by Azalea Ellis
Zed pulled a splinter the size of his finger out of the fabric of his chest, where it had pierced through both of his jackets. “Oops? You just made a bomb. Out of a tree branch.”
“I agitated the molecules a little too hard.” I moved to another branch, this one quite a bit larger, and held my hand out again. I coaxed Chaos out, asking it to slowly make the molecules of the wood shiver. The wood smoked, and I pushed it a little harder. The branch burst into flame, bright and hot and full of color. The light pulsed out like a bloom, bringing color to everything it touched. I felt a brief burst of joy, a surge of curiosity and wonder. Under the warmth, the feelings didn’t fade right away. How long had it been since my curiosity wasn’t ruled by necessity and fear?
“Wow…” Zed breathed.
I turned to grin at him, but the Other Place distracted me. Outside our little circle of light, the darkness had risen. The world was bending in on us, blackening and twisting. Something sucked at the flame, and it took a surge of Chaos to keep it going, a steady stream of power coming out of me. “What’s happening?” I said, that old familiar fear searing through me.
“It’s hungry,” Zed choked out.
The Other Place warped, squeezing in on us. I could feel it, gathering, actively watching us. “Get us out of here!” I said.
Zed stumbled a few feet to the side and tore at the air.
I considered dropping the link to the flame, just letting it die out, but I didn’t dare. What if the Other Place decided to take the warmth from us instead? We would die instantly.
Zed tossed himself through the rip, and I followed, stumbling onto the warm ground and scrambling away on my hands and feet.
He turned and closed up the rip, cutting off my connection with both Wraith and Chaos, then collapsed next to me in Blaine’s backyard. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.
YOUR STAMINA HAS INCREASED!
Chapter 14
I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
— H.P. Lovecraft
Shaken by our experience, Zed was reluctant to immediately open another rip, or let anyone else into the Other Place with him, until he was sure it was safe, and he better understood what had happened. Tentatively, he created a pinhole opening to the Other Place, and we found that it was no longer distorted or seemingly aware, but, even so, neither of us wanted to go back through.
While Zed was busy testing his Skill with small rips and sending small fires through, the system Adam had set up to contact NIX pinged loudly.
We all piled through into the lab, where one of the smartglass screens showed a retro-looking text interface, a short message, and a blinking cursor.
CONSOLE 1: DROP LOCATION REQUEST RECEIVED, CODE MENDELL-X90. PLEASE CONFIRM IDENTITY AND OBJECTIVE.
CONSOLE 2: _
Adam and I shared a look, and he scrambled to connect a handheld pad to the console in front of us. “I’ll try and track them. You handle the comms.”
I reached forward to the screen, my fingers hesitating over it. What should I say?
CONSOLE 2: EVE REDDING HERE. REQUESTING TRADE OF NANITE BOOSTER FOR INFORMATION THAT MAY HELP END INVASION.
The response took a while in coming. Adam muttered with frustration at their encryption while the rest of us waited with bated breath.
CONSOLE 1: WE HAVE NANITE NUTRIENTS. PLEASE ELABORATE ON THE NATURE OF YOUR INFORMATION.
CONSOLE 2: EARTH HAS OFFENDED THE ESTREYANS IN A WAY THAT MAY BE REVERSIBLE. THE MENINGOLYCANOSIS CULTIVATED BY NIX IS A VECTOR FOR A SECONDARY DISEASE WITH NO KNOWN CURE, WHICH IS ANATHEMA TO THE ESTREYANS. NO CONVENTIONAL METHODS OF CONTAINING ITS SPREAD HAVE PROVEN EFFECTIVE. EARTH IS IN DANGER OF A WORLDWIDE PANDEMIC, EVEN BEYOND THE INVASION THIS RESEARCH HAS TRIGGERED. I HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT A POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO THE PANDEMIC, AS WELL AS THE INVASION.
I didn’t want to give away all my bargaining power, but, at the same time, the prospect of the Sickness was too dangerous to keep to myself. Even if NIX didn’t agree to meet with me, they’d know the hazard posed by their infected research subjects.
CONSOLE 1: PLEASE ELABORATE FURTHER.
Adam glared at the screen, then shook his head. “I can’t find them. No need to keep them talking just to draw out the conversation, and I wouldn’t trust them with any more information than necessary.”
I grimaced, but nodded.
CONSOLE 2: I WILL REVEAL MORE IN PERSON, WITH NANITE BOOSTER PRESENT. ATTEMPTS AT CAPTURE OR OBSTRUCTION WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE.
There was another long pause, but finally, they responded.
CONSOLE 1: PLEASE AWAIT COORDINATES.
As soon as I’d read the message, the connection cut off, leaving me staring at a black screen.
The next day, while we were still waiting for NIX to contact us with a meetup location, I took a walk in the backyard near the edge of the tree-line.
Jacky and Sam were sparring on one side of the backyard, and Kris sat by herself on the other, hunched over something in her lap.
As I walked past, Jacky muttered to herself, “Come on you idiot Skill, grow. Get bigger!”
Sam smirked. “Everybody watch out for Jacky the she-hulk. Jacky stomp, Jacky crush.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she darted forward and punched him in the shoulder.
He clutched his arm, doubling over in pain. “Oh,” he gasped, then straightened up again after only a couple seconds, the tension receding from his face. “Your cruel fear-mongering won’t work on me, Jacky. I’m a super-healer, remember?”
She cracked her knuckles, one by one. “Oh? You mean I don’t need to hold back?”
He paused, eyes widening a bit, then shuffled away.
“You know, your actions don’t discredit his claims very well,” I said.
“I am gonna cruelly fear-monger all over the place,” she said. “But I’ll do it like the stunningly beautiful woman that I am. Someone that no one would ever dare to call a she-hulk.” She flicked her bangs back and grinned wickedly.
Sam ran to hide behind me, my taller body blocking him from Jacky’s view. “Eve, let’s band together against the forces of evil. No one person can stand against them alone.”
Jacky snorted out a laugh. “The forces of evil welcome this challenge!”
I dodged out of the way as she shot toward us. “Sorry, Sam, you’re on your own.” I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him about his most recent activation of Black Sun and the soldiers he’d killed, but, to my surprise, the signs of tension around his eyes and in the slope of his shoulders were almost nonexistent, though his eyes themselves looked slightly shadowed. He seemed…carefree. I guessed he was handling it better than I’d anticipated.
I left them to their sparring and walked up to Kris.
She turned away from a pile of wood shavings to greet me with a tired smile. “Hey, Eve. Are you here to practice your Skills? I can move, if you need the space.” She looked over to Jacky and Sam, still sparring on the other side of the backyard.
I shook my head. “No, don’t move. I just came over to see how you’re doing.”
“Oh.” She smiled, her eyebrows rising just a little, as if she were pleasantly surprised. “I’m practicing,” she said, pointing to a small pile of dead insects and animal bones in front of her. It moved, then, and I realized the pile was actually a four-legged form about the size of a cat. The little four-legged amalgamation picked up a stick about the thickness of Kris’ finger and brought it to her, without any obvious input from the girl. She took it without even looking up, and began to carve at it with a laser tool she must have gotten from Blaine’s lab.
“What are you making?”
“I’m building myself another marionette, since mine got eaten by that wyrm.” She reached into the shavings beside her and lifted up a half-formed wooden puppet, with joints crafted to allow a range of movement greater than a human’s. “I looked up the blueprints online, and I’m going to make i
t so it can unscrew its hands or legs and put on replacement parts that do different things. Modular.” She said the word slowly, as if tasting it.
“And that should work better for your Skill than the…little pieces from things that were once alive?”
“Well, my marionettes before were a lot easier to use than the held-together bodies. But it’s also weird…it feels like the spirits on Earth are pretty weak. At least the ones around here. On Estreyer, I could feel them in the air and the ground and the trees around us. Here, I have to reach really hard to call them. But already, this puppet feels like a good body. I just wish it wasn’t going to be so small. There’s no way it’ll be able to carry me.” She kept her eyes trained on the wood in her hand, using the laser to carve it with surprising deftness. “Oh!” She looked up into the air, a bright grin growing on her face. “I just leveled up my Manual Dexterity!”
I knew she must have been practicing a lot, to get a spontaneous Attribute level-up from the tiny amount of Seeds in her system. As far as I knew, the only Seed organisms she’d ever assimilated were the ones that gave her the Summon Skill. “Have you heard the term significance-based Skill before?” I said.
She frowned and shook her head, stopping carving to look up at me. “No. What does that mean?”
“Well, Adam has a significance-based Skill. He didn’t realize till Torliam told him, actually. I don’t know all the details.” We’d been too busy fighting for our lives on a constant basis for me to take the time to delve into it. How many times had that stopped me from learning, now, probably without me even realizing it? That was dangerous. Knowledge was power, and if I was too distracted to learn the important things, it would catch up to me. I realized I had stopped talking and Kris was staring at me expectantly, so I continued. “Basically, when Adam uses things that are valuable to him, or have some sort of significance, his Skill gets stronger. He once used the tattoos on his arms to hold back a goddess.”
Kris’ eyes widened a bit. “Is that why he adds blood to his ink sometimes?”
I smiled. “Exactly. So I wonder, what would happen if you treated that wood with your own blood? Or maybe wrote some sort of instructions or drew images on the inside with your blood? You’d want to be careful, of course. Make sure Sam is around to help you so there are no complications.”
Her eyes grew even wider as I spoke. “Do you really think that will help? Why didn’t anyone ever say anything about this before? I could have been making all my marionettes stronger, and maybe I could have actually helped out more.” She didn’t whine, but her words were accusing, all the same. “Did the others know about this, too?”
I grimaced. “Well, at least some of them did. They probably just didn’t think to mention it.”
“I know I’m still young,” she said, “But I can make a difference to this team, too. You guys shouldn’t count me out.”
She was right. I said so, and she opened her mouth as if she’d planned to argue, blinked, and then closed it. “Yeah.”
I called Torliam’s name in a voice just a little louder than normal, knowing his Perception was high enough to hear me.
When he arrived, a greasy cloth in his hand that he’d been using to clean the joints of his armor, I asked him to tell us more about how Skills worked.
First, he explained significance and how some Skills seemed to adjust their power output based on it. “There is some argument among the learned ones of my people whether the Skill is somehow aware of the significance, or whether it simply allows your…lower consciousness? Is this the word?” He looked to me for confirmation.
“Do you mean subconscious?”
He nodded. “Yes. Some speculate that the subconscious affects the power of the Skill, and the use of significance is only a way to trick the deeper parts of our minds into believing more power must be channeled, and doing so. In any case, the method is effective for many, regardless of how it works. Others, like you and I,” he said, turning to me, “may benefit by placing significance on our Skill use to some small degree, but are better served by conscious control and exploration of the different aspects of our greater powers. With mastery comes control and versatility.”
He was right, I knew. As I gained control of Chaos, I’d moved beyond simple destruction. “What are the aspects of your Skill?”
Kris nodded eagerly, grinning in excitement. “Ooh, show us!”
Light blue mist blossomed out from Torliam’s hands, but, before he could comply, Adam started shouting, the alarm in his voice drawing everyone’s attention.
“Stop! She’s down, leave her alone!” He was sitting in a lawn chair to give his Animus Skill a break, but had electricity crackling around both hands in obvious threat.
Sam stood over Jacky, who’d collapsed onto the ground and was moaning softly. His eyes had blackened again, and he looked up from Jacky to Adam, a discouraging smile on his face.
“She’s fine,” Sam said, staring Adam down without any hint of fear or regret. “I just gave her a little bit of weariness, maybe a smudge of depression, to counter her more lively emotions. It will wear off soon enough.”
I stood and walked toward him slowly, checking Jacky to make sure she really was alright.
He turned to me, those black eyes meeting my own. I saw the sucking emptiness in them, felt an instinctive fear of it, but whatever power his gaze now carried, he didn’t use it on me. “What’s wrong? Don’t you trust me, Eve?” He tilted his head to the side like a child.
I forced some of the tension to leave my body. “I do trust you. But we’ve also seen some of the things you can do with that new Skill, and you just used it on Jacky. You can imagine why we’re a little worried.”
He rolled his eyes. “She’s already feeling better. I know, because I’m not getting as much charge off her.”
Jacky did stir, sitting up and lifting trembling hands to hide her face, and taking ragged breaths that sounded like they might turn into sobs.
Adam spilled black liquid and grew ink legs from it, then moved to Jacky’s side.
When he tried to wrap an arm around her, she flinched away from him like she hadn’t done since they were strangers. Like she expected him to hurt her. “Sorry,” she said. “I—I just…”
Adam scowled at Sam. “A charge?” he repeated. “The same type of charge you get when you hurt people?”
Sam looked down at Jacky, watching her struggle to her feet with detached interest. “This is much less permanent. I will admit, I am somewhat…desensitized at the moment, but I know I don’t want to hurt Jacky. I’ve won the spar, and that’s enough.”
Gregor peeked out of the back door of the house, his eyes quickly taking in the situation, his hands moving to rest on his daggers.
When I reached for Jacky’s hand, she took mine and allowed me to help her up. “I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was small and shaky.
I positioned myself between her and Sam. “Why don’t you tell us a little more about how your Skill works, Sam? It seems like you’ve got a better grasp on it than you did the first time.”
He stared at Jacky, frowning a little as she refused to meet his eyes. “Black Sun works on a sliding scale. It dampens the things that make me weak. Fear, fatigue, guilt. The more I turn it up, the less I feel, and the stronger my ability to push those same debilitating feelings onto others. The psychological pain seems to count as an attack for my Harbinger Skill, offsetting my ability to heal.”
Jacky let out a shaky breath, finally meeting his eyes. “It just…caught me by surprise. I’m okay.”
The faint frown marring his forehead smoothed. “I’m glad. Shall we go again?”
Her jaw tightened, and she shifted backward, away from him.
“Maybe you should turn it off for now, Sam,” I said.
He turned, flicking his hand as if shooing away my words like a bug. “I don’t feel like turning it off.” The words came sharp and quick, and, after a pause, he continued in a more reasonable tone. “We don’t have
to spar any more, but this is a useful Skill for me, and it needs training. It’s one of the nine Skills we got as part of the Seal.” He walked away, moving to take Adam’s empty seat without meeting any of our eyes again.
I shared a look with Adam and Torliam, but stayed silent. The uncharacteristic languor on Sam’s face made me uncomfortable, but he was right. “Just don’t use it on any of us without asking, alright?”
He waved his hand at me again, then closed his eyes. “Yes, yes.”
Once Sam’s Black Sun Skill reached the limit of how long he could keep it active, and he was forced back to normal, he apologized more sincerely to Jacky, and once more promised he wouldn’t use the Skill on any of his teammates again.
She accepted his apology, but her grins were a little weak for a while after that, and she spent a lot of time practicing her martial arts by herself. She also avoided physical contact with the men of the group, and would flinch if they got too close without her noticing.
I gained a couple more levels in Strength by trying to keep her company while she worked out, bringing that Attribute to a cool twenty-five. Compared to her, I might as well have been training with marshmallows on sticks instead of weights.
Torliam grew antsy over the next couple days, as we waited for NIX to contact us again. At first, I thought it was just tension from watching the news and being stuck at the base, but when I said as much, he shook his head. “No. It is the Skill. Tracker wishes for me to move north, and is urging me onward with increasing strength as time passes. It is like…an itch, which I cannot reach to scratch. The longer we sit idle, the more trouble I have thinking of anything else but the desire to relieve its irritation.”
To his great relief, NIX contacted us not long after, sending only a set of coordinates to the console. Luckily, the military base they wanted to meet at was also north, so we wouldn’t have to backtrack to reach our eventual destination.