City of the Falling Sky

by Joseph Evans

  They had no time to run, and nowhere to run to.

  Eiya yanked open the glass door and hauled herself out of the tube, but before they could even contemplate what to do next, the elevator platform came into view.

  There was a heavily bearded man aboard it, puffing and sweating, his eyes closed. When he reached the bottom, he opened his eyes and swore loudly as he saw Seckry and Eiya. He grabbed the sides of the elevator to steady himself, before pulling a gun out of his pocket, dropping it in his haste, then picking it up and waving it at them nervously.

  “Stay where you are!” he said, through trembling lips. “I will smash your skulls to pieces. Do not make a single movement!”

  “Please!” Seckry said, frozen still. “We don’t mean any harm.”

  The man’s hand was shaking even more violently now.

  “How on earth did you get in here?” he demanded. “And who are you?”

  “We came here looking for Ropart Sanfarrow,” Seckry said, amazed at how calm he was managing to keep himself with a gun pointing at his head. “But . . . we were too late.”

  The man’s eyes looked confused and were darting from Seckry to Eiya and back again.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Someone named Jenniver Layne,” Seckry said.

  At these words, the man lowered his gun slightly.

  “Jenniver?”

  Seckry nodded shortly, and noticed a bead of sweat drip from his forehead.

  The man was silent for a long time, before eventually saying, “You weren’t too late.”

  “What do you mean?” Seckry asked.

  With the gun still held shakily in Seckry and Eiya’s direction, the man elaborated.

  “The skeleton you must have seen in the other room is a decoy. It’s plastic. I just wrapped my lab coat in it and made it look authentic with a bit of effort. Ropart Sanfarrow is still alive, and he’s standing right in front of you.”

  It was near impossible to tell due to the masses of facial hair that the man was sporting, but those eyes . . . those eyes were the same eyes as that young man in the photo, and the older man on the VHS tape. This was, indeed, Ropart Sanfarrow.

  “How can I trust you?” Sanfarrow asked. “How do I know you’re not working for Darklight?”

  “We have something that’ll make you trust us,” Eiya said, and she nodded to Seckry.

  Seckry pulled out the locket that Jenniver Layne had given him and held it out.

  “Jenniver gave us this,” he said.

  Sanfarrow’s arm dropped almost involuntarily and the gun slid out of his hand and onto the floor as he gave a whimper that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

  “Jenniver,” he said, and took the locket cautiously from Seckry.

  He stared at it for a while, and it seemed as though he forgot that anyone else was around for those moments.

  “Why has she sent you to find me?” Sanfarrow asked, coming out of his daze.

  “Because you’re the only one with the key to the Divinita chamber aside from Kan Darklight,” Seckry said. “And we have to get in there and stop the Divinita Project before all the innoya that Darklight has captured have the life sucked out of them.”

  Sanfarrow looked lost for words.

  “We need to sit down,” he said eventually.

  “No, Kevan Kayne is not here,” Sanfarrow said in response to Seckry and Eiya enquiring about him. “I believed that Darklight had captured him, but I had no idea whether he was alive or not. From what Jenniver’s told you . . . it sounds as though he is dead.” His lip trembled as he said it and he looked close to tears. “When Darklight learned that we were plotting against him, me and Kevan had to make a run for it. I escaped. Kevan . . . didn’t.”

  “What does Darklight want helitonium for?” Seckry asked.

  “Kan would stop at nothing to cut company costs. His only concern is financial success. Endrin’s biggest costs are their power reactors. He always said that he would find a more efficient way to power the city.”

  “So that’s what he wants it for,” said Eiya. “He’s going to use helitonium to generate electricity?”

  Sanfarrow shook his head lethargically. “It would be easier if it were that simple. But no, helitonium cannot be used to power the city. It’s the wrong type of energy, it just wouldn’t work. No, Kan wants something even more powerful than helitonium. The most powerful force ever recorded in history. Have you any idea what that is?”

  Seckry and Eiya exchanged bemused looks. They didn’t have a clue.

  “In year zero, Seckraman, son of Gedin, appeared in the midst of the city and prevented the Great Meteor from destroying the planet. He raised his hand up to the sky and unleashed a great power. The power of Gedin. Kan Darklight wants this power.”

  Seckry almost spat a laugh.

  “Seckraman? He wants the power of Seckraman? Wait . . . is that why the logo for the project is the same symbol that I saw on an old painting of Seckraman?”

  Sanfarrow narrowed his eyes. “As far as I was aware, that logo was an original design by artists at Endrin. But the project is, indeed, based upon the acquisition of Seckraman’s power.”

  “Seckry,” Eiya said suddenly. “That’s why they stole Hindglubber’s illusional time theories, isn’t it? Darklight wants to use the helitonium extracted from the innoya to create a wormhole, go back in time, and steal Seckraman’s powers. Hindglubber was saying they wanted to steal something from the past and bring it into the present. It was this.”

  “You’re almost right,” Sanfarrow said gravely. “But Kan does not simply want to steal Seckraman’s powers, even if there were a way to do so. No, he wants to steal Seckraman himself and bring him to the present. He wants to keep him in a vegetated state, and constantly draw the power out of him, provided it’s in limitless supply, powering the city for years to come without the need of a single, expensive power reactor.”

  “This is just . . . insane!” Seckry said, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “This is the son of Gedin we’re talking about!”

  Sanfarrow kept a serious face. “Darklight has no ties to religion. Sacrilege has no meaning to him.”

  “But Seckraman prevented the Great Meteor from hitting the earth, didn’t he?” Eiya said, confused. “If Darklight theoretically stole Seckraman from the past, wouldn’t the meteor hit earth?”

  “That is the most dangerous and devastating outcome of this Gedin forsaken experiment, yes,” Sanfarrow said, disgust in his voice. “Of course, nothing like this has ever been attempted before. If this thing somehow works for Darklight, then he will be the first person to turn Hindglubber’s radical theories into reality, and he will be the first person to alter history.”

  “But . . . why would Darklight want the meteor to hit? Wouldn’t it wipe out everything?”

  “Kan is insisting that he will be able to steal Seckraman after he has destroyed the meteor,” Sanfarrow explained.

  “He’d be willing to risk the fate of the entire earth for the sake of powering the city without the need for reactors?” Eiya asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Sanfarrow said.

  “But . . .” Seckry cut in. “We’re all talking about this as if it’s possible. Is time travel even a reality?”

  Sanfarrow breathed in slowly. “Most people would say not. But then most people aren’t aware of the existence of helitonium, believing it to be something of myth and legend.”

  “You believe he can do it?” said Eiya. “That Darklight can go back in time using helitonium?”

  “Yes . . . I believe so,” Sanfarrow said.

  “Mr Sanfarrow,” Eiya said, after a while. “I think I’m an innoya.”

  Sanfarrow cocked his head slightly.

  “My earliest memory is of waking up in the Endrin compound, which is when Seckry found me.”

  Seckry took a moment to briefly explain why it was that he was inside the compound himself.

  “And those worms were put on a train, never to be seen agai
n? Dear Gedin and Gainstop, it’s even worse than I imagined . . . but more pressing as of right now, you say you have no memory before that point?”

  “Nothing,” Eiya confirmed.

  Sanfarrow considered this.

  “Erasing the memory of the innoya was never a part of Darklight’s plan, as far as I knew. And you say you came into consciousness in the cultivation unit, above ground? I just can’t see how Darklight would have been so careless as to let somebody escape.”

  “When I was at Endrin,” Seckry said. “Jenniver showed me security footage of the night I rescued Eiya. She showed up as a really bright light on the camera. Jenniver said that the tape was even damaged from the light. She said a team of experts had to work to restore some kind of picture.”

  “Bright light?” Sanfarrow said, perplexed. “Innoya have certainly been captured on film before, and they are depicted like anybody else. They certainly do not emit any light. From the looks of it, you’ve already attempted to use the innoya detection device I have down here. What were the results?”

  Seckry and Eiya gave each other a slightly guilty glance.

  “We don’t think it worked properly,” Eiya said. “It showed nothing. There were no red or blue particles on the projection.”

  Sanfarrow lowered his bushy eyebrows and headed back into the room that held the device. Seckry and Eiya followed him hurriedly.

  “In all the years I’ve had this thing, not once has it failed on me. I believed it to be unbreakable.” Sanfarrow slid open the glass cylinder with a thud, stuck his one arm in, and then flicked a load of switches on the control panel with lightning speed.

  The machine whirred into action and a few minutes later, a diagram appeared of Sanfarrow’s arm, glowing pure, bright red.

  “Looks fine to me,” he said, with an air of relief. “Eiya, is it? Would you please be so kind as to step inside once again?”

  Eiya stepped in cautiously and put her hands to her sides, looking nervous.

  But when the projector fired up once more, they were presented with the same faint outline of Eiya’s clothes, and invisible space all around them.

  Sanfarrow slowly made his way over to the wall which held the projection and put his hand to the image.

  “What in the name of Gedin?” he whispered to himself.

  “What does this mean?” Eiya asked from inside the cylinder.

  But Sanfarrow didn’t answer. He disappeared into the main room and began rifling through stacks of books, tossing things aside, flicking through huge, dusty tomes, and finally smoothing out the page of a particularly old looking hardback.

  Eiya stepped out of the machine and slid the door closed behind her before she and Seckry followed Sanfarrow.

  “Could it be?” Sanfarrow muttered to himself. He flicked a few pages, and then flicked back again before looking up and getting to his feet. He surveyed Eiya with awe.

  “Before I make any conclusions,” he said. “I just want to be sure of the facts. You say you were found by Seckry in the cultivation unit, in the mud that was above the Divinita chamber? And you showed up as a bright light on Endrin’s security camera footage? And you have no memory whatsoever of anything before that night? And nothing has come back to you since, no flashbacks or anything?”

  After Eiya confirmed all of his questions, Sanfarrow took a deep breath.

  “Then Eiya, the reason why you have no memory beyond that night, is that you had just been born.”

  Chapter Thirty one

  A Temporary Existence