by Gwynn White
"Ehli, we need you to push them back, or something," Ocia said.
I know. Except Stroman and his code was what she needed first. She took two steps toward him before he slashed at her leg with a knife she hadn't seen.
Schaefer swung his pistol down.
"No!" Ehli shouted.
Stroman broke for the hall leading away from the door.
Ehli connected with his mind and locked his legs, tripping him as Schaefer's shot burned through his side. He gasped and skid on his hands and knees, his knife clanging on the stone as it skipped away from his outstretched hand.
Ehli flashed Schaefer a disappointed glare
He held up a hand and shook his head. "We don't have time to let him get away." He nodded at Stroman. "Please. Get the code."
Ehli didn't know if Schaefer planned to carry Stroman with them or leave him to continue bleeding on the stone.
Stroman held his side and pushed blood through his fingers. "You'll nev—"
Ehli snapped into his mind with the fierceness of a snake bite, cutting off his threat and surging through the connection with more girth than it was giving her. The strain caused Stroman to cry out and roll onto his back. Scenes of teeth clenching on exposed flesh and tearing skin free filled Ehli's mind like an opened trap. The violations repulsed and slowed her progress. There was no closing your eyes against these visions—they burned into her memory with breathtaking impact. You entered a code. What is it?
More pain. A child's leg snapped into a compound fracture, white bone cutting through flesh as the poor little one's voice screamed gargling mercy. Willo did this, and the rejects feeding these visions were proud.
Ehli's hold in Stroman's mind lost ground.
Schaefer grabbed her hand. The break in concentration let her back into her body enough to realize she was staggering away from Stroman. She opened her eyes as Schaefer pulled her around to face him, eyes locked. She knew his plan, and didn't stop him before he stepped forward and kissed her. A strong, "we used to be married, there's nothing more I could ever want," kind of kiss. Doubt faded into the nostalgia of his scent that she'd spent so long near and in love with.
Surprise turned to familiarity as their kiss went deeper, and in that connection to their past, Schaefer became a conduit of power. She reentered Stroman's mind with the ease of jumping on a rotted tree trunk. She broke through, demanded the code, and read the numbers instantly. Thank you. She passed the code to Schaefer and grabbed the back of his head to cap off their kiss.
"Thank you, love." He separated, and quickly punched in the code. The light turned green, and the door unlatched.
Ehli couldn't help the brief thought of Cullen, and the guilt that followed, but she didn't have time to worry as Ocia, Torek, and Jolnes shoved through and slammed the door shut. Schaefer entered a new series of numbers, and the light flashed red-green-red before relocking.
"We're good. Let's go," Schaefer said. He took her hand and started to pull her past Stroman, writhing on the ground.
Ehli touched the man's mind, and a biting shock jolted her back. Under the shadow on his face, she saw his glare. As Schaefer pulled her away, she thought of her son, and decided there wasn't time to wrestle out every bit of the reject in Stroman. I'm sorry, she thought as she turned from jogging sideways to a heated run down the hall, the groups' footsteps echoing down the open stone corridor.
"You're not going alone," Stroman said back, and in his message was strength enough that it surprised Ehli.
Schaefer jerked a bit on his handhold, forcing her to center back to their sprint. "I'm not risking you or our son for anything."
Emmit's nerves demanded more room to stretch, the battle raging in his body as he tried to control connections with Cullen, Hopper Brinoway, and Sprinkles, who'd already picked up Willo and another named Scanis. Willo's threats cloaked him like a whisper passing over the hairs in his ear. But he couldn't move or escape the growing weight of responsibility. His view of Hopper's ship was crucial to tying him to the weakest of his three connections.
Hopper Brinoway had slowed his pre-flight preparations, while Cullen repeated distance calculations that produced results he couldn't make sense of. Trust yourself, he whispered to Cullen. You're just nervous about going home. The Solvent is built to handle the trip. It just needs your memories and focus. The engine's ready. Start opening the bubble.
Emmit sensed something off about his mom's connection. Mom, are you okay?
"She's just a little shaken up," his father said. "Be there in five minutes."
As soon as their connection separated, another barged in. "We're almost there," Willo 'pathed. "Your next step is to cloak us from everyone on the ship."
How can I do that? His brain was starting to ache, and he was becoming increasingly anxious that he'd fail and let go before Hopper Brinoway and Cullen made the pull. Complying with Willo's request could snap his tether. Do I have to hurt Sara?
"No. No one is going to get hurt. We don't want to draw attention. I can help, but the mirage has to originate from you. When we ride in, you're going to picture only Sprinkles, and project that to Sara and Adi. Focus on Sprinkles and keep that locked until we're hidden away. We'll take it from there, and then you can let go."
Emmit added memories of his wolverine's black furred face, how the shade was darker in the oval from eyes to jawline and down its neck. Their trip through the jungle had added a splash of hardened mud and blood to the short fur around his face. When Sprinkles snarled, he showed the thumb-length incisors and red gums holding them in.
"Emmit?" Sara cut into his connections. Standing beside him, she could have spoken out loud.
He pushed back. "Please," he said aloud. "My brain's at full capacity. Just talk, or don't. I'm a little busy."
"...Okay. I'm just sensing a lot of unease in your brainwaves."
Emmit saw his chance. "Can you help?" As he looked up at her, he made Sprinkles, Hopper Brinoway and Cullen his only three thoughts, bracing himself before letting her in. "Don't interrupt my three connections, but maybe coax the matter around them so that I can concentrate on my job."
Sara's insertion felt like two arms trying to stuff inside a thin sleeve, but a little adjusting allowed her in. Emmit held tight to the three connections, catching, and pinching back a couple subtle attempts by Sara to link to them as well. I said no. These are mine.
Sprinkles ascended the stairwell to their floor and would arrive in ten or so seconds. Can you open the doors? I was thinking—
"I'll take care of him."
No.
Sara paused. From the corner of his eyes he caught her gaze, but didn't meet it.
I thought he could go in the generator room, since all the beds and chairs will be taken. If you can just open the door for him, please.
"Is there something wrong?"
The tendrils he'd felt testing his three connections now probed the light touches on the connection holding and wrapping around Sprinkles. They searched for weaknesses or falsities. He concentrated on the smooth brown of mud on Sprinkles's fur, where the black stuck out in hardened barbs.
The door hissed as it slid open.
A sudden shriek bled into the growl of his wolverine.
He looked over as Sprinkles tackled and sank his teeth into Sara's neck. The grip muffled most of her cry, and the shock stifled his. Only the wet rustling of ripped flesh filled the space of sound. She kicked weakly, her arms failing, but lacked the stiffness or control to do anything against his wolverine's grip.
Willo?
She and Scanis darted inside around the corner, Willo winking at Emmit as a spray of blood hit her face, and they ducked inside the generator room.
"Emmit, what's happening?" Cullen asked.
Emmit was too busy trying to connect to Sprinkles's jaws to loosen them and make him stop, but his connection had vanished. Sprinkles was a wild animal, and the five meters between them might as well have been none. Was Willo going to use Sprinkles to kill them all?<
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"No," Willo said. "Consider that your and your father's payback. His pet's gone."
"Emmit!" Cullen landed with a thud and a grunt behind him, then ran for Sara.
Sprinkles looked up. No. That wasn't Sprinkles anymore. The wolverine looked at Cullen, maw still clenched around Sara's throat. Her eyes fluttered, but failed to find Cullen. The wolverine snapped a bone, then released Sara and bared its blood-dripping fangs at Cullen, who seemed only to be armed with a knife.
"Sara!" his dad called out from down the hall.
The wolverine snarled and turned its gaze toward the sound.
Blue laser beams punched the wolverine up and off Sara, tearing holes that made Emmit's eyes go wide with shock, separating his mind from the ability to move. The sound of his wolverine's cries struck him with the cold loss of hearing a friend dying. Sara had worried about letting Emmit die on her watch, but instead, she had now died on his. This was his fault. The pain she'd suffered when the Osuna took her brother would live on in him. Revenge would fuel the strength he brought to the fight.
Willo had outsmarted him.
"Remember, the rejects are outside, held back only by your compliance," Willo 'pathed. "Keep us hidden, and I'll let you all leave with your lives. Tell them about us and I'll strand you here until they arrive."
The ship reeked of copper, feces, and burnt fur and flesh. Cullen stood over Sara, her blank stare making it clear there was nothing to examine. Cullen's dark stare turned on Emmit, the silencing emphasizing his condemnation and disappointment. "You didn't do that on purpose, did you?"
"I lost control!" Emmit shouted. "I'm sorry. I wasn't as strong as I needed to be."
Adi, glancing back from looking down the hallway, looked scared.
"We have to leave," Emmit said loud enough for the group in the hall to hear. "The engines will overheat if we don't go now, and we don't have time to shut down and cool off."
Torek appeared in the doorway first, levitor rifle ready as he peered in at Emmit and scanned the ship's interior. Ocia, his mom, his dad, then Jolnes stood around Sara's body, but stopped only for a moment before stepping over the blood on the floor to enter the ship and shut the door behind them. Sara's body remained outside.
"Dad, Mom, everyone. I'm sorry. I thought I could get Sprinkles to come with us." What he couldn't share weighed on him with increasing pressure.
An annoying sound blared from his father's wrist. He checked his watch and silenced the alarm. "The engines are overheating. Cullen, please return to your chair. We have to go. Ehli is here now to help you concentrate on Vijil."
Cullen nodded, and started back for the cockpit.
"I assume you saw my video, Cul?" Torek asked.
"Yeah. Come on," Cullen said, not angry, but also all business. "I need your eyes on these calibrations."
Torek hustled after him, leaving Schaefer to walk to Adi and Emmit. Emmit pushed away thoughts of the generator room.
"Son?" his mom 'pathed. "What're you hiding?"
He forced his thoughts to his last memory of Sara's dead stare and mauled throat. I'm sorry, he told her, trying to deflect his mother's probe. He pushed her out. "Everyone leave me alone."
His dad's hand clutched his shoulder. "You have the best connection with Adi and his father, but if you need, we can try fitting your mother into that role."
Emmit's pulse thumped in his chest as the rejects reached their floor. "The rejects are here. No time. Just leave me to it and stay out of my head."
His father squeezed his shoulder and patted his head. "Okay." He walked to Emmit's mother as she watched Emmit, sadness and worry lining her face. His father put an arm around her waist—the intimacy startled Emmit—as he quickly led her and Jolnes to the two doors on the other side. "We'll be ready as soon as you are."
They made up? Emmit didn't know what to think of that.
"Emmit, let's go!" Cullen shouted from the cockpit.
Emmit shook off thoughts of his mother and father, straightened in his seat, and tapped the button to turn both neuronet poles back on. The purple light sent him and Adi back into Hopper Brinoway's cockpit.
Adi's father bolted upright and leaned forward. "Adi! Is everyone all right?"
"No."
"Emmit!" Cullen shouted again.
"We need to leave now," Emmit told Adi's father. He searched for Cullen's mind until the plug found its matching hole.
"Emmit. We need to talk," Cullen said. "I know you tried to hide that the poles were on, and I'm assuming they were on so that Adi could talk to his father. You have two seconds to tell me why, or I'm taking this ship back to Larpenter Station and the lot of you can find your own way home."
Cullen would find out eventually when they arrived on Vijil in an Osuna ship, and since Hopper Brinoway was being cooperative, he didn't see overwhelming harm in telling the truth—about this, anyway. He shared the conversation he'd had with his father about a multi-bubble and Cullen telling his people as soon as they arrived so that there wasn't an immediate firefight.
"Nothing like throwing all our chips in on one in a billion odds. My people are worth it to me, and I'll have words with your father after we're safe on Vijil. Are you confident you can fit our bubble inside the Eon's?"
Emmit pulled on Adi's father's memories, and the grief over his last words with his son being spoken in anger instead of love. Yeah. He would fix the other lies, but now wasn't the time.
"You ready, Hopper?" Cullen asked.
Emmit heard it in Brinoway's head. The pilot nodded. "I am."
"Okay. Don't make me regret this sudden alliance. Your son in return for my home, but no tricks after that."
"None planned."
The rejects were huffing outside their door, armed well enough to shoot their way in if Willo commanded them. It would be a slaughter.
"Mouthguards in," Cullen said. "Ten, nine..."
Emmit and Adi took theirs from pockets in their seats.
Emmit sank into observing Hopper Brinoway and his son, and then Cullen and his chosen memory of Vijil.
Cullen had lived a dream as a boy not much younger than Emmit, standing with his father on an apartment balcony overlooking Vijil City. The orange glow of the setting sun reflected off the dark glass of the skyscrapers on the other side of the passageway. Rivers of flying cars soared in stripes and weaving colors along charted airways between buildings and into the veins of the city. His dad held him in a side hug, and took a drink of coffee. Cullen looked through the gaps between the streams of flying cars to the ones riding the streets twenty stories below. "Someday I hope you share this view with your son," his father said. "You have more adventure ahead of you than I can tell, and I have to trust the Father of the Ancients that He'll give you back, but as you go, please never forget that I let you go with great trepidation and loneliness.
The ship shook and a deep chill filled Emmit's blood, seizing him in the strength of the Mericure bubble that could pull the depths of space and kiss them together in the blessing of passage.
"Until you have a child," Cullen's dad continued, "you can never understand what it means to love the life that is part you and wholly free, at risk in ways that can't always be foreseen, which will keep you up at nights in fits of worry and prayer. This is the world and universe I'm charged with training you for, and yet in its complexity there is the overwhelming sense of being unprepared for the task."
Cullen lost himself in the wonder of seeing this memory with clarity unlike ever before.
A jolt of power surged through Emmit's body, blinding him from seeing Hopper Brinoway. The universe inhaled, and in its breath the floor left them, but the bubble held them up.
"Now!" Cullen shouted.
A second surge bolted through Emmit, forcing his spine straight. His teeth clenched into the give of the gel mouthguard.
The surge coursed long enough to itch at his fingers and toes, making them numb as his eyes burned and his scalp fired off at every hair follicle.
&nbs
p; "But if you can't be prepared," Cullen asked in his boyhood gentle voice. "How do you know that I'll make it back? What if I don't?"
"I can't..." his father started. "I refuse to give that fear reign over my life and my mind. You will make it back, and when you do, I and your mother will greet you with joy so great it will break us down. We will praise the God of the Universe from our knees and extend our hands for His blessing to return."
The power filling the surge bled away, and Emmit's sight returned to the ship and the strength of the present.
"Ha!" Cullen shouted. "Hopper Brinoway, connect me to airsync and enhance to full range."
The captain's joy filled Emmit with too much excitement to stay seated. He spat out his mouthguard and helped Adi out of his seat. "We made it!"
Adi missed the armrest and took Emmit with him to the floor. Emmit landed first, Adi clutched to his chest, and laughed as he rolled him over.
"Son," he heard through Cullen's earpiece, followed by the sobs of a grown father broken and unable to speak.
Emmit's chest shook in time with Cullen's.
"Is Mom there too?" Cullen blurted.
"Yes." His father's voice shook. "Yes, she is. Praise the One. Praise the One."
Cullen's eyes burned with tears as he let his head sink into his hands. The man had become the child, and in the shedding of adult worries, he embraced the joy that overwhelms.
A door hissed open behind Emmit, along with a sense of trouble and urgency. His smile fell as he turned to see Willo and Scanis flee through the exterior door of the Solvent.
"Willo and Scanis have escaped!" Emmit shouted.
As Emmit reached out to connect with them, the passengers of the Eon were whipped into a frenzy, anger and visions of torture driving them. To his frustration, their thoughts clouded his search for Willo and Scanis. It wasn't long before he sensed the passengers of the Eon spilling out onto the streets of Vijil. Willo had turned them into a mob.
Emmit forced Cullen's tear-blurred eyes open to track them on the exterior camera, then alerted Hopper Brinoway to do the same. Cullen had landed them in the middle of the street he and his father had overlooked fifteen years ago. Outside, the ground shook from the cars Willo sent crashing.