Sunspire (The Reach, Book 4)

by Mark R. Healy

  “Come on. We’re going to check the entrances to this place and make sure they’re secure. Make sure no raiders have snuck in. We still have time before Knile gets here.”

  “And after that?”

  She glanced at the window. “After that, hopefully we’ll be collecting our boarding passes and catching a ride off this rock.”

  44

  The console beeped again, a sound with which Ursie was all too familiar, and then a warning flashed on the screen. She dismissed it and reset the system back to the first menu, then prepared to try all over again.

  Her hand hovered over the console, trembling. She didn’t know what to do. She’d tried every option ten times at least, and no matter what she did, she always ended up with an error or a warning. A dead end.

  So what was the point of going through it all again?

  There’s something you’re missing, she told herself. If you keep searching, you’ll find it.

  But at the same time, another part of her was saying the opposite. It was telling her that the real reason she couldn’t save the railcar from smashing into the Earth was simply because she didn’t know the system. She wasn’t an engineer, or a tech of any kind. She was a layperson, and with only a matter of minutes to work with, the odds of her finding a solution were astronomically low.

  Right now, it was the second voice that was loudest, the most compelling. She felt herself slipping into despair.

  She turned to Tobias. “Can’t you do anything?”

  “Me?” Tobias said, taken aback. “Well, I’m just a nobody, see–”

  “You said you used to work here. You should know something.”

  “I know how to clean out the trash cans and solder up a capacitor on a sweepdrone, but I’m thinkin’ that ain’t gonna help us right now.”

  Ursie turned from the console and slumped to the floor, burying her head in her hands. She let out a sob that wracked her whole body, then fought to suppress another.

  These emotions had been building up for some time, and now they threatened to overwhelm her, cascade out of her like a torrent.

  “Why didn’t he check this shit before he left?” she said, distraught. “Knile’s the expert. It was his job to do this, not mine.”

  Tobias lowered himself against the console and sat on the floor nearby. “He was in a hurry. Had to get things done fast. Made some blunders.” Tobias shrugged. “He’s only human, y’know. He can’t know everything.”

  “He should’ve tested it or something.” She flicked the tears angrily from her fingertips. “I don’t know. He shouldn’t have left me here with this goddamn mess to clean up.”

  “You’re not angry with him,” Tobias said. “Not really.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “Nope, you ain’t. You’re just at the end of your tether, same as the rest of us. Strung out like yesterday’s laundry, lookin’ for somethin’ to blame, somethin’ to vent your frustrations on. But deep down you know the truth. This ain’t nobody’s fault. It’s just a big pile of shit we happened to fall into, and now we can’t get out.”

  Ursie knew he was right, that she was simply lashing out in frustration at Knile, but for some reason that just made her angrier. She wanted to scream, to take an axe to this room full of useless consoles and carve it up, leave it nothing but a pile of smoking, gashed machinery.

  The thought of herself leaping about the room with an axe in hand suddenly made her choke with laughter, but it quickly gave way to another sob, and then more tears were falling down her cheeks.

  Now she felt spent, utterly defeated. Her rage was gone.

  “I’m sorry, Tobias,” she said softly.

  “You got nothin’ to be sorry about, kiddo. You’re the bravest young thing I ever laid eyes on. Heck, most of the ones your age that I’ve seen wouldn’t even try to do the things you’ve done. So don’t you be sorry. Don’t you dare.”

  “We’re going to die here.”

  “Well, that ain’t written in stone. Not yet.”

  “It might as well be. Once that railcar smashes the elevator… this place is going to be ripped apart. Knile tried to sugarcoat it, but I could see it in his eyes. He’s afraid.”

  Tobias seemed to stew over that concept for a few moments as he tried to think of a reply. Finally, he said, “Well, whatever comes, we’ll face it together. You and me.”

  “Yeah,” Ursie said sadly. “I guess we will.”

  He stretched out a wrinkled hand toward her and held it there expectantly.

  “Go on, take it,” he said. “Let’s do this together.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can. Just reach out and take my hand.”

  “I won’t touch you. I told you that before.”

  “Because you’re afraid of who you are?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to Lazarus this whole time? He’s right. I’m a demon. A goddamn monster.”

  “Like I told you before, you can’t go through life never touchin’ anyone again. You can’t just shut everythin’ out.”

  “I don’t have a choice. That’s all there is to it.”

  “You do have a choice. Now is the time to make it, before it’s too late.” He held his hand steady. “Don’t make me go alone.”

  Ursie looked across at him, and as she stared into his eyes she realised something – he was just as scared as she was. He wasn’t offering his hand purely as comfort to her. In fact, he looked as though he needed her support more than she needed his.

  He was begging her to give him solace, and something about that melted her heart.

  What harm can it do now? We’re going to die anyway.

  She gave him a reassuring smile. “You’re not alone, Tobias.”

  She reached out and brushed her fingers against his. At first she only felt the warmness of his fingers, his leathery callouses. The dryness of his skin, like paper. She’d never known a father, or a grandfather for that matter, but she imagined that this must be what it was like to feel the touch of one such as that; more than a mere physical act, there was something else conveyed in that simple contact, something that she couldn’t even begin to describe. It was like the sensation of coming home, as strange as that seemed; that for the first time, she was home.

  Then she slipped beneath, felt herself entering his mind as if she were dropping beneath the gentle swell of a wave in the ocean.

  The first thing she encountered was her own emotions reflected back at her. That simple contact between them had elicited similar feelings from Tobias – that sense of belonging, of being home, surged through him with overwhelming potency. She saw half-formed memories there as well, children without names or faces, laughing and running across a sandy beach. There was the silhouette of a woman sitting at a cafe, a warm smile her only discernible feature.

  Then it all melted into nothingness.

  Ursie slipped deeper, drawn downward as if she had no control over her momentum.

  The warmth and happiness began to slip away. Now she saw darker memories – the destruction of the habitat, a woman lying in a pool of blood after some sort of industrial accident. Tobias himself staring out of a window at the coldness of space, a forlorn expression marring his countenance.

  Then came the clumps of cold, inky blackness she remembered from the last time she had looked inside his mind, on the first day they’d met. The disease, or whatever affliction it was that had taken his memories from him. They closed in around her as she descended, becoming thicker and thicker by the moment.

  She knew with an awful certainty that they were going to suffocate her, trap her down here forever.

  In her confusion, she lost her sense of self. She wasn’t sure if she was Ursie anymore, or if she had somehow become Tobias, or was neither. She felt as though she’d somehow become an amalgamation of the two, a hybrid that was simultaneously both of their minds, as strange as that seemed.

  Around her, the gentle ocean had become a raging sea.

/>   She flailed at the blackness, and it stuck to her like tar. It was becoming so thick that there was nothing else to be seen anymore. She was lost in some sort of void.

  She tried to scream and couldn’t, swung her arms like a mad thing.

  Then, something changed. Her hands passed through the nebulous mass around her, and some small part of her realised that there was no substance to it after all. It was not a physical entity, but merely the absence of everything, like a pocket of darkness that could be dispelled with the light.

  She just had to find a way to bring the light.

  Steeling herself, she pushed through the darkness, urging herself onward even though it felt as though she were entering a bottomless abyss. She kept going, further and further, and just as she thought she would never see the end of it, suddenly there was light. Glorious, golden light.

  She seized it with all of her soul, took it within her and headed back into the darkness.

  The nothingness shirked away from her like a vampire fleeing from the first rays of the morning sun. The further she pushed, the more the darkness shrank. Soon she came to another glowing orb of light, and instinctively she probed at its edges, finding what could only be described as an anchor point, and here she reattached the light that was within her, forming a kind of bridge through the darkness.

  She turned and found the next clump of blackness, entered within it, then did the same once again. Then again, and again. She became lost in the process of hauling those tendrils of illumination, repeating it over and over, dragging the light with her as she went, and time seemed to stand still. She became almost like a machine, moving from place to place, never quitting until she could be sure that she was free, that the cold darkness had been eradicated and could no longer trap her here.

  At some point, she reencountered the warmth once again, that feeling of being home, and then the space around her seemed to dissolve.

  She awoke to find Tobias standing nearby, hunched over the console. It took a moment for her to realise where she was and what had happened. She’d become so disorientated within his mind that she’d forgotten about reality altogether.

  Then it came back to her.

  The railcar. Had it already hit bottom? Was Knile dead?

  She struggled to her feet, and immediately saw that something was different about Tobias. His cheeks were flushed, and there was a sharpness in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.

  And his fingers were working away at the terminal before him.

  “Tobias,” she croaked, her throat dry, “what’re you–?”

  “I remember,” he said breathlessly. “I remember it now. Almost all of it, I think.”

  “Remember what?”

  “I weren’t always no trash man, Ursalina Ballerina. No, not at all. Good ol’ Tobias was part of the railcar maintenance crew, back in the days before his memory went bad.” He tapped at the console. “Now, I never was no engineer, but I used this system plenty of times for repair jobs.” He looked at her, his eyes sparkling. “I can work it.”

  The console beeped, and a message appeared.

  Remote location online. Then, Warning, Earthside power low.

  “What did you do?” Ursie said.

  “This end of the link is the master. It can turn the other side off and on, as long as you know what you’re doin’. So now we’ve got a link downstairs!” he exclaimed. “Control from both ends. We can do things with the railcar, no?”

  She frowned uncertainly. “By that you mean–?”

  “Your friends ain’t dead, and nor are we. This might take me a minute, but… we should be able to touch that railcar down as soft as a duck’s behind.”

  Ursie stared at the old man in disbelief. What exactly was going on here? How had this happened?

  She thought back to when she had entered his mind, how she had repeatedly banished the darkness within. That act of connecting one part of light to another… had she somehow reconnected those damaged and broken neural pathways within Tobias’ mind, reforming links that had been eroded throughout the years?

  Had she somehow reversed the process of decay that had crippled his memory?

  Was that even possible?

  At this point, she didn’t care how it had happened. Their miracle had been delivered, with a fucking bow on top.

  She fumbled for the comms button, almost falling over herself in excitement.

  “Knile,” she said. “Good news!”

  45

  The lightning flashed outside, and the silhouette of a man was briefly revealed over by the railcar landing dock. Stoic and still, it almost seemed like a statue, a broad-shouldered gargoyle left to the whim of the elements.

  “He’s still there,” Roman said, joining Talia at the window. He scrubbed at the grime with his sleeve, then leaned forward for a better look. “What’s he doing?”

  Talia waited for the lightning to flicker again. When it did, she saw that Norrey was in the same place as before, patiently standing and looking up at the sky as the rain tumbled down around him.

  “I guess he finished his sweep of the area,” she said.

  “So why hasn’t he moved the whole time he’s been out there?”

  Talia considered that. Since she and Roman had started their exploration of Sunspire’s interior fifteen minutes ago, they’d seen Norrey from three different vantage points – the window in what might have been a cafeteria, the dormitory, and now from this kitchen. Each time he had looked just as he did now – standing still and straight, patiently awaiting the arrival of the railcar.

  “Maybe he decided the railcar should be his main focus.”

  Roman gave her a sceptical look. “Come on, Tal. Don’t tell me there aren’t alarm bells going off in your head right now.”

  She glanced around the filthy tiled floor of the kitchen and wrung her hands together. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself, but now that Roman had voiced his concerns, she couldn’t deny that she shared them.

  “Okay. I don’t entirely trust Norrey and Kolos. But, in saying that, if they wanted to kill us or rob us, why wait until we’ve climbed all the way to the top of Sunspire Mountain? They could have done it down in the lowlands and saved themselves the trouble.”

  “Maybe they were hoping we’d lead them to a bigger score.”

  “And if they were, what exactly could we do about that? They’re toting assault rifles, for goodness sake. Not to mention they’re built like brick shithouses.”

  “So we’re basically their prisoners?”

  “I’m not saying that. We just need to be careful about how we handle this. Up to this point they’ve done nothing to suggest they mean us harm.”

  “But you still don’t trust them.”

  She gave him a little smile. “I don’t trust anyone.”

  Talia sensed someone had arrived, and a moment later there was a voice behind them.

  “There you are.” They turned to see Kolos standing in the doorway of the kitchen, shrouded in gloom, his assault rifle slung over his arm. He looked about, a bemused smile on his face. “What happened? You getting some exercise?”

  “Just taking one final look around the complex,” Talia said. “Making sure we don’t have any last-minute surprises.”

  “Smart move,” Kolos said. “Although, we really should head back to the control room now. Your friends are due any minute.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Talia lifted a hand to Roman’s shoulder and guided him toward the door. “We’re coming.”

  Kolos stepped aside. “After you.”

  She kept her head low as she passed the bodyguard, hoping to hide the growing uneasiness within her. There was something predatory about Kolos now. He was more confident, even brazen, as if all along he’d been wearing a mask of reservedness that was now beginning to slip.

  They marched back toward the control room, through the dormitory foyer, Kolos not far behind. Out the window she could now see shimmering light from above, and she realised that the r
ailcar was now within view. It was perhaps only a minute or two away from touching down. She even thought she could hear the sound of it over the thrum of rain on the roof.

  “Look!” Roman said, pointing. “They’re here!”

  “Told you,” Kolos said. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”

  Talia and Roman did as he suggested. The sound of Kolos’ boots behind her was like a heavy drum beat, setting the tempo of a death march. Now she felt sick to her stomach. Her intuition was telling her that she’d made a grave mistake somewhere along the line, and that it was too late now to correct it. Part of her argued that she was overreacting, that the excitement of Knile’s imminent arrival was screwing with her judgement, but it did not diminish her unease.

  Not in the slightest.

  They moved through the old cafeteria, and when they were half-way across, a voice suddenly emanated from the darkness.

  “Stop.”

  Her heart caught in her throat, and she wheeled about, trying to locate the owner of the voice. The cafeteria was indistinct in the darkness, full of shadows, but she thought she saw someone standing at the edge of an old vending machine that had been stripped of its contents.

  Kolos moved quickly, ducking down behind a table and swinging his rifle up into the ready position.

  “Put the rifle down,” the intruder said. “My partner has you covered from the other side of the room.”

  Talia looked about helplessly. Who was this? What did they want? And why in hell had they arrived right as the railcar was about to dock?

  “Yeah, give me a reason to put a round through your skull,” said another voice, female this time, coming from behind a counter on the other side of the room.

  “No chance,” Kolos growled, maintaining a low profile behind the table.

  Something twigged in Talia’s mind, and realisation came to her.

  She knew these voices.

  “Duran?” she said, disbelieving.

  Illumination blossomed overhead, and Talia turned to see Zoe over by a light switch behind the counter. In the other direction, it was indeed none other than Alec Duran behind the vending machine.