by J D Morganne
“Nano!” His voice echoed. “Eh-sha-nah.” It was becoming increasingly harder to talk, to move. The gel was turning him into a living corpse. The thought of using his black flames terrified him, but he had to get some light in there, if anything some sort of flare to pinpoint his location for Nano and Eshauna. He took a deep breath and let it flow out, cleared his mind, anchored himself to where he was in that moment. He rubbed his fingers together and ignited a small, black spark. Then, a flame, which lingered above his thumb, providing the most miniscule of lamps.
It was enough.
Enough for his situation to manifest a fear so extreme, his limbs went still. For miles, hundreds of opal skeletons were entangled by these roots and now Jaxon would be one of them.
His fight kicked in and before he knew it, he’d snapped. A murder of flaming crows squawked into existence, flapping all around him.
33
Aria had embellished every tunnel with turquoise ribbons, sparkles and glitter, like some mermaid exhibit. Even the tunnels people had to crawl through melded with her excessive décor. Earthens gathered in a mezzanine deck between the first and second levels. The Ulai Chamber. All in their party attire, chanting and cheering over a faint rumble of djembes.
Beck stood on an upper-level landing, secured by impregnable glass, overlooking a sea of familiar faces. She witnessed their quiet reserve, the whispers questioning her leadership. Had she psyched herself into thinking any of them were loyal to her? She hadn’t yet recovered from fighting Cayman and now she had to check over her shoulder for her own people.
Beck’s eyes roamed to the Koloberry. She’d never had a reason to hate it. The source of their power, health and infrastructure, all she knew about it was good. Now, it was tearing her family apart like Cayman had done, and she hated it.
“How many men are patrolling the border?” she asked the nearest Lion to her.
“Unsure, Emiir.”
“Find out.”
He ran off as Aria approached.
“You look beautiful,” Aria said, always smiling. “Where’d you find that dress?” She perched against the railing.
The powder blue ensemble was one of three dresses Beck owned. It had belonged to her mother. The inner layer clung to her, while the outer lace flowed like the tunnel’s water walls. She hadn’t bothered to change the mauve polish on her toenails. Her beauty regimen was the only thing keeping her sane when she couldn’t manipulate how she wanted. She was already depressed she couldn’t dance. Cayman had tainted her birthday with bruises and painful memories. Her instinct told her there was more to come.
“You worried too?”
Beck was standing in a cave with tunnels that sprouted to each tier in Jerus, protecting the biggest and most important tree known to anyone from any Door, while figuring out if she had feelings for the man sent to destroy it. She was more than worried.
“My ma died,” she said to Aria, “fighting to protect us from technology. Why am I doin’ this again?”
“Because Torchers want Jax?” Aria shrugged with a sigh.
Beck faced Aria and took in the rose red, skintight ensemble she wore. She didn’t know how to react to a dress like that. Lately, their relationship was different. They spoke less and Aria kept secrets.
On one hand she wanted to thank Aria for coming to her senses and realizing she would never leave Nano. On the other hand, she wanted to scream at her, shake her until she was concussed.
“Where’d you find that slutty thing?” Beck shifted her attention from the dress to two Lions trying to expostulate a drunken couple intent on climbing the Koloberry gate.
“This old thing?” Aria joked, striking a sexy pose. “Nano bought it from Bongani’s.”
“For you?” Beck tried not to look as accusatory as she sounded.
The humor poured from Aria’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” The longer Aria stood there, the angrier Beck became.
Below, the couple were thrusting their fists. The man shouldered one of the Lions into the gate. Needing assistance, the Lion waved over another soldier who was guarding an entrance.
“No one should be leaving their post,” Beck muttered, and started toward the steps, but Aria hopped in front of her.
“Let them handle it.” She took Beck’s arm and led her back to the wall. “It’s your earth day.”
Beck snatched away from her too fast and curled over at the knot pulsating in her back. Her nerves were on edge and Aria was on her nerves. How could she be so placid? Beck was doing a selfish thing, continuing with this celebration, knowing Cayman was out there lurking. Knowing he could use a celebration like this to usurp her. Why wasn’t Aria furious? Why wasn’t she screaming at her to think?
“You aggravated or somethin’?”
“Anga buys you stuff like this?” Beck flicked the thin strap of Aria’s dress. “Like you’re his putkhaa.”
“Whoa. I ain’t a whore for nobody. Your brother”—
“Treats you like horned-pig swill.” She pinched her fingers as she spoke like this would reiterate what she said. “And he buys you ‘I’m sorry’ clothes without actually saying ‘I’m sorry.’ Meanwhile, Jax is perfect and likes you.”
Aria snorted and shifted, tenser now. The crowd’s chaos roved to the ceiling, and every orifice of the antechamber. Their vibrations pulsed through Beck’s feet, and arms, before settling as nausea in her stomach.
She waited for Aria to raise her voice, too. She waited for her to scream, to prove she was as upset as everyone else. Cayman’s actions had threatened her livelihood, too. Beck was cursed to never have the life she wanted, but Aria deserved better. She saved lives, smiled through mayhem. She was the amiable one who deserved every gift in the world, including Jaxon.
“He told you I kissed him?” Aria said.
Beck’s nod was deliberately slow.
Aria went on to say, “I can be happy. You right ’bout that.” When she turned to face Beck, and beamed into her eyes like she was about to tell her the secret recipe to her apple pies. “But I don’t need Jax or your brother for that. And if you think Jax has eyes for anyone other than you, you’re a damn fool. You should’a seen him at the fair. So nervous to talk to you.” She shook her head, eyes wide, horrified all over again. “So, no. Plus, it scares me when his veins glow.”
Beck went to swipe her hair behind her ear, but froze mid-air, Aria’s words halting her relief. “What?”
“I’m not sure what’s causing it, but every time he drinks koloberry water, it stops.”
Muddled, Beck faced Aria. “You’ve been giving him koloberries… to eat?” Using it as a healing ointment was one thing. It could be lethal for people who weren’t accustomed to ingesting it. Aria knew that.
“To drink and it’s not what you think.”
“You don’t even know how he’ll react to that.”
“Well… yeah, I do. It healed him. I’m not sure how yet, but, if he’ll let me”—
“You gave him that water without talking to me?”
“Why would I talk to you about it?”
“Jaxon’s a Lion.”
Aria snorted. “O…kay, but he ain’t property. I hate when you get like this.”
No, she was right. Jaxon wasn’t property. They had no idea what he was. And Aria didn’t know how Koloberry water would affect him, which meant she didn’t know what he was capable of either.
“Like what? Like I’m the only one thinking? You’re not a medic!” She was a medical researcher! She couldn’t go around running experiments for her own benefit. “Don’t give him anything else koloberry-related without my permission. You’ave no idea what he could’a done to you.”
If Aria bit her lip any harder, she would break skin. “What do you mean?” she dared ask. “Hesch nahdelicaa-wes ewe nah.”
She’d said Jaxon wouldn’t hurt them, but that wasn’t true. If he could hurt them, he would. Below, the couple’s spat turned into a full-fledged f
ight between the Lions trying to settle them down. The taps of djembes went silent.
Beck’s mind buzzed. Her control had gone with Cayman’s attempt on her life. She had made the choice too late to let Jaxon leave, but it wouldn’t dissolve the problem. The potential for war was there because Cayman was still alive. As long as he was, he wouldn’t stop coming after the Koloberry. Or worse, he would chase Jaxon, force him back to the tunnels, force him to do the impossible. She wouldn’t protect Jaxon. If she did, her people wouldn’t respect her.
“Excuse me,” she said to Aria, before descending the winding steps.
Aria huffed and followed her. “What’re you doin’?”
Beck’s people respected her enough to clear a path across the wide tunnels to the bridge, but her presence didn’t pause their commotion. The robust man fussed. With one Lion’s knee in his cheek, another buckled his hands behind him.
“Shame on you!” the drunken girlfriend spun around, her dreadlocks slapping Beck’s dress. She shook them behind her shoulders with a snobby sneer. “You’re gonna let them do that to my man?”
Beck raised her lip. “Your ‘man’ is attempting to destroy primordial land.”
This woman had the same blonde hair as any Earthen, but her blue and yellow eyes were Alastan. She was like any other filthy, rowdy Alastan Beck had encountered. And she was on the wrong damn soil.
“Your purest.” The girlfriend tried a mocking bow, but ended up drunkenly tumbling into Beck, who shoved her away.
Beck had worn the wrong clothes for this. She lifted her dress to bend to the girlfriend’s level. “Are you stupid? Why would you come here?”
Less stupid than filthy, with the teeth of a titan shark and the breath of a dragon. The nerve of her to bring such negative vibrations onto Beck’s land.
“I… am…” the girlfriend searched the crowd, eyes darting. “Not… for… what typ’a person have a party in the one place… someone could assassinate”—
“At-at. No threatening, simian.” Beck stood up and away. The woman was waiting for something. Searching for someone. Was she stalling Beck? Was this woman’s outburst a distraction? A signal?
“Contact the border. If anyone else got across, I wanna know. Seems to be the norm these days. Check the conference room to see if Nano and Jax got the grids on,” Beck told one of the Lions, who had gathered to secure the situation.
“Gotchu, Emiir.”
“Get every exit cleared and covered. And get rid of them.” Beck nodded at the girlfriend and her man. She turned to head for the conference room, where she planned to spend the remainder of the evening.
“You’ll never get rid of us! We’re here to stay. And Jerus will be ours again.”
Beck had had enough. An explosion was exactly what she needed. She spun so fast that her dress fluttered like a calla lily. “You’re nothing!” Everyone in the tunnel riveted their gazes on her. She had become the person she hated, a perfect stereotype of inherited power. “You wanted your technology. Knowledge was harmonized. We lived together. For hundreds of years… peacefully, and then Cayman spread his anti-earthen ideals and decided to destroy that peace. You mean nothing. And I want you to stop breathing my air.”
Beck paused for a moment. Without Zo, there was only Alasta—Alastans—and, for them, she meant what she’d said more than she cared to dramatize. She meant it enough to prove it, but she was tired and her head knocked with the intensity of rumbling train tracks. “Turn some music on. Ain’t this a party?”
She didn’t stay to hear the djembes start to entice the night again. She yearned to dance, to transcend to a level of wisdom and growth, like every Emiir before her. Instead, she was sucking up her fear, swallowing it, choking it down while it fought and clawed to get out. She hopped past her Lions into the empty conference room.
“It’s all secure, Emiir,” one said.
Beck didn’t care either way. She closed out their voices, the drums, and her fear.
34
It was white.
White there.
And Jaxon couldn’t fight the polygonal-flowing pressure swelling in his chest. He had come from… home… not Naruchi… home, where Beck and Aria were. Before, he was with Nano and Eshauna and… now he was in this white space.
There was no one.
Nothing.
Its familiarity sickened him.
The next second, darkness swallowed him into an overbearing black cubical. The good thing about his quiet white was that he felt nothing at all. With the darkness came every feeling. In the darkness, he’d shattered endless times already. He felt small, infinitesimal, worthless.
“Jaxon.” Eshauna shouted directly into his ear.
He blinked his eyes open, felt the tickle of tears on his ears. It took him a couple minutes to come to. Eshauna. Nano. Grids. Watch Eshauna. The grids. The dam. The tower.
“Hey.” Nano slapped his cheek. “You with us, bait?” he slapped him until Jaxon’s vision steadied.
Jaxon swatted Nano’s hand away. “Cut that out.”
“I’m try’na help you, Little Bro.” Nano wrapped him in a bear hug and tried to pull him up but ended up rocking him back and forth as Jaxon wiggled loose.
“Get off me!” Jaxon wanted, but couldn’t push Nano away. His arms were limp as wet yarn.
Nano, realizing, tossed his jokes aside. “You good.” He stated it, and gave Jaxon a hard shove on his shoulder. “Get up. The tower’s up.”
Jaxon waited for the bleeping in his head to stop. When it finally did, he saw where he was. Out of that hell and on the ground. Eshauna was blocking fulgent rays of setting sun with one hand and shaking the gel off a stick with her other. She’d used it to close up his wound.
“What was that?”
“Colloid River,” Eshauna said, dropping the stick and kicking it away. “It’s a type of quicksand that basically hardens like clay. The more you move, the faster it hardens.” In the distance, she’d churned up hands and lifted the ground, in turn lifting the sword’s handle. “Beck put a bunch of holes in the village and destroyed the dam.”
And the water had poured through, into the holes and settled underground. An underground quicksand river. He understood now. Aria had once used the stuff to mend his wounds. Every medical ointment that woman used had a deadly side. “How did I get out?” Jaxon took his time standing to his feet.
Eshauna pointed to an inverted crater, a small pore in its center.
“Ey, you accurate as hell to do that unconsciously,” Nano said.
Confused, Jaxon’s gaze flocked from the open land to his own dry clothes. No more of that eutectic-like gel turning him into a human statue. He recollected a detonation, a rampant wave, a surge of weightlessness. He recalled the ground rushing up to meet him. He’d coughed up what felt like every meal he’d eaten for weeks and more. Now, all that was left were mounds of mud, ramshackle houses and acres of black glass in the distance where the village ended.
Jaxon used Nano’s shoulder as an anchor. “The grids?” For a moment, he thought the ticking clock in his head was counting down till he erupted, but it tapered off after a few seconds.
“We already got into the lab,” Nano said, nodding a faded sheet of paper in Jaxon’s direction.
A face flashed in his memory. That woman at the fountain that day—and the fair—had written numbers on that paper. Nano had entered the numbers from the paper onto a broken keypad he’d found behind a cement block in the lab’s exterior wall, and the wall had divided like drapery.
This tech-equipped lab had been here all along? In the middle of nowhere? It was reminiscent of Nano’s tech graveyard, except not as messy. A fuzzy layer of years’ worth of dust settled atop large machines. They all surrounded a central control unit, a table of complicated mechanisms and flashing buttons. Jaxon curled his toes, itching to explore.
He ran his thumbs over dusty buttons, squinting to see tiny white commands. Muut. Eemye. All in Terramulken. When he reached the end of the row
, in the upper left corner, he hovered his finger above a teal button that said Piim. He went to fish out his Terramulken pocket dictionary, but Eshauna slammed her fist on the button.
“It’s the power,” she said.
If either one of them knew how difficult it was, they would have been as hesitant. The button would boot the computers, power up the grids. It was his connection to Obedience, where he had disappeared from months ago, where he had left his mother. It was his connection to his old life. He didn’t know if he was ready for that.
In a smaller space, the popping sound might’ve been deafening, but with the walls gone it reverberated across acres. Birds flew a rainbow across the sky, escaping continuous ominous vibrations from cranking machines. A terrifying crack resounded, like lightning striking a tree, and Jaxon, Eshauna and Nano ducked. The grids were slowly rising, each one, some at the same time—some several seconds later—slanting at the setting sun.
“Sounds like popping corn.” Standing, Nano licked drool from his mouth.
Eshauna and Jaxon stood up too. “From freakin’ giants,” Eshauna said.
“This village runs on solar power?” Jaxon inquired.
In Obedience, they used good old-fashioned battery power and electricity. Even Jerus had electricity. Solar power meant a solar charge. The sun was setting and the grids had awakened only moments ago. “There’re solar batteries, though, right? To store energy it collects from the sun?”
“I guess,” Eshauna said, eyes flat and uninterested.
“Hell yeah,” Nano said. “How could a village run without ‘em? But bait, we ain’t used this system in ages.”
There was no time to charge, and no time to wait another day. Jaxon needed to try now. He tapped his celrings and waited for the inevitable. They wouldn’t work. He, Nano and Eshauna had simply wasted time.
“Aicis?”
There was no response.
“Aicis?” If he waited anymore, he would only disappoint himself.
