by Beca Lewis
Looking around the room, Earl asked, “Are you ready?”
“Ready!” we all shouted.
In my head, I heard the nursery rhyme I had played in Earth. “Ready or not, here we come.”
I hoped it was the Shrieks and Shatterskin who were not ready. We’d find out soon enough.
Shatterskin Forty-Nine
“Except me,” Zeid said after everyone else had left the room. We had both stayed behind because he knew my secret. When I had looked around the room, I saw Zeid sitting beside Suzanne and Beru. I looked straight at him, pretended that I knew him, and moved on.
But it had been a lie. I didn’t remember Zeid, and he knew it too. I could see the pain in his eyes. I wanted to remember. I just couldn’t.
There was nothing to say. I wasn’t doing it on purpose. But that didn’t make it hurt any less for Zeid. I could at least feel that. There was something between us, something important, but the memory of it was hidden from me.
“Is it because of this?” Zeid said lifting my left arm and revealing my friendship bracelet from Johnny. I remembered Johnny. But my life that included Johnny felt like a dream from another lifetime.
A lifetime when I had been just a young girl and Johnny had been a young man who had only begun to suspect how I felt about him. Johnny lived in a world without Shrieks. Without a monster called Abbadon who intended to destroy every living thing.
When I lived in the Earth Realm, I knew of evil people. Johnny and I had escaped more than once from men that had wanted to harm us. But it was nothing like what was happening in Erda.
The crush I had on Johnny felt just like that now. A schoolgirl crush. But maybe the memory of that crush, kept me wearing the bracelet, and made me feel guilty when I looked at Zeid. Perhaps I had closed the door on who Zeid was to me, because of Johnny.
Zeid dropped my arm but continued to hold my hand. We stood face to face only a few inches apart. Even though I didn’t remember Zeid from before, he pulled at me. I wanted to stand there looking into his eyes that reminded me of the ocean until all of the nightmares of Abbadon faded away.
It was Zeid who broke our eye contact. “Stay safe, Kara Beth. It doesn’t matter that you don’t remember, because I do.”
Zeid dropped my hand and left the room without looking back. My heart sank. I should have told him to stay safe too—so many things I should have done and didn’t.
I didn’t have long to wallow in regret because Pris flew in the door and pulled my hair. “Stop it!” she said. “Bring your ziffering magic and let’s go. You don’t have time to be mooning around after Zeid or anyone else for that matter.”
After pulling my hair, Pris switched to my earlobe and dragged me towards the door. For a tiny thing, Pris had a lot of strength and determination. I followed. She was right. I had no time to be trying to figure out who Zeid was to me. Besides, there was no way I was going to get Pris mad at me again.
Niko had assigned everyone with something specific to do. He had given us an hour to get it done. Even though no one wore watches, everyone always appeared on time or finished in time.
Once I was late to a meeting, and Aki had spent our next two sessions teaching me how to access time internally which is where she said it resided anyway.
There were only forty-five minutes left before we were heading to the surface. But Niko’s assignment to me was different. I was to go into the meditation room and be quiet. Listen. “Get back to listening, Hannah,” he had said.
Calling me Hannah was probably a signal to me. As Hannah, I had been good at listening to my internal guide. The disorientation I faced when I returned to Erda had thrown me off, and listening had not been high on my priority list. Now it had to be. Niko had said so, and I could see Aki nodding in assent.
I almost rolled my eyes at him, and then stopped halfway through the roll. We both pretended that it hadn’t happened. Even with the eye rolling, I knew he was right.
“Okay, okay,” I yelled at Pris who wouldn’t let go. “I’m going right now.”
“Better. I have to go feed our insect friends.”
“Where are they?”
“In a big room. You don’t want to go in there though. They’re everywhere. We’ll have them right behind you to clean up after you all dissolve the Shrieks.”
Pris flew off down the hall. Her wings sparkled in the light of the tunnel. Now I knew that it was the trees that were providing the light source. They used a portion of their energy to glow where a light was needed. When light wasn’t, they automatically turned themselves off.
As I walked the hall to the room, I asked the trees to dim their light, and I slowed both my walking and my breath. I didn’t need to wait to get to the room to listen. I could listen while I walked.
With each step, I opened myself to hear what to do. The Oracle had taught me how to reach her, and I opened myself to her. The return of my memory was due in large part to what had happened in that room.
Now I asked what I needed to know and to give me the wisdom to do the right thing.
I was running even before I felt the first boom. In the transport room, Beru tossed me my shield, headset, and backpack. We were still taking our own supply of salt and water. No one wanted to be trapped with a Shriek while Coro was busy with another.
Within a split second of stepping onto our circles, we were on the surface. With our earmuffs set on high and shields in front, we advanced toward the sound. Not just shrieking. Shattering. The Riff had come to us.
Shatterskin Fifty
The surface was total chaos. Every living thing was trying to flee from the ear-splitting sounds that the Shrieks were making. But this time they had nowhere to go. They were trapped in an ever-narrowing box surrounded by Shrieks advancing on them.
Abbadon must have learned a new strategy to use with the Shrieks. Probably from watching the last battle through our mirror shields and how we had won it. His new plan appeared to be frighteningly effective. Hundreds of Shrieks were arriving from all four directions. All of them moving towards a center where they had trapped their prey.
They had abandoned the line moving through the forest, and instead, each massive column headed towards the center. Once they reached the center, everything would be dead, and maybe then they would advance again in a line, killing as they moved through the land.
Yes, that meant they were stunning themselves for a time when they shrieked at each other, but then the next line moved forward and took over. And there were lines upon lines of Shrieks ready to step in and take over.
The sound they fired at each other wasn’t enough to stun them for long, and after a few minutes, they were moving again. Relentlessly forward towards the center.
And that was the Shrieks that we could see. Now that we learned from the last battle that they had learned to be invisible to us, there was no telling how many Shrieks there were actually present.
At the last minute, Teddy and Pita had rerouted where we came to the surface, so instead of emerging in the middle of the converging Shrieks, we were on the outskirts of the line advancing from the east.
Even with our earmuffs turned on high the sound was almost paralyzing. My body wanted to shut down and stop moving, but I pushed forward, although I wasn’t sure how long my strength would last.
At first, we ran in a line, spread out behind the East column until we got close enough for our next plan. I could feel everyone’s distress. What was saving us was that the Shrieks’ attention was towards the center, and so were their sound blasts.
We were receiving the residual sound which was bad enough. However, if the line we were chasing turned and fired at us, we knew we might not survive. The only chance we had was to keep blasting them before they knew we were there and turned around.
It was hard to watch what was happening w
ith the trees. They were absorbing massive amounts of sound, attempting to soften the effects of it on the animals by taking the hit themselves. Now that I was aware of the trees as the breath and source of life on the planet, I knew that the trees taking such massive hits would have huge ramifications. We had to stop the shrieking as fast as possible to minimize the damage.
Teddy had altered the shields we were using while we were below and increased the magnification to a thousand times. All of us thought that it was possible Abbadon might have modified the Shrieks to withstand the magnified sounds we had blasted at them, and we must have been right.
Even with the increased capacity of our shields, it took a concentrated time for each blast to stun the Shrieks in front of us, and at the same time, we were hurting the trees too.
I had to shut down a part of my feelings to keep going, and I knew everyone else was doing the same thing. Still, in spite of it all, I could feel the overarching support and love of the trees in spite of what we were doing to them. I knew they understood. It didn’t make it any easier.
The Shrieks’ increased capacity to withstand their own shrieking must have been how Abbadon had been able to change the Shrieks’ battle plan. Besides, it was unlikely he cared whether they lived or died. They were only a tool, not living beings.
Even if they were, Abbadon wouldn’t have cared. Killing everything was his goal in the end anyway. What were a few hundred dead Shrieks to him? He had already destroyed villages, people, and forests and everything that lived in them for thousands of miles.
We knew that there was no way for our small team to stop all the Shrieks Abbadon had created for this attack. It was as if he knew this was his last stand with the Shrieks.
What we had planned would work, I told myself. If we stopped the Shrieks here, we had a chance.
So even though it looked hopeless, we worked hard not to let that thought enter our minds. Instead, we focused on our strengths and what we could do in each moment. Professor Link was continually alerting us to what was happening. He was in contact with Lady and her dragon friends who were flying high above the battlefield. They had to stay out of range of the sound that the Shrieks would periodically blast at the sky.
We could see birds by the hundreds falling to the ground every time the Shrieks swept their sound upward, and I prayed that Lady and her fellow dragons would be safe. But in order to see more, I knew that sometimes the dragons had to swoop down within range, putting them in danger.
Cahir and his friends were behind us, trying to find the end of the Shrieks’ line and providing a border that no animal would cross. Through his eyes, I could see how thick the range of Shrieks was, and it was only the continual encouragement of the rest of the team that kept me from feeling despair. That, and the awareness that there was no option for failure.
The Priscillas were still underground with the Ginete and Whistle Pigs, waiting with the Shriek-eating insects. They were all safe for now, but if Shatterskin got this far, they would be destroyed too. We could hear his booming in the distance and knew that we had a limited amount of time in which to work.
There were so many ways we could fail. Either the Shrieks would turn on us, our earmuffs or shields would stop working, or more Shrieks would arrive or were already present that we couldn’t see. Then there was the chance that Coro and the storm would not get through or that one by one we would get picked off by a well-planned Shriek attack. These were the things that we knew could happen. What about the ones we didn’t know about?
Because we knew we couldn’t fight all those Shrieks, our focus was to create an escape path for the animals trapped in the center, and do it before we became incapacitated. Once that path was created, Coro would arrive with his drenching salt rain. We were praying that the Shrieks didn’t need to be stunned to be dissolved.
I could hear James directing his men as Niko led the team through the opening in the line. Then Ruta and Aki followed, with Zeid, Beru and me behind them.
We were increasing the width of the path as we went. James and his team were keeping the path from closing behind us.
If we could keep our wits about us in the face of mounting pressure and impossible odds, we had a chance. I had the star that Liza gave me that I could press if I needed to, but I was afraid if I saw what else was present I would succumb to fear. If all else failed, I would use it, but until then there was enough to deal with.
We were almost to the front of the line when I heard Link call out, “Behind you.”
I turned to see that the men from the village were no longer there and the path that we had made was closing. We were trapped.
Shatterskin Fifty-One
I hesitated. If I fired, and James and his men were behind the line of Shrieks that I could see, I might kill the men.
“Help!” I said to Link. “I can’t see James’ men, and I’m afraid to fire.”
This time I had a direct response from Lady. I had heard Suzanne in my head before, but never when she was a dragon, so it took me a second to recognize her voice.
I looked up as she swooped over our heads and the line of Shrieks, and then rose swiftly in the sky, just as the Shrieks turned to fire at her. I watched as she wobbled and then recovered.
“They are far behind the line with Cahir. They needed to move back because James was stunned. It’s safe to fire on the Shrieks behind you, Kara.”
All this took a matter of seconds, but it was enough time for a Shriek to be almost on top of me, his slimy hole filled green body practically touching mine as he opened his mouth. I screamed as I fired, again and again until the way behind us was clear again, and we were surrounded only by Shrieks that stood stunned or fallen.
The three of us looked at each other, and Zeid gave Beru and me a thumbs up sign. Beru looked almost as green as the Shrieks. I knew she hated battle and would do almost anything not to be there. But Beru was courageous, and the one thing she would always do is protect her friends if she could.
The ground began to shake, and I panicked thinking that Shatterskin had arrived, but instead it was all the animals that had been trapped in the center flying past us to safety.
As they passed us we could all feel the gratitude they extended to us for saving their lives. For a moment I almost forgot that we weren’t done. I wanted to stand there and feel the love forever. But we had to move. We knew what was coming.
What we did next was the most dangerous thing we could think of doing, and we were doing it on purpose. We turned off our shields. We didn’t want Abbadon to see what we had planned. But that meant we had only our earmuffs to protect us, and the shrieking had become even louder.
We had only a few moments before we would not be able to move. We threw our shields up over our backs as we ran back through the line of Shrieks dodging the animals running in the same direction, running as low as we could, hiding beneath our shields to be as invisible as possible.
The Shrieks we had stunned were still frozen as we made our way back through the line. As we ran, we could hear the roar of the coming storm. The Shrieks must have heard it, too, because the shrieking increased as they began moving through the woods trying to outrun the storm.
We watched them go, grateful that they were not coming towards us. But if the Shrieks made it to safety, wherever that was for them, before the storm arrived, we would have to face them again.
And then the wall of water arrived. It literally looked like a wall. It was taller than the trees and black as night. The wall cascaded over them, moving across the line like a car wash. If the Shrieks could feel anything, it must have been shocking to discover that it wasn’t just water that drenched them. It was highly concentrated salt water.
Ariel was behind the wall of water pushing it away from the fleeing animals and us and into the lines of Shrieks. Once we were past the last line of paralyzed S
hrieks, we turned and watched as the fleeing Shrieks first began to expand and then burst and dissolve. Within minutes, the forest floor was littered with green blobs.
We knew what came next—the army of insects. We raced to the nearest tree and grabbed the lowest branch and pulled ourselves up. This time I knew that the tree had lowered its limbs for us. It wasn’t an illusion, they moved. There wasn’t time to contemplate what that might mean, because we could hear the skittering of insect legs and flying ahead of them the Priscillas looking triumphant.
The Priscillas all landed on my shoulders at the same time, and the two younger sisters kissed me on each cheek. Pris was still acting miffed, but I could tell from the gleam in her eyes that she was teasing me. It was good to have her back on my side.
“I was never not on your side, Missy,” Pris said. “It was you acting as if we weren’t to be trusted.”
“I was wrong,” I whispered.
“Could you say that a little louder, please?” Pris demanded.
“I was wrong,” I said loud enough that almost everyone heard me and started to laugh.
“Imagine that!” Zeid said. I glowered at him, even though I knew that he, too was teasing. Although I was exhausted, I was feeling good. We had defeated those Shrieks. We could defeat others. Or Earl and Ariel could. We had discovered that they didn’t need us to stop the Shrieks anymore. They could do it without us.
But that left the bigger problem. Shatterskin. He didn’t need the Shrieks to continue to shatter his way across the land. All they had been to him was a way to neutralize anyone who might be able to fight him. And if he thought it was important to do that, it meant there was a way to defeat him.
The next phase of our plan had to be put in place, and it would mean that I could no longer hide from being myself, or using the magic that I now knew that I had.