The Joining: The Saga of the Shards Book One (The Cycle of the Shards 1)

by Chris Stephenson

  Refusing to give his detractors the satisfaction of knowing he was in pain, he just uttered “I’m fine.” As he began to get up.

  Critock was trying to figure out the angles with the student in the way when suddenly he dropped out of sight. He thanked anyone that was listening, Gods or the Five or whomever, as he made his final push. He mentally prepared himself for a joining. He saw his target, and pushed himself to fly as fast as he could towards him. The join would be at high speed and it would be quick. He hoped that the negotiation would be just as quick; he may have to come up with some kind of an explanation to get away from the students quickly. Maybe it’d be simpler than he thought, maybe someone in that room could be Pt’ron and this whole thing would be over in a matter of minutes! He allowed himself some last thoughts as he rushed in.

  Kyle finally got to his feet, using a nearby desk of a sympathetic classmate for support. It could not have been timed better, or worse, if he had planned it. The instant that Kyle stood up was the moment that Critock had hit the point of no return. He had enough time to see the boy stand up, and he could not change direction quickly enough with the velocity that he had reached. He mentally cursed louder than he ever had without uttering a word as his spirit form and Kyle’s body met. Kyle literally never knew what hit him as he was standing away from the window, and the only thing that anyone else saw was a bright flash that they mostly attributed to the sun reflecting off of something else in the room.

  As soon as Critock hit him, full in the back, the joining began. Instantly Kyle went flying forward as though he had been tripped again, and landed face down in the middle of the room. This time only Travis and Melissa were laughing, as it looked like something had seriously hurt him. Phelps’s face was red and angry as he yelled, understandably thinking it was the two bullies that had taken him back down. “What is the matter with the both of you?” Both of them put their hands up, as confused as anyone else in the room, though their innocence was no matter to Mr. Phelps, who mentally already had placed the two of them in the principal’s office. But that could wait. As the classroom went silent, he turned to the boy on the floor, who had both hands on the ground, trying to stand up, but was twitching curiously. “Kyle?”

  Kyle was raising himself from the floor as best he could, but he found it difficult. He felt like someone had stabbed him in the back very quickly, and then pushed him. He blacked out for just a moment, and now that he had come to he felt very wrong. His body was sluggish, his vision was slightly blurry and almost seemed like everything was farther away than it should be, and he didn't recognize half the words his internal dialogue were saying. Almost like a loud clicking in his ears. He heard Mr. Phelps calling his name, and at the same time felt like he was going to throw up. He knew, even with his strangely fuzzy mind, that he needed to get out of the room quickly. Regardless of what else was going on, he didn't think he could live down the humiliation of having fallen over twice, and then throwing up right in the center of the classroom. He looked at his teacher pleadingly, and asked a one word question.

  "Bathroom?"

  Phelps nodded slowly, and Kyle stood up as quickly as his body would allow him. He felt a blast of energy from every pore in his body, as though he had been given a shot of adrenaline, and he bolted. He almost burst through the classroom door, and began to head for the Men's room farthest away from the classrooms, one that hopefully would be deserted at this early part of this class period. He felt sore suddenly, but still with an urge to vomit, and he walked as quickly as he dared, lest some hall patrol or teacher find him. He had left so quickly he hadn't had time to grab a hall pass, and if anyone saw him at this point he was likely to just end up throwing up on them, or just plain passing out. He didn't know what was happening to him, he didn't know much about his health other than he was okay his last physical a year ago. Hopefully it was just some kind of spasm or something. He'd go to the nurse after he got out of the bathroom and everything would be fine. Hell, maybe he'd even get out of school and dodge the bullet that was his confrontation with Brian Boyd altogether! The closer he walked to the bathroom though the more he doubted everything was fine. Everything on him hurt and was tingling and nothing was making sense in his own head anymore.

  Kyle pushed through the bathroom door and quickly crouched to check for any feet in the stalls. None there, and nobody at the urinals either. His energy wearing off, he stumbled to the mirrors, and looked at himself. He was shocked at what he saw. His eyes seemed to be changing color back and forth from his standard blue over to a orange color over and over, the irises seemed to be arcing blue streaks of electricity. Indeed, he now saw those same streaks, albeit larger, crossing over his skin, jolting out of his fingers. He turned on a faucet to splash himself with water and looked at himself with amazement as the strange clicking inside his head seemed to become English.

  "Ka-Ki-Kr...Calm down! Calm down! This is normal. You are okay! We're going to be okay! YOU'RE OKAY!"

  Kyle put his hands over his ears. Was this what going mad felt like? He always heard people talk about hearing voices, was this actually happening to him?

  His hands didn't blot out the voice. "This is a joining. It's normal. I'm from another planet. Every bit of your DNA is being rewritten to include new information. You're going to be ok, please don't panic. This next bit is a bit rough..."

  The voice was suddenly replaced by a piercing loud squeal, terrible in his ears and it seemed to be coming from inside his head. He felt his stomach lurch, and he fell backwards into a parallel toilet stall. As his body started to refuse to obey his commands, he flailed an arm around, knocking closed the stall door. His last thought alone was that he hoped no-one was going to come in to see whatever was about to happen take place.

  From the outside of the stall, it looked like there was an electrical storm happening right behind the door. Suddenly big blue electric streaks began emanating from the stall, increasing in intensity and size until suddenly they seemed to fold back in on themselves, drawing back in to their source. There was a bright flash of light then from behind the door, and a powerful force which pushed back the centers of the walls around the stall and the stall door itself. After that, everything was quiet. The sudden heat from the electric display had fogged up the mirrors, there was a running faucet, and one particular stall was all but destroyed from the awesome display, but nobody came running in to see what was going on, for in the one instance of actually good timing that had happened thus far this day nobody was close enough to the bathroom to notice anything out of the ordinary. The closest classroom had heard a sound similar to a far away 'thump', but that was as close as it came.

  Slowly, the stall door opened. Slowly, cautiously, Kyle emerged. He held on to the small wall that met the door, and then pushed himself across to the sink. As he reached it, he placed both hands on the sink itself and looked down into the basin, as though he was about to throw up. Instead of vomiting, however, he looked up at the fog-covered mirror, and lifted a hand to wipe it off. The hand slowly moved revealing Kyle's face.

  "Oh no. Ohhh no."

  Critock looked through his eyes and saw Kyle looking back at him through the mirror. He blinked, Kyle blinked instantaneously. He had complete control over his body. He heard a small yelling voice from the back of his brain.

  "WHEREAMILETMEOUTLETMEOUT!" The voice was almost incoherent. Critock put Kyle's hands in his hair and took a couple steps back. How could this have happened? He had his target in his sights! It was supposed to be the teacher, not some boy! He started breathing faster, and he felt his control slipping. His thoughts were intermingling with the boy’s, and the two languages were becoming a mixture of nonsense that he had to sort through. He had to fight his own base instincts of panic as well. How could this have happened! What had gone wrong! After a few moments he realized that his thoughts were not in the guttural clicking of the Marconian language, and instead were in a dialect and voice he was unfamiliar with. With a start he realized it was the boy’
s. He was thinking his thoughts but in the boy’s voice. Almost without realizing it, he had overtaken the forward consciousness of…Kyle. His name was Kyle Edison. Okay, that was a start. The screaming had ebbed somewhat, becoming more of a dull background voice than a ringing in his ears, but Critock didn’t know enough about joining to know if that was because the boy was wearing himself out or if he was fading farther and farther away. He moved his mouth experimentally, watching himself in the mirror, silently forming words in a language he didn’t understand. There was some tingling in the body, ‘his’ body, that wasn’t exactly pleasant, and his reaction time wasn’t where it usually was, but he could move the muscles, and while the boy was still protesting the joining greatly it seemed that either he was allowing Critock access to the body or he simply didn’t know how to stop him. He glanced at the door, marveling that the simple act of moving the eyeballs was a feat unto itself. Satisfied that no one was coming in, he looked back at the mirror, and took a deep breath. Every action, including breathing, was now becoming easier to him, and he assumed that soon he would not even hear the dwindling yelling of the understandably scared child. He knew he had to try to calm the boy before he could even begin to deal with the situation and try to find a way out of it. In a day, if he was somehow still able to locate Pt’ron and the Shards and deal with that in his diminished state, he would be gone, but the boy would remain.

  Once the joining had ended and Critock and Kyle were two different individuals again, Critock’s memories would remain with the boy. While he had never had personal experience with the aftereffects of a joining on a primitive species, he had both read and heard that it could have a significant impact on the joinee. For the most part, joinees would remember nothing, their brain automatically repressing the incident to protect their sanity. Sometimes, the brain just couldn’t handle it, and even after joining would completely shut down, rendering the joinee a vegetable. In very rare circumstances, the joinee would remain lucid after the incident and also remember everything that happened and retain all knowledge that the joiner possessed. This typically only happened if the joiner and the joinee had maintained a good repartee during the joining itself. This is what Critock was hoping for. With his knowledge the boy could do great things for this world, and perhaps be a part of bringing it out of the dark atomic ages that Earth was currently in. At the very least it would assuage his conscience a bit. Even though it was the boy’s own fault for standing up when he did, he could not have possibly known what was about to transpire.

  The voice was still dwindling, and Critock blinked again, and found he could do it effortlessly. The diminished optical ability was a little hard to get used to, but everything else was progressing well. He took this opportunity to try and speak to the boy, and by speaking out loud to test his command of the vocal cord, muscles and tongue. “Kyle. Kyle, can you hear me. Please listen to me.”

  The screaming and yelling had stopped, and Critock hoped that this meant that the boy would listen to reason. “If you look through your memories, you can tell things are different. There’s two thousand years of new information in there.” The fact that he was able to rattle off Earth timeframes easily while just a short time ago he would have chastised Tomkari didn’t escape him. “You can access it, take your time. I’m from another planet. I’m an alien, but I’m not here to destroy or take over anything, do not be scared of me. I’m here to stop a very bad person from destroying the world.” He decided to dumb down his mission as much as possible. If the boy wanted the facts, he could go looking for them. “I accidentally took over your body, I was trying to get to the teacher when you stood up. I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop it.”

  There was a small answer, very far away. “Get out.”

  Critock sighed. This wasn’t going well at all. “I wish I could. My species is able to do incredible things, but we’re still limited. If I extracted myself from your body right now, I would be left in a weakened state, and I’d be unable to work to the best of my abilities. That could mean that this school and everyone in it, to say nothing of the rest of the world, would die. My world would too, Kyle. I give you my word, in a little over a day, I will get out. If you can hold it together until then, you might get to keep some of my memories. You can use those to be an incredible human. Your life will change, you’ll no longer have a need for what this school can provide, you’ll be far above anyone else on this entire planet. What do you say?”

  There was a beat, and he was met with a rush of images. A larger boy with an angry scowl. A red-headed girl. A few other faces, none of which clear enough to pick out. An older man sitting at a table eating some sort of noodles. Then a small voice again that called from out of the darkness, so slight now that Critock had to strain to hear him.

  “Get out.”

  Critock sighed as the boy went silent. At least the yelling had stopped. Confused anger had been replaced with a silent seething, and that was better than nothing, at least for his own sanity. With that taken care of for the time being, though not resolved, Critock allowed his thoughts to turn to a more pressing issue. Namely, what was he going to do? Every plan that they had come up with on the way here, everything that Qua’roti Alpha had said, it was all now out the window. The teacher was almost perfect. He had access, he was already above the students so any additional questions would not seem out of the ordinary, the plan would have worked. Now? Now he was just one of the crowd. It was a minor miracle that the kid wasn’t Pt’ron in the first place! A quick glance at Kyle’s memories and self quickly made him realize that this was one of the last students suitable for this sort of subterfuge. He wasn’t anyone that anyone would listen to, there was no opportunity to use any kind of influence because there just plain wasn’t any. He had friends but none of them were in any kind of power. He went over everyone in his mind. If he stretched, he supposed that the one called Daniel might be of use. He didn’t know enough about what went on in a school office to know if there was any access that could be gained. The rest were just fairly normal, which was fine. The red-headed girl…Shanna? She knew something of computers. That might be useful. He noticed that when he thought about the girl, Kyle seemed to be trying to push back his probes, as though he was actively trying to prevent finding out more about her. It wasn’t anything that Critock couldn’t push past, but he let it go for now. The kid was mad enough, he didn’t want to turn what was already one of the worst joinings he had ever heard of into a full blown war.

  There was a sudden sharp pain from his left wrist, and he winced. He looked at it to see a single silver band seem to come through the skin and stop, looking like a bracelet more than anything else. Critock remembered the one part of the plan he still could accomplish, and also realized he could still try and salvage this. He tapped it and then held the wrist up to his mouth. “This is Critock. I have landed, but there’s an issue. The joining went wrong.”

  There was silence, and then the voice of Qua’roti Alpha came through the bracelet. “We cannot send further support, Critock. The Military Corps has taken further control of the operation. The timetable cannot be moved.”

  Critock sighed as he paced back and forth. “Alpha, I didn’t join with the target. There was an accidental joining. Repeat, Accidental. We need assistance."

  It was quiet for a moment, and Critock imagined the head of the Religious clique of Marconia arguing with the head of the Military. He half wondered how one bad decision several hundred cycles…years…ago could have led to all of this. The voice came back on suddenly, and shortly.

  “No withdrawal until the Shards and Pt’ron have been destroyed. I’m sorry Critock, you will have to make do. You and Tomkari are on your own.”

  Critock let out a guttural Marconian curse and stopped as he realized the Human vocal cords were not meant for such speech. It physically hurt him to curse. He searched for a word in the English vocabulary found in Kyle’s mind that would fit his current mood and he used it, over and over again. Obviously contacting Alpha furthe
r wasn’t going to bear fruit. The last thing that he had heard was true.

  They were on their own.

  11

  The bathroom door opened, and Critock almost stumbled out, still getting used to the novelty of using the boy’s body, and also the somewhat higher gravity of Earth as opposed to most of the planets he had been to. Ever since the last statement for Critock to remove himself from Kyle’s body, the boy was completely quiet, having withdrawn his consciousness completely from anywhere Critock could mentally access. However, potentially as a last form of rebellion, there were some parts of his mind he could not reach. Certain memories, perhaps fantasies, that could not be seen. Probably out of shame, or privacy, Critock didn’t know, and honestly at this point did not care. He didn’t need any of that, and if the boy was going to be sullen and bitter over this, he can go ahead and sit in the back of the brain for the rest of the time this was going on. He had enough to deal with right now. First and foremost, accessing the memory of exactly how to get back to the classroom he had fled from. It took him a moment, being unaware of the architecture of the human mind and where certain memories were stored, but after a couple of near wrong turns, he was able to navigate back to where he had started from, where he heard his original target, Mr. Phelps, speaking through the door.