by Azalea Ellis
Before I could ask him, the pod slowed to a bumpy stop, and we both looked toward the cab.
“We’re here,” Jacky said, her fingers gripping tight around the steering wheel as she stared out the front window. “Looks like someone got here before us, yeah?”
Stretching out before us was miles of smoking ruin and devastation.
The team left the pod and walked on foot through the splintered remains of the forest around NIX.
Trees bigger around than the span of my arms lay in splinters. Smoking craters dotted the land. There had been multiple fires, though instead of turning into a raging inferno they seemed to have died out, or perhaps been put out.
Some of the ruined areas still held residue from whatever had created them. One crater chattered and buzzed with electricity, while another area deformed the passing light like a fun-house mirror. We avoided those.
We clambered past a downed military plane. I used Wraith to check for signs of life within, but found none.
One particularly gigantic crater in what had been the backside of NIX’s mountain held the remains of an Estreyan ship, impaled by a giant metal rod that had collapsed and twisted around its target. Dust was still falling through the air. I frowned, and then followed Adam’s gaze into the sky.
“They dropped that from orbit,” he said.
Ah. “They’ve been preparing for this for a long time. I knew that, but…” I shook my head, looking around at the devastation all around.
Torliam touched his hand to my elbow. “Are there any alive?”
We had to get a bit closer for me to tell, but the search was fruitless.
Torliam nodded when I told him, his jaw clenched. Perhaps the sight of the ship brought back memories of his own initial visit to Earth.
We came across the remains of quite a few more human planes and vehicles, a couple more downed Estreyan ships, many signs of Skill use, and widespread general destruction, but when we crested the last mountain ridge and looked down upon it in the evening sunlight, we were still shocked into silence.
Wispy tentacles of smoke writhed out from the wreckage like a living thing. A few pieces of equipment remained—a crushed ball of metal that had probably been a heli-pod at some point, some rubble that looked like collapsed tunnels leading away from the bowels of the compound. But mostly, where NIX had been was just a jagged scar in the side of the mountain. It reminded me of a large anthill that someone had taken a boot to.
Some of the inner side of what had once been the circular base remained—rooms and hallways torn open all the way down the mountainside, bared to the air. The rest of it was either burned away or lying in and across the river at the bottom of the mountain, creating a dam that forced the river to well up and spill over.
I looked around for the remains of the Shortcut, but didn’t see it. Perhaps they’d had some plan in place, ready for the Estreyans to attack, and NIX had somehow managed to evacuate it. Or perhaps it was part of the thousands of tons of material that had been seemingly vaporized.
“What did they hit it with, a space laser?” Zed said. Everything was burnt, even the parts now covered with water.
“They were burning out the chance of further infection,” Torliam said. “It is believed that strong fires can mitigate the further spread of the Sickness.”
“But that isn’t true, right?” Sam said, looking between Torliam and me.
Torliam let out a humorless laugh, short and sharp. “No one actually knows. It might work, it might not. We still do not understand the Sickness. Even Ifkana of the Panacean could only suss out the Sickness once it had physically affected the host. It may sit dormant for years, even decades, before symptoms begin. We do not know.”
Zed turned to me. “Well, I’m guessing there’s no way we’re going to find any nanite paste left in there.”
“Or any ships still capable of flying,” Adam said.
“Or anyone who can reach out to the Estreyan ships, to ask them to stop all this so we can talk,” Sam said. “We could have been in there, you know. There were plenty of Players, just like us, forced to play the Game and join NIX. People who were just trying to stay alive. They didn’t deserve this.”
“Ironically,” Adam said. “NIX pretty much caused the very thing they were worried about. If they hadn’t captured mister big-shot here,” he gestured to Torliam, “and didn’t start developing weapons to fight against the aliens, the aliens never would have attacked.”
I closed my eyes and stretched out my awareness. Maybe there was some equipment that could be salvaged, or even someone still alive in there. Before Wraith even reached NIX, movement in the woods drew my attention. I turned my head to face that direction. “Someone’s out here. A Player, I think. They’re still alive.”
I hurried toward them, and the others followed. “They’re pretty hurt,” I said.
My words were confirmed when we drew near enough to see the Player. He was stumbling forward senselessly, badly burnt, with large swaths of his uniform melted into his blistered skin. “Hey, do you need help?” I called.
He didn’t turn, almost as if he hadn’t even heard me.
“Either he’s in shock, or maybe his eardrums are burst,” Sam said. “Maybe we can draw his attention visibly.” He began to circle around, moving to get ahead of the wounded boy.
“Be careful,” I said, walking with him. “He might attack out of fear, not realizing you’re trying to help him. Whatever happened to him, I’m surprised he’s still alive.”
The Player turned his head a little toward us. His left eye was milky and bubbled, like an egg that had been fried in oil. The other eye was still intact, but whatever intelligence or comprehension he’d once had was absent from it. He opened his mouth, and saliva spilled out of it like a tiny waterfall.
My heart jumped.
He lunged forward clumsily, spluttering on his own indrawn breath.
I jerked back, tripped on a branch, and fell backward. I caught myself on one arm and spun away.
The infected Player lunged forward again, lips drawing back from his teeth in a feral grin. When Chanelle had been bitten in my first Trial, I’d seen that same look of mindless, inhuman hunger. “He’s a wolf!” I called out.
He lunged forward again, and I didn’t even think, I just reacted.
I lashed out with my clawed left hand, all six digits ripping into his neck like it was play dough, tearing right through to the other side.
Blood fountained out toward me, and I instinctively closed my eyes as it sprayed my face, but a couple drops touched my tongue.
The boy dropped in front of me, throat hanging open.
I stumbled a couple steps away, shaking little bits of meat off my fingers and spitting frantically, my eyes still squeezed as tight as they would go. I fumbled at the water pouch by my waist, opening the cap and pouring the contents straight onto my face to remove the blood. “Meningolycanosis,” I sputtered out, still spitting, making sure that I didn’t swallow even once, just in case. “The blood could be infectious.”
Torliam had already been moving my way, and without hesitation, he backhanded the air, a rush of misty blue power slamming me in the face and stripping away everything foreign, even bits of my skin.
I didn’t care. I opened my mouth, pushing my tongue out, and he did it again.
The dryness was so extreme it hurt, and I was sure the skin of my mouth would crack and split. I could already feel beads of blood welling from my face.
Torliam poured his own water straight into my face, and I leaned into it, gasping with relief.
After a few moments, I dared to open my eyes.
The others had spread out in a defensive formation around me. Zed’s guns were both trained on the body as he nudged it to make sure it wouldn’t get up again, and Jacky’s hair was floating around her face as she lightened her personal gravity in preparation for sudden movement. Sam’s hands pressed onto my forehead, checking me for injury.
After a quick check wi
th Wraith, I relaxed, swallowing gingerly a few times before I could speak. “There’s no one else, and he’s very dead.”
Gregor walked past me and yanked one of his daggers out of a tree. He must have thrown it to try and stop the Player, but missed.
Zed scowled fiercely. “Are you okay?”
I moved over to the body, thinking of Blaine and what he’d said about the meningolycanosis. “I’m fine.” I looked around, and almost jumped at the sight of another little body made of bugs and small animal bones.
It wouldn’t even reach my knee when standing straight, but was crouched beside Kris protectively, head swiveling back and forth like it was watching for danger.
Kris noticed the direction of my gaze. “It won’t hold together very long. If I concentrate hard enough, things that were once alive can hold a spirit again, but it’s pretty weak, still, because the body isn’t…real. Bugs and decayed squirrel pieces weren’t meant to be in that shape, so my Skill is kind of forcefully holding them together.”
Gregor walked back to stand beside me, staring down at the corpse at our feet. “Did he have the Sickness, too?” He looked up at me.
I’d been wondering the same thing. “I don’t know. We can find out, but I think you and your sister should walk away a little, so you don’t have to watch.”
His bushy eyebrows drew down. “I can handle it.”
He was eight. He shouldn’t be able to handle it. “You don’t need to be here, and there’s no reason for us to provide you with any more nightmare fuel if we can help it.”
Kris didn’t have any objections and went willingly when Jacky took both kids’ hands and settled down with them behind a big tree trunk about thirty meters away.
I pushed my awareness at the corpse, trying to work past its skin and into its body without touching it. “Adam, could you make me a couple knives?” He did, and I leaned over the Player, pausing for a moment to realize that I was about to dissect someone I’d killed. It’s funny, the things that can become normal.
With Adam’s help, I cut into the chest, breaking the sternum and peeling open the ribcage like some sort of grotesque flower.
Birch watched what we were doing with interest, and had to be shooed back a couple times when his curiosity brought him too close.
Wraith found no sign of Seeds, either their glow of power or their actual, microscopic bodies. “Looks like the meningolycanosis wiped out the Seeds. He must have had the same upgraded version Chanelle got.” The same one we’d given the God of Knowledge to weaken him.
The rest of the dead boy’s issues were obvious to the naked eye. Black veins ran through his flesh, spreading out from his heart.
Adam poked at the Player’s lungs with a stick, and when he pulled back, they stretched out like freshly chewed gum. Pretty sure that wasn’t normal for a still-cooling body. The tissue must have been decaying already, before death.
Torliam shuddered and looked away. “Do all humans defile each others’ bodies upon death?”
Sam patted his arm. “I know, it’s…unpleasant. But autopsies have contributed a lot to the human understanding of medicine.”
After a moment to brace myself, I nudged the other organs away from the boy’s stomach, then sliced into it. Finger bones spilled out, surrounded by a pink fleshy sludge. He had already begun eating someone. “The ‘wolves’ don’t eat people,” I said. “They just bite to spread the infection.”
I stood and moved away from the body, dropping the ink knives Adam had created for me on the ground. “This isn’t conclusive proof, but I think Blaine was right. The meningolycanosis is a vector for the Sickness. We’re going to have to find a way to contact NIX’s remaining branches.”
Chanelle’s nostrils flared, as her eyes lost their wide vacant stare, narrowing as she focused on the remains. “Is that a dead body?”
We looked from it, to her. What was I supposed to say? Obviously, it was a dead body. Which we had cracked open like a nut and poked around inside. “Err…”
Sam shuffled sideways in front of the Player, as if hoping to block it off from her. “It escaped from NIX,” he announced. “Which the Estreyans completely obliterated, by the way. It was infected with meningolycanosis, and it attacked Eve. It was completely rabid, even though its body was so injured already. She killed it.”
“I noticed,” Chanelle said dryly, staring at the Player’s ravaged throat expressionlessly. “But it was a ‘he,’ not an ‘it,’ right? He was infected, so you just killed him?”
Sam’s face scrunched into a cringe of guilt.
“She had to kill him,” Adam said. “There’s no way we could have taken him with us alive, and we don’t even have any of the anti-meningolycanosis serum, which wouldn’t have left him able to fend for himself, even if he wasn’t rabid anymore.”
“I guess I’m just lucky you didn’t do the same to me,” she spat. “But I’m not surprised. I remember when I was first infected, Eve. I was going to eat you alive.” She almost grinned as she said the words. “And you were so terrified, scrabbling like a soft little pig as you tried to get away.” The smile slipped away, along with the lucidity in her eyes.
Sam put his hand on her arm and helped move her back onto the cot. “She’s back in the fugue state, I think,” he said, shooting me a look of dismay.
“She was probably just upset to see what could have happened to her,” Zed said. “I mean, the body is pretty gruesome. If we hadn’t rescued her from NIX… And, maybe not all that anger was natural.”
I grimaced. Chanelle had the Sickness. It wasn’t the same as the meningolycanosis, but we all knew that she’d lose herself just as surely as the corpse on the ground had, if we couldn’t find the cure in time.
The quest Window popped up in front of my face, bright and completely incongruous with the ravaged earth around us.
WESTWARD BOUND
TRAVEL WEST AT TOP SPEED, MAINTAINING TREE COVER FOR CONCEALMENT.
COMPLETION REWARD: ESCAPE IMMOLATION
NON-COMPLETION PENALTY: IMMOLATION, DEATH
I blinked. Then, I swiped the Window away and rushed over to the place where Jacky had stopped with the kids. “Just got a quest. Escape to the west with the trees as cover. Something’s coming. Something that will burn us to death.”
I crouched down, and Gregor slipped in between my backpack and my back so I could carry him. We ran like deer for the next few minutes, being sure to follow what tree cover remained. I didn’t trust the Oracle completely, or really much at all, but there was no way I would ignore the threat of immolation.
The Estreyan ships arrived behind us, flying in at top speed to hover above the shattered NIX compound. One was larger, like a huge stingray floating in the air. It was surrounded by ships that looked more like sharp-angled lobsters without the legs.
“Keep running!” I huffed, using Wraith to keep watch behind us.
Fire poured down from the stingray-like ship’s belly. Our shadows stretched out in front of us from the harsh light, and even so far away I felt the heat on the back of my legs. The shockwave hit next, a storm of howling air and heat that blew outward from the impact with the force of a bomb. Below the attacking ship, the remains of NIX melted, vaporizing away or turning to slag from the heat.
Once NIX was nothing more than a bed of molten Earth, the ship took its plasma beam outward onto the surrounding battlefield, leaving nothing untouched as it scoured away every trace of the enemy in an ever-expanding circle.
We just kept running.
Chapter 12
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
— Robert Frost
After a grueling amount of running, the Oracle’s quest announced it was completed, and we slowed, turning to head toward Blaine’s house, our old base. I’d wanted to bring his body with us, maybe bury it and give the kids a funeral. But there was no way anything had survived the Estre
yan ship’s thermal attack. I could only be grateful the Oracle had kept the rest of the team alive. If we’d been in the military cargo pod when the attack started, I had no doubt they would have made extra sure we burned beyond crispy.
We’d made good distance, and were setting up the simplest of camps as the sun went down. The need to stop was mainly for Adam’s benefit, because he refused to be carried, and his Animus Skill was at its limit after a few hours of continuously renewing his leg construct.
Torliam had offered to pull him on a floating sled made of his own power several times. Adam’s refusals grew increasingly clipped.
As I was settling in to try and play with Chaos again, the events of my nightmare floating up to the surface of my mind, Kris shuffled over to me.
“They burned him up, didn’t they?” she said, her voice small.
I patted the ground next to me, an encouragement for her to sit down. “They did,” I said. “But we can still hold a funeral for him when we get back to his house. I don’t think he’d be the type to be too sentimental about exactly what was done with…his body.” I held back a grimace, hoping that didn’t seem insensitive of me.
To my relief, she let out a tiny snort that might have been taken for a laugh. “He told my mom, ‘Donate my body to science!’ but she said if he died she’d get revenge by burying him in the backyard.” She sat down facing me, her legs crossed. “Of course, she ended up dying first.”
I could tell she was leading up to something from the way she pressed her fingers together and kept shooting glances at me then looking away. “What is it?”
“Do you think…do you think his spirit is still on the other side? On Estreyer, I mean? I could feel that it was gone, when we got here, but did it just disappear? I can feel the spirits all around us. Most of them are asleep, and I don’t think they’re all from dead people. It’s not like ghosts. But back on that battlefield, where so many people got killed, there was a lot of energy. Anger, fear. And there were a lot of spirits who wanted a body. I could feel a few empty bodies, and dead things that could have been held together to make a body, but I was scared to try it.”