by B. J. Keeton
It took Squalt a moment to realize what was happening, but when he did, he shouted, “Let her go!”
Damien scoffed. “No.” He waited a moment, then added, “Tell me who broke into my house and stole my book.”
“I don't kn—”
Nary Thralls screamed. Her cheek erupted as the black nanites burst out from under her skin. Blood speckled the arm of the chair. Damien looked at her and said, “Oh, please, Nary. It doesn't hurt that much.” She screamed in response. He looked back at Squalt. “Well, it doesn't.”
“I don't know who stole your book, Damien,” Squalt said. “Let her go.”
“I said no to that, already, Gilbert.” He turned his attention to Nary. “What’s about to happen, however, is going to hurt quite a bit.” Tears welled in her eyes and her mouth opened to scream, but Damien clamped his left hand down on it before she could. “Let's try this the quiet way first. What do you say?”
She responded by blinking tears from her eyes and letting them run down Damien's hand. Squalt said, “Damien, why are you doing this?”
“I need answers, Gilbert.”
“And you're not likely to get any from Nary Thralls. She's as oblivious to all this as… old man, she didn't even know the Charons were real until a few minutes ago. You heard her.”
“More's the pity,” Damien said. His whole right arm was pulsing now, the skin rippling as black tendrils of nanotechnology flowed from his body and out of the back of the hand he had attached to Nary Thralls' neck. She made a sound that would have been a shriek had he not been covering her mouth.
Squalt watched as the culinary professor’s pale white skin darkened. Her cheeks and lips began to bulge, and her veins began to fill with nanites. Half of her face was filled with the tiny machines under Damien's control, and they were working their way up and down simultaneously. They poured from her nostrils and through his fingers, finding their way into her mouth. Damien removed his hand; it was no longer necessary to keep her silent. The nanites rushed into her throat and filled her airways and her mouth. Her neck expanded and throbbed as a solid layer of nanites separated her skin from her muscle. Tears rolled down her cheek and onto Damien’s hand.
Her eyes looked back and forth between Damien and Squalt, and when they rested on the headmaster, he looked away when he saw the fear and pain in them. She was asking him for help, and he would do nothing.
Damien saw their eyes meet and focused his concentration on the nanites in her throat. The nanites released her airways, and she sucked in a sharp breath. Then she did what Damien had hoped she would do: she screamed. It was louder than he had anticipated, and it made Squalt flinch.
“You can help her, you know,” Damien said. “Just tell me who took my book. Tell me why those people would break into my house and take something from me. In fact, you can tell me how they knew I was writing it in the first place.”
Squalt ignored him. “What I don't get, Damien, is that you were able to breach our security and do this,” he gestured at Nary, “but you weren't able to stop a few men from removing a single book from your home?”
“My nanites were inactive,” Damien said.
“Of course they were,” said Squalt, condescendingly.
Nary's cries and weeping became louder. She stared at Squalt the whole time, urging him wordlessly to help her. Damien urged the nanites to coat her eyes.
“I don't know who took your book, Damien,” Squalt continued. “Why don't you let her go and stop this?”
“If you want me to let her go, then you'll tell me what I want to know. And you'll start within the next five seconds.”
Squalt pursed his lips and sat down. He rested his elbows on the surface of his desk and steepled his fingers.
At the end of the five seconds, Damien leaned down to Nary's ear and said, “I truly am sorry for this. If any gods truly exist, you'll be in a much nicer place than I ever will.”
She cried harder. She screamed louder. Her airways were once again blocked by Damien’s nanites as they ramped up their expansion. Her once pale skin was now a dark shade of grey that was growing darker by the second. Her face, neck, and upper torso were bloated. Nary Thralls’s skin looked wrong, like a sweater that didn’t fit quite right. Her chest heaved as she tried to suck in air, but couldn’t. Every so often, Damien would open her throat, letting her inhale or exhale, but never both. Every exhalation was a raspy scream, and every inhalation was a gasp.
Through it all, her tears never stopped. It only took a moment for Damien to finish what he had started.
Damien recalled his nanites; they rushed back to his body, coating him entirely for a split second before soaking back into his flesh. He looked at the dead woman, then back at Squalt, who said nothing. Damien fixed both of his hands on either side of Nary's skull. He twisted and pulled up at the same time, pulling the skull free along with a few vertebrae with a wet snap-pop.
He lobbed the professor's skull toward Squalt, and it landed on his desk and rolled toward the headmaster. He rose off his steepled fingers and elbows just in time for the disembodied head to fall directly into his lap.
Chapter Twenty-five
Ceril’s first thought was that he had gone blind. His second was how much his whole body tingled, like he was just waking up from a lengthy nap and had to get his blood circulating again.
“Saryn? Chuckie?” he asked aloud and got no answer. “You there?”
He quickly Conjured a light in the palm of his hand to see if his vision really was gone. It wasn’t. Wherever he was, there was simply no light anywhere. He extended the Conjuring, until he wore it on both hands like gloves made of light.
He was in no pain, so he picked himself up and tested his arms and legs.
Good. They all moved.
He remembered walking along…and then…falling? The ground must have given way beneath him as he walked. The ruins of Meshin were apparently in worse shape than they looked. He hoped that Saryn and Chuckie were okay.
He looked around, and all he could see was rubble; a dome of dirt and stone surrounded him, and he knew that he was lucky in that none of the bigger stones had landed on top of him. In fact, they had fallen so perfectly that he actually had enough room to sit up and move around, but not to stand completely. He could see purple dust floating in the air, especially around his hands. His Conjured breather would protect his lungs from the irritants, but not his eyes, so he Conjured a protective coating for his eyeballs.
He had to get out of there. His air would eventually run out, and he had to find out about the rest of his team. Chuckie was tough; he could take care of himself. But Ceril’s heart began to beat a little faster when he thought about Saryn falling through the ground the way he had. She wasn’t trained like Chuckie was. He had to make sure she was okay.
At the far end of the rubble dome, Ceril noticed a gap between stones that was slightly wider than the rest of the barrier. It was a potential way out. He lay on his back and kicked at the stone that partially blocked the opening, careful to place his force so that he would not topple the larger blocks above him.
A smile crossed his face as he did so. The concept he was using to free himself was not very different from a game that he and Gramps used to play. His grandfather had stacked different sizes of blocks in a tower a couple of feet high, and they would get points for pulling them out of the tower without making it topple. Larger blocks were worth more points, but were generally more dangerous to remove. Ceril loved the game, even though he had never been terribly good at it. He always wanted the high-point blocks even though they typically supported too much weight to be removed. He was always the reason Gramps had to rebuild the tower.
In his current situation, if he toppled the tower, he would do more than lose the game.
He carefully kicked the block to create an opening just big enough for him to squeeze through. He removed his pack and pushed himself through the tiny opening. Once Ceril was on the other side of the rubble, he carefully snaked hi
s arm back through to grab his pack.
Even though he had spent very little time in the cramped little chamber, being able to stand up straight and stretch out was ecstasy. Once he had enjoyed just standing upright for a moment, Ceril called out to his friends again.
And once again, he got no response. He looked around, and he saw purple light above him. That must be the hole he had fallen through. He was too far below, however, for the sunlight to illuminate anything but dust particles in the air. Ceril boggled for a moment on how he had survived a fall from that height, but he pushed the thought from his mind. There would be time to dwell on that later.
The opening was way too high for any hope of climbing out, so Ceril had to make a choice: either he could wait for his friends to rescue him, or he could explore the chamber he had fallen into and try to find his own way out.
He opted for exploration, as there was no indication that Saryn and Chuckie were able to stage a rescue. The darkness around him was oppressive, but his Conjured light-gloves illuminated a decent radius around him. The ground, he noticed for the first time, wasn’t a typical cave floor. It was tiled with octagonal blocks, each containing a single symbol.
Ceril's brow furrowed as he knelt down to investigate the tiles. He traced his fingers along their edges and the symbols. He didn’t recognize the runes, but they felt familiar to him somehow. The tiles were not embossed or engraved, but completely smooth. Their most striking quality, though, was their color: the tiles were golden and the symbols were shiny silver. Not purple. Nothing was purple in here except for the dust and rubble that fell from above.
In a world that had been so permeated by a single color, its absence was shocking. He crawled along, looking at the tiles. Each one was decorated with a different symbol. He crawled for a while, and he never found even one that repeated.
Even more interesting than that, the symbols were not on the tower above, and therefore, not a part of the Jaronya’s Text. He could see no relationship to modern Erlonian scripts, nor ancient, nor any other languages he had researched. Intriguing, he thought and his heart raced as his mind raced with possible explanations.
Ceril stood up and secured his pack. He chose a direction at random and began walking. He soon came to a wall, golden like the floor, but not made of tiles. It was blank except for a silver strip that ran horizontally in two directions. Ceril chose to follow it to the left.
***
“Ceril!” Saryn screamed. She fell to her knees and edged closer to the maw. The purple sunlight did little to penetrate the blackness, and she could see nothing but clouds of dust floating around. “Ternia! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
No response.
She pushed herself to her feet, and the section of ground she touched gave way beneath her hand. She lost her balance and might have fallen in, too, if Chuckie hadn’t been there to catch her.
“Careful, Saryn,” said Chuckie.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You good?”
“I think so. You?”
“I'm breathing and not in the hole. I'm dandy,” Chuckie said.
“Ceril fell in.”
“We need to get him out of there,” he said, and walked toward the hole.
“Are you stupid, Chuckie?”
He stopped and looked at her. “Excuse me?”
“You just saw the edge give way. You just stopped me from falling in, and now you're going right back to the edge? What, do you think you’re going in, going down there?”
“Sounds about right, yep. If Ceril’s in trouble, we go in and help him. It's simple. You'd do the same for me. So would he. The thing is, though, I'm not going to be falling in like you were about to do. I'm going to take this rope,” he raised his left hand to show her the rope he had taken out of his backpack, “and I'm going to tie it to something solid over there.” He pointed at the nearest ruined building. “Then, I’m going to lower myself down there, make sure Ceril's alive, and get him out if he is.”
If he’s alive, Saryn thought. If. She couldn’t think about that right now. He was alive, he had to be, and they had to do something to get him back to safety.
“You’re right.”
“Yep.” He turned and walked to the nearest building. “Mind helping me tie this off?”
She trotted over to him and took the end of the rope. “I’m not really good at any of this,” she said. “I never took anything but basic interdisciplinary combat, and I never had any survival courses. I don’t know how to tie knots.”
“It’s not too hard,” Chuckie said. “It’s just wrapping the rope around itself a bunch. Just take your end, wrap it around the middle of this column here.” When she had done as he asked, he took the rope from her. “Yeah, and then you just take the loose end and…” He tied the knot effortlessly. “See?”
Saryn tugged at it, checking its stability. She looked Chuckie in the eye and said, “I'm going, too.”
“What?”
“I'm going down there, too, Chuckie. You can't think I'm going to stay up here in the open with you both down there getting into who-knows-what.”
Chuckie grimaced and said, “Well, how do you suggest we do that, then, Saryn? I need you up here to lower the rope for me to get down there. I doubt there are any walls to rappel down.”
She thought about it for a moment and said, “We'll Conjure our way down. Those Jaronya can Conjure wings, right?”
Chuckie nodded apprehensively. “Maybe…”
“Well, I don't think we can do that,” she said. “Our nanite skins don't have enough tech to do it, nor,” she added, “do we have the finesse in controlling them if they did. But we can Conjure shock absorbers and parachutes. Combine that with the ropes, and I'm pretty sure we can jump into the hole and not, you know, kill ourselves.”
Chuckie blinked at her and said, “You're serious?”
She nodded.
“What about meeting up with the head honcho of Purpletown here? We were given an hour. Don't you think that at least one of us should at least make it?”
“Ceril is more important.”
“It's not that I don't agree with you, Saryn,” said Chuckie, “but these guys have kidnapped us, and are keeping us prisoners. I'm thinking that maybe doing what they say this time might be a pretty good idea. Especially since it sounded like it may be our one chance to save our asses.”
“Look.” She dropped her hands to her side and tossed a stray sprig of hair out of her face with a flick of her neck. “We don't know what they want. We know they think we're saviors of some kind. We know they want to try us for killing two of their soldiers or scouts or whatever. To me, those are pretty contradictory ideas. I don’t really want to see which one they choose. If we're late—”
“We're going to be,” Chuckie interrupted.
“—then we can deal with it,” she continued without pause. “And so can they. We need to make sure that Ceril is alive—like you said—and get him out of there if he is. And if he’s hurt, his chances are better with both of us down there than just one of us. And who knows what they'd do if only one of us shows up to their meeting. They might see that as being more disrespectful than missing it entirely.”
“We’re so screwed,” he said. “Okay, whatever. You're the brains of this operation. Just tell me exactly how you want to do this.”
She did, and ten minutes later, they were both secured by ropes tied to the base in the ruins. They nodded at one another, and leapt into the purple haze of dust.
***
Not long after Ceril began to follow the wall, the chamber narrowed into a hallway. His light-gloves began to reflect off of a second wall, but the corridor was hardly confining. There would have been plenty of room for his entire team to walk side-by-side if they weren’t all separated on separate ends of the Instance by now.
He made a mental note to himself: once they were through this situation with the high priest, they would leave and find Swinton and Harlo. He had no idea where they were or wh
at they were doing, but he hoped they were doing better than he was.
Ceril followed the wall for a while and never noticed any deviation in it. If it were curved, it was imperceptible. There had been no corners or turns. He occasionally looked down to note the symbols beneath his feet. He had walked over far too many now to know if there was any repetition among them, but he still recognized none of them.
It just didn't make sense to him. The writing on the broken tower had been Erlonian; he knew it. But beneath the tower, in whatever kind of subterranean building this was, the symbols were unrelated. That was absurd to Ceril—impossible, even.
There was always a connection.
Ceril was thinking about the languages when the hallway once again expanded into a chamber that opened around him. The wall he had been following disappeared when it cut a hard right. The wall to his left did the same thing, only in the opposite direction. The light from his hands no longer had walls to reflect on, and the darkness immediately became more oppressive. He froze in the doorway to a much larger chamber.
Cautiously, he stepped forward. The Conjured light barely cut through the darkness. As he made his way further into the chamber, the ground rumbled, but only slightly. Not again, Ceril thought.
He stopped and looked down. The tiles under his feet were still, but those around them looked different. He kept walking forward. When his feet touched the tiles in front of him, the tiles rose slightly.
The chamber was building him a staircase.
The increases in height were so small that he did not realize what was happening until he was already perhaps eight feet above where he started. His balance wavered, and he steadied himself before he fell. He doubted a fall from this height would hurt him—especially since his more recent tumble had been much worse—but he still preferred to remain standing for obvious reasons.