by Azalea Ellis
She’s barely twenty or something, and here she is, making our whole military and government look like incompetent fools. Sure, a lot of people died while she was gathering whatever leverage she used to blackmail the aliens into compliance, but I can’t blame what happened to Mordsmouth on her. She did her best, and gave those people a chance to escape that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I’m not too proud to say I was wrong. You’re welcome in my city any time, Ms. Redding.
POSTER “NOT JAMES BOND” SAYS:
Hahaha, did you see the look on her face when they asked her if she was a shapeshifter hiding in the form of a human woman? Hilarious!
POSTER “NINJA PIRATE WARRIOR” SAYS:
I told you guys that theory was ridiculous.
POSTER “ALL YOUR BANDWIDTH ARE BELONG TO US” SAYS:
I don’t have any beef with the Redding chick, but I gotta say her whole “look” is seriously intimidating. No wonder the aliens took one look at her and decided to make peace instead of war.
On a more serious note, I still want a proper explanation for how this whole effing shit-grenade of a situation got started in the first place. We get a peaceful scout mission from an alien and just assume they’re an enemy? *BOOM.* Oops?
POSTER “ME-FOR-PRESIDENT” SAYS:
Official story is, they thought it was an experimental ship from another country, and by the time they’d shot it down, it was too late.
Of course, that’s total bullshit. You’ve seen their ships. No one on Earth is building something like that. What really happened is some people got trigger happy, or maybe even greedy, seeing as they captured one of the survivors to experiment on.
The idiocy is astounding.
Of course, that’s not even getting into how they covered it up as terrorist attacks and started preparing for interplanetary war under the table.
BTW, anyone know where I could commission a costume like hers? I live on a farm, will pay for work with potatoes.
POSTER “ALIEN77” SAYS:
This is what I’ve been saying all along, sheeple. Wake up! The government is corrupt. We need to overthrow the system and start ruling ourselves. We’re never going to have real prosperity and control over our lives till we have freedom. I’m talking anarchy. Don’t gasp in shock and outrage. Look around you. Think about your life over the last few months. Anarchy is the answer. We need to take our fates into our own hand, just like this Redding chick.
Though, to be clear, I’m not at all convinced by half the things she said. I still think the aliens introduced that plague on purpose as an excuse to wipe us out. If you stop listening to the obvious surface agenda of all those news broadcasts and put the underlying pieces together yourself, it all makes sense.
Especially if you think about how dependent we are on the fish people now, since without their help the world economy would fall into a devastating depression.
POSTER “SERIAL-PESSIMIST” SAYS:
Alien77, you know they’re not fish-people, right? That’s just what their ships look like. They’re perfectly normal-looking, just much larger than humans.
POSTER “ANTHROPOLOGIE-4-EVER” SAYS:
I want to know where these Estreyans originated from. How is it possible that an alien race looks so similar to, and is supposedly even able to reproduce with us humans? Are there more humanoid races out there? Was that a winged cat? Why does Redding have scales on one of her arms? Is that a mutation from the experiments, or do a lot of Estreyans carry non-standard traits like that?
POSTER “CHASE123” SAYS:
I hadn’t realized how tall she was, before now. I’m digging the Amazonian look. I wouldn’t throw her out of bed for eating crackers, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink.
POSTER “POP-TARTS LOVER” SAYS:
You’re an idiot, Chase123. I’m more interested in her superpowers. As far as we know, each of them have their own powers, and some of them even have more than one. Is it possible to give everyone these powers, or do you have to have an alien ancestor?
POSTER “BAY-BAY-BACON” SAYS:
I’ve drawn a fan-art story about Eve Redding, her flying cat, and the very buff, mild-mannered reporter who is tasked with covering the story of her adventures. *Cough Cough* You get the idea. Not safe for work. Find it here.
Chapter 37
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.
— H. P. Lovecraft
A few days later, my popularity had grown, but it hadn’t done anything to mitigate my exhaustion or relieve my growing sense of desperation. Every day, hundreds more infected were added to the queue of those who needed to be checked and possibly healed with the lance. Despite working twenty-four hours a day and speeding our process up to be as efficient as possible, we were still falling behind. If it continued, things would spiral out of control.
The main upside to my new popularity was that I’d been able to get a couple companies to agree to supply the rescue and relief efforts, in exchange for future payment of a few handfuls of Estreyan precious metals—which seemed much less precious on Estreyer than they were on Earth, thank goodness—and agreeing to endorse their brands in various ways.
We’d examined the god’s artifact to see if we could figure out how to replicate its effects, but, except for the fact that the lance was mixed with Seed organisms, as if they'd been folded into the metal in trace amounts, we didn’t discover anything we could use.
I felt a sudden flash of greed for the power inherent in those Seed organisms, but tossed the thought away as quickly as it had come. I didn't know how to extract them. Even if I did, I wouldn't know how to use them to do what was necessary, even if I even managed to live through the process of assimilation. The lance was literally made to fight the Sickness, so I should let it do its job.
I joined Torliam on his shift to inspect those he healed, still hoping to find a way to discover if the Sickness had infected someone without using the lance. That way, we could save time by only using it to heal instead of examining everyone. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to sense the signs of the Sickness when it was subtle enough that it hadn’t yet started deteriorating the body.
YOUR FOCUS HAS INCREASED!
I waved the notification away with a vague hand motion, then rubbed at my eyes, hoping to alleviate the headache building behind them.
After his healing shift ended, I took the lance from Torliam. I inserted it absently between my armband and my skin, my eyes tracking over the huge crowd of people I needed to heal during my session. I jerked when the pain registered, then looked down to my arm. The lance was stabbing into the soft skin of my inner elbow.
I drew it out, then stared at its tip as it absorbed the bloody smear. I laid it flat against my forearm. The head of the artifact extended to my palm. I reached out and grabbed Torliam by the elbow before he could walk away. “Torliam.” When he turned to me, I showed him the lance, measured against my forearm. “The lance has grown.”
He stared down at it, and after a moment, said, “This is very curious.”
I grabbed blindly for an empty seat and tossed myself onto it. “Why would it be growing? Do you think it’s getting stronger? Maybe that’s why the healing has been going more quickly.” I didn’t wait to listen for an answer, instead sending my awareness into its metallic form.
I focused as hard as I could, till I could sense the vague vibrations of its molecules, but I didn’t find anything that stood out as strange. So I pushed some power into it. The lance lit up in my mind like the bodies of our patients did. Instead of showing me a language-blueprint, it showed me itself, and all the places where cracks ran through it. Not really cracks, more like slices. Places where pieces of the puzzle fit together.
I pushed more power into it, till the sounds of the room around me and my own body fell away. My hand trembled, th
e surge of power and focus still not enough. The edges I had seen were visible as the lance shivered, but nothing happened.
Torliam’s hand wrapped around mine, and I gasped as the lance lit up like a star with his power.
It burst apart.
I didn’t even have the mental capacity to breathe while my awareness was so focused on the artifact, now a swirling mass of metallic petals, each pulling at my consciousness equally, forcing me to split my attention. It hurt.
They shot forward and sliced right into the dazed civilians.
I restrained my horror, and they jumped in varying levels of fright, but calmed when we all realized they weren’t actually injured.
Each of their bodies bloomed into illumination before me. With another thought, I healed those who needed it. The drain on my power was bigger than I’d been prepared for, and I forcefully stopped it when I realized I was about to pass out.
The petals exited the civilians’ bodies, more like light constructs than actual matter, and reformed in my hand, just like when the lance had first appeared at the feet of the god. “You’ll have to finish,” I half-slurred, turning to Torliam.
He scowled down at me. “Damnation, Eve. Is it possible you could pass even one day without forcing others to worry for you?”
“I’m just a little tired,” I said. “I think it’s worth it, since we just found a way to heal multiple people at once.”
One of our guards brought me a platter loaded with food, some of which was available in the mess hall, and some of which looked like they may have brought it from their own ship’s supplies as a treat for me, since it was actually appetizing.
I sat in the corner and ate constantly for almost an hour, ignoring the looks of amazement from the humans who happened to notice my gluttony. The rest of the team was assembled, and a crowd of our volunteers gathered as well, curious about the excitement on our faces.
Torliam was able to reproduce my success, except with many more petals, and proceeded to heal the entire crowd at once. His face grew a little paler and he panted while the lance reassembled in his hand, but he turned a boyish grin of excitement on me. “This will make a difference,” he said simply.
Sam’s grin was almost woozy. “You just healed almost as many people as we finished the whole of yesterday.” He paused, then sighed. “We…are going to need more healers for the brain damage and the original bites, even disregarding the other wounds they manage to give themselves.”
I nodded. “The Shortcut anchor should be finished soon. Maybe a week longer.”
Torliam handed the lance to Adam. “This method of use requires a significant amount of strength, but we must all practice till we are able to do so.”
Over the next few days, we had to work out a new system for the healing. It required even more calories than we’d been consuming before, and a mid-day nap. We’d all taken on two shorter shifts instead of one longer one, and we seemed to actually be catching up on the number of people who needed to be cleared of possible infection.
We still hadn’t made any progress on duplicating the lance or even truly quantifying its effects. One of the scientists we’d pulled in to help augment our limited knowledge had said, “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s more like reality is being warped than any sort of cellular modification or regeneration.”
Despite the deep resentment between my team and their organization, NIX sent a Thinker to our base to try and help.
Gregor snorted at the man after listening in to his initial report. “You barely have any real knowledge about Skills that aren’t from a Characteristic Trial. You don’t understand Seeds. Your information isn’t even relevant.”
I agreed we may simply not have a good enough base understanding of how Seeds worked in the first place, and put in a request for some theoretical experts from Estreyer.
Still, the ability to heal dozens of people, hundreds if you were Torliam, at once was a huge relief to me. I had time to keep working with Chaos and studying chemistry. I read about synthetic drugs and wondered idly if Chaos could create such things given enough power and control. That would really help Sam and the healers, given our short supply of just about everything.
I even spent some of my spare time before bed working on the Oracle’s last gift, which I was a little surprised hadn’t been necessary to find the cure to the Sickness. I wondered, if I solved it now, would it show me cryptic visions of something I already knew?
I’d taken to experimenting on fish, since they couldn’t scream when Chaos didn’t work exactly as intended, and the ones I killed were waste-eaters from the polluted river and inedible anyway.
I could now fuse together broken bone with some accuracy, but trying to work with nerves was like trying to build the Eiffel tower out of limp spaghetti. Nerves were complex in structure, and, unlike bones, I couldn’t just fuse them together easily and be done with it. Chaos didn’t bend itself to delicacy well, and kept overpowering my attempts at change.
My frustration only made things worse. Once, after a dead fish threw itself off the table in front of me when I messed up, I picked it off the floor and hurled it across the room with a shout of aggravation.
Unfortunately, the door opened right at that moment, and the fish almost hit Adam in the head. He ducked, then looked over his shoulder to the splattered form on the wall behind him. He turned his gaze back to me, eyebrows raised high.
I plopped back down into my seat and looked away, refusing to allow any embarrassment to leak out. “It was being difficult.”
“The dead fish? What did it do to you?”
I poked at another smelly specimen on my desk and refused to meet his eyes.
“You know…” he said, walking over to me, “I can walk just fine. See? You don’t need to drive yourself insane learning how to heal fish spines.”
I looked at him.
He crossed his arms and smirked down at me. “Legs aren’t everything. Someone famous said that, I think.”
I still wanted to keep training in the hopes of healing Adam, but his lack of reliance on me made me feel a little better. Adam picked up a fish, rubbed with disgusted fascination at the slime covering its body, and, without warning, threw it at me. “Payback,” he said simply.
Within the next two seconds, we devolved into a fish-fight, lobbing them at each other like they were throwing knives. By the time we ran out of ammunition, both of us were covered in bits of raw fish, and the room looked and smelled like the inside of a very messy meat factory. I walked around and disintegrated all the pieces I could find with Chaos, which was a good exercise in control since I didn’t want to destroy the walls and floor.
Adam went to take a shower after watching skeptically as I used Chaos to get rid of the fish on myself, and I, still grinning, walked toward my quarters.
I passed a large group in the mess hall, shouting and laughing as they played some sort of game. Human civilians, Estreyans, and members of the military had gathered, along with my team, and none of them seemed to care who was who.
Zed sat at the edge of the room with his eyes closed and his legs crossed. Surprisingly, when I stopped in the doorway, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. He grinned and hopped up, jogging over to me. “I think I’m getting the hang of this Perception thing!”
“Oh?”
He nodded. “I’m starting to see more types of cracks, out of the corner of my eye. These are…different. It’s hard to explain what they look like. Colors, maybe, that don’t exist in the real world. I can’t touch them so far, and I can only see them half the time, but I’m wondering if maybe they lead to different versions of the Other Place. How cool would that be?”
I grinned. “You’ve got the weirdest power.”
He gaped in mock outrage. “You literally have the power of Chaos, Eve. You shouldn’t throw rocks when your own power is a glass house.”
I squinted at him. “I’m pretty sure that’s not how the expression goes.”
“You’re just
upset because you didn’t think of it first!” He stuck his tongue out at me, and I resisted the urge to pinch it between my claws.
“Little brothers,” I said, letting it be a curse and an endearment both.
On my way up to my room, I ran into Kris, or rather, she, riding atop the shoulders of an Estreyan and ordering him to run “faster, faster!” almost ran into me.
He skidded to a stop when he saw me, power flaring as his Skill stopped Kris from flying off or smashing her face into the back of his head from the sudden change of momentum. He gulped, eyes darting back and forth as if looking for some way to hide from my sight.
I laughed. “Kris, did he lose a bet with you or something?”
He relaxed subtly, perhaps reassured by my lack of anger. The Estreyans who’d stayed behind on Earth all seemed somewhat awestruck by myself and the team, which manifested itself in different ways, many of them awkward.
Kris shook her head, the rising pink in her cheeks betraying her chagrin. “He was telling us stories about how they used to ride into battle on eight-legged horses, and…” she looked away, “it sounded fun.”
Gregor burst out of the wall, turning from Shadow back to his corporeal state while in the air, screaming a war-cry as he descended on Kris and her Estreyan “mount.”
He slammed into the side of the man, whose power flared again, softening the impact.