by Azalea Ellis
Jacky fairly sprinted across the room.
As soon as Kris returned to close proximity to her body, she stopped clenching at her chest plate and her movements grew smooth again. Obviously, there was still some sort of connection to it which allowed the puppet body to function. I imagined it might become just an empty puppet if taken too far away from Kris’ original body.
Gregor ran back to his sister, holding a marker and a small whiteboard. Tears rolled down his face again, and his voice had risen with panic. “What’s wrong with her? Is she dying?”
“She needs to stay near her body,” I said, careful to avoid another accident with my reshaped teeth.
He stopped crying with a few deep breaths and some sniffles, but his deep frown remained. “This isn’t safe. What if she gets separated from her body? We have to find some way to get her back in it.”
I hesitated. “Maybe…the Remnants can do something to help. Right after everything, I got a quest to go to them for help against Pestilence.”
Torliam rubbed his face. “I have been searching for them already, and my Skill has found nothing.”
“There should be a way,” I said. “Maybe the Oracle’s third gift has a clue. I still haven’t been able to solve it, though, and I don’t feel any closer than when I started.”
Zed cleared his throat, looking around pointedly. “Guys, you think maybe we should go somewhere less…filled with bodies? We should check on the Estreyans, too. They didn’t all have the Sickness to start with, right? So some of them have probably survived. Maybe they can help us.”
We found a plastine box about Kris’ size, placed her inside, then filled it with ice in the hopes that preserving her body would pay off later. Jacky insisted on carrying it with her, strapped to her back in place of her pack, with the puppet riding in her arms.
We came upon a couple infected still alive in the halls, and Zed killed them with a bullet to the head before they could even look at us. “Don’t want them reporting how miraculously alive the rest of us are to their boss, just in case he’s watching this place,” he said.
We came to the edge of the stairwell leading down to the ground floor, and I motioned for the others to stop with a raised hand. “There are a lot down there,” I said. “Why don’t you take us out of the building through the Other Place? That’ll be a lot simpler.”
Zed complied, and we stepped into the deathly cold of the grey alternate world. As soon as the opening closed behind us, a weight lifted off my shoulders.
My eyes widened, and I turned to look at the others, examining them for any change. “Pestilence’s influence just stopped.”
Torliam and Adam both scowled, almost identically. They rounded on me, and spoke at the same time. “Has he been attacking you all this time?” “Explain yourself.”
My scales rippled with irritation. “The Sickness is a product of his influence. You can’t heal it, you can only negate it. That’s what I’ve been doing. But as soon as Zed closed the opening to the real world, the tug against my willpower just…disappeared.”
Zed looked around. “That…actually makes sense. Sam and I noticed that when we dragged Adam and Jacky in here to stop them during the fight that they stopped acting so crazy. We thought the Other Place was just draining them, but when we brought them and Gregor back in after you locked yourself away, we noticed they didn’t seem to be getting any worse while they were inside. That’s why we tried to keep them here while you were burning yourself and that whole quarantine room into mush. Maybe Pestilence can’t reach in here.”
That could be game-changing information. If we could find a way to replicate the effects without the deadly cold, we might be able to save a lot of people.
We hurried down through the empty halls of the building and moved a few blocks away before returning to the normal world.
When we exited, I looked around in horrified disgust. Even here, there were bodies and crazed, dying people.
I watched through the window of one of the buildings we’d set up as a temporary shelter as a woman in a floral nightdress set fire to an empty crib, cackling madly through split lips.
On a street corner, a man nibbled daintily on a small leg, which had been torn off at the knee.
I smelled the ash and saw plumes of smoke rising from fires all over the city, and klaxons once again screeched out a warning to those people who could still manage to care about their own safety. Perhaps those who hid inside would live, if those with the Sickness did not tear and burn down the city in their consumptive rage and delirium before succumbing to death, or if Pestilence didn’t decide to spread his influence further as he continued the charade of disease.
“The Champion must have been defeated,” Torliam said. “When his realm was disturbed, I thought it so unlikely that another god would be attacking him. Yet, what is this, if not for his death?”
Adam gritted his teeth, shuddering. “All this time, he’d been holding back…that thing. Now it’s free to do what it wants. The world is going to crumble.”
“I thought you couldn’t kill a god?” Zed said. “Just…disburse them? So he’s going to come back, right?”
I frowned. “I’m not so sure. Maybe you can’t kill them, but I have a feeling, if you were powerful enough, you could make them…cease to be. You’d just have to change the universe into a place where they didn’t exist. And even if that’s not possible, it might take a very long time for what’s left of him to gather enough of his power to affect anything. Also,” I paused, tilting my head to the side as I searched for the best path toward the Shortcut anchor, “I’m not so sure Pestilence is a god. I can sense Seed power. He didn’t feel like any god I’ve met, and none of the people under his influence feel like a Skill is focused on or affecting them. Even if the bug-body was a decoy, there should have been some flare of power that indicated Pestilence’s control over it.”
Zed’s eyes narrowed, then widened. “What if he was just hiding whatever powers him in another realm?”
I turned, leading us down the clearest path. “Do you know something we don’t?”
“I told you how I’ve started to notice other cracks in the world besides the ones to the Other Place, right? These cracks have different colors, and I can’t touch them, yet. I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of…entrance, in his chest. I would notice it sometimes, when you guys destroyed the bugs forming his body. It’s not a rip, more like a line, or a point.” He shook his head, fingers clenching reflexively around the grip of one of his guns. “It’s hard to explain it, when you can’t see what I can. But it makes sense, right?”
“It does,” I said. “We’re gonna need you to keep focusing on your Perception, if you’re the only one who can see it. It would also explain why the God of Shaping and Molding was hiding in that hellscape realm all this time.”
Adam’s head was on a paranoid swivel, his gaze traveling all around as he searched for danger like a character in a horror film. “Is the god definitely dead? If he’s still alive, he’d probably be our best bet to make it through this alive.”
“I will search for him,” Torliam said. His eyes went blank for a moment. When they regained focus, a frown grew between his brows.
I sensed the glow of Seed power flare within him as he fed strength into the Skill.
He turned, slowly, till he was facing me. “I do not believe he is alive. Or if he is, there is no path to him. When I strained for a different answer, my Skill pointed me, with the slightest of tugs, toward you.”
Chapter 41
You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
I tilted my head to the side, then nodded. “We can probably use that pod,” I pointed. “It’s still running, and there are enough seats for all of us.”
Adam looked to the pod, then to me. “Wait. You’re just going to let that statement fly by? Why is Torliam finding you when he looks for the lost god?”
I waved my hand for them to follow, t
hen crossed the street to the empty pod and climbed inside.
The others packed in behind me.
As I drove off, I explained. “Well, it’s in the prophecy, isn’t it? I’m one of his distant descendants. I don’t know if I have any of his Seed organisms in my body or not, though if I do it’s probably a minuscule amount. However, I am a godling.”
Torliam nodded, but the others stared at me in confusion.
“When I swallowed that piece of Behelaino’s Seed core, she said it would give me the chance to ‘ascend’ and called me a godling. Some of you were there for that, remember? I’m not a god, but Chaos isn’t a Skill like most of the ones we have. It’s the direct power of the god, and I guess it makes me kinda like one of their physical manifestations.”
Sam leaned forward, looking out over my shoulder. “Does—does this mean you made a blood-covenant with them when you healed them? Do you need to do that with the rest of us, too?”
I shifted my grip on the steering wheel, which wasn’t sized for people with extra-long fingers tipped by claws. “It is a one-sided blood-covenant, like what we had with Torliam before he had it broken. It might give you access to a little more power than you’d normally have, and you might have some extra awareness of me. I hope that’s not a problem. I figured you guys wouldn’t mind, if I could save your lives.”
Torliam’s face was carefully expressionless, but the others expressed their lack of worry about sharing a blood-bond with me.
“I might need to give the rest of you a little blood, too,” I said. “It’ll help me counter Pestilence’s influence, if he comes after you.”
Gregor’s voice was small, coming from the back seat. “Do you think he’ll come after us again?”
“Definitely,” Adam said, before anyone else could respond.
Gregor hunched into himself, and Jacky sent Adam a threatening glare.
Adam scoffed. “Do you think it’s better to lie to him? He can handle it. We’re all going to have to handle it. It’s not like we can just hide in the Other Place forever. If you haven’t noticed, the conditions there aren’t exactly conducive to life.”
The thought of Pestilence showing his face again filled me with a volatile mix of emotions that set my heart pounding. My fingers flexed, squeezing into the steering wheel and leaving an impression of my hand in it. My lips had curled back from my teeth without my conscious intent.
Zed noticed, but didn’t comment on it, instead saying, “Why did Pestilence even come after us in the first place?” He looked to me. “With the Champion out of the way, he’s so much more powerful than us, there’s no way we could have stood against him. Even with the lance. He didn’t need to come after us. He didn’t need to destroy it. He chose to.”
I replayed the thing’s words in my memory and felt my mind start to rush, as it did when the universe was a puzzle just starting to slot together in front of me. “Because we were a beacon of hope, still. Futile as our power was against him. Because the Sickness isn’t just physical.” I turned to Torliam, my gaze boring into his own as I willed him to understand.
He nodded, slowly. “It brings only ruin. It is despair. It is hopelessness. It is the loss of all that ties the mortal world together. We brought hope.”
Sam settled back into his seat, his eyes shadowed but not black. “He needed to attack because he was afraid of what would happen if he let us keep going.”
I laughed, the sound sharp and biting. “It was a preemptive strike. It’s true, he will come back again. Because we didn’t die. And he was lying when he said he couldn’t be defeated. We’ve all seen the evidence, and we already have a quest to work with the Remnants against him. The lance isn’t our only answer.”
Gregor’s fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white. “It killed Chanelle because it was afraid? That’s why Kris is…like this?”
I slowed the pod to a stop as we came to the edge of the hastily-erected encampment around the Shortcut anchor.
“We’re going to keep fighting him, right? We’re going to find a way to kill him for good, so he can’t ever hurt us again, right?” The boy leaned forward, almost pleading with me. “We have to.”
I grinned back at him, showing too-sharp teeth. “You don’t have to convince me. I’d want to kill him, even if he ran away from us and pleaded for forgiveness.”
“It will be justice,” Torliam said.
Zed grinned, his fingers trailing over a spot in the air that seemed just like any other to my own senses. “Let’s not pretend. Eve doesn’t really get justice. This is about revenge.”
“Hatred is a strong motivator,” Sam said. “Pestilence has made a mistake.”
I agreed. I looked out onto the strewn about bodies of Estreyans and humans alike, catching faint glimpses of Skill effects going off in the distance. More than just my appearance had changed, when I remade myself. I didn’t know if I’d taken another step down that sociopathic spectrum Kilburn had accused me of being on, or if I’d just somehow broken under the stress of so much despair and the following rage. It might even be some side effect from acknowledging myself as a godling instead of a human. Whatever it was, it was cold and predatory, and filled with a hatred that swirled like ice and fire inside me.
I pulled up the quest Window again, looking for any extra clues I may have missed in my distraction the first time around.
THE REMNANTS
FIND THE REMNANTS AND CONVINCE THEM TO LEND THEIR AID AGAINST PESTILENCE.
COMPLETION REWARD: ANOTHER WEAPON IN THE GREAT WAR
NON-COMPLETION PENALTY: DEATH
It wasn’t much to go on, but I shared the Window with the others.
Adam twirled three-dimensional ink in the shape of a small snake between his fingers, absently making it disappear and reappear with sleight of hand. “They must have done something to block even pseudo-scrying Skills like Tracker. If Torliam can’t find them, what other options do we have? They’ve somehow managed to stay unrevealed until now, and I’m pretty sure even NIX wasn’t aware of them, or they would have been capturing people to harvest Seeds from or experiment on.”
Torliam’s jaw clenched.
The ink snake whipped around faster as Adam closed his eyes. His lids fluttered, an indication that he’d activated his Hyper Focus Skill to work on the problem. After a few minutes, they snapped open. He turned to Torliam. “Didn’t you say the Skill is based off how familiar you are with whatever you’re searching for? What did you ask the Skill to find, specifically?”
Torliam’s eyes widened, and his expression lacked the usual antagonism when he returned Adam’s gaze. “I searched for the Remnants, I believe.”
Adam smirked. “So why don’t you try looking for Eve’s mother and father, independent of their association to the organization that calls itself the Remnants?”
Torliam wasted no time, power flaring as he set it to work. Less than a minute later, his smile stretched across his face like a self-satisfied cat. “I have them. East and slightly south. Not far, but not near either.”
I let out a low chuckle of satisfaction. “Well, that was less difficult than I thought it would be. Now let’s see if there’s anyone we can get to give us a quicker ride.”
I drove the pod slowly through the encampment, avoiding the putrid, dead bodies. Many of them had died to wounds, but just as many had died from Pestilence’s influence itself. When its effects grew too much for their bodies, they simply collapsed in a puddle. Like Kris…
Soon, we came upon a mixed group of humans and Estreyans fighting back against the infected trying to exit the downed ship. An Estreyan with copper hair, who I struggled at first to recognize as Captain Milan past the dirt and grime covering her, lead the resistance group.
Above them, a fighter ship flitted around, picking off the remaining infected and attacking the wings of the downed ship when they moved despite the damage already done to them. It looked like they’d purposefully broken the ship’s wings so it couldn’t fly away, but it was
attempting to leave anyway. I shuddered to think what damage Pestilence might have caused if his minions were able to commandeer it.
I didn’t expect to be able to completely avoid all infected from now on, but I also didn’t want to advertise Pestilence’s failure to him. It was likely he’d soon realize I wasn’t dead, but we needed time to prepare before we faced him again. Hopefully, it would be enough to keep Pestilence out of the truly valuable information about any future plans.
I had Adam contact the fighters with a parrot ink construct.
They almost destroyed it out of distrust before it could reach them, but Captain Milan held out a hand to stop them, her eyes narrowing.
When the parrot reached them, it spoke in my voice, repeating the words I’d spoken as it inflated to its full size, like a balloon. “Not all hope is lost. The Sickness is stronger than we knew, and wears a body to walk among us, the same way the gods form a physical manifestation. Yet it has failed to remove the threat to its existence. The godkiller lives, and continues to fight against it. Captain Milan, bring those you are able to save out of the city, and meet us with the ship at the junction of roads.”
Her eyes widened, as the people around her started chattering with excitement, confusion, and distrust.
The parrot, now completely deflated, disintegrated. With our message received, we left.
A few hours later, the fighting around the Shortcut anchor died down, and the scarred fighter ship flew to the junction where we waited, settling down warily a few hundred meters away.
Captain Milan exited the ship, and I got out of our pod, walking toward her slowly so she had time to examine me and notice all the features that had remained the same about my body, as well as the Voice symbol and the Oracle’s two gifts.
“It’s me,” I said simply. “It’s going to be alright. We have a place to go, and some people we hope will help us beat the Sickness, who goes by the name Pestilence, by the way. We’ll find a way to kill him for good, so that he can’t come back and do this again.”