In Eden's Shadow

by Amanda Churi

  I applied more force to shut him up, squeezing until he wailed like a human, and I felt his bone crumbling beneath his skin. “You’re obviously wrong. You know as well as I do that you cannot even compare to me now, and certainly, no fledglings can, regardless of their numbers. I trump you and the others a hundred times over.” I leaned down, staring him dead in the eye. “Don’t think that I’ve grown soft in captivity. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.” I snapped my gaze to the horde of demons, making sure each of their eyes collided with mine. “None of you do, so don’t try me. I am in no mood to make bargains or negotiate. Either my way goes, or you go.”

  The demons looked to one another, no one speaking for a large frame of time as they processed my threat, wondering which course of action to take.

  I knew what they would choose, and if by some chance they didn’t, they would be led to the correct decision very quickly. If they thought that I was bluffing, they were in for a rude awakening.

  “Oh, stop being such a crybaby,” I sneered, tugging on Korbu’s shattered hand. His cracking face was streaming with black tears, small pieces of skin falling and revealing the scorched cheekbones beneath as he debated whether or not to switch forms and fight me. “You know that if you resist, it will only get worse.” I released his hand, smirking as he crumpled to the ground with a thud. He groaned while cringing and massaging his hand, trying to rebuild his body as he glanced at me, who loomed above as an ominous, unmerciful soldier. “And if you somehow muster up the courage to battle me, I will utterly decimate your ass. Remember that.”

  He scowled, huffing furiously and turning his head away. “An Essence… Brilliant idea, Satan. Ten out of ten.”

  “Oh, it was! And speak of the God…” I kneeled, locking eyes with he who I used to call a friend. “You should escort me to the gates. I’m anxious to see how much the interior has changed if the fields have become this much of a shithole.”

  “…You do realize that if you enter the gates, you’re history,” Korbu muttered darkly. “You’re living a fairy tale if you think He will pardon you.”

  I snickered, rising to my full height and looking around at the decimated dimension that I used to know every nook and cranny of. The surrounding demons instinctively hustled back at the sight of my sly smirk, my cognitive map spinning as I tried to decipher the location that I had randomly awoken in. “Korbu, Korbu… You’ve never been more wrong.”

  He winced, rebreaking his fingers to put them back in place. “About what?”

  I looked over my shoulder, feeling my eyes fall dark as my tail went erect beside me, Coruscus abruptly stopping a hair away from Korbu’s face and settling between his eyes. He did not dare to move. “You will take me back, and He will pardon me—

  “Because neither of you have a fucking choice.”

  Two

  On and On

  Time—he is inevitable. You can run, hide, dodge, and even outsmart—

  But only temporarily.

  Some forces beyond understanding are often pushed away as a natural occurrence or coincidence, but that is a mistake. Death, Fate, Time… They have names. They have stories. They have motives, favorites, and they have eyes everywhere.

  And that means that in the end, they can and will catch you.

  Maybe someone as little and damned as he would never see them under normal circumstances, but he had looked into Death’s eyes once upon Phantome’s battlefield, staring at his scythe and waiting for the final blow. Now, as Griffin fled to save his petty life, he could almost swear that he saw Time instead, racing across the dark cavern walls as a shadow with one claw running across the stone and the other digging into their tracker that could just not go fast enough.

  He could hardly move in the deadly pod, his neck and spine cringing as he was pinned back by the speed of their travel. Guilt and grief consumed such a large piece of property within his heart that he could not even scream as scarce beams of light streaked past him in the abyss. His skin was frigid, his core had gone numb, and where a prosthetic weapon had replaced that of flesh, a ghost limb had grown, burning with the very pain that beamed from his heart.

  Her face was all that he could see—frames of her lively green eyes and dead gray ones switching back and forth. Not a single detail between past and present hid from him: her once gorgeous, long, vibrant hair falling to that of briars; her flawless pale skin transitioning to a blemished ash; and, of course, her smart, decisive brain housed behind the cunning face that was now caught on his very clothes.

  “…Fifteen, sixteen!”

  The tracker flew to the right, the curve so sharp that Griffin found himself back in reality as his head smashed against the left glass panel. Dazed, he forced himself to blink as he was shoved back into an upright position by the air, struggling to process the current situation.

  Flye manned the tracker he was encased in, her hands coated in blood as she gripped the trembling yoke for dear life, shooting them through the very essence of night. Seek sat directly behind her, hair matted with foreign death and her skin rampant with hastily patched injuries.

  Griffin groaned in the back seat, trying to lean forward and grab Seek’s attention. His spine violently knotted, knocking a painful groan out of him and in turn rolling Seek’s head slightly back to face him, her cheeks white and irises completely gone.

  Griffin hardly kept himself from screaming at the sight of her altered appearance. Those wise, determined eyes had never been so flushed and dead, so rocked by pain and betrayal… And all that she could stare at was him.

  She did not speak. Now that her eyes found him, he became her all. Griffin did not know what to say—or if there was any word to possibly shatter the seemingly unbreakable ice about her heart. Straining his body, he forced himself to lean forward a mere inch—just barely enough to look over Seek’s shoulder.

  Kaitlyn’s black and blue, mutilated body lay curled at Seek’s feet. Her battered face rested on Seek’s thin thighs, eyes closed and breathing hoarse as Seek covered the semi-repaired holes in Kaitlyn’s head where ears once protruded. Even so, blood found its way out, squeezing through the fragile bones in Seek’s fingers and racing down her arms.

  “Is-is she—?” Griffin started to say, hardly able to breathe.

  “Alive?” Seek hissed, her eyes never so much as twitching. “Barely. Flye was able to man up and help me get her out in the nick of time, unlike you.”

  “Huh?” he wondered, squinting painfully. “I-I can’t—”

  “Do anything right?! We know—!”

  “SHIT!”

  Seek’s head whipped back to the front, and Griffin’s hit the headrest with full force as Flye gave the tracker another horrific jerk, sparks flying beneath them as the back of the tracker escaped the range of the magnets, grinding against the rail.

  “Come on!” Flye screamed, gritting her teeth as she grappled with the laws of physics, nearly crushing the yoke in her hands. “Just a bit more!”

  “Flye, what are you doing?!” Seek cried, increasing the pressure around Kaitlyn’s skull to keep her from suffering a fatal blow. “Get a grip!”

  Flye bellowed with rage, jerking the yoke back. The tracker groaned under the pressure as Flye reared the front of the tracker up, forcing it to leave the range of the magnets as well.

  The tracker jolted and sputtered as the connection between the rail and magnets broke, both ends suspended as the pod slid at a horrific speed to the side. Seek and Griffin screamed, Griffin’s heart racing as he watched the sparks alight beneath them and illuminate the caverns they traveled through. Several other tracks ran adjacent to their own path of travel and converged farther down, some occupied by trackers and others by Elites.

  The soldiers of winter flew across the rails at nearly the speed of the automobiles, a torrent of ice flying over the elderly tracks and eliminating friction; yet the ice soldiers shot forward with horrific stability, swinging their chains and honing in on any tracker that loomed close enough.
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  “Flye, hurry up!” Griffin wailed. “The Elites! They’re on our tail!”

  “Still?!” Seek snarled with fright.

  Flye growled. “Don’t tell me what to do, moron!” She held the yoke firmly in place and risked a glance over her shoulder. The Elites were dangerously close, but she paid attention to her allies instead, watching the following trackers copy her dangerous maneuver and slide on at an angle.

  “W-what?!” Griffin cried. “What are you all—?!”

  “Ten…” Flye whispered. “Eleven…”

  An Elite close to another tracker got within striking range, and before he lost the opportunity, he struck, throwing out his chains and swiping the tracker out from under. Ice and fire clashed. The tracker skipped across the rail for a heartbeat more before the unevenly distributed weight allowed gravity to take over. The pod tipped onto its side and rolled over the thin rail, tumbling into the depths.

  “Tracker down!” Griffin alerted Flye, whose face was stone. She disregarded his words, continuing to watch her allies fall one at a time, but she never stopped counting.

  Piece by piece, the horde of trackers behind them fell apart, uncountable Encryptors tumbling into the clutches of Death. An army fell to that of a regiment, and when all near trackers had been defeated, several Elites set their sights on Flye’s tracker, who led the escape.

  “Flye!” Griffin tried again as two Elites flanked each side of their tracker. “Do something!”

  “Thirty-one… Thirty-two…” Flye looked back at her passengers, black eyes flickering with fire. “Hold on! This is gonna get messy!”

  Seek quickly closed her eyes, leaning down and shoving Kaitlyn’s face into her chest. Teeth chattering and muscles liquefying, Griffin gripped both sides of the pod and pushed out to hold himself in place as Flye turned back to the front, the Elites twirling their chains and taking aim.

  One struck. The grapple flew under the tracker, and it skipped, rocking back and forth as a burst of ice covered the surrounding rail. The tracker creaked; the buttons and lights of the interior flickered as shards of ice and sparks of electricity clashed.

  The other lashed out, knocking the tracker back toward the opposing Elite before it tipped over. The infrastructure buzzed; smoke spilled out from the pod as the soldiers ripped open the shell, slicing hunks of wires and nearly putting the tracker out of business.

  “FLYE!!!” Seek and Griffin screamed in unison.

  “SHUT UP!!!”

  Furious, Flye yanked the yoke back to its limit, and she closed her eyes as a sudden feeling of weightlessness took hold of the contraption.

  Griffin did not understand what was happening until he looked out the window. His heart flatlined when he saw the Elites falling beside him, thrashing in midair and trying to fly like chickens. Genuine fear danced in their eyes as they blindly threw out their chains in hopes to latch onto something.

  “No, no, no!” Griffin cried. The lights went out completely and gave way to impenetrable darkness as his hips slightly lifted from the seat. He strained his arms, pressing out with all of his might and peeling his eyes wide, hoping to take in at least some essence of light as the air whistled beside them, joining them in their plummet.

  An explosion of blue lit up their falling coffin. Griffin whipped his head to the side as an Elite smashed into an outreaching rock, erupting into a waterfall of ice crystals.

  Griffin took an unstable breath, his head flying around as another burst of blue shot through the night; all that Griffin saw was the Elite’s semi-intact arms and legs tumbling down into the unknown.

  The walls. They were closing in, preparing to pinch them like a bug and take their blood into the stone.

  Frantic, Griffin spread his feet wide and slammed his fleshy hand into his metallic palm, throwing his head into his chest as Fate’s whine surrounded them. “Holy Mary, pray for me! Saint Joseph, pray for me! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph assist me in my last—!”

  His legs surged with energy, folding as Griffin flew up, the arc of his spine smashing against the roof as he saw stars and roared bloody murder. He fell nearly as fast as he rose; the headrest of Seek’s chair decked him in the chin and knocked his head back as he crumpled to the floor, body ringing and burning all over. His face folded in agony; he gasped for air when the pod ferociously kicked forward, shooting him across the floor and shattering his back against the seat.

  Trying to act like a man wasn’t important to him. He openly cried out of pain and relief as the electricity flickered back on, the pod smoothly gliding forward as though nothing happened. The salt from his tears and bloody mouth swirled together, nearly choking him, but he did not stay down, lifting his mechanical arm and gripping the seat as hard as he could. He had to grind his teeth to distract himself from the painful blood bruises surely forming on his back; even his powerful prosthetic struggled to lift such a dead weight, but it did just enough for Griffin to get the edge of his rump on the seat before he plopped back, heaving.

  Seek groaned in a daze. “We’re alive…?”

  “Don’t know how,” Griffin wheezed. “I… Don’t think I can move my back…”

  “Great,” Flye huffed. “First, an amputee—all that we need now is a paraplegic.”

  “Hey! If you had reacted earlier—!”

  She gave the pod a rough jerk, throwing Griffin against the wall. “Please! There was no way around it! This track is the only one to Pikë! And PSA, I told you to wear your seatbelt, so don’t yap at me about your boo-boos, ‘kay?”

  Griffin fell silent, honing in on the statement before the insult. Using his fleeting energy, he forced himself to reach for Seek’s seat, using the strength in his prosthetic arm to pull him forward. He gasped as he collapsed over the chair so that his front half hung beside Seek. “Pikë?” he warily repeated. “As in where Seek and Kaitlyn found us?”

  “Where else?” Flye spat, never looking behind her as the tracker slowly lost speed.

  “…Is that smart?” he wondered. “Surely the Proxez are going to expect a move like that since it’s a former rebel base and all.”

  Flye sighed. “Maybe, but we don’t have a choice at this point. They’re gonna lock down the entire empire to catch us all, and if we get stuck inside, we’re nothing more than fish in a bowl.” Her eyes darkened, shoving away any light that tried to penetrate. “We have to go out.”

  Griffin wasn’t too on board with the plan, but what could he do? He spat a glob of blood onto the floor as Seek slumped back down in her seat, her bloody fingers cringing around Kaitlyn’s face. Concerned, Griffin eyed her up, watching her eyes gradually regain their pupils and shift back to a light gray. “You alright, Seek…?”

  “Never better,” she grunted, reaching down under the seat and grabbing a roll of duct tape. She put the end in her mouth, pulling and tearing off small pieces and wrapping them around her fingers to hide the gashes. “Have to get these covered up before we touch open air.”

  “Better speed that up,” Flye urged.

  Griffin looked ahead. A small ray of distant, fragile light quickly approached, and within seconds, the gloomy beam washed over their beaten tracker. Griffin stared up, breathless.

  The ever-lingering sky continued to shift aimlessly in an unchanging pattern, just like it had for centuries. Petrifying mist slithered into the depths that began hundreds of feet above, singeing the sides of the crevice with burning-cold ice and emphasizing the disparity between the surface and their location. They were so far down that what little luminance existed in such a desolate world merely tickled them; the overhanging toxins hid the tracker as they crossed the divide, concealing them from the airships that could be heard roaring above.

  …Hopefully…

  “I can’t believe Kaitlyn fell into this and lived…” Griffin exclaimed in awe, staring down into the gaping jaws of night that stretched endlessly below. “It’s so cold… I can hear it slowly cracking the glass.”

  “She’s a trooper,” Seek grumbled. “T
here’s a reason she’s been my bodyguard all these years… She could and would withstand anything to protect me.”

  Silence descended upon them as the four finished crossing the rusted rail that connected the two landmasses. The shadows recaptured their bodies, and they continued their journey.

  Griffin stared at Seek as she continued to bandage her wounds with whatever was available. “You never really told us why Typo can find you like that… There’s a lot that we never seem to know until it’s too late…”

  “You’re one to talk about speaking up,” Seek hissed, sharply tearing off another piece of tape and resuming her messy patchwork.

  “Hey—!”

  “Don’t argue,” Flye butt in, shooting Griffin a deathly glare. “This situation is all your fault, so just shut up, would you? Be happy we got your ass out; trust me, I didn’t want to carry you that final stretch.” She raised her neck, looking behind them as a headlight came aglow in the roughly carved out tunnel. “Looks like someone else got through those shitty tracks that Justus laid out. Guess his calculations were just right.” She sniffled, wiping her bloody nose and turning back to the front as she began to tinker with a few buttons. “Nerd.”

  “…A nerd that was smart enough to make a track that was viable, but too hard for enemies to follow,” Griffin grumbled.

  Flye reached behind her and karate chopped Griffin’s neck. “IF I WANTED YOUR INPUT, I’D ASK! Just pretend that you’re in time-out; sit down, pout, and think about what you’ve done!” She huffed irritably and ignored the gagging child, refocusing her attention on the more pressing matter. “Besides, don’t go acting like you’ve got his best interest at heart. Justus was nothing but honest with you, and you were like an immature cock ruffling your feathers…

  “…You know… There’s a reason King de Vaux always kept you on the back burner,” she went on to say. “Even though you may take to the front lines, puffing out your chest and trying to act brave, you act on nothing but impulse, and that’s not being a hero. That’s a coward. You make others pick up your slack and take the blow instead.”