by V. M. Law
He laughed, his head thrown back. Kasey took the opportunity to meet Corbin’s gaze. Though he looked broken, as if he aged a century since she last saw him, his eyes remained strong, unclouded, ready. He nodded, so slightly that she questioned whether or not she even saw it, or if she just imagined it. As Eugene’s laughter reached the vaulted ceiling and echoed around the chasm of the Interrogation Wing’s main lobby, she thought anything was possible, and that she would lose her sanity if that ragged bastard didn’t quit his cackling. He sounded like a grasshopper, she thought, and the similarity aroused a sickness in her.
“Enough!” she screamed. “I accept your bargain. If you release my grandfather, I will take his place by your side, and you can take me for whatever purpose you have in mind. Whatever they want of me.”
Her words silenced the man’s laughter. “You don’t know? You’ve been on such a long journey, and you don’t even know?”
“I have a shot,” Jakob said, his voice quavering.
“Wait,” Kasey said.
“I can take it,” he repeated, anger mounting in his voice.
“No!” Kasey panted. Turning to Eugene, “What are you saying?”
“The prophecy? Signal Day? You have been consorting with the Ascendancy, actually had a conversation with immortal Brysen Lee, and he didn’t tell you about the prophecy?”
Kasey’s thoughts reeled. Her gaze jumped to Jakob, who did not meet her stare, and she again said to Eugene, “Speak. I can still blow my brains out right now.” She did not raise her gun, but kept her finger pressed on the trigger. Anton and Jakob stood in her two peripheries, guns leveled at Eugene.
The man, bleeding in rivulets now, approached Kasey, walking with confidence despite his awful wounds, and when he stood a handful of inches from her face, he looked at her with eyes that looked like those of the dead and said, “Would you like to know?” Eugene’s lips spread in a grin, and the effort caused his upper lip to tear in half, right up to his nose. Blood poured from the split.
“Don’t let him touch you, Kasey!” Jakob screamed.
But his words did not reach her in time, and before she had time to think, she found herself nodding to the bleeding corpse of Eugene Farrow. His hand shot out and palmed her forehead, like cold metal.
At once, images she had never seen, places she had never visited, crashed into her mind like a lifetime of someone else’s memories. She fell to her knees and screamed as centuries passed for her. So much. So much. She crumbled before it, quivered at the mass of time marching by in her head. His voice boomed in her mind and she wanted to scream over it, drown it out, but her lips were sealed shut, and the only sound that escaped her mouth as his voice raved in her mind was like a strenuous gasp escaping through a lacerated throat. “We’ve been waiting for you, searching. The wormholes are for you, Kasey Lee.”
Jakob leveled his rifle and looked to Corbin for approval. “I can end it, Corbin!”
But the old man objected. “Don’t shoot him, Jakob,” he said, just loud enough for Jakob to hear him. Like an admittance of defeat. “She’ll die.”
Eugene paid no attention to the rifles aimed at him. He stared directly into Kasey’s eyes, which had rolled into the back of her head as she began convulsing. “When your great grandfather first encountered our wormhole, first responded to our call, he did not comprehend the importance of his actions. He sent what humans would call a time capsule, of sorts. A fragmentary selection of your lives on the planet you call Earth. In those documents, in the minuscule trove he sent us, was you. Your father, actually, but in him, the High Priest of the Center saw a budding power that he predicted would one day lead to you. The High Priest recognized you for what you would become—our prophet, our savior—and he issued a holy order for all of our kind, all of the Emissaries, to find you.
“We did not know, when you contacted your kind, that we would bring our curse upon you. The Ides, the ravenous hive of singular beings with no drive save to feast and procreate. But we did. And now your survival is more crucial than ever. You—”
Kasey felt a cold, sharp pain shoot through her spine and her knees locked. Every muscle in her body seemed to cramp simultaneously. The voice disappeared. She struggled to comprehend its meaning, and a great realization had been dawning on her when the voice devolved into a shrill cry of pain. Did she hear a clap? Somewhere, far off?
At once, her consciousness returned. She sat bolt upright in the Interrogation Wing of MarsForm’s Siberian Outpost and Corbin Lee’s face greeted her when her vision first drew into focus. He turned to Jakob. “What have you done? You have finished us.”
“He was going to kill her!”
“You’re lucky you didn’t.”
They argued, and their screaming grew in volume as the words flew faster from their lips. But Kasey didn’t hear. Whatever had been inside Eugene Farrow no longer resided there, and the mangled corpse of the former CEO of the company sat like a pile of rotting meat outside a butcher’s store, food for the carrion.
But something had been in there. Something that the Council, MarsForm, anyone on the planet or in a space station, did not understand. She had been on the cusp of something. She didn’t know what, but she felt in her heart a door closing and locking itself, never to open again.
The argument between Corbin and Jakob picked up, and Anton joined in, screaming that they needed to leave, that they were lucky to be alive this long.
“Freeze! Where you are! Put your hands over your head and drop your weapons!” The voice boomed through an amplifier, filling the lobby of the Interrogation Wing and cutting the argument over what to do short.
Jakob spun, surprised and furious with himself for being taken at ease. Corbin had the look of a fugitive caught with one leg over the fence. Anton dropped his weapon and the clatter of metal slamming on the ground woke Kasey to the reality of the situation. Before she had the time to drop her own weapon, a trooper walked up to her, cocked his fist back and sent her flying to the ground with a firm punch to the jaw. The others received similar treatment. Anton fell to the ground beside her, and their eyes met for one moment before the troopers decided that there were not enough cells for four prisoners. The man who punched Kasey pulled a pistol from its holster, held it to Anton’s head. He pulled the trigger.
She would have screamed, but her consciousness fled her again, leaving the final words she heard echoing in the blackness of her mind. “We need her alive. She can’t leave the planet.” But she didn’t even know if she heard the words. They could have been a memory, a dream. A fragment from the mystery of the Emissary’s touch on her forehead.
Anything at all.
A rough hand wrapped itself around the nape of her neck, and she felt herself being pulled along the floor, though, as she finally went completely out, she had the sensation of flying over a vast chasm with no bottom in sight.
About the Author
V. M. Law writes science fiction.
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Keep an eye out for the next book in The Ascendants series, coming soon.