“Why haven’t you used the pyramid to destroy me, Jax?” Narasimha asked. She reached into the pyramid but Jax kicked the hand away again. “It would end the fight swiftly and permanently. Would it not?”
Hank seemed to perk up at the mention of using the pyramid: “Jax, you’re inside it! You can do it—activate it!”
“Is it the same reason you spared the bear in the arena?” Narasimha asked.
Jax went to kick her hand away as it reached for his boot. Narasimha swung the shock stick. Jax couldn’t pull his leg back, but managed to avoid the attack by pushing his body into the centrifugal pull. The stick hit against a beam, leaving her vulnerable. Jax fought against the pull and pinched her hand against the beam with his foot. He had wanted to stomp on it to knock the weapon from her hand, but couldn’t pull his body in fast enough.
“I’m not you, Hank. I don’t know anything about DNA,” Jax said.
Narasimha reached to grab the extended leg with her other hand. He shoved his foot down, sliding the hand he had pinned along the beam, pushing the shock stick in a cutting motion at the reaching hand. She pulled her hand back.
Hank and Maven were flying back to the Hornet. They went in a wide arc to avoid the debris and mines that were left from the Atticus. Maven spoke before Hank could answer Jax.
“Felix? Why is the plane moving away?” Maven sounded concerned.
There was a click of static before Felix spoke: “Maven? Get back here as soon as you can. That rocket explosion must have hit one of the thrusters; we can’t maneuver to pursue. We are going to have to return to normal airspace as soon as we can.”
“Jax?” Grimshaw spoke.
Jax reached for the shock stick. When he pulled it from the lioness’s hand, it shut off.
“We don’t have very much fuel in this pod,” Grimshaw said, “and when we open the hatch, our oxygen is gone. We’ll only have whatever is left in our suits.”
It wasn’t the best news Jax had ever heard. His own suit only had forty minutes left before his own carbon monoxide asphyxiated himself.
The black Animalis plane with rockets had recovered. It began gaining altitude again.
“Hodge, are any of the mines still active? Send it over to one of their wing tips,” Grimshaw said.
A tiny speck sat motionless while the plane moved over it. With a sparkle of thrust, it shot to the right wing and exploded. The tip shattered and the plane started to swerve to the right. The plane began to drop down, doomed to an explosive re-entry in the atmosphere.
“Felix, we’ve docked with the Hornet,” Maven said.
A new voice came into the frequency: “This is Captain Hernandez. Hurley, are you alright? Who all is out there with you still?”
“Good to hear you again,” Grimshaw responded quickly. “There are five of us in total. I have three with me in my plane’s cockpit, Hodge and I, and Little Hank here. Jax is holding off one of the leaders of the Animalis militants. They're in the pyramid, and their trajectory isn't good.”
“We’ll send another plane now. I’m sorry we can’t get you ourselves. Can you two hold on?” Hernandez asked.
“This is Jax. I can, sir,” Jax said.
Narasimha had managed to pull her upper half inside the pyramid. If she made it in just a little farther … Jax waited.
“Hang in there, Jax,” Hank said. “I’ll see you when you make it down safe.”
Narasimha was finally in a position to come after him, and she thrust herself toward Jax in the middle of the pyramid. In a quick motion, Jax lit the stick and shoved it into her. She shook, and began to drift with the pyramid rotating around her. The corner opposite Jax was swinging in line with the rotation of the pyramid. He pushed her gently, and the force of the spin pinned her into the converging point of the pyramid. It would be cruel, but he would have to shock her again every few minutes to keep her from gaining control of her body and attacking him.
The captain’s plane descended slowly out of view, leaving the five to wait for rescue. Although, the cockpit of Grimshaw’s plane should have been designed to re-enter atmosphere. Jax suspected, or maybe just wanted to believe, that she was staying to be close to him.
Jax tried to calm his nerves now that Narasimha was unconscious. The adrenaline had tunneled his focus again. Clouds of crimson and gold nebulae swung by with an infinitude of gem-like stars overwhelming the spaces in between. A mist of white hung in the view beside him.
The mist wasn’t stars, or a nebula. Jax twisted his waist to get a better view of it, but the mist continued to spray just beyond his helmet. It was flowing out of something on him. Right at his neck, where the helmet should have sealed to keep his oxygen in.
Jax pushed his head against one of the beams of the pyramid and felt the last of the seal click together. The lights of his heads-up display sprung up on the glass of the helmet, giving him an altitude readout, guidance lines to objects in view, and, amidst the rest of the information, his oxygen supply and an estimation of how long he could expect to keep breathing:
12:04
“Can your cockpit re-enter the atmosphere?” Jax asked Grimshaw. They were drifting farther and farther away from the pyramid, but he could still see her and Hodge through the cockpit window. Both of them had their suits on. Grimshaw smiled when she saw him looking at her, then his rotation spun them out of view.
“It can,” she said. “But we aren’t going to leave you.”
“Good.” Jax tried to sound positive. “It feels like I’m already back on Earth, with you so close.”
“Hodge?” Grimshaw said, but her voice was distant, talking to Hodge in the cockpit. “How long can we last?”
Hodge’s voice echoed into her microphone, inaudible to Jax.
“We’ve got forty minutes,” she said to Jax. “What’s your oxygen at?”
“I …” Jax debated lying to her, telling her that he could wait for the rescue plane. “I’ve got twelve minutes left.”
“Say again?” The fear in her voice cut into Jax’s heart.
I should have lied.
“You can still make it back to Earth, Hurley,” Jax said. “With Hodge, and Little Hank, while you’ve got oxygen.”
“No, Jax. Not without you.” Her voice switched to Hodge: “Put Jax’s location in.”
Jax already knew what she was going to find: it would take five minutes to get to him, and once they opened their hatch, they’d have to rely on their suit’s own oxygen, then it would be another fifteen minutes to hit the surface of an ocean and get open air. Jax would still die halfway through the trip, and the rest of them would be at risk.
Her breathing grew panicked.
“Thank you for being my friend, Hurley,” Jax said.
“What if we do it manually?” she was saying to Hodge. “Burn full throttle the whole way?” And Hodge gave an inaudible response.
It could be almost an hour before someone came to rescue them. Even their tiny reserve of cockpit oxygen would run out by them. If they left now, they might be able to make it back to the Earth without suffocating. She couldn’t let herself die for some crazy kid who thought he loved her after just a few months of knowing her. He couldn’t let her.
The ocean of stars swept past him, streaming though his vision in brilliant clusters of color and depth. The crest of the Earth came into view, the rim glowing hot-yellow, red, and orange, refracting the light from the sun and dividing the colors in the clouds. Lights from a thousand cities gave life to the dark and separated the land from the sea. It was all so pretty.
“Jax? What are you doing? Why are you breathing like that?” she asked.
Jax’s oxygen was coming out in a slow trickle, and he had begun breathing slow, shallow breaths. “I cut off my oxygen supply,” he said. It hadn’t taken long for his head to start getting light. “You’re always so happy.”
“Turn your air back up!” she shouted, obviously not happy.
“I …” He had to talk slower. He couldn’t catch his brea
th. “I thought maybe I could … be one of the reasons … you were … are so happy.”
“Not if you’re dead, Jax! Come on, we can’t stop fighting,” she pleaded. “Give me a chance to save you.”
“Please, Hurley,” Jax tried again. “I’m the one … trying to save you.”
The speaker was quiet for a minute. Jax listened to the sound of his lungs filling and deflating. The glass of the helmet catching the noise and reflecting in, as a steady hiss, into his own ears.
Jax thought of Hank, that he had let him go. If he had held onto his hand, and let himself be pulled away from the pyramid, he could have gone back to normal life.
“You saved us,” she finally said. “Even if no one else on Earth knows it. I love you, Jax.”
Jax could see her looking at him through the window. It was the one time he had ever seen true helplessness in her expression. It was painful to see. He could feel his own heart breaking with what he was forcing her to do. Hodge said something to her.
“Yes, get a return trajectory ready,” she said, then she spoke to Jax again: “Don’t give up, Jax. Please don’t give up.”
Hodge hit the thrusters, and their pod shot away.
——
I’ve let the one person go that might have loved me. Hurley’s eyes held onto Jax’s small figure spinning farther and farther away into the certain death of space. His back rotated past, and for what might have been the last time, she saw his face. He’s still trying to smile.
Her cockpit, the last remaining piece of her beautiful space plane, continued to descend past the wreckage of the battle. As the distance between her and Jax grew, the space was left empty. A void, deprived of heat, energy, life, and breath. And she hated herself for the choice she had made. You foolish old woman, Hurley scolded herself. You stop thinking for one second and ruin the rest of your life. You …
“… fool,” she whispered aloud.
But it was done. Nothing she could do now would save Jax—or herself.
“Hodge?” she asked, voice trembling. “When did I become an aimless people pleaser?”
Hodge, though, said nothing, leaving Hurley alone with her thoughts.
Make a difference, save the world … That was what Jax had wanted most. And hadn’t she let him have it? He had dragged Narasimha and the pyramid—humanity’s greatest threats—out into the depths of space. It was heroic, right out of a storybook. She should be so happy for him, so proud of herself for aiding him.
After another moment without a response from Hodge, she tilted her head to look at him. Hodge was belted into the co-pilot’s seat beside her, his fur drifting in beautiful waves without gravity to hold it down. His eyes were wide, still looking out the window at where Jax had disappeared. His ears stood up above his head, twitching back and forth, searching for the sounds that were no longer coming through their cockpit speakers. She could hear his nose cycling the air of the cramped cockpit, searching for scents that might as well have been a universe away.
“Maybe he’ll make it … I think he’ll make it,” Hodge finally said, and he sounded genuinely hopeful. “Don’t you?”
Hurley swallowed down the ache building in her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “I hope he does.”
And she tried to smile, but cried instead.
Chapter 24
The Ghost of Dr. Ivanovich
Jax was alone. Maybe Narasimha would regain control of her body soon and she would kill him before the carbon monoxide, which was building up in his suit, did. Unless she lost consciousness …
He pushed himself over to where Narasimha was pinned. He reduced her stream of air. It would either kill her, or keep her in an unconscious state until someone was able to find them.
His heart was still beating rapidly; he would need to calm it down quickly to cope with the new atmosphere content in his suit.
He closed his eyes and focused on his breath. Slower. In, and out. In, and out. Ten seconds on the intake, hold. Ten seconds on the exhale, hold. He could feel the rhythm slowing in his chest. Eleven seconds in, hold. Eleven seconds out, hold. He continued up to sixteen-second intervals.
A tingling sensation started to creep into his feet. It was spreading up his legs, tingling and pulsing. Not more than five minutes had passed; his brain couldn’t already be shutting off unnecessary functions, so something else was happening. His eyes were closed, but the vision he had in his mind seemed more than his imagination. He was experiencing his legs in a way he didn’t understand. They expanded out in his awareness, spreading like a blanket. Muscles, tendons, bone, veins, blood … more depth of sensation than he had ever known.
He tried to open his eyes, but his new world had slowed his experience of time. The muscles behind his eyelids were waiting for the synapses to fire and send their electric orders down the connected nerves. The pulse of the electron cloud within each atom seemed almost frozen. How was he seeing this? It couldn’t be real, could it, without his brain even functioning as fast as this strange consciousness? He wasn’t dying, he knew that; he could see the life in his body.
What else did this strange awareness have to offer? Jax pushed his mind out around himself. There, life—Narasimha’s incapacitated body. Her inner makeup spread before him. The hard, pointed nails were his nails. The golden fur was his fur. The tail, extending out of the base of her spine, was his tail. And the short tip of the tail … Memories flowed into him. It was a story more rich than the lioness had experienced herself.
The pain of the flesh separating under the knife. Blood working to seal off the open wound. Each cell obediently following the instructions dictated by its DNA. But there was pain before the tail had been cut from her body, more potent than the physical shocks of nerve signals. The scene filled with the living matter that connected to that moment. He saw, or experienced, another Animalis—a breed of house cat—whose lineage was also somehow contained in Jax’s awareness. Her tail had been removed, sliced off by a laser rifle, in an attack on a group of humans that had been breaking Animalis for farm labor. Jax could feel the sting of Narasimha’s pain, guilt for not protecting the cat, and remorse for the Animalis having to give life and limb for their cause. He could feel the deep connection that Narasimha made with those around her. Her love was simple, natural, and more potent than what Jax had felt, even for his own parents. Narasimha had cut her tail off and gave it to the cat, as a token of her love and her sacrifice.
Jax pulled himself out of the experience. What was happening? He hadn’t died, not this quickly. How could he be seeing, and living, someone else’s past like that? His imagination had never been that vivid.
Jax pushed his awareness out farther, and found the pyramid, locked in his new, timeless reality. It shook him to come in contact with it. As his mind began to spread out with what made up the pyramid’s existence, Jax wanted to tremble, to cower back and hide from it. The history of life over the entire planet. More than that, every element of emotion—joy, triumph, remorse, sadness—were now within his sphere of experience. What he had seen from his own eyes, and heart, were less than molecules in the cosmic expanse of the reality that was life. What he had known as love was a tiny fragment of what had been experienced in the pool of life that he was now a part of. He wanted to hide every moment when he had thought his life was too hard, and disown every time he had thought he had achieved something great, for fear that this accumulation of existence would crush him with some immeasurable laugh at his own insignificance.
But at the same moment that he realized he was a speck of nothing, a warm, comforting sense of purpose filled him. This thing, this access point of all life, had brought him here. Like a two-sided mirror, Jax’s focus had expanded out to the entirety of life, and the focus of life had been brought down on Jax. Don’t move. Watch him, it seemed to whisper. What will he do?
He could feel it now; he was inside the machine. He had activated the pyramid. But it was more than DNA that he had power over now; he could see the history of the world,
and every detail as it existed in the now, and fragmented trails of possibilities and probabilities spread out into the future. It was all kept within the DNA, and as it passed from life to life, it accumulated a record held as a code in the very atoms of the DNA molecules. Jax could see the pyramid reading subtle differences in the subatomic particles within the atoms, reading it just like the binary of a computer. A feeling of immense power came into him, and it scared him.
This was the machine that had created the Animalis.
Jax wanted to understand it. He started to follow histories that were contained in the DNA around him. His own path had connected with Narasimha, Hank, Grimshaw, and at each of the points of connection, he could transfer from his DNA to theirs.
When he found himself holding Moxie and pushing her inside of Hank’s space suit, his curiosity became excited. Had the Animalis created the two strange creatures? It couldn’t have been Narasimha that had used it, or else she wouldn’t have been looking for them.
Moxie’s DNA spread out its secrets before Jax.
“Hello,” a strange and inhuman voice said.
Jax stopped examining the DNA in surprise. The voice hadn’t been in the history. It was immediate, something in the endless time he was experiencing. He tried to mentally answer “Who’s there?” but the thought didn’t extend out of him like the voice had.
“You made it, Jax,” the voice said again. “Are you looking at our body?”
The history of Moxie was still spread out in Jax’s mind.
“Thank you for keeping us safe. You protected us.”
Was it Moxie speaking to him? He tried again to find the source of the voice. There was a connection in his thoughts. Jax could sense the entity at the other end of the connection, but it wasn’t part of the DNA. There was no arrangement of electron spin for the pyramid to decode to show its history. It was on a different plane of existence. Jax’s mind struggled to envision how it could exist outside of the realm of reality that everything else was in.
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