I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1)

by John Patrick Kennedy

  It felt as if the boundaries of the real and the imaginary had been moved so they lay across each other like tangled sheets. Julie forced herself to breathe, forced her heartbeat to slow down. I can’t have another heart attack. Not here.

  “Feel better?” asked Ms. Jance.

  Julie’s lips tightened. She wasn’t about to give the head the satisfaction of seeing her panic. So she simply said, “Did I sleep long?”

  “Several hours.”

  “Good.”

  “Why did you inject me with that material?”

  It was you or me. “We needed a test subject.”

  “I see.” The corners of the head’s lips turned down a little. “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

  “No. The robots have shut down.”

  “What’s that got to do with the experiment?”

  “They—” Julie looked down at her hands. They were shaking. I’m only forty years old. The skin seemed splotchy and translucent in places, the opposite of liver spots. “It was their experiment. To see how the astral material would affect you.”

  Damn it. It never was an experiment. Only a way of saving my own skin. So I didn’t end up a… talking head. Oh, God. “They were supposed to observe and question you, to see if you… were under control of the astral beings. It was…”

  She shook her head. It hadn’t made sense then, and it still wasn’t making sense now.

  Ms. Jance cleared what was left of her throat. “Well, if it’s any comfort, I don’t feel as though I’m under my own control, let alone anyone else’s.”

  Julie walked back to her chair, briefly leaning on Scarlett’s table to keep her balance. Ms. Jance’s body slumped in the computer chair, apparently not animated by the same force that controlled the head. Julie wondered what would happen if the head were destroyed. Would the body move then?

  Ms. Jance cleared her throat again. A very polite sort of noise. Ahem. “Ms. Black, you couldn’t see your way to… put my head back on the stump of my neck, could you?”

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing the astral beings would want me to do,” Julie said. “It took a great deal of effort to get your head cut off in the first place, you know.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose. You were afraid of what I might do. Perfectly understandable.”

  “Stop being so polite.”

  “Mmmm,” said Ms. Jance’s head. It pressed its lips together, as though to prevent a smile. “So you’d rather trust an artificial intelligence than a black woman.”

  “It has nothing to do with your being black.”

  Ms. Jance sighed. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that sentence.”

  Julie circled the robots, keeping what she hoped was a safe distance. She had absolutely no sense of any kind of presence from them; they were less alive than the two bodies under the sheets, as far as her goose-bumped flesh was concerned. Ms. Jance, however, made the hair on Julie’s arms and the back of her neck stand on end.

  “You’re not black anymore, Ms. Jance. You’re not human.”

  Ms. Jance lifted an eyebrow. “Even if I conceded that argument—and I don’t— it’s a matter of one type of pseudo-human intelligence versus another. And only one of them, if I may remind you, is out to destroy the human race.”

  Pax was running out of island when he saw a possibility. He could hear the waves crashing against the bare rock of the eastern shore, growing louder and louder with every pace. If he didn’t do something soon, the monster would chase him right into the ocean.

  That’s when he saw a crack the width of a dirt road that had opened up in the ground, swallowing a stream that now plummeted into the darkness below.

  There. That could work.

  It wasn’t wide enough to fit the monster. It was just a crack in the ground, not some kind of tourist cave with floors and handrails and lights. But it was going to do.

  He ran past the crack and circled back around toward it, letting the monster catch up to him. This was going to be close.

  Pax dropped inside the crack, falling until his hamster ball wedged itself against the walls. He strengthened the ball with as much energy as he could spare—making it glow bright—and let himself drop through the bottom of it. He hit the bottom of the crevice, spotted an outcropping and backed under it.

  The monster stopped over the opening of the cave. Pieces of trash pinged off the walls, dropping all around him. Tentacles slithered against the sides of the cave, reaching for the bright, distracting hamster ball.

  You just keep your tentacles on the ball, buddy.

  Scarlett wanted to help Pax. But Terry had her by the scruff of the neck and wasn’t letting go. Her immaterial body felt like it was a candy wrapper pinched between his fingers. Worse, he’d wrapped his spirit around hers to keep her from getting away.

  They were floating over the island, invisible, watching Pax fight the monster.

  Pax jumped out of the crack in the ground, shot up into the air, and slammed onto the monster’s back, wedging it into the crack. Its tentacles whipped around, trying to catch him, but he was already a couple of hundred feet up in the air again. Another couple of slams on the monster’s back, and its shell split along the sides. Most of the monster was shoved into the crack. The main legs snapped backward and wiggled crazily in the air.

  She cheered.

  Terry frowned and crooked a finger.

  The monster was ripped out of the crack, shedding metal plates until it was mostly just a mass of oozing tentacles. Terry gestured again, and the monster healed itself. A third gesture, and the plates lifted off the ground and fitted themselves onto the monster again.

  “That’s cheating,” protested Scarlett.

  Terry moved his face slightly. His eyes turned up at the corners, and the sides of his mouth showed little laugh lines, although she couldn’t have said he was exactly smiling.

  “What?” she demanded. “Do you think this is funny? You were like a father to him. Instead you’re this evil bastard who treats him like he’s some kind of experiment.”

  The lines around his eyes deepened. And one corner of his lips twitched.

  Scarlett knew she could yell until she was blue in the face and he wasn’t going to listen. What she wanted to do was teach this fuckwad a lesson. The problem was, there was practically no negative energy to gather. Terry, despite being a complete asshole, wasn’t producing the negative energy at all.

  Must be an astral thing, she thought. There’s got to be a way to get more.

  Scarlett looked down to Pax and saw negative energy flowing from him. He was astral, true, but he was still human (sort of), so the negative energy flowed off him in waves.

  It wasn’t nearly enough to stop Terry, but maybe…

  She called the negative energy. It came in bits and starts. Terry sensed it at once and smiled again, as if it were of no concern. And really, it wasn’t nearly enough to hurt him.

  But it was enough to give Scarlett the power to send a message to the arctic ice and the black pool of negative energy that lay there.

  Help me! she sent. If you want this thing stopped, you need to help me! Now!

  For a long minute there was nothing. Below, the creature continued to hurl rocks at Pax. He sat there, staring helplessly at it, knowing he was beaten.

  A single black tentacle speared out of the ground and slammed into Scarlett, spitting her. Her back arched in agony as it poured negative energy into her faster than it ever had before. Her body practically ballooned with the injection.

  Terry made a gesture and the tentacle shredded. His spirit squeezed Scarlett’s even tighter, and his hand on her neck squeezed enough to throttle any creature that needed to breathe.

  Do you really think you can stop me?

  She couldn�
�t. Scarlett knew it. The power the tentacle had managed to give her wasn’t enough to make Terry let her go, let alone defeat him in a fight. She could feel the way his spirit wrapped around hers, holding it in place like a mesh net around a snarling animal. She couldn’t get free.

  Maybe getting free isn’t want I need to do, thought Scarlett. Maybe what I need to do is join with him.

  He’d come to Earth to turn Pax from human to astral. He and Lana had to pour everything they had into making Scarlett and Pax transform. And the negative energy had prevented Scarlett from fully transforming because it didn’t want humans to stop being humans. So it entwined into her spirit to prevent it.

  Almost like the way Terry was entwined with her now, to prevent her from stopping him.

  Scarlett poured power into them both, intertwining the negative energy with Terry’s astral form. Terry realized it almost immediately but wasn’t fast enough. The dark energy wound around his astral spirit, joining with it.

  Silly girl, Terry chided. Do you really think that will hold me for long?

  It doesn’t need to hold you long. The negative energy and the astral energy were nearly mixed. If you guys can change humans to astral, I bet I can use the negative energy to change astral to human. And if I can make your astral human, I bet I can mess you up.

  She watched the blobs that were her hands reform. Fingers. Palms. She slowly opened and closed them, adding creases. A scar along one finger that she’d gotten as a kid, screwing around on a playground. She changed the color to look like her old human skin, resisting the temptation to make herself a little less pasty-pale. Fingernails with silvery half-moons near the cuticles. Veins along the insides of her wrists.

  Power. Magic. Negative energy. Astral bullshit. Whatever it was, she was using it to rebuild her body the way it had been, in all the glory of its mortality. Mortal flesh. Mortal blood. Mortal clothes.

  … and then she made the mortality spread over to Terry.

  His grip slipped a little and then came up more firmly under her skull. The bones in her neck ground together painfully, and she winced. Terry’s fingernails bit into the back of her neck, and he shook her a little. He was looking more and more human, more and more solid.

  “You must stop this, child,” he whispered—a human voice coming through human vocal chords. “You must not prevent me from—”

  “I am not a child.” She could feel the skin pulling on her cheeks as she grinned at him, the frizz of her hair being caught in the wind. “I’m not your tool. Not your weapon. Not your student. Not your ally. And neither is Pax. Leave him alone.”

  Tears—real tears—welled up in her ducts and ran down her face.

  “Regretfully, I cannot. He must learn—”

  She tuned him out and shifted her vision to look at Terry’s spirit, where it was tangled in her own. She poured more and more mortality into his flesh. More and more humanity: The ability to cry. A strong appreciation for Stephen King novels. What it felt like to get a paper cut. Shame. Guilt.

  His astral spirit was beginning to rally, beginning to fight back. But it wouldn’t be enough. Scarlett was sure of it. She said, “Let me go.”

  “Regretfully—”

  She sent every last bit of her negative energy through their intertwined spirits, making it rip through their now-human flesh like a buzz saw. The damage was hideous and both of them screamed with the pain of it. Blood poured out of their mouths and noses, then their eyes. Scarlett blinked it away and managed to get one more look at him as her vision began to fade. He was writhing in agony.

  Now it was Scarlett who smiled. “Fuck you, Terry.”

  They both started falling.

  Chapter 17

  Pax rocked back as the monster’s rocks slammed into him. He should put up a screen—he should do something—but he didn’t have the energy.

  It wasn’t fair, Goddammit. He’d defeated the monster, or at least pinned it down, and then it had just levitated out of the hole, healed itself, and put all its armor back on.

  Someone is fucking with me. And if I can’t figure out who, I’m never going to stop this thing.

  Above him, someone screamed.

  Pax’s head snapped up. Two specks were falling from the sky. They grew from specks to dolls and from dolls to people as he watched. One was desperately fighting the other, trying to break free.

  Seconds before they hit, he saw they were Scarlett and Terry, and Scarlett was holding onto Terry for all she was worth. Pax tried to throw a shield out to catch them, but he didn’t have the energy.

  The two landed on the rocks with a pair of splattery thumps.

  Pax stared in horror. Then the sun burst up from the horizon, filling Pax with energy.

  Too late, thought Pax. Too late, too late, too late.

  Another rock hit him in the back of the head. Pax threw up a shield around the monster without any effort. He rose to his feet slowly and walked to where Scarlett and Terry lay on the ground.

  Scarlett’s neck was at an impossible angle, her head practically turned backward. The bones of her spine were weird jumbled lumps that looked like they were trying to push out of her skin. One arm was over her head; the other was bent underneath her. Pax knelt beside her and lifted the arm off her face. It was nearly unrecognizable. The bones in her skull had smashed. There was a trail of blood leaking out of her ear, out of her nostrils.

  Not the silvery astral material. Not negative energy. Blood. Real blood, as far as he could tell. He touched it. It felt like blood, it was warm like blood. How did she do that?

  He crawled over to Terry.

  He had smashed, face-first, onto the rock. His skin had kept the bone fragments from flying all over the place, but it had still ruptured, leaking blood and shockingly pink brains out of a flap that had broken free above Terry’s ear. The fact that Terry was bald just made it worse. His skull looked stretched out under the skin.

  Pax rolled Terry over to see his face. It was a mass of blood; one of the eyeballs had been smashed. Pax rolled the body back over.

  Human. They both looked human, inside and out.

  Terry must have pulled the monster out and healed it. Pax looked to the beast behind him. She must have made them both human to stop him.

  It was a hell of a thing to do. Especially since Scarlett knew it would kill her, too.

  Scarlett said death doesn’t mean much, anymore.

  Bet it still hurt like hell.

  Pax looked at Terry’s broken body and frowned. He didn’t think for a second that Terry was actually, totally, out-of-his-hair dead. It took more to really kill someone astral than it did a normal human. If you didn’t destroy the spirit, you were basically just wasting your time.

  He looked back at the monster trapped in his hamster ball. It was trying to climb up the walls and start it rolling, but it wasn’t working.

  If he hadn’t brought Terry here, the monster wouldn’t have been created.

  If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Scarlett (no, Lana. Lana did it) wouldn’t have killed everyone at her school.

  If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Pax wouldn’t have killed that old preacher guy on the street.

  If he hadn’t brought Terry here, Pax would have died.

  Maybe he would have been better off dead.

  Maybe everyone would have been better off if he had died.

  Maybe the whole universe would be better off if Terry were dead.

  I’m the one who brought him here.

  I have to track him down.

  I have to kill him.

  Pax leaned back from the bodies and looked out over the ocean. If he squinted, he could almost pretend nothing had happened: the water still crashed against the shore, the silhouettes of the shorebirds around him dark against the sky. The sun burned orange o
n puffy purple clouds. A breeze was coming in, pushing the clouds away. It was going to be a good day. The sailboats would be out.

  Looking for the missing and the dead.

  Pax looked down at Terry once more. He was astral. He could be anywhere. But if Scarlett had hurt him—really hurt him—then Terry would be in only one place on Earth.

  Pax reinforced the shield around the monster, working his mind so the shield would stay up without him consciously thinking about it. The monster was thrashing wildly now, but as long as the sun was shining, Pax would be able to hold it.

  He lay on the rock next to the bodies. Step number one: disconnect his senses. He’d done this a thousand times before, while traveling to the astral plane to hang out with Terry, who had once been his idol.

  Whom he was going to kill.

  Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—gone. And Pax’s consciousness was gone as well.

  Scarlett’s body sat up and screamed in pain and shock. Julie screamed back as much out of shock as horror. Scarlett’s head whipped around to stare at Julie as Ms. Jance’s head rolled off the table. It hit the floor with a wet smack, bouncing and tumbling until it came to rest against one of the chair’s metallic legs. The scalpel clattered on the tile and landed next to Julie’s feet. She picked it up.

  The girl’s head turned back and forth stiffly. “Where am I?”

  Julie tried to swallow but could not. The movement felt as though she were tearing something in her throat.

  From the floor, Ms. Jance said, “You are in Room 221 of DARPA.”

  Scarlett sat upright, her lank hair in loose strands over the side of her face. With her free hand, she tried to push the hair out of her eyes, but the fingers weren’t working properly.