by Jacob Whaler
The little girl looks up at Jessica and uncurls her fingers from the Stone. She drops it into Jessica’s hand.
“Hey.” Jessica smiles and opens her eyes wide. “That looks like the rock you lost, doesn’t it Matt?”
“Sure does.” Matt tries not to be too obvious.
“Would you mind giving this rock back to him? He could use it to help other people, just like he helped you.”
The little girl looks from Jessica to Matt. “OK.”
“Thanks,” Matt says. “This will help me a lot.” He holds out his hand.
Jessica drops the Stone into his palm. “You look terrible.”
Matt stands up and stares at himself. Black streaks cross his body. His shirt is gone, and his pants are riddled with holes and on the verge of falling off. He grabs his backpack and rummages through it.
“I always have extras.” He pulls out a white T-shirt and a pair of white short pants. “I’ll change later.”
Images flash in his mind, forcing his eyes closed, throwing him to the ground. Veins of lightning fill the clearing, piercing bodies and exploding internal organs. Men and women. Jessica is among them. She turns to Matt, reaching for him. Screaming.
He opens his eyes and looks into her face. “I’m going alone.” Matt slings the backpack onto a blue shoulder and moves from under the ledge.
Jessica reaches out and grabs his ankle. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the clearing,” Matt says.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No!” Matt gently pushes Jessica back. “The transports have all landed. I have to protect the people, help them get away. You stay here and take care of our new guest. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, would we?” He smiles at the little girl.
Not fair.
Jessica mouths the words and releases Matt’s ankle. She looks up at him with moist eyes that carry a complex mixture of anger tempered with love.
“Sorry,” Matt says. “Go with the rest of them into the city. I’ll find you later.”
“I thought we were going to stay together. I thought you promised. I don’t like being separated.”
“Neither do I.” Matt squints his eyes through the trees, searching for the clearing. “But I’m not ready to see you die. Forgive me.” He reaches for Jessica’s head, pulls her close and kisses her.
Then he twists and moves away.
“You be careful, Matt Newmark.” Jessica’s voice lowers to a whisper. “Remember. You don’t have to be a hero.”
“Never was a hero.” He takes a couple of steps toward the low hum of the heli-transports. “I’m not going to start now.” He sprints away through the trees.
After a hundred meters, he stops.
Why am I leaving Jessica?
He turns and looks in her direction. The sound of the massive heli-transports settling in the clearing comes from a hundred meters in the opposite direction.
His eyes go back and forth. Thinking, weighing.
As his eyelids drop, he sees a frozen image of people, members of the freedom camp, running from the transports in the clearing. Ragged tongues of lightning belch from EM cannons on the sides of the black beasts, cutting them down.
So many. They need me. I can save them.
But what about Jes—
He squelches the thought before it can change his mind, turns and sprints to the clearing.
CHAPTER 33
I’ve got them now, Jhata thinks.
Inside the cathedral, Leo stares up at the light coming through dozens of stained glass windows.
“Is this real?” Yarah reaches out to touch the polished surface of a jade column rising thirty meters to the ceiling. She looks at a forest of identical columns.
“It’s all real,” Jhata says. “I threw it together one afternoon when I was bored.”
“What’s outside?” Leo says.
Jhata nods toward a heavy wood door. “Shall we have a look?”
Without waiting to answer, Yarah runs across the floor, weaving in and out of the green pillars on the way. She stops in front of the door, looks up at its immense size and the intricate patterns carved in the wood.
“How do you open it?” she says.
Leo stops at her side and gazes upward. His fingers reach out to trace a line along its surface.
A crack appears in the center of the door, running from top to bottom. Both halves swing open, as if on their own, letting in sunlight followed by a breeze of moist, salty air.
Leo fills his lungs. “I love the smell of the ocean.” He takes a couple of steps out into the cobblestone courtyard and glances carefully from side to side.
A black railing runs its entire circumference with only blue sky beyond it.
Yarah blasts past Leo and runs across the courtyard to the other side, scattering a flock of yellow birds with bright red beaks gathered in the center. When she gets to the black railing on the other side, she jumps high, wraps her fingers on the top rung and pulls herself up, hooking her leg on the bottom rail and coming to a sitting position.
She stares at the valley below.
A vast city of glass spreads out before her eyes. At the edge of the city, a forest of blue pine extends to the foot of a jagged-toothed mountain range. Three rust-red moons float above the horizon.
Yarah finally opens her mouth. “The Emerald City.” Her feet dangle over a sheer rock face falling away a thousand meters below. “Just like in the fairytale books.”
“I thought you’d like it.” Jhata stands behind her. “I made it just for you.”
Leo stops beside Yarah, his fingers stretching out carefully to grasp the railing. He leans over the top and stares with rapt attention. When he looks back up, he takes two steps backwards. “Quite a nice world you have here,” he says. “Are there any people?”
Jhata leans against the rail. “All my worlds have their own people, their own civilizations.” Her gaze sweeps through the valley and ends at the mountain peaks directly across from where they stand. “It would be too difficult to be alone.”
“I’m going to have people in my world, too,” Yarah says. “And I’m going to be the queen.”
Jhata pats Yarah on the head and runs her fingers through her dark hair. The little girl is such an exquisite specimen of unrestrained creativity and natural telepathic powers. Even now, Yarah is scanning her and Leo’s minds, simultaneously. Jhata finds pleasure in it, like tiny fingers scratching her back in all the right places.
Imagine what Yarah could do with a little more training and a few more Stones.
Jhata lets the thought leak out of the protected zone in her mind, like bait on a hook.
“Do you really think I could get more Stones like you?” Yarah looks up at Jhata with brown eyes that shout of innocence and instant trust.
“Of course, my child,” Jhata says. “There’s an unlimited supply. You just have to know where to look.”
“Could you show me?”
“When the time is right.” Jhata turns away from the railing and begins to walk to the center of the courtyard. “How about if we eat first before we go to the city?”
Yarah slides to the ground from the rail. “We get to go to the city?” She jumps up with her arms flopping beside her, like a bird. “I can’t wait!”
As they walk across the courtyard, Jhata probes Leo’s mind for the information she craves. He isn’t a natural telepath like her and Yarah and will have no idea what she is doing.
From her earliest memories, Jhata moved through minds at will. As a child, she was content to stay indoors, effortlessly roaming the landscapes of any mind that wandered by. They reminded her of planets, with continents and oceans, vast cities rising on empty plains, small towns, highways, mountain ranges, storms, earthquakes.
And like any planet, each mind is a unique combination of natural and artificial structures.
For Jhata, scanning a mind is like dropping into an uncharted world. She flies over land or water, most
ly just empty space, looking for unique forms and patterns, anything that catches her eye. The weather might be calm as a spring morning or violent as a typhoon. Cities could rise and fall in seconds. Mountains might suddenly appear where none had been only moments before. The landscape is constantly changing, flowing and fluid.
And it can be dangerous.
Children’s minds, like young planets, are especially unpredictable and erratic. And Jhata can tell at a glance that Yarah’s is a firestorm of activity, whole continents appearing and disappearing at random. Her volatility is off the charts.
But that is only part of the challenge.
Yarah, like other telepaths, has the ability to detect the presence of others in her mind. If that happens, predators can suddenly appear. You might get locked in, unable to leave, becoming the prey. A millennia of experience has taught Jhata to be on constant alert when jumping into the mind of another telepath, and to build defenses within her own mind to the probing of others.
As they walk across the courtyard, Jhata is impressed at what she sees in Leo’s mind. It possesses the structure and organization of a much older man, with row upon row of orderly mountain ranges, calm lakes and rivers, vast oceans with silken surfaces, cities built on mathematically precise grids.
It will take time to find what she is looking for. She senses tension in his mind, making it more difficult to scan properly. She needs to get him to relax. Sleep is even better. It will allow her to make a slow, careful inventory.
They pass back through the open wood doors into the cathedral-like building, past the great jade pillars, beneath brightly colored stained glass windows, and through an immense wooden door on the other side, coming out onto a balcony.
The smell of saltwater drifts up on a delicate breeze.
“So this is where the ocean is,” Leo says.
Far below, a sandy strip of beach runs from left to right. Long horizontal lines of white appear on the water, waves stirred up by the wind.
On the balcony, a table is furnished in medieval style, with meats, breads and desserts of assorted colors. Not a vegetable is in sight. Three high-backed chairs with red cushions complete the picture.
“Let’s eat,” Jhata says. “Then you can explore the city.”
Leo and Yarah sit, filling their plates and eating the food without question or suspicion.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the universe.
Children are so easy.
“I’m sleepy.” Yarah curls up on her chair and drops into relaxed slumber.
Leo drops the bone he is gnawing. “I’ll just take a quick nap.” He pushes the dishes back and puts his head and arms on the table.
Soft snoring sounds float across the silence from both children.
I could kill them now and take their Stones.
“Sweet dreams,” Jhata says. She drops into a complicated fractal structure on an endless plain in Leo’s mind. A thrill runs through her. It conceals a cache of recent memories, still fresh enough to unravel.
CHAPTER 34
Be back to you in a few minutes, Jessica. Promise.
Matt grips the Stone in his hand and races across the spongy ground past the mammoth trunks of centuries-old cedars. Above his head, fires burn through the canopy of the forest. Shattered trees lay next to jagged stumps, felled by EM cannon blasts. Here and there, charred bodies are scattered on the forest floor, nothing more than lumps of smoldering flesh.
Smoke hangs in the air like the breath of dragons.
As he gets closer, the hum of the heli-transports turns into a low frequency vibration that travels through the ground and reaches up through the soles of his feet and legs, resonating within his chest cavity, playing with the rhythm of his heart.
He crouches and hides behind a boulder at the edge of the clearing, moving forward on his belly to get a peek at the transports that have landed in the clearing.
When he sees them, a hundred meters away across an open field, their small size surprises him. For all the howling and destruction he has witnessed, each one is barely twenty meters long. Five of them, black attack-helis, stand end-to-end in a line at the center of the clearing, side doors still shut, quad rotors spinning slowly.
Matt scans across their hulls.
What they lack in size, they make up for in armaments. Each carries four EM cannons, one in the front, one in the back and one on each side. Each canon rises above the roof of the transport on articulated arms, able to spread destruction in any direction.
To Matt’s surprise, a group a men and women from the camp are gathered in a tight group halfway between him and the attack-helis. He recognizes the tall man with the beard, the one who opposed Eva in leading the people to the city. Others in the group look familiar from the flash of images Matt saw in his mind.
Images of death.
The man with the beard now stands facing the group, his back to the mechanized black dragons, his arms raised.
“Do not fear.” His voice booms over the low vibrations that shake the ground. “No need to run, no need to hide. Those who have gone back to the city will find only Abomination. It will infect their souls, make them weak. They are lost. But we are still strong.”
The tall man turns to face the attack ships. He raises a black crossbow, the same kind Matt saw in the tent. Loading an arrow, he points it at the nearest ship, less than 30 meters away.
“Leave us,” he says, talking to the ship as if it were alive. “You were born in Abomination, and your name is altogether Abomination.” The air whistles as the arrow flies at the black ship.
With a quiet sizzle, the arrow vaporizes on impact with the carbonite hull of the transport. Gray dust dribbles like drops of rain to the ground.
Each time he blinks his eyes, Matt catches glimpses of what’s going to happen to the people in the clearing, like random frames of a movie.
Nausea radiates from his belly. He tries to push back the blackness that pours through him.
Don’t shut your eyes.
Matt forces his eyes to stay open, afraid of what he might see. As a diversion, he takes a clean white T-shirt and pants out of his backpack, slips off the burnt rags that cling to his body, and slips on the new clothes. The white fabric stands out in stark relief next to his blue skin.
Finally, his eyelids heavy, he gives in to the urge and lets them close.
It begins almost immediately. Images of people in the field near the attack-helis. They are spread out, running in confusion to the safety of the trees, their eyes wide with terror, screams rising from their throats. A network of jagged white lines bursts from twenty EM lasers along the line of ships. The lightning rips through the fleeing crowd, piercing backs and exploding out through chests, leaving smoldering piles of flesh and bone on the grass.
With effort, Matt lifts his eyelids.
The group is still standing in front of the black hulks. A blanket of silence lies over the field. Faint lines of vapor rise from the open barrels of the EM lasers.
It’s going to happen.
Without further thought, Matt jumps to his feet, backpack in hand, and runs out from behind the boulder onto the field, heading for the front of the group.
The tall man still has his back to the crowd and is yelling epithets at the ships, arms waving in the air, like a defiant grasshopper throwing challenges at a sleeping lion. He stoops and loads another arrow into his crossbow.
Matt stops a few meters away and turns to face the crowd, dropping his backpack to the ground. Hundreds of pairs of eyes move their focus from the tall man to Matt. With dark blue skin, a white shirt and white pants, Matt thinks he looks like a Martian who has wandered too close to the sun.
“Leave now. Run for the City.” Matt throws his arms back at the black monsters that stand in silence behind him. “In a few minutes, they’ll kill you, all of you.”
At the sound of Matt’s voice, the tall man abruptly turns and faces him, bringing his crossbow up to point directly at Matt’s chest.
/> The man’s hoarse voice rises to a crescendo. “Look at him. His blue skin shouts Abomination. He is the one that brought these black beasts to our camp. And now he wants us to leave.” Spit bursts from the man’s lips. “The sooner he is dead, the better.
The man takes a step closer to Matt, crossbow cocked and pointed.
The thought of touching his sternum and withdrawing the blue skin armor crosses Matt’s mind. His fingers momentarily hover over his chest. But then he looks at the arrow tip only a few meters away and withdraws his hand.
“Please,” Matt says. “Listen to me. They’ve come to kill you. They’re calibrating the instruments now, scanning the crowd, locking in on each of you. You’ve only got seconds to live. Leave now, while you still can.” He drops to his knees and brings his hands out in front, his voice dropping until it’s barely audible. “I’ll do my best to protect you. Please trust me. I’ve seen it.”
“You’ve seen it?” The tall man bursts into a loud laugh. “So you really do think you’re a prophet?”
The low-frequency sounds coming from the black ships go quiet. A deathly silence floats across the field.
A dozen people back away and peel off from the crowd, turning to run, disappearing into the trees.
Good, Matt thinks. At least a few are getting away.
“Let them go back to the city,” the man says. “Like a dog to its vomit.”
Matt faces the man. “I’m afraid you’re going to die.” He grips his Stone and begins to slowly breathe, reaching out to the present moment until he holds it in his grasp, ready to stop time.
“No,” the man says. “You’re going to die.” He stretches out his arms so the crossbow is two meters from Matt.
A faint popping sound, like pulling apart two pieces of cloth charged with static electricity, comes from the black ships.
Matt turns his head in time to see the tips of the EM lasers light up with a blue glow.
Time stops as his mind grips the present.
Matt casts his gaze across the field. As far as he can see, the air is milky white. A black dart from the man’s crossbow hovers in midair two feet from Matt’s chest. A massive network of barbed bolts of lightning from twenty EM laser cannons hangs suspended above the ground.