by Daniel Price
She cradled him in her arms, her voice choked with tears. “Just hang on, Zack. Stay with me.”
Peter climbed to his feet and raised his bloody hands at Ivy. “Look, there’s been enough death today.”
“Oh, really? Who have you lost? Last I checked, the breachers were still alive.”
“Not all of them,” Peter reminded her.
“Right, yes, the Golds.” Ivy laughed. “Funny how the Pelletiers didn’t lift a finger to save them. But they didn’t like what we did that night. Oh boy, were they mad. You know how I know?”
Peter closed his eyes. “Ivy . . .”
“Shut up.” She turned to face Amanda. “He never told you what happened, did he? What your demon masters did.”
Amanda glared at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I was pregnant with twins,” Ivy said. “Two big, healthy boys. You should have seen the echosounds. They were gorgeous. They were perfect.”
Her eyes glistened with tears. Her gun quivered against Liam. “But then my due date came and I couldn’t stop bleeding. Something had gone wrong. Richard rushed me to the hospital but it was already too late. When they pulled my sons out of me . . .”
She let out a cracked, delirious laugh. “They were shiny all over, as if their bodies had been dipped in metallic paint. Can you picture it, Amanda? Can you guess the colors of my sons’ corpses?”
“Look—”
“Silver and gold!” Ivy cried. “Gold and silver! Do you get it now? It was a message from the Pelletiers. They killed my children and desecrated their bodies while they were still inside me.”
“We have nothing to do with them,” Peter said.
“Bullshit!” She gestured at Bug. “My brother’s dead! Semerjean ripped his throat out, all to save this woman.”
Amanda had to fight to keep her tempis from screaming out of her. “We never asked them to help us. We didn’t ask for any of this! We hate them as much as you do!”
“Well, they love you,” Ivy said. “They love you Silvers like their very own children. So you can see what a delicious opportunity this presents for me. I only wish I had some metallic paint for your corpse. That would really make it poetic.”
Peter caught a gleam in the corner of his eye. He turned and saw Rebel fumbling with something, a small, metallic device with a radio antenna.
A detonator.
“No!”
There were three rooms in the Absence that none of the Silvers got to see: a closet on the engine level, a pantry in the kitchen, and the lumivision lounge on the dining deck. Inside each one was a hundred-pound block of cyclotrimethylene putty, a powerful explosive more commonly known as Wild-9.
Rebel had installed enough of the stuff to vaporize the Absence. He’d been saving his present for the Pelletiers, but this seemed a good enough time to use it. If he was lucky, maybe Semerjean was still on the ship somewhere.
Panicked, Peter made a fevered dash toward Rebel. Ivy aimed her gun at him and fired. The bullet cut a path through his shoulder blade. His chest exploded in a fist-size spray of blood.
Liam’s eyes went wide. He broke away from Ivy. “Dad!”
The moment Ivy lost her hostage, Amanda attacked. A tendril of tempis crashed down on Ivy’s forearm, breaking its bones and throwing the gun out of her hand. It skidded across the tile and came to a stop between the unconscious bodies of Zack and Mercy.
Rebel gripped the detonator with his last three working fingers. He flipped the lid with his teeth, closed his teary eyes, then slammed the button against his chest.
And then . . . everything stopped.
Rebel was so wrapped up in his expectations that it took him three full seconds to realize that the Wild-9 hadn’t exploded. The ship was still in one piece, but something had changed. All the partitions had toppled to the floor. The floors and walls stopped vibrating.
The Absence had come to a complete and abrupt halt.
A hundred yards away, the struggling black Griffin shot several yards above the saucer. Theo looked at Melissa, frantic. “What are you doing?”
“It’s not us.” She slammed the air brake, then peered out her window. “It’s them. They stopped.”
“What?” Theo raised Melissa’s phone to his mouth. “Hannah, are you there?”
Hannah sat up in the kitchen and rubbed her throbbing skull. Everything had gone topsy-turvy. All the people in the room, all the Gothams’ fancy equipment, they’d all been thrown to the floor.
She saw her phone on the tile and picked it up. “Jesus. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Theo said. “I don’t like this.”
Heath peeked out of his window, then sucked a loud gasp. Melissa followed his gaze and saw exactly what he was looking at.
“Mother of God . . .”
A dark new shadow filled the dining room. Amanda and the Gothams turned their heads to the east. Two enormous faces peeked in through the nearest windows—a white-haired man with fierce blue eyes, a brown-haired woman with irises as black as tar.
Esis looked down at Amanda, her huge lips curled in a smile. “Hello, child.”
TWENTY-ONE
Melissa Masaad had seen enough supernatural mayhem in the last eight months to fundamentally alter her reasoning. She’d moved mountains to make room for the existence of chronokinetics, unhinged her jaw to swallow the notion of parallel Earths. She’d made peace with the fact that were no givens left in her universe, only Givens.
But nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the Pelletiers.
They floated thirty thousand feet above the ruins of Atropos, standing shoulder to shoulder on a floor of pure sky. Azral wore a sharp gray business suit with a casual open collar. Esis sported a Russian leather waistcoat over a white blouse and slacks. They both looked perfectly comfortable in the upper troposphere, despite the subzero temperature and the unbreathable air. The wind blew all around them without ruffling a hair.
Most jarring of all was their impossible size. Theo had once told Melissa that the Pelletiers were abnormally tall, but he’d undersold them by at least two hundred feet. The Absence looked like a beach umbrella next to them. The Griffin was just a hummingbird in the backdrop.
“That . . .” Melissa tried to form words, but her brain was still trying to process the situation. Like Jack on the beanstalk, she’d climbed beyond the clouds and was now facing giants.
Her paralysis broke. She gripped Theo’s wrist. “Tell me those are lumic projections.”
He shared her thunderstruck expression. “Those are lumic projections.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
Melissa snatched a wireless transceiver from the glove box and set it to Integrity’s main frequency.
Cain watched her through the dashboard camera. “Wait. What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” Theo asked her.
“There are two people out there whom I feel very comfortable calling ‘aliens,’” she said. “If these are indeed the Pelletiers you warned me about—”
“They are,” Theo said.
“—then we have a whole new problem. All of us.”
The radio crackled with chatter. She raised the handset to her mouth. “This is Melissa Masaad, Integrity Associate 42144. Authorization rider: 6-Athena-26.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I need to speak to Noah Butterfield. Now.”
—
If Mink Rosen had still been alive, he would have been the only one on the ship to see the real Azral and Esis. They stood together under the glass dome of the terrace, their attention fixed on a small, floating hologram of the Absence. Through its ethereal windows, they watched live, tiny replicas of the people in the main dining room: the living, the dead, and the two men caught in between.
Esis assesse
d Zack’s and Peter’s conditions before focusing on Rebel. He continued to clutch the Wild-9 detonator, slamming the button over and over.
“Richard . . .”
Every move she made was matched in real time by her giant lumic doppelgänger. Every sound was amplified to a thunderous degree. When the big Esis spoke, the windows shook. Teeth rattled. Even the Silvers in the kitchen could hear her, like a neighbor’s TV that had been turned to top volume.
Ivy cradled her broken arm and fixed her crying eyes on Rebel. “Do it, love! Do it!”
Rebel was trying, but the detonation signal was jammed. Nothing he did could set off the explosives.
Esis rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake . . .”
“Ga’helgen la-ïl,” Azral muttered to her.
“Yes. Of course.”
She made a quick, twirling gesture with her finger. A horizontal portal, no larger than a tea saucer, opened ten inches above Peter’s dying body.
Liam kneeled at his side, distraught and confused. “What—”
A silver disc dropped through the opening and landed on Peter’s chest. The survivors in the room watched intently as the metal burned through his T-shirt and affixed itself to his skin.
Liam shook him in panic. “No! Dad!”
“Calm yourself,” Esis said. “He heals.”
Peter thrashed on the floor, his body coated in a sickly yellow glow. After four seconds, the light faded and his convulsions stopped. His eyelids fluttered chaotically.
Liam checked his wrist pulse, then lifted his shirt. Though his skin was drenched in sweat and blood, his exit wound had already sealed. Only a thick, jagged scar remained, and even that was starting to shrink.
Amanda stayed at Zack’s side, her tempis still clamped around his severed neck artery. His vital signs were getting weaker, but no new portals were opening. Azral and Esis didn’t seem to have any interest in healing him.
“Goddamn you . . .”
A tempic knife popped out of Amanda’s fist like a switchblade. She moved it to the healing disc on her back.
“Stop.”
She looked up to see Esis’s huge black eyes fixed squarely on her.
“Those devices are disposable,” Esis warned her. “They only work once. You won’t heal him. You’ll simply harm yourself.”
Amanda met her gaze with trembling fury. “Save him.”
“Why? So you can defy me yet again?”
“We were done! We broke up!”
Esis pursed her lips skeptically. “A lie that only you believe.”
“Don’t let him die. Please!”
“We’ll deal with you in a moment,” Azral told her. “If you have any sense, you’ll keep your mouth shut and wait.”
He turned back to Rebel, sneering. “It must ail you, Richard, to see your careful plans fall to dust. These elaborate traps you set for us.”
Rebel looked away from the window. “Fuck you.”
“Ever the poet,” Esis quipped.
“And the fool,” Azral said. “I almost pity him. But then I remember all the atrocities he’s committed—”
“Atrocities?” Ivy rose to her feet, red-faced. “Look at yourselves!”
The Pelletiers viewed her with matching scorn. “I blame this one,” Azral said. “The fanatical voice in his ear.”
“Oh, she’s awful,” said Esis. “Like a lesion in the midbrain. She stimulates aggression.”
“Shut up!” Ivy cried. “You killed my sons!”
“You killed your sons. You could have seen the light of reason. You could have listened to Pendergen when he tried to make peace.”
Azral shook his head reproachfully. “And yet you persisted with your violent crusade, forcing us all down a harder path. My family has been inconvenienced but you, Ilavarasi, have lost friends, children, siblings. How many more must fall before you finally learn?”
Ivy wept into the crook of her arm. “I’ll kill you . . .”
“And still she swears violence,” Azral said to Esis. “She is beyond hope.”
Rebel spat blood at them. “Just get it over with already, you shitcocks. I’m sick of looking at you.”
Azral scoffed. “Did you think we came here to kill you? Is that what you see in your future?”
“He sees nothing,” Esis said. “He’s no true augur.”
“Nor a martyr,” Azral added. “Death is a far better fate than he deserves. No, sehmeer, I believe he should be exposed for the false prophet he is. Let him live to bear the condemnation of his people.”
Screaming, Ivy searched the area for her fallen gun. “Monsters! Demons!”
Azral looked to his mother with weary eyes. “Mortula shi-la ma’tin.”
“With pleasure.”
Esis pinched two fingers together. A two-inch portal materialized in the dining room, a meter away from Ivy’s head. She didn’t see it. Her attention was on the shotgun by her brother’s corpse.
She rushed toward the weapon, babbling incoherently with rage. Once upon a time, she’d been a princess among her people, the most gifted daughter of the clan’s most powerful family. But now even Amanda felt pity for the creature Ivy Sunder had become. She wondered how many more losses it would take before she became just as broken and twisted as the woman in front of her.
Ivy seized the shotgun and spun around to face the Pelletiers. “I’ll kill you! I’ll—”
A fast-moving projectile flew out of the Pelletiers’ portal, piercing the back of Ivy’s skull. Her head snapped back. She sucked a sharp breath.
Rebel struggled to crawl to her. “Baby?”
Ivy touched her scalp with a trembling hand, saw the blood on her fingers, then stared in astonishment at her husband. “I . . .”
Her eyes rolled back. She fell face-first over Bug, then lay gravely still on his chest.
“Ivy!”
Esis smiled vindictively. “When last we met, Richard, you fired your noisy weapon at me. I captured the bullet in a temporal portal and promised you it would return one day.”
She leaned in closer, her nose almost touching the window. “You sealed her fate seven months ago. She died by your hand.”
Rebel dragged himself toward Ivy, his cracked voice wavering between a whimper and a scream.
“Do you think he heard us?” Esis asked Azral.
“Doesn’t matter. Already I see a change in the strings.”
“Oh yes,” said Esis. “A new day dawns. Only one question remains . . .”
She narrowed her eyes at Amanda and Zack. “What are we to do with this pair?”
—
Hannah looked down the hallway, her fingers clenched like steel hooks. She had too many reasons to be nervous at the moment. The Pelletiers were upstairs, along with half her group. Integrity gunships were approaching quickly from below. And she wasn’t entirely sure that the ship was free of its Gotham problem.
But her biggest concern was twenty yards in front of her, in a shallow nook at the end of the corridor. A man she’d kissed just minutes ago was about to do something stupid, and very likely fatal.
“I don’t like this,” Hannah yelled down the hall. “I think we should try something else.”
“There’s no time,” Jonathan said. “We need an exit.”
His alcove was just ten feet away from the delivery hatch, far closer than Hannah would have liked. Once the big door dropped, the entire hallway would become a vacuum, a rather strong one at that. Hannah had once seen an episode of MythBusters where the hosts simulated an explosive decompression on an airplane. It didn’t end well for the test dummy.
“At least use the rope you found,” she urged Jonathan.
“I told you, there’s nothing to tie it to.”
“I can anchor you. I’m heavy as shit.”
Twelve feet behi
nd her, Mia and David toiled frantically in the kitchen. While one scrambled to get Gemma’s surveillance station back online, the other fiddled with the ship’s public address system.
Mia pressed a green button on the console and spoke into the microphone. “Hello? Can anyone hear me? Peter?”
Not a squeak from the ceiling speakers. Cursing, Mia scanned the console screen. “It says ‘Remote Locked.’ But who’s locking it? Integrity?”
“No idea,” David said. “It’s obviously not working. Look for something else.”
Once again, Mia pondered the strange black device that Jonathan had found in the manager’s office, the cryptic “solution” her future self had told her about.
She picked it up by its cloth straps and studied it from every angle. There was a sliding compartment on the lower left side, one she’d never noticed before. Opening it revealed a pair of thick sport goggles, plus a yellow slip of paper with bold-faced warning text:
Always make sure your aerochute is fully charged before jumping. Do not jump anywhere near a solic generator tower.
“Aerochute . . .”
Sixty feet away, Jonathan took a deep breath, then squinted his eyes at the delivery hatch.
“Okay, get ready,” he told Hannah. “It’s too heavy to drop all at once. I’m just gonna drop the edges.”
“Just be careful,” Hannah yelled. “You and I have unfinished business.”
“You make it sound like you’re gonna whack me.”
He peeked out of the nook and eyed Hannah awkwardly. “That was a mob joke, not a—”
“Just do it already!”
He focused his thoughts and dropped a one-inch sliver from the base of the door. The sky took a hissing breath through the slit. All the dust bunnies in the corridor began rolling toward the opening.
Mia ran to Hannah and brandished the aerochute. “Wait! Tell him to put this on!”
“What?”
“It’s for skydivers! It—”
Jonathan’s next drop blew the hatch wide open. It hurtled away from the Absence, taking half the doorjamb with it. The hallway filled with sunlight and shrieking wind. Hannah could feel the draft from the kitchen.