by David Beers
The Unformed would finally crossover.
Seventy-Two
“They’re breaching the detainment center.”
Yule was staring at the wall when General Spyden spoke, having not even heard her enter the room.
Daniel was with him in Trinant’s office now, though he sat at the opposite end of the large room, having nothing to do with anyone.
He’d gone for Daniel a short while ago, saying, “They’ll be here shortly.”
“Okay,” Daniel had replied.
“You’ll be safer if you’re with us.”
The broken father had gazed at him for a second, but instead of arguing, he’d asked a simple question. “Where is Jackson Carriage?”
“He’s being held in ….” The Pope had trailed off for a second, thinking of the words to describe where Carriage had been placed. “The One Path’s prison, I guess.”
Daniel didn’t move, only said, “I want him to come with us. I want him in that room with you and me. I’m the reason he left the Vatican and went for Nicki. He shouldn’t be punished for that act. If you want to punish him for the rest, then do it when we get back, but if you want me in that room with you, then he’ll have to be there, too.”
The Pope didn’t think long on the request. He’d agreed, having Jackson Carriage removed from that liquid room, and now the three of them were in Trinant’s office.
They’re breaching the detainment center, the general had said.
Yule looked over at Carriage, wearing fresh clothes and sitting alone in a chair against the wall. He was a dreadfully thin man; he showed no emotion at all, not even as he heard that the attackers were reaching the place he’d been hours earlier.
He simply stared out the window on the far right, a small section not displaying the Globe’s internal world, but rather showing the sky.
Yule turned to Spyden as she continued speaking. “The High Priest is in there, Your Grace.”
Trinant nodded without looking at anyone else. “As fitting as anything, I suppose. Let the people he wanted to control take hold of him. That means they’re how far away from us?”
“Fifty floors, Your Grace.”
“And has any part of my military come up with a single plan to stop this?” The words flowed from Trinant’s lips, dripping with accusation.
The general seemed not to notice.
“We have a few options, Your Grace, but conditions on the ground might be changing our strategy. It’s the reason for the delay.”
“What conditions?” Trinant asked.
“Their madness seems to be growing,” Spyden said. “Before, they were focused on moving up, on attacking us, but they’re losing focus. They’re attacking each other now.”
“Why haven’t we seen it on the displays?” Yule asked. “What we see is them still moving up, defeating your codes and locks.”
“There are a lot of places to look,” the general said, turning slightly to Yule. “You cannot possibly see them all, nor even a fraction. They are still moving up, but … Here, look.”
The middle window pane changed, no longer showing a random hallway, but a white room with black, golden liquid inside it.
Dear God, Yule thought, his eyes immediately finding the High Priest. He was naked, and hanging suspended in the liquid.
“Focus on the outside of the room,” the general said. “You see them? There’s at least 200.”
Yule’s eyes narrowed as the mass of people came into focus. The general was right; a large group of the attackers stood just outside the white room, in the hallway, all staring forward as a few up front entered. Their hands were at their sides, their strands hanging off and draping onto the floor.
“Wait, look at that. Some … Some don’t have the static dripping from them,” Benten said.
“That’s another reason for the delay, Your Grace. The vast majority still carry those … weapons, but some are losing them, and they don’t even seem to notice. The pace has slowed for all of them, but the ones lacking the strands have begun attacking the others.”
“Goodness!” Daniel shouted from across the room.
Yule was watching the same scene unfold.
A man in the back, one whose hands had returned to normal, was standing and staring forward like the rest—as if waiting in line to enter the room ahead.
He had looked to his right at the woman next to him, stared for about three seconds, and then with both hands grabbed her jaw. With one hand gripping her upper teeth, and the other yanking at the lower portion, he slammed her to the ground.
The woman’s strands slapped at his face and neck, creating bloody lashes across his flesh. Smoke rose from his face, but still he kept pulling at her face, and as Yule stared on, he finally ripped her lower jaw from the top.
The woman’s hands fell to her sides and her eyes stared wildly up into the air, not seeing anything. Her face was distended, looking impossibly long. The man stared down at her as if he wasn’t sure what had just happened.
“Jesus,” Daniel whispered.
“It’s happening like that all over, Your Grace. Not in massive numbers, but something is changing with them.”
“What about outside of here? In the rest of our territory?”
“There is no change,” the general said. “We are still losing massive amounts of ground, and quickly.”
“So only the ones in here are changing? We’re losing the rest of the war?”
“I’ll have our options momentarily” the general said, then stepped from the room.
Daniel stood and walked across the room, standing in front of the giant windows. Yule went to him. They both looked at the pane showing the dead woman. Her jaw hung loosely in its flesh. The man that had pulled her apart had stood and went back to staring with the rest of the group; no one else noticed the dead woman lying by their feet.
“It’s to our benefit that they rip each other apart,” Daniel whispered.
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
The two stood in silence for a minute, Yule having no words, and Daniel silent as well.
“Your Holiness.”
The words came from behind Yule, a whisper that he wasn’t sure anyone other than he and Daniel could hear. The Pope turned around and saw Carriage standing behind him. His eyes were cast to the floor, his face looking nearly skeletal.
He hasn’t eaten, the Pope thought. And a man that thin can’t go without food.
“I would like to speak to the two of you, if it is possible,” Carriage said.
The Pope didn’t look to Daniel, but thought about whether he wanted to grant this man an audience. Regardless what Daniel thought of him, he was a lost soul … Yet, he’d been directed by other lost souls. The Church had been eliminating those with the sight for years, and this man had done what he was told. What was commanded of him.
“Speak,” Yule said, the voice of a ruler taking over. He was not among equals here, nor with someone he cared for.
Carriage looked up and across the room, his eyes falling on the general entering the room. She was heading to Trinant’s desk. Benten stood and walked over as well. Trinant didn’t look in their direction as the general began speaking.
Carriage turned to Daniel. “Your daughter is alive.”
Daniel’s breath caught in his throat, his chest stopping its outward movement.
“I felt her a few moments ago. She’s here, in the One Path,” Carriage said.
Yule’s eyes found Daniel’s, and the man looked terrified. For the past two days, a calm acceptance had overtaken him, but now his lips were trembling.
“You’re sure?” Daniel asked.
“Yes. She’s grown too powerful. I can feel her without even trying. She’s like a pulse inside my head, like a heartbeat.”
Carriage glanced at the Pope and then averted his eyes, staring at the floor.
This lost soul reveres you. He may have done evil, but he would lick your shoes if you told him to. What does that say about your Church? Perhaps D
aniel can tell you later, if you dare to ask him.
Daniel walked away from the group, going to a bench against the wall. He sat down on it and put his head in his hands. Yule looked at Carriage once more and then followed Daniel, the thin man following silently.
“Is she safe?” Daniel asked as the two approached.
“I can’t tell,” Carriage said.
“Everyone that wanted to hurt her is gone, Daniel,” Yule answered. “Right now, the High Priest is being destroyed by the invaders downstairs, and the First Priest is already dead. There’s no one else after her, not right now.”
“Can you contact her?” Daniel asked, looking up, his eyes red and full of tears. “Can you reach her?”
Carriage stared at him for a long time, and Yule began to understand the conversation he was overhearing. Jackson Carriage had the sight too, and Daniel knew it. That’s why Daniel had recruited him, because the man could find his daughter when no one else could.
He would truly do anything, anything at all, to get his daughter back.
“I don’t think so,” Carriage said. “I can try, but that’s all.”
“Will you?”
Carriage nodded, and Yule saw the odd bond between the two of them. The man had once tried to kill his daughter, him too … but now they were working in tandem, and the Pope was on the outside of it all.
“Yule,” Trinant called from the other side of the large office. “You’ll want to hear this.”
Yule looked over at the small group, then said to Daniel, “I have to go.”
Daniel reached up and grabbed Yule’s hand, startling him. “Don’t tell them. Don’t tell them she’s alive.” Yule looked down, seeing Carriage’s shock in his periphery at someone touching the Pope in such a manner.
“I won’t, Daniel.”
Daniel stared for another few seconds, his red, teary eyes pleading with the Pope. Whatever words had passed about men and gods, they mattered not here. The man in front of Yule trusted no one with his daughter—probably not even Yule.
“I won’t,” he said again.
Daniel finally released him and the Pope went to hear the One Path’s best plans for survival.
Tidus looked at the prison for the upper echelon of society. There were no pits here, but rather a room that stretched forever. Naked men and women floated inside it, unmoving. They went back as far as the eye could see—Tidus knew that these prisoners could see him, just as he had been able to see those in the pits.
Tidus stood inside the detainment center, looking at these naked people, and not knowing why.
A large group was behind him, both inside the room and outside of it.
Why are we here? he wondered. Why are we all staring at this?
The question was a logical one, if a bit foreign to Tidus’s mind. They had been moving upward, with one goal in mind—what the Prophet told him. They were here to kill the Ministers, and the Ministers were at the highest point in this forsaken place.
Yet, he was here, staring at these people.
What are you doing? he asked himself again, and giggled immediately after.
He was losing focus again, and though the Ministers were important, so were these people. Because it was people like them that had thrown him into the pits.
There’s time, Tidus thought, for whatever the Prophet wanted.
It was growing harder to remember that, though—what the Prophet had told him to do.
With a wicked smile, Tidus tossed the strands from his right hand onto the black liquid in front of him. They stuck on the outside edge as if they possessed suction cups.
A moment passed … and when the black liquid started melting, Tidus giggled harder.
There was a fat, bald man not five feet in front of him.
Tidus wanted to have some fun with the fat man.
Seventy-Three
Rachel Veritros looked on without understanding. The world was unfolding before her, and though she could intervene again, she didn’t.
She had watched Nicki Sesam speak with a woman that should not exist, who had died years and years before—the entire time Veritros thinking all was lost. And then, the woman who should be dead simply stood up on her stoop and went inside as if Nicki had never been there.
And then what did Nicki do? She laid down and went to sleep; Veritros had kept watching, not daring to venture away. There were others she could go to—the Prophet’s sister … the Prophet himself if she truly wanted (though that was at a much greater risk, and something she’d never attempted).
Veritros waited, hoping something might happen, but as time passed, she slowly began to believe it might actually be over. The Prophet was alive and preparing for the Union; Veritros knew that much. The sister had failed and the last chance—the last one that Veritros could see anyway—now lay in a world she couldn’t enter, a place she wasn’t sure was even real.
And then Nicki woke, and Rachel had access to her again. Miraculously, as if she had never left at all, back in the same building where the High Priest had previously imprisoned her.
How? Rachel wondered. How is any of this possible?
Her first instinct—as it always would be—was to rush forward. To crowd the girl and tell her what must be done. Veritros held back, though, because for the first time in long years she didn’t understand …
Long ago, she hadn’t understood as well—when the Ministers asked her a question that was utterly foreign. Again and again, she had attacked that question until finally an answer was revealed.
Now, as Veritros watched Nicki speaking with the Prophet’s sister and some woman she didn’t recognize, a new question came to her.
What aren’t you seeing? What are you missing now? What question aren’t you asking?
Something was happening and she was finally seeing it. Something wildly out of her control; was it the Unformed?
What aren’t you seeing? she asked again.
Nicki Sesam, the key to all of this, sat down in front of the two women, and Veritros stared from her position inside the Unformed. She stared and was silent,
“You’re his sister?” Nicki asked. “The dark man’s? The weapon’s?”
The woman in front of Nicki nodded. She’d said her name was Rebecca, and the one to her right Raylyn.
“Yes. I am.”
“And you?” Nicki said, looking to Raylyn.
“I’m ….” The woman paused, smiled, and looked down at her feet. “I’m lost,” she finally said, looking up. Her smile was gone and her face solemn. “Completely and totally, for the first time in my life, I’m lost.”
Nicki didn’t know a thing about Rebecca Hollowborne—but this woman was telling her the truth. Nicki saw herself in those eyes, a wandering loneliness.
“Why did you come for me?” Nicki said. “How did you know I’d be here?”
“We didn’t,” Rebecca answered. “It’s a long, long story, and we’ll tell you at some point, but we knew you’d been here, so we came. Neither of us thought you’d actually still be here.”
The three of them had left the room with the skeletal box, walking down long hallways before finding a few benches. Nicki sat on one, the other two women across from her.
“What do you want with me? You didn’t come here to talk.” Her eyes flashed to Hollowborne. “You certainly didn’t.”
“You don’t know me any more than I know you,” Rebecca responded, her voice easily as harsh as Nicki’s. “I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to you. I’m not my brother, any more than you are.”
The last words echoed in the hallway, and then everything fell silent.
Any more than you are.
Nicki felt hot, unwanted tears in her eyes.
“What do you mean?” she said. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I’m different than him. Just because we share blood, that doesn’t make me him. Just because you have power like his, that doesn’t make you him either.”
“I don’t
understand,” she said. “I don’t understand any of this.” And the tears came then, unstoppable, wracking her whole body. She bent over, wrapping her arms around her stomach, and sobbed. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. I don’t understand it.”
She could see nothing, her vision blurry; Nicki only felt her stomach cramping and the tears rolling endlessly down her face.
“I’m not him. I’m not him. I’m not him.” The words streamed from her mouth, nearly unintelligible with the body wrenching sobs pulling on her.
Nicki didn’t see or hear Rebecca moving, but only felt arms draping over her back. Sitting down beside her, Rebecca held Nicki.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all okay. You aren’t him. I know you aren’t. You never were.”
Nicki fell into the embrace, perhaps having never needed to be touched so badly in her life. The sobs kept coming, her body rocking back and forth, but Rebecca didn’t release her. Hanging on, even as the girl leaned into her.
Minutes passed, and finally the sobs slowed, coming out in hitched cries.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said through clenched teeth, anger in her voice. “I don’t know what to do.”
No one said anything and Nicki straightened up, pulling away from the woman she barely knew. She kept her arms wrapped around her stomach, as if somehow holding herself could both protect and give her support.
“What do you want with me?” Nicki finally asked, sitting up further, but staring listlessly at the floor. Her voice sounded dead, the pain that had just erupted falling away and leaving a husk. “Why did you show up here?”
“It’s not over.”
And then Nicki heard what the voice had said before, when Nicki first hung inside that box: It’s not over. Maybe it never will be, but this is not the end.
“Why? Why can’t it just be over? I don’t have anything else to give. I’ve already given it all. Everything. My fucking father!” The last word erupted, screeching across the hall like tires on pavement. It echoed for a few seconds, and then the hallway was silent.