Grimacing, I shifted—
“Oww …”
How could a person keep sustaining pain like this? Just yesterday I’d been lucky not to shatter my shoulder. A fortnight ago I’d been almost killed by an army of automatons, including making it through the collapse of a building … I’d fought orcs, marachti, been pummeled by earth and rock and water more times than I could count … how much more of that could I take? Surely there had to be some sort of quota, a capacity for enduring beatings. I was well overdue for breaking a bone as it was. If things kept on compounding like this, likely thing was at some point I’d trip up a stair somewhere and die from it as it all finally caught up.
I raised my head, cutting a swath through the mists. Unsteadily, I rose.
My eyebrows knitted.
The mists cut open around me. But they didn’t close, didn’t spill back together. Moving with that same lethargy, there was only a very slight kind of oozing, very slowly and gently wafting. At this rate it would take hours, if not days, to stitch up the gap I’d cut through it.
It was the same behind me, I saw as I turned and craned. I could track my descent through the mists from the portal Carson had opened—only it was not so much a descent, I realized with widening eyes, but a horizontal track, until the rocky lip that had flung me skyward some twelve feet rearward. So how had I fallen?
“I came out sideways,” I murmured.
And so the mountain in the distance I’d seen from the crystal chamber … it hadn’t been a mountain at all. It was just the horizon, flat and barely craggy with rock. I’d just been looking at it from the wrong angle—just like I’d come in, then ended up rolling, as though some component of gravity from Yyrax had leaked through with me and pulled me along.
Peculiar. Very peculiar.
I took a moment to peer up into the sky, such as the fog allowed me to see anyway. Grey-green in hue, it was pocked by a frail disc, half the size of a penny at arm’s length.
A distant story came back to me from some wayfarer’s tome—how the ground could be unstable in these places, how the fracturing process forcing worlds together created great cavities under rock, and the slightest disturbance caused them to fall in.
I pushed it out of mind. It was not going to happen.
And anyway—I needed to find my brother.
Giving my line launcher a gentle pat—didn’t want to tug it too hard, or someone would think I was giving the signal to be yanked back in—I set off. Manny had likely been carried the same way out as me, maybe even smashed into the same rise that cast me momentarily skyward.
Question was, from here, where would he have—?
The thought stopped before it completed.
A vacuum was open in the mist ahead of me. Only small, it looked as if it had once been larger, but had filled most of the way in.
And glimpsed through it …
My heart thudded.
Manny? Here?
I strode forward on shaking legs. Swiping hands through the mist to waft it away, I fell to my knees, groped for—yes, a body—the mists were moving too slow; my wafting was doing almost nothing—so I grabbed him
(it)
around the midriff and pulled—
The body rose—
And there he was: my brother. He hung limp in my arms, his face gaunter, cheeks desperately thin. His dark skin had taken on a sallow cast, his closed eyes sunken. His hair was soaked through, clothes too, the mist having condensed onto his skin, puddled underneath his body. There was little heat about him—and despite the burst of elation I felt at setting eyes on him again, the sheer flood of tear-inducing joy, I was instantly guarded.
A person turned cold when they died.
“Manny,” I choked, holding him up with one arm. The other, I pressed to his wrist, the arm lolling lazily. I held, waiting …
I couldn’t feel anything.
“No,” I whispered. “No, no …”
I readjusted my grip—then lowered him to the floor, stooping down over him, so I could hold his arm tighter and get my fingers placed just right.
I thought … but no, there was nothing … or was that?
“Come on,” I breathed, loosing his hand. Now I shoved my fingers into the small of his neck, beside his windpipe. When I was a kid at school, and had to take my pulse for science or PE, I’d always had to do it that way; I could never feel the damned thing in my wrist. I’d never asked about it—it was just one of those awkward me things—but cradling Manny, groping at his neck to find some sign of life, I prayed that it was some familial thing we siblings had been unfortunate enough to inherit …
There.
A pulse. Low, and slow … but it was steady.
He was alive.
Tears sprung into my eyes, hot. My vision suddenly warbled, spreading the mist and the fractured landscape into a blurred mire.
“Oh, Manny,” I spluttered, bowing low and hugging him. He didn’t react, didn’t respond at all. But that was fine. I didn’t need him to—not yet, anyway. For the moment, the most important thing was that somehow I’d found him here, somehow he was still alive, fifty-one days after having stepped through that ill-chosen gateway.
And now I needed to get him back out of here.
Wrapping my arms around him, and slinging his limp arms across my shoulders in the process, I said, “I’ve got you, bro.” Then, clutching tight, I reached for the line launcher on the rear of my belt—and depressed the button to reel the both of us in.
As we weren’t actually going up a slope, it was a bumpy ride, the line launcher dragging us hard along the ground. My heels dragged, and at first I fought, jerking them up like I was running backward. That sent me off balance though, tipping myself and Manny over, so I struggled back onto my feet and let the launcher just drag me, through the fog, carving a path perpendicular to the one I’d already made … past the jag of rock that had acted like a ramp and sent me flying … and then finally to the portal that had remained open—and through which Heidi and Carson and Borrick and Bub crowded, pressing in close as I arrived—
“Move!” I yelled—
I zipped through the opening, closing my eyes and ready to slam headlong into the lot of them—
I didn’t hit anyone. Somehow, they’d all shifted clear; I simply sailed in, to a room that was warmer, with thinner, much less saturated air I appreciated immensely—and a crowd of perturbed expressions.
“Mira,” Borrick breathed. “You’re back. We thought—”
“You got him!” said Carson. His face was white as a sheet in the dim light of the torches. He stared at me, and at Manny in my arms, like he’d seen a ghost. “Is he okay?”
“He’s alive,” I said. I lowered Manny onto the floor. It was positively soaked, the semi-stagnant scent of the broken world rich in here. Putting him into the recovery position, I bent over him to press my ear to his chest. “He’s breathing.”
“He was just out there?” asked Borrick.
“In the mist,” I said, “yeah. Just lying there, like a hundred feet from the portal.”
“After all this time? Had he made camp? Tried to cut back through?”
“I—I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see anything else out there—just his face in the fog. It had almost swallowed him.” Bowing again to check my brother’s breathing, I waited for its soft tickle against my face—I had to check, to know that he hadn’t … “Let’s get back to the Velocity, okay? They’ve got a medical bay, right? They can help him.”
Borrick nodded. “Of course. Let me …”
Bub stepped in before Borrick could. “I have him, Miss Mira.” He bowed, and gently lifted Manny up as though he were cradling a baby.
“Be careful,” I said nervously, eyeing Bub’s armor barbs.
But Bub didn’t need telling; he held Manny at arm’s length, so he was not remotely close to receiving even a scratch by the longest of the barbs. In the orc’s huge hands, he was very well supported—and almost peaceful-looking, lyi
ng there.
“I’ll do the gates,” said Borrick. “You just tell me where.”
“Here,” I said, thrusting my compass at him. He could do it—I just wanted to be beside Bub, beside my brother—to know that he was still here, that he was really alive—and that I hadn’t got to him moments too late.
Borrick cut a gate on the wall adjacent to Carson’s portal. The latter was still open, its edges shuddering. More hairlike tendrils had extended from its outer edges now, but they’d not extended far—nothing remotely like the vast tear Carson had opened to do away, three times, with the Order of Apdau, nor on the University of Akron green.
Heidi was staring at it with a peculiar expression.
“Mira,” she said slowly, “you said Manny was only a hundred feet in.” Turning confused eyes onto me, she said, “How long were you gone for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few minutes, tops.”
Carson spluttered.
“What?” I asked.
The four of them were giving me very baffled looks.
“Mira,” said Heidi at last, “you weren’t gone a few minutes. You were in there for hours.”
My eyebrows knitted. “That’s impossible. It was only … less than five minutes.” I looked back into the gateway. Holes remained where my body had cut twice through the mist, jagging off at an oblique angle. It continued its very gradual ooze through the gateway, flattening into misty pancakes that condensed into the growing puddle underfoot. “I literally just fell left, walked a few steps, and found him.”
“It was four hours and twelve minutes, Mira,” said Carson. “I timed it. We were going to go in after you … but the elvish rope kept moving, slowly … and then when we did finally decide to follow …” He blanched. “You reappeared. But you were moving …”
“Slow,” said Borrick. “Like time wasn’t running right for you, until you got back in here.”
I peered at the open gateway.
Was this how Manny had been gone for fifty-one days, yet was only a hundred feet from the portal’s exit?
I shook it off. Didn’t matter. I had him. We could theorize about this broken world another time.
“Let’s just get back to the Velocity,” I said.
Borrick nodded. “Of course.”
We went.
11
The Velocity’s medical bay contested my library for space. Unlike some of the quite confined areas within the ship—mostly corridors and some of the crew quarters, although nestled among them were grander public spaces and a litany of Burnton’s many apparently necessary ‘offices’, often sporting great murals of him in various poses—it was a streamlined open space, cordoned into areas via extendable walls. The dozen beds could be granted a modicum of privacy with these walls, or curtain rails either on the beds themselves or looping around the ceiling. All but one were empty. The last was occupied by one of Tyran’s cookie-cutter followers, stripped to the waist and bandaged across the chest. The bottom of his six-pack was visible—and if I didn’t have my brother’s care paramount in my mind at that very moment, I would surely have taken more than the passing glance I did.
“How are you faring, Wembley?” Burnton called happily to the resting man.
Wembley lifted a hand and tilted it left to right—so-so. “Stings a bit, sir.”
Burnton chortled. “Went and got himself jabbed by a pitfly on a quest over the Mejula-Frye.”
“What’s a pitfly?” Carson asked.
“A very unpleasant insect,” said Burnton, “easily the size of your head, with a nasty nip, to put it lightly. Isn’t that right, Wembley?”
“Very right, sir.”
Burnton guffawed, and Wembley cracked a smile, like being bitten by this bug was a great laugh. Carson, on the other hand, had a much more somber look about him.
“Still,” Burnton said, “the larvae have all come out of the wound now, and that’s the main thing.”
Carson whited. “Larvae?”
“Oh yes. They’re over there, in that jar.”
Sure enough, behind Wembley, on a shelf that ran around the wall, sat a massive mason jar filled with translucent fluid the color of vinegar, and a few dozen maggots. They had bulging, milky white eyes that were easily visible—the bugs were, after all, almost four inches long each.
Carson gagged, and twisted away.
The medical officer, Doctor Fiennes, led us, Bub in front with Manny still cradled in his arms, to one of the beds. There, Bub laid Manny down, with much more care than I would have expected a being of Bub’s mass to possess.
Manny’s breath rose and fell very softly.
Otherwise, he did not move.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Doctor Fiennes affixed a flat metal disc to Manny’s chest. The disc was attached to a thin length of copper-colored wire, mimicking the color of the medical bay walls, leading to an overly large pair of earmuffs that rested on the doc’s head. I realised this tool was Harsterra’s version of a stethoscope. He listened intently, shifting it here and there.
“Well?” I demanded when the silence had gone on too long.
“Your brother’s breathing is shallow,” said the doctor, his accent more strongly resembling Turkish than Tyran’s American-ish. “Likely his lungs have taken in some fluid too, I believe. We must drain it.”
“Will he wake up?”
“Let the man look him over,” Heidi said softly. “You’re asking for a diagnosis before he’s even had a chance to look at him.”
“I will inform you as soon as possible,” said Fiennes. “For now, please let me be working, okay?” And he bustled us away, then drew the curtain around the bed to give himself some privacy to get this figured out.
I was half-tempted to shove back through the curtain and stay there. This was my brother, for crying out loud! I needed to be with him!
But Heidi put an arm over my shoulder and guided me away. “He’s in the best care he can be in right now.”
Was he? The jar of pickled fly larvae sitting beside Wembley’s bed might beg to differ—how long had they been in there to grow so big before Fiennes plucked them out?—but I didn’t fight it, just let Heidi guide me away. It wasn’t like I could do anything myself. I’d gotten him to a care … professional? Overseeing it all like a helicopter sister wasn’t going to speed up Manny’s recovery.
Or his—
I didn’t let that macabre thought conclude. Manny would be okay. He would recover. There were no two ways about it.
“Your brother is in excellent hands,” said Burnton, guiding us out from the medical bay.
“He’ll get in touch with me if anything changes?” I said. “If Manny wakes up?”
“Well, via me, but yes.”
As good as I could possibly hope for. “Thank you.”
“I see your uncertainty,” Burnton chuckled, “but let me assure you, Doctor Fiennes is the best sawbones around.”
“Sawbones,” I echoed stiltedly.
“Old Harsterran expression,” said Tyran, waving it away.
“Actually,” Carson began—
“He’s a very accomplished fellow. Why, I daresay he’s operated on most of my crew at one time or another.”
“Plenty of maladies onboard this ship, are there?” Heidi asked flatly.
“Oh, you know how it is—this Seeking business isn’t all fun and games, is it? Ninety-five percent of it is, of course—the joys we have!—but that last five percent …” He sucked in a breath, arranging his lips in a sort of reverse pucker. “Well, we’ve had our fair share of incidents, as I’m sure you all have yourselves.”
“Like the pitflies?” Carson asked.
“Oho, no,” said Burnton. “No, those blighters weren’t so bad at all. All in a day’s Seeking, that.”
Carson paled. “But … the larvae …”
“Anyway.” Burnton clapped his hands. The sound echoed down the hall we’d exited into, a copper-paneled affair without decoration—alt
hough, I could see at that end the open door to one of Burnton’s offices, dominated by an imperial desk and a sprawling banner of himself in a Superman-esque pose. The divot in his cheek wasn’t present, and nor were his greying roots—although the last of those appeared to have been banished in the time we were rescuing Manny, though his coif was the same style. His fingernails, too, as he predicted they would, looked flawless. “I presume you’ll want to know where we’re going?”
“Where we’re going?” I echoed.
Burnton blinked. “The Spoon of Undying?”
“Oh. We’re headed there now?”
“Of course! I did say—I said, ‘Tomorrow, we heed the call of adventure’.” For a second, he looked lost. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
“Erm. Yeah, you did.”
“I did,” he said—and then he repeated it again—“I did,”—much more firmly this time. Which led me to wonder, though not for the first time, if Burnton had sustained a traumatic head injury sometime during his foray into Seeking. Maybe once Manny was back on his feet, I’d take Fiennes aside to query it.
“Well, we’re en route to our entry point as we speak. The world is called—”
“Wait,” Carson erupted. Boggle-eyed at Tyran, he said, “We’re en route? As in right now?”
“Correct,” said Tyran. And then … “That is correct, isn’t it?” At Heidi’s nod, he said, “Yes, of course it is. So, as I was saying, we are traveling to—”
“I didn’t agree to this!” Carson said.
“Err … you did,” I said. “Last night, in the library.”
Face reddening, he blustered, “Well, yes, but—but I thought you’d—you’d at least ask me once more, to be certain! I might have changed my mind!”
“Well, did you?”
“I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it anymore! I was more focused on your brother dying, and all this stuff with the Antecessors lying to you—speaking of which,” he said, “does that not make you want to reconsider?”
“Reconsider?” Burnton echoed. Gone was his somewhat self-satisfied smile, and likewise the faintly dumbfounded expression he assumed when what he was saying was in doubt. His expression now was affronted, like one of us had spat upon the many murals strung throughout his ship. “You’re not backing out of this, are you?”
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