by Stel Pavlou
“Don’t stop!” Daniel warned, tearing out into the open. “Just keep going!”
It was the last thing he said before the ground opened up and swallowed him.
14
UPSIDE DOWN
Daniel tumbled through the gaping earth, his mouth filling with dirt. He clawed at the smothering rubble, desperate to breathe until—
Whoosh!
An ice-cold blast of air opened up his airway. He was in free fall, hurtling into a void filled with the sound of stone hammering into the ground and shattering into a thousand pieces.
He was sure the same thing would happen to him any second now and there was nothing he could do about it.
He flailed around, tears streaking from his eyes, the memory of Fix clumsily yelling in his ear, “Do it!”
The silver relic had protected him once before; maybe it would do it again.
Daniel closed his eyes, clutching the artifact on his chest, and silently begged—please work, please work!
Any second, and this was going to hurt; this was going to hurt really badly—
He crossed his arms in front of him and, with every nerve in his body on fire, Daniel raged. “Arghhhh!”
Whompff!
Howling louder than Daniel ever could, unleashing a power that struck more terror into his heart than his oncoming extinction, the air spun beneath him at cyclonic speed—
Wham!
Daniel found himself launched into the storm created by the relic just at the moment of impact. He was cushioned by its fury, coming nose to nose with the ground before rebounding into the air, and landed more or less on his feet.
But it wasn’t over yet—everything that had fallen through the hole after him started smashing into the ground from every side.
He glanced up. A boulder the size of a GoLoader was coming right at him. With nowhere to hide, and no time to run, Daniel’s instinct kicked in. Sweeping one arm over his head, he wielded the cyclone like a shield, batting the boulder away at colossal speed. It smashed into the other side of the chamber, before rolling to a stop.
Daniel took a moment to catch his breath while his accomplishment sank in. He laughed like he’d never laughed in his life. At least, what he could remember of his life.
His actions alone didn’t control the silver relic; his feelings and his thoughts were just as important—as though this thing could read his mind.
Daniel had to want to protect himself.
Now he understood! He couldn’t help it; he punched the air. “Yeah!” Ouch. Maybe that was a little too much. His ribs couldn’t take the joy.
Heck, everything hurt more than usual and—where the drote was he? And where were his friends?
The terrain didn’t make any sense. He stood in a honeycomb of collapsed passages, too many to count, while the enormous boulder he’d swatted away appeared to have rolled . . . uphill.
He shut the relic off by thinking of something else, letting the cyclone blow itself out.
“Blink?” No reply.
His voice echoed down the passageways, bouncing from one tunnel to the next until it sounded as though a multitude of Daniel Coldstars were calling Blink’s name.
“Anyone? Hello!”
“Anyone? Hello!”
“Anyone? Hello!”
“Anyone? Hello!”
“Anyone? Hello!”
Now he was just creeping himself out. Okay, so he was alone. Blink had to be down here somewhere, but where? There were a handful of passages within a few paces of where he was standing. It was a wonder he hadn’t fallen straight down into one. One passage climbed sharply, another dipped away. Which one was the best was anyone’s guess. Except—
Over there . . . the faint, warm glow of—what?
Was that Blink? Why didn’t he answer Daniel’s call? Maybe he was hurt. Daniel took a step toward the glow before forcing himself to stop.
Wait a minute. Had the Nightwatchers found him? He waited and watched.
No, the light didn’t move. It held steady.
Was that . . . daylight? Had he found the way out?
In a time before this one, before the darkness, he vaguely remembered a brilliant, shining light hanging in a vast open space he seemed to recall had been “the sky.” It’d been so many years since he’d seen it; so long ago that he wondered if it was just his imagination playing tricks. But then he remembered that warmth, that prickling sensation across his skin, and he figured it had to be remembering something real.
Of all the memories, the Overseers hadn’t wiped that one.
Could it be bright enough to be daylight? He wouldn’t know unless he looked.
The passage was narrower than any mining tunnel, and the solid rock walls were smoother too. The surface felt glassy, as though some incredible force had melted it and it had then rehardened.
But with every step things only grew stranger.
The farther he went, the more that gravity seemed to be changing direction. By the time he was halfway down the passage, he was walking on the wall.
The problem was that when he peered around the corner, it wasn’t daylight that he found—but artificial light spilling from a cannon-like object that looked like it was about to open fire.
Daniel pulled his head back before he got shot in the face, but no blast came.
“Wait a minute. . . .” That thing looked familiar. He poked his head carefully back around the corner. “A gravity generator?”
He’d never seen one in the mines. They were used on ships and asteroids to create a field when the gravity was too low. Was he on an asteroid? Asteroids were nothing like planets. Going outside would mean trying to find some protection and a little air to breathe. Otherwise there would be no escape and—
Wait. How did he know any of this?
Had they forgotten to wipe another memory? No, that wasn’t it. Everything changed the moment . . . the silver relic—
What was that?
Behind him, coming from the opposite passage, there was a low, electrical hum drifting hypnotically down a shaft even narrower than the last.
It had a steep incline, but there didn’t appear to be too far to climb.
Maybe he could just peer over the top and see what was going on? If he didn’t have any luck here, he could always find his way back to the honeycomb. There were a thousand other routes to try.
Daniel threw himself forward to begin the climb and immediately regretted it. Gravity inside this passage pulled him in another direction entirely—
He careened out of control—shooting upward, headfirst into who knows where, all sense of knowing up from down completely gone.
Tumbling back out into the open, he landed in a heap on a metal deck.
Dazed, Daniel tried to make sense of where he was, but all he really knew for sure was that he had landed in front of a human face suspended inside a large glass tube. Rotating slowly, it seemed conscious of the world around it, and as it turned toward Daniel it locked its eyes upon him, mouthing silently: Help me! Help me!
The face was Blink’s.
15
FACE-TO-FACE
Daniel scrambled back as fast as he could until there was nowhere else to go in the passage.
How had they caught Blink so fast? What had they done to him—? His face . . . trapped inside a glass jar, no bigger than the ones they used to pickle Ridgeback eggs, hung from a wire like an eerie decoration. How was that even possible?
But Blink’s was not the only face confined to a glass prison—Daniel was surrounded. Henegan’s face spun around in another jar, and Nails’s face occupied the one next to that. And then there were the disappeared; grubs he suddenly remembered he hadn’t seen in forever.
They were all here, every single one; thousands of grubs all fighting to get a better a look at Daniel, all begging him for help, each one part of the intricate workings of a gigantic machine that defied a simple explanation. The jars were suspended on long, thin telescopic arms, while a spider’s web of ca
bles and hoses crisscrossed in between them. Every now and then tiny mechanical bugs would emerge from the wiring, examine a jar, make some kind of adjustment, and scurry off. The entire apparatus sat under a vast metal umbrella with platforms and staircases bolted to its surface for whoever tended to this monstrosity.
With his back pressed against cold stone, Daniel struggled to his feet.
He stood bolted to the ground for what seemed like an eternity, trying to make sense of it, but nothing about this place made sense, especially when he noticed a single face hidden in the crowd. . . .
It was his own.
Daniel watched himself and reached out—wrapping his fingers tightly around the glass flask, prying the object free.
His own face gazed up at him from the palm of his hand. What was this thing? A hologram? It didn’t appear to have a generator. It was sealed at both ends.
“Wait a minute. . . .”
He shook it like a snow globe. The face disappeared in a cloud of sparkling particles before condensing back down into a face.
“Holocules,” he whispered. Literally holographic molecules; microscopic particles of programmed energy and matter that floated freely in the air like dust, waiting for the order to form up.
He felt a breath so close to his ear that every hair, across every inch of his body, stood on end. Daniel spun around.
No one there.
“Daniel . . .” a voice with the timbre of grinding metal whispered in his other ear.
Daniel spun to face the other direction—
Still no one there.
“Who are you?” Daniel called out.
The voice sounded cruel and amused when it whispered back, “The better question is: who are you?”
“I’m Daniel Coldstar—”
“That is a name,” the voice admonished, “but it is not who you are.”
Every time the voice spoke, it did so in each ear, sometimes switching mid-sentence, and each time so close that he could feel a presence over his shoulder, little hairs buzzing on the inside of his ear.
Yet still that presence remained invisible.
“I don’t understand,” said Daniel.
“Where are you from?” the sinister voice asked.
“I don’t know,” Daniel replied, surprised by the level of his own anger. “They won’t let me remember!”
“Who are they?”
“The Overseers,” Daniel responded.
“Perhaps it is not they who hide your memories. . . . Perhaps it is you.”
That didn’t make sense. “Why would I do that?”
The voice whispered back, “Why would you want to remember a family that betrayed you, that cast you aside like worthless garbage?”
The words struck Daniel harder than any physical blow. He searched his heart, but the answers weren’t there. And all these questions sent him into a panic, which he fought very hard to overcome.
He gazed upon the glass vial containing his holocule, and, seeing it through his tears, he said, “What is this?”
The voice slithered from ear to ear. “That. Is. Your. Mind.”
“And if I break it?”
“You die.”
Daniel glanced around, wiping the tears on his sleeve. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
A cruel, whispering laugh echoed in his ears. “You are our property,” it said. “Your body is a machine; your mind stays here. Leave, and your body will die, but it can be replaced. There is no escape.”
“You’re lying,” said Daniel, tucking the glass flask into his utility belt just in case. He craned his neck to get a good look at the far recesses of the machine’s superstructure. “Why won’t you show your face?”
“What purpose would that serve?”
“Because,” said Daniel, reassuringly touching the relic on his chest, “you know you can’t stop me while I have this. And I’d like to see your face when you try to lie to me again.”
“Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know,” said Daniel, searching. There had to be another way out of here somehow.
“An Aegis is a feeble weapon,” the voice whispered. “It is no match for me.”
There—a staircase leading up to all platforms with a bridge suspended out to the side and disappearing into the cavern wall. Daniel broke into a run, the voice staying with him, taunting him. “There is nothing up there for you but pain and sorrow.”
No different from being down here then, Daniel concluded, but he wasn’t about to voice his thoughts. Something deep down inside told him to stop communicating with—whatever this was. Everything he said came back twisted, trying to confuse him.
Resolutely, darting up the stairs, his heart racing—three flights, two, a few more steps—he rounded the corner, saw the bridge, and—
Standing on the other side of it, an imposing figure, cloaked in darkness, calmly waiting for him.
Daniel pulled up short. An Overseer?
No. A small glimmer of light revealed a twisted version of Daniel’s own relic pinned to its chest and, for one brief moment—a face made entirely of jagged edges.
No, not an Overseer. This was something else.
Still with that voice like grinding metal, and still right in his ear, the figure whispered, “I am impressed you have made it this far. I advised that you be terminated. Your reeducation was a failure. You never should have been placed back into the general population. You have jeopardized everything.”
Daniel refused to respond. He knew more Overseers were coming. This was just a tactic to try to slow him down. It wouldn’t work. Daniel was too busy trying to figure out how to get past him.
The figure hissed. “Vega Seftis sees promise. You may still serve the Sinja in new ways.”
The Sinja? “Who? Are they like Overseers?”
“We are the Sinja,” the figure spat. “And they serve us!”
Daniel couldn’t figure out if he was amused or angry, until the twisted relic mounted on the Sinja’s chest shrieked as though it were alive.
Pulling dust, debris, and anything else that was lying around into a swirling maelstrom, the Sinja grew a legion of phantom limbs.
Daniel had never seen anything like it. His eyes widened, his hands shook. Unsure of himself, he grew unsteady on his feet, but he wasn’t about to turn back now.
Bringing his forearm up in front of his face, Daniel set the air swirling to create the most powerful vortex shield he could muster.
The dark figure came at him at inhuman speed, its phantom limbs balling their fists, leaving trails of dust in their wake.
Daniel tasted the lining of his stomach in his mouth. He didn’t have a clue how he was going to defend himself, but he had to even the odds somehow.
If he could wield air like a shield, could he launch it like a weapon?
There was only one way to find out. Daniel pulled his arm back before slinging a tornado at the figure with such force that he dropped to his own knees.
The spinning blade of air hurtled across the bridge, meeting the dark figure in a shock wave of such incredible power that it sliced the Sinja in two. Limbs tumbled in all directions and then—poof, the storm collapsed, leaving nothing but a faint breeze in its wake.
There was no figure. Like the holocule faces trapped inside the glass vials below, the Sinja had been an illusion as well.
Daniel stood up, the anger and fear that had been feeding on him lifted from his shoulders. He felt confident and strong in ways that did not fully make sense. But in this moment, listening to and trusting his inner voice, he had been changed.
With a tremor still tugging at his legs, he walked carefully across the bridge, aware of every sound, every rock fall—every misplaced chink of light. By the time he reached the other side, he was fully aware of something blundering around in the dark, just around the next corner.
This time he waited, only just managing to stop himself from attacking when he realized who it was.
“Blink?”
; “Dee, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“Things got a little complicated—”
Blink caught a glimpse over Daniel’s shoulder of the massive machine he’d left behind. “What’s that thing?”
“It’s nothing.” He grabbed Blink by the arm, shoving him in the other direction. “We have to get out of here.”
“No kidding,” said Blink. “I think I found the exit.”
16
OUT OF REACH
Daniel closed his eyes and drank it in. “Fresh air,” he said. “Right?”
The opening sat far above their heads. A pale light flickered from somewhere farther up inside the shaft. It certainly wasn’t daylight, but as Blink said, maybe it was nighttime outside.
The problem was how to reach it. There was no way of climbing to it directly. The rock face underneath the opening curved inward. Unless they could figure out how to defy gravity and climb upside down by the time they reached the top, they would never make it.
“Maybe we should go back the way we came,” Blink suggested.
“Why don’t we just turn ourselves in to the Overseers, save them the hassle of having to find us?” said Daniel.
“They don’t have a clue where we are,” Blink snapped. “There’s more than enough time.”
“They know,” Daniel insisted, trying his hardest to keep his anger in check. “Trust me.” Surveying the chamber, he said, “We’re going to have to jump.” He pointed to a ledge on the wall opposite the opening. “From there,” he said.
It was easier to reach. The climb went straight up. But there had to be a good twenty paces between the ledge and the source of the light. They’d never be able to jump that distance. “Are you crazy?” Blink protested.
“You got a better idea?”
“Yes. We go back and we find something to use as a ladder.”
Daniel ignored Blink and started climbing. “Have fun back at the Racks,” he said.
“You are one stubborn drote,” Blink replied under his breath.
Daniel just kept climbing, Blink eventually following him all the way up to the top. Before he had time to get cold feet, Daniel took the utility hook on his belt and latched it onto Blink.