by Azalea Ellis
As we moved through his house and down into the lab, we found that the concrete door had been blasted open. It was obvious that someone else had been there. Furniture was overturned and strewn about in the main house, and his lab and our basement training area looked like a tornado had hit it.
“NIX,” I said aloud.
“Yes.” Adam nodded. “They must have come searching for us, or any clues to our whereabouts, when we escaped.”
Kris and Gregor were both dead on their feet, so Jacky and I took them back upstairs. “Did you live here, before?” I asked, carrying Gregor with his head on my shoulder. “Do you have a specific room that’s yours?”
Gregor shook his head, so I chose a room at random. I set him down to try and find a blanket for the bare bed. He looked so small, standing alone and silent in a room that should have been decorated for a little boy by loving guardians.
I found a blanket that smelled only slightly musty, then heard a scream that sounded like Gregor’s. I ran back to the room and opened the door to find the child throwing himself about in a frenzy of destruction, beating his limbs against the furniture and walls, his breath tearing out from his chest in desperate sobs.
Jacky ducked her head out from a nearby room, and I shook my head.
Gregor needed a release. Unlike his sister, he hadn’t cried. The bruises he was no doubt accruing all over his body could be easily healed by Sam, if they were bad enough. I only wished we could heal emotional damage as easily.
I walked into the room and shut the door behind me, waiting for Gregor to tire himself out.
When he finally fell to the floor, still beating his fists ineffectually against it, I wrapped him in the blanket and picked him up, settling him on the mattress and sitting down beside him. Once his breathing had calmed a little, I said, “You know, Blaine did pretty much the same thing, when you were hurt in that mock battle with Squad Ridley.”
Gregor squirmed to look at me inside the blanket cocoon I’d created around him. “Really?”
“Yeah. You and he are very similar, you know. He even broke his glasses and didn’t realize it, he was so upset. Then, he calmed down and started thinking really hard, and came up with a plan to help better protect you and the rest of us from NIX.”
“But…there’s nothing I can do to make it better. It’s too late.” His voice broke on the last word, and tears leaked down his cheeks.
I hugged him to my side, my hand combing through his hair. “I know. It’s the most horrible feeling in the world.” I was silent as he cried, and I tried desperately to think of something that would comfort him. “He loved you, though. More than anything, he wanted you and your sister to be safe and happy. He wanted you to live a good life.”
Gregor’s face ran with snot, and I looked around for something to wipe him off, finally settling on the far edge of the blanket. We could wash it later. He forced out words past choked sobs. “I can’t be happy. I’m too sad.”
“Well, you’ll probably be sad for a while. That’s normal, and it means you care. But if you find a chance to be happy, even if it’s just a little one, you should take it.” I was no good at this. I wished the boy had someone better suited for comforting and dispensing life advice, but I was the one there, so I had to try.
“Do you think he might have left something behind? Kris said, maybe he did, even if it isn’t exactly him anymore.”
I squeezed him a little closer. “I don’t know. It’s not something I’d place too much hope in, but we’ll definitely check, once all this is over.”
He nodded, and the sniffling sounds of his breathing slowed, until I thought he was asleep. But when I shifted, his hands tightened around the edge of my armor at my waist. “You won’t die, right Eve? Even if my Skill only protects me, you’ll be strong enough to protect yourself, right?”
“I won’t die. And I’ll do my best to keep everyone else safe, too. I promise.”
His fingers loosened, and he sank into sleep, dried tear tracks on his cheeks.
We spent the better half of the next morning lazing about and eating all the nonperishable food from Blaine’s pantries that we could fit in our stomachs. Sleep helped with the physical exhaustion, but the drain of the last few days, along with the months before that, had worn on us all.
Torliam had turned his Tracker Skill to finding the god soon after we got to Earth. The “pull” he’d described had started off too faint to follow, but had grown stronger with a bit of time. We would be heading north, when we were ready.
Halfway through the day, Adam got one of the smartglass screens on the wall working, and connected us to the news. This time, there was more than panicked speculation.
One in every seven alien ships was a different type, which the news had taken to calling “Destroyers.” They were slower than the other, smaller, ships. But they created a beam so hot it could melt concrete and steel.
“Hot enough to burn out the Sickness,” Torliam murmured, frowning at the images of panicked people running in the streets. It had been a destroyer that burned NIX as we escaped, and probably what decimated it so badly in the first place.
A slightly shaky film clip showed a distant group of Estreyan ships flying upward above the ocean, as what looked like a barrage of meteorites shot down from the atmosphere to meet them. “This is footage of a group of the alien invaders flying over the Atlantic Ocean,” a reporter narrated. “The Earth Defense Force has commenced a series of kinetic bombardments above that area, apparently in the attempt to take out some of the invaders while they were far enough away from populated areas to avoid collateral damage.” We watched as the things that looked like meteors, but were in fact a group of huge metal spikes with guiding thrusters attached, reentered the atmosphere and attempted to hit the Estreyans.
The Estreyan ships, so very different from our own airplanes, met the spikes with attacks of their own, disintegrating some of them before they could come into range, and evading others with that graceful speed that seemed more animal than machine. Still, a couple ships were clipped, and a couple more were caught unprepared for the spikes to explode in their midst.
“We are being told that the orbital spikes were seeded with small-payload nuclear weapons, which seem to be effective against the alien technology.” More than half the ships still escaped, some showing signs of damage, but the reporter was grinning as if this was fantastic news. Maybe it was.
The clip cut to city scenes, where enforcers stood outside huge cement blast doors, keeping back a crowd of people. “Panicked citizens in many areas not under immediate threat of the invading aliens are still attempting to enter the emergency shelters, where enforcers have been stationed to keep them out. The leader of Nevada’s Defense Force has made statements urging the citizens to remain calm and return to their homes, as the emergency shelters will not be opened except in the case of imminent threat. Resources would be drained too quickly otherwise, and unavailable if future need arose.”
Adam changed the channel when it devolved into more speculation between the newscasters.
“The aliens attacked a military research facility!” A man screamed into the camera. “It’s obvious they’re here to keep us from advancing technologically. They don’t want us leaving the solar system. They want to keep faster than light travel to themselves!”
Another channel showed a woman in a lab coat talking about the effects of nuclear radiation spreading through the air and water after the orbital attacks on the Estreyans over the Atlantic.
Government officials gave statements, some calm and assured, and some—less proficient in the art of lying—sweating bullets and looking trapped by the reporters’ harrying questions.
Once the news began to repeat, Sam turned to Torliam. “Is there any way we can contact the ships?” Sam said. “Torliam, you’re the prince. Maybe, if we could just talk to them, tell them they’re going about this all wrong, we could help. I mean, we could even lie to them. Tell them the queen called off the attack.”
“I know there is a communication system between ships, but I do not know how they function well enough to build for us one out of Earth components. Perhaps, if we had another ship to cannibalize…or, if we were able to gain access to one of their ships directly, but—” he shook his head. “I do not have military authority. By now, my mother has probably sent through updated orders to her warriors on this world. Even if she has not given the command to kill us on sight, she would have done her best to remove our ability to undermine her. She is not stupid. She plays the game better than any I have ever met. That is why she is queen.”
I fiddled with my sixth finger nervously. There was a tiny chance that Earth might be able to stop the war from our end. If NIX could be made to understand the consequences of their actions, the reason why Queen Mardinest had ordered the invasion, maybe they’d agree to a peaceful disarmament. Plus, I needed to get nanite nutrient paste for Zed. “Adam. Can you find a way to contact NIX?”
He smirked at me. “I’ve got the system Blaine used to ask for a meet up ready to go already.” When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “I’ve gotten used to your thought patterns. When things go wrong, inevitably the answer somehow involves more danger.”
While we waited for NIX to respond to our query, we trained, and we played with our new Skills. I was worried about what the Seal of Nine might mean for the individual members of the team. Whatever the “greater Trials” were, I had no doubt they would be dangerous. Each of us needed to be at the top of our game individually, in addition to working on our cohesion as a group.
At my request, Zed took me into the Other Place again. He’d bundled up till he looked like a three-hundred pound homeless man. “I’ll do whatever it takes to save my niblets from freezing off,” he said, when I raised my eyebrows incredulously. He dumped a similarly huge pile of cloth in front of me, then snickered as I struggled to fit into the many layers.
Once we were ready, he lifted his hands to the air on one side of our base, away from the rest of the team. “There’s a crack in the world, right here,” he said. “Can you sense it, with your Perception Skill? Wraith, right?”
I nodded. “Yes…but I can’t feel anything. It’s just empty air.”
He moved his hands, flexing his fingers, and Wraith slipped through the gap he’d created, rapidly extending to fill the room I was in…again.
I shook my head, disoriented by reality layering over itself like that. I pressed my awareness cautiously against the air around his fingers, focusing hard. “I can feel it,” I said. “You’ve opened up a tiny hole, but the rip extends…” I traced it in the air, moving my hand along it, till I couldn’t reach any longer.
“Yes, exactly. Do you feel any of the other rips?”
I searched the room around us, focusing my awareness in small areas and moving my attention slowly so that I wouldn’t miss anything. “Only this one,” I said, shaking my head. I reached toward the rip, gingerly touching the space. “I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it like you are.”
“Hmm. Well, let’s go. Prepare to be turned into an icicle.” He dug his fingers in once again, grinning. Reality opened up between his arms, the void peeling back to reveal a cold grey shard of Other Place hanging in the air.
I walked around the rip. When I stood on the other side, I found myself still looking at the base in the Other Place. Zed wasn’t there. I looked down and saw his legs extending from below the rip in the air, and when I walked back around, he was there, waiting for me with a raised eyebrow. The opening was like a multi-sided display screen. If I stood on one side of the rip and him on the other, would I see him if he stepped through from his side? Maybe not. Or maybe I’d be able to see a cross-section of his insides as he passed through.
“Pretty cool, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, yes, you’re awesome. Can we go now?”
“Yes, but,” he sobered, “just be aware of the effect it can have on you. It’ll drain your warmth, your emotions, your energy… If you feel like it’s getting bad, just let me know, and we’ll come back to this side immediately, okay?”
“I remember.” I braced myself, then stepped through after him. The cold hit me like a punch to the gut, and I exhaled swiftly, my breath immediately forming tiny ice crystals in the air.
I turned in a circle and looked around at the washed out room. “You know, since this place is the same medium-gray with dim light all the time, you could probably use small rips as a flashlight in the dark, if you ever needed it.” In contrast, the portal back to the normal world was painfully bright and colorful, and I could feel the heat emanating out of it. As I watched, tiny, ash-like pieces of fuzz coalesced in the air around the opening, as if drawn there by static electricity.
Zed let it close, the two edges melding back together again.
Abruptly, I felt vulnerable. Cut off from safety. The feeling didn’t last long, though.
“No people here?” I said.
“No. None that I’ve ever seen, anyway. And I don’t know how anyone could survive in this place.”
“But the trappings of civilization are here. This building, people made it. We brought in those mats over there, when we were first setting up the base,” I said, pointing. “Half the weights are missing, and it’s like someone removed the door from the frame. In fact…it looks like anything we’ve moved recently hasn’t transferred over to this side.”
“Exactly!” He bounced up and down, though I thought it might be for warmth more than excitement. “So…I’m thinking this is some sort of other…dimension. One outside of the three we live in.”
“Four,” I said.
“What?”
“Four dimensions. Three spatial, one temporal.”
“Okay, that makes sense. So what does that make this place?”
I chuckled, though the spark of humor was snuffed out as quickly as it had formed, as if it had died to the cold. “I don’t know, I was just repeating something I’d heard. If you want an actual theory about this place, you’d be better off asking Bla—” I bit down on my lip. Blaine wasn’t around to ask about these things anymore. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I tucked them under my arms, shivering.
“Let’s get moving,” he said. “It helps a little, not to stay in one place.”
We walked around the base and then moved outside. It was just as cold, but it wasn’t any brighter, and the sky looked grey and uniform, like it was obscured by an ever-thickening fog.
At first, I thought it was snowing, and though that would have made sense along with the temperature, it wasn’t frozen water falling from the sky. In fact, it didn’t seem to be coming from the clouds at all. I caught one of the fluffy, light grey things floating gently down, and it crumbled in my hand. I didn’t dare to smell the residue, in case it was poisonous, or a clump of some sort of infectious spore.
“I thought it was ash, at first,” Zed said. “I’m still not quite sure. I think it might be some sort of condensation being formed out of the air. Like a snowflake made of something besides water. Hopefully it’s not toxic.”
We walked around to the back of the huge house, where the lawn gave way to woods again. I coughed up phlegm as my lungs protested at the biting cold. “I’m…feeling very bland,” I said.
“Do you need to go back? I can open up another rip.”
I shook my head. “I’m alright. But a fire would be nice.”
He dug in his pocket and held out his hands to mine.
I raised mine to match, and, with a little flick, the lighter in his hands flared to life. The flame was barely orange. It flickered weakly, then slowly shrank till it died out. “Did you run out of fuel?”
He shook his head, sticking the lighter back in his pocket. “No… I think this place just killed the flame. Maybe there’s not enough oxygen?”
I breathed deep, and coughed again as my lungs protested the attempt to freeze them. “I don’t feel winded or lightheaded,” I said. “Maybe we just need a bigger fire.”
A thought sparked in my head, a faint curiosity. I turned to the trees behind us, spotting a couple branches that had fallen to the ground. “Maybe I could start a fire,” I continued.
“With what?”
“With Chaos,” I said. “That’s all you need to burn something. The molecules rubbing against each other a little too quickly, and whoosh.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you could do that. I thought it was just black tendrils of ‘fear-me-because-I-can-disintegrate-your-face’. Have you lit a fire before? One that isn’t black?”
I shook my head, shuffling over to one of the fallen branches. “No. Before, I couldn’t use Chaos unless I had to, because it was killing me, and every time I used it I made it stronger. After we killed the God of Knowledge, I guess I could have tried, but it seems like we haven’t really had a moment to stop and breathe, and there’ve been more important things than playing around with my Skill just for fun. And…because I’ve been afraid of Chaos for so long.” I looked up to him. “Seems this place has frozen that out of me. I didn’t even realize I was still resisting, till now that the feeling’s gone.”
He shuffled back and forth, hunching his shoulders. “Glad to help, you can thank me by starting a fire. If not, I’m opening it back up to find some warmth. Pretty sure the snot inside my nostrils is frozen solid.”
I couldn’t really find it in me to crack a smile at his joke. I stretched out my hand toward the branch on the ground, reaching inside myself for Chaos. Even as the intent formed, I felt a couple infinitesimal sparks of Knowledge’s power that had been hidden at the end of those synapses release themselves. I knew how to do this. “Shiver,” I murmured aloud, and Chaos roiled up.
The branch exploded, little chips and splinters shooting out in all directions. I jumped back, the sudden shock of surprise leaving so quickly that the adrenaline in my veins felt strange and foreign. “Oops.”