Intrepid

by J. D. Brewer

  I chucked the tomato out in the ocean and didn’t bother to wait for the plunk before I picked the next one to throw. Nobu wouldn’t miss them, and tomato by precious tomato, I pitched them into the sun. But stripping the plant bare didn’t change things.

  No.

  There was no going back to my life with Nobu.

  I didn’t know if there was any way to move forward with Texi. She contained within her Creation, but that meant there was also an equal amount of Destruction in her too.

  And there was more.

  I couldn’t figure out what to call it. I couldn’t figure out if I’d ever felt it before. I couldn’t even admit that something else was bubbling in my veins, bursting the capillaries that lead straight to my heart and inflaming my lungs every time I took a breath.

  I wanted to touch her again.

  I wanted to rip her apart with my own Energy.

  And that made no sense to me.

  I walked towards the benches where Nobu planted his flowers. “I know they don’t serve an edible purpose, but that doesn’t negate their necessity. A little bit of beauty is never worthless,” he’d said. I laid down on a bench and laced my fingers behind my head for a pillow, and I counted the stars until my eyes grew as heavy as my heart. But dreams turned out to be just as disturbing. I was in the Nothing with Texi, bursting into the Multiverse into existence. Whispers grew loud, banging into our ears in the violent chaos of Creation, and I pulled her into a kiss that caused my own veins to rupture.

  “She’s gone! Wake up!”

  I heard it in my heart. She was gone. Gone. Gone.

  “Liam! Wake up!” How Santiago sounded simultaneously panicked and calm at the same time was beyond me. It took me a moment to realize he’d woken me from the dream, and he already had his screen pulled up to hone in on Texi’s tracker when I finally opened my eyes. I sat up and didn’t have time to groan as my body adjusted. I really needed to stop sleeping in such strange places. The plush bench was not nearly as comfortable after a few hours of laying on it.

  “Dude, did you hear me?”

  I shook my head as realization finally sunk in.

  She was gone.

  I pulled up my screen and let Santiago enter our coordinates. “The 620s? Why would she go there?” I asked.

  Worry fell into Santiago’s hurried movements. “Why would she Jump without us in the first place? There are too many whys to be asked here. We need to stop asking and go get her. I knew we shouldn’t have given her access to the Planck Web yet.”

  I didn’t argue with him. There wasn’t enough time to do so, because the more seconds we spent here, the more chances she had to get in trouble on the 620s. They were a wasteland, and going anywhere in those Veins was unbearable. The only creatures that existed there were the mammoth-bears and the things mammoth-bears ate.

  It was also a good spot to Interim Jump between Veins if you thought someone was tracking you. There was a static kind of Energy that took a while to cut through signals, and it gave you a head start.

  That’s what worried me most. What if she was already gone? How did she know to go there first?

  We entered into the Nothing. It flooded over us like the eye of a hurricane. We both believed we’d land within feet of her, but when we dissolved back into reality, we didn’t find Texi. We found something else entirely.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Wherever Texi had gone on this planet, it wasn’t in this location. The tracker’s calibration must have been off, and it plotted us amongst a bunch of nesting mammoth-bears.

  Of course.

  In fact, we landed right smack dab in the middle of a mammoth-bear den.

  This adventure kept getting better and better.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness of the cave and I swore under my breath. Their sharp teeth were as white as the drifting snow that leaked from the cracks of the open cave, their tusks were as sharp as the ice-mountain ranges, and their ragged fur stank of damp death.

  I slid towards Santiago, and reached out to grab his shoulder so we could Bucket Hop to the same location, but a paw swiped out. It scraped me across the chest and pushed me through the air. I lost my grip on Santiago before I entered the Nothing, and when I landed on the hard, iced ground, I felt the crack of bone and the vibrations of my own sturdy scream.

  I propped my neck up and saw that there was nothing around me, but my arm was bent at an unnatural angle. The claw marks tore my shirt to shreds, and a cold I’d never felt before traced its fingers across each slash of skin. I knew there was a way to equalize body temperature by tuning down the sense of feeling, but I didn’t know how to do that yet. There was still so much Santiago had to show us.

  The 620s were hell.

  I know that people describe hell as flames and fire, but those people have never felt the burning heat of being frozen.

  I tried to stand up.

  I’d lost Santiago.

  How could I have lost Santiago?

  I thought of where I came from and forced my Energy to return there. I didn’t want to return to an angry pit of mammoth-bears, but losing Texi and Santiago within minutes of each other was simply not an option.

  I landed at the mouth of the cave and yelled for Santiago. “Hop towards my voice,” but he didn’t appear. He must still be in there. I’d only been gone about thirty seconds, but that was enough time for someone to get killed. “Don’t do this, Santiago! We need you!” I said it more for myself than for him as I closed my eyes to Hop back into the cave.

  I landed where I began, and saw Santiago slouched against a rocky wall with a mammoth-bear hovering over his face. Its teeth were wet and ready to close down on him, but when I appeared, the creature turned its attention to me. I needed to draw it away, because it was the only thing standing between Santiago and me. If I Hopped between them, there’d be no room and I’d only put myself within the traps of its teeth and claws. “Come on, you bastard! You hungry? Huh?” I stepped backwards until my back nestled into the cold wall. At least the other beasts wouldn’t be able to get behind me.

  I shivered at the sight of them as they stirred from their sleep. My new entrance was a bit more clambering and attention-grabbing than our last.

  I blinked and felt a surge of Energy. It was like I could taste everything that went into building every mammoth-bear that surrounded us. There were eight adults and two cubs, not that I could see them all to count them. I just felt it to be true and therefore knew it to be true. I closed my eyes again and felt the Energy trickle into and out of my pores. Every cell within me burst into the heat of it, and I felt it drawing from something greater than myself.

  “No!” I yelled. “Nooooooo!”

  But it was too late.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I felt the cool air of morning as we landed back on the deck. I had Santiago hoisted over my back, but he still wasn’t waking up. I stumbled over to one of the lounge chairs, laid him down, and wondered how to stop the blood from pooling out of the gashes on his forehead, neck, and torso. I clasped his wrist between my thumb and fingers to feel his still-faint pulse and put my ear close to his mouth to hear his barely steady breathing.

  I should have known better than to make him Jump when he was this injured. Corbin should have been warning enough, but it was Jump or let Santiago freeze to death. He didn’t have time to heal back on the 620s. Neither did I! I knew I’d taken the right risk, but he should have started healing already. Something was slowing it down, and I knew it was my fault he wasn’t healing. Whatever it was I did back there was making it more difficult, but at least he was alive.

  “You’re okay,” I whispered more for myself than for him. He had to be okay. There was no other option for him. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if, in trying to save him, I turned him into a delusional mess.

  I tried to assess my wounds, and realized I probably shouldn’t have Jumped either. My cuts kept reopening with every move I made, and, although I knew they wanted to heal, I al
so knew they wouldn’t if I didn’t lay still for a bit.

  There was another option for me too. Sometimes Jumping this injured didn’t affect the brain. Rather it altered the ability to heal. What if I wasn’t out of the woods either? What if my wounds didn’t heal, and I bled out?

  Tatters of my torn shirt kept falling into the cuts every time I moved, and I tried to lift it over my head. The movement was too excruciating, so instead I tore at the slashes and pried the shirt apart with shaky fingers from the hand that wasn’t attached to my broken arm. The bone in my other arm was snapped in two just under my elbow when I’d landed after the mammoth-bear struck me. I looked at it and tried not to cringe at the angle it dangled in. The last thing I needed was to have it heal in that shape, and not even my screaming woke Santiago up as I adjusted it back into the place it needed to be in. I took in deep, shuddering breaths, but it didn’t ease the pain of it. I ran my fingers over my cuts. The blood kept trying to coagulate where the skin was torn, and I felt the folds attempting to reach out towards each other like tiny, stretching fingers trying to touch at the tips.

  I looked back to where Santiago rested. “Come on, dude,” I pleaded. “I need your help to find her.” I tried to pull up the tracker on Santiago’s bracelet, but the signal had been deactivated. She was gone, and we were in no condition to go after her. How had we lost her? It was a question that wouldn’t stop revolving in my head.

  Nobu’s whale theory flooded my thoughts, and now that Texi was missing, all I could see was how impossible the situation was. It was as if Nobu was sitting right next to me saying, “You’ll find her when you’re meant to.” But maybe I wasn’t meant to. Maybe I’d failed the one job I’d spent my entire life preparing for.

  How do you find one person in the shadow of infinity?

  I propped up Santiago’s head with a cushion on the lounge chair and stumbled towards the kitchen for water and a rag. Maybe if I cleaned his wounds, it’d kick-start the healing and he’d wake up.

  But when I got to the galley, loss hit me in the gut. I punched the marbled counter of the kitchen with my palm over and over again. There was a thwack-thwack-thwack as the hand suctioned and un-suctioned against the stone, but even the feeling of hard granite on soft skin couldn’t hurt me more than the hurt rampaging through me.

  The mammoth-bears.

  They were huge orbs of organic beings, and I’d sucked them dry of life. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. In the cave, I’d closed my eyes, felt the pull, and converted their Energy into something else. I shot it out into the storm and heard the snow pick up new currents inside the clouds. I heard the rumble of an avalanche from the sky as it bucketed down at the mouth of the cave. In that moment, I felt all of their strength flow into me. I felt like I could destroy the entire cave with my bare hands if I just thought to do it.

  But as their bodies fell limp in huge sacks of fur around me, I tasted a different Energy. One that was familiar. One that was terrifyingly weak.

  I let go of the pull.

  And Santiago… he was in his own bulking heap on the ground.

  I remembered the cold being everywhere as I crumpled onto my knees, trying to catch a running breath. Santiago was on the other side of the fallen mammoth-bear, and I had to climb over its limp body to get to him. The only thing I could think of was to get Santiago out of there before he woke up and saw what I’d done.

  I’d been so mad at Texi yesterday morning over how much death and destruction I thought she’d triggered within the universe, but all along it’d been me. I was the one with Destruction in my veins. I had been scared for her, I’d wanted to protect her, and I’d destroyed in order to do it.

  In the cave, I did the same thing for Santiago.

  Was I like her? Was I a hybrid too? How could they keep that from me? There was information I was still missing, because being the same thing as Texi just didn’t make sense to me.

  I hovered my fingers over the gashes that still vibrated on my chest. I’d never seen anything like them. The blood that dripped around the edges was being sucked back into the body like I’d put a vid on a snail-paced reverse. The red drops retracted back into me, and the throbbing receded with every drop that returned. All the Energy within me was still hot to the point of being pleasurable, and I couldn’t hold on to any one emotion, because everything was running through me.

  There was a truth somewhere to be found in my marathon thoughts, but I couldn’t slow them down enough to figure it out.

  I’d lost her.

  How?

  I closed my eyes as the pink skin kept closing around the muscles. I slid down to the ground and laid down so that the cold floor touched every inch of my back. I tried to stay calm and count to ten the way Corbin had taught us to do as kids. “When the world’s about to explode, count to ten. A lot can change in ten seconds if you let it,” he used to always say.

  But ten seconds passed, she was still gone, and Santiago was still hurt.

  I heightened my other senses so that I heard every wave as they crushed themselves against the boat, and I could smell the shift of air when it happened. I reduced the tingle of feeling on my skin, and although I knew I was still healing, I lost the throbbing feeling of pain that existed everywhere outside of me.

  Infinite minutes slid by, and I stared up at the light bulbs that hung on mosaicked, miniature chandeliers throughout the entire kitchen. The community that lived on this boat seemed to have left everything in amazing condition. In my imagination, I could trace every item back to the moment it was carefully chosen. The people here obviously had time to prepare for the end of the world, because no detail was rushed or left to chance. Corbin never told us how they found the boat, and sometimes I wondered what finally wiped out the people who lived on it. Were there bodies or bones when Saltadors commandeered it? Or was everyone gone and washed away?

  My eyes skimmed the tables that rested in deep rows. Nobu and I always sat at the one to the left wall. There was a nook there that blocked off the other tables with their mocking emptiness. Something about all the missing bodies always bothered us.

  As a kid, I made up all kinds of stories about the Geetians who lived on Geeta, because in every nook and cranny, I could see the ghosts of their lives: pictures in albums, art hung on the walls, annotations in the margins of books, tattered toys in the playroom. There was a row of five posts in the middle of the expansive kitchen that were the only dividers between the prep area and the cafeteria tables, and little lines climbed up them like ladders. They marked heights, ages, and names like Henna, Coum, Yuna, and Varter. I thought of those kids all the time, and I wondered what it felt like to know you were the last children of humanity—the last hope for an entire dying people.

  Is that what Texi had become?

  I had to ask myself again. Did I share her burden? Was I like her?

  I wanted Texi back, and I wanted to rewind time. I wanted to go back to the moment we stood on the bow of the boat—before I got mad at her. Maybe if I hadn’t lost my temper, she would have confided in me. Maybe she wouldn’t have run off like that if she thought she could trust me.

  She was gone.

  Gone.

  What was I supposed to do now?

  “Go back to what you know,” I whispered to the ghosts who sat along the benches of the galley. “The beginning will help you figure out the end…”

  Texi

  The Humanitarian Project Trials

  I do not wish to stir up fear, although fear we must in this case!

  I, for one, am afraid that the Calvary has done more than what we’ve discovered. Who is to say that there are only ten of these subjects out there? Who is to say that there was not more than this one experiment we’ve uncovered? I believe it is in the interest of humanity that the Elders of the Gaian Order undertake investigations into all aspects of the Calvary’s business…

  —Dr. Anastaisa Einsteino, High Chancellor of the Shadow Boxers

  —Seventieth Generation of
Dr. Alberta Einsteino,

  —S-1, V-1.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Trees trapped in the warm colors of the sun. It was fall wherever we’d landed, but the temperature was still held captive by a polite summer. The leaves shifted in and out of every possible shade of crunch, and I could practically feel the colors crumble under my bare toes when I walked. To say that this new warmth was a relief would be an understatement, and I was thankful to let feeling drift back into my skin and realization drift back into understanding.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  The gloved hands pulled back the hood and yanked off the goggles. “I’ve missed you,” Lindsay said and wrapped me into a hug.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She smiled and stepped back to take off her bulky jacket. “It took you long enough. I’ve been watching that spot from the cave for hours!” She tossed the jacket on the ground along with the goggles. Even though she wore normal clothing underneath it, her image felt off because the black pants and green shirt were too plain for how stylish she normally looked. “We don’t have much time, but I’ll do my best to explain.”

  “You’re a—”

  “Saltador? Yes.”

  “Are you a Shadow Bo—”

  “No.”

  “A Calvar—”

  “I represent the Nothing, not some misguided political party.”

  I took a shuddering breath. There was yet another group at play in all of this, as if there weren’t enough people with agendas to figure out. Lindsay’s dark eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them before, and it triggered memories of jokes and laughter and secrets.

  Secrets. This meant that like everyone else, she’d kept so many from me these past years.