Dark Matter (Interchron Book 3)

by Liesel K. Hill

  The screen cut to a man who, like the blond doctor was light of skin and blue of eye, but this man had dark, close-cropped hair and a broad, jutting forehead.

  “Others take a different view,” the too-professional voice of the female newscaster intoned.

  “These criminals aren’t responsible for their actions,” the dark-haired man said. “We’ve proven it by mapping their brain chemistry. It’s abnormal, which means they’re sick. They need psychological help, which is what we’re trying to give them. They aren’t capable of changing on their own, yet the BCO wants us to punish them for something they can’t help. And they’re entirely unscientific about the whole thing. Where’s their proof?”

  Maggie had realized some time ago that the blond doctor had been a very young, nearly unrecognizable Doc. She supposed, somewhere in the back of her head, she’d suspected who the dark-haired man would become. Now she knew. The dark-haired doctor on the newscast had been Bartholomew.

  But Maggie wouldn’t have needed to connect all the details to figure out the man was B. She recognized the memory. Though the room looked like a cylinder from the outside, to those standing within, it would be round.

  Maggie wondered what would happen if she entered the room. She wanted to see these interactions. Wanted to see B's face, and hear his words clearly, standing next to him, rather than through a wall of glass.

  Rather than beating on the glass, she backed up, planning to throw her shoulder against the glass in hopes of shattering it. Running forward, she slammed her body into the barrier. To her great surprise, nothing shattered. She didn't feel the barrier against her shoulder at all but merely flew through the air and landed at B’s feet.

  If he saw her enter the memory, he gave no sign of it, just as Clay hadn't. He remained focused on the other her. The Maggie that was part of the memory.

  “I don’t believe you,” the other her in the memory hissed.

  B turned fully to face the other her, a dangerous glint in his eye. “What you believe is irrelevant—”

  “Belief is always relevant,” Other Maggie growled through gritted teeth.

  “—and we are done with these words. Time for action.”

  Maggie watched as B touched the other her’s forehead. The two of them stayed locked in that position for long minutes. Maggie could see the dual energies passing between the other her and B. She remembered all too well what went on in her head, and his, during that time. She saw his memories of Adaiah.

  She felt curiosity about what it would look like from this point of view when she spun out of his head and onto the island to meet Adaiah. Would the other her simply wink out of the room? Would Maggie recognize the energy around herself? Had she unknowingly Traveled to the island? Perhaps she would—

  With a scream, Other Maggie wrenched away from B. B fell backward with a cry of pain.

  Maggie blinked. She hadn’t seen this part before, when she’d touched Lila at Interchron the memory had come back. There was more. Some space of time between when she’d invaded B’s mind and when she’d gone to the island.

  The other her staggered around, looking to be in pain and barely able to keep her balance. On the other side of the room, a ball of energy began to gather. Maggie watched with fascination as more and more energy balled together. She wondered where the energy came from. Who called it forth? Was it the other her? She didn’t think so. She didn’t see any energy around her other self, and she had no idea how to do…whatever it was this energy was doing.

  The energy seemed to build outward into the room, a mound tilted on its side and growing. Then it…imploded was the only word Maggie could think of. The mound collapsed in on itself and stretched far back in the other direction. Into itself, and nothingness. It swirled and eddied, reminding Maggie of the swirl necklace Doc always wore. The one she’d seen above the building where she’d watched that news broadcast.

  The whorl of energy disappeared, and then Maggie saw it: down a long corridor and through a distant door, it sat. The island.

  What had those people they’d met before the eclipse said about wormholes? Perhaps they’d been right. This was how she’d left the ship that day.

  Something brushed past Maggie’s arm. An energy she couldn’t identify. She would have sworn it was a person, brushing past her as they walked by, but she saw no one. Only empty air, the round room, and other her. What happened next served as something of a confirmation.

  An invisible force shoved the other her hard, and Maggie watched her other self tumble head first into the portal leading to the island.

  The light, the memory around her collapsed in a shower of colors. She was left in the eternal darkness once more.

  Maggie spun on her toe, looking for the next window of light. It didn’t come.

  “No, no, no!” she cried into the dark voice. “Show me more! What happens next?”

  Actually, she knew what happened next. She’d seen it before when she’d touched Lila. She landed on the island and met Adaiah, the Remembrancer.

  Maggie spun three full circles, willing more memories to reveal themselves. She obviously had no control over them.

  Then, in the distance, one of them did. Or at least she thought so. The memory was so small, it didn’t look like a square of light, as the first two had. Rather, it was a pin prick of light, so far away, it might have been a luminescent grain of sand.

  Maggie lunged toward it with her mind, her body, and her entire soul. The window-memory barreled toward her so quickly, she barely had time to register the boundaries of the memory before she’d flown inside, her nose pressed up against the glass pane of one of the lighthouse windows.

  She, her other self, sat inside with Adaiah. Obviously the Remembrancer had taken her into the lighthouse at some point, after Maggie had landed in the yard. Luckily, most of the windows in the lighthouse were broken, and this one was no exception, so Maggie could hear the conversation clearly.

  “This battle is going on in the heaven’s above us as we speak?” Adaiah was asking Other Maggie, sounding incredulous.

  “Yes,” Other Maggie answered. She held her hands in a peculiar way, directly in front of her chest and balled into fists, as if she were cold or something. Suddenly, she cringed, closing her eyes and hunching her shoulders as if in pain. It seemed to subside only seconds later, and she returned to a relaxed post. “Yes,” she repeated. “On the ships the collectives have orbiting the planet. This man is the Mastermind. He’ll take my free will and use it to make me give him the knowledge in my head.”

  Adaiah frowned thoughtfully. “How did you get here.”

  Other Maggie shook her head. “I don’t know. Something pushed me and I landed out there where you found me.”

  Adaiah seemed neither worried nor reassured by that answer. Her expression, one of mild concern and curiosity, remained the same.

  Other Maggie cringed again, closing her eyes, squeezing her fists and hunching her shoulders, as before. The cringe lasted longer this time, though. When it finished, and she relaxed, she looked pleadingly toward Adaiah.

  “Please, I can feel them trying to yank me back through the portal. I can’t hold them off much longer. If he takes my memories, freedom and individuality will be lost. Help me! He’ll take them. I don’t know how to stop him.”

  Adaiah hesitated, but then seemed to decide something. She nodded. “Give them to me. I’ll keep them safe here at the lighthouse. But Maggie, you must return and retrieve them. Memorize my neural signature so you‘ll recognize it again when you sense it.

  Other Maggie frowned. “What if I can’t come back?”

  “You must,” Adaiah said fiercely.

  Other Maggie looked more terrified than ever. “What if I don’t?”

  Adaiah’s face remained calm, but her voice held a quiet urgency. “Then all is lost. Memories are rivers of identity that seep into the pores of your soul. You’ll need what’s in your memories to win the war.”

  Leaning forward, Adaiah put her ha
nds on either side of Other Maggie’s face. A white, fluorescent light, equal in brilliance to that of the orb, flooded the memory with light, blinding Maggie as she peered through the lighthouse window.

  It left afterimages, dozens of them, on her retinas. Not just of the scene in front of her, but other shapes and figures she would have sworn were those of people she knew, places she’d been, and events she’d experienced. White silhouettes of Marcus, Karl, Doc and Joan. The shape of Interchron mountain. She and Marcus in the diamond cavern, standing palm to palm. Even the skyline of Vegas, where this all began.

  Maggie jerked her head from side to side, trying to dispel the afterimages and the vertigo that came with them.

  When her vision finally cleared, she seemed to have skipped ahead in the memory. Other Her and the Remembrancer no longer sat inside the light house. They’d come out onto the lawn and now stood only ten feet to Maggie’s right.

  Other Her had one hand on her temple and seemed to have a hard time standing up straight, continually hunching over, as though she might collapse at any moment.

  “They’re seeping away,” Other Maggie moaned. “My memories. I feel them siphoning away. Who will I be without them? I’m afraid.”

  “Yes,” Adaiah said calmly. She held Other Maggie’s hand in hers. “You will be. But if freedom is to be preserved, you must remember the good above the bad, joy above fear, and love above loneliness.”

  Other Maggie screamed and gripped her head in both hands. Maggie recognized it as the same cringe her other self had felt inside the lighthouse, only it had gotten monumentally worse.

  “He’s taking me,” Other Her whispered. “Pulling me back.”

  Adaiah let go of Other Maggie’s hand and stepped back. “It’s okay. Let them take you. Just make sure to come back. Maggie—”

  Other Maggie looked at Adaiah.

  “Don’t fail.” A sheen of moisture covered the Remembrancer’s eyes now, and her voice grew thick. “The things we don’t remember enslave us. And the ones we love. You must have truth—a perfect knowledge of all things past, present, and future—to be free.”

  Other Maggie looked terrified. “But how do I—”

  With a sound like the snap of a whip, Other Maggie disappeared. Her scream echoed in the air around Adaiah. The memory collapsed into darkness.

  Maggie sat down on the ground of the eternal darkness, pulled her knees into her chest, and cried. She might not have a play-by-play of what happened when she returned to the ship, but she remembered enough after recovering some of her memories to know the important things.

  She’d gotten out of the round room, somehow, and tried to find Marcus, wanting to warn him of what was happening before her memories seeped away completely. She hadn’t made it. The trauma of the memory loss had rendered her unconscious, and by the time Marcus found her, her memories of him had evaporated.

  A perfect knowledge of all things past, present, and future. It’s what she needed to win. And she didn’t have it. At least, not yet. Was it possible to have a perfect knowledge of the future? Well, Karl could Travel. And so could Maggie, apparently. So, perhaps there was.

  A heavy, slimy feeling crept up on Maggie. Grim determination replaced her sadness. The Cimerian had arrived. She could feel him. Could feel the evil and malice emanating from him. All her eyes could make out was a dark silhouette against the slightly less dark of the room.

  Maggie rose slowly to her feet. Other Her, in the memory, had been a basket case of fear. But Maggie felt none of that, now. She knew what had happened to her, or most of it, and while she didn’t know how to use the knowledge to her advantage yet, something about it took away her fear.

  All the team knew about this mission was that it had gone horribly wrong. They didn’t understand the half of it. B nearly took Maggie’s free will in that room. With it would have gone the remnants of individualism. The rebellion had balanced on a razor blade, and come to within a whisper of catastrophic wounds. But some strange being had pushed Other Maggie through that wormhole. They’d known that only Adaiah could have saved humanity in that instant.

  Maggie had no idea who the being had been. An angel? A phantom from the realm of the Vanished? Perhaps just a human who possessed a neurochemical ability to make themselves invisible. Whoever it was, they were obviously on Maggie’s side. Marcus had been right. Things would work out somehow. Her memories would be recovered somehow. Even if she couldn’t understand how. Maggie’s fear evaporated as surely as her memories on that island had.

  She rose to her feet and turned to face the Cimerian.

  When his voice came, it came inside her head, whispering to her mind, rather than her ears.

  At last, the voice rasped. It was only a matter of time before you and I faced off.

  Everyone kept saying that Maggie was the Cimerian’s equal, but she wasn’t. Tenessa had been right about that. Maggie had the ability to manipulate dark matter, but standing here, inside her own head with the Cimerian, she also knew that her abilities didn’t truly equal his. In a fight with him at this moment, she would lose, hands down. Maggie needed to stall. Give herself time to think of something.

  "Why did you show me all that?" she asked aloud. “Those memories. Why are they important?”

  I showed you nothing! It was as close to yelling as she’d ever heard the Cimerian come. You’re simply more skilled at memory hopping than I. But I’ve caught you at last. You cannot escape from this room again. I’ll block any other memories that might interfere. Just you and me now, Executioner. In a few moments, all mankind will be under his thumb.

  Maggie had no doubts as to who “he” was.

  The Cimerian gathered dark energy around his hands. Dark matter. The kind that only lived where the light didn't, in the spaces the light didn’t fill. It was an energy default, an energy like a vulture. It fed on the scraps the light left alone. It couldn’t create anything by itself, couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be beautiful, or admired. Doc said embracing dark matter might actually be easier, because light energy always burned.

  Registering a vague fear on the periphery of her thoughts, Maggie reached out to the dark matter with particles of her mind again. They wrapped themselves around her, and this time, she didn’t place a limit on them. Welcoming them, she finally understood.

  Something separated. Maggie stood outside her own body, though it didn’t look like her body. The dark of the room allowed her to see the light in her own cells. She saw the way the light energy created every ounce of her. Her cells, her nerves, her blood vessels. Her brain, her heart, her emotions. The light energy swirled around her. Some of it made up the matter of her body.

  Other energies emanated from her. These were her abilities, including Healing, Traveling, and others she couldn't identify. She peered more intently and noticed more: a thin, subtle energy had wrapped itself around the energy of her abilities. The Traveling energy around her was blue. Yet the blue energy around her didn’t look like the blue energy around Karl. Tiny grey tendrils striped the blue energy, like a candy cane. Similar vines laced the green energy of Healing. They also wrapped around energy that had no color or visible spectrum: her dark matter abilities. In that case, it looked like the vines wrapped around something that wasn't there.

  Yet not all her abilities had this gray energy looped around them. She peered more deeply at the vines, trying to figure out what they were. She examined them at the microscopic level, and then the nanoscopic level. She peered closer and closer, deeper than the human eye could see, deeper than mankind's most powerful microscope. She understood what the gray vines were. She’d learned inexplicably how to Heal and Travel, abilities she hadn’t previously possessed. The gray vines were an ability unique to her. They allowed her to grasp energy from the abilities of others and pull them into herself, absorbing the ability. The gray vines were the energy of her Executioner abilities.

  “You have everything you need to defeat the collectives, Maggie,” Clay had said.

  Mag
gie willed herself to slide back into her body, and it was so. She reached out with the gray tendrils of energy to the Cimerian and scooped up the dark energy around him. The gray vines wove into the dark matter, exploring every part of it, and pulling it toward Maggie. The dark matter merged with her, becoming one of her abilities as surely as she could Heal and Travel and find light-producing objects.

  The Cimerian’s mouth dropped open. No, the voice in her head whispered. It got louder. No. No! It is not possible! You are only a Separatist. You do not have the ability…

  He trailed off as Maggie drew the energy from him, just as B tried to draw free will from her. Only, the dark matter was black rather than purple.

  Maggie gathered energy. The same energy Justine tried to use on her: black energy with red thorns that killed on impact. Maggie no longer had any qualms about what she had to do. This man was evil. He would enslave mankind, taking their freedom from them. Freedom is the very nature of the human race. Without it, they would cease to be human. She would not let him obliterate the human race. She would not let him enslave Marcus, or Jonah. Or David, or Doc or any of her friends. She would not allow Clay's death to be in vain.

  "I’m not just a Separatist," Maggie said. "I’m the Executioner."

  The eternal darkness collapsed.

  Chapter 39: Prophecies of War

  Leaving the chaos of people gathering and clashing in my yard behind, I caught up to Bart half a mile down the road, under a stand of poplar trees. Despite the month, their sweet, musky scent filled my nose.

  Darkness permeated the lane, lit only by periodic, dimly flickering lanterns. Even the moon shone brighter than their flickering wicks. Under the trees, I barely discerned Bart’s silhouette.

  Muted shouts wafted to us from down the road as I gripped Bart’s shoulder, forcing him to turn toward me.

  "Please, Bart," I said. "Let's fix this. I don't want to be your enemy.

  Bart snorted. "Then you shouldn't have stolen the woman I was after."

  That made no sense. It's become obvious he doesn’t truly care about Adaiah.