by Nadia Afifi
The Trinity men, however, did not retreat. Sarka stood at the front of the group, spraying bullets in every direction while other fighters used the wall partitions and overturned furniture for cover. Like Parrish, Elder Young crouched on the ground, hands raised in the air while he recited prayers over the gunfire. Through smoke and falling dust, his temples glowed faintly in the same blue light from Rozene’s memory. Three Trinity men stood in unison, firing their weapons at the nearest robot.
Amira clutched the railing, color draining from her face. Rozene had not imagined the Elder’s strange power. The Trinity Compound had their own tricks to bring into battle. The memory of Rozene, flailing like a marionette at her Sisters in Faith, flashed into Amira’s thoughts, and her heart sprinted in response.
A stray bullet ricocheted off the high ceiling’s chandelier and hit the staircase where Rozene, Amira and Barlow stood.
The three new arrivals, who had been observing the scene mutely from above, took their cue to retreat. Their movement, however, drew several eyes upward, including those of the grinning robots, who turned in time with Parrish.
Elder Young pointed at Rozene and yelled something incoherent.
At that moment, two of the robots lunged forward at the Trinity men.
A young, lanky man charged to meet them, ripping apart his black coat to reveal the wires strapped around his chest. He unleashed a battle cry.
“Get down,” Hadrian yelled.
The sound and force of the explosion shook the landing as debris flew and scattered across the room. Amira fell on her knees, feeling the floor tremble beneath her. Barlow also lost his balance, yelling something she could not hear over the powerful ringing in her ears.
Shaking, Amira looked up. The explosion was not as large as it felt, leaving most of the men dazed but mobile, but there was little left of the two robots and nothing of the young man remaining in the small, smoking crater in the center of the living room floor. The chandelier fell to the ground, sending shattered gold-colored glass in every direction. The ringing in Amira’s ears subsided, replaced with low curses and coughs as everyone collected themselves following the blast, feeling for missing limbs or open wounds.
Elder Young leapt up and pointed to the landing. “Kill the apostates, kill them all!” he screamed.
“Let’s move back,” Barlow said in a low voice while Rozene moaned in pain.
Below them, Hadrian had the same idea, lifting a weak Parrish over his shoulders and sprinting up the staircase as the Trinity men resumed fire. The robots followed in a reverse retreat, stepping backward but continuing to fire along the way. Electromagnetic fire struck two Trinity men in near unison. Both let out a strangled scream and gaping holes appeared where their chests and abdomens existed seconds earlier.
Rozene hurtled toward Hadrian when he reached the top of the stairs, gripping him in a fast, friendly embrace before resuming her retreat. She hobbled through the door and Hadrian clapped Amira on the back of the head, still balancing Parrish around his shoulders.
“Family’s back together again!” Hadrian crowed, extending his arm around the door for a final volley of bullets.
They tore at breakneck speed down the corridor, but when they entered the room with the prism-like structure, the Trinity guards from the back entrance waited under the door’s archway, blocking their escape.
“Quick, behind the pillars,” Hadrian shouted to Barlow as the rest of the Trinity men poured out from behind them.
They were trapped.
Suddenly, a Trinity man toppled forward, blood spurting from his chest. The other men spun around.
Several voices rose in a battle cry. Through the falling dust, D’Arcy, Lee, Maxine and a small group of teenagers charged into the room, brandishing rifles and stunners. Speechless, Amira dropped to her knees.
The Trinity men took positions behind the pillars on the other side of the prism. The new arrivals crouched in positions on the far side of the room, firing at the Trinity men. Hadrian bolted to join them, dodging fire in the open space. All from Hadrian’s ship, several looked no older than sixteen. The oldest was a girl Amira recognized, aiming her rifle with visible skill. Lee immediately adopted the role of leader, barking commands.
D’Arcy fought her way toward Amira, her dead eyes and frozen face betraying battle shock. Amira embraced her and could feel D’Arcy tremble. With one shoulder still bandaged, D’Arcy wrapped her other arm around Amira. A bullet struck the pillar above them, raining dust over their heads. Either the dust or the sight of Amira roused D’Arcy from her terrified state and she smiled.
“I couldn’t stay on the ship,” she yelled over the gunfire.
In front of them, the Trinity men advanced on Parrish.
Though ashen-faced and limp, Parrish rallied and the robots resumed their attack while Amira and D’Arcy helped Rozene. Several robots moved to protect them but struggled under the hail of bullets and Parrish’s weakening state – they reacted slower, their movements stilted and sporadic, which emboldened the Trinity men. The sides of the pillars that sheltered Amira and Rozene came under heavy fire, cracking and sending additional trails of dust into Amira’s face.
Behind a nearby pillar, Maxine spat, reloading her weapon. Her eyes met Amira’s and she winked, before unleashing a fierce torrent of electromagnetic fire. The Trinity men continued their assault, seemingly targeting their part of the room. Targeting Parrish. Targeting Rozene.
Rozene slumped against the pillar, her arms folded over her stomach as she mouthed a prayer of her own. She remained a believer, Amira realized, in her own way. While Amira readily left everything behind her except for the small bag she carried on the train to Westport, Rozene always carried a heavier burden on her shoulders.
Amira leaned forward to say something encouraging, but before she could speak, Rozene looked up at her and shook her head. Her eyes were heavy with resignation. She was preparing to die. Amira clutched Rozene’s hand in response and the two women shrank down together behind the pillar, surrendering to fate.
Bright light filled the room, the earlier coral sky now blue and crisp with the sun’s emergence over the mountain’s high ridges. At this new influx of light, the glass pyramid also illuminated and the machine above it came to life with a whirring growl.
The machine’s awakening brought a lull to the fight, as both sides behind the pillars paused to process the strange phenomenon unfolding in front of them.
Light gathered at the pointed base of the pyramid, growing in brilliance until beams shone from all four corners of the prism in a blinding burst of energy. The glare of light subsided, and Amira gasped when she suddenly saw herself, D’Arcy and Rozene huddled together on the far-right side of the square room, then again to her left and right on the other side of the glass. She stood up and her three copies stood up with her. There were other figures as well – Barlow, Maxine, Parrish, Elder Young, Trinity men, all apparently in several places at once.
And then Amira understood. The machine was both hologram and prism, using the sun to reflect everything the light touched and refracted through the glass, so the holographic copies materialized from all sides of the room. Victor Zhang had built a hologram unlike any other. The images were vivid and real. From a distance, there was no telling reality and illusion apart.
Mass confusion enveloped the room as its occupants appeared to quadruple in number in an instant. Zhang’s robots spanned every corner, along with Trinity men firing in all directions. Figures darted and ran across floors and past pillars, bullets flying ineffectually through bodies that turned out to be air and illusion. Other bullets found their target, each strike causing four identical bodies to fall to the ground in perfect unison. Hadrian darted around the pillars, capitalizing on the confusion as he fired, though he often shot at the wrong targets since they adopted the same tactic of continuous motion. Parrish’s robots were no wiser, unable to
distinguish between flesh and phantom, striking at anything with two legs and a weapon.
The chaos provided a fleeting opportunity to escape. Amira grabbed Rozene by the arm and they made their way toward the door leading to the house’s entrance, dodging men and machines from pillar to pillar. Rozene sank to her knees before reaching the exit, moaning at the onset of another contraction. Amira called for D’Arcy, but she had joined the other compound children to help them reload.
Lee collapsed onto the ground and clutched his leg. Rozene let out a low, guttural sound before doubling over again. Hadrian yelled in fury, rushing around his pillar and spraying a hail of bullets at the Trinity fighters.
The battle grew fiercer near its end. Half of the Trinity men were dead, wounded or retreating. A sizable force, however, remained scattered across the room, including Elder Young and Sarka, who lobbed a grenade at one of the robots. The machine sank into the ground, a dense plume of smoke rising where its head once sat.
Amid the confusion, one man in the room walked with calm purpose. Andrew Reznik kept his eyes trained on Parrish, one of four, as he moved intently through the melee. A small pistol rested at his side. Amira’s ears began to ring again, loud static through the already deafening sounds of battle.
“Stay here,” Amira shouted to Rozene over the blasts of gunfire.
A shot struck the ground close to a copy of Parrish, kicking up dust residue from the floor. Across all four sides of the room, Parrish remained still. Reznik fired near another pillar opposite the room, and this time, all four images of the man coughed and shielded their eyes.
Reznik had the real man in his crosshairs. The corners of his mouth curved in a malicious smile. Barlow suddenly ran from behind a nearby pillar toward the real Parrish, further confirming his target. Reznik strode deliberately forward and fired a single shot into the center of Parrish’s abdomen.
Parrish slumped to the floor, fumbling at the metal cap on his head. Amira watched in horror as the remaining robots froze, kneeling on the ground with their twisted grins in place. The room went quiet when the remaining Trinity men realized what was happening.
Hadrian ran forward to shield Parrish, firing at Reznik.
Reznik smoothly stepped sideways and returned Hadrian’s fire, hitting him in the left shoulder. Hadrian fell to the ground. The Trinity men advanced.
Amira sprinted toward Parrish as well, then dove to her knees to examine him. Shaking, he moved his hand to reveal a black pool of blood bubbling below his ribs, which soaked the still-bloody bandage on his right side.
Quickly, Amira removed the cap from Parrish’s head and placed it on her own. It felt warm against her scalp and tightened when she slid the sensors on her forehead as Parrish had done.
Immediately, a sensation unlike anything she had experienced seized her. Her body was heavy and her head light as kinetic warmth spread from her forehead to her eyes, traveling through her blood until it reached her brain. Her surroundings dissolved in a single moment. It was as though her skull had been opened and the contents of her mind spread across the room thinly like butter on toast. Every footstep was sharp and clear, but she heard each sound from ten different places at once. The room unfolded in a panorama above her, but every detail was known to her – a bead of sweat running down Elder Young’s forehead, Rozene’s eyes glassy as she looked skyward from behind her pillar, offering a soft, final prayer. Opening her eyes was too overwhelming, Amira realized, so she closed them and tried to focus her thoughts, as she had done many times as a child confined to dark, punishing places. And all at once, everything was clear. She felt the presence of others in her mind’s eye, other bodies and minds, and they would move where she wanted them to. She had many arms at her disposal, metallic arms that could crush and stun anything in their path. She could jump and climb the walls around her, free of all obstacles in her way.
Swiftly, she summoned these visitors, and the robots rose together in perfect unison. Elder Young, who was advancing toward her and Parrish, stopped in his tracks.
Amira flung one robot at Sarka, firing its weapon, while two others leapt to the left in Reznik’s direction. He slid behind a pillar to avoid their crushing feet. Two Trinity men charged toward D’Arcy and Amira spun the nearest robot around, pulverizing them in a hail of bullets. Amira never felt so powerful or free, to climb and leap and destroy. She was the solitary conductor of a deadly orchestra, each instrument playing its own harmony to a song that only she could hear. Her enemies were falling around her, bones crunching like dry leaves under her metallic feet, but she could not stop or relent, so great was the rush of anger that rose before each strike and the triumph as they fell, one by one.
Then something changed. A tremendous force hit one of her bodies and ripped it in two, wiry innards erupting with the split, and her control was shattered. From her other eyes, she watched the robot collapse to the ground. She tried to focus but became acutely aware of how weak her own body, her real body, had become. Her arms were too heavy to lift and she was slumped sideways against Alistair Parrish, whose ragged breathing was painfully audible.
The prism flickered weakly. Dark clouds stretched over the house and the domed ceiling was streaked with tears of heavy rainfall. With no sunlight, the holograms around the room vanished, leaving the remaining survivors visible, a small group surrounded by ruin and death. The robots were immobile. Though Victor Zhang’s cap remained fastened to her head, Amira could sense them but not revive them. Everything was too blurry, too unclear.
Hadrian yelled something, but she could not untangle the words in her cluttered mind.
Through this fog, a figure approached her. Elder Young had his arms outstretched in front of him like a monster in an old horror movie, his sallow features twisted in a furious snarl. His halo of blue light snaked across his forehead, like bulging, radioactive veins. In seconds, his hands were on her throat.
“Apostate bitch,” he snarled as he delivered a sharp blow across her face. Somewhere in the room, D’Arcy yelled.
She reeled, her focus shifting back and forth from the robots and her own aching body. His hands moved up to the cap on her head, trying to pull it off.
He could shoot but he wants me alive first, she realized.
Finding her last reserve of strength, she grabbed his face and pushed him back, adrenaline pulsing through her every muscle as she fought in those last seconds for her life, for Rozene’s life, and the unborn life within Rozene struggling at that very moment to enter the world. She dug her nails into Young’s face. The cap on her head heated against her skull and together, they screamed in pain. New images flashed before her, faces she had never seen before of bloody men kneeling on the ground, one after the other, followed by a young girl lying on red-stained sheets and crowds moving together in prayer. She tried to pull away but when she opened her eyes, her own horrified face stared back at her. It was surreal, watching the fury in her own black eyes while a pair of weathered hands tightened around her throat. The world grew smaller as she watched herself being strangled, the vision of her face blurring as the hands tightened. She tried to move her own arms and found that she could, tightening her grip around Elder Young’s face. She pressed her fingers deep into his eyes.
Pain shifted to rage, rage into fear as she spun on an invisible axis, so that she was in her own body, then Young’s, then her own again. She heard a voice cry out, shoot her now, and she screamed with all the force she had left, so that the scream rang through her ears and filled every corner of her sentient mind, leaving nothing but a raw, red fury that coursed through her entire body.
The prism exploded, the force of the blast knocking Amira off her feet. Her head throbbed and she clutched at her ears, desperate to stop the piercing ringing sensation that blocked out everything around her. She raised her head to find herself suddenly high in the air, on a level with the glass dome, looking down at the chaos below, where friend and foe
alike crawled or lay unconscious on the ground.
Now accustomed to the sensation of leaving her body behind, Amira reacted without alarm until she noticed something strange on the atrium floor. While her own body writhed on the ground, hands clasping her ears, Andrew Reznik contorted on the floor in similar fashion across the room. Déjà vu passed through her. She sensed a presence she had only felt once before, and looked up to find another figure hovering nearby – Reznik, surveying the scene with passive disinterest.
Amira understood why Reznik seemed familiar when she saw him in Rozene’s memory, beyond their brief encounter at Westport. She had seen him before, as the young boy who pushed her and ran up the hill during the Gathering, only to find a strange house. This house.
Their eyes met and Amira was back on the ground, gasping as though she had been submerged underwater. She looked up to find Reznik staring back at her through the clouds of dust and chaos. His face, normally unreadable, shifted like an old silent movie reel, delivering revelations in staggered motion – first shock, followed by fear, then a sinister interest that shone in his eyes, the realization of a shared mystery.
The floor tilted and Amira fell to her hands and knees, struggling against the blackness that passed over her eyes. She fainted, the chaos of the room fading to a distant echo.
Chapter Seventeen
Mothers of Evolution
Amira regained consciousness in a remote, distant world. Everything was far away, from the faint, echoing shouts of the blurred figures around her, dodging shards of glass and falling debris, to the sensation of her own body.