The air was filled with tiny little plant pieces.
I shouldn’t have been able to see them. They were too small. It was like my eyes were cameras, telescopes that could zoom in somehow to reveal these little minuscule living things, gray green like flakes of fungus, tumbling and spinning past, between me and the others.
I saw all of this in an instant. Then it all snapped back together, and the air was suddenly just air again. I stretched out my power, but felt nothing.
“Mat.” Alex sounded really worried now. “Are you okay?”
I blinked. Okay? I wasn’t going to give a bullshit answer. Something about the way the two Dark-Net dudes watched me, told me for sure that they knew what I was feeling. Somehow, they knew.
“This room is way more than just a room,” I said.
Alex’s eyes widened.
The other two just kept watching me calmly.
“It’s alive, isn’t it?” I asked them. “It’s filled with power.”
Things suddenly felt very tense. It was something you noticed when you’d been in a lot of fights, and were about to get in another. The air, the body language, the way the other person watched you, it all felt like things did on a hot August night right before thunder boomed and lightning struck.
My skin began tingling again, this time more strongly, more like the thousand needles stabbing my skin sensation when I was around another Empowered.
The Dark-Net dudes—there was a golden glow around them.
One of them casually lifted a hand and my legs wobbled, and I felt a hundred years old, like I was about to topple over.
Without thinking, I pulled power into me from the room. The tumbling little plant-things reappeared in my vision. Energy refilled me, making me feel 22 years old again.
“I’m not a hero,” I told them. “I just want to find my sister. Save her from the heroes who want to kill her, or worse, make her a prisoner.”
The guy lowered his hand and once again the room was normal seeming. Alex raised his eyebrows at me in question, but I ignored him.
“You’re different,” the guy who had raised his hand said. “Not like other so-called Empowered.”
“What do you mean, so-called?” I asked.
“Not for us to say,” his pal replied.
Then why the hell had they mentioned it?
In my experience, people who pointed something out but then refused to explain what the hell they meant were either messing with you or they wanted to get your attention. My money was on getting my attention. Which they now had.
“We aren’t enemies,” they said at the same time to me.
I shrugged. “We aren’t allies, either.”
“Not yet,” the guy on the right said. “Things may change.”
“Is the questioning finished?” I asked.
Alex shrugged. “Is it?” He asked the Dark-Net dudes.
Their faces were expressionless.
“Yes,” they said in that creepy stereo of theirs.
“Then you’ll send us to Persia? We can go?”
“There was one more thing. Your test.”
“The test?”
“Yes, a small thing.”
One of them pivoted, and walked to the wall behind him, placing his hand on the wall. He turned back, something cupped in his hand.
He strode toward me, face expressionless, held out his hand.
In it was a shard of amber, glittering with crystals.
“Take this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It is of the Earth.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I reached to pick the shard from his hand, like I was reaching for a burner on a hot stove. I stopped with my fingers just inches from the shard.
“You must take it,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. I lifted it from his hand. It was warm, like something living. For an instant, it seemed to squirm in my hand.
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Hold it. Close your eyes.” I closed my eyes. It didn’t seem to be squirming any more, maybe that had just been the way it felt in my hand at first. “Send your power into it.”
“How can I do that? It’s not a plant. It doesn’t live.”
“It is connected to plants.”
I sighed. Fine. Anything to get this over with. I reached out with my power. The amber made no sound in my head. Just what I’d thought. My power couldn’t feel—I stopped. There was something there, like sap in a great tree. I eased my power slowly inside the shard.
“Wait,” I said. “It’s alive.” I turned my head, my eyes still shut. “What is this?”
An image formed in my mind. A crystalline amber waterfall-like arc of this stuff, in a cave somewhere, lit by the moss growing on the wall, like in the mine at Mossville.
I could feel the image’s warmth. There was a sound, a low hum. The walls were spider-webbed with glowing veins, only these shined with a golden light.
The frozen amber waterfall held something inside it. A form. A human form.
My heart seemed to stop.
Suddenly my hand was open and the shard was gone.
I opened my eyes. The Dark-Net dudes smiled. I swallowed. Hell of a time for them to show emotion. Both were mahogany brown now. They looked identical. One of them carried the amber shard back to the wall, pushed it into the wall.
My mind still held an afterimage of the crystalline waterfall. “Where is the amber waterfall?”
“What you see is hidden from us,” they said.
“How do I see it? I don’t understand.”
“The world is alive in more ways than you realize.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“It means exactly that.”
“What was the point of this test?” I asked, not hiding the irritation in my voice.
Worry flashed across Alex’s face.
“You have seen,” they said together, making me shudder again. “That was the point. Now we can take you to your destination.”
I started to ask another question, but stopped. The image in my mind faded away. I’d seen, but I didn’t know what any of it meant. Pretty clear they weren’t going to be able to tell me either.
I hoped Persia would be less creepy than this place.
They unsealed the hatch in the middle of the floor. A smell like warm mud filled the room, mingled with a shit stink and the strong scent of growing things.
I don’t know exactly what I had expected. A submarine. A speedboat that could take us to a seaplane. Maybe I’d watched too many of those dumb Empowered TV shows with my sisters, but something like that. But after what had happened here, I wasn’t surprised there was no vehicle.
Instead, there was an opening to what looked like a huge pipe.
The stench of rotting fruit flooded my nostrils, and I gagged. This place was a bouquet of stink. My stomach lurched and I nearly lost my breakfast.
I glanced at Alex, who looked like he wanted to puke, too.
“I’m not getting flushed down a giant garbage disposal,” I said through gritted teeth.
“The smell comes from the source,” one of the Dark-Net dudes said, right on cue. Figured. More cryptic commentary.
I didn’t bother asking them about the source, they’d just feed me bullshit.
There were veins covering the pipe walls, looking like the ones running through the mine shafts beneath Mossville. Only these were throbbing.
“I will take the lead,” he said.
“And I will take the rear,” the other chimed in.
The first one disappeared into the tube. Alex hesitated for a split second, then disappeared inside.
I ground my teeth and jumped in after him.
Warm, stinky blackness rushed up to meet me.
8
For a second, it was like I’d been swallowed by an ocean of mud.
I couldn’t think for that instant, which seemed to stretch for like an hour. Warm, sticky mud imprisoned me.
I couldn’t move. I frantically held my breath, thrashing slowly in the mud. I would suffocate.
Then, it was like we broke through a trembling, living barrier, and I walked alongside Alex and the Dark-Net dudes, who were back to being hooded guys again. I couldn’t make out the others very well, everything was blurred. We all should have been covered in sticky mud, but weren’t.
We walked along a moss-covered path. Above us, a forest of roots hung down from a black sky. The roots glowed, enough to throw off light that showed the way. We walked past huge heaps of human and animal corpses. Mounds of people, antelope, birds, even whales.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” answered Alex. The other two guys stayed silent.
Our feet made loud squelching sounds as we walked, echoing in the space around us. Roots grew up from the earth ahead of us.
A warm, coppery smell, like blood, filled the air.
My stomach twisted, but didn’t heave.
Alex coughed. “The smell,” he said.
Everything seemed to curve away from us. The bone white roots turned red, like blood.
I stopped.
The other three continued walking and began to fade away.
“You cannot stop,” one the Dark-Net dudes said. “If you stop, you will be lost forever.”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t getting left behind. It was like I was in a dream, but it was real. I was awake. Fear uncoiled in my stomach and I started breathing fast. I shook myself. Must focus.
Alex looked white-lipped as well.
This wasn’t like anyplace I’d been before. It felt like when I’d worn the amplifier, only I couldn’t feel my power, I only sensed everything around me with a razor sharp vision, like in the tunnels. Like inside the strange room at the Cannery a few minutes ago. Or was it days ago? Or had weeks passed? But that couldn’t be right.
My brain felt like it was ripping apart.
I shuddered but kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Maybe the air in that giant pipe had been drugged.
I’d never done drugs before. Never had the urge. I’d drank booze, but not since being out of Special Corrections. But this didn’t feel anything like the buzz you got from drinking. It was my mind—it felt stretched.
“What-is-happening?” I asked.
The forest of roots hung down in a colossal tangle from the sky, and roots from below intertwined with them.
I stopped, again. “We can’t get through there.”
“Open your heart,” one of the guides said. “Ask the roots to open for you.”
I pushed my power at the roots, but there was no way inside them. I closed my eyes, tried again. Still nothing.
“Sorry, it won’t work.” I pinched my lips together.
“You must open your heart. Feel the roots.”
“I can’t feel them. If they were actual roots, I could, but the fucking things aren’t!”
The colossal roots rising from the Earth and descending from the sky, they weren’t like ordinary roots. “I can’t feel them!” I snarled.
“Awareness is not the same thing as true feeling,” one or both of them said. “Your emotion determines your reality.”
Now they really were getting under my skin. I shoved my power at the roots, but it was like shoving at a mountain. I swore, tried yet again. Nothing.
“I can’t do it,” I told the Dark-Net dudes. They didn’t say anything.
Alex would understand. I swung around to face him.
“They’re asking the impossible,” I told him.
Alex didn’t answer He stood absolutely still, like a statue. His eyes were closed. For a second I thought I saw a green glow around him. I blinked and it was gone. Must be this place.
I turned back to the roots, slowly, so very slowly, like one of the glaciers Ruth told me about seeing once. I felt like that glacier, moving by inches for so long. I pressed harder, fighting to open the roots. Nothing. It was like trying to open a granite mountain. I ground my teeth, and heat flushed through me. Damn it.
“Why can’t I get through?” I snarled, the words taking forever to come out of my mouth.
The Dark-Net dudes were silent for forever. “Your anger keeps you from moving forward,” they finally said, in unison.
“My anger is mine,” I muttered. “It gives me strength.”
“It holds you back,” they replied.
I clenched my muscles, and pushed my power at the roots again. Anger boiled inside of me. My muscles shook. Sweat drenched my arms and chest. After what felt like a month, I gasped, and let go of my power. My anger had turned to exhaustion. My shoulders slumped. There wasn’t any point. I wouldn’t be able to get through, not with my anger.
I shivered. My power was worthless here.
“Your anger kept you from going forward,” the Dark-Net dudes said. One of them touched my arm.
Power bubbled up from the Earth, through the soles of my feet. The feeling of hopelessness vanished.
I waved my arms, and the roots drew back. We walked past the roots and out to the other side. Alex walked alongside me, his eyes staring off into the distance.
The world seemed to blink.
Suddenly the roots were gone, along with the earthen sky. We stood in a huge tunnel that had to be a half-mile wide, but the tunnel ceiling was just out of reach.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are still inside,” the Dark-Net dudes said in unison. “In the earth.”
“But where in the Earth?” I asked.
“Near the end of the secret ways.”
None of this made sense. Walking underground would take us months, and I remembered enough high school geology to know that walking underneath the ocean would take us way down to where things would get really hot, and the pressure would crush us. But, the path we’d taken was unlike any road I’d ever walked.
“What happened to the roots?” I asked them.
“Nothing. They remain.” But instead of roots, twisting vines bearing pods the size of watermelons, emerged from the ceiling and hung just out of reach.
This was a freakish garden out of one of Ella’s fantasy books.
A mist began to fill the air, droplets glittering like a crystalline rainbow, until the world began gleaming with light.
I tried to call out to Alex, but I couldn’t make a sound, and the only sound I heard was cascading water, as though an invisible waterfall was nearby. I lost track of time.
The mist parted and the four of us stood in a cave, sunlight shining in from the mouth a stone’s throw away.
“We have arrived.”
I blinked.
“Just like that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Of course, it hadn’t been just like that, we’d gone on some sort of freaking fairy trip.
I rubbed my eyes. They were hooded dudes again, grungy, and smelly. What the hell had happened?
“Why do you keep changing how you look?” I asked them.
One of them gave me a lazy smile. “You see an aspect of who we are.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“How we appear depends upon where we are.”
I shook my head. “Shape shifters? Those are just legends.”
“We do not shift form.”
“But you look different.”
“You see a different aspect,” they said.
I shook my head again. From the moment I’d entered Mossville, things had gone very weird.
Alex shuddered, like he had just woken up from some secret dream. He blinked and looked at me. He looked unsure of what he was seeing.
“You aren’t human, are you?” I asked the Dark-Net dudes.
“Not as you imagine it,” the black guy said. “Gotta stretch your mind.” Just like that, they sounded like the homeless men we’d first seen outside the cannery.
“Hang loose,” the white guy said, and they slipped back into the shadows, and vanished.
A wa
ve of heat rolled out from the shadows, like opening the door to an oven set on bake.
“These guys specialize in weird.” I fanned my face with my hand. I touched Alex on the arm. He felt reassuringly solid. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Beats me,” he said.
“You were frozen,” I said.
“Strange, you and the others looked frozen to me.”
I squeezed his arm. “What did you see?”
He thought for a moment. “It’s hard to describe. It’s like the world had become an aura of shifting colors. That strange sky and the ground beneath our feet, it all faded until it was barely visible.”
“Weirder than weird,” I said.
“You can say that again.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck. He looked toward the sunlit cave mouth. “Guess we’d better see where we are.”
“Wait.” I narrowed my eyes. I wanted to see if the node were still open. “Flashlight,” I told Alex.
“What?”
“You must have one in that bag of yours.”
He unzipped his backpack, handed me one, and took another.
Figured.
I turned the flashlight on, shining the beam at where they’d gone.
A rocky alcove there, with an ancient basin with a puddle of dark water in it, and more water dripping from a crack in the ceiling. I reached out with my power. Fungus on the walls, that was all.
No.
Something in the rock. Roots? Tendrils. It wasn’t bleeding energy like the mine back in Mossville. But there was a strength. The room began to spin. I swayed.
“Mat!” Alex steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. I pulled my sense back inside me.
“What was it?” he asked.
“The walls are alive.” I shivered. The weird just kept getting weirder. I turned off the flashlight, handed it back to Alex. “You wanted to see about finding out where we are?”
He nodded, concern obvious on his face.
“I’m fine,” I told him. He looked like he thought that was bullshit, but didn’t say anything. “Let’s just get going.”
“Okay.” He still sounded dubious.
The cave opened to a rock-strewn hillside overlooking a dusty valley. We squatted just inside the cave, sipped water Alex had brought, and ate more of those damned protein bars he seemed to have an endless supply of. I’d have killed for a hamburger.
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