You cannot hear them anymore.
She focused on them harder and imagined a bubble around Balir’s head, allowing all sound but those two to pass. Slowly, the humming and ringing faded to nothing.
Try again, Balir, she said in his mind.
He released another wave of clicks; for the first time, she realized how complex they were, hearing the depth and range of their tone through his ears. When their echoes returned, she nearly broke her own concentration with her wonderment — his mind assessed every tiny sound, measured them, calculated how long they had taken to return to him, how their properties had been altered, analyzing a hundred different factors before creating a picture in his head.
It was as unlike sight as she could’ve imagined, but it somehow relayed similar information, mapping out the chamber around them. They were on a platform on one end of a huge room, the bounds of which he could not detect. Ahead, a gaping chasm awaited, too deep for Balir to sense the bottom. A narrow walkway extended over it. The walkway went through a series of turns, its form growing fuzzier as it continued beyond the range of his perception.
“Thank you, Nina,” Balir said. “Though it is narrow, we need only follow the path.”
“What path?” Aduun asked.
Nina realized at that moment all the details that were absent from his mental image — the stars, the light and dark, the colors. He could sense Nina and the others behind him, but his pictures of them were distorted, mere shadows with obscured faces. It reminded her of how Quinn’s sculptures looked in their early stages — clay with form and shape but no true features.
“There is a winding path ahead of us,” Nina said, maintaining her connection with Balir. “We can’t see it, but Balir can as long as I keep shielding him.”
“Follow closely,” Balir said, “and mind Nina.”
Vortok took a heavy step forward. “I… don’t know if I can.”
“It is too disorienting,” Aduun said. “Each step feels like we are going to tumble into nothingness.”
Vortok grunted his assent. “It makes my stomach sink.”
“Aduun, put your hand on my shoulder, and Vortok take hold of his tail,” Nina said. “Then close your eyes.”
“You mean for us to cross blindly?” Aduun asked. “That is worse.”
“Open yourselves to me. Trust me.”
Though Aduun made no verbal response, his hand settled on her shoulder a moment later. Gently, she nudged into his mind, meeting no resistance. She did the same to Vortok, who seemed to welcome her mental presence. She clenched her teeth in concentration — still holding the shield around Balir — and projected Balir’s sound-sight into the other valos.
Not sure how long I can maintain this, she pulsed to them through the connection. Need to move.
—so strange—
The thought had come from Vortok, but she brushed it off as Balir walked forward. Her awareness of herself was limited to the shadowy image Balir had of her and the distant, nearly-numb sensation of forcing her legs to move. She kept her hand on Balir’s arm, the physical contact helping to solidify the mental connection. Aduun and Vortok kept close behind.
Nina’s mouth was suddenly dry as they stepped onto the walkway. It was perhaps three feet wide at best — wide enough to maintain one’s balance while still serving as a constant reminder of the seemingly bottomless pit lurking to either side.
Her stomach flipped at the thought of falling.
The ringing, humming noise reentered her awareness, making Balir’s mental image fuzzy and indistinct.
Gritting her teeth, she strengthened the bubble, hardened it, and thrust away the invasive sound. She would not allow fear to be her master, just as her valos had refused to let Kelsharn be theirs.
Balir increased his pace with renewed confidence, and soon the platform behind them was outside of his perception. Everyone but Balir shuffled their feet as he led them through the many turns, as though afraid the walkway would vanish if they broke contact with it for even an instant.
We feel you near, the voices whispered loudly in Nina’s mind, sweeping through the open link for the valos to hear. The hair on the back of her neck and on her arms raised.
You’re almost here.
Help us!
The group’s steps faltered at the volume of those voices, at their sudden intrusion. Confusion flowed from Balir and Vortok, but from Aduun she sensed only further uneasiness; he alone had heard the voices before.
“Nina?” Aduun grated.
She shook her head, gathered her willpower — borrowing some from her valos — and cast the voices out. Nina could not afford a break in her concentration; she and her companions wouldn’t survive any distractions. For an instant, she felt a hint of displeasure, of anger, but it vanished as quickly as it had come.
Each step forward seemed a mile long, each moment a self-contained eternity. The change in Balir’s sound-sight was subtle at first; he picked up the hint of objects in the nothingness around them, too indistinct to identify, too sparsely placed to investigate. Then Nina realized the bottom of the pit was within his perception, slowly rising to meet the path as they proceeded.
The objects his clicks had been bouncing off grew more numerous and distinct, and soon were rising to tower over Nina and the valos.
Trees.
She picked up the scents of earth, bark, and leaf through one of the valos well before her own nose could detect them. She slowly pulled back from their minds and opened her eyes.
Ahead, the inky black path was flanked by tall, familiar, purple-leafed trees. The starry backdrop remained, but there were hints of ground, now — dead leaves seemingly suspended in the nothingness as though gathered on the forest floor, the occasional jutting root. She glanced over her shoulder. The trees behind them were ghostlike things, mere suggestions of physical objects.
Farther back, the trees weren’t visible at all.
“The sound is back, Nina,” Balir said, muscles tensing beneath her hand.
“I know. But I think we’re almost there. We just need to walk straight.”
Nina took his hand, lacing their fingers together, and led him forward. Aduun followed, maintaining his grip on her shoulder.
The forest materialized around them as they advanced, the trees shimmering as they came into view. A strange sense of excitement and familiarity sparked inside Nina. These were the kind of trees that grew in the forest near her home. And this landscape, with its dips and rises…
She had a sense that she’d been here before, even though that was impossible.
Aduun and Vortok moved up to walk beside Nina, both looking around with awed, suspicious eyes.
“Are these trees real?” Vortok asked.
Balir ran a hand along the rough bark of the closest trunk. “As far as I can tell, they are.”
The trees stopped up ahead, and there appeared to be bare ground beyond them. Dread seeped into Nina’s excitement, souring her stomach and making her mouth dry. She squeezed Balir’s fingers.
“What is wrong?” Balir asked.
She didn’t reply, couldn’t reply. When they emerged from the trees, she lifted her gaze to the mountain slope ahead of them, and her dread burst to mingle with a torrent of conflicting emotions.
“What is this?” Aduun asked.
The abrupt tree line gave way to grass, allowing full view of the rise they were standing upon. The grass grew sparse near the rise’s rocky edges, which fell away to steep slopes. The stone path at Nina’s feet — stones that had been shaped, cut, and placed with meticulous care — continued forward through the grass and along a narrow footpath bridging the rise with a huge, isolated mesa. She knew the dark walls and buildings atop the mesa well; they were all in the right places. Everything was bathed in the silver glow of two moons that had materialized overhead.
“That…that is Bahmet,” Nina said, unable to take her eyes off the place she called home.
But this wasn’t her home. This wasn’t her Bahm
et. It couldn’t be. She’d never seen a stone path in the woods leading into the city, and that was only the most immediate of what wasn’t right.
“Bahmet?” Balir asked. “Your home?”
“Yes, but it’s…not,” Nina said. “It’s different. The same, but it’s just…wrong.”
“I know this place,” Aduun said. “These mountains. But this…this should not be here.”
“This was built after you were changed, after Kelsharn took control over Orishok’s people,” Nina replied numbly, licking her lips. “He forced them to build this place.”
“They built all of that?” Vortok asked incredulously. “Our tribe lived in tents made of hide and bone. How could we build those structures?”
“Remember when I said Orishok wasn’t like you? He was made into something more, and Kelsharn made some use of the valos of another Creator to assist in building this place. Quinn says the Creators were like gods… I know you don’t know what that is, but it means they had unfathomable power. If they can change creatures into new forms, like they changed you, if they can give life to stone, fire, and shadow, if they could make all…this,” she swept her hands through the air, indicating everything around them, “they can do anything.”
“So at some point during our trip through that darkness, we emerged from the caves?” Aduun asked.
“No. I think we’re still underground,” she walked forward. The valos delayed for only a moment before hurrying to walk with her. “Like I said, something’s different here. This isn’t the Bahmet I know.”
No one spoke as they approached the ominous wall around the city. The archway leading through was fully intact, as it was in Bahmet now; she could still remember it having been crumbled when she was very young, before the stone valos helped repair much of the damage the city had suffered after centuries of neglect. Orishok’s people had never seen a reason to fix any of it; they hadn’t possessed their heartstones, hadn’t required food or shelter to survive, hadn’t cared.
The differences between this place and the Bahmet she knew grew more apparent once they were within the walls. Her home was filled with vibrant vegetation, all cultivated by herself and her parents. It was a city full of life and color despite boasting only three inhabitants.
Here, the vegetation had a twisted, wild look. Tall trees stood along the main road, but they appeared stretched, withered, and somehow malicious. The stone around their bases was uneven and cracked, displaced by their gnarled roots. The street was deserted; there wasn’t a valo statue in sight. None of Orishok’s people were here to await Sonhadra’s eventual embrace. The stony remains had been people, and she’d come to know them in her own way throughout their childhood. They were part of what made Bahmet home.
The voices grew louder with every step, begging her, urging her, demanding she move forward.
Come. Come now!
You are close! Free us!
As they entered the square, Nina came to a halt. There were twelve twin-peaked stone mounds, each taller than her, in a ring around the crystal formation. In her Bahmet, that spot was home to a statue of Orishok that Quinn had sculpted, a benevolent protector who held vigil over his dead tribe. It had been a replacement for the huge statue of Kelsharn that once stood in its place, hiding the lost heartstones of the death valos inside the platform beneath it.
But she wasn’t sure what to call the thing on the platform before her now. A crystal pyramid? The base of the formation covered the platform completely, and it tapered steeply near the top to end in a fine point. It was a mess of rough crystalline planes, many of the surfaces muddy and unpolished, and stood perhaps fifteen feet high. The voices emanated from the crystal, vibrated through it, at their loudest and most insistent.
Her feet moved of their own accord, carrying her closer to the crystal.
She broke her gaze away from the formation abruptly. It took everything within her to quiet the voices screaming in her mind, to shut out the demands for release, to resist their strange compulsion. She shifted her course and approached one of the stone mounds again.
She placed a hand on one of the peaks and looked down to find heartstones on the ground.
“These…these are stone valos,” she said.
Did their people in Corfoha know of these dormant valos? How long had these remains been here? She couldn’t imagine Zoya, Rock, or Vlunn leaving them here, alone, with their heartstones scattered amidst the dirt and weeds.
Aduun, Balir, and Vortok cautiously joined her. She saw their wary gazes at the edges of her vision. Vortok’s hackles were raised, and Aduun’s quills were up. Her unease mirrored theirs. Everything about this place screamed at her to run.
“What happened here?” Aduun asked, voice low. Nina got the sense that he feared speaking too loudly would wake something terrible.
“I don’t know. The voices are coming from the crystal, but I…I don’t know what it is or what happened here,” Nina replied.
“The voices are coming from that?” Vortok grunted, projecting a glimmer of fear from him.
As though roused by their mention, the voices assailed her with renewed strength. Nina clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, pushing them away, forcing them out of her head. She met an unsettling amount of resistance.
Something else flickered on the edge of her awareness. Rage. Hunger. Dozens of bestial minds, all worked into a frenzy, all railing against something.
They are trapped. Those are the calls of missing tribesmen.
The muscles of her neck strained as she cast her mind out toward the beasts, narrowing her focus and bolstering her shields to protect against the unrelenting onslaught of demanding voices.
She turned her head to the right and opened her eyes. Though the plants adorning it were different, she knew the street well. It was the road that led to the gardens…
The road that led to what Quinn called the Zoo.
To this day, Quinn had set foot in the Zoo only once, during her early days in Bahmet. She’d declined to accompany Orishok and Nina to the place afterward; just thinking about it had conjured powerful, frightening memories in Quinn’s mind of her captivity on Earth and aboard the Concord.
“I found them,” she said, looking at the others. “I found your people.”
“They are not here,” Aduun said firmly.
“Not here.” Nina lifted her arm and pointed down the dark street. “There.”
Aduun’s gaze followed her gesture. He nodded once. “Let us go, then. I do not wish to linger here.” With a final glance at the crystal pyramid, he stalked in the direction she’d indicated.
She and the valos set a quick pace and moved in a tight group. The voices slammed into Nina’s mind again, crashing into her barrier with enough force to produce sharp pains in her skull and make her steps falter. They weren’t crying for help anymore, weren’t requesting or demanding; they were attempting to psychically compel her to return.
She reached to the sides, grasping Vortok’s fingers to the right and Balir’s to the left.
“I need your strength,” she rasped.
All three valos opened to her, pouring their strength of will into her mind. Their protective instincts washed over her, knitting together to bolster her shields and hold back the assault.
She led the valos to the Zoo; the space was surrounded by a high wall, not unlike the preceding gardens, but this wall was adorned with sculptures of alien creatures beyond Nina’s imagination. As wild as many of them looked, she didn’t doubt that somewhere in that infinite sea of stars, they were all real.
They entered through a wide archway and followed the path toward the center of the Zoo. Light stones activated as they moved, casting gentle illumination on the stones beneath their feet, but the surrounding area remained dark. The silence of the place only heightened Nina’s anxiety; it was in direct contrast to the frenzied beast-minds she sensed nearby.
Broad steps led them up onto a wide central platform, putting them that much closer to the
starry, illusory sky. Warm light bathed the platform, but only shadow remained beyond.
Aduun alone strode forward, swinging his gaze from side to side. “Where are they? Their scent is in the air.”
“They’re all around us,” Nina said between heavy breaths. The physical exertion of their hurried pace seemed insignificant compared to how taxing it was to maintain her mental defenses.
“In the dark?” he demanded. “Why can’t we hear them, why haven’t they called?”
“Aduun, they’re in—”
A bright flash cut off Nina’s words. She released the valos’ hands and threw up her arms to shield her eyes from the intensity of the light. Slowly, her vision adjusted, and the world around her came into focus again.
“Oh,” was all she could manage after she lowered her arms.
The platform upon which they stood was raised above everything else, giving them clear view of the surrounding cages and pens. Each one seemed to contain an animal. Many were familiar, creatures she’d learned about from Orishok, and all were deadly.
The animals looked ragged, emaciated, and many paced their cages restlessly. Those closest to the platform slammed into the invisible walls of their cages, jaws agape in silent roars, splattering saliva and blood on the unseen barriers.
These were the beasts she’d felt. These malnourished, maddened creatures. If there was anything left of the people these creatures once were, she couldn’t sense it now. Not without opening herself up to the other voices.
“Aduun, I’m sorry.”
“These are our people,” he said solemnly, without the tiniest shred of doubt. “This is our tribe.”
Chapter Twenty
Aduun moved his gaze over the caged beasts — over his clan, his kin, his friends. They’d been here all along, trapped as beasts. Whatever suffering he’d endured was nothing compared to what they’d been through. They were wild, ravenous, their bodies wasted away but their ferocity heightened.
They stared up at him with no recognition in their eyes. Their mottled fur and flaking scales only enhanced the outlines of ribs, spines, and hips over which their skin was stretched. Many of the cages were riddled with gouges in their dirt and stone, as though the desperate prisoners had attempted to claw their way to freedom.
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