by Dan Krokos
He opens a drawer in his desk and pulls out a crystal carafe filled with a ruby red liquid, wine, most likely. He pours it into a small glass and takes a sip.
“What do you call yourself?” he says to Nina. “Are you a North as well?”
“In a way. My name is Nina.”
Not in a good way. Although I guess I don’t have any more claim to my name than she does.
“Nina North,” he says, tasting the words. “Tell me where you would take these eyeless.”
“Through the Black.”
I shiver inwardly at the word, but keep myself still. Taking the eyeless anywhere sounds like a bad idea. Killing them is a better one. I see again the images Noah showed me. I see their corpse-pale bodies and the enormous claws they have instead of fingers. I try to recall their faces, but it’s too blurry. Letting Nina live was a bad idea. That was our chance to stop this, and we were too weak, all of us. I doubt Gane will give me a second chance to end her.
Gane steeples his fingers. “You said that before. What I want to know is where the Black leads.”
“Does it matter?”
Gane nods. “It does to me, yes. The eyeless have ravaged our world. I won’t have it done somewhere else just so we can live free of their threat.”
“Your world,” I say. “This is your world.”
He lifts one eyebrow. “Does it look like yours?”
“No. So, I ask again, where am I?”
“What’s left of my world.”
“How did I get here?”
“How can you not know?”
“Because I jumped through a black lake thing and woke up in your cell.”
“You came through the Black.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“The boundary between all universes. A buffer, to keep them separate.”
I don’t say anything.
“Look around you.” He takes a sip and gestures with the glass, as if to say, Go on, take a look. I’ll wait.
I have to believe, because the proof is all around me. This city is as dead and empty as can be.
I can’t imagine how it got this way.
He stares at me blankly until I say, “Then where did these eyeless come from? What did they do?”
“They ate,” he says, as if that explains it; then to Nina he says, “What guarantee do I have that you won’t use the Torch to destroy us completely?”
None, I want to tell him. Anything that comes out of her mouth is probably a lie. Trust her at your peril.
Nina raises her hands to the city around us. “What’s left to destroy? The eyeless have done a thorough enough job, I think.”
“Then why take them?” he says.
Nina has nothing to say.
Gane looks at his desk for several seconds. “I’m going to tell you a story. Will you listen?”
I can’t tell who he’s talking to, so I just nod, and so does Nina.
“Once there was a park in the city. You can see it just to the north, behind me. Parents took their children there to play. It was full of museums and restaurants, a huge park, right in the middle of everything. They called it, unsurprisingly, Central Park. Until one day in 1973, when a hole opened in the ground and many people fell inside and disappeared. The hole was so black, it was like looking into nothingness. They put tall fences around the hole because they didn’t know how to make it go away. Aside from those missing, life went on.”
He pauses for another drink. Every hair on my body stands on end.
“When I was a boy, they told me the Black was a gate to hell. A gate that, if left unguarded, nightmarish creatures would come through. They would beguile and deceive. They would rend the flesh from your bones. Our city was great then, even if the rest of the world was not. We thought New York was invincible. My family came here on a plane from Belize, despite the hole. I remember seeing it through the window as we flew over.” He closes his eyes and sighs.
“Then one day things did come through the Black, but they didn’t beguile or deceive. They just killed and ate. Creatures with no eyes, mouths filled with needles, claws that could cut a man in two with one swipe. They spread through the city like cancer, cutting people down by the thousands. Thousands became millions. They spread and multiplied. They ate the people of this world and there was no way to stop them. We fought back in a great war that lasted many years. It blackened our land and almost left us extinct. In the end the world was dead and the savaged survivors gathered here. And one day the eyeless just…disappeared. They went to the hills, and who knows what they’ve been doing since. They come to us whenever we have too many children and it seems we might thrive again. They take them and devour them before our eyes. And then they leave us be. Again and again. In the beginning it seemed as if the eyeless moved with one consciousness, controlled by some higher power. Theory turned to fact when the president offered a reward to kill the Torchbearer—a masked woman who was spotted behind the eyeless ranks, holding some kind of staff with the end aflame. The Torch hasn’t been spoken of in twenty years, until you came through the Black. And now you claim to know where it is.”
Commander Gane has tears in his eyes. I know what it’s like to remember something you’d rather forget.
“So if you are planning to take them somewhere, I want to know it’s not to a world like ours once was. I want to know it’s to a hell where the monsters rightfully belong.”
Gane finishes and sinks into his chair. He pulls out a rag from his vest pouch and mops sweat from his brow.
I stay on my feet, but just barely. The implications…it’s too much. This was once New York—not mine, but close enough. I try to imagine the monsters spreading and multiplying, eating everything in their path. How do you fight a war against something like that? It’s a virus on a global scale.
We’ve been waiting for these monsters to come and conquer our world. But they’ve already done it to this world, decades ago. Noah somehow knows what they look like, so they have to be related to the creators. They have to be the monsters Mrs. North was so afraid of.
But the question why? remains unanswered. Why destroy this world?
Why destroy ours?
If our world is in the same danger that destroyed Gane’s world, then the creators have to be from a different universe entirely. One much more advanced.
Gane folds his rag and takes another drink. “So I ask you for the last time, where do you plan to take the eyeless?”
I speak quickly, before Nina can start. “She’s going to use them to conquer our world. She wants to make our world like yours.” I know it’s true. It all adds up. Nina knew where the entrance to the Black was, and she came here willingly. She wants to control the eyeless, to take them out of this world, where their job is clearly finished. It’s on to the next world…ours.
“She’s lying! She’s—”
Nina never finishes.
Gane roars and sweeps everything off his desk, bursting upright from his chair. He stretches his hand out to Nina, palm out, fingers spread; Nina chokes as her feet come off the ground. She drifts up…then slams hard into the floor. Her head bounces and she writhes on her stomach, moaning.
I don’t move.
Because I can’t. Gane holds me with his mind the entire time, like a vise. He’s crushing my chest, making it hard to breathe. Then he releases me, and my knees wobble and my heart pounds. I start sweating in my burlap bag of an outfit.
Nina climbs to her feet, cautiously, eyes on the floor. A welt on her cheek grows before my eyes, deepening from red to purple.
“Do you want the eyeless gone or not?” Nina says quietly.
“On my terms, yes,” Gane says.
The elevator rises out of the floor behind us.
“Miranda North, I will speak with you later,” he says, eyes on Nina though he’s speaking to me. “You may rejoin the others.”
“Don’t let her do it—”
“Go!”
I nod and close my mouth. Until I can get
Nina alone, I have to trust that Gane is smart enough to see through her deception. If any monster is here to beguile, it’s Nina. I wanted to give Sequel that chance to return, but there’s too much at stake now. Too much…
“Go, now,” he says, quieter.
I nearly say thank you but realize how pathetic that would be. The fact that I’m about to return to Peter and Rhys is almost enough to make me smile. The only reason I wouldn’t want to leave is so Nina can’t try to manipulate Gane. Who knows what she’ll say or do when I’m gone?
In the next second, Noah is standing in front of me, and I almost yelp. “You can’t let her stay with Gane,” he says, panicked. “You can’t.”
Why not?
“Because she’s going to trick him. He’s underestimating her. Listen, I know things about Nina I shouldn’t know. Someone put this information in my head. I think—”
Gane is staring me down. “Leave under your own power, Miranda.”
There’s nothing I can do.
Noah sighs. “I know.”
I turn around and see that the two in red have returned to escort me. The man and girl with their outlaw masks. They’re stoic as before, hands clasped behind them, eyes forward but not looking at anything in particular, especially not me.
I step into the elevator and turn around, ready to rejoin Peter and Rhys. Nina and Gane watch as the doors begin to close.
In the last moment, right before the doors shut, Nina turns her head and smiles at me.
Being alone with Gane is exactly what she wants.
We ride down as fast as we ascended. My stomach flutters and my feet go light. I feel their eyes on my back, but refuse to give them the satisfaction of turning around.
I break the silence as we step onto the main floor. “Hey, could you guys fill in the part between my coming through the Black and waking up in that cell with different clothes on?”
I hear the girl’s steps falter, then resume.
The man says, “You came through unconscious, which happens for everyone the first time they go through. Your armor was removed for obvious reasons.”
His voice sounds familiar, in a way.
It takes everything not to turn around and rip his mask off. We enter the tunnel lined with torches, and their footsteps become crisp. They stay a few paces back, which I’m grateful for.
“Who removed it?” I say.
“I did,” the girl says.
“Everyone gets knocked out the first time, huh?”
“Yes,” the girl says. I’m surprised they’re talking to me at all.
“Who were the other interlopers? The ones who came before us?”
“I was one once,” the man says, which makes me stop, but his gentle hand on my back pushes me forward, and my spirits rise with a shred of hope. More from the way he guided me than his words. I wait, not sure what it means.
We pass through the iron door into the jail. Peter and Rhys jump up from where they were resting against the wall.
“What happened?” Peter says, coming to the bars.
But it’s the man behind me who answers. “Quiet, all of you.” His tone has changed. He’s not telling us to shut up because we’re prisoners; he’s doing it because he doesn’t want anyone to hear. My heart thrums. Please don’t let it be a trick.
Rhys’s mouth drops open and his eyes narrow. Behind me, the iron door shuts softly but doesn’t lock.
“Take off the mask,” Rhys says.
“I said quiet,” the man in red growls.
The cell door swings open, whether automatically or under the man’s power, I don’t know. And I don’t care.
“Step out,” the man says.
The girl hovers by the door, shifting from foot to foot. They’re as tense as I am. Which is the only reason I don’t think they’re acting under Commander Gane’s orders.
“Is this a trick?” Rhys says.
If it is, it doesn’t make sense. Gane has the power to move us however he wants to. He doesn’t need to trick us.
“Boy, I don’t have the time or the patience. Follow me, or rot here. Assuming Gane doesn’t dismantle you first to see what makes an interloper tick.”
Peter and Rhys share a look, then step out of the cage. The two in red whirl around and open the door again. They move fast and so do we. My heart pounds, but not from fear. Even with the horrors that lie outside this building, we have a chance if we’re together.
“What about our armor?” Rhys says.
“It’s taken care of,” the girl says over her shoulder. Up close, her eyes are the color of honey.
“We need something hidden within the suits,” Peter adds.
“Taken care of,” the man says. It’s enough for us to follow him—not like we have an abundance of options.
We exit the tunnel onto the main floor of the beehive, then start along the perimeter wall, following the circumference of the floor counterclockwise.
Suddenly, Noah is walking beside me. “You sure this is a good idea?” He cranes his head down to peer into my face, but I refuse to look at him.
Nope. But it’s the only option I see at the moment.
“Because right now we know where Nina is. If we leave, we might not find her again until it’s too late.”
If we stay, it’s as prisoners.
“Listen, I think I know who Nina really is.”
Who?
“You know the Miranda you saw in Mrs. North’s memories? The one we think is the Original you?”
Yes. How could I forget? It was the first time we realized that our creators seem to have creators of their own.
“Yeah, I think Nina is her daughter. A clone the director raised as her own child.”
The director?
I almost stop to look at him, but we’re moving too fast.
“Almost there,” the man says from the front. We’re approaching the next tunnel cut into the wall.
That’s when the elevator door in the pillar opens and Commander Gane steps out, Nina at his side.
“Where are you taking them?” Gane calls from the pillar. No alarm in his voice, not yet. With each passing second, I expect to feel his mind grab my body, to hold me in place.
“Don’t stop,” the girl hisses at us.
The man breaks off from our group and faces Gane. “Commander, the scientists wish to study the interlopers in their laboratory.”
Footsteps clack on the stone floor—Gane walking toward us, fast. “No, no no no. No one moves them without my permission. Take them back.”
By now we’re halfway into the tunnel.
“Stop!” he yells. I feel the first brush of his mind against my skin. It evaporates the second I’m out of his sight.
“Run!” the girl says, sprinting ahead. “The horses know the way!”
Horses?
I don’t have time to think about it. Peter and Rhys fly past me, and I coax a little more strength from my limbs until I’m running just as fast. Faster, even. A hiss carries down the tunnel from behind, and I recognize the sound—smoke grenade. Over my shoulder, a wall of gray smoke billows after us. The man in red bursts through it, arms pumping.
“Gane’s blinded!” he shouts. “Keep moving.”
He doesn’t have to tell us twice. The tunnel slopes down, around a corner, then up again to the exit. I’m almost giddy with the freedom of open sky above me, even though it’s not my sky. I catch the landscape in a glance—ancient rotting skyscrapers, the towering sharp beehive of the Verge surrounded by a moat of black water. The tunnel traveled under the moat and let us out at the water’s edge.
Like the girl said, five horses wait just ahead in the street, next to the burned-out hulk of what was once a taxi. They stamp their feet and churn up dust with their hooves. The man types a code into the keypad outside the tunnel’s opening and a portcullis slams down.
“What is this?” Rhys says, head craned back at the ruin around us. “What—?”
“Shut up. He can still grab us,” the man says,
breathless. “Take a horse.”
Four of the horses are all black. The last one is gray, but only because of the dust and grit matted in her coat. Patches of her shine through brilliant white. None of them have saddles.
Peter and Rhys are slow to move toward the horses, obviously stunned by their surroundings.
“Now!” the man roars.
The gray one turns her eye to me, as much of an invitation as I’ll get. I grab a hank of her mane and swing my leg up and over.
Smoke pours through the bars in the portcullis. I hear Gane coughing in the cloud, much too close.
“Dammit, boy!” The man circles his black horse past Rhys, who refuses to climb on. Not the best time for his trust issues to surface. Peter and his horse are already twenty yards down the street, the Empire State Building towering behind him. He stops and swings the horse around, mouth falling open. I follow his gaze—
The last free horse whinnies as its hooves come off the ground. It hovers under Gane’s power, legs thrashing at the air. My gray steps sideways, nimble as a dancer, as the black throws its head around, wide-eyed, lips pulling back from its teeth as Commander Gane lifts it higher. I grab the gray’s mane with both hands as she shifts under me. She rears, kicking with her front legs, and comes down, but she doesn’t leave the other horses behind, even with my frantic heels digging into her side.
“Go girl!” I plead.
Gane is at the bars, choking on the smoke cloud, hand stretched through with fingers spread wide. He snaps his wrist like he’s tossing a chip into his mouth, and the horse arcs up and over the mouth of the tunnel like a tossed football. I watch, frozen, as it plunges into the black moat.
Rhys decides it’s time to go right about then.
“Ride!” the man shouts. The girl in red blows past me, and Peter’s black horse kicks up a plume of dust as he keeps the lead. Rhys scrambles onto the back of the man’s horse, and together we pound the dirt, side by side. My horse moves under me like liquid, carrying me away from Gane and the Verge. I feel Gane’s mind crawl over my skin, tugging at my rags and limbs. I begin to rise off the gray, but clamp my feet down at the last second. She seems to run faster as I settle onto her back again.