by Lucia Ashta
“It looks like it might hit this area. I don’t know if we’ll have time to get this done before the sky breaks open and lets loose its reserves.”
“I don’t know if we’ll have enough time either. But I don’t want to leave. I’m so close. I can do this,” I said.
“I don’t want to leave either.”
I wasn’t fully rested yet, but Dolpheus was right. Time wasn’t on our side in this instance as it wasn’t in many others. I pulled my legs in and rested my hands on my knees, stretching into my back. “I’m going to get back to it.”
“Uuuuh. I’m still super tired. I don’t think I can do it just yet. I might take a nap first. I don’t mind a little rain.”
Neither one of us minded a little rain. But O’s storms usually brought quite a lot more than that.
“Take a nap then. Who knows? Maybe you’ll wake up in the inner lab as I did last time.”
Dolpheus yawned but didn’t rein in his outspread appendages. Like a stunted star, he was ready for sleep. “Yeah. Maybe, huh?”
“If you get in that way before I do, just wait for me there. I hope to be able to get in too. But if it seems like you’re waiting too long, start snooping without me. The longer we remain inside, the greater the risk of being discovered. Remember, we’re looking for anything that will intrigue the King. I imagine that my father won’t just leave the secrets to his splicing empire lying around in plain sight.”
“But he also won’t expect intruders in his lab.”
“Right. So look for anything that might excite the King. And let’s hope we get lucky,” I said.
“Well, we are often lucky.” There was a joviality to his voice that I didn’t expect.
“True. Let’s hope it continues.”
“Why don’t you sleep too? You look as worn out as I feel.”
“I’m sure I do. But I don’t want to do it the easy way. I want to take this head-on. I’m so close to being able to manipulate the force field mindfully. I want to try. I want to see if I can do it.”
Dolpheus yawned again. “If you insist, man. I like the napping idea much better right now.”
“I need to know whether I can do it. It’s time for me to understand more of my capacities.”
“All right.”
“I suspect that I’ll need all of my faculties in place to retrieve Ilara. I have the feeling that things won’t turn out to be as we think them. I think I’ll need every single one of my abilities before this is over.”
I reached over and brought a palm down on his arm with a slapping sound while I moved to stand. “And if I can’t do it, hopefully you can. At least we know napping worked once before. Maybe set the intention of penetrating the force field as you drift off.”
“I’m already on it, Tan. I’m already floating away into the dream world, passing through the force field and through the lab’s walls. I’ll see you inside there. Or I’ll see you back out here if you don’t make it in.”
I liked his confidence. Never one to doubt himself, there seemed no reason to begin now. Our good-natured competitiveness had long given us the edge to push forward when we might have fallen back.
I covered the few steps that brought me back to where I’d been, within inches of the force field’s shimmer. I looked at the sky. Even more dark and foreboding now.
I settled back into my wide-legged stance. Brought my gaze ahead. Without another thought as to what I might or might not accomplish, I let my eyes lose focus until they barely noticed what they saw.
Then, I closed them and brought myself fully within, where nearly anything was possible.
Sixteen
As it often did when I abandoned any definition of myself, time became difficult, if not impossible, to measure. It might have taken me hours to get to the point where I now found myself. Or perhaps it had only been minutes.
I’d known that I needed to arrive here if I hoped to make any progress at infiltrating the force field. Still, once I did, it caught me by surprise, when I’d almost forgotten what I was attempting to do, and nearly didn’t recognize my cue to begin exploring the threads of the force field’s matrix.
It was when I was fully content to be in the hazy space of nothingness and at once everything that I could proceed. Only then, I lacked the desire to do anything. Being was sufficient to satisfy my soul. My usual conceptions of reality were absent, and solidity vanished to reveal itself as it, in truth, was: fully malleable. Existence was a great gift, wholly independent from what one chose to do with that gift.
It took a great surge of will to move forward from the contentment of being one with everything on planet O. Still, Ilara was motivation enough. There was little I wouldn’t do for the woman. I’d fallen under her enchantment when I met her and was able to look into those remarkable eyes up close. She’d remained a constant part of me since that first encounter. I had to continue if I wanted her ever to be a concrete part of me again.
Exhilaration bubbled within. I must have smiled though I wasn’t sure whether my mouth moved or not. I observed the exhilaration flow through me, mindful not to climb aboard its wave. Too much emotion might distract me from the serenity I needed to continue.
When stillness returned, along with the sensation that I didn’t particularly care whether I succeeded, I reached out with intangible tentacles that extended from my personal energetic field. They made contact with the force field, or rather, with its components. I thrummed the threads. They responded pleasantly. So I ran my palm along the tight weave that composed the force field.
It was an artful manifestation of intelligence. I caressed it again. My own energy continued to extend toward it, admiring. Then, I plucked one string, as if the harp wasn’t my instrument, but another’s.
Like a timid lover, I touched in entreaty. The thread softened and yielded at my touch, becoming supple and warm. The matrix was ready for me. It parted its legs in invitation.
I dove in. Nothing went as I’d thought it might. Instead, it went the way it was supposed to.
I forgot all about my plan to create an exception to the force field that included Dolpheus and myself. I probably even forgot about Ilara for moments at a time. I gave myself to the sensuality of the matrix, to its ability to be almost anything. To perhaps be what I understood as the essence of life itself.
I synced myself with its rhythm. I could have stayed there, within its folds, all day.
But then, from a faraway place in my brain, in floated a prompt. The inner lab. As if in a fog, I chose to go there. I plunged farther into the soft yielding of the matrix, only to discover that I could push right through it.
Beyond the force field, all it took was a drifting, lazy thought of the inner lab, and I transported there. I was already in the midst of the mind frame (which was mostly a removal from the structure of thought) necessary for effective transportation.
In the next instant I found myself no longer assaulted by the whipping winds of the gathering storm. The energy of the forces of nature was replaced by a different kind of energy. It was cool, but a different kind of cold than the one that brought out bumps across your skin and made your nipples erect. A sterile chill engulfed me, along with a silence that was far too quiet to be the product of nature.
My body reacted, realizing that its environment had changed, and that this wasn’t one with which it was naturally comfortable. The sudden body awareness began to call me from the somewhere place I’d had to go to touch something outside of myself. Gradually, I grew aware of the perception of my senses. The sound. An artificial hum, soft. Still, I didn’t like it. The smell. Aseptic. Of some place too clean. The taste. The air, tangy. The smell of metal.
I blinked my eyes open experimentally as if I’d been asleep for a very long time. I noticed Dolpheus on the other side of the room, blinking as I was, disorientation written across his features.
I looked around. Blank, white walls where metal shelves weren’t covering them. A wide, long bed, also metal, hovering in the air
just as the King’s glass bed had. Bigger than necessary for the body of any human.
I heard movement across the room. Dolpheus was standing, wobbly like a newborn moab, much before it became as fierce as its mother. Our eyes met across thirty-or-so feet of immaculate tile. Dolpheus covered the distance between us with loud footfalls. I turned to the table, imagining the people who lay there, giving their will to my father. Dolpheus joined me. Still, neither of us said anything, not even about the occurrences that allowed both of us inside this forbidden room.
Before either of us were ready for it, the echo of footfalls far down a corridor somewhere, near enough to be heard. Each moment, closer.
My body resisted purposeful movement, yet I moved. Dolpheus moved. We swiveled and scanned the room, searching for a place to hide. There were no good ones. We moved to take bad ones.
I pulled a large metal drawer open. Dolpheus did the same beside me. Inside mine, there was a body. His was empty. He climbed inside his and I closed mine, without even wondering who the naked man draped in a sheet was. I yanked the one next to it open. Full. This one was a woman. Her breasts tinted blue, a sheet beneath the peaks. I slammed this drawer shut too.
I reached for the one above the woman’s. This one was empty though an awkward climb. The footsteps were nearer, loud now, several people.
I shut Dolpheus’ drawer the final inch he hadn’t and pulled the woman’s drawer partially open again. I used it as a step to reach the one above hers. I shut hers, mindful not to look at the features of her face. It was disturbing to see bodies meant for life lying here, lifeless.
I braced my hands above my head and slid the drawer, with me in it, shut, careful not to cut myself on the bare metal slides and braces. The last couple of inches were the hardest to close, but I managed.
My drawer clicked shut just as the door to the room clicked open.
Seventeen
If I’d anticipated that both Dolpheus and I would be able to breach the force field and gain access to the inner lair of my father’s splicing empire, I might have thought past this step instead of flinging myself forward just so that I could make some progress toward rescuing Ilara, if only through momentum. I might have given more effort than I had toward elaborating a sensible plan—though Dolpheus and I had tried, you know that, but it was possible that we hadn’t tried enough.
In planning, I might have imagined that it would be a good idea to place ourselves precisely in the position we found ourselves in right now: hidden from sight, able to overhear whatever conversation was held within the lab.
It would seem that Dolpheus and I inadvertently found ourselves in an ideal situation. There were no papers lying around on any of the lab’s immaculate surfaces. There was no sign announcing, in big bold letters, whichever of my father’s secrets would endear me to the King. There was a blank wall that hid the programming unit that controlled the many aspects of splicing. I knew this from the last time I was here. It was where I had, by chance, discovered a trace of Ilara’s transfer off planet. It was only because whomever the King had commanded to move Ilara off O wasn’t as savvy with processing units as I was, or as father or Aletox were.
The trace that I found was faint, nearly unrecognizable for what it was. The King’s servant, or whoever he was, hadn’t been entirely devoid of skill. He’d done a competent job at covering his steps. However, as soon as I saw the glitch, the piece of code that wasn’t supposed to be there, I knew it was about Ilara in the same way that I’d known that she was alive before I received any external confirmation of the fact. When it came to Ilara, I just knew things. There was no good explanation for the knowing, it just was.
That earlier exploration, searching for a sign of Ilara on my father’s processing system with near desperation, had taught me that it wouldn’t be worth my time to bother with it now. I probably would have anyway—bothered with it—because the hunger for news of Ilara hadn’t been alleviated with the confirmation that she lived. If anything, it had intensified. I’d try anything. I would scour my father’s system, looking for anything that might interest the King, even though I suspected I’d encounter exactly what I had last time: string after string of zeros and ones that looked like nothing meaningful unless you knew what you were looking at.
I was cold, near the point of shivering already, in a frigid metal drawer intended to contain the dead, or the near dead which to me was somehow worse. I was surrounded by bodies that appeared lifeless. My dearest friend lay in another drawer, likely wondering why he’d insisted on joining me on this mission.
Still, I couldn’t help but ponder whether our circumstances were unexpectedly fortuitous. Before hearing the footsteps along the hallway and jumping into this drawer, I’d had no idea how we’d procure what the King wanted. Perhaps this was our chance. If we didn’t freeze before we could get out of these drawers and if we could actually hear anything that was said from within these metal boxes.
Already, the people in the lab were in conversation, yet all I could hear were faint mumblings. I couldn’t even make out the timbre of my father’s voice. As recognizable as it was, with its forceful undercurrents that imposed themselves upon you even when he communicated in whispers, I couldn’t tell if he was speaking.
I wouldn’t get anything to take to the King like this. I lay there, shivering, with my hand clamped in a death grip against my sword to keep its sheath from clanging against the metal of the drawer. Was there any way that I could open my drawer enough for the voices to waft in, without those conversing discovering me? But no, how could I? They would hear the drawer’s click as it opened, and they would see the drawer ajar. Lifeless bodies in lifeless drawers weren’t supposed to move them.
My eyeballs grew cold. I shut my eyes; perhaps my eyelids would keep my eyeballs warm, I thought, with hopeful delusion. It was dark in there, anyway. I’d kept my eyes open to make a statement to a theater empty of its audience: I was alive even if I was in a lifeless drawer meant only for the lifeless.
My balls had retreated, given over to despair. I began to wonder if my choices would kill my best friend. He deserved the death of a hero if he deserved death at all. He didn’t deserve death by drawer. I hoped the same could be said of me, but of that I was less certain. I remembered many of the thoughts I’d had and the actions I’d chosen, even if I wanted to forget them. I hadn’t always been noble. I hadn’t always chosen the honorable path. If anyone had to perish from death by drawer, it was me. Not him.
I decided right then, in the moment immediately before my eyelids froze shut and my balls fused to my dick, that I would push open the drawer and draw all the attention in the room to myself—this part would be easy. I would do something so that everyone would need to be involved in subduing me and—I hoped—dragging me off to another room. This would give Dolpheus the opportunity to slip out of his drawer—if he could hear enough to realize what I was doing, if he wasn’t frozen to death by then, and if he (and I) could open the drawers from the inside. There were a lot more ifs where those came from.
It was a crappy plan with a low chance of things going the way I needed them to, but it was all I had. It was what I would do if I had to.
I waited, listening to unintelligible murmurs and counting long, freezing breaths to keep my mind from grasping the panic it kept leaping toward. My nose hairs were frozen. Each breath tickled. It was a good thing I was too cold to sneeze.
It was time. I had to move now to do it. The cold was slowing my brain. I’d already forgotten the conditions I set for myself to mark the moment that demanded action, but I was certain they must have been met. I steeled myself as much as I could, while I tried to reduce the shivering enough to get my teeth to stop chattering and my muscles to work in a way that I could control. I wriggled like a worm toward the back half of the drawer. I planted the soles of my boots as firmly as I could against the drawer’s back, my feet shaking inside them.
I pushed off. The soles of my boots deflected off the metal and the sides
of my knees slammed against either side of the drawer. Hard. I knew a blow like that should hurt, but I was too frozen to feel anything.
I hadn’t even managed to push against the top of the drawer with my hands as I’d intended. I’d have to do much better next time. If not, both Dolpheus and I were likely to die in here.
I prepared myself again, and took extra time to steel myself and draw in the strength that the cold had robbed me of. As impossible as it seemed, I swore that I was colder now than I’d been just the moment before. This might be my final chance.
I drew in a breath that clanged around in my chest like a death rattle. My eyes shot wide open. Obviously, my eyelids weren’t yet frozen shut. Still, things were worse than I thought. I planted my boots firmly, willing them not to slip again. I gripped the metal above my head with fingers that could no longer bend.
I didn’t let myself think anymore. I pushed with all I had.
Nothing happened.
The drawer didn’t budge. I slid around awkwardly inside it, banging joints, making more noise than I should have. My muscles just weren’t working the way they were supposed to, the way they usually did.
I’d waited too long.
Eighteen
Here’s a thing I’ve learned about assumptions and fears and plans: They never turn out to be exactly the way I imagined them. In fact, they often turn out to be the complete opposite. Thankfully, this happened to be one of those instances, when it was a good thing that what I wanted to happen didn’t actually happen.
As I let my legs fall to the sides in an expression of frozen defeat, a sound that had never sounded like hope before rang out, echoing through my metal prison, like the songs of the Devoteds, promising salvation. There was a click, unmistakable in its meaning. Then there was a second one. And a third.
My drawer remained closed, yet light, sound, and ambient air traveled through the common chamber that contained all the drawers to reach my own slice of frozen torment. The air that flowed into my drawer wasn’t enough to warm it, but it was sufficient to keep the freezing process from advancing.