We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

  “That’s my daughter! I will not allow her to—”

  Her last words turned into an agonized shriek. A wall suddenly lit up beyond the turnstile, between my mad mother and me. Comprised of bars of white light, my mother’s body pressed into them—and in response, the security system dissuaded her with a powerful, though ultimately harmless, jolt of electricity.

  She reeled backward, falling off the turnstile and into a blubbering heap at my dad’s feet.

  A distinctly burnt smell tinged the air.

  I’d have felt sorry for her, if she hadn’t been so unbearable.

  “I warned you,” said the clerk. “Only travelers permitted may—”

  “M-Mira,” Mum coughed.

  Dad was stooped over her. “Ileara,” he said, pushing the slightly frazzled hair out of her face. “Oh, Ileara, why did you …?”

  “TTYL,” I said, snapping off a little wave—to Mum and Dad, and to the hordes of Seekers in their queues who watched me with a kind of awe, as I stepped away from the service station and the turnstile, then mounted the marbled black and white steps up to a wall of oblong metal plates.

  The plates contorted, folding themselves away and disappearing on tracks into the greater wall, others moving in to replace them in quick succession. At every moment, it looked as though the plates would jostle just enough as to permit a glimpse into the core of the mountain—and perhaps a view of the Entanglement itself, whatever the strange, manipulatable thing was buried within that allowed for this to be possible. But it never did offer a view inside—and regardless, when I reached the top of the six steps leading up, a plate clicked into place within the bay corresponding to our queue.

  “MIRA!” Mum belted. “MIRA BRAND! COME BACK HERE! COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!”

  I ignored her. “Do the honors, would you, Alain?”

  “Gladly,” he said. He pressed a fingertip to a ring with a purplish-red gemstone set upon the top. Then he swiped both hands down, forefinger of his right hand still upon the ring, the forefinger and middle finger of his left extended to cut upon the gateway.

  It split apart, widening, the colors within it much more muted than my own, the blackness so much darker. A peculiar smell came with it, one which was not entirely unpleasant, though nor was it one I could imagine many would grow wistful for.

  “After you,” I said, waving to Heidi and Borrick.

  They went, her first, though not before giving me a nervous glance, then Borrick afterward.

  My mum shrieked my name again.

  I didn’t look back—just held my breath, and stepped through, leaving them behind once more.

  18

  “Err …”

  This was my first word upon stepping out of the gateway.

  The Laknuria promised by my million-world clock was a technological marvel, if only in scale, a vast city that had devoured an entire continent.

  What we stepped out into was a pink rainforest, stinking of Parma Violets (sugary tablet sweets that taste like actual perfume), with silver mountains peeking out of the gaps between dumpy, birch-colored trees, with leaves resembling the kind of fungus growing out of tree bark that would make a bearded hipster boom with joy—dinner, yum …

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  Heidi shook her head, teeth gritted. “They changed it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t you feel it?” she asked. “Someone changed the pathway.”

  My eyes narrowed of their own volition.

  “I felt it,” she said, panting. “I was moving through, just like normal—and then it was like I got jerked to one side or something—like there was a fork in the road or something, and instead of going left, something pulled me hard to the right.” She massaged her ribcage. “It really hurt.” Eyes alighting upon Borrick, watching the motion of her hand—he snapped his eyes away quick—she said, “Did you feel it?”

  “I thought I felt something,” he said. “But I just figured maybe it was the Entanglement struggling with capacity or something.” He added limply, “Although I’m not honestly sure that’s a thing.”

  “You didn’t feel it?” Heidi asked me.

  I shook my head. “Must’ve happened up near your end of the gateway, before I even got there.” Biting my lip, I looked around the place where we’d come out—an absolute eyesore of a world, with all its garish, too bright colors warring for dominance. The heat was awful too, much too hot and humid. I’d been in it for all of thirty seconds, and already I could feel my clothes sticking to my body as sweat broke out on my skin.

  I peeled off the upper of my two tops, leaving one underneath. It’d be pretty damned disgusting very quickly, spotted with sweat under my arms and in the small of my back, but at least with one layer removed I’d slow down the process of melting. Of course, if Borrick were not here I could lose that one too, traipsing around like a former swimwear model on an episode of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Sadly, he was here, so I was not about to do that.

  “Right then,” I said, eyeing our surroundings—plenty of trees, and a whole lot of underbrush, fat-leafed plants wending around the trunks. There wasn’t a whole lot of dirt to see, most of it covered by the bright pink leaves. However, every exposed patch that I could see was the same: about two feet in diameter, with one single plant in the middle: a tall, spindly thing with a kind of bulb-shaped protrusion on the very end, about half the size of my fist. I couldn’t see how it kept itself up—the stems were delicate, and at least three feet tall. “So what do we do now?”

  “No choice but to move and find a way through,” said Heidi. “Hopefully we can spy a connection to somewhere in Kew Gardens, or close to it, so we can get to where we’re actually supposed to be.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “Well, be my guest.” I removed the compass from my belt and held it up. “Which of you wants it?”

  “I’ll take point,” said Borrick keenly, holding out his hands.

  “Suit yourself.” I tossed it in an easy arc. He caught it and appraised it with hungry eyes.

  “Amazing,” he mused, turning in a slow circle and watching as he swept it out, causing the picture on it—which was no longer the Way-Crossing, now that the Entanglement had closed the short-lived connection—to shift from a wide, twilit ocean marred by an oil derrick, and … wherever else led back to Earth. “How does it work, do you know? There must be some innate quality to it … perhaps on the glass? Or the needle?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” I said. “If they’ll ever speak to you after this, ask my dad at some point—he might be able to answer.”

  Borrick looked disappointed. Nevertheless, he began to lead, picking a direction entirely at random and setting off into the brush. He kept the compass held out ahead of him at all times, clutching tight between his fingers, perhaps in case a bird, or a particularly aggressive mosquito, should swoop down out of the canopy and snatch it off of him.

  We followed, Heidi first and then me dragging my heels in last, elbowing long leaves and low-hanging boughs and fern-like vines out of my way. I kept one eye on the clearing behind us at first, watching the trunk of the tree where the black antipode of our gateway had vanished—just in case somehow my parents stepped through too. But it had closed, so there was no way for them to get through. Besides: they didn’t know where we were going.

  On the other hand, neither did we. Were we even on the same world as Laknuria? Possibly the other continents had remained natural, not eaten up by technology the way our intended destination had been. Of course, we could be somewhere else entirely, on the other side of the universe for all we knew.

  And then there was the question of how exactly we’d ended up in the wrong place to begin with. The Entanglement should’ve taken us straight there. Had the clerk keyed in our destination wrong? But no, that couldn’t be so—Heidi had felt the gateway move as she traveled through it.

  We had been going to Laknuria, I was sure of it.

  It was just that somehow our path had
been adjusted as we moved along it.

  The who of it was answered at once.

  Antecessors.

  I glared up at the canopy. “I know you’re watching,” I murmured.

  “Sorry?” said Heidi, looking back at me.

  I pursed my lips. “Nothing.”

  I should tell her—should tell both of them—what I knew. What the Antecessors had shown me.

  But … why? On the one hand, they deserved to know—which in itself was a discomforting thought, after what they’d both done to me—but on the other, look what the knowledge had done to me. All my dreams had shattered. Doing that to another person, even if that person were an enemy?

  It seemed extremely callous. Definitely warranted, in some cases—but exceptionally cruel too.

  And that was the other thing—how to think of Heidi and Borrick. I hadn’t been able to call them friends, when I explained to Mum and Dad where I’d gone—Borrick for the more obvious reason. But to call them enemies? That … wasn’t exactly true either. Oh yes, it would have been, before. But now …?

  Again, I couldn’t think on it. It brought me dangerously close to a ground on which I didn’t want to tread.

  So I sidelined it.

  Heidi slowed her pace so that she was more or less alongside me—you know, when the spacing of the neon-pink trees and similarly bright brush allowed us.

  “I’m sorry about your parents,” she said quietly.

  I waved her off. “It’s fine. I’ve come to terms with it.”

  “I mean leading them back to you,” she said. “I was literally at the back of the line for our food when your mum and dad appeared out of the crowd and demanded I take them to you. I was too shell-shocked to do anything else.”

  “It’s fine,” I said again. “I get it. She’s been my mum for eighteen very long years. Believe me—I understand.”

  “I’m still sorry,” said Heidi. “If I’d thought about it, actually had my wits about me, I would’ve fobbed them off and got out of there. Instead of … you know.”

  Once more, I said: “It’s fine. Honestly. It’s done now. Not your fault. They’d have caught up with me eventually, I’m sure.”

  Heidi sidestepped a fuzzy, bushy sort of plant that rose with many overlapping leaves to almost her full height. It looked like a wasp’s nest was built on the tip of it, nestled into the pink leaves. Possibly one had: the fuzzy brown thing positively teemed with bugs, crawling over it like it was a glob of pure, sugary nectar. Heidi waited to check I passed it without affronting the insects—I did, mainly because I resisted the urge to swat the ones that buzzed too close to my face—and then we were moving once again, following behind Borrick and the questionable path he was cutting through the forest, what with the compass being ninety percent of his focus right now.

  “How do you think they found you?” Heidi asked.

  “I’m famous,” I said plainly—not a brag, just a simple fact. “I daresay someone saw me, talked, and word got back to them.”

  “Kind of impressive,” said Heidi, “if a little scary.”

  “Yeah,” I said, breathing a hollow laugh, “not half.”

  The forest buzzed. Bird trills were sporadic; most of the noise came from insects, a constant flux of humming and whistling and vibrating and musical chirping that would raise gooseflesh all over the arms of the most bug-phobic. (There’s probably a word for that—a word that Carson would probably know.)

  Carson. My stomach fell at the thought of him.

  It was yet another line of thought I had no choice but to shut down. There had been a lot of those, these past five weeks. Strangely, at least half of those seemed to be concentrated into today.

  “Do you think they’re the reason the gateway changed course?” Heidi wondered.

  “How would they even do that?”

  She considered. “Not sure. But they might have.”

  I was as close as I’d come to telling her about the Antecessors, that it was them who were overseeing this ridiculous game, were tugging on the strings for whatever vapid, banal purposes they always had—their own poxy entertainment.

  Before I could, Heidi said, “I think you’d have liked my mum a whole lot more than yours.”

  “Your mum up and walked out on you,” I said.

  She winced. “Okay, fair point. But she was a Seeker, first and foremost. And I guess … adventure came calling, like it did for you.” Glancing sidelong at me, she said, “I just meant that she’d understand you—you know, more than your parents seem to.”

  Adventure come calling—hah. No such thing. Oh, I might’ve believed it in the years before I ran away, when my parents pushed me and pushed me to the point where I had no choice. But now? Now I saw a lot more clearly the ways I’d been pushed and pulled—not just by the Antecessors, as they were right now, but by my family too. Mum, and to a lesser extent Dad, had tried to force me away from Seeking—and yet it had only drawn me more and more to it.

  I was like a puppet on strings, just a set of strings that moved opposite to the direction my puppeteer—my mother—had tried to direct them. Now that I knew the truth, I was pulling back myself—and Antecessors had hold of another set, tugging me along themselves now instead.

  Damn it—the whole thing made me itch. How little control in my own life did I have?

  The past five weeks, I’d operated in a stupor. And could anyone blame me? If I engaged my mind too much, if I looked over the ramifications of what I had seen, and what I’d then come to realize—it was a recipe for going mad.

  “Mum was a bit more of the research type,” Heidi went on wistfully, “rather than being in it for any sort of glory.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Mm.” Heidi frowned at a fat mosquito that fluttered in on two pairs of spindly wings (at least I thought two; they blurred, they were moving so fast). It hovered over the head of one of the tall, spindly plants in the perfect circle of peaty earth, a few inches away, as though considering the plant’s head with its bulbous, shining compound eyes. Then it zipped away.

  “Before she disappeared,” Heidi went on, “she was researching technology. Biotech, I think, looking at her notes later. I think she was after something to bring back to Earth—stuff for human adaptation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Dunno,” said Heidi. “Medical stuff maybe? Physical enhancement?” She shrugged. “Might’ve been some sort of Gundam mech type thing for all I know.”

  “And the Flames, they tie to those goals?”

  “I don’t think she was so much interested in the Flames themselves as some of the offshoots of the questline.”

  “Offshoots?” I asked.

  “A lot of those worlds are industrialized,” Heidi explained. “All sorts of high-tech stuff in them. I half dread to think what we’ll find in Laknuria that she might’ve been interested in. Grey goo, maybe.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “What’s grey goo?”

  “Nanomachines, or something,” Heidi said. “I don’t remember exactly; I skim-read the Wikipedia article after Borrick mentioned it.” She licked her lips. “Carson could probably tell us.”

  Carson again—my heart panged with sorrow.

  Suddenly, I wished he were here, that he were making awkward, duck-footed passage through this vibrant pink rainforest with us. I could almost picture him, clutching the strap of his man bag as ever, like it was the only thing that kept him anchored to the world. He’d probably have taken his sweater off, some old-man cerulean thing and tied it round his waist. Not that it’d matter; he’d be absolutely soaked in sweat, worse than all of us, great dark patches beneath his armpits, probably streaked across his entire torso, gluing his shirt to him. Heidi might cajole him, a friendly tease, suggest that he just take the shirt off before he turned into a puddle—and he’d clear his throat madly, face the bright red of a swollen tomato, and he’d stammer something out and avert his gaze …

  It’d be just like the old days.

  I pushed away
my lamentation. The old days were gone—and they were all lies anyway. Why wish for that, when it meant a lapse back into ignorance to a universe that thought of me as nothing more than a rat in a cage?

  Because you were all together, I thought, with your friends.

  “I followed the questline on my own for a while,” Heidi admitted. “And then … not alone.” She shot a pointed look at Borrick’s back as he continued to power forward. His gaze a pinpoint on the compass, it was a wonder he hadn’t broken his nose by walking headlong into the trees yet. Or gotten a mouthful of swarming bugs.

  “Eventually,” said Heidi after a moment, “I had to give it up—got stalled out. And so I began to look at … other options. The Tide of Ages, for example.”

  I cleared my throat. “Right.” Self-consciously, I brushed my pocket, where the Tide of Ages currently rested.

  “I figured that if I got it—if it worked as it was supposed to—then I could turn back time to before my mum disappeared—and stop her from going.” She sighed heavily, a great exhalation that must’ve cleared out all the air from her lungs. “We know how that turned out, don’t we.”

  I bit my lip. Another secret I possessed, another thing I hadn’t told Heidi. I’d felt plenty guilty about it from time to time in the past, when I caught her looking wistfully at the orb sat upon the mantel or walked in to find her alone in the study with it cradled in her hands, like if she held it or perhaps turned it over in her hands, in just the right way, she could activate it.

  I always disavowed myself of my guilt by reminding myself that I’d saved Heidi’s life with it, restored her being cut through by one of Borrick’s marachti.

  Now, though, listening to her story—it was a lot harder.

  I mulled it over, how different our stories were. I’d set out into the world in search of glory. Every quest I had undertaken, more or less, was with that single goal in mind. Sometimes my focus on it was so singular that I’d made huge, glaring errors on the way—the confusion with regard to Brinn Overson’s crypt being one of the most major (and thank heavens Tyran Burnton had reeled in his ego at the end of that, rather than make me feel like a total bungling dimwit)—but it was what always pushed me onward.