by Paul Tassi
The tower grew ever closer, and Noah eyed the lit rooms, all of which had shattered windows and tattered curtains blowing in the breeze. He took one more step forward and felt the pavement give beneath his foot.
Noah cried out and quickly leapt back. Erik hopped to safety a few feet ahead. The pavement split and a dark crack forked left, causing Kyra to lose her balance and stumble onto the collapsing section. Noah dove forward, grabbing her by the arm. She screamed as a huge swath of road dropped out from underneath her and landed with a soft thump on the sand below. Erik quickly scrambled to join Noah, and the pair of them pulled the dangling Kyra up to solid ground. Noah could see on his readouts that her heart was racing.
“Still safer than Sora?” Noah said to her, but she was too out of breath to either glare at him or express her gratitude. Still, better she were here with them than sitting on an exposed ship with no weapons. Though that was only true if the building in front of them was as empty as Theta claimed.
They soon found it was. Empty of life, at least.
Everyone gasped involuntarily as they made their way into the central lobby of the hotel. There were corpses strewn all over the place, draped over couches and on top of defunct fountains and abandoned luggage carts. Xalan corpses. Fresh Xalan corpses.
There was black blood everywhere. Some was dry, but much was still wet. The smell was unbearable.
“What in the hell …” Erik began, but couldn’t complete the thought.
These were far from the dusty skeletons they’d seen on the way. Theta tried to regain her composure and scanned the bodies.
“T-The Xalans have been dead for less than a day,” she said before succumbing to a fit of coughing that sounded dangerously like dry heaving.
Some of the dead wore armor, but most wore nothing, as was customary for Xalans who weren’t in the military. Nearly everyone was next to some sort of a weapon, however, either a blade or a gun.
“What happened here?” Noah asked no one in particular.
“Soran raid?” Finn offered. The young Stoller had gone pale as milk.
Kyra held her breath and gingerly stepped around the corpses.
“Not one Soran body, or body part,” she said, more unfazed than Noah thought she’d be. “Not a drop of red blood.”
Theta was studying the bodies after resisting her apparent urge to vomit.
“It appears these wounds were all made by … Xalan weapons,” she said, startled.
“Or they killed each other,” Noah breathed.
“There’s Resistance all the way out here? Why would they bother with Earth when there are uprisings all over the colony planets?”
No one had an answer for that. Noah looked down and saw one Xalan corpse clutching a thin blade that was buried in the neck of another creature next to him. The stabbed Xalan held a pistol that had ruptured the abdomen of his attacker.
The lights were dim, and the grisly scene had everyone visibly on edge. They pressed forward toward a large central staircase where the bodies started to thin out. There was Xalan electronic equipment placed throughout the room, and Theta scanned each device she passed that wasn’t obviously destroyed.
“What is this place?” Noah asked her. She sifted through code on her display.
“Decrypting,” she responded absentmindedly and kept walking forward, stepping over bodies. “The power source is concentrated above us.”
The five of them ascended level after level up wide spiral staircases. More dead Xalans were sprawled out on the stairs. Black blood soaked into the plush red carpet. Most of the stairways weren’t lit, and they had to illuminate them from lights on their armor alone. The wind whistled through the empty windows in the guest suites all around them and created unnerving screams that Noah often swore had to be coming from a living being. His readout told him that everyone’s heart rates were through the roof, his own included. His only consolation was that there were no beating hearts around but theirs.
“Here,” Theta whispered as they finally reached the twenty-seventh floor. A sign said “Skyview Bar” in both English and the other looped language. A dull glow was coming from down the hall. They crept around the corner and made their way through an arched entrance. Everyone was holding their breath.
Bits of tables and chairs lay in splinters all around them. The room had been stripped of its furniture. Replacing it were clusters of Xalan machinery. Holographic monitors showed various data readouts, and there were enormous empty spherical vats rooted in the floor, most of which had their glass shattered. Theta quickly ran to the closest console cluster and began wirelessly extracting data from it.
There were more bodies here, all with similar injuries to those they’d found below. The walls were marred by black plasma burns, and what little was left of the bar’s stock had been reduced to a large pile of glass on the bloodstained floor.
“A laboratory,” Theta said finally. Noah looked at the large, shattered glass tanks. “Operated by …” Theta continued, but trailed off.
“By who?” Erik asked.
“By the Genetic Science Enclave,” Theta said in a panicked tone. Noah had heard that name before. Alpha had mentioned it many times. The Shadowmakers.
“Stay alert,” Noah said as he made his way around the room. Massive windows gave way to a view of the city’s skyline. The wind howled through fractured glass.
This was a mistake, he thought. We should have never come here.
Noah remembered his mother’s tales of the Desecrator, the Xalan monster that had gone down the wrong evolutionary path and murdered his creators.
This is wrong.
His head started to hurt. A piercing migraine split his skull until his eyes teared up. He pressed forward next to Erik, motioning to Kyra to get behind them.
Noah stepped around the curved wall of the central bar and found one more cylindrical tank ahead. But this one was intact. And lit. And there was a figure inside.
Noah moved closer. The shape was smaller. Far smaller than any Xalan should be.
The shape was human.
Wrapped in pressurized bandages, his arms were locked into metal clamps above his head. His feet were firmly secured to the floor, encased in the base of the unit. Through the bandaging, Noah could see dark black veins snaking their way all throughout the man’s body. His bald head hung down, his chin pressed to his chest.
Noah walked forward in amazement and put his armored glove on the glass. The noise sent a jolt through the man, whose head rolled up to face them.
Erik froze. Noah’s heart stopped. He knew the face immediately. All of Sora would have.
Lucas opened his eyes. Not steel gray, but ice blue.
8
Lucas blinked, his vision swimming. He could see shapes moving outside the glass.
Not again, he thought. No more.
He dreaded these brief periods of consciousness. They only came rarely, but they were excruciatingly painful with whatever the Xalans were pumping into him that seemed to light his nerves on fire. It was already rotting his veins from the looks of it. Why didn’t they just kill him already and be done with it? Why had they kept him alive at all?
There was muffled shouting coming from outside his container. Was that … Soran? Lucas’s eyes widened. The faces were swimming in front of him, but they did look decidedly human-shaped, that much he could see as things started to come into focus. His heart leapt in his chest.
They found me.
More movement and suddenly the glass of the enclosure began to sink into the ground. Once it did, Lucas saw the four human shapes in front of him, with one lanky form that had to be a Xalan. He couldn’t get his lips and tongue to move.
The Xalan pressed a button on the unit and the clamps around his arms and legs were released. Lucas collapsed to the ground, tubes popping out from various attachment points on his body and hissing as they swung wildly through the air. Three pairs of hands found him and dragged him out of the unit.
He could fin
ally understand what they were saying.
“Lucas,” one said. “Lucas, can you hear me?”
His head was fogged, and he cringed as the wind whistled loudly through the room. The sound was almost deafening. He looked up and saw a sign he’d read many times before in his rare waking moments.
“Enjoy your stay in fabulous Dubai!” the etching over the bar said, with the same phrase written in Arabic above it.
He blinked, and attempted to speak again, this time with more success.
“You … you the rescue team?” he slurred. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken aloud. “Is Asha here?”
He tried to rise, unsteadily, and a pair of strong arms grabbed him. Lucas tottered backward a step and came to rest leaning against the bar.
“Lucas, do you know where you are?” the voice said again. His face came into focus. He was a tall, good-looking young man with blue eyes and short blond hair. Beside him was a lanky kid, shorter with green eyes, and a girl who—
Lucas’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be her. He was hallucinating. But as he shifted and stepped on a piece of broken glass, the pain convinced him that he was not. He remembered the young man’s question. The others looked like mere children. What sort of rescue was this?
“In Dubai,” he spat out. “Earth.”
During his brief lapses of consciousness, he’d managed to deduce that much, but little else about his imprisonment. He couldn’t remember. The feeling was starting to flood back into his limbs. His sickly looking veins remained black, however. He wondered if he was dying. Or dead.
The young man put an armored hand on his shoulder.
“You’re going to be okay now.”
Lucas saw a canteen extended out in front of him. He took it, and saw it was being held by a white Xalan.
“Zeta?” he asked.
“No, I—” the creature began. She was too short to be Zeta. Lucas interrupted, his voice still strained.
“How did you find me?”
“You called us here,” came a second voice. A boy stepped forward. His green eyes were familiar.
“What?” Lucas said. “How?”
Where was Asha? Why would she not be with his rescue team?
“Lucas, you won’t know me, but you have to understand what I’m about to tell you,” said the blond in power armor in front of him. He was tall and broad shouldered, but looked quite young as well now that Lucas could see him clearly. He looked warily at the blue-eyed girl again.
“What are you talking about?” Lucas asked.
“My name is Noah,” the young man said. “And this is Erik.”
Lucas blinked.
He saw the burn creeping up the young man’s neck. He looked into the other boy’s eyes. His world was flipped inside out in an instant.
“No,” he said, backing away. “You’re not—”
It was another nightmare. He had them every night. Why had he not learned by now? He stumbled forward toward his chamber. Maybe if he got back in he could get away from all this. He was tired of being taunted. This was what, the twentieth time he’d been rescued in a dream? But this one felt so real. More shards of glass dug into his bare feet.
Noah caught him.
“Lucas,” he said, spinning him around toward the group, away from the chamber. “You were supposed to have died on Xala. You’ve been gone for sixteen years.”
This can’t be real, can it? Lucas didn’t want to let himself believe it.
“Where’s Asha?” he asked.
“Alive,” the one who claimed to be Erik said. “She’s been looking for you this entire time. She never believed you were dead. She was the only one.”
“I can’t—” Lucas’s knees buckled. The blond girl caught him, her eyes darting back and forth nervously. Lucas stared at her, transfixed. Blue eyes.
Would-be Noah slid a broken metal console underneath him so he could sit.
“What’s the last thing you can remember?” Noah asked. “What happened on Xala?”
Lucas rested his hands on his knees. The white Xalan was scanning him with some sort of device, which he waved away like a buzzing gnat.
“I-I,” he stammered. Xala seemed like yesterday. Sixteen years?
“I detonated Natalie in the comm relay,” he finally said. “Woke up on fire. Arms, feet, hair, burning. I was being crushed by the corpse of the Desecrator. The blast flung him into me, his plating must have shielded me from the worst of it. He smelled like he’d been cooked all the way through.”
Lucas thought back to the moment. The lifeless orange eyes of the monster inches away from his own, the skin melting off Lucas’s arms and legs as he struggled, screaming beneath the crushing weight of the creature’s shell of a body.
Lucas looked down at his hands now. They were smooth, unblemished, as were his legs and head.
“Something pulled me out. A face. Eyes full of galaxies. They took me here.”
The group looked at each other and whispered.
“And since then?” Noah pressed.
“Only awake every so often. They pumped me full of … something. Incredible pain. Indescribable.”
The white Xalan whispered something to Noah.
“What are you saying?” Lucas called out to her. The creature looked startled.
“I-I said that the records here say you have been kept in cryostasis for nearly the entirety of your stay here. It is why you have lost all sense of time.”
Lucas looked down at the ground. Pieces of a broken mirror that had once been on the ceiling were strewn on the tattered carpet. One flashed with a glimpse of his own face. He lurched backward when he saw his electric blue eyes.
“What … what did they do to me?” he asked. The white Xalan looked nervously at the others.
“We need to go,” Noah said. “We’ll explain everything on the ship.”
He and Erik helped Lucas to his feet.
“Is it … is it really you? Are you my … sons?” Lucas asked, his voice cracking. It was real. This was real. No more nightmares. It was over. And all it cost him was sixteen years he couldn’t even remember.
“Yes,” Noah said, and Erik gave him a tight-lipped nod. He saw so much of her in him. She was alive. And she’d never lost hope.
Lucas was finally able to walk on his own, though Noah kept steadying him whenever he faltered. The white Xalan had hacked together a rough bit of armor plating he could wear instead of the bandages he was wrapped in. She’d pulled the materials from the many, many corpses that littered the rooms and hallways.
“Did you do this?” Lucas said, looking at the bodies, wondering how children could have decimated such overwhelming forces. Even if some of them were his children.
“Did you?” Erik asked from behind him.
Lucas was confused.
“I haven’t left that tank in a decade and a half, according to, uh, what’s your name?”
“Theta.”
“Friend of Alpha’s?”
“I am his daughter.”
That made Lucas stop abruptly.
“Well, how about that.”
Suddenly, Lucas clutched his head, which exploded with pain. His eyes felt like they were going to erupt from their sockets. The screams were loud. So loud.
And then they were gone.
“What was that?” said the thin one they called Finn. The name sounded familiar.
“I don’t …” Lucas said, shaking his head and squinting. He looked up at the sign on the stairwell.
OVERLOOK POOL.
“This way,” Lucas said, pointing down the dark hallway. The others looked at each other nervously.
“We have to get back to the—”
Lucas ignored Noah and lurched down the hallway, pulled forward by a force he couldn’t explain. Something painful. But not his pain. The pain of others.
He stumbled through a pair of shattered glass doors, his burning muscles failing to work properly with the electronic assists of the Xalan power armor at
tached to his legs, even if they’d been kept from atrophying during his imprisonment. Lounge chairs lay shredded around the pool, which now overlooked barren desert that assuredly used to be a gorgeous view of the gulf.
The pool was filled up with human bodies. Dozens. No, hundreds. Lucas heard the gasps of the others as they caught up with him.
The bodies were in various stages of decay, and in different states. Some had white or gray rotting skin, others were completely black, like they’d been burned to a crisp. Most had faces twisted into looks of agony. Lucas could feel their fear, their pain, somewhere deep in his mind.
What happened to them? What’s happening to me?
He caught another glimpse of himself in a streaked mirror that made up part of a nearby wall. His eyes frightened him. He’d seen those eyes before. But it couldn’t be …
“I need answers,” he said, turning to Theta. “What is this place?”
He paused, then shouted.
“What have they done to me?”
The question echoed off the tiled floor. Theta glanced into the pool. Behind her, only a sliver of the moon cast any light on the mass grave before them. The hologram on her translator collar flickered in the darkness as she spoke.
“I am still deciphering the vast amount of data from the cores here, but as I understand it from what I have decrypted, this is a new phase of the Genetic Science Enclave’s Shadow project. It was conceived just over a decade ago with the goal of transforming Sorans into Shadows, rather than Xalans.”
“Am I …” Lucas said, as he looked in the mirror. The black veins were creeping up from his neck onto the sides of his jaw. His blue irises flashed in the darkness, catching the moonlight. His pupils were still black, at least.
“You are in the midst of the conversion process,” Theta finished for him. “Results so far indicate that the process, if possible to complete, would take years for Sorans, rather than days for Xalans.”
“What do you mean, ‘if possible to complete’?”
Theta walked over toward the pool of dead bodies and hunched down near the edge. She pricked one with a long thin needle that extended out of her suit, then another, and another. Finally, she spoke again.
“The logs say there have been no successful conversions to date.”