Ashfall Legacy

by Pittacus Lore

  Gold energy lapped me up, like a giant tongue. The Etherazi swallowed me.

  And then it receded from the ship. Receded from the universe. Dragged me into the space in between.

  I was a boy. Five years old. Riding on an airplane for the first time. I looked up at my mom, sitting next to me, as she gulped down some ice water, her hand shaking.

  And then I was a man. In my forties. My beard scratchy. My arm ached all the time because of the metal sleeve I’d donned—my shame. I stood on the bridge of a spaceship with strangers all around me and stared at a screen, gazing out at a planet wreathed in fire. A hand patted me on the shoulder. I turned and came face-to-face with what was most definitely an older version of Zara, one of her ears missing, scars covering her snout.

  “You did what had to be done,” she said. “You—”

  DON’T GET LOST NOW.

  I’d been unstuck in time. Adrift in my past and future. The Etherazi shoved me back into the now, just as it had when I’d been overwhelmed by the Wayscope.

  I floated through an emptiness, a stillness. The Etherazi was coiled around me. I could see into the beating core of the thing. A writhing mass the size of a car, the thing was shaped like a heart—not a cutout Valentine’s heart, but a gory and twisty science-class-dissection-day heart—ventricles and arteries and all that good stuff, tangled around one another, pumping out the incomprehensible energy that gave the Etherazi its dragon-like form.

  “Yikes,” I said, surprised my voice worked in this place. Surprised, also, that I wasn’t dead. Unsurprised, at least, that the first thing I said was dumb as hell.

  Two leathery flaps on the Etherazi’s core peeled back, revealing an enormous eye—reptilian, jaundiced, and ancient. The sight of a massive floating eye was way grosser in person than those boring hobbit novels suggested. I tried to recoil, but the Etherazi held me in place.

  THE BOY OF MANY NAMES. I HAVE WAITED GENERATIONS FOR YOU.

  The Etherazi’s voice was in my head with all the subtlety of an anvil. I tried to keep my cool.

  “My ship, my friends, what did you—?”

  THEY ARE WELL. I HAVE SPARED THEM TO CONSECRATE OUR ALLIANCE.

  “Um, what?”

  THE PLACE YOU SEEK. DEATH AWAITS YOU THERE.

  I slid into another spot on my timeline, a place I didn’t yet belong.

  I stood on a planet where ash fell like snow. The clouds were dark overhead. Huge buildings cluttered the horizon, their windows shadowy gaps, many of them crumbling in on themselves. I got some real post–nuclear holocaust vibes. I held out my hands and let some of the foamy ash collect in my palms. My father’s ring glowed brightly on my finger.

  I was there. The planet where my dad was stranded. How far into my future was this?

  Turning around, I caught sight of a massive structure at the end of the debris-covered road. A black pyramid, its walls a dull metallic black. There was a crashed spaceship—an ISV, like the Eastwood—broken against the side of the temple. It looked like someone had plowed the ship right into the building kamikaze-style, but the pyramid wasn’t damaged in the least. In fact, considering how desolate everything else was around here, the temple was in remarkably good shape.

  Whump!

  Something struck me between the shoulder blades. I staggered forward two steps and fell to my knees. My chest was hot and sticky. I looked down—there was a dark hole in my sternum. I’d been shot clean through the heart.

  I was supposed to be invulnerable. But something with enough force had lanced straight through me. I tasted and smelled fumes from my own insides, like motor oil. In those last moments, the worst part was not understanding. I didn’t know how or why or—

  COME BACK. THAT FUTURE IS NOT FOR YOU. ONLY IF YOU GO UNPREPARED. ONLY IF YOU DO NOT LISTEN.

  I snapped back into my present, still floating through the Etherazi’s energy field. I groped at my chest and gasped for breath.

  “Did I just—?” I swallowed. My tears were cold on my cheeks. “Did I just die?”

  The eye stared at me, completely unfeeling.

  ONLY ONE END. OF MANY POSSIBLE. YOU ALWAYS DIE. ALL YOUR KIND MUST. BUT YOU MUST NOT DIE SO SOON.

  “This is fucked,” I said. “Why would you show me that? Why are we even talking?”

  It occurred to me only after I said it that the alternative to talking with the Etherazi was getting eaten or turned to dust or whatever. Luckily, the monstrosity enveloping me didn’t seem to mind my tone.

  YOU WILL GO TO WHERE THE ASH FALLS. FIND WHAT IS LEFT OF YOUR FATHER.

  “I was trying to do that when you showed up,” I said. “I was trying to find—”

  YOU WOULD FAIL. THERE ARE ENEMIES WITH YOU. IT IS NOT SAFE TO GO YET, BUT THE TIME WILL COME SOON. AFTER WE MEET AGAIN.

  Enemies with you, said the colossal creature made from psychic energy whose species perpetuated planet-wide massacres for no apparent reason.

  “This—this—!”

  I shouted incoherently. Trapped in this in-between space with a cryptic-ass time-traveling intelligence, I was getting more than a little freaked out. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to regain some composure. This Etherazi had saved me from getting lost in the Vastness. It knew about my father. It knew a frightening amount about me. I needed to ask the right questions.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Why are you helping me?”

  I AM THE GOLDEN PROPHET WHO LIGHTS THE WAY, THE KINSLAYER, HE WHO WALKS AMONG THE ENEMY, ARCHITECT OF LIBERATION.

  “Oh,” I replied, blinking. “That’s your name?”

  YES.

  “It’s long.”

  YOU ARE SYDNEY CHAMBERS, HUMAN, DENZAN, WORLD KILLER.

  World killer?

  “Um, no, just Syd is fine,” I said.

  SOON, THE MASTERS WILL RETURN.

  “What masters?”

  OUR OLD MASTERS FROM THE TIME FORGOTTEN. YOU CALL THEM THE LOST.

  I blinked. “You mean the Lost People? My dad’s research—”

  THEY SEEK TO RECLAIM THEIR UNIVERSE.

  “Uh, which universe is that, exactly?”

  ALL.

  “Oh.”

  YOU WILL KILL THEM IN THEIR CRADLE. I HAVE SEEN THIS.

  The brief vision I’d had of myself—it wasn’t exactly a vision; it was like jumping ahead to another part of my life. I’d stared down at a planet on fire. I knew, somehow, that I was the one who’d given the order. I’d torched that planet. And Zara was with me.

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t really see myself becoming, like, a world killer, okay?”

  INEVITABLE.

  “Agree to disagree.”

  WE WILL MEET AGAIN WHEN IT IS TIME.

  “When? What happened to my dad? What did he find out there? Who—?”

  Even as I asked these questions, the giant eye flapped closed. I could sense the Etherazi beginning to recede from me, so I started shouting.

  “Hey! Wait! You can’t just—!”

  It was gone.

  I floated in the vacuum of space. Something like a daze came over me, an empty feeling in my mind due to the absence of the Etherazi’s booming voice. And into that absence shot the knifelike pains of a major migraine.

  Also, I couldn’t breathe. The oxygen in my lungs was frozen. My skin crackled.

  Exposed. In space. It left me out there.

  And I was too messed up to care.

  I remembered only fragments of Reno coming to get me, the captain buckled into her Battle-Anchor, the mech-suit even more intimidating up close. The bulky arms were surprisingly gentle as she wrapped me up and tugged me back toward the ship.

  “Hang in there, Cadet,” she told me, her voice shaky. “Hang in there.”

  I didn’t know it then, but the Denzan part of me was working overtime, converting light rays from this galaxy’s sun into nutrients, keeping me alive. Surviving in the vacuum of space was a lot like getting drowned by your mom.

  Also, it wasn’t
just light rays my body was absorbing. There was a warmer, more powerful energy that I’d been exposed to. The Etherazi. It had fed me just enough to keep me going.

  By the time Reno got me back on the Eastwood, my hair had turned a glowing shade of gold.

  18

  I tiptoed my way back to consciousness, coaxed awake by whispers. My nerve endings were slow to fire, but once they did, hoo boy, did I hurt. My headache was at spike-through-the-forehead level. My skin had a frostbitten sting; even the smooth-as-silk extraterrestrial sheets felt like they were covered with coarse bristles. Every inch of me screamed like tenderized meat.

  It took some effort to stifle a moan, but I wanted to hear what they were saying about me. This was one of Mom’s oldest lessons. Play possum until you know what’s up.

  “I need something that approaches an explanation, Tycius,” Captain Reno said. “Because I don’t know what in the blue blazes just happened.”

  Reno and my uncle were watching over me, whispering just a few feet from my bed. I could tell by the smell—like aloe and lemon—that we weren’t in my room but in the Eastwood’s medical bay. I sensed a monitoring device squeezing my upper arm.

  “I’m as baffled as you are,” my uncle replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m not sure anyone’s ever seen anything like it.”

  “Arkell and Aela were able to patch the breach in the ship,” Reno said. “Arkell called the damage ‘surgical.’ Have you ever known one of those monsters to be surgical, Tycius?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Our guard was down, and that son of a bitch should’ve torn right through us,” Reno continued, with a mixture of relief and mystification. “The kid was enveloped, Tycius. The Etherazi had him out in the Vastness for some three minutes before I got to him. The monster kept him alive out there and then lit off like it’d just popped by to say hi.”

  If either of them were paying attention to the monitoring equipment, they would’ve noticed my pulse going up. It was really sinking in now. An extraterrestrial destroyer that even the Denzans didn’t fully understand had sought me out.

  World killer.

  “The Etherazi incursion pinged on the institute’s sensors,” Reno continued. “They want to know what happened, and I’ve got no idea what to tell them.”

  “Tell the institute that we had a close call, but the hostile didn’t seem interested in us.”

  Reno scoffed. “Close call? That was more than a—”

  “Ten years ago, my brother disappeared, destroying his own trail and years of research in the process, and both the institute and the Senate were ambivalent about it,” Tycius hurriedly whispered. “Now we have his son, the key to finding Marcius, and not two weeks after we leave Earth the kid turns into an Etherazi magnet. How do you think they’ll respond to that news?”

  Reno paused to consider this. I held my breath.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Your people love to talk. They’ll talk the whole thing to death. The cadet will be my age before they so much as assemble a panel to debate the issue.”

  “Exactly,” Ty said. “They’ll take control away from us. I can’t let that happen. Don’t you want to find Marcius? Don’t you want to know what he found?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we keep this quiet,” Ty concluded. “The other cadets think Sydney tried—stupidly or bravely, depending on who you ask—to distract the Etherazi while you finished prepping your Battle-Anchor and that you saved him just in time. Vanceval wants to find Marcius as badly as we do; he’ll play along. All we have to worry about is Arkell.”

  “I can keep Arkell in line,” Reno responded. “I’m one of the First Twelve, and he’s an ex-Rampart wannabe terrorist who couldn’t blow up a balloon. For all his attitude, he loves the Vastness, and he knows one bad report from me will keep him planetside for the rest of his life.”

  “Good,” Tycius replied. “We’ll still want to keep an eye on him.”

  Reno’s comm beeped, and I heard her suck her teeth. “The institute is hailing me again.” She sighed. “I’ll be back. I want to be here when he wakes up.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Tycius said.

  Once Reno left, Tycius sighed deeply and sat down in a chair next to my bed. He brushed some hair out of my face, and I didn’t feel at all weirded out by his long extraterrestrial fingers. It was comforting.

  “I know you’re awake,” he said. “How much did you hear?”

  I popped one eye open. “Most of it.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  Tycius nodded. “Your hair is gold now.”

  “Seriously?”

  I reached for the tablet on the table next to my bed and turned it to mirror mode. Tycius wasn’t kidding. My hair was the color of coins in a video game, of bars in a bank vault. I matched the Etherazi who’d taken me.

  “I kind of like it,” I said.

  “It’ll fade once the Etherazi’s energy leaves your body,” Ty said. “I think. I’m not sure. I don’t understand what happened at all, Sydney. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I replied. “I don’t understand half the stuff I see up here either.”

  Ty shook his head like that wasn’t much comfort. “I should’ve never let you use the Wayscope. I should’ve never rushed you.”

  He produced the cosmological tether and held it out to me. I took the ring, examining the faraway cosmos contained in the gemstone. A golden streak flashed across the surface—or maybe that was just my imagination.

  “We’ve long known that it was possible to spot an Etherazi through the Wayscope,” Tycius continued. “But we never imagined that they could see us, too. That’s what happened, right? It came for you.”

  I swallowed, setting the ring down, suddenly afraid of my only link to my father.

  “I think it was waiting for me there,” I said. “It knew we’d come looking.”

  “The way to Marcius . . . Did you see it? Could you find him?”

  I shook my head. “I saw too much. It’s all jumbled. I don’t know where I was.”

  “Jumbled” was an understatement. Words got jumbled. My memory of the Vastness was like a broken window. Nothing fit together.

  “We’ll work up to it,” Tycius said. “With training—”

  “He said I wasn’t ready yet, but when the time was right, I would know.”

  My uncle’s mouth hung open. He gave me a look like I’d just said something insane.

  “Who said that?”

  The Golden Prophet? Kinslayer? The Architect of Liberation? The psychic space dragon had a ton of really dramatic names.

  “The gold one,” I settled on. “The Etherazi.”

  “You . . . you spoke to it?”

  “Mostly he shouted words into my brain, but . . .” I hesitated because of the wide-eyed way my uncle was looking at me. “Yeah?”

  Ty sat back. “Amazing,” he said, stroking his chin. “There were attempts to communicate during the invasion of Denza. Some survivors of their temporal violence reported voices. None of it made sense. It all sounded like madness driven by contact with the Etherazi. But you’re saying that the two of you . . .”

  “Chatted,” I said. “Yup.”

  My uncle leaned forward again. He was having trouble sitting still.

  “You shouldn’t tell anyone about that. Not even Captain Reno.”

  After listening in on his conversation with the captain, I didn’t need to ask why. It would freak people out. “Okay.”

  “What did it say?” he asked.

  What did the Etherazi say? Oh, well, it called me a world killer. Showed me my death. Showed me another future where I was watching a planet burn. Pretty good talk we had.

  I decided right then it was probably smart to keep a few prophecies to myself. It’s what my mom would’ve done.

  “He told me that the masters were coming back,” I said. “He seemed shook.”

  “What mast
ers?”

  “He said we call them the Lost. Like the . . .”

  “The Lost People,” Tycius finished, his eyes widening. “Why did he tell you this?”

  Because I’m supposed to kill them in their cradle. Whatever the hell that means. Couldn’t tell my uncle that.

  “I think he was warning me,” I replied. “He said these masters wanted to reclaim their universe.”

  “Mind games,” Tycius said with a dismissive wave, then squinted, pondering the matter further. “But what would be the point of that?”

  “I don’t think he was screwing with me. I think he feels threatened by . . . by whatever’s out there. He said we should form an alliance.”

  “Diplomacy,” Tycius said. “With marauders. This is unprecedented.”

  “I know you made fun of my Earth sci-fi, but in those books, like nine times out of ten it’s the precursor aliens that come back from a cryogenic stasis or some shit and wage war against the younger species.”

  Ty’s hair sprang up, then eased back down across his head. “Marcius’s research focused on the Lost People. Their artifacts are so widespread, he thought they might have evolved traits or created tech that could help humans beat the Wasting. He thought he’d found their home world . . .” My uncle stroked his chin. “I’ve considered dozens of scenarios for why he was stranded out there. An accident. Sabotage. But what if Marcius found something that frightened him badly enough to cut himself off? What if he was trying to protect the rest of us . . . ?”

  I nodded along. “And now, just when we come close to finding him, there’s a big bad waiting out there to warn us off.”

  “I checked the Wayscope. An energy spike caused by the Etherazi erased the data it collected. We’re still at square zero.” Ty’s mouth formed a tight line as he glanced down at the cosmological tether. “Knowing all this, I’d understand if you didn’t want to try again.”

  “Whoa, I never said that,” I replied. “The Etherazi didn’t give me the impression that this is something we can just ignore. Not to mention, based on the Vulpin who attacked us on Earth, we aren’t the only ones looking for my dad. We need to find him. I want to find him. I just think—I don’t know—that we should be better prepared next time?”