by Dean Murray
Kyle's hand snapped shut on empty space and a split second later a blast of lightning tore through the air. Everything was happening so quickly that for a second I wasn't sure who had attacked whom.
It wasn't until the lightning discharged its fury against the ward that I realized Kyle had defended himself simply by stepping back behind his defenses. I was still trying to adjust to the sudden outburst of violence when Fenrir threw himself into the ward as though trying to get through so that he could tear my throat out.
Fortunately the ward was strong enough to repel the attack and it threw him back into the wall with enough force to shake the floor.
Despite all of the shocks to my system, my anger hadn't gone anywhere. I reached out to the heartbeat of my surroundings, keyed in on the crackle as the ward continued to discharge the energy it had just absorbed, and slowed the crackle down to a hum. Kyle was still moving several times as fast as I was, but now I could at least follow the fight.
As I began amping myself up, Kyle stepped back through his ward and cut loose with a bar of white-hot golden light. I'd expected him to attack Fenrir while the gigantic wolf was still reeling from its encounter with the wards, but instead Kyle targeted Mephistoles.
It was the same attack that I'd seen Kat use to destroy trees like they were nothing more than twigs, but Kyle's beam of light was an order of magnitude more powerful. It should have vaporized Mephistoles and gone on to bore through the rock wall behind him, but instead it simply stopped, disappearing inches before it struck his body.
Kyle stepped back through the ward a split second before Fenrir threw himself at the ward again. This time I was amped up enough that I was able to see the ward deform. Fenrir's jaws closed only inches away from Kyle's head before the wolf was once again thrown clear of the cerulean field.
"You failed, Kyle. You can't fight both of us, not forever. Eventually you'll be half a step too slow and one of us will manage to cut you down."
"I don't fail. I accomplished exactly what I intended to accomplish, old man. Your ability to negate my sun lance is impressive, but we both know doing so isn't cheap. You just burned a peak memory. I can't imagine that you have too many of those."
"Now you're the one who's underestimating me. My…advantages are such that stopping something like that requires nothing more than base memories. I do hope you didn't waste one of your peak memories, infant."
Kyle's smile got even bigger. "All the better. How much did you lose just now? A month, two months? You just finished torching the mountainside in a failed attempt to kill my do-gooder brother. How much did that cost you? A year? Two?"
"I've got enough reserves to squash you like a bug."
Kyle shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not, but the real question is if I'm the one you should be worrying about. Jace and Kat have to be smarting from the beat down you just administered to them. If I were you, I'd be a lot more worried about what they're going to be doing back at your place while you're stuck here for the better part of a month trying to kick my doors down."
"The two of them don't have a chance in hell of breaking my wards."
"Maybe, but who's to say that it will be just the two of them? The location of your lair is hardly a secret. Everyone knows where it is, they just know that it would take more than a day or two to breach your wards, and they don't want to tangle with you."
"I need the girl."
"That's uncommonly dense, even for you. You don't want the girl, you want her research journals. Those are with Jace and Kat, not with us."
Mephistoles paused as though thinking about what Kyle had just said, and Kyle used that fraction of a second to attack. He darted through the wards again, sidestepped Fenrir's lunge, leaped over a blast of fire that left his clothes smoking, and stabbed Mephistoles through the shoulder with the sword that had spent the entire fight up until now sheathed at Kyle's waist.
The scream that tore free of Mephistoles' throat raised the hair on the back of my neck, but his obvious pain didn't slow him down much. A sword that looked like it was crafted out of strands of black light materialized in Mephistoles' hand and he made a savage cut at Kyle's neck that should have taken off his head.
Mephistoles was obviously amped up to at least four or five times normal speed—he was fast enough that I wouldn't have been able to evade his attack, but Kyle was faster than me. I expected him to block the black sword with his silver one, but instead he sprinted towards the closest wall and ran up it, throwing himself backwards in a flat trajectory that took him over Mephistoles' sword.
Fenrir was moving much slower than I remembered from my fight with him, but even so he'd had enough time to spin around and charge back towards the other two combatants. I stepped towards the fight, desperate to do something to help, but the ward still hadn't gone anywhere.
I was forced to watch as Kyle spread his arms in opposite directions and sent another beam of golden light at Mephistoles while slashing Fenrir across the face with a strike so fast that his sword was nothing more than a blur even to me.
Mephistoles once again dispelled Kyle's attack, but this time the force of the beam sent him staggering back several steps. More astonishing though was the black blood flowing across Fenrir's muzzle. The cut wasn't enough to stop Fenrir, not when he was out for blood. The dark wolf didn't even slow, but it was in that precise instant that Kyle's genius was fully revealed.
Fenrir's teeth once again snapped shut on empty air and then he clipped Kyle with his shoulder, sending him careening through the ward and across the stone floor. I feared for a second that Kyle had cut himself on his own sword, but a couple of seconds later he pulled himself back to his feet and saluted both of his opponents.
"Thanks for the warmup. I promise I'll be back whenever you least expect it to continue what we just started."
Kyle shuddered slightly and then slowed down until he was moving with nearly the same languid torpor as the other two. I was still amped up, and for the briefest of moments I was tempted to charge him. I didn't know the first thing about combat, but as Kyle had just demonstrated with Fenrir, if you were moving at seven or eight times the speed of your enemy you had an advantage that was hard to overcome.
I had a good chance of coming out on top. Kyle was already breathing hard from his exchange with Mephistoles and Fenrir. I wasn't stupid enough to think that he'd exhausted his emotional reserves or his memories either one. But he was too close to me to amp himself back up before I could land my first blow.
I could feel the decision balance on the edge of a knife and then I took a deep breath and released all of my effects. I had no delusions regarding my ability to take on both Fenrir and Mephistoles. It was still possible that killing Kyle wouldn't result in his wards fading away, but even if he'd been lying that didn't change the fact that Fenrir and Mephistoles would be waiting for me once the ward came down.
I was wasting memories and emotional strength that I might need later on.
"Come on, Selene. It's time to go back and fix ourselves something to eat."
Chapter 5
The walk back to Kyle's bunker was a quiet affair. We crossed back through the eerie halls and spaces without incident, and then Kyle led me down the stairs until we arrived at a level even further down than his bedroom.
Saying I was shocked at what I saw next would have been an understatement. Rather than the dark, damp dungeon that I'd half expected him to throw me in, I was instead gifted with a vista that was nothing but bright light, greenery and dark, rich soil.
"A garden?"
"Yes, a garden. I was serious when I said that we would be coming back to get something to eat. Here that means more than just sticking something in the microwave—that means picking the food and washing it before sitting down to prepare it."
He looked at me and cocked his head to one side. "You seem surprised."
"I guess I am. I never would have guessed that this is what I would find down here."
Kyle shrugged. "It was the only logical
thing. When I found this place I knew that I needed to keep a low profile. I worked with some of the best architects money could buy for nearly six years to design somewhere I could disappear, a sanctuary where nobody could ever find me. Power, water, food, it all had to be addressed before we moved the first shovelful of dirt. My electricity comes from a pair of heat-driven turbines that tap into a hot spot in the earth's crust thousands of feet further down."
I took another step into the massive, circular space and gloried in the feel of the lights on my skin. It wasn't sunlight, not quite, but it was close—close enough to chase away the chill that had been a part of me ever since I'd opened my eyes in Kyle's bed.
Kyle let me twirl with my eyes closed for several seconds before continuing. "The level above this one is full of waste treatment equipment, there are two separate wells that draw clean water up to the bunker and every single mechanical component has redundant backups in place that should be sufficient to last at least another forty years."
I stopped spinning and opened my eyes. "But why? What purpose does all of this serve?"
"It let me keep the city above us a secret and it made it so that I could research in peace. It gave me a chance—at least temporarily—to bow out of the unending fight that is part and parcel of life up there."
"Wow, I wouldn't have thought you were the type. This seems a little—well, I guess…back to nature for someone so determined to enslave everyone in the world. I would have thought that it would eat at you to have to spend hours every day maintaining equipment and growing your own food. You seem more like the type to have a huge staff taking care of every possible extraneous bit of your life so that you can concentrate on your research…"
Kyle reached over and took a heavy black bag off of a shelf near the door. "You're missing the point. It's not about turning people into slaves, it's about establishing a new order. It's about ending the pointless wars between the pantheons. It's about making society truly fair for the first time ever."
"Oh, that makes all the difference. I can totally see how I misjudged you now. You're totally the kind to spend half your day growing organic food and the other half writing your manifesto."
"Sarcasm doesn't become you, Selene. You're better than that."
"Really? I'm having a hard time believing that. I kind of like sarcasm, but if I'm really 'better than that' then you'd be answering my questions rather than just filling me with more of your political BS."
"You didn't ask a question. You made an observation."
I shot him a dirty look and just waited. For a minute I thought I wasn't going to get an answer. He walked over to a patch of dark soil and began digging into it with his hands. After just a few seconds of effort he came up with several large potatoes.
"Researching doesn't work like that. Sitting in front of my chalkboards for hours doesn't necessarily translate to advances. Real creation almost always happens while the inventor is doing something else. My brother worships something that men have defined as being bigger than the whole world but yet still small enough to fit in your heart, but the truth is that the subconscious is the true creator. All I can do is provide it with as many truths—as many of the pieces—as possible, remove any unnecessary distractions, and then it's up to my subconscious to come up with the solutions I need."
"This is just about cutting yourself off? It's all just so that you don't have any distractions?"
"No. Safety is a prime consideration, as is maintaining the secrecy of the prototypes I found in the city up above. There are many things that played into my decision to come down here. I'm not the first though. It's happened dozens of times over the thousands of years of our existence.
"At some point the true men and women of the mind retreat away from everything else. They withdraw, just like the Awakened on this continent did, in an effort to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. Humans can get away with a lesser degree of separation, but that's never the case for us. If we stay where others of our kind can get to us, we eventually end up pulled back into the conflict."
"So what happened to the ones before you? If that's the solution to all of the problems in the world how come everything that needs to be known hasn't been discovered a thousand times over?"
"They failed. Secrecy is never enough. Eventually someone always stumbles upon their retreats and they never even see the attack coming. Sometimes they opt for wards, but without my most recent round of discoveries there isn't a way to create a ward that is both strong enough to serve as a significant deterrent and weak enough not to serve as a gigantic signal fire to everyone within a few hundred miles that there is something valuable there."
"That's it? You figured out everything?"
"Yeah, basically. At least it was working up until recently."
Kyle walked over to a tomato plant and sighed as he picked three large specimens off of the vines. "I'm so close. I thought I was close even before I came here, but the pantheon that lived in the city above us knew things. They were close to inventing actual artifacts, so incredibly close. I just need a few more years and I'll be able to change everything."
"What's an artifact?"
He didn't look up from his bag. I waited, but he simply moved on to a plot of onions.
"Kyle, what's an artifact?"
"I guess your education is less complete than I was expecting it to be. Come on. Everything else I need is already upstairs in the refrigerator. Let's go eat."
Chapter 6
Dinner was surprisingly good considering that Kyle made everything from scratch from what he was able to grow downstairs in his garden. If the food exceeded my expectations, the conversation was even sparser than I'd expected it to be.
We'd finished eating and I'd cleaned up before Kyle finally spoke to me again.
"I take it that you've decided against killing me?"
"What makes you so sure?"
His smile this time had an element of exhaustion to it that I hadn't been expecting. "I saw you thinking about it next to the last ward before you finally let your time manipulation drop."
"I guess not. It's tempting, but I'm not sure I'd get away with it. Besides, even if I did kill you, I'd still have to worry about Mephistoles and Fenrir."
"Maybe, but maybe not for much longer."
"What do you mean? Do you have a plan that would let you kill both of them?"
"Now you're giving me too much credit. I'm not capable of taking both of them on."
I fought back a yawn. It didn't make sense. I'd just spent who knew how many hours unconscious—there was absolutely no reason for me to already be tired. I was only supposed to need a few hours of sleep per night.
"So what did you mean then?"
"I mean with any luck we won't be dealing with both of them for very much longer." Kyle walked over and took me by the arm, pulling me to my feet, but this time the motion was almost gentle. "Come on. You're exhausted."
"I don't understand why."
"You just burned several days' worth of memories at the very least. Actually, it's even more likely that you burned a couple of peak memories to make it happen. Sustaining that level of time bend isn't the kind of thing you should be doing lightly. It will be less of an issue as you get more experience and are able to isolate the drain so it's just taking memories rather than tapping into the rest of your system as well, but for now that kind of expenditure will leave you exhausted."
I was so tired that I let Kyle lead me downstairs to his bed without complaining. I was already in bed and only a couple of breaths away from unconsciousness before I realized that it should have creeped me out to be sleeping in the bed of someone I didn't trust.
**
I woke up an indeterminate amount of time later feeling much better. I used the gigantic white marble bathroom and then slowly made my way to the stairs. I already knew what was in the bottom two levels, but I didn't know what was directly below the bedroom.
I debated calling out for Kyle. This was a shockingly h
uge installation to find underground, but there was a decent chance that he'd be able to hear me if I stood in the stairwell and yelled. In the end, my curiosity won out.
Despite all of his threats and rough treatment, some crazy part of me wanted to trust Kyle. It made absolutely no sense, which meant that it was probably some kind of leftover feeling from one or more of my past incarnations.
Based on everything I'd been told so far, that shouldn't have happened. Jace and Kat had been in perfect agreement that it wasn't possible for an Awakened to bring knowledge from a past life forward to another incarnation. I didn't doubt that they'd been telling me the truth as far as they knew it, but I was becoming more and more sure that there was something else going on, something that they didn't have any experience with.
I'd been learning things much too quickly, but that was nothing compared to having amped my system in ways that nobody had ever taught me. I didn't know how, but somehow I'd carried something across the barrier of death. That had to be the reason I was so inclined to trust Kyle, but it didn't mean it was a good idea to act on the inclination.
I walked down to the level just above the waste reclamation equipment, and carefully pulled open the heavy door. The room behind the door was full of equipment, fertilizer, seeds and everything else required to keep the bunker in working order. I took a quick loop around the level in case Kyle had secreted something important down there with all of the spares, but the truth was that I didn't even know what I was looking for.
I was more than a little disheartened as I pulled the door closed behind me and started up to the next level. I started to open the door—pushing it forward—and then at the last second I recognized the characteristic shimmer of a live ward.
I pulled my hands away from the door like I'd been scalded, relieved that I'd managed to avoid crossing the plane of Kyle's defenses. Interesting. I'd been surprised that Kyle had taken me down to his bedroom and left me unattended not just once, but twice. I'd been wondering if that was some kind of sign of trust, but apparently he didn't trust me any more than I trusted him. He just knew that everything he valued was safely secured behind a ward that I didn't have the ability to bring down.