AER (The Elements Series Book 3)

by Tracy Korn

  "What's happening back at the other Gaia? The one at the bottom of the volcan—" I start to say, but the words are suddenly ripped from my throat and replaced with violent coughing.

  "Easy, your atoms were just scattered to the wind and then smashed back together," the man says, now standing behind one of the console stations closest to me. The details of his face are still hard to make out in the dim light, but I can see a line of white flashes surging and fading over his skin. They start at his temples and curve along the edge of each cheekbone. I stumble backward into Arco, and the man with the light-up face laughs. "Oh, my neural filter," he says, absently gesturing to the lights. "I'm an Alpha Channel tester," he adds, but I just shake my head at him, confused. "You know, the test pilots…the people who jump off the cliffs and wrestle aliens to set the virtuo-cine adrenaline thresholds for everyone?"

  "Did you capture the feed?" Calyx asks before he can explain anything else.

  "Yeah, they didn't scan in. Jack loaded a chaser scramble, though, so they won't be following in the same hub. We'll have to give it a few more minutes," the man answers, then picks up several more white coats from the console next to him and crosses to us. He looks like he's in his mid-twenties, like Lyden and Arwyn, when he's finally close enough for me to see what he actually looks like in the soft, blue-gray light. His dark brown hair rifles out of the white knit hat pulled down tightly over his ears, and the now bluish light from the relays pulsing over his cheekbones reflect in his dark eyes. His smile shows the same solid bar of bioengineered teeth as Tieg and Dez…ugh, Dez. My stomach twists when I remember her running out of the cube enclosure and Tieg's carelessness in going after her, knocking the door closed before the others could get in with us. "You all look like shivering puppies," the man laughs again, then drapes a coat over Arco's shoulders before moving behind us to help Vox, Avis, and Ellis, the last of us to step out of our transfer hub. I try to tell the man about the guards …about seeing what had to be Ms. Rheen, but I can't get the words to come out through my chattering teeth.

  "Why… is it so…cold?" Vox asks, then coughs.

  "Alpha channel platforms—everything outside of the cines is cold like this. It's a little warmer once we get away from those cubes, though—can you walk by yourself yet?" the man asks.

  "Eco is a friend," Lyden says, walking toward us from the blue, hazy shadows of the room with his arm around Arwyn, who clutches at her white coat against the cold. She sees Arco almost immediately and closes the distance between them in a few strides, then throws her long arms around his neck.

  "You used to be the one standing on your tip-toes," Arwyn laughs. He bends down to hug her, and winds up burying his face in her hair.

  "I'm sorry…I knew something wasn't right when you stopped port-calling us…" he coughs. "I just didn't know how to—"

  "It's OK. There's nothing you could have done," she says through a sob, and I have to look away before I start crying too. I take another deep breath and turn around to scan the other clear cube enclosure for my brother. Liam is just helping him to his feet before he does the same for Fraya and Myra, then passes each of them a coat from the rest of the pile thrown over one of the console tables. Calyx looks at the coats that remain.

  "What happened?" she asks, turning back to me, and I will my teeth to stop chattering so I can tell her about how the cube enclosures back at Phase Two locked and how Ms. Rheen and more guards must have come into the room as we were transferring. I close my eyes against the image of her red dragon lady nails tapping on the console table again and the fiery flash of hair I saw just before guards grabbed Dell, then shake my head and open my eyes, wishing it were a terrible dream I could wake up from just that easily. Calyx nods, then looks back over her shoulder at Eco as I make my way to Jax. "Did they scan into another hub?" she asks. "Or are they…somewhere else?"

  "I don't see any new Omniclass logs, so Jack isn't locked down in Phase Two again—at least not yet," Eco says. "But he didn't scan out either. I can pull a digital feed at home…we should get out of here. The ping is reporting an active neural freeze under his credential, so there's a good chance they went to plan B."

  "All right, shut this down; we'll reconnect there," Calyx answers.

  "Wait!" I say as loudly as I can without making myself cough again. "They have to come—they have to follow us!"

  "They can't yet—it's not safe," Liam says, pushing his hands into the pockets of his coat as he crosses out of the cube, passing Jax and me to stand next to Lyden at the foot of the amphitheater stairs. "Even if your dad hacks his chaser code, they can't follow us here. It's a failsafe…he'll have to reenter the coordinates from a different hub," he adds, then closes his eyes and presses his lips together against his chattering teeth.

  "But there were guards everywhere; they grabbed Dell," I press, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  "A neural freeze would have locked down the entire Phase Two facility, so they're safe. We really need to go now," Calyx says, looking up the stairs at the doorway.

  "And they weren't alone—your friends emptied out the labs from what I saw before we transferred. We'll make contact when the dust settles," Liam says.

  "We'll help you, but we can't risk staying here any longer. Come on," Calyx says, motioning us all up the stairs and toward the back door of the room. I start to protest, but then hear Lyden in my thoughts.

  Keep your channel open…keep Liddick in your mind, he thinks, then pushes the dark, shaggy hair from his eyes. I nod up at him, and he presses his lips into a thin smile before nodding back to me. That's how you'll find him, Jazwyn. It's OK. This isn't over, he adds in a final thought, then turns to walk beside his other brother, Liam. Jax wraps his arm around my shoulder, and we follow Calyx and Eco up the rest of the stairs to the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  Interra

  Liddick

  "You're split if you think we're going all the way back through those biomes," Tieg says through his teeth, and I'm about four seconds from putting separations in that solid wedge of enamel once and for all.

  "If you want to go back into that transfer room and let them carve gills into you, by all means, man, make my day. You're the reason we're still here!"

  He takes a few steps toward me, but Azeris jerks him back by his collar.

  "Both of you stow it and keep feeling for the panel," he says. I roll my eyes and go back to focusing on the nothing in front of me for some disturbance in the energy field.

  "It should be right here," Dell says, his panic sitting heavy on the back of my neck. Jack checks the small panel on his wrist.

  "Remember, the coordinates are jumping because of the neural freeze I launched into the system, so it could be anywhere along this corridor now," he answers. "The freeze won't last long, though—not with that many clone systems, and apparently, the DNA logs of all the captives pulling at it too. We need to get to the tree line."

  "We'll get you topside, but I'm coming back for the others from the labs. They won't last long if the guards wake up before they do," Dell says.

  "We'll both come back, but now we need to go—find the hatch."

  "OK, here. It's here," I say, pushing forward when I feel the shallow pocket of warm air in front of me. Jazz's dad nods.

  "Good! Come on. Like I said, we need to get past the tree line."

  Daylight falls through the opening made by the panel as we push through, but then I remember that it's not daylight. I still can't seem to get it into my head that nothing here is normal—not the trees, not the grass. It's all been created by the Gaia scientists just like the insects and the mutant animals. Did my brothers help create them? Did they do it because they were trying to protect me? We move quickly through the dense evergreens, but I still can't focus. Jack said the transfer to Admin City worked, and if Jazz's own father isn't worried, I shouldn't be either. She made it…that's all that matters.

  "We won't have to go all the way back through the biomes—just as far back as the S
and. We can get to the Badlands from there," Cal says.

  "Did he say the Badlands?" Dez grips my arm, and I try not to flinch. If it weren't for her and her mollusk brother, we'd all be in Admin City right now too. I nod in her general direction, but I can't bring myself to look at her.

  "It will be all right," Jack says.

  "The only other port-carnate hubs within a 50-mile radius are either at Gaia Sur or right behind us, and everything there us is scrambled by the neural freeze. The only way to catch up with the others in Admin City is to go through my hub. That's in the Badlands," Azeris says, seemingly fully recovered as he holds a heavy evergreen bough out of the way so we can all walk along the narrow path. "We've got a few other things to juggle between here and there, though."

  "What's left? Didn't we just freeze everything?" Tieg says, rolling his eyes.

  "Temporarily. We still need to get through the Ice biome, deal with the antlions in the Sand biome, and then navigate straight up the main vein of the tunnel shark system to the Badlands," Jack says as he walks under the evergreen bough that Azeris is still holding up. "It's the only feasible way topside from where we are now."

  "We're going back to that desert?" I ask, hoping I've missed something.

  "It's the only way back up to the surface. We'll just have to stay close to each other," Jack says.

  "There are enough of us—tunnel sharks attack solo. We'll be able to take one of them if we have to," Cal adds, thumbing the tooth necklace over his chest.

  "Do we have to cross over that ravine? I don't want to hear those voices…not again," Dez says, still holding onto my arm.

  "That program isn't running anymore—none of the safeguards for Phase Two are in place. No more head games, but all the abnormally large insects and animals are still here…those, unfortunately, are real," Jack answers, and a chill runs down my back when I remember that idiotically huge ant crawling on Jazz when we first started crossing the Rush.

  "We're clear…" Jack says, facing the chasm in front of us. It isn't nearly as deep as it looked when we were crossing over before, and the fog is also gone.

  "What happened to it? It's not bottomless anymore, and the path is wider," Dez says.

  "Like I said, no more mind games. What you saw before was your worst case scenario come to life—the program was designed to read your fears and then put them between you and where you were trying to go," Jack says as we walk along the dirt path between the evergreens.

  "But…why?"

  "Because no one is supposed to know about Phase Two—the first team designed the Rush in the first place to swallow up the original group of test subjects when they escaped. Figured they'd just leave it in place if any one ever escaped again," Jack says. I resist making eye contact with Dell, and especially with Cal. Dell was right, the whole Vishan origin story was nothing but the result of the Phase Two science experiments.

  "We need to go back for the others still in there—the people those sharks pulled from the Badlands. We can't leave them," Dell says.

  "We won't," Cal answers. "We won't leave anyone, but we're going to need help."

  Dell nods. His hollowing guilt hits me in the chest as he moves past me to start on the stone path that crosses the ravine, which must be almost ten feet wide rather than the two feet it was when we crossed before.

  "Like Jack said, we're going to have to go through the Freeze before we'll be able to get to the tunnels—that's not going to be comfortable, especially now that your treatments are neutralized," Azeris says, looking back over his shoulder at Tieg, Dez, and me. "You should all stay close."

  "Wait, how did that happen to our nanites? When?" Tieg balks.

  "When Liam coded the transport hubs—it removed the Vishan splice and the tunnel shark nanites, if you still had any," Jack says.

  "But you didn't get in the hub until after the others transferred…" Zoe says to me, then bites her lip, obviously wishing she hadn't said anything.

  "There is still enough of a DNA neutralizer charge in those hubs as they're cycling down." Jack's voice is careful, no doubt remembering me screaming at him to get in the hub just after he launched the neural freeze. He takes a deep breath to change the subject. "So, only your baseline regulator nanites are still active—the ones that are adjusting your blood levels for pressurization at this depth—but those will only work while we're in range of the Phase Two platform…the Sand biome is on the cusp; it may get uncomfortable there unless we can find a tunnel shark."

  "Unless we can find a tunnel shark?" Tieg's eyebrows shoot up, and I want to punch him all over again.

  "So we can dose with their nanites again, crite haven't you been here for the last 24 hours?" I nearly choke on the words as my throat closes in frustration.

  "Liddick…" Dez says, tightening her arm around mine, but I'm done with them both.

  "What?" I snap, then sigh when I see her unnaturally blue eyes widen. I take a deep breath. It's not her fault…she ran out of that hub because of me. She was happy to see me. This is my fault. "I'm sorry," I finally say, crossing onto the grass at the end of the wide stone path. "We just need to get to Admin City."

  CHAPTER 4

  Admin City

  Jazz

  The port-carnate room we just transferred into was similar to the one from the underground Phase Two facility, but the rest of this place looks nothing like it. The walls in the corridor just outside the transport room are white, but only the bottom half—the whole top half is a window that opens to the endless black sea of space sitting just above a glowing, milky haze. It reminds me of how the cloud blanket over the Rush spread out below the Vishan's Lookout Pier, and then it seems to hit me for the first time…that is actually space out there.

  "There's a better view from my hab. Come on," Eco insists as most of us slow down, trying not to trip over ourselves or each other when we see the huge satellites emerging like giant white, leafless trees from this opaque blanket of air below, which must be the port-cloud.

  His hab? Vox thinks, and I actually hear her snort in my mind. I roll my eyes at her, but she just shakes her head at me like I'm the one being overly critical.

  "I know we've seen this view a million times in school feeds, but it's surreal to actually stand here," Arco says, shaking his head in amazement as he looks out the window, the light bouncing off the port-cloud and illuminating the angles of his face with a soft glow.

  "Earth is really under there somewhere," Myra says, nearly pressing her face to the window in an effort to see what is below us.

  "We really need to get out of here before the storyboard crew comes in," Eco says, raising his eyebrows at Calyx. She nods quickly and wedges her lip ring between her teeth as she waves us forward.

  "Let's go. We'll get clothes and ID chips for you tomorrow when we go to the Boneyard to run another sweep for the rest of your crew."

  "The Boneyard?" Arco asks, jerking his attention from the window to Calyx.

  "It's just what we call The Seam building," Eco says as we follow him and Calyx down the corridor. "Everything is built from scrap tech, so our code signature doesn't draw a lot of attention on the Grid. The Boneyard isn't pretty, but it's powerful," he adds.

  We eventually turn, then move down a short flight of steps. Eco opens another door to a frigid breeze that hits us from across an open lot with an illuminated floor. Several evenly spaced white pillars run from the ground to the ceiling with digitized words hovering in the air next to them.

  "Fever Plank?" I read one of the floating, shimmering words. "Garden Plank?" I read another sign next to a different pillar. "What are Planks?" I ask as we make our way to a column to the right that, from here, looks like it's made of light.

  "Planks are just different levels—we're at Fever Plank. The bridge transport we just left is in the Orion Complex—it's a virtuo-cine compilation studio," Eco explains without slowing his pace toward the column of light, which must be about five feet wide and ten feet tall.

  "A what?" Jax asks.
Eco stops for a second to look over his shoulder, astonished until he blinks it away.

  "A virtuo-cine compilation studio…it's where they put the components together that go into a cine plot. You've been in a virtuo-cine, right?" he asks.

  Jax huffs a laugh and narrows his eyes. "Well, yeah. Of course," he says with an exaggerated shrug, and now it's Eco's turn to narrow his eyes. He nods as we cross the illuminated lot.

  "Right. Well, it's where the storyboarders thread the plot sequences. There can be any number of them—it just depends on your neural ranges."

  "Our ranges? Does that mean how many realities we can tolerate?" Myra asks, and Eco raises an inky eyebrow at her.

  "Imagine is a better word than tolerate. You could be flying a twenty-first century commercial plane, but if you've learned how to push it to become a dragon, suddenly you're riding a dragon," he says, and lets his dark eyes go wide.

  "I'm totally riding a dragon." Vox turns to me.

  "Good for you," I say, giving her a sideways look. "When can we find out where my dad and Liddick and the others are? How soon can we—?" I start to ask, but stop when we all walk straight into the column of light, and a gust of air pushes us toward the curved wall at our backs. "What's hap—" I gasp, cut off when the light encloses us, and I feel everyone's anxiety push in on me.

  "Take a deep breath and touch your head to the wall behind you, quick," Eco says.

  Before I can ask anything else, a whoosh of air passes over my ears, and Myra's head and torso elongate like stretching elastic. I try to yell, but nothing comes out. What's happening!?