The stone glowed as we entered the room. When we dragged Mary in, inside her containment cage, it began to flash quickly and angrily, even more so than when we’d brought Leonard to the crystal world portal with the Iskios inside him.
“How’s this going to work?” Suma asked, her tweets and squawks becoming English in my earpiece.
“Essentially, I have to download the life forces inside Mary into the stone.” It was going to be a huge gamble, and I suddenly wished Barl were inside me to guide me. I was putting a lot of faith into the tablet’s readings from the Bazarn library. The idea was sound. If the Theos had been able to put themselves into the stone and have their life force moved out afterwards, then you could potentially do the same with a single identity.
The readings stated that you could theoretically “download” someone near death and insert them into another body. It referred to downloading one’s memories into a clone. This wasn’t quite the same as that.
“Are you sure?” Slate asked. His voice was low as he looked at his friend Mary. Her eyes were steaming black, her lips in a snarl showing teeth.
“You will never save this one. The Unwinding is already too far gone. Mary is dead, and so are you,” the voice inside Mary said.
I couldn’t believe it. I had to try something. I knew my wife was still in there, and I needed to separate her from the Iskios. I found my gaze drifting to the slight bump on her stomach. She couldn’t be more than fourteen weeks. Our baby was inside there. There was no turning back now.
The portal table flashed on and off in warning to the Iskios in the room, but it still functioned as normal as I keyed in the codes Karo had made me memorize. Instead of pulling the Theos out, I’d be putting the Iskios and Mary inside.
I felt my entire body flush in anxiety at the prospect of what we were about to attempt. It was hard to even look at Mary, knowing she was possessed by the Iskios. Her glares and snarls were so alien to her face, it was like looking into a stranger’s eyes.
Suma was scanning through the documents Slate had brought with him, translating them with a plug-in adapter.
“She doesn’t need to touch it to be absorbed. That’s how they worked before. It essentially beams them into it.” The portal table said it was ready.
“Then how do we get it to only lock on to the Iskios? If we can do that, then Mary will be left alone in her body with the baby,” Slate said.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. “That’s it. We need to isolate the Iskios and beam them into it. But how?”
Suma was still reading, but her snout twitched inside her facemask when Slate made the suggestion. She let out a few squawks, which quickly translated. “I have it!”
I rushed over to her side. “What does it say?”
She looked up slowly from the tablet and walked out of the room, waving me to follow. “We have to isolate one of them. But it will involve opening the shield and shooting at her again with the crystal pellets. When one of them mists off, we pull it into Clare’s Locator.”
“The one that told me where Mary was?” I asked.
She nodded.
I didn’t love the idea, but we were left with few choices. I pulled it out of my pocket and passed it to Suma, who quickly went to work programming it.
____________
“Are we ready?” Slate asked, positioning the pellet rifle in the air, aiming at my wife.
“Ready,” I said, and Suma tapped the controls on the shield. We’d spent an hour working out the details in private, away from the prying ears of the Iskios, and we thought it just might work.
Mary’s black eyes went wide as the Iskios controlling her realized the energy shield was down. She raced forward, black mist spilling off her hands. Slate shot fast and firmly, hitting her barrier at chest level. The mist shot out, and Suma ran from behind, tapping the Locator. The mist spread until it grazed the Locator, which glowed orange as Suma broke away. I turned the containment shield back on, and the loose mist sucked back into Mary’s mouth.
“What have you done?” the alien voice asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” I answered. “Do we have it?”
Suma smiled at us, and Slate set his gun down. “Got it!”
“Now we need to see if the next step will work.” Suma went to work at the portal table. I was sure glad to have her there; otherwise, I doubted I’d have been able to pull any of this off. Why had I gone alone? My mind had been so focused on getting to Mary, and I’d thought the Theos inside me would have been able to help more. Either way, it had worked out, or was about to work out. I knew it.
She tapped away at the commands for at least fifteen minutes, while Mary spouted out angry death promises toward all three of us. It was getting easier to ignore, especially since I knew it wasn’t her speaking to us. I only hoped she was still in there, undamaged.
“Dean, I think it’s ready. The program didn’t want to be tampered with, but like anything, there’s always a back door open. They were advanced, but a couple of thousand years is a long time for technology. Some of this is actually quite archaic.” Suma’s noises translated, and I laughed at how confident and smart she could be without coming across as smug.
“Then it’s time.” Slate pulled the containment field closer to the stone, his forearms bulging as he dragged along with my wife and her “guests.”
“We’re going to get you back, Mary,” I said, looking her in the eyes. The black mist didn’t dissipate, but for a second, it felt like she heard me.
“You will all die. Everyone will die. Whatever you do here won’t be enough,” the Iskios voice said.
I ignored it and spoke to my wife beyond the mist. “I love you. We’ll be home soon, honey. Our family will be home soon.” I blinked away a forming tear and cleared my throat. “Suma. Let’s do this.”
She tapped a key on the table, and all of our eyes went to Mary as the shield went down. Black mist raced toward me.
Thirty-Two
“Dean, look out!” Slate shouted and dove at me, knocking me to the ground. The mist careened over our bodies and was sucked toward the portal stone. The ink-black blotches appeared to fight the pull momentarily, but their effort was futile. They were sucked toward the stone, stopping for a second on the surface of the gem before being absorbed.
Something thudded to the ground behind us. Mary! I pushed Slate’s heavy form off me and scrambled over to Mary’s limp body.
“Mary, are you okay?” I asked but received no response. She wasn’t in an EVA suit, but Slate and I had been able to breathe here before. It was only outside we needed the respirators. Just to be sure, Slate came over and passed me one of the breathing apparatuses, and I slipped it over her head.
Her chest was rising and falling slowly, which was a good sign. Was Mary still inside? And was she alone? “Mary, you’re going to be okay,” I said.
Suma was looking over from the portal table. “Dean, we have a problem.”
“What is it?” We couldn’t handle more problems at the moment. I only wanted Mary to wake up.
“The portal. It’s dead.”
Without the portal, we had no way of leaving the planet. Oddly enough, I didn’t even care. If Mary was free of the Iskios, that was all that mattered. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m going to go check on the Unwinding,” Slate said. “Maybe it’s gone, since the vessel isn’t in their control any longer.”
I hated the casual way he called Mary the vessel but didn’t say anything. I was being oversensitive. “Good call.”
Suma continued to try to work the portal table, with no luck, but as Slate came back into the room a short time later, Mary’s eyes fluttered open.
I’d been through a lot over the last few years, but seeing Mary come to, with no black mist covering the whites of her eyes, had to be the highlight of it all. My heart leapt in my throat, and I broke down then and there. The emotions of the last few weeks came flooding out, and I pulled my helmet off, le
tting the stale air brush against my wet cheeks.
“Mary, it’s Dean,” I said through choked coughs. She was looking past me, as if her eyes wouldn’t focus on the room around her. “Mary…” My hand touched her cheek, and she finally turned her head, and I saw her pupils dilate as she locked eyes with me.
She tried to speak, but nothing but a low growl emerged from her throat at first. A few more tries, and I made out a single word: “Dean.”
More tears fell, from each of us now. Hers fell down the sides of her face, over her ears and to the ground.
“I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am,” I said, laughing with my tears.
“Are they…?” Mary tried to sit up, her head moving side to side.
“They’re gone. Don’t worry, they’re gone,” I assured her.
Her hands went to her face and over her eyes. She stuck a hand out and gave the tiniest of smiles when she saw no mist attached to any of her appendages. This time, I helped her to sit up, and Slate came and assisted me. She had us lean her against the wall in the portal room. It was silent as Mary glanced around, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
“What happened?” Mary asked. I set a hand on hers and felt the trembling beneath my palm.
I tried to speak calmly. “We got the Iskios out of you. They won’t be bothering you any longer.”
She was panicked. “Inside me? What are you talking about? The last thing I remember is being in the crystal pyramid with you two. How did Suma get here?”
“You don’t remember anything at all?” Slate asked, crouching down beside Mary.
Mary quickly shook her head from side to side, as if to vehemently deny any recollection at all. “Dean, where are we?”
“On the abandoned world where Slate and I met Suma.”
“Why?” Before I could answer, she threw another question out at me. “How long ago were we at the Theos world?”
I didn’t know how to answer this without worrying her. “First off, it wasn’t the Theos world. It was the Iskios.”
Her eyes went wide. She pulled the respirator off her face and touched her mouth, as if feeling the black mist pouring down her throat. “They were inside me, weren’t they?”
I nodded.
“What did they want? What happened?” Mary’s voice was quieter now, less strained, but her hands were still shaking and her eyes were wet with tears.
“They took you from us. You sent us back to New Spero with some power of theirs. I’m not sure how it worked. The Padlog were there, and they broke the spell momentarily,” I said.
“The Padlog?”
“The insectoids. They’d been following us, tracking us to the world. Their Supreme didn’t give me much for details on their trip, but they were only trying to stop us from unleashing the Unwinding.” I looked up to Slate, who still hadn’t told us what the vortex was doing out there. Had it failed after the vessel was gone? I could barely wait to ask him, and his eyes told me he had something urgent to say.
Mary closed her eyes. “I see them now. They fired above me, and I … I shot them with some black energy. Oh, Dean, what have I done?”
“You didn’t do anything. Not a damn thing!” I yelled the last and took a second to compose myself. “They manipulated us to get us there, and they took you as their vessel. It’s only been a few weeks. I don’t even know how long. Five or six, I think. The days have been a blur.”
“Five weeks!” she yelled out in surprise. I glanced down at her stomach, which she caught, and her hand ran down to her belly. “What is it?”
I leaned over to her, our heads were touching. “The Iskios said you were with child. It was one of the reasons they chose you over me as the True.”
“I’m pregnant? I’d thought there was a chance but hadn’t tested it yet.” Her voice started off strong but cracked as she kept talking. “This is unbelievable.” Tears flowed freely, and I found myself welling up.
I wanted to reprimand her for not telling me, for going on the quest to find the Theos with the possibility, but it wouldn’t accomplish anything good. I bit my tongue, because Mary was here and healthy.
“We’re going to have a baby,” I whispered, and kissed her on the forehead.
“Boss, I hate to break up this moment, but we have some unfinished business,” Slate said.
I broke contact with Mary and turned to him. “What is it?”
“The vortex is still there, and it’s not getting any smaller,” Slate said. “I think it’s still coming for the planet.”
Mary was getting up behind me, and when I went to stop her, she waved me away as she began to stand, using her left hand pressed against the wall for support. “I’m fine. Just a little foggy. What’s the vortex?”
She really had no memory of her last few weeks, and that was probably for the best. “The Unwinding is the energy force of the dead Iskios from the crystal world,” I said. “We went back, and all the color was gone: nothing but clear crystal the whole world over. It’s here now, and from what we’ve heard, it’s devoured entire systems’ worth of ships, moons, planets, and even stars.”
“And…I was the one leading it?” she asked.
“It wasn’t you. It was them using your body.”
Mary’s arms wrapped around herself, as if seeking comfort. “The distinction doesn’t feel as clear for me.”
“What do we do?” Suma spoke for the first time since Mary had come to. “The portal is closed, and we don’t have a ship. The Unwinding is coming to destroy us.” She stood beside Mary, and now it was my wife who put an arm around the small Shimmali girl.
We stood inside the dead portal room, each looking at one another for answers we didn’t have. There had to be a solution, but what was it?
“Let’s go outside. I need a clear perspective.” I let Slate and Suma go ahead and paused to turn to Mary. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
My hands gripped around her tightly, and her head nestled into my neck. “Dean, thank you.”
“For what?”
“For finding me. For getting me back. I don’t know how you managed this, but I can’t wait to hear the story when we’re back home.” She slid her hand into mine, and we walked down the corridors. She looked around, seeing the inside of the building Slate and I regaled in our tales about the place.
“I would have done anything.”
“Is everyone okay?” She was obviously asking about the rest of our friends.
“Yes. Oh, and we now have a robot in our crew.” I smirked as Mary eyed me suspiciously.
“I’ll want to hear that story too.” Her hand went back to her stomach. “Dean, do you think she’s okay?”
“She?” I asked, wondering why she chose a sex.
“I can feel her down there. It might be a boy, but I don’t want to think of her as an it.” It made sense to me.
“I think she will be just fine.” I winked at her, and we made it past the corridors, bridges, and the exterior doors where Suma and Slate stood, propping the door open.
“Look, boss.” Slate pointed toward the sky, where we could make out the swirling vortex even from way down here. The cloud cover was lighter than it had ever been, but winds blew heavily around us as we stepped onto the platform high above the city level.
“Is that it?” Mary asked.
“That’s the Unwinding. The destructive force they’d been waiting a long time to unleash on the universe. We’d hoped that freeing you from their grasp would have been enough to stop it, but evidently, it wasn’t. For all we know, it’ll move without rhyme or reason now.” I stopped talking and watched it a moment longer before speaking. “Or maybe it was programmed by the Iskios that had been inside…” I hesitated, knowing it would sound insensitive. Mary didn’t seem to notice.
“We need to stop it.”
I knew that, but I just wanted to escape it. Then we could get the collective knowledge and power of the Gatekeepers, or the Planetary Alliance I’d heard Rivo’s father mention in pas
sing and let them deal with the problem. Sadly, there was no way around this.
We couldn’t leave the planet, and it was about to be destroyed by the Unwinding.
“I didn’t come here to save you only to have us be eaten by an energy vortex.” I hated the option, but it was the only one we had. All the pressures of the last few years, starting with the moment James was ripped from my living room, to the search for the Theos, then Mary, exhaled with a deep breath.
It was my only possibility.
“Boss, why do you have that look on your face again?” Slate asked, picking up my vibe.
I squinted at Mary. She was so wonderful. Even now, with tangled hair and dirt-stained cheeks, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on. She was my everything, and she was carrying our child. The irony of my decision pained me to no end.
“Dean, what is it?” Mary asked, grabbing my hands in hers. She felt like home.
I looked away, unable to watch her eyes as I said it. “I know how to stop it. But I think it’s a one-way trip.”
Thirty-Three
“What do you mean, one-way trip?” Mary pointed toward the powerful vortex, high above in space. “How can you stop that?”
I patted the Shifter in my pocket. “Garo Alnod.”
“Who, or what, is a Garo Alnod?” she asked.
Of course, she didn’t know anything about Bazarn, or Rivo and her father. “Without getting into all the details, Garo is one of the wealthiest beings in the universe. One of his companies was trying to create something called a Shifter. You’d be able to transport anything to another dimension.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Mary asked.
“Let’s say your star’s about to go supernova, and you have a system with a hundred billion lifeforms nearby. This would allow you to transport a whole world away. Believe me, I don’t understand the science behind it at all.”
“Okay, well, that makes some sense,” Mary said, probably still wondering what this had to do with me.
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