Naomi sighed. “Soren promised he wouldn’t do that.”
“Because he knew you couldn’t handle it, you frigging’ bleeding heart!”
Naomi thought she would go deaf from the shout in her head. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
“Really? Just like that? I was certain I’d had have to force the situation as I always do.”
“It’s the only way to free us all. However many lives are lost here, even our own, it pales by comparison.”
“You forget,” Cosmos said, “this is the future relative to your world. Most of these lifeforms already have multiple backup copies of themselves on ice somewhere, many have clones they share all memories with; so snuffing out any one of them isn’t the end of things as you understand it.”
“Thanks, I appreciate you saving me being at odds with myself.”
“The only way for this to work is if we’re both a hundred percent committed.”
Naomi realized this argument could well have gone on forever without the sense of detachment access to the oversoul was giving her, allowing her to think through the issue with less emotional outbursts. What was she going to do when she lost access to the Zone Magic? She couldn’t go back to the way she was. She wondered if Soren was making them pay all too stiff a price to walk this road with him. Using black magic always came at a price. Always. And it was never anything you wanted to pay.
She let her fear and worry and angst be consumed in the fireball exploding at her center, devouring her concerns along with the rest of the planet.
Maybe she should have asked first how the hell they were going to get themselves out of this situation before, not after the fact.
But her worries were for naught. So long as the Zone Magic maintained Naomi’s access to the oversoul, reconstituting her body was no big thing.
But something had happened to her.
That price for using the black magic she knew she was not going to want to pay.
Naomi and Cosmos were fused more than ever before. Naomi could no longer pretend they were distinct human beings with entirely different agendas and means of accomplishing their goals. They were one and the same person. The oversoul access dissolved the illusion that all these past and future lives were all that separate from her.
Like it or not, Naomi and Soren both—if their love was to last—was going to have to get used to the idea of a blended her. Cosmos was her beast as the Frankenstein monster was Soren’s beast. Well, on that score, Soren and Naomi should get along better than ever.
She wasn’t so sure Soren would see it that way.
But he had no mind power to spare for that concern right now. He would be engaged in his endgame with the Fenquin queen. This was simply his latest move on the board. Checkmate of the Fenquin queen was still a long way from being assured.
FORTY-THREE
“I’m such a loser.” Player pulled at his hair, and every time he would look at the clump of follicles wrenched loose from his scalp in the palm of his hand as if he were reading the tea leaves that confirmed what he was saying.
Aeros and Airy floating above him and just behind his shoulder looked like the “angel” and the “devil” on each shoulder fighting over his soul. They were indeed quibbling over what to do about Player.
“How did we get saddled with the teen with the tendency to wallow?” Airy thought-projected into Aeros’s head.
“Teens are all prone to wallowing. Unless you’ve got a way to snap him out of it…”
She pointed to the band section in back—the owls hooting away, signaling their disapproval of Player’s behavior. “His own feedback mechanisms aren’t working. Who are we to come between him and his self-pity?”
“Guys, just because you aren’t moving your lips, doesn’t mean I can’t hear you, okay? Triad magic, remember?”
“You’re the one who could stand to remember, young man.” Aeros sicced swarms of nanites on Player that buzzed his face like meddlesome gnats, forcing Player to swat them away. At least they were a minor form of distraction at a time when none other was working.
“Wait. That’s our in!” Aeros exclaimed. “Go with it, kid. I agree; you’re a total loser. Maybe you should use your elemental magic to conjure a blade of the purest steel to slash your wrists with.”
“Aeros!” Airy was aghast at his behavior.
He grimaced at her and thought-projected something at her which Player couldn’t understand—not without their transhumanist sector upgrades to hack the code in real time. “Huh. That could work.” She shifted her attention to Player. “Yeah, kid, you’re a complete waste of time.” She and Aeroes emitted a combination of aerosols; the nanites he conjured self-assembled into a menu, which she handed to him. Meanwhile the fog of aerosolized drugs Airy had procured further messed with Player’s mood. “Here’s a list of ways to do yourself in which we think suiting of a blowhard who needs an epic way to fail to compensate for the epic success he was hoping to have some day,” Airy said.
“What’s gotten into you two?” Player jumped up from the crate he was using as a stool. “I am not a loser!”
“No, kid. They’re right. Total loser.” The voice was coming from one of the stained-glass images of Christ that made up the windows in Player’s loft. The other Christ personifications in the other windows were piling on. “I say we crucify him. He, at least, deserves it.” The ones paying homage at the feet of the crucified Christ in one of the picture frames were now throwing rocks at Player, and the offerings of food they’d bought to lay at the feet of the crucified Christ.
“Great!” Player blurted. “Just great. Glad we’re all agreed.” He collapsed back onto his stool.
“We’re getting ready to hack into the Fenquin queen’s mind, kid, with the help of the Zone Magic. You think you can get her to feel this way about herself?”
Player lifted his heavy head. “Epic fail. Of course!” He glanced back at them. “You bet.”
Player continued sinking into character, lowering his head and sandwiching his skull between the vice grip of his palms pressing ever inwards.
The instant they were inside the Fenquin queen’s head, he went to work on her psyche with the help of his two compatriots. Player married his dark feelings to Aeros’s nanites that were running the algorithms to both accelerate the output of dark thoughts and darken them further. Airy contributed to Aeros’s nanites by secreting the chemical elixirs that would allow the nanites to mire themselves in negativity all the more efficiently.
And, last but not least, Player used his elemental magic to make sense of what elements he was being exposed to in the Fenquin queen’s mind that he’d never been exposed to previously. Each one of those elements, yet to be discovered on Earth in his time, had added to and expanded not only her consciousness, but her ability to wield science as magic relative to what they could do on Earth.
Even without understanding what many of these elements he was sensing did, he fed them to Aeros so he in turn could incorporate them into the construction of the nanites. That way the nanites could stitch the influence the elements had on their thinking into their self-evolving algorithms which in turn could infiltrate more deeply into the Fenquin queen’s consciousness.
If the triad of Player, Aeros, and Airy could augment the Fenquin queen’s doubts about herself at a moment when her people were rising up against her; and the rest of the team, namely Soren and the beast, and the other three-party assemblages of wizards, could find a safe refuge for her to retreat to from the anxieties welling up inside her… They could corral her toward whatever exit Soren and the beast were preparing for her to leave the theater of their minds.
Well, the Player triad was doing their part at least, finally, in this overall drama, instead of sitting on the sidelines, feeling useless. The toughest thing for Player right now was to not gloat over that, but to continue his downward trajectory, heaping more and more self-hating comments on top of himself. Well, who was he kidding? He’d been acting all his life that he was all that to get people t
o give him attention; so any role that was total b.s. was a role he was built for.
FORTY-FOUR
“Any time, pretty boy.” Stealy revved the motorcycle, hoping its beastly grumble would scare some life into him.
Ramon stared at the mandala dangling on the chain in his arm, wrested from one of the display cases in Victor’s penthouse suite. “This is the first time I’ve tried to do this without Lar. God help us if I screw it up.”
He hopped on the motorbike behind Stealy, still staring transfixed at the medallion. Using the power of his mind alone, he made the dials move into their proper alignment—there were eight of them in the golden amulet, each band laid out like another one in the Aztec calendar—only the symbols were different. “This thing is so ancient. It didn’t even originate on this planet, you know?”
Stealy smiled condescendingly. Ramon was rocking his sudden access to the oversoul by way of the Zone Magic for all it was worth, explaining his ability to figure out the amulet without Lar, and also his ability to turn the dials without physically touching the talisman.
Through the triad magic Stealy shared with Ramon and Vima, it was easy enough to see what was going on in his mind. All Stealy got for communing with Vima’s mind was a cold chill.
Vima had stopped aging at twenty-one, although she had continued to grow more beautiful, almost with every day. For all that, Ramon wasn’t looking to hump her more as Stealy suspected he would; if anything, he seemed more afraid of her and less willing to join in the triad magic. Hearing Vima in his head was as close to her as he wanted to get for right now.
The portal opened by the pendant in Ramon’s hand coming into a certain configuration was leading them off world. Considering Ramon’s earlier comment, Stealy wasn’t particularly surprised. It took more than the bands of the medallion finding the right configuration for the magic to work, of course. It took the medallion being in the hands of a mandala magician—but even then, the timing had to be right, it had to be a cosmic alignment of some kind, and for the mandala magician to survive the magic—well, he had best be warded as he was now by the triad magic he shared with Stealy and Vima, and by Vima’s womb magic. And this one time, Stealy suspected, by the Zone Magic as well.
So, just where were they headed that needed Zone Magic to keep them all alive—even with all the other forms of magic at their disposal?
Stealy, not particularly eager to find out, felt her heart leap, as she zoomed through the portal on the bike. All she could think was, “Wonder if they grasp the concept of biker babes on Planet-X?”
As for Vima, she’d flown through the portal ahead of them on her own recognizance. Well, not flew exactly. Her mode of travel was more related to her womb magic; it was more like watching the baby shoot through the birth canal. Stealy couldn’t rid her mind of the analogy; it was the way space and time flew past Vima. It sent even more shivers up Stealy’s spine than the thought of where they were headed.
***
“I don’t get it.” Ramon ran his hand through his unruly mop of hair, pushing the hood of his robe back at the same time. The sight before him was mind-blowing; he couldn’t deny that. But there was also the strange sense of déjà vu. “It’s another off-world pyramid—constructed on an ocean planet, I grant you, which must have been quite the undertaking.”
“You can bet that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That thing must go for miles beneath the surface of the water,” Stealy said. Her bike, landed on a floating barge of ice, didn’t give her much room for turning around and heading back the way they came. For doing tricks off of, the castoff kind of sucked. She surveyed the floating nature-made barge, clearly perturbed. They had to hope the one trick they needed to pull off—an escape—it could handle.
“But we decided that these pyramids on other worlds just served to plug Earth and the other planets into the cosmic energy grid; they’re like Christmas tree lights. And I thought we light up the tree to ward off the Grinch that stole Christmas—otherwise known as the Fenqin queen.” Ramon was ostensibly bitching that this was ground they’d covered already, but he was really trying to talk this out. He’d missed something, obviously, something big; otherwise, the medallion wouldn’t have brought them here.
“Use your access to the oversoul by way of the Zone Magic, you moron,” Stealy sniped. “I can’t believe I have to explain to a mandala magician what’s going on with a mandala figure traced half way across eternity.”
Ramon sucked in the salty ocean air, trying to calm his overexcitable nature. “Yes, I see it now. The damn pyramid connects at the base to the ocean bed. But it shares the base with the pyramid pointing out the other side of the planet, the other direction. And there’s a matching pair of opposing pyramids set at ninety-degrees to those two. It’s…”
“Yes, the star on top of the Christmas tree,” Stealy said, smiling, “the one thing worth stealing, if you could figure out how to stick this planet in your back pocket.”
“I still don’t get…”
“Concentrate!” That time both Vima and Stealy shouted at him at the same time. The two women didn’t share much but their impatience for Ramon.
Ramon hated being put on the spot. It was like those tests Victor gave him, timed tests under pressure with Victor leering at him. Ramon always froze up and didn’t make the least headway until Victor was out of the penthouse and Ramon was left alone to study the medallions. “You think you two could find something else to stare at besides me, like that ridiculous pyramid, for example? I don’t do well under pressure.”
“Says the man fighting to save the universe from tyranny at the end of time.” Stealy just groaned and accommodated him rather than force the issue. Maybe she could apply some of her Stealy magic to the subject of that pyramid for a worthwhile insight of her own.
Vima beat her to the punch. “The rosary beads of the pyramids themselves, laced across space and time, are for praying to ward off the Fenquin queen. All those prayers concentrated over all those eons… it was to power the magic for today,” Vima explained. “But the worlds turned away from worshipping false gods, one and all, over time. And so the spell needs a little extra kick from us right now. But don’t fool yourself, this is the moment of inception.”
Stealy figured the queen of womb magic would know.
“Once activated, the four opposing pyramids of this planet, will focus and channel the prayer energy of so many worlds and peoples, over so many millennia. That will help us to shake off the influence of the Fenquin queen, lending power to all the sentient souls demanding to be set free. Supercharging their psychic energy.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ramon said. “From a mandala magician’s perspective, that makes perfect sense. I guess from the perspective of your womb magic, too, with respect to the moment of birth to this boosted consciousness. What I still don’t get is how to light up the star on top this Christmas tree.”
“Hurry!” Vima squawked, rubbing her belly, as if going into sync with whatever birthing ritual was taking place here.
“I think I know what I have to do,” Stealy said.
“What you have to do?” Ramon was sure he was the one to fit the final piece to the puzzle, if he could just figure out what to do.
“Stay here.” Stealy throttled up her motorbike, dialed her stealy magic into her oversoul. Once in thief mode, with access to that kind of power, she sped across the water, racing the bike fast enough to not let gravity catch her. The bike’s magic had kicked in. She jumped the crests of the waves as if they were ramps made of wood or stone back home.
She had stolen the anti-gravity tech right out of the Akashic records with her oversoul access. This Zone Magic was something else.
She reached the base of the pyramid and started to soar toward the top.
“That bike’s engine will burn out long before she reaches the apex of that pyramid, assuming that’s where she’s headed,” she heard Ramon say in the distance. His whisper carried across the water much better than it should, but
when her stealy sense was heightened, so were the rest of her senses. She wondered herself if the bike’s magic would be enough. The gravity of this world was greater than on Earth. The pyramid bigger than usual. She needed more horsepower. And the anti-gravity solution wasn’t working any longer—perhaps owing to the magic of the pyramid itself.
“Do your part, mandala magician!” Vima commanded.
“But I thought…”
“You’re the one that must light up that Christmas tree and that star—she just has to be in place in time to steal what she needs right out of the Fenquin queen’s mind.”
Ramon groaned. Just when he was starting to feel better that the pressure was off him and on Stealy, it turned out he had some trick to pull out of his ass, just no idea what. And Stealy was approaching the pyramid’s apex, despite all odds, accessing abilities she didn’t know she had, and probably didn’t without access to the Zone Magic.
Man up, Ramon. There was an idealized image of him floating off in the distance. His oversoul? Is that what he looked like when he wasn’t scattered across time and space, the various shards of the crystal that was him broken by the sum and sundry insecurities he could never overcome in life, the fears, the doubts, the sea of dark emotions?
Rather than do his usual calming meditation, he used the idealized image of himself instead as a tuning fork to resonate to.
Seconds later the insight came, but too late. He was supposed to be on the top of that pyramid to fire up the Christmas tree lights for Stealy. He should have been on the back of that motorcycle with her. The one time he wasn’t—wouldn’t you know.
When his panic spiked, he shifted his sense of self to the oversoul—it was that or be devoured by the anxieties; it was little more than a strategic retreat.
The instant he did, he saw what he had to do.
He used his mandala magic to teleport himself to the top of the pyramid, just as Stealy reached it. She had parked the bike at its apex. It should have been a sharp point, but instead the top of the pyramid was a flat stage, just big enough to accommodate her bike. As soon as she sensed his presence, she spun around on the seat and wrapped her legs around him.
Reawakened (Frankenstein Book 3) Page 28