Soul Cycle

by Erik Hyrkas

  She’d softly curse each time she injured her foot, but with the help of the halo, the bleeding would quickly stop and the wound would close up. She wondered if this would exhaust the energy in her halo more quickly.

  They were steadily angling closer to the stream. She could tell because the gurgling was getting louder and the ground was becoming squishy between her toes.

  “I see something,” Hunter whispered.

  Brit strained her eyes and scanned the shadowy underbrush for any sign of movement.

  Hunter pointed slightly to their left along the far river bank. There wasn’t a creature there. There was a statue of some sort. It was covered in vines and moss and looked ancient. The statue wasn’t of a human form. The stone creature was broad with bony spines jutting out from its skull at irregular intervals.

  Hunter led the way to the river bank opposite the statue. The air was thick with pungent swamp odors.

  “There was some sort of bridge and road here,” he said.

  He knelt and brushed away layers of mud and dirt to reveal flat red stone. Brit saw other red stones in the stream where a bridge might have once been.

  The water was cold but not deep, and Hunter led the way carefully across. Brit wanted to stand in the cool water and soak her sore feet for a moment, but then her imagination went wild with the thought that there might be some type of fish that lived off of human toes. That was enough to keep her moving.

  “Looks like another statue, but this one is some sort of bird,” Hunter said. He gestured to a new statue, smaller than the spiny alien. “Reminds me of the thing that we met on our first day here.”

  “It has wings and feathers, but it doesn’t have a beak. The mouth looks sort of human,” Brit said.

  “Sure is ugly,” he said.

  Brit lift her necklace. “It is that way,” she said, gesturing down the clear-cut path ahead.

  “I’m happy to follow a road rather than walk through bushes and shit,” he said.

  “Me too, but what if this road leads to it,” she said.

  Hunter shrugged. “Then it’ll be easier to get there.”

  She sighed. “I mean, somebody built this road. What if they have the ilo and don’t want to give it back?”

  “Whoever built this road didn’t bother maintaining it for many, many years,” he said. “They’re probably long gone. That bird thing probably carried it off to its nest, which might just be along this road.”

  “Or it might be in the middle of some city full of creatures that eat humans,” she said.

  “You’re so fucking negative,” he said. “Cheer up! Walking down a road should be much easier than stumbling through the forest.”

  Hunter was right. Walking along the overgrown road was much easier, and much easier on Brit’s feet. She thought back to the mine entrance where the fallen enkelis were fighting with the soldiers and wondered if that would mean more soldiers would show up there soon. She wondered whether Jax and the others would be safe in the cave. They were too deep for their halos to sustain their core needs, and she worried that even if the enkeli guards didn’t find the secret cave, simply not allowing the slaves to get back to the surface would be enough to kill them eventually.

  A buzzing or humming sound was emitting from the trees around them. It started out so subtly that Brit was unsure when it had actually started, but now it was loud enough that it unmistakable. It felt like the air was vibrating.

  She checked her necklace and noticed that the arrow was no longer pointing straight ahead but slightly to the left. She looked back at the road, which seemed unnaturally straight. It must have had a slight curve to it, or maybe they were getting closer.

  Brit looked around. “Sounds like…bees,” she whispered.

  “Can’t be,” Hunter said.

  “Why not?”

  “My cousin owned an apple orchard. Even when all of the trees were in bloom and bees were everywhere, it was never this loud,” he said. “I don’t see or smell any flowers.”

  “Let’s keep moving,” she whispered.

  They walked on and watched the forest around them even more closely than before. The gaps between the trees seemed darker and the dank smell of decay thicker. The canopy of leaves over the road was so thick that the sky was nearly completely blocked out.

  Hunter stopped walking and pointed into the forest to their right. “There’s some sort of building over there.”

  Brit checked her necklace. “The ilo is this way,” she said, pointing down the road they were traveling.

  “Maybe there are people who would help us with supplies or weapons,” he said.

  “Or maybe an army of enkelis that will torture us for a the next few millennia,” she said.

  He stepped off the path and walked in the direction he had pointed. Brit saw the bronze walls that Hunter must have seen, but she couldn’t make out a full building.

  “Hunter,” she whispered with exasperation. “We have a job to do!”

  The humming was loud, but it was not so loud that he wouldn’t have heard her. And yet he walked away through the trees toward the structure.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, and she walked after him. They were wasting time when an legion of enkelis would soon descend on the planet. There wasn’t time for little side excursions.

  “I think the humming is coming from these buildings,” he said. He wasn’t whispering, but he wasn’t shouting either. The humming was now loud enough that she wouldn’t have heard him if he had whispered.

  “Jax and Marcy need us,” Brit said. “We have to get the ilo.”

  “Look, even if we find it, we know that the enkelis can get to Earth. Even if we don’t go back, they’ll think we might have gone to Earth and then every human will be in danger,” he said. “We need more of a plan than escaping and seeking refuge with some lord who doesn’t have the spine to fight Jumala directly.”

  “We don’t have a better plan,” Brit said. “We need to stick to the plan we have and not squander our only chance.”

  “My daughter is on Earth,” he said. “We need a better fucking plan. This building might have weapons or tools we can use to destroy the enkelis. That’s worth taking a few minutes to look.”

  He looked at the building in front of them, then followed the wall to the right. Now that they were closer, Brit could see that the bronze wall was actually a massive dome. It stretched off in each direction without any obvious entrance.

  They walked for a long time. Brit realized that they might have walked around the entire building, but because there were no distinguishing marks there was no way to know.

  “Which way is the road?” she asked.

  “Just use your necklace,” he said.

  “That will tell us where the ilo is, but we’d have to walk through the woods. We might walk parallel to the road for miles,” she said.

  “We’ll just go to the right of wherever it points,” he said. “We should run into the road that way.”

  Her panic eased. He was right. That should work.

  “I’m sure we’ve walked around the entire building. There isn’t a way in,” she said.

  “I wonder if the entrance is up there,” he said, pointing at the top of the dome.

  “We can’t get up there,” Brit said. “It’s way too steep. We need to get back to the road and find the ilo.”

  Hunter growled in frustration and then slapped his hand against the wall. “Fine,” he said at last. “You are right. Which way is the ilo?”

  She checked her necklace and pointed toward the building. “It’s off that way,” she said.

  “Then we go this way,” he said, and he pointed to their right.

  They headed into the woods in as straight a line as they could. The humming slowly receded into the background noise of rustling leaves, and Brit began to panic. They shouldn’t be that far from the road. The ground became soggy and the rush of fast moving water was ahead.

  Hunter ran forward and she followed him. They stoo
d on the bank of a broad river that bent at this point. They couldn’t see far down the river in either direction, but there were no bridges or other obvious indicators that the road was nearby.

  “What the fuck,” he said.

  Brit checked the necklace. “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Now the ilo is that way,” she said, pointing so far to their left that she was pointing slightly behind them.

  “Did we walk in a circle?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Brit said. After a long pause, she added, “I think that it is moving.”

  “Damn it,” he said.

  “We only have about six more hours before the necklace runs out of power,” Brit said. “We need to move faster or we’ll have to go back to the mine to charge it.”

  Brit had a sinking feeling. Whether they found it or not, she wondered if they could find their way back to the mine without the road. They had already walked for hours and had no clue which direction the mine might be.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Let’s just head straight for the ilo and we’ll figure out where the road is later,” he said.

  Brit wanted to argue that chasing the moving ilo and being lost was a dangerous idea. They might run out of power before they found it and have no way to return to the mine. Hell, they could find the ilo and not find their way back to the mine.

  “There’s some good news,” she said.

  “What?” Hunter asked.

  “Well, it changed direction so much while we were walking that it’s either pretty close or it’s moving really fast,” she said.

  “If it’s moving fast, that would be terrible news,” he said.

  “I thought I was the pessimist here,” she said.

  “I’m not the one giving bad news,” he said.

  Brit held the necklace in front of her, and they followed the arrow as quickly as they could through the underbrush, over fallen trees, and around steep ridges. As they walked, she had to tilt the necklace to point higher up.

  “Shit. I think I know where it is,” he said.

  Brit looked to see where he was looking. Ahead were tall tree-covered hills. Well, all of them there tree-covered except one. On the crown of that one barren hill was a ten-story cylindrical black tower. A giant buffalo-sized bird-creature landed in one of the top windows.

  “Crap,” she said. “I was sort of hoping that the creature had just dropped it somewhere and we’d go pick it up. Maybe it’s made a nest up there.”

  “I hope it didn’t swallow the ilo,” Hunter said. “We’re not really equipped for bird-hunting.”

  The fact that the ilo had been moving and was clearly right where the bird-creature had flown into was not encouraging. Hunter might be right. The bird might have swallowed it.

  “If we climb all the way up there and it flies away, well, that would be bad,” she said.

  “Fucking terrible,” he said. “Let’s be sneaky enough to not scare it off.”

  They walked through the trees, scanning the sky occasionally for the bird and double checking the necklace as they went. The ilo was definitely at the top of that tower.

  “You know,” Brit whispered, “from the top of that tower we might be able to spot the road, maybe even the mine.”

  “That’d be amazing if there wasn’t a giant demon-bird up there,” Hunter whispered back.

  “I’m just trying to be optimistic,” she whispered.

  “Stop trying. You’re going to make me depressed.”

  “I’ve never seen them attack anybody,” she whispered. “They might be timid.”

  “If it is timid and flies away, then we’ll be able find our way back to the mine, but without the ilo,” he whispered. “If it isn’t timid and doesn’t fly away, we might get eaten. You’re really fucking terrible at making me feel better.”

  “You’re welcome,” she whispered.

  He shushed her. There was a loud screech above them. They looked up and a second buffalo-bird-demon, a creature that Peter had called a raivo, flew into the tower’s upper window where they had last seen the other creature.

  Hunter stopped and grabbed Brit’s arm so that she stopped as well. They were now at the edge of the tree line around the hill. There was no cover between this point and the tower, which was still a hundred yards away.

  Now that they were closer, Brit could tell that the tower was made of massive stone slabs and polished to a shiny finish. The stone wasn’t actually black, as she had initially thought, but more of a deep indigo. Along the walls below the window were long black stains that weren’t clearly visible from a distance. Brit wondered if that was demon-bird shit, and what demon-birds might eat that was so dark. Along the wall of the tower were bowling ball-sized white rocks that had some of the same black stains as the wall.

  “I don’t see any type of door,” Hunter whispered. “We should walk around until we figure out where the entrance is before leaving our cover.”

  Brit nodded. This seemed like a completely reasonable plan.

  Another screech overhead made them both look up. A third raivo flew into the tower.

  “It’s some sort of fucking bird convention,” Hunter whispered.

  “Let’s worry about the birds after we find a way in,” she said.

  They skirted the clearing around the tower until they reached the side opposite where they had begun. A flat patch of wall the shape of an arch was clearly visible. There were no clear markings to indicate a door, but the fact that the rest of the tower was curved suggested the possibility that this was the entrance.

  Both Brit and Hunter studied the tower’s flat arch. They were too far away to make out any seams or devices to open the door.

  A fourth screech made them look up again. They were now on the opposite side of the tower from where the bird-demons were flying into the tower, but they could still see it approaching.

  “At least they won’t look down and see us,” Hunter whispered.

  “That’s true,” she whispered. “Let’s hurry before I chicken out.”

  They ran across the hundred yards to the tower. As they reached the flat arch, they heard another screech but this time couldn’t see the creature that made that sound.

  “I hope they don’t fly around the tower at all,” Hunter whispered.

  The arch was nearly twice human-height and perfectly flat. There was a seam in the stone that Brit was sure indicated that this was, in fact, a door, but there were no doorknobs or other indicators of how to open it. Hunter threw his weight against the wall, and it did not move. The only sound was his pained exhale of breath.

  Hunter rubbed his shoulder and Brit scanned the ground around them. This side didn’t have the same white stones that the other side did. There were faint stones demarcating a path under the thin layer of dirt on the hill.

  This was definitely the entrance, she thought.

  Still gripped her power chisel in her left hand as she ran her right palm over the stone along the door’s edge, searching for something that might trigger the door to unlatch. At the top of her reach, the door made a soft clicking sound. She pushed and, despite being made of stone, it swung inward easily. Long unused hinges moaned softly, barely more than a whisper, but knowing that there were massive raivo somewhere above them made the sound seem deafening.

  Brit stepped inside and barely turned in time to see the door shutting behind them.

  “Why did you shut it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “It closed on its own.”

  She started feeling around for a way to open it again.

  “Wait,” he whispered. “Let’s not make any more sound just yet.”

  She lowered her hands. Hunter had a point. The door had already made a sound twice, once opening and once closing. Opening it a second time and risking it closing a second time would be asking for trouble.

  “I don’t like it,” she whispered. “We’re trapped.”

  “We havi
ng mining picks,” he reminder her. “Worst case, we dig our way out.”

  Brit checked her necklace. She had to tilt it completely vertical. The arrow now pointed straight up. All of their hopes of returning to Earth were somewhere right above them.

  They were in a cylindrical room of deep blue stone with a single square platform on the wall opposite where they stood. The ceiling was twenty feet up and unremarkable with the exception of a square recess directly above the portal. The walls were polished and glossy but had seams where the stones that made up the wall met. The floor was slabs of pale rose stone flecked with gold. White mortar filled the gaps between the floor slabs.

  Huddled in one corner were a heap of ancient rags of various colors. Brit approached them carefully, and as she neared, realized that the rags were actually clothes stretched over the mummified alien creatures. Two large frames hugged a smaller one. The bodies were not human, but whatever they were, Brit hadn’t seen their kind before. They were dark black and thick with bony spines protruding from their skulls. Their heads where broad, and where their cheeks had rotted away, Brit could see massive flat teeth embedded in their heavy jaws.

  There were no clear signs of violence or injury to them. They had died there, huddled together without any indication of a struggle.

  The largest of the three mummies clutched something in his massive three-fingered hand. Carefully, Brit pried the fingers open and a smooth red ball the size of an orange clattered to the floor. It bounced and rolled away from Brit to Hunter, who had been studying the platform as if looking for traps.

  Hunter knelt and picked the ball up. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They had it.” She pointed at the mummies.

  A globe of red energy and sound burst out from Hunter’s hand and knocked Brit down. The sound was enough to leave her completely deaf, her ears ringing. Beyond bruising her tailbone and deafness, she suffered no serious injury.