Resolved. That word hung in the air, heavy with implication. There was a faraway look in my dad’s eyes.
“When we found—when we found the temple, Alex lost his mind. It wasn’t the cure for the Wasting. Not—not the one we were expecting, anyway,” my dad continued. “He murdered most of the others before we could stop him.”
The temple. In my vision of that grim planet, I’d glimpsed a great black pyramid in the center of a ruined city. Right before something burst through my chest.
Alex. He must have meant Alexander Abe, the one human on my dad’s crew. He’d killed his own shipmates? What could’ve driven him to that? I thought of the times of death on the ship’s manifest, so many in rapid succession. How quickly Abe had killed the others; how mercilessly.
“But we did stop him,” my dad continued. “Killed him. We killed him thanks to . . .” He shook his head. “That will be my shame to carry, for however long I have left. A very small shame, in the face of a much bigger one . . .”
My dad shook his head, trying to straighten out his thoughts.
“You must listen to me, Vanceval,” my dad resumed. “I know this will be hard for you to hear. This is your life’s work as well as mine. The Lost People, this place we call Ashfall—they must never be found. I’m doing everything I can to eradicate my trail, but you must do the rest. For the good of the universe, you can’t let anyone come looking for me.”
For a moment, my eyes flicked away from the screen to Vanceval’s face. His eyes were wet with tears as he watched with me.
“There is a loose end,” my dad said. “My son is in possession of a cosmological tether. It should be extinguished when I expire, but—just in case—you need to find him. Recover the tether. Destroy it. Do whatever you have to do. We are lost. Don’t let us be found.”
He coughed.
The transmission ended.
It was Vanceval who sent the Vulpin to kidnap me all those years ago. And he did that on the wishes of my own father. My father, who didn’t care what kind of collateral damage might come from his transmission.
My vision blurred. There were tears in my eyes now, too.
Vanceval put the tablet aside and peered at the glowing cosmos contained inside the cosmological tether.
“I expected your father to die, as he all but promised to do,” Vanceval said. “It’s why I never tried to find you again, after the first time was such a failure.” He looked over his shoulder again, at the Vulpin working on the ship. “Mercenaries, I have found, can be terribly unreliable.”
I clenched my jaw, trying to get a word out. My tongue still felt packed in cotton.
“I had a decade to consider your father’s request,” Vanceval continued. “A decade among my relics to consider a dead end to my life’s great passion. I have watched your father’s transmission over and over again. And I have decided that it is not his decision to make. He was not of sound mind.”
I actually agreed with him. Not that old Vanceval seemed like the picture of sanity either, at this point.
“I tried to extract the coordinates from you on the Eastwood, knowing that you could be . . . damaged as a result.” Vanceval clicked his metal fingers together regretfully. “It had to be done. I knew enough about your father’s associations to know why Marie Reno and those others are still so interested in him. The humans want to find Ashfall because they think it will cure their sickness. But you heard your father. What they found drove Alexander Abe insane. Whatever is there, your kind is not equipped to deal with it.”
But you are, I thought.
“But I am,” Vanceval said solemnly. “I am a man of science. And I will have answers.”
He stepped forward and turned on the Wayscope. The equipment crackled to life above me, the goggles creaking as they lowered to just above my forehead.
“You know the truth now.” Vanceval leaned down to peer into my eyes. “You understand that I must see what is on Ashfall. Will you do as I ask?”
This time, I managed to shake my head. Vanceval scuttled backward. Maybe I was exhibiting more motor functions than he was ready for.
“That disappoints me,” Vanceval said, then waved at someone over my shoulder. “I hoped to avoid this . . .”
Nyxie reappeared, with a tattered bundle slung over her shoulder. She dumped the pile of rags at Vanceval’s feet, and it groaned.
Not it. He.
My uncle.
They’d really beaten the hell out of him. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the skin turned dark purple. There were gashes—Vulpin claw marks—all over his arms and face, his clothes shredded by the wounds, not to mention a blaster burn on one of his legs. His hair pulsed quickly, like an erratic heartbeat, desperately trying to find nutrients to heal his wounds.
At first, I didn’t think he was conscious. But then his good eye focused on me and he groaned again, this time more in frustration than in pain.
“Aw, Syd . . .” Ty’s voice rattled in his throat. “Damn it.”
I glared at Vanceval and Nyxie, my eyes practically vibrating with the force of it.
“Nyxie will kill him,” Vanceval whispered, like he could barely stand it himself. The Vulpin smiled at me and shrugged, like What ya gonna do? “But first,” Vanceval added, “she will torture him.”
The Vulpin girl spun out her blaster from within her coat, the same one that she’d used on Zara, and fired a burst of plasma into the floor. Then she crouched over my uncle and pressed the hot barrel onto the top of his head, burning away hair and flesh. He gritted his teeth, trying not to scream, and eventually failed.
Vanceval averted his eyes. “Denzans are not built for this barbarity. Give me what I want, Sydneycius, and this can all be over.”
“Don’t, Syd . . . ,” Tycius panted. “Don’t—”
“Hmpf,” I grunted, the best I could do. It was a noise of agreement. I managed a very weak nod, staring at Vanceval.
I wasn’t going to let them hurt my uncle over this. Vanceval could have my father’s coordinates and go off to that lost galaxy, chasing death.
I’d meet him there.
“Thank you,” Vanceval said with genuine relief.
He clumsily slipped the cosmological tether on to my finger, then lowered the goggles the rest of the way over my face.
LOCATION ENCRYPTED.
DNA VERIFIED.
ACCESSING.
My mind opened to the Vastness. It was like before, the tether creating a glowing trail for me to follow through the stack of star systems. My practice in the basement of Rafe’s pizzeria had definitely helped give me the confidence that I could handle this. Not to mention knowing there wasn’t some Vulpin hacker shit attached ready to zap my brain. Being out in the Vastness no longer felt so frightening. I could slip easily between one cosmos and the next. All I had to do was hold the tether in my mind and it would pull me in the right direction.
Ashfall.
There was no Etherazi lurking this time. I was alone.
It occurred to me that I could derail Vanceval’s whole plan by letting my focus lapse, by drinking in too much information. Let the Wayscope fry my brain and give my dad what he wanted—to be left for dead on a strange planet, away from his family, buried with his secrets.
But I wanted to know. I wanted to see Ashfall as badly as Vanceval did. Even knowing what the future had in store for me, I couldn’t resist the pull.
I wanted to see my dad again and tell him to his face that it was pretty fucked up to send people after his own family. To leave us hanging. To put the fate of the universe on me.
I was done running from things.
I let the cosmological tether take me to his location. Seven systems from here, three of them not even charted, including the one with Ashfall. The most efficient path would require three weeks of travel time, if a ship burned like hell.
I knew Vanceval would be watching my progress on the Wayscope’s screen, so I took my time figuring out the correct route. I made some mistakes, veered
off course, made it sloppy.
Every second I spent in the Vastness was another second for my body to recover.
The moment I honed in on Ashfall, though—the very instant that I identified the last wormhole that would need to be ripped open to send a ship there—the Wayscope went up. I gasped at being yanked so quickly out of the Vastness, my consciousness slamming back into my physical body with the force of an anvil. I immediately had a splitting headache and felt a bit of blood trickling down onto my upper lip.
“Bastard,” I mumbled.
I could speak. I could feel my fingers and toes. I strained against the straps on the Wayscope’s arms and legs, but I couldn’t budge them. I wasn’t strong enough yet.
But I was close.
“I have the coordinates,” Vanceval said, disconnecting his tablet from the Wayscope. “Is your team ready?”
Nyxie nodded. “You say the word, we’re breaking atmosphere.” She nudged my uncle with her toe, then jerked her chin in my direction. “What do you want us to do with these two?”
“They can’t be allowed to follow me.”
Vanceval wouldn’t look at me or Tycius, even though we were the ones he was condemning to death.
Nyxie’s whiskers twitched in irritation. “Fucking Denzans, man,” she said to me. “Guy thinks it doesn’t count if he doesn’t tell me to kill you directly.”
I strained forward, willing myself to move. My forearms twitched. I could almost feel my strength returning.
Nyxie pulled her blaster and aimed it at Tycius.
“You probably don’t want to watch this,” she said to me.
Come on. Come on. Break free. Fight!
Her finger on the trigger.
“What is that?”
That was Vanceval. He’d stopped a few yards away and pointed out at the ocean. Nyxie turned to look.
There was something coming out of the water.
Someone.
A gleaming exo-suit. A dented faceplate. Rust on the joints.
A wisp.
“Hey!” That was one of Nyxie’s crewmates. The rest of the Vulpin had noticed the intruder and approached it with weapons drawn. “You can’t be here!”
The Vulpin surrounded the wisp, made a tight circle, but the exo-suit kept walking up the beach. Didn’t even seem to notice them.
The wisp was walking right toward me.
Nyxie shook her head. “Poor cloud guy was probably just checking out the bottom of the ocean for his archive, and now we gotta ventilate him. This job can be something awful on the conscience.”
I laughed, but not at anything that Nyxie was saying. It was partly out of relief and partly out of disbelief—the kind of sound you might make when you step off a curb and just narrowly avoid getting hit by a car. That near-death-dumb-luck chuckle.
Because I’d seen that wisp before. And so had Nyxie, although she didn’t realize it.
“He Who . . .” I struggled to get the words out.
“Get your people to the ship,” Vanceval said, suddenly alarmed. “Now.”
“What?” Nyxie replied, eyeing me. “What’re you saying?”
“He Who Walks Among the Enemy,” I said.
With a pathetic hydraulic wheeze, the wisp’s faceplate popped open.
Gold fire poured out.
29
The smart Vulpin, the lucky Vulpin—they were the ones who retreated immediately. The ones who went sprinting for their cruiser.
The ones who tried to fire on Goldy? Well, that didn’t work out so great for them.
Watching the Etherazi burst free from the exo-suit was like seeing a waterfall pour forth from a plastic bottle. It seemed impossible that something so huge could be contained by something so small. The sight hurt my brain to look at, a sharp ache unfolding behind my eyebrows as Goldy reared up, his serpentine body turning the beach beneath him to solid glass. He unfurled his fiery wings and shrieked. In my brain, his cry echoed as laughter.
Some of the mercenaries, obviously panicked, tried to shoot him. Their plasma bolts were absorbed into his body.
A tendril of energy lanced out from Goldy’s midsection and shot through the nearest Vulpin. I watched as his fur turned gray and then blew away on the wind, his skin peeling back, revealing bleached white bones. The mercenary’s skeleton crumbled and broke against the beach’s new glass surface. Another Vulpin tried to sprint away, but one of Goldy’s spiky limbs went solid and sliced through his body, splitting him in half. I flinched as the Vulpin’s remains flew in our direction.
The Vulpin’s airborne torso smacked right into Nyxie, knocking her down. She quickly staggered back to her feet, fur matted with gore, her face a horrified mask.
She never pulled the trigger. In the chaos erupting all around us, my uncle and I no longer mattered. It was all about survival now.
“To the ship!” Vanceval screamed, shielding his eyes from the sight of the Etherazi.
Nyxie stumbled over to him, holstering her blaster, and draped her coat over the Denzan’s head. She ushered him toward the ship, steering well clear of the Etherazi.
Meanwhile, on the beach, Goldy expanded farther, overtaking two more Vulpin mercenaries as they fled, reducing them in an instant to nothing but bones. My eyes burned to look at him, my brain struggling to put into context what I was seeing. In one moment, he was a massive serpent with wings flapping above the Vulpin, the air itself warping around his presence. And in the same moment, he was a tidal wave of energy, a shapeless wall, a mass of chaos. He was so powerful, and yet he took his time with the Vulpin. He could’ve overtaken them in a breath, unraveled their entire spaceship. I’d seen how the Etherazi moved during the invasion, knew what they were capable of.
Goldy was toying with them.
No. He was herding them.
Tycius crawled toward me, keeping his head low. “Look away, Syd . . . ,” he pleaded as he fumbled with the restraints on my legs. “Look away.”
I couldn’t. Goldy’s form was too beautiful and horrific. My mind yearned to make sense of him, even as my brain turned to liquid between my ears.
And then one of his wings swept too close to the warehouse, disrupting its temporality. The broken wall rebuilt itself before my eyes, sealing off my view of the beach.
I let loose a low, ragged moan. My head felt like it’d just been pulled off a spike.
“Are you okay?” Ty asked me, unbuckling me from the Wayscope. “Can you move? You really need to move.”
I coughed into my shoulder, then made a tentative fist. It wasn’t as strong as it should’ve been, but at least I was back in control of my fingers. I pushed off the chair and wobbled to my feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked Ty. He seemed to be having an even harder time standing than I was, and once we were both on our feet, we leaned against each other.
“I’ll live,” he said. “Vanceval. I never thought . . . By the tides, the man has lost his mind.”
The entire warehouse shook as the Vulpin cruiser hammered its afterburners and streaked into the atmosphere. They’d gotten away. Some of them had, at least. Goldy had all but let them. He’d also saved my life along with Ty’s, so I couldn’t be too bitter about it.
The desolate beach and this empty warehouse were suddenly eerily quiet. A back door that had taken shape in the rebuilt wall slowly creaked open, like something out of a slasher flick.
Tycius took a protective step in front of me.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate the gesture, Uncle,” I said and eased him behind me. “But let’s be realistic.”
Goldy—in the guise of a wisp—tottered into the room. His exo-suit didn’t have the same points of articulation that a more modern version like Aela’s did, so his legs were a bit rigid, and the dents and rust on his torso made it seem like he could fall apart at any moment. It was a little ridiculous to think of what was contained inside there and how it’d just erased a handful of Vulpin like they were nothing.
“Hello again,” Goldy s
aid as he approached, his voice tinny and mechanical as it emerged from the suit, a relief after the booming psychic shout-fest I’d endured last time.
“I knew that was you,” I said. “On the street.”
“Yes,” Goldy replied. “I did not intend to make myself known to you then, but the Vulpin woman sought to accelerate our timeline. I delayed her to this more appropriate juncture.”
The Etherazi stopped in front of us, golden energy flickering beneath his faceplate. The arms on the suit swayed back and forth, like Goldy didn’t know what to do with them.
Tycius shook his head. “This is impossible.”
“No,” Goldy responded. “I am capable of producing the same wavelengths as an Ossho. It is quite simple.”
“You can communicate,” Tycius said, like he hadn’t quite believed me when I’d told him about my previous conversation with the Etherazi. “You monsters are capable of speech.”
“Insulting him is maybe not a great idea,” I said quietly.
“There has been nothing for us to discuss until now,” Goldy said.
“Nothing to—?” My uncle’s voice shook with anger. “You slaughtered millions—”
Goldy raised a hand to Tycius, cutting him off, demanding silence. “Your species has the luxury of forgetting the atrocities you committed, reducing them to silly religious observances. But I remember what you did, Denzan. In the long ago.”
Tycius touched the bands on his arm. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“In the long ago, your kind exiled mine to the space in between. Imprisoned us. Many of my brothers and sisters went mad there. When they were set loose, their rage crashed against your world.” Goldy paused. “I tried to warn them that eradicating your kind was a waste of energy. They didn’t listen then. They do now.”
My uncle’s mouth hung open. I couldn’t blame him. He’d just had some millennia-spanning grudge laid at his feet, an explanation for the Etherazi attack on Denza plopped down like it was completely inconsequential.
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