a man materializes, two distinct handprints burned onto his face. “Lost are we?” Newman says.
My heart plummets a million miles in my chest, hitting rock bottom with a thud. They knew we were coming. It’s impossible. How could they know?
My mouth isn’t working. Caden, fearlessly and maybe a little stupidly, says, “Thought we’d tour some of the more decrepit parts of the area. And would you look at that? We’ve already found the rats.”
Newman ignores him and lets his gaze settle on me. “Come to hand yourself in?” I keep my mouth shut. “Let me guess, you’re here for some sort of revenge?”
I stare him down, my anger festering.
“I knew you were dumb, but I didn’t think you were this dumb.”
Caden steps between us. “Hey man,” he says, “how’s the face?”
Newman’s dark eyes, sunken into two blistered fleshy pits, spark with resentment. “You know, you’ve always irritated me, Coleridge. It’ll be a nice day on earth when you’re finally swatted.”
“Thanks, buddy. Good to see you too.”
“You know him?” I ask under my breath.
“As a Summoner, you run into underwalkers from time to time. It comes with the job.”
Newman clasps his hands together. “This has been lovely. But I’m afraid, sweetie, it’s time for you to come with me.”
“Bite me,” I snap.
He sneers, starting forward. “With pleasure.”
I’m already angry, so I have no trouble calling up my aerokinesis and forcing him back. The air comes at him like a fist, punching his pink disfigured face. I feel it happen, as if the air is my own outstretched arm. My chest swells with satisfaction and with a growing urge to do it again.
Newman has stumbled a couple steps back. I hit him a second time and the satisfaction grows. I feel my power coursing in my veins, strong and heady, and I lap it up. It slams into him once more.
“Melissa,” Caden warns. “Behind him.”
With a start, I see all the dark shapes that have amassed at the end of the large nondescript foyer. Or maybe they were always there and I simply never noticed. My aerokinesis drains away.
“That was cute,” Newman says as he recovers, but he’s still out of breath. “I see you’ve discovered my friends.”
“I’ve got to say I’m surprised, Newman,” Caden says. “I didn’t think you’d have any.”
He shrugs. “I’m a popular guy.”
“I doubt that,” I mutter.
“So here’s how this is gonna work. I’m going to give you until the count of three, and then I’m going to kill Coleridge.”
“I’d like to see you try.” Caden laughs.
Newman smirks. “One.”
Quietly, I whisper, “Caden, when I say so, I want you to run.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Two.”
“I’ll be right behind you. There’s a fire stairwell over there, you see it?”
He looks right, eyes touching on the faint outline of a door, a green-lit box above it that depicts a cartoonish man running down a set of stairs. “I see it. I’m still not leaving you.”
“Caden, I swear to go—”
“Three,” Newman announces. He starts his approach again, his so-called ‘friends’ gathering behind him like roaches. A second later, he’s crossed half the room. “Lover’s spat, is it?” he taunts.
“Not at all,” Caden replies. He sets his foot back a step, preparing himself for a fight. “We were just deciding which limb to cut off first. Maybe you can resolve the issue for us. Which are you fonder of: your leg or your arm?”
He’s too close. I try to harness my aerokinesis again, but my panic has overcome my ability to be useful. Newman flips a knife out of his pocket and says, “The head’s always a good place to start.”
“I agree completely,” Caden deadpans. Then he throws a punch at the man’s face.
Newman catches his fist mid-air, jabs forward with the knife. Caden twists and grabs the man’s wrist, running his knee into his arm. Once, twice, three times. Meanwhile, he’s pulling his fist loose, clawing at Newman’s other hand and dragging it back towards him.
Newman is twisted around, his back bent, his arms at awkward angles behind him. Caden lifts a foot and slams it into his back, forcing him down to the ground. At this point, Newman gets a hand free and grabs Caden by the upper arm, flipping him onto his back.
I can’t do anything to help. I watch, powerless. Now Newman’s roaches have come forward, a swarm of black leather jacket exoskeletons and dark spidery limbs. I reach for my powers but they aren’t there. Fear has reared up like a nightmarish ghoul and possessed my body. I’ve got no other option. They launch at me. And I run.
I make it as far as the stairwell before Newman skids in front. I come to a halt, my eyes wide, and my thoughts jump to Caden.
I start taking steps backwards, risking a glance behind me. Caden’s on his feet, but only barely. His face is bloodied and bruised, and there’s an underwalker on each arm, holding him up. A third punches his stomach. My heart constricts, but my eyes snap back to Newman who’s making a fast approach. For every step he takes forward, I take one back.
“You’re making this harder than it has to be,” he says.
“It was always going to be like this,” I reply, my voice shaking with rage. “There is no easy way out.”
“Maybe not for you.”
Then I stumble into something behind me, only it’s not a wall. It’s hard, soft and alive. Hands suddenly grab my upper arms and gloved fingers dig into my skin. An underwalker. I struggle, slamming my foot down onto him, kicking his legs with my feet, throwing my head back in a last-ditch attempt to knock him out. But everything I do only causes his grip to tighten. His breath brushes on the back of my neck and his grunts reaching my ears as he continues to keep me still.
Newman advances, eventually coming to a halt before me. I don’t stop struggling the entire time, even after I realise it’s futile. Behind me, Caden is yelling my name. But I can’t see him. I can’t do anything to stop everything I feared from toppling down over me.
“We have plans for the world,” Newman says, “plans that will change life as we know it, and they all start with you. You are our kick-start. Our little red button that will trigger an explosion. We plan to use you. To press you down until you are weak, empty and lifeless. My dear, there is no way out.”
Then his gloved fist connects with my face, and everything boils down to two things: brilliant light exploding across my vision and a thick, all-encompassing darkness.
***
Sometime later, I’m in a corridor, my feet dragging along the dirty ground. I try not to think too much about where they’re taking me. I’m helpless to stop it. The echoes of Newman’s punch are still pounding around inside my head, making my vision dim and blurry. I’m struck by an overwhelming sense of disorientation. The sort you get just after you wake from a particularly vivid dream, when you’re still sorting through what’s real and not real. And before you remember, you’re on your bed and that’s all, in fact, a dream.
I lift up my head—a movement that requires a monumental amount of effort—and lay my eyes on my passing surroundings. As it turns out, Caden was right. The building is deserted, or was, before the underwalkers infested its halls like cockroaches. There are graffiti on almost every wall.
Most of them are small, dark and worn. But certain words burst across the dusty grey cement in full colour: fluorescent yellows, royal purples and violent reds strobing at the edges of my vision. There are cigarette butts, plastic bags, take-away cartons, beer bottles and coke cans rotting in corners, melding with the buildings infrastructure.
The whole place stinks of mildew and old garbage. It’s a third realm, one for all the horrid and grotesque souls to squander their time. It’s where things come to rot, to die.
I screwed up, I think. There’s a lump in my throat and I know it means tears. I swallow it.
So I screwed up. Caden’s gone, maybe dead, and anyone who could possibly help is entirely unaware of where I am. Crying’s not going to fix anything. It’ll only make it worse.
We come to a door. The off-white paint is cracked and peeling in long strips, like a set of claws raked it away. Someone knocks on it. It’s a man. No, it’s Newman. I can see the side of his face. The blisters like pink bubble wrap stretched across his cheek.
“Come in,” a voice says faintly, and Newman reaches for the rusty door handle. The door scrapes along the floor as it opens; one of its hinges has loosened and it’s hanging lopsidedly from the frame.
Newman enters and drags me behind him. I try to protest, but the sound emerges from my throat as a raspy breath.
The door scrapes shut behind us as Newman steps aside. And there’s Davion, dressed in his typical all-black suit. He’s sitting on a desk with a glass table top and sleek metal legs. It’s the sort you’d find in a luxury office on the top floor of a city skyscraper, which makes it shockingly out of place down here in the dirt.
He’s been doing something on a laptop. Now Davion’s eyes peer over its silver frame, growing alert as they land on me. “Melissa,” he says. “What a pleasant surprise!”
I try to speak again. “We both know this wasn’t a surprise,” I spit out bitterly and cough. He smiles.
My eyes take note of my surroundings. Aside from the desk, the room is bare. The floor has been swept and the air smells vaguely of frangipanis. Someone has clearly tried to sweeten the room with air freshener, but instead, it takes the odour of old rot and turns it into the ripe scent of fresh trash. I try not to breathe too heavily.
Davion shuts his laptop and leans forward in his chair. “Don’t mind the smell,” he says, swatting at the waft of air in front of his face. “We tried to get rid of it, but the place is a dump. It was a damn miracle that we got the electricity working.”
“Infect some other building then,” I mutter.
“Infect,” he repeats, tasting every syllable. It must taste bad because he grimaces. “Unfortunately, this was the only place suitable to our needs.”
He slides his laptop into a brown messenger bag on the floor. “What are you doing here, Melissa?” he asks, sighing, almost like he’s tired of me, like he wishes I’d have stayed away. I find the display perplexing.
I keep my mouth shut.
He reaches into the bag for a second time and tosses an object onto the desk. It clatters and skids, quickly coming to a stop before the edge, and I stare down at the thing, curved edges and black surface. I know immediately what it is.
A device: one that swapped me and will swap me back. I shiver.
I look up at him, being careful not to display any emotion on my face, and after a moment he starts to chuckle. “Is this what you came for?”
I don’t say anything but I get the feeling I don’t have to. He already knows.
He smiles, a smug expression that roughly translates to I win. But I don’t know what it is he thinks he’s winning. “It took us a long time to make this. We spent years designing it, testing it for flaws and smoothing out the kinks. It’s the first of its kind: a corporeal tool that can swap two incorporeal spirits without killing their bodies. We’ve made thousands of them.”
Thousands. The word echoes in my mind, ricocheting off the walls until it falls flat as a disk. What possible use could he have for thousands?
“But you know what these devices don’t do?” he asks. It’s rhetorical. I hold my breath. “They don’t swap people back.” And suddenly he brings down a fist, smashing the disk into a dozen flattened pieces. I jump.
He steps out from behind the desk and stops in front of it, leaning casually on the edge, studying me. My heart beats furiously in my chest. I shake my head. I’m confused and angry, and I don’t know what to say or what to do. I’ve landed myself in a mess and now I’ve discovered that my reasons for doing so were pointless, that is, if he’s telling the truth.
A minute later, Davion speaks again, his tone a mixture of disbelief, amusement and, strangely enough, a little disappointment. “You really thought the device would fix it?”
“What else was I supposed to think?” I ask, my temper flaring. “It’s not exactly like my disease came with an instruction manual!”
I hate the sympathy in his eyes. He did this to me! What right does he have to pity me? And why would he at all?
“What if I told you that you already possess the ability to swap back?”
“I wouldn’t believe you,” I reply curtly. But the more I think about it, the more I realise it’s not true. I don’t know anything about this supernatural world. Who am I to rule out what is and isn’t possible?
“Don’t you ever wonder why I didn’t just let you die? Why I risked so much in our recent efforts to capture you when all I needed to do was wait for your disease to wipe you out?”
“You’re worried I’ll swap back.”
“Were. We were worried. That little meeting you invited me to the other night cleared up quite a lot. Firstly, your disease has accelerated. Secondly, you have no idea how to swap back regardless.”
“So why all the attacks? Why the pyrokinetic, Kira Merritt and the clones?”
Davion smiles. “Why do you think?”
I don’t have an answer for him. He’s not making any sense. He could have killed me in Rand’s living room that night but he didn’t, sending a host of underwalkers after me instead, violating ancient spectre laws. It seems like he just didn’t want to get his hands dirty. But even still, it’s a lot of effort to go through just to avoid wiping me out himself. And I doubt he’s so much the saint that he’d lose sleep over such a thing…
It’s been over a minute, and I still haven’t said a word. Davion must grow impatient because he answers himself. “It was a safety measure. I discovered Sara had returned and couldn’t risk letting her live. They were never after you; it was her I’d set them after.”
“But why?”
“Because there is a way to swap back, Melissa, and your solution falls within your reach day in and day out without fail. It’s been doing so for years.”
I frown, spinning through my mind for a hint of what he might mean. “I don’t understand.”
“Your heat surges,” he presses.
My frown deepens. “What do they have to do with this?”
He shakes his head, disappointment drizzling over his features like water. “This entire time, the ability to return to your old body has resided within you. I assumed it was only a matter of time before you figured it out. That’s why we sought you out and hunted you down. That’s why we couldn’t risk waiting around for your disease to do the work.”
“How—,” and suddenly it comes to me: the times during my heat surges when I sought release from the heat, when I seemingly transcended my body and rose up as a disembodied, spectral form. How could I have done that if I hadn’t left my body behind? I’d been halfway to swapping back. The same thing that’s killing me was offering me a way to escape death, and I’ve been blind to it. If I’d just taken the time to think through all my options, all the possibilities, I may have been able to realise it for myself. Instead, I rushed off for a building that held nothing of value, nothing but danger, my brain clouded by thoughts of visions and dreams. Death was expecting me, and I delivered myself to him.
Davion starts speaking
again, his voice as background to my buzzing thoughts. “Spirits are naturally cold, as I’m sure you know, and when they come into contact with heat, they do everything in their power to get away from it. Your heat surges generate enough heat to force your spirit to leave your body. From there it’s all up to you. You could let yourself slip back into the heat or you could enter a different body, your original one, for example. When two spirits find themselves in the same body, the weaker one is evicted. Your friend can slip back into her original form, and you can assume yours. It’s simple as that.” he pauses. “Well, not anymore.”
Davion’s eyes light on someone behind me and suddenly there’s a rough set of hands on my arms, pulling me back around towards the door. I struggle to rip free from the grip, confusion and fear battling within me. “You’re not going to kill me?” I ask, my words come out like a gasp.
“Oh, I was. But the fact that you’ve handed yourself to us has provided me with an unmissable opportunity.”
“You want to recruit me,” I say. “It’ll never work.”
Davion laughs. “I don’t want to recruit you, Melissa. We all know that was never going to happen. I want to use you.” He turns to Newman. “Get the machine ready. I want it fully operational in an hour.”
Newman’s eyes grow wider. “Sir,” he says, “are you sure? That’s a direct violation of Keon’s orders—”
“My orders are none of your business!” he bellows, angered. “So keep your mouth shut and do as I goddamn say!”
My heart rate spikes, fear choking up my throat. “Machine?”
He raises a hand and the man drags me to the door stops. “Did you know it’s possible to extract a spectre’s abilities?” I go still. “Firstly, you have to remove the spirit from the body and heat it up to a manageable temperature. Then if you insert a syringe made of durable metal in just the right place, you can drain the abilities straight from their host. It’s almost too easy.”