“I’m going to the north end of the perimeter, where the farmland is, here,” I say, tapping my index finger on a green area of the monitor. “Levi and Navaa will stay at my side, but I’ll need about a thousand troops within a couple hundred yards of the area, human ones that won’t give off any noise. They’ll be defending the area until I get the Akshaji here, holding off the enemy if necessary.” I don’t bother explaining that it more than likely will be necessary because it’s not like I can just whistle up a Rift. This might take a while.
“Just make sure you stick to that specific acreage. It’s an area that the Immigrants didn’t have time to booby-trap. Stray too far from it, though, and you’ll be in trouble. Go ahead and move out,” Violet tells me, “the troops will be right behind you.” I nod my thanks. I want to hug her. I want to hug them all, but there is no time. There is no time for friends or history. There is only right now and my duty to this cause. I notice Ezra working at a terminal. I smile broadly at him and he smiles back, giving me a little nod. He’s telling me to go, not to worry. I begin to walk, and the other two join me. I wring out my sorrows. I push away my fears. I set aside my anxiety. There is no room for fear or guilt that I didn’t listen to the advice of the others. I can feel only one thing, determination, for the mission. Besides, there’s still a very good chance that I won’t be able to open the Rift at all. If I can’t, then the call to wait for the SenMachs was the right one. But of course, it will be a hollow victory. Without the Akshaji, we are fucked. I can’t believe it, but I want to be wrong.
As I take to the early morning outside, on Main Street, my troops begin to follow behind me. The sky is purple. The winter’s pale light will eventually take over, like an animal rolling on its back to expose its belly. There is no goose-stepping. The human faction of the UFA is moving too quickly, as I am, through the streets and the neighborhoods, the sound growing louder as new members join us. When I am told through my earpiece that we have the number I asked for, I start to run and they follow.
I don’t mean that I jog. I sprint. My legs pump like two pistons and my lungs begin to burn. I hear the others behind me, though it’s mostly their breath, a steady drag and pull of the early morning air. Their feet are moving too fast to make much noise. Eventually Navaa simply ascends into the sky, unable to run as fast as the rest of us. I am not thinking. I am just a collection of parts, an assembly of verbs. When we reach the open field, the rows and rows of harvested crops, now naked from the season, I stop short, on my toes to keep from falling on my face.
“We’re going to need some breathing room here. Take a defensive formation a hundred yards in a circular position around us,” Levi shouts. The troops fan out, and Navaa lands, the ground trembling slightly at our feet as she does. “Okay. This is as secure as it’s going to get. Go ahead.”
Navaa puts a single hand on my shoulder. “You can do this, Ryn,” she tells me firmly. “I’ve felt you holding back on my Earth, afraid of the Kir-Abisat, unwilling to accept this gift our enemies have given you.”
“It’s not a gift,” I huff. “None of this is a gift. It’s ridiculous. This whole thing.” Navaa remains silent because she agrees. It is ridiculous. Tens of thousands of people have staked their freedom and their lives on the promises made by a teenage girl with a smart mouth and a robotic arm.
“It does not matter how we got here. Here we are. Close your eyes and find the song, Ryn. That’s all that matters right now.”
I exhale slowly. My breath leaves my lips in a frosty cloud. In my mind, I quickly assemble my memory palace—Opa Joseph’s vinyl Lab in Stockholm.
He’s a hippie, not a scientist, and he’s still downright revolted by the digital revolution. He’s been collecting records since he was twelve. He has thousands of stacks, alphabetized in categories that he keeps on lovingly handmade shelves in the basement of my grandparents’ compact home. On a single leather chair, surrounded by speakers that at the time were as big as me, my opa introduced me to the Beatles and Portishead and Edith Piaf and Jeff Buckley.
In my mind’s eye I see this room, the same blond oak shelves and the thin covers of each record. I smell the damp chill of the basement mixed with the pungent aroma of my opa’s weed—a vice that he will never give up.
I pull out a record. It’s Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral. The jacket’s artwork looks the same, a beige-and-ochre abstract painting with a black tear. Instead of the band’s logo, the writing is in Akshaj. This is their tone, living on the grooves of an unblemished disk.
All the sounds I’ve ever heard are stored here, associated with different artists and shelved in different sections of the Lab. I pull the album out of the sleeve and grip the sides of it lightly. I make my entire body go still. I block out every other noise around me, all the shuffling feet and the rapidly beating hearts and the birds trilling. I take the Akshaj record out and put it gently on the record player.
The imaginary act of setting the needle down is my own self opening up. It is careful work, getting the needle in the groove, just as it is preparing my body for opening a Rift. When the first rumble of a note from the Akshaj Earth begins to play, I latch on to it. I roll it around in my head. I let it ricochet off my skull and down into the rest of my body. When I’m sure I have it, I start to hum. The noise grows inside my cells. I let it build as my voice grows louder. I keep at it, sure that it must be working, but when I open my eyes, there is only the tiniest spark of emerald for my effort.
“Shit,” I say out loud. “Shit!”
I look over to Navaa with panic in my eyes. “I don’t know that I can do this here. I think there are too many people around and it’s loud outside.”
“Nonsense,” she says dismissively. “We don’t have time for this. You must do it, Ryn.”
“I’m trying,” I tell her through clenched teeth. I close my eyes and enter the space again. This time, I can’t even find the record. I know the Citadels will be here any minute, and I feel the panic rising inside of me. I grab my short hair by the roots and let out a muffled scream. It’s too much. I’ve never been able to fully open a Rift on my own and now I’m supposed to do it here? This is not going to work.
“I can’t,” I tell them both, my voice sharp with disappointment. “We should just get ready, we can take them. We don’t need the Akshaji.”
Navaa walks directly in front of me and grabs both my clenched fists and holds them in her own hands. I’m about to lash out, but before I can, she says, softly, “The Faida were born to fly. Most of us flew before we walked. Still, I was terrified the first time I stood on a cliff’s edge without my parents. I knew logically of course that I could soar, but I was also equally sure that, somehow, my wings wouldn’t work, that I wouldn’t be able to catch the air. To this day, I don’t remember stepping off the edge. That’s because I stopped thinking. I let my fear go, I let everything go.”
“I’m not afraid!” I say quickly, defensively. “I want to open the Rift. Why would I be afraid of it?”
“I don’t think your fear comes from failure. I think you’re afraid of succeeding. I think you’re afraid of what that means. I don’t blame you for rejecting this—you know it’s what the altered Roones want. You don’t want to give them that.” Navaa moves her hands to my shoulders and practically shakes me. “But like everything else they’ve given you, you must use the Kir-Abisat against them. This is not for them. It’s for us. All of us. Don’t be afraid of falling.
“You will fly.”
I know what Navaa is saying is only partially true. I am afraid, but I am also stubborn. I think a part of me has always felt that if I succeeded in this, then somehow the altered Roones have won. My failure would be theirs. Now I see how epically stupid that is. It would be the same as me standing in front of a Settiku Hesh and letting them gut me because I’d rather die than use the skills that ARC gave me. I would never do that and this is no different, not really.
Once again, I close my eyes. I touch my fingertips together and
lay them on my chest so that they form a triangle. I go back to the basement, to my opa’s Lab. I pull out the Nine Inch Nails record once more and gently set the needle down. This time, though, I don’t just listen to the noise. I remember what Navaa told me—what she’s been trying to tell me all this time.
I become the noise.
I focus the song right in the center of me, where my fingers are open. As I begin to hum, I push the sound through them, through my chest. My entire body vibrates. I lose myself. I forget my name and who I am. I am simply a sound. My lids whip open and there is the green glow of the Rift five feet in front of me. I keep singing and I watch the neon mouth open like a lazy yawn. I keep at it, focusing my hum until it’s bouncing off every molecule. It feels like it’s both tearing me apart, and yet somehow pulling me together. I’m both wave and particle, and I’m equally excited and scared.
The color of the Rift changes from purple to black.
There’s no time for relief or pride. The three of us leap into the Rift. The sound inside is different than when we’ve opened one with the QOINS. It is softer, a lulling, a sweet echo of song. This is not just a Rift. It’s my Rift. It’s me. It’s like staring in a mirror inside of a mirror. It is the sound of my own voice inside my head. I understand the Kir-Abisat now. It’s not just a way to unlock the Multiverse, it’s a way to become the Multiverse. I feel its power thrum inside of me. I understand something on such a fundamental level that there are no words to describe it. There are no words because it’s a secret that’s never meant to be spoken, only felt, only ridden on, like a board inside the funnel of a wave.
I used to think the altered Roones were geniuses. Now, I know they are fools. They thought they could control this, control us. But that’s impossible. They can’t have this. This is as much mine as my own skin. I belong to the Multiverse in a way they will never be able to. No matter what they do, they will only ever be in the audience. This is my stage, my song, my poem, my film. They could no more claim it than I could my father’s portraits. I could say that I painted them, but anyone who knows my dad would know that he alone has that particular line, that way of mixing color and painting light.
I grin in smug satisfaction as I see the horizon ahead. No prison will ever be able to hold me. No chains can bind me. They will never be able to take me. I don’t have to be afraid of them because even if they kill me, I will open a Rift with my dying breath and live forever inside the emerald waterfall of time and sound and space.
Unfortunately, my unbridled joy is short-lived because as soon as I step foot onto the Akshaj base, I see that it is empty. There is no sparring, no cajoling, no ruckus. There are only bare stretches of grass that’s been worn thin and brown from trampling. Without even bothering to look at Levi and Navaa, I race up the steps of their templelike base. I throw open the doors, my heart lurching to my throat, because if the Akshaji are gone, the chances of us defeating our enemies may well be gone, too.
I never, ever thought I would be happy to see a person I so despise, but I exhale a deep, worrisome breath when I see him sitting there on his throne-like chair. He has a single leg dangled over one of the armrests and he is reading an electronic tablet. A handful of soldiers are standing sentry and just two or three servants scurrying about. To my great relief, no one is naked, but to be honest, I’d rather see a hundred scantily clad Akshaji than this near empty room.
The man in charge looks at me curiously when I clamber in with my companions. After the cacophony inside my Rift, this room is achingly quiet.
“Sairjidahl Varesh,” I say, realizing that I am not only out of breath, but a little light-headed. From the corner of my eye, I see Levi look at me and then I see him reach around his back, presumably for his slim pack.
“Well,” Varesh purrs. “If it isn’t my favorite human.”
“What happened?” I ask in a rush. Levi grabs my hand and shoves some of the SenMachs food cubes in them. “Stop,” I hiss at him.
“You look like you’re about to faint, Ryn. You need to eat and drink,” he orders me sternly.
“I too was going to say that you looked especially cloud faced, but I didn’t want to be rude,” Varesh chimes in. I purse my lips in frustration, but then I realize that I can’t afford to be off my game, not now. I shove the gel cubes in my mouth and take a long pull from the water bottle.
“Thank you,” I say, maybe a little gruffly to Levi. In my defense, it’s hard to act like a capable lady in charge when someone is trying to feed you. “Now, what is going on? Where is everyone?”
Varesh folds two of his arms. The other four pick off imaginary fluff from his uniform. “Why?” he asks while raising a single eyebrow. “What reason could I possibly have for not living up to my end of the bargain?”
Certain death, an arm is hardly worth thousands of lives, maybe you’ve been in league with the altered Roones this whole time . . .
“No reason. We had a deal. The enemy has attacked so I don’t have time for whatever this is.”
Varesh says nothing for a full ten seconds. Finally, he cocks his neck to one side and gives me a predatory smile. My fingers flex instinctively. I don’t know what in the hell is going on, but I do know that the three of us can dispatch the people in this room. Now that the SenMach food has done its work, I’m ready to go.
The Sairjidahl stands slowly and walks toward me. I shift my weight to my back foot, ready to pounce. But instead of getting aggressive, he lays three hands gently up and down my back. The skin beneath my uniform bristles at his touch. “Walk with me,” he says softly. This cooing, attentive version of Varesh is scarier than the manipulative, dictator one. I want to scream at him. I want to yell that there is no time for any of this, but just in case he’s not a complete bastard and is following through on his word, I have to play nice.
We move toward the very end of the great hall, and by that, I mean great. It must be half the length of a football field if not more. Varesh guides me up four flights of stairs and then through layers of jewel-colored silks that serve as a sort of screen door. Once we are through, I see that we are outside, on a massive veranda. And that’s not all I see.
“Your enemy is my enemy,” Varesh whispers seductively in my ear. “I promised you an army, Citadel Ryn Whittaker, and there it is.”
I look out and there, to my unabashed relief, are his soldiers. They are about half a kilometer away, along with the massive green tower of their Rift. It’s the only area that would be big enough to stage so many men and women. I pull my binoculars off my utility belt to have a better view and what I see is an amethyst ocean peppered with gold and silver. They are drilling, sparring, and sharpening weapons. There are also rows and rows of white tents that look like sails upon this sea.
“And they’re ready to go right now? You won’t need shelter. We have actual lodgings for your people.”
“They are ready. I began to pull them from our Rift sites as soon as we met on your Earth. I can only imagine what you think of me,” he says honestly as he looks out to his people. He leans against the stone balcony with four hands. “But I am no betrayer. The things I have done, that all of us have done under the banner of the Roones, have left me with little else to offer but my sword and my word. You have both.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” I tell him, not bothering to hide the edge to my voice. It’s all very well and good for him to play nice, but my SenMach arm is a not-so-subtle reminder that while Varesh might be a man of his word, he’s also cruel. This, too, I will use to our advantage. “Look at this patch,” I say pointing to the new artwork we’re all sporting. “Your people need to see this before we leave. They can’t kill anyone wearing this symbol. If there’s time, there are patches for all of you, too.”
Varesh studies the wings and fists velcroed to my chest. “I see that we are included in your coat of arms.”
“Of course you are.” I look him straight in the face and hold out my hand for him to shake. “Welcome to the United Free Army.�
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Chapter 24
It’s one thing to open a Rift for three people, it’s another thing entirely to open one for over twenty thousand. Luckily, I don’t have to do this alone. I am not the only one with the Kir-Abisat gift here. The other races still need a conduit—a human in this case to get them to my Earth. There’s Navaa, of course, and 433 Akshaji with the same ability. No kind of tech is a match against the Kir-Abisat, regardless of conduits, though, thank God. When we begin, the sound is incredible. It is a symphony of tones. It makes my teeth rattle and my veins thrum. The Rift we open is a fucking monster—a Day-Glo kraken with emerald tentacles ready to consume us all. When the Rift turns to a shimmering onyx, it is time to go.
Being inside a Rift with thousands of other people is what I imagine a drug-fueled outdoor concert would be like. A roaring, thumping sea of arms and legs and bodies all moving together in ecstatic unison. I say I imagine because I’ve never been to a festival like this due to my job and also because I hate annoying people on drugs.
When I see the bright white slit of light indicating the end of the tunnel, I shift my body. I’m not sure what to expect on the other side. I put both hands on my guns and use the kick of the barometric pressure to give me a boost. I fly out of the Rift, spinning sideways in midair and landing safely in a squat—just in time for a Settiku Hesh to take a swipe at me. I leap up and back, vaulting in the sky. Before I land, I manage to shoot a Spiradael squarely between the eyes.
The Citadels are everywhere and I need to get back to the Command Center so I can see where we are at and, more importantly, where I can shore up our defenses with our new reserves.
“Doe!” I scream, because I can barely hear my own voice above the screams and weapons fire. “Patch in the Akshaj comm units to central Command. Tell the team I’m on my way down there and that we have our reserves.”
The Rift Coda Page 27