A stone door opened, and he jumped inside. The drop was deep, but he landed flawlessly anyway. An array of Intelights was the first detail he noticed, followed by the length of the sewer that stretched in front of him—and the stench. He checked behind him first and then continued down an elevated platform on the side of the sewer. A stone wall rose to his right, curling into the ceiling to form an arch.
He could make out a faint noise in the distance. The farther he traveled, the clearer it became. Someone was screaming from what had to be excruciating pain. Sword drawn in front of him, he picked up his pace.
He pressed his back against the wall as he neared the corridor’s end. Leaning forward slightly, he caught a glimpse of laboratory equipment in the room ahead. He closed his eyes as the screaming intensified. Was that a child?
Debonicus stepped around the corner, disappeared, and was suddenly hacking at air on the opposite end of the lab. He had missed his target. But it was the scene directly under his nose that rattled him. A young boy, no older than five, lay on a table with his shirt off and chest ripped open. His eyes were closed, but he was definitely awake. Tears streaked down the sides of his face. Debonicus glanced at his wrists and ankles, which were bound to the table.
Sensing an electrical blast, the Pogu vanished again. A thunderous bang obliterated the far wall, leaving a crater in the stone. Debonicus looked across the lab to find Mendac, but it was only a fleeting glimpse before the man had disappeared again. He was fast.
Debonicus bolted to another spot, dodging Mendac’s electrical fist. He tried to charge, but the Intel General was already somewhere else. Was he moving faster than Debonicus—an Adrenian Pogu?
It was a hopeless scrum that achieved about as much as a dog chasing its own tail. Tables were flipped and lab equipment clattered across the floor as the two men dashed throughout with no regard for their surroundings. It seemed Debonicus remained wary of only the little boy on the testing table, whose eyes had yet to open, likely suffering from indescribable fear.
Mendac began to toss voltaic orbs across the chamber. They moved as fast as any Adrenian, catching Debonicus by surprise. Such thrust would require exceptional, meticulous weaving.
Debonicus huffed. He may have been cautious throughout his journey here, but perhaps he still had underestimated what he was walking into. He should have come here with a clearer strategy, but he couldn’t have ever accounted for speed such as this. He decided on a wide-sweeping attack, something that would cover every space of the room besides what was behind him—he wanted to keep the boy safe.
He slashed horizontally in front of him, and a razor-like gust cut through the room. It sliced a few cabinets, candle racks, and Intelights in half, but it did nothing to Mendac. The man stood perfectly still. He hadn’t even bothered with dodging the attack.
“You’re going to have to cut me to hurt me,” Mendac said.
Debonicus’s eyes narrowed. He appeared in front of the general, hacking downward as Mendac moved to the right of him. A flash of blue blinded Debonicus momentarily, as Mendac’s hand touched his shoulder. A shockwave rocked the right half of his body, from his head to his feet. Debonicus yelled, but managed to muster up an elbow strike to Mendac’s ribs.
Mendac staggered, and the Pogu switched his sword to his left hand as he swung again. Finally, he sliced Mendac’s bicep and broke skin. Taking advantage of Mendac’s condition, the Pogu thrust his sword toward his chest, but Mendac vanished again. Debonicus whirled and gazed down the hall. The general was fleeing. Debonicus gave chase, but then everything went black.
* * *
Bryson felt the pressure against his temple disappear. He opened his eyes to see Vistas’s grave face. A minute of silence crept past while Bryson stared blankly at the servant’s chest, replaying what he had just seen.
“Why’d you stop?” Bryson eventually asked. “I can handle it.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped if there was more to show—at least of the fight. Debo gave me a fragmented memory. What you just saw was the first half; I’m about to show you the second. But there’s a piece missing in the middle.”
“Mendac was that fast?” Bryson asked.
“Who knows,” Vistas said.
“Why did he erase the rest of the fight?”
The servant placed his hands on his knees. “My best guess is that something happened that he does not want us to see. And that’s fair, considering he allowed us in his memories in the first place—an invasive ability. He even allows you to enter his thoughts during certain parts.”
Bryson rolled his eyes. “Just like Debo to pick and choose what he shares.”
Vistas’s gaze held steady on Bryson, despite the Jestivan’s habit to purposefully avoid eye contact. “When I first saw the memory, I was more concerned about what I had seen on the table.”
Bryson sighed and looked down at his knees. “Throughout my childhood, I used to dream about someone carving into my chest. I’d wail helplessly, but couldn’t move or see ... and I remember it being because I was too scared to open my eyes. I knew it was something I had experienced before, but it wasn’t until all the terrible truths about my father were revealed that I was able to guess who was responsible. This verifies it.”
Vistas nodded slowly. “Let’s see the rest,” the servant said. “There isn’t much more.”
* * *
Placing his hand against the wall for support, Debonicus limped down the sewer that led to the hidden laboratory. He pressed his other hand against his face, its skin textured like shriveled rubber. Mendac had dealt more damage to the Pogu than anyone had during his existence as a Bozani. Luckily, he was able to heal fast.
He entered the lab and stepped over toppled tables to the boy. Organs, bones, and muscles were exposed. Hundreds of hair-sized pins were inserted throughout the body’s internal contents. They almost seemed invisible. Debonicus looked over every tool that sat nearby, as if he could somehow fix this mess. He wasn’t a doctor or surgeon, only an executioner.
A radiant light bathed the lab before vanishing immediately. Debonicus froze and muttered, “This cannot be ...”
“It is.”
He paused at the sound of a lady’s voice but didn’t turn to look at her. “Since when does someone of your rank leave the empire before the executioner returns? We shouldn’t be down here at the same time.”
“How is he?” the woman asked.
“Why?”
“How is he?” she repeated, this time with more bite.
If Debonicus were wise, he would simply answer the question. She was known for her erratic behavior. “He’s split open, but he’s awake.”
A string of floating lights entered the left side of Debonicus’s peripherals before forming a cluster and transforming into a woman. She gazed down at the boy, her eyes as fierce as he’d ever seen them. The amount of volume in her charcoal black hair made her shoulders look skinny. Her bangs were long and thick, and a tattoo of a black circle with a dash cut through four sides peeked through them.
“This is something twisted,” she said.
Debonicus continued to stare at her. “We shouldn’t be down here at the same time, Naipa. This is reckless; my aura alone is enough to overwhelm this city.”
Her eyes slowly drifted to him. “Well then, leave. I have memories to clean—thousands of them, seeing that your fight was taken outside.”
“Will you make me forget? Please?” The question came from the boy on the table, his fragile voice shaking violently.
Both Debonicus and Naipa looked down at him. He had finally opened his eyes. Naipa frowned. “Not yet. We must have you healed first.”
Another tear slipped from the boy’s eye. “Will you fix my heart?”
“What do you mean?” She leaned over and gazed into his chest. “It is beating. What’s wrong with it?”
“Look closer,” he said. “I’m always sad and scared.”
The woman straightened up with a curve to her eyebrows, realizing w
hat he was implying. “Your heart isn’t broken, sweetie. It’s filled with all of the right things.”
“Like love?”
She smiled. “Like love.”
The innocence of the boy’s comments made this moment even more devastating. “Bryson, buddy,” Debonicus said. “You’re going to be okay.”
The boy gazed at him through his blond bangs. “How do you know my ...” His voice trailed off as Naipa waved her hand over his face, sending him into slumber.
“How are we going to fix this?” Debonicus asked, gesturing toward Bryson’s chest. “We aren’t miracle workers.”
“We’re soldiers,” Naipa stated. “Someone is on their way.” She glanced across the room. Hurried footsteps became audible. “Here he comes.”
“And what are we to do with the kid?” he asked, looking back at Bryson. “He has no dad, and his mom wants nothing to do with him.”
Naipa shrugged. “There are orphanages everywhere.”
“No.”
“I’m sure the Intel King would take him in.”
A man sprinted into the lab before stopping to bend over and huff for air. After taking a moment to collect himself, he hustled forward. He was pudgy, with olive skin and deep black hair and gaudy gold glasses crowding his face. He stopped in front of the boy, his eyes widening. “Oh my ...”
“Who are you?” Debonicus asked.
The man finally turned and acknowledged them. As he rounded the table and slapped on a pair of gloves, he said, “I’m Mendac LeAnce’s research partner, Nyemas Jugtah.”
“So you were aware of the extent of his experimentation?”
Nyemas paused just before reaching for some tools, his frown pronounced. “Never.”
Naipa yawned. “If he had been part of this, he would have been on your list of names to kill. Isn’t that correct, Debonicus?”
She was right, but that didn’t stop him from glaring at the strange man.
“And is it you I have to thank for the note I found in my office?” Nyemas asked as he began threading string through a muscle laceration.
“No questions,” Naipa snapped.
“Very well then.” After a pause, Nyemas tried speaking again. “You two are high-ranking Bozani. I would have expected more discomfort from your presence.”
“We’re significantly suppressing our power as of the moment,” Debonicus said, shooting Naipa a dirty look. “Which is taking quite a bit of effort with both of us here.”
“Will you shut up?” Naipa spat.
Ignoring Naipa’s remark, Debonicus studied Nyemas’s approach to the situation. He didn’t like the casual nature of it. “How long did you work with Mendac?” he asked.
“Over a decade,” Nyemas said. “I was here mostly, holding down the fort while he was on his frequent excursions into the Dark Realm.”
“You seem awfully okay with this.”
“I’m disgusted,” Nyemas replied. “And a little shocked, but I guess I shouldn’t be.”
“And why is that?” Debonicus asked.
Keeping his hands pinned against Bryson’s chest, Jugtah tilted his head to the side. “Over there.”
Debonicus followed the scientist’s gesture to a lectern. He approached it while Nyemas continued operating on Bryson.
“Mendac LeAnce has always been known as a Weaving Theorist,” Nyemas began to explain. “He’s created hundreds of them. However, he has a particular obsession with only a couple, and they both rest on that lectern.”
Debonicus stopped behind the lectern. Two thick stacks of parchment rested side by side on its surface. On the cover pages of each stack was the name of the author—Mendac LeAnce—and the name of the respective theory: The Theory of Energy Gates and The Theory of Connectivity.
Debonicus opened his mouth again, but Naipa cut him off. “Go back—now. I’ll seal this room and clean the city up.”
He tried to match her glower but was distracted as Jugtah folded the boy’s skin back onto his chest. The boy would have many scars in his future, but there was something peculiar about two of them. They seemed to have been carved into his chest.
“What is ‘T2’?” Debonicus asked, eyes narrowed.
Jugtah stepped back and observed it from afar. “I don’t know.”
Debonicus noticed Naipa had yet to remove her gaze from him. He gave her a nod, then his vision vanished to white.
* * *
Bryson’s mind buzzed as Vistas removed his fingers from Bryson’s temple and traded his seat on the table for an armchair. Ten minutes passed, possibly more. This raised a lot of questions, but it gave a couple answers, too. Now he knew why he had no memory of anything before that night. That woman—Naipa, was it?—had likely wiped it clean.
Still, Bryson was most intrigued by the two theories—one more so than the other. Two years ago, he began having a reoccurring dream of being in a classroom with a chalkboard at the front and shadows covering the wall on one side. Written on the chalkboard was something in a strange language. He had never understood it, but over the course of the year, Agnos had eventually translated it to “The Theory of Connectivity,” which had only presented more questions. The words might as well have stayed in their original language, because either way it made no sense. If the likes of Agnos and Lilu had never heard of such a theory, nobody did.
But now Bryson knew where it could be found. He only wished he knew what the Naipa lady had meant by “seal this room.” He’d need to get in touch with Lilu since she was already in Brilliance.
Bryson looked up at Vistas, whose legs were crossed, hands folded on his lap. “Have you been able to make sense of any of it?”
“Like anyone, my intuition has a ceiling,” Vistas said. “Knowledge of the Light Empire is far beyond it.”
Bryson pressed his face into his hands. Who and what was Naipa? What happened in the rest of the battle with Mendac? Jugtah was Mendac’s research partner? How much had he known about his partner’s missions in the Dark Realm, and why hadn’t he told anyone of this fact?
“Every question you’re asking yourself right now I’ve asked myself repeatedly over the past few years,” Vistas said, his eyes glued to the Jestivan.
Bryson stood up and headed for the door. “I have to leave, Vistas. Someone might have answers for me. Thank you for showing me that.”
* * *
Bryson stood alone in Shelly’s room. The princess had gone with her mother to see a doctor elsewhere in the palace. A cluster of white lights appeared, converging to form a human shape. Thusia. Her straight blonde hair disappeared behind her back, and a braid circled her head. She smiled. “Hey, Bry.”
He didn’t return the warm greeting. “Who’s Naipa?”
She froze, her smile slipping from her face. “What?”
“Naipa—who is she?”
Thusia continued to stare at him. He couldn’t decipher if it was shock or confusion on her face. After some time, she finally said, “I’ve never heard of the name.”
“Don’t play dumb,” he said, his tone the flattest it had ever been, needing her to know that this was serious. Besides, he could tell simply by her reaction that she recognized the name.
Finally, she sighed. “I can’t tell you, Bry. Quite frankly, I don’t know how you know. Nobody down here knows that name—including any royals.”
“Well, I know it, and now I want to understand its significance.”
Thusia’s gaze lingered on him before she waved toward a sofa. “You need to sit down. I don’t think you realize the severity of this situation.”
“What situation?”
“You knowing that name!” she hissed.
Bryson matched her glare, then moved to the couch. Releasing a deep breath, Thusia stared at the night sky through the glass ceiling. When she looked back down, she walked over to where he sat and placed her hands atop his armchair. “If you want to know anything, you must tell me how you know the name.”
“I experienced—”
“And ..
.” she proceeded, cutting him off. “You must understand that I cannot guarantee you information. Once I find out what you know and why you know it, I’ll have to present this knowledge to higher authorities. They’ll be the ones who determine what I can share, which will probably be nothing ...” She trailed off and shook her head. “And they’ll also determine what they’ll do with you.”
Bryson’s jaw clenched. “‘What they’ll do with me’? All because I know of a name? What if I tell you I know she was a fair-skinned lady in her upper thirties with jet black hair that has entirely too much volume for her tiny frame?” Thusia’s eyes widened more with each descriptor. “And what about the tattoo she has on her forehead? Or her abnormally large hazel eyes?”
Thusia looked as if Bryson had just described a demon. “I don’t get it,” Thusia said. “You’re going to get yourself killed. Do you want a Pogu coming after you?”
“I want to know who Naipa is!” Bryson exclaimed.
Just as he yelled, the floor opened as the platform in the corridor below ascended. Princess Shelly stood at its center, looking toward Bryson and Thusia, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. “What is going on up here?” she asked.
“Summon Suadade,” Bryson demanded.
“Aw, good to see you too, love,” Shelly said with a mocking smile. “Doctor’s appointment went great. All of my vitals are doing swell ...” As Bryson continued to pay Shelly no mind in favor of staring daggers into Thusia, Shelly rolled her eyes and said, “Very well.”
Another cluster of lights formed before morphing into Suadade. He wore his typical garment: long robes and a scimitar sheathed diagonally across his back. He scanned over the faces in the room and said, “Is this another ‘play-date’ kind of deal? I have business to attend to in the empire.”
“Who’s Naipa?” Bryson asked.
The Chronicle Page 14