by Brandt Legg
“They can’t survive without us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
But he wasn’t. He just did not want to debate right now. He had to end Rip’s threat to his people.
Markol clenched his teeth, pushing himself forward through the assignment. Looking at Huang, knowing if he had been born eleven million years later, he could be staring into that Eysen himself, wondering at its mysteries, sensing a deep connection, intuitively knowing it was an actual link to the ancestors of himself.
Instead, the future man’s knowledge was going to cost him his life today.
Sixty
Finally together again, Trynn and Shanoah wanted to savor their final hours, but the drama of their day demanded something more unfortunate.
“I heard you got raided,” Shanoah said, a worried look on her face.
“It was the false lab,” Trynn said.
“I know, but they are telling you they suspect you.”
“Suspecting and proving are two different things,” he said, reaching for her arm.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said as their fingers laced together.
“They’re just reminding me of their decree.”
“And what about last night? They could have caught you with Ovan.”
“Ovan has his own issues,” he said, moving his hand to her back. “It may not have been about me.”
“Of course it was about you. It’s all about you.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “It’s all about the Imazes.”
She pulled away. “That’s what you think.”
“That’s because it’s true.”
“No, The Circle decided to go with the Imazes. That does not mean . . . ”
“What? That my course is wrong?”
Shanoah sighed. “It will be a long time until we have those answers.”
“About me and the Eysens, or you and the Imazes?”
“Both.”
“But you leave tomorrow.”
She ignored his comment. The countdown continuously echoed in her head for a hundred reasons. “Perhaps we will both succeed.”
“If The Circle doesn’t stop me.”
“But you know there are those who believe in the Eysen.”
“There is Welhey on The Circle. Beyond that, I could not say.”
“You know there are others—scientists, historians, the Etherens—and I believe there are more.”
“You?”
“You don’t need to ask that. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times.”
“And each time we get to the same place,” he said.
“Yes.” She nodded slowly. “You are brilliant, Trynn. I believe given enough time, you would save us all . . . but we don’t have enough time.”
“Time is a funny thing.”
She smiled at the words she’d heard him say countless times. “I think you know how I feel. What you’re doing is dangerous, and goes against The Circle’s wishes, but I know you must. And I support you in that. But will you support me?”
“You know I do.”
“But you aren’t just risking your freedom, or your life. Everything is in jeopardy—our society, humanity’s whole future, my life.”
He looked at her, wanting to be angry, but incapable of it, especially with her. “I know the stakes better than anyone. I have watched in High-peak as the future deteriorates. We saw what the original Eysen project did. But instead of being frightened by those results, we should have been encouraged, because we saw what was possible, what great change—”
“But the destruction. We saw so much destruction,” she said. “And it was out of control. That is why The Circle forbid you to go any further.”
“They forbid me because they were afraid.”
“Of course they were afraid. You showed them the end of everything.”
“The end of everything is already upon us. I showed them hope. If they had the courage, they would understand it is the only way to save us.” Her hard look told him he had gone too far. “I didn’t mean the only way.”
“Yes you did. You don’t think the Imazes have a chance.”
“I do, it’s just . . . I have never seen it happening. The Eysen—”
“How much have you seen?” Her eyes gleamed with a passion that could have been anger in a different setting. “It’s eleven million years. You have only seen a blink, a fraction of a blink. You cannot know if it would work, if we succeed.”
“It is so much more than that. It is eternity. You want to go out there physically, to drift into eternity, and you talk about a blink. The only chance of success in the Imaze’s mission is to find that one blink in all of eternity, the one blink that makes us see. How likely is that, Shanoah?”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she successfully kept them back. “It is as likely as anything.”
“I know,” he said, his soothing voice and loving eyes working to calm her fiery resolve. “And I know if there is a way through the abyss, you will find it.” He touched her again, fingertip to fingertip. “I must admit . . . sometimes my selfish desires cloud my judgment with you and the Imazes because it is unbearable to think of never seeing you again.”
Her eyes softened. “But we will see each other again.”
They stared at each other in a silence communicating far more love than their words could share.
“I have the same burden with you,” she said. “Although your quest is here on this planet, how easily can you get lost across eleven million years? How likely is it The Circle will not find you? Banish you? Punish you in ways we cannot dream?”
In her words, he thought of the risk he so often ignored, knowing that down another path of his own making, he could lose her forever. If The Circle discovered his work before it succeeded . . . And what if it did succeed? What if he did more damage than the first Eysen experiment?
What if he ended it all?
“We both have everything at risk,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “But we are more than each other’s only hope, we are the world’s only hope, everyone’s only hope.”
He nodded. “We will have to help each other. We will be able to communicate.”
“We can’t,” she said.
“Yes, we can,” he insisted. “It’s possible.”
“I know it is, but I can’t compromise the Imaze’s mission by communicating with you through the Eysen.”
“You have to, Shanoah. You will jeopardize the mission if you do not.”
As much as she believed in the Imaze mission, she also knew he was right. The vastness and blindness of space across time . . . the odds were so great that she would be lost. But the Eysen could provide them a guiding light to bring clarity in the darkness.
“When you go into the different entry points,” he said, “I can show you . . . help you find them. Otherwise, your mission is just as dangerous as mine. Even if you find the right point, if the moment is off even a little—”
“I know,” she said, staring at him, not wanting to argue, not wanting to deny his premise, to refuse his assistance, when she knew he was right. “I don’t know how it would work.”
“Together, we will find a way.”
Sixty-One
Markol tried to steady his hand from shaking.
“How much time?” his assistant, Vide, asked, much surer of the assignment than his mentor.
“Just a couple more minutes,” Markol said.
Shank had secretly had a discussion with Vide, who was prepared to act in case Markol hesitated.
The giant, three-dimensional projections of Rip’s sphere covered every angle of his face, eyes, the visuals of his thoughts, yet they could not tell this man wasn’t Rip. Lines of circles and dots—the Cosegan language—translated everything. All around Markol and Vide, floating translucent buttons and pads supplemented the thought controls that powered most of their commands and computations.
In their multifaceted thought waves, Cosegans were able to
multitask at incredible rates, simultaneously undertaking complex actions and thoughts that Huang and Rip might only dream of. And in that process, Markol thought of Trynn. It had taken him weeks to prepare for this encounter with Rip. The pressure, the details and minutia of making it all work, the connections constantly fluttering and slipping across the eleven million years . . . And it wasn’t just him and Vide, there were the Enders, a team of thousands of top Eysen specialists and scientists working furiously to maintain the link, to keep control of the connection, and everything they did reverberated through time, changing the subtlest of instances—blinks of a tiny animal’s eyes, the precise crossing of a certain spider’s web, a leaf blowing just so in a breeze millions of years from now, all of it going differently. Anything could affect the change.
Markol watched the variables, seeing it shake and wobble through the clarity. “Less than a minute now,” he said, his hands still trembling from what he was about to do. They saw the excitement building in Huang’s face as he got closer and closer to the center. They, of course, all knew what he would find there, something he had been searching for since the Eysen discovery.
Markol’s own eyes widened as he saw Huang’s eyes widened as he saw the center core.
Markol smiled weakly and nodded, as if Huang could see his farewell greeting. Then Markol touched the holographic power override sensor, and it was all over.
The powerful jolt from the Eysen center core extinguished Huang’s life in an instant.
The Cosegans all watched him drop to the floor. There would be no chance for revival. Even if he had been in an ICU unit when it happened, everything inside him had been fried.
Markol’s lab remained hushed for a moment longer.
“Shut it down,” Markol said in a weak voice, then repeated a little louder, “Shut it down.”
The images from Rip’s Eysen went dark.
Markol took a deep breath, and then notified Shank. “The archaeologist is dead.”
Savina received the transmission from Huang hours after his death. Having no idea anything bad had happened, she immediately tried to contact him, excited to join the mapping of the Eysen center core. Instead, once linked, she sat horrified, witnessing what had happened through her Eysen.
She, by far the most brilliant of all the Eysen researchers, the one who had gone the deepest, immediately theorized what had occurred. All the evidence was there that it had been no accident. He had intentionally been targeted from within the Eysen, and only the Cosegans could have done it.
She contacted Booker right away. “Huang is dead.”
“What? How?” Booker asked disbelievingly. He, like everyone, adored Huang. He also knew Huang was inside one of the most secure facilities on earth with nearly a thousand special operatives and every known modern military hardware defending it.
“I’m still running the data . . . ” she began.
Through his shock and mourning, Booker immediately assumed the Foundation had gotten to Huang, or perhaps the same mysterious group that had targeted Rip in Italy.
“How . . . how did you know?”
“I saw it on the link.”
Booker, through another screen, contacted Rip’s facility and directed the Blaxer in charge to check on Huang. Neither had been notified of any security breaches, and the commander reported airtight conditions.
“I’ll go immediately,” the Blaxer replied.
Booker provided the twenty-nine digit entry key code that, coupled with the commander’s retina scan, was the only way through the vault door.
“What about the Eysen?” Booker asked Savina.
“I saw the Eysen,” she said. “It’s safe, but Huang is dead.”
“Who did it then?”
She continued pouring through her Eysen, trying to track the originating source.
“Who did it?” Booker asked again.
“The . . . the Cosegans.”
“What?”
“The Cosegans,” she repeated. “They killed him.”
Booker shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“It was them,” she said woodenly.
“How?”
“They used the Eysen,” she explained, still stunned herself. “The Cosegans used the Eysen as a weapon and killed Huang across eleven million years.”
Booker was silent for a moment, knowing Savina was too practical and methodical to have gotten something like this wrong. He believed her, somehow knowing it was possible.
And then the frightening question lodged in his throat until he could finally force it out.
“Why?”
Sixty-Two
Trynn looked at Shanoah, lost in thought. He could tell she was worrying about the mission. “I saw Mairis today.”
“How’d it go?” she asked, coming back from her thoughts.
“She said she hates me.”
“Sorry,” Shanoah said, touching his hand. “She doesn’t though.”
“She was pretty convincing.”
“Mairis is young.”
“Is that an excuse?”
“Yes, I think it is.”
They were quiet for a while.
“Trynn, she just wants to be loved. She lost everything, including you—”
“I was there—”
“No, you weren’t, and you still aren’t.” Shanoah sighed. “You love your work, and that’s okay, but you have to include her. She needs to be loved. She needs to see that she is needed. She needs to be hugged and fawned over. You have to allow yourself to get past her mother in her and see her for the young woman she has become. She needs it. It will make her whole, or at least closer to whole. Her anger is only a coverup for the intense hurt and abandonment she feels.”
He thought about that for a long moment, feeling the truth resonate in her words. “You’re right. You’re right. You are so right.”
They were silent again for a while, and then Shanoah surprised him with a question about the far future. “How do you approach different times? I mean specifically. How can you choose?”
“It’s as if . . . we are the palm of a hand,” he explained, laying his hand out between them. “The hand is holding all the knowledges and events of eternity.”
“Okay.”
“In attempting to contact specific people in other times, it is as if each finger reaches into those eras, carrying the wisdom and experiences we seek to convey. It does not matter in which order we press those fingers. They are but destinations. We may touch the year they call 1500 BC, and then the year they call 2000 AD, but after that, back to 800 AD, then ahead again. We can go how and where we like, because it is all before us.”
Shanoah touched his hand, as if trying to wrap up time itself and hold it between them forever. “It is the same with the Imazes,” she said softly. “In crossing the field and going forward in time . . . but I go physically, and . . . I may not make it back.”
They both knew she might die, but mostly ignored that fact. Otherwise it would eat them from the inside and burn them at the edges of everything they did.
“I know,” he whispered. “But if you get lost, I will come find you.”
She wiped away a tear. “It is such a long way, eleven million years.”
“I was there and back this afternoon.”
She leaned over and kissed him. For the last time? she wondered.
Weals clicked his strandbands to send a message to the Arc. He was surprised when she answered.
“Trynn and Shanoah are together, safely tucked in bed . . . actually making love at the moment.” He said it in a way that made it sound especially salacious.
“Of course they are,” the Arc said. “She leaves in the morning, possibly forever.”
“They talked first,” he said, somewhat dejected that she didn’t want the pictures. “His secret Eysen facility is called High-peak. I have someone running the name through our systems, seeing if it comes up with anything. Welhey, other things we already knew, but there’s someth
ing you might want to know.”
“Yes?” she said impatiently.
“He did another insertion today.”
The Arc nearly gasped, and instinctively looked out her window over the expanse of Solas glowing in the darkness, relieved it was still there, that the Terminus Doom had not swallowed them yet. Then, suddenly, she was hopeful. “What was the result?”
“Apparently better than the last, but not what he’d hoped.”
“Hmm.”
“He’ll try again.”
“He does not have enough globotite.”
“Still, we have more than enough proof to banish, even imprison him for life. Are you going to send the guardians to arrest him now, or are you still planning to wait until the launch?”
“That is my decision,” the Arc snapped. “I do not take council with you.”
“Of course, but if you want it done off the official record, I could remove this problem at any time.”
“I’m aware of your credentials . . . and . . . ” she hesitated to use the word, “talents.”
Summoned to Shank’s office inside the great hall, Markol assumed he wanted the grueling details of the archaeologist’s death. He had decided not to provide the grim description to Shank, but rather simply report it had been done.
“You failed,” Shank said, as if scolding a dog.
“What are you talking about?” Markol responded, indignant. “I watched him die.”
“I’ve just come from the league. I assure you, the archaeologist is still alive.”
“How?”
“It was someone else at his Eysen.”
Markol closed his eyes, devastated that he had killed the wrong person.
“Don’t get emotional about this. Whoever died was someone who understood far too much about the Eysen. He needed to be killed as well. Nothing wasted. This just means we have to go in again, and this time get the archaeologist. He is key.”
“Okay,” Markol said reluctantly, dreading another encounter, but knowing it was necessary.