The part of them that had been Ana frowned. They had no time for indulgence.
Maybe there was an answer in one of Jackson’s files.
He was really good in vee space—
The floor split open, and AnaLex scrambled out of the way of the bright green vine that grew up through the crack. Its color was all the more remarkable in contrast to the mirrored background that framed it and reflected it a hundred times.
What is it?
Jack and the Beanstalk?
Explain.
Later.
A gray-haired head appeared through the crack and then a face, a curiously grinning face.
“Colin?” They ran forward to embrace him.
“Ana?” He squinted. “Lex?”
They nodded. “Yes. It’s a long story. How did you do that?”
“A little trick I picked up from Jackson. I broke out. I’ve been sizing up the enemy. I don’t think he realizes I’m free.”
“The enemy?”
“Our old friend, the former Lord of Agartha.” He winked. “Are you two… um… are you ready to get out of here?”
They nodded. “We’ve been trying for a long time.”
“Climb aboard. I’ll show you what I found.”
EDDY CUT his connection to Andy and Aaron. “I’m not sure this is such a good idea.” They’d all moved into the storage room that sat in the middle of the house, but even in there he could hear the wind howling outside like a wounded coyote. “The last time you three went in, we barely got you back.”
“What did Andy say?”
Eddy sighed. “She said we had to do whatever we could to stop the storm. To stop Davian.”
Jayson shivered. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea either.” His face was ashen white. He’d woken up screaming, and it had taken three of them to calm him down. The man had looked like he was sixty years old when they’d first arrived at the farmhold, worn and tired. Now he seemed to shine with new energy, and if Eddy hadn’t known better, he would have put the man’s age at no more than forty.
“We have to do something.” Marissa was the calm voice of reason, staring pointedly at each of them in turn.
Jayson shook his head. “He’s in there. I don’t want to see him again.”
Marissa knelt next to him. He was seated on the floor between two shelves full of storage bottles, his knees drawn up to his chest. “I know how he hurt you.” Marissa put her hands on his knees. “But if we don’t stop him, he will hurt many more.” She reached out and touched his cheek. “Is that what you want?”
Jayson stared at her, his lower lip trembling.
Geez, what did Davian do to you? Eddy wished he’d left Davian Earthside. He would have stayed there himself if he’d had any idea of the evil that lurked under Davian’s handsome face.
“It’s okay. We’ll be there with you.” Marissa indicated Danny and Delancy.
“I haven’t approved that yet,” Eddy warned.
Marissa shot him a look that said his approval wasn’t required. “So what do you say, Jayson? Father?”
His head whipped around, and he stared at her again. “You’re beautiful and amazing.” He tucked a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I don’t deserve to be your father.”
“Yes, you do. Help us now. We need you.” The last bit came out strained, and Eddy remembered how young she really was. These kids were only fifteen, and they’d been tasked with a burden he wasn’t sure he would have been able to bear now.
At last, Jayson nodded. “What do I do?”
“Come sit with us.” Marissa pulled him up into the middle of the storage room, and he sat in a circle with the three kids.
Thunder rumbled ominously outside.
Eddy knelt next to Marissa. “Are you sure?”
“There’s no other choice.”
Eddy hugged her. “Stay safe. Andy will kill me if I lose any of you.” He didn’t mention that he’d likely kill himself instead.
He stepped back, and Santi, leaning against one of the shelves, pulled him close, wrapping his arms around Eddy’s chest.
He trusts me.
The other four grasped hands, and a moment later they slumped over.
“What do we do now?” Sandra asked.
Eddy rearranged them in more comfortable positions on the floor. “We keep them safe.”
DAVIAN SAT in his throne on top of the stone tower he’d found in one of the world mind’s vee spaces. They were a bit of a bore, these virtual worlds—far too realistic and tame. He’d conjure up a suitable menagerie of creatures to populate them when he’d secured things. Then he could take his time with some of the kids who had escaped his grasp at Agartha. Fashion them into sadistic little soldiers to enforce his will on the general populace.
He grinned.
He couldn’t see the world himself, something he considered a shortcoming of the overall system. But he could hijack the eyes of many of the colonists through their loops.
Davian amused himself flipping from place to place, seeing the scenes of terror that were playing out as his storm destroyed buildings and trees and rained electric terror down on the populace.
When he found Eddy, he’d have to thank the man for bringing him up here. This was turning out to be better than his wildest dreams.
No hotbox for him, not anymore.
COLIN AND AnaLex stood on the rim of a wide valley. Colin looked around. He knew this place. It had been Lex’s playground, the same one Jackson had described to him all those years before. He’d been there many times since he’d become one of the Immortals.
It was Lex’s no more.
The stone tower was now a castle, built of rock as dark as the heart of the void. It was surrounded by a tangle of thorny brambles and then by a wide moat full of rancid water.
The green hills had yellowed and blackened, too, as if a vast fire had swept through the valley.
AnaLex frowned. “How did he get in?”
Colin shrugged. “I’d guess the same way I did. The same way Ana and Jackson got here.”
“Someone transferred him in.” They looked off into the distance, their brow furrowed.
Colin found it hard to look at her. Or at them. One moment she had Ana’s angular, sharp features, and then the next she had softened to Lex’s beautiful, younger face. Sometimes they were both present at the same time.
At times they looked feminine, but then they shifted into a more masculine appearance, or something in between.
The effect was creepy.
“How do we get in?”
“We just—” AnaLex frowned. “That’s weird.”
“Can’t get there?” Colin wasn’t surprised. He’d tried it earlier.
“No. There’s some kind of block.” AnaLex became Ana for a moment, her scientist’s gaze trying to work it out.
“I tried Jackson’s tricks earlier and couldn’t get past the moat.” He glared at the black castle.
“Can you reach the outside world?”
Colin frowned. “I don’t know.” He closed his eyes. Aaron.
Nothing.
“I don’t think so.” It was strange to be so limited. He’d gotten used to being an Immortal with all the powers the name implied.
AnaLex grinned, particularly eerie when they flashed two sets of overlapping teeth. “Maybe if we can’t get in, we can force him out.”
MARISSA OPENED her eyes. She was standing with Danny and Delancy by the peaceful lakeside, in front of the door Jayson had shooed them away from earlier. “Where’s Jayson?”
“Here.” He was standing behind them, sweating profusely.
“Best to get this over with.” Marissa reached for the handle. As she grasped it, a surge of electricity rushed through her hand, knocking her backward through the air. “Damn.” She got up and dusted off her virtual self. “That would have hurt in-body.”
“I think he has to do it.” Delancy looked at Jayson.
He looked at each of them in turn. “You�
�ll protect me?”
Marissa nodded as she rejoined the group. “We’re right here with you.” She wondered how things were going out in meat space. She grinned to herself—using the term Andy had taught them for the real world.
“Okay, here it goes.” Jayson opened the door.
The world went dark, and they were all sucked through into the other side.
THE HOUSE had taken a direct lightning bolt hit in the storm, and Eddy suspected that only the heavy rain had kept the whole place from going up in flames.
Nevertheless, the blow had almost deafened him and had sent jars and boxes and other items careening off the shelves.
The sleepers seemed undisturbed.
The rest of them worked to clear debris to the side of the room. They had one remaining working lantern, which cast a jumpy golden glow across the cluttered space.
Sandra and Sven knelt next to the children, whispering prayers over them.
Santi looked at Eddy, and he shrugged. “Whatever helps.”
Eddy started taking the remaining items off the shelves and stacking them as neatly as possible in corners of the room, hoping to remove any additional potential missiles.
The house shook again, and the movement was followed by another peal of thunder.
“That was close.” Had it struck one of the trees near the house? Eddy found Santi suddenly in his arms. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Santi nodded. “Just startled me.” He leaned down and kissed Eddy.
Eddy savored the kiss and then pulled away, staring at his deputy in the flickering light. “I thought you said….”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t like a little romance.”
Eddy grinned. “I can work with that.”
MARISSA WOKE in utter darkness.
She sat up, breathing quickly, trying to calm her fear. Her heart would be racing, if she had one in vee space.
She felt all around her. There was nothing. She was floating in an inky blackness. “Oh no, oh no, oh no….” She closed her eyes, but there was no difference.
Where was she? What had happened when she’d opened that door?
A white slit appeared, widening until it revealed a giant cartoonish eye. “I remember you.” The voice rumbled through the darkness.
“What… who are you?” She tried to scramble away from its gaze, but there was nowhere to go.
“Oh, pardon me.” The eye closed.
Suddenly there was light, a diffuse white glow, and she was gently lowered to the floor. She was in a box, a silver, shimmery box. She looked up to find a man standing there before her. He offered her a hand up.
She declined, rising awkwardly on her own. “You’re the Preacher.”
He laughed. “Yes, that’s what the folks in Agartha called me. You’ve probably heard a lot about me.”
“What is this place?” She frowned. Aside from the whole black-as-night thing, Davian didn’t seem sufficiently evil.
“You and your friends stumbled into my new domain.” He waved his hand and the world changed, revealing a stone-floored room lit by flickering candlelight. He extended a glass of red wine to her.
“No, thank you. It’s always a bad idea to eat or drink in the nether realms.”
He laughed again. “They’ve been teaching you well. What have they told you about me?”
“That you’re evil?”
Davian shook his head. “We often vilify that which we don’t understand.”
“I don’t—”
He snapped his fingers, and two chairs appeared. He sat down and gestured for her to do the same.
She frowned. She didn’t remember any fairy tales where someone got herself in trouble just for sitting.
“Back on Old Earth, they let everyone do whatever they wanted. It worked for a while, but eventually there were too many people who wanted too many different things.” He leaned back and spread his arms out on the back of the chair. “They started fighting over what they had and what there was—food, water, land. The fighting got worse and worse over time, not better. They used it all up, and in the end, they destroyed whatever was left, and each other.”
Marissa frowned. That wasn’t exactly what she’d been taught. “The nation states did it, not the individual people, and often they were brutal and repressive to their own people.”
He grinned. “You’re very intelligent, aren’t you?”
She blushed. “I don’t know—”
“Was there ever any crime in Agartha?”
“I don’t think so—”
“Did you ever lack for anything? Food? Water? A place to sleep?”
“No.” He made it seem so simple.
“We’re in a generation ship, one that’s going to take hundreds of years to reach its destination.” He waved his hand, and an image of the ship appeared.
She stared at it, fascinated. Andy had shown her what the world looked like before, but it still amazed her to see it.
“If mankind does the same thing all over again, we’ll strip this world of its resources long before we get there. Forever is a closed system. Once we use it up, there’s no more.”
Marissa frowned. It made sense.
“I want your help.” He looked pained. “It’s not going to be easy, bringing order to chaos. You’re the oldest of your peers, right?”
She nodded. “One of them.”
“They listen to you. I can tell.” He grinned, and she was warm all over. She wanted to like him.
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I’m going to need people I can trust in the real world. People who can help me ensure that order persists.”
“What about freedom? Individual will?”
Davian swatted away the idea. “Freedom is an illusion. We’re all trapped, controlled by society.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “We need to think about the greater good.”
She remembered.
His hand was on her shoulder, as he stared into her eyes and told her what to do.
Trapped in a web of gray static, the world around her wrapped in film.
Dull days and dull nights, mechanically eating, sleeping. Even working when her tiny fingers were nimble enough to weave.
Pain. Endless pain.
She pushed him away. “Leave me the fuck alone! I don’t want anything to do with you or your plans.”
Davian gaped at her, and then a lazy smile crossed his face. “I’d hoped you’d make this easy on me. On yourself too. But there are other ways.” He waved his hand theatrically, and she was plunged back into her box.
This time she wasn’t afraid. She laughed at him, at his theatrical flourishes, at his veiled threats. “Fucking asshole.”
Then she started poking around, looking for a way out of her prison.
Chapter Thirteen: Boxed In
COLIN PASSED the skills he’d learned from Jackson on to AnaLex. It was strange, seeing them as one person, but he supposed he would get used to it. He’d gotten accustomed to much stranger things before this.
Would he ever want to be so intimately linked to anyone?
Maybe to Trip. No one else.
AnaLex nodded. “It passes outside the normal subroutines. We always wondered how Jackson and his progeny managed to tap into us without us knowing.”
“Yeah, kinda like the limbic system bypasses the normal veins and arteries in the body.” He reached down and coaxed up a green vine. It rose to chest height, questing around in the air. “It would be amazing to do this out in meat space.”
“Like a super power.” AnaLex experimented with a vine of their own. “So what do we do?”
Colin grinned. “When strategy and finesse fails, try brute force.”
THE WALLS of the storage room rattled in the wind.
“How strong is this house?” Eddy asked, casting a worried glance at the ceiling.
Sven shrugged. “Strong enough to survive a regular storm. We never considered the need to worry about hurricane-force winds.”
“I don’t suppose t
here’s a basement?”
Sven shook his head.
There was a loud crash.
Eddy shuddered. “That didn’t sound good.”
COLIN AND AnaLex wove a cage of vines over the stone castle, intertwining them to make a nearly impenetrable cage. They worked side by side, combining their strength to hem Davian in.
With the cage completed, they squeezed it tighter, encountering the invisible barrier Davian had erected to protect himself, the one they couldn’t cross.
Though they pushed with all their might, it held.
He was strong, or else his barrier was proof even against Jackson’s abilities.
Colin dropped to his knees, exhausted. “It’s too difficult. We’ll never get past it.”
“Perhaps we’re going about this wrong.” AnaLex cupped their chin in their hand, staring at the cage.
“How so?”
“Look at the shape.”
Colin looked up at the cage of vines. “It’s a dome. So?”
“So, what happens when you compress the entire surface of a dome equally?”
“It… gets stronger.” He stood up, staring at it.
“Up to a point. With infinite force, we could break through like this. But we don’t have infinite force.”
He nodded. “But we can apply the force more strategically.”
AnaLex were becoming more cohesive, more of a single entity. “Apply enough force at one point—”
“And we might break through. Where?”
“There, at the very top.”
He nodded, and together they pushed.
DAVIAN VIEWED scenes of destruction through the eyes of people from Darlith to Micavery. The Rhyl, the river that ran through Darlith, was swollen with rain and threatening to overflow its banks. Winds whipped at the buildings, ineffectual where they encountered bricks but devastating when they contacted wooden structures and roofs.
In Micavery, the waters of Lake Jackson were in turmoil, and at least one tornado had swept through the town, leaving a path of devastation.
The Rising Tide Page 23