Dorian and I stared, captivated, as a blurry image came into focus. The scene crystallized, revealing the profile of someone from an odd angle.
Dorian’s breath caught in his throat.
Chapter Fourteen
It was Bravi.
Floating before us, she stared forward with complete focus at something beyond our range of sight. The image flickered and crackled with static like an old TV set.
My breath caught in my throat. Was it really Bravi? Instinctively, I reached toward her, part of me hoping I might get her attention or somehow communicate that way. I pulled my hand back at the last moment, suddenly afraid the mist would disappear. My movement didn’t draw her gaze, though, and it became clear that whatever this was, it was one-way—she couldn’t see us.
Bravi, or whatever this version of her was, continued looking down at something, her eyes hard. There was a vague sense of movement somewhere out of focus, and blood was sent spattering across her face. Dorian and I both jerked back in shock. For a moment I was afraid that she had been hurt, but quickly noted it lacked the signature shadows of vampire blood. A hunter's blood perhaps? My heart sank. A human?
There was no trace of pain on her determined face, but her jaw was set tightly. She wore a strange kind of uniform. I squinted, trying to make out the fuzzy outline. She wore a tan-colored vest with dark violet piping at the low collar. A weapon belt wrapped around the waist of her ragged pants.
"Is this—?" Dorian’s question hung in the air. Is this actually happening?
I shrugged. I didn’t know if we were really seeing our friends or if this was another spectral trick. I couldn't tell where Bravi was, either; the angle was too awkward. Framing her head, I could pick out vague details of a small, dull stone room. The sides of the room darkened with shadows as the image flickered for a moment, showing more of the room when it focused again. Now we could see that gathered beside Bravi were several other Coalition members. I saw a flash of Zach and Gina, making me suck in another sharp breath. Kono's dark skin and pale purple hair caught my eye. All of them wore the same uniform vests over their clothes, but they all had different piping on their collars. My mind churned. A rank insignia? None of this made sense.
For a terrible moment, the image seemed on the verge of collapsing, but it recovered just enough to let us see that all of the Coalition members were looking down at the same point. Their lips moved, but no sound came. I had a brief flash of frustration. I desperately wanted to know what they were saying and to hear their familiar voices again. The projection rippled as Reshi moved into the frame. She squared her shoulders and raised her massive fists powerfully into the air, her fingers curled and flecked with blood. She faced the others with a tight smile devoid of happiness, but it radiated a determination similar to Bravi’s. Kono said something, shaking his head fiercely. Just as it appeared to be on the verge of showing us what the Coalition members were gazing down at, the already fragile base of the projection shattered, and the pieces were immediately sucked down over the cliff edge.
Dorian cursed under his breath, and I understood his irritation completely.
"What the hell was that?" I wondered. "Those vests, and the blood…"
Dorian scowled. "I have no idea, Lyra. Who even knows if it was really them? The last time we saw Bravi, she was alive and kicking hunters left and right at the training camp. Are they still at the camp, using it as a base as we planned, or have they had to move? Who knows how long we’ve been gone?" His brow furrowed, deep in thought.
"And whose blood was that?" I wondered, thinking of the dark color spattered over her face and Reshi's fists. "Everyone’s faces were so…" I trailed off, not wanting to plummet our confused feelings deeper into hopelessness. I hoped the Coalition was doing okay, wherever they were—if it was indeed them. What time would it be in the Immortal Plane? I licked my lips nervously as I considered everything. What had our time in the Immortal Plane cost our friends and allies if they now looked so grim?
As we ruminated, the mist rippled, and another slab of reflective flooring split off, coming to hover in front of us as if about to spit up another image. Dorian tensed, and I readied myself to drink in every detail of what it was about to show us. Maybe this was no more real than a dream, or something halfway between like the projection of Lanzon, but perhaps it was vitally important. We couldn’t risk turning our backs on this strange phenomenon.
Sike sat at a table, hunched over some papers beside someone even lankier—Echen. They pored over the books together, looking bored and weary. The dim yellow light and papery walls said it was the Hive, but that was impossible.
"But we destroyed the Hive," I muttered. Frustration at my own lack of understanding of what we were seeing made my brain pulse with a dull ache.
Dorian shook his head. "So what—or rather when—the hell are we seeing?"
The mist refused to answer. It changed again. The yellow hues rippled away, and Sike's face melted into the interior of a building. It was stark white with gray flooring that had a Bureau vibe to it, and something in the tiles reminded me of somewhere I'd been before, but I’d been inside quite a few HQs. I was almost ninety percent certain that it was a Bureau building somewhere, though. The vision drifted the length of the hallway, flickering and wavering slightly, then disappeared entirely for a second. When it returned, we saw Rhome sitting with his hands clasped before him on the table. His gaze was somber. Carwin and Detra were nowhere to be seen. I could only hope they weren’t with their father for a good reason.
He reached up with one hand to rub his weary eyes, which were underlined with deep shadows. My heart broke open for him at the sadness he emanated. Some indecision waged a battle on his face. He buried his face in his hands. An unfamiliar Bureau representative stood next to him, confirming my hunch about the location.
On the other side of a thick glass barrier, Kreya stood in a cell. A cold rush of shock went through me. She was bald, her hair shaved down to her scalp with stitches healing in several places. Her skin swarmed with darkness, her ravaged forehead marred by angry, barely healed chunks of reddish scar tissue. She laid her palms on the glass as though trying to reach for Rhome. Her mouth opened to let out a cry or a scream, but I heard nothing. She banged a fist against the window, desperate, her eyes wild.
The image snapped and flickered again, denying us the opportunity to watch events unfold with Rhome and Kreya. In a cell somewhere unknown, Inkarri sat alone in a carefully padded and heavily secured cell. She rocked back and forth, gnashing her teeth and shivering violently, coated in a sheen of feverish sweat. Her skin was more like the blue of a ghastly corpse rather than her typical brilliant shade. Clearly, she had fared terribly in the Mortal Plane without the ambient dark energy in the air to sustain her.
"What are they doing to them?" I stepped toward the rippled image, but it didn't clear up at all. It remained grainy and wavering, flickering through multiple layers of color and disjointed images of places and people that I didn’t recognize, as if trying to infuriate me.
"Where are the kids?" Dorian wondered, his voice tight with worry. He swallowed hard.
As though the universe was listening, the next scene switched quickly to show Detra. I heaved a sigh of relief, clapping a hand to my chest. She was coloring on a piece of paper with Mortal Plane crayons. Her skin looked too pale, meaning she hadn't fed in a while, but it was clean, and her hair was less wild than it had been after her experience with Sempre. She scribbled passionately on the page with a gray crayon, drawing a towering figure with a crown and red eyes. She held the red crayon tightly in her hand and ground it against the page, angrily scribbling out the figure's head.
Carwin sat across from her at the stark white table with Roxy next to him. She put one arm around Carwin as they watched Detra draw. There was a smile on her face, but her eyes were concerned and swollen. From crying? My heart clenched as her smile threatened to crumble, twitching every few seconds. Had something happened to Kane? We hadn’t seen him at all so far.
The floating section of the reflective floor began to pull apart, holes appearing in the image until more chunks tore themselves free from the void and came to strengthen it. As the picture stabilized, I hoped for a scene with Kane, but my hopes were dashed. A redbill appeared, streaking across a sky full of angry black smoke. I could see two bulky figures on its back, which turned out to be Arlonne and Bryce. Bryce sat behind the dark-skinned vampire, his arms tight around her waist.
"She made it! At least, I hope so…" I mumbled. The last time I’d seen Arlonne was on the mechanical jaspeth as it went down in the training camp battle. But… why would she be with Bryce? Were they in the Mortal Plane or the Immortal Plane? It was impossible to tell through the billowing smoke. Both wore grim expressions, and their mouths didn't move as they swept across the landscape, circling the tear. It grew in size until it took up the entire field of vision. The atmosphere around the tear had worsened, lightning bolts ripping across the entrance every few moments. It was more reminiscent of the view of the tear from here in the Higher Plane than anything I'd ever seen in the Mortal Plane.
Dorian pointed to the image, drawing my attention. "Bryce doesn't have a sling."
"He doesn’t?" I peered closer at Bryce and Arlonne.
It was true. Bryce was free of a sling and even bandages. And his hair wasn’t the same, completely buzzed into a military cut, so different from how long it had been when I saw him last. Arlonne’s was far longer than I remembered. Did this mean a lot of time had passed since we left the Immortal Plane?
"How… how long have we been gone?" I wondered aloud, my words wavering with shock.
The redbill dipped lower, away from the tear. Red splayed across the image. Familiar red clay rocks that reminded me of the Canyonlands came into view. Okay, so they’re in the Mortal Plane. The redbill swung down to land on a stone buttress, its feathers buffeted violently by the wind. Bryce and Arlonne stared up at the tear as glowing, pulsing clouds swirled around them.
I watched with bated breath as they dismounted the redbill and moved forward into the blackness of the weather. When Bryce lost his footing, Arlonne grasped his hand with her modified arm—which now looked permanently attached to her body—and jerked him back before he plummeted into the murky darkness. Horror flashed across their faces. Arlonne snarled and hauled Bryce forcibly back to the redbill. The stone beneath them flickered as if it were not completely solid. The redbill gave a startled squawk. The ground wasn’t entirely there—kind of like the edge of the cliff here in the Higher Plane. They scrambled back onto the redbill, but I barely paid attention to their rush, as something far more confusing and disconcerting caught my eye.
Treetops from the Immortal Plane surrounded Bryce and Arlonne on all sides of the red buttress.
My lips felt numb with shock. "I don't understand," I muttered. I spoke my thoughts aloud as they floated up out of me, unable to stop. "It looked like they were in both the Mortal and Immortal Planes. That's impossible."
Before I could process what that might mean, the image changed, and we fell into a hush. The interior of another building, this one more chaotic than the Bureau HQ from before. A collection of sophisticated instruments and technological machines in the forefront screamed Bureau to me. At the very least, it was likely in the Mortal Plane.
Zach and Gina sat with Harlowe and Mox, vampires who had been sent through to the Mortal Plane during the evacuation. They were all dressed in Bureau fatigues. The four sat huddled behind unfamiliar officials in Bureau uniforms designating high-ranking leadership. The entire group was tracking something that moved on the screen. Gina's face fell with devastation, her bottom lip quivering hard as Zach shook his head fiercely. Harlowe and Mox stared, transfixed by the screen. Two Bureau figures darted toward Zach, shoving phones in his face. Zach snatched both, barking silently into one line first and then switching to the other. He waved the second phone at Mox and prodded her to take it. She accepted it with an awkward movement, holding the receiver gently up to her mouth and speaking into it.
Zach’s mouth ran nonstop as he went back to the first phone. Gina hovered at Harlowe’s elbow, a stitch of deep worry between her brows as they both watched the screen. The perspective changed to show a sliver of the screens. Various newscasts—as many as seven monitors showcasing different shows and live streams in a variety of languages—were playing. It was hard to comprehend, but there were flashes of red decals and glimpses of military planes. A missile flashed across one screen, a newscaster gesturing urgently to the image. The military forces of an uncountable number of nations dotted every screen. My stomach clenched, and a wave of nausea rose up inside me. I couldn’t tell what was going on, but something in the Mortal Plane was terribly, terribly wrong.
Infuriatingly, the image switched.
Now we looked down at a forest of lush, dark trees the color of ripe blueberries. It was so unnatural a color for trees, one I knew I'd never seen in the Mortal Plane. I knew for sure they were somewhere in the Immortal Plane. The sky shimmered with twinkling emerald lights. Lightning bugs? An aurora? I fought to make out the small shapes, but it was impossible to tell. A small group of figures gathered in the trees, barely visible, as the soft lighting around them provided minimal illumination. From their posture, it looked like they were hiding. My pulse staggered as I watched excitedly. I couldn't see details, but I counted several forms that appeared to be wildlings.
There was one pair of larger forms, lithe and tall like vampires, but too short to be ruler caste. The duo leaned on one another as if collapsed into one singular shape. Something about the image made my pulse quicken, but I couldn't put my finger on why. Dorian's breath hitched as the image flickered closer. The sharp features of the duo flashed before us for only a second, not enough to make any sense of their faces. I wanted to ask him if he recognized them based on the vague details, but Dorian offered up no words. He merely shook his head, his brow furrowing deeper as he whispered something, but it came out too jumbled and fast for me to understand. Odd. I barely had time to think about it before things began to change. The picture abruptly vanished and tumbled into a stream of neon shades, and then another image formed from the dizzying array. My head grew woozy from peering into the swirling, shifting colors.
The next image was a building with a meticulously constructed courtyard paved with sparkling white crystal prisms. The crystal cast brilliant rainbow arcs from one side of the path to the other, creating a continuous arched tunnel of light. Immortal Plane. It had to be. Where else would anyone construct something so bright? There was no sound, but figures suddenly darted across the path.
My stomach dropped with dread as gem blasts flooded the vision; this was a battle in progress. My mind filled in the gaps from experience. I knew the horrifying sound a gem blast made as it streaked through the air. I could never forget the sounds of battle—the hissing and shouting, the violent clash of hard weapons, the stomping of hunter boots. The view dropped low to reveal figures at a leg-level perspective, as if a camera operator had gotten down on the ground to get a unique shot. People jumped. Swords slashed through the air. Bodies flailed and fell, landing violently on the ground. Blood dark with shadow and the bright red blood of humans smeared the brilliantly glittering floor. I felt sick, my battle adrenaline rising even though I wasn’t there.
Someone dressed in a tan vest fell into view, a bit shorter than the others, allowing us to see more of the figure. From the shape, I knew it was a female vampire. She dropped to one knee, shadowy blood pouring to the ground from a wound in her chest. She snarled up at someone, blood bubbling at the sides of her mouth. Her hair fell back to reveal a slice of her profile.
My heart stopped.
The perspective jumped, and suddenly we were staring at her as she glared hatefully with burning violet eyes up at someone. Blood leaked from a deep wound across the lower part of her slashed throat and her chest. Without immediate help, she would die.
Laini.
"No
!" Dorian snarled, and the cloud shattered as he attempted to grab at the faint afterimage of Laini. A swirling mist was the only thing left behind for us to stare at, horrified.
The show was over.
Chapter Fifteen
I stared at Dorian. Fear coursed through every inch of my body. I shook my head. "No. None of this can be real, Dorian. It just can’t be true.”
Tears welled and leaked from the corners of my eyes, but I was too stunned to blink them away. The shock left me with a devastating sensation of being hollow and numb. I was clinging to Dorian, nearly strangling his hand in my grasp, and his grip on me was just as desperate.
Neither of us could believe what we’d just witnessed.
I was still reeling; my mind was racing. The vampire we’d seen on the verge of death looked like Laini… no, as much as I wanted to deny it, the vampire was definitely Laini. The battle in the courtyard was somewhere in the Immortal Plane that had an excessive number of opulent gems, but we'd never been there. As I took a strangled breath, the back of my mind reasoned that such decadence had Itzarriol written all over it. Horror coursed through my veins. I clenched my eyes shut against the memory of the sight.
"We have to get back to the lower planes," I blurted. "People are dying without us. Everything is going to hell, and we’re not there to help.”
Dorian stared at me, slack faced with shock. He blinked, and his eyes regained a bit of clarity. "Maybe, but how can we know that we didn't just conjure these images up? We need to consider that possibility in a place like this. Jia said that we made Lanzon appear and that he… that the projection was then taken over by some universal power. What if this is something similar? It could be serving a warning like Lanzon’s visit did. This plane is powerful, so it’s reasonable that we may not understand everything that’s happening. Maybe this place is messing with our heads like the Immortal Plane did to you, only now it’s both of us. Humans and vampires were never meant to come here, remember?”
Darklight 6: Darkbirth Page 19