by Alex Hayes
I take a few steps and ram into a wall. Damn it. I almost wish I was still green and had my infrared eyes. I activate my phone while holding the light close to my chest. Just enough glow to make our way.
A plain-walled corridor leads to yet another doorway. This one is closed. We pin ourselves to the walls. As I reach for the handle, something snaps in my chest and I gasp.
“Id, what’s up?” Marek whispers, fear tightening his words.
I feel…not pain, but an absence. Like a cord’s been cut and my sense of Cadi’s direction is gone. “Something’s happened to Cadi. I can’t sense her anymore.”
Panic beats a steel drum inside my head.
Please, God. I can’t be too late. They can’t have killed her.
Marek grabs the door handle and pulls, but the door doesn’t budge. “Shit.”
I flip my phone light to the entry.
“The lock needs a card key,” Marek says.
“Can we break through?” I’m desperate as hell.
He pulls at the door. “Steel. Let me check that desk out front.” He returns waving a card. “Visitor badge. Let’s hope it works.”
Marek swipes the card across the reader. The lock clicks and he shoves open the door. “Let’s go.”
We switch on our phone lights and swing them around. The room’s so big I can’t make out its edges, but the place echoes like it’s empty.
“What the shit, Sherlock,” Marek growls. “There’s no one here.”
“What’s that?” I point. My breath claws at my throat as I take in what looks like a body on the floor. Stepping toward the shape, I see a splash of white through the gloom. Squatting, I reach out a shaky hand and grab the fuzzy white hat.
Cadi! No! My mouth says the words but no sound escapes me. My heart crumples and collapses in on itself.
Marek grabs my arm before I can dart to the figure. “Let me look first.”
I stand numbly and let him.
He lifts a card similar to the visitor badge he produced earlier. “Not her. Probably a security dude.”
Relief knows no bounds, and yet, that scrunched form is a body. A person. A human being. Dead.
A shudder races up my spine. “Like those bodies they found in Hopper, do you think?”
Marek glances up. “I’d say so.”
Fear trickles through my chest. “We’ve got to find Cadi before they do this to her.” We walk until our phone lights illuminate the opposite wall of the warehouse, and I see a row of twenty or so gray-painted doors. “They must have gone through one of these.”
Marek reaches a door first and taps. Steel. “These look like storage closets. They’re too close together for anything else.”
“One has to lead to another room or a corridor. An elevator, maybe. We’ll have to check them all.” I grab the handle of the closest and pull. The damned thing’s locked.
Marek tries another. Same deal. “No card-reader. We need a physical key.”
We pause, then say together, “The security guard.”
Ugh. I don’t want to rifle through a dead guy’s clothes, but I head over to the body. After giving it a light pat down, I slide my hand into the right pant leg pocket, gingerly, trying not to gag. Another access badge and some car keys. That’s all. Shaking my head at Marek, I step away from the body.
Marek returns to the doors. He gives one a solid kick. “It’ll take a crowbar to open these.”
I return to his side, hopeful. “You got one?”
“No, bro.”
My chest falls.
“But I have a barbell. Figure that’ll work just as well.”
I punch him on the shoulder. “You rule, man.”
Marek smiles. “Yes, I do.”
40
Cadi
Darkness is replaced by an orange glow, but I hardly comprehend it because a sharp snip in my chest breaks my connection to Idris’s crystal.
What happened?
My crystal doesn’t answer. Its vibrations simply dim to a low whimper. Whatever I just passed through has cut the psychic cord between us.
We’re in an arched passageway hewn through rock. John drops me to the ground. My limbs feel heavy and my face hits a floor of gritty brown sand that billows and drifts strangely through the air, as if gravity here is somehow different. After spitting granules from my mouth, I pull in a breath and find it’s not enough. Slow deep breathing doesn’t help.
My snake-like binding slithers away from my wrists and I struggle to my feet.
John’s having difficulty, too.
The bitch woman has returned to the lizard form of my mother. She cocks the weapon John used on me, like she’s preparing for a showdown, and struts along the narrow passage.
My lungs ache as I stagger to the rock wall for support.
Evil Bitch returns. “The general has secured the area.” She grabs my arm and drags me down the passage.
I can’t resist. All I can do is fight to catch my breath.
The passageway opens into a massive cave with stalagmites and stalactites the size of school buses. Near the cavern’s center, a sphere of whirling orange gases, like a small sun, floats between two silvery disks that seem to hold the globe in suspension.
John follows, moving slower than me.
More rolling, clicking words come out of Evil Bitch’s mouth. “You’ll have to transform, Corporal. Apparently, the atmosphere cannot sustain humans.”
John’s body twists and deforms into an ugly mass. The sound of tearing fabric accompanies the appearance of four arms with enough muscle mass to rival Schwarzenegger in his prime. Pants tear apart, leaving stretchy boxer shorts to cover an expanded frame, as he morphs into a hideous, aquamarine-colored humanoid with four violet eyes and a strange double mouth.
Meanwhile, the unsustainable human — me — is dragged toward the micro-sun where a figure stands, facing us.
“General Loguïti.” Evil Bitch bows her head.
Panting hard, I look up at the general. He’s more horrendous than the new John. Bigger. Bluer. Wearing a crisscross of straps over his muscled turquoise chest. And holding a nasty looking weapon about four times the size of the one Evil Bitch cradles.
“Commander Rill,” the general says with a voice that sounds like glass shards being ground across a chalkboard.
I cover my ears and shudder.
Commander Evil Bitch lets me go and I slump to the ground. Brown sand rises in a plume around me, then settles again while my lungs burn.
“You have neutralized the Gatekeeper?” she asks.
A rattle comes from the general’s throat and his double mouths open wide. “The last of the Livran elders.” His shape glimmers like quicksilver as he transforms into a lizard-man who could be an age-progressed Idris, except for the two forward-pointing horns sticking out of his brow. His clothes hang limp on his smaller frame.
My heart breaks at the thought that this horrible monster has consumed the last of a race of people. Worse, that race of people was mine. I’m one of them, except I’m not. I’m human. And it’s killing me.
“What is this creature?” General Loguïti nods his head in my direction. “A human?”
Evil Bitch grins a wide green smile. “No. She’s the first of our new Livran breeders.”
She pulls back her shoulders and smirks my way. “Soon, we’ll have an endless supply of Livran hosts to assimilate.”
The general casts a hand in my direction. “Assuming this puny creature survives.”
Evil Bitch grabs my arms and shakes me. “What is wrong with you? Transform, you fool!” Cruella de Vil in crocodile skin. But her touch triggers something inside me.
My crystal warms and where her scaled fingers grip me, my skin starts to change. Closing my eyes, I imagine myself looking like her, like Idris. A whooshing sensation flashes through my body, followed by a massive inhalation. My lungs clear. I can breathe again. Several more breaths and I’m almost feeling normal.
I open my eyes to find my skin gr
een like Idris’s.
My heart cries with longing. He’ll never find me now. But I know that’s just as well, because if he does, he’ll be captured too.
“Much better.” Evil Bitch turns back to the general. “Her bond brother is on the other side of the wormhole. I detected his crystal before we crossed.”
Damn. The bitch is on to him. Wait. What did she say? Wormhole? Like a real one?
So we’re not in an underground chamber on Earth with some weird gravity effect? We’re on another planet? How’s that possible?
I scan the surroundings. Breathing past a whole different set of olfactory nerves, I recognize smells, some familiar and some horribly foreign. The heat and the dryness I know, but the air crackles with something I don’t recognize, an unhealthy static and an acrid odor that make my nostrils twinge.
Evil Bitch glances at me, eyes brimmed with loathing. “We need suspension spheres to contain her, before she discovers what she’s capable of.”
The general laughs. At least I think that’s what he’s doing. He holds up a palm. Three silver-blue balls fly out from behind a stalagmite protrusion and circle above the general’s hand.
Whatever those spheres are, if they do what Evil Bitch wants, I’ll be trapped. Possibly forever.
I need to escape. Now.
If I’m to use my telekinesis without disabling myself, I have to do so in a small way. Without staring at anyone or anything in particular, I take in every detail I can. Evil Bitch and the general are both armed.
Like the ping pong balls I controlled in the barn with the kittens, I should be able to manipulate both of their weapons at the same time, as long as I think of them as a single unit. Aim them at each other and pull their triggers. Whether they’re set to stun or kill doesn’t matter. If they disable each other, then all I’ll have to deal with is John. Smash him into a rock wall hard enough and it won’t matter if I pass out.
Worth a try.
I go for it. The weapons move, triggers pulled, but Bitch Lady’s on to me too fast. She jerks her weapon toward the ceiling and knocks me to the ground with a telekinetic thrust.
The general isn’t so quick. His weapon discharges with squiggles of blue light and hits Evil Bitch square on, leaving a pile of dust in her place.
Choking with horror, I scramble to my feet and stumble for cover.
Another blast from the general’s weapon. Blue light reflects around me.
I land on my butt, quivering in a heap behind a massive stalagmite.
Need to move. Get away. But I can’t shift a muscle.
41
Idris
“It’s. Barely. Making. A. Dent.” Marek punctuates each word with a whack on the first steel door in the row with his fifty-pound weight bar. Duh, duh, duh in a determined D-Flat. Another ten cracks and he pauses. “Your turn.”
I catch the hefty barbell and take a turn at the door. My impacts release flutters of peeling paint but accomplish little else. Twenty-five strikes and two screaming biceps later, I stop.
“We’re never going to get through.” I try slipping the tip of the bar between the door and the frame, but it’s too thick and falls away.
Marek snorts. “Never say never. What we need is to start thinking with our brains, not our brawn.”
I set one end of the barbell on the ground and try to think, but my mind just crowds with worry. What have they done to Cadi? Is she hurt? Terrified?
God, I need to concentrate. My free hand lifts to finger the crystal still sinking into my chest. It vibrates under my touch.
If only I could use my ability to manipulate sound waves and get us through those doors, but how? I wish they included light waves, then maybe I could focus light like a laser and cut my way through.
I spin to face Marek, who’s moving down the line of doors, tapping them each a few times, then moving on.
The barbell thunks, hitting the floor in a rhythm as I trail after him. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out if any of these doors sounds different from the rest.”
A flicker of hope ignites inside me. “I might be able to do that. Better.”
Marek gives me a don’t-be-a-smart-ass look. He’s the one, after all, who’s the science guy.
“I’m not ragging on you, man. I’m serious. If I can tune these sound waves I emit, maybe I can sense them bouncing back. You know, like an ultrasound.”
He shrugs. “Go for it.”
I set the weight bar on the ground and lay a palm flat on the first door, then touch the crystal on my chest like it’s a talisman. An answering tingle encourages me.
Focus.
I visualize sound moving through water, creating tiny waves. The steel door hums under my palm. A picture takes shape in my mind, something not unlike a sonogram. “The space beyond is six feet by six feet. Four shelves on the back wall. Some tubs or buckets on the floor. That’s it.”
Marek grins. “Way to go, Sonic. Do that to the next one.”
The second room contains boxes filled with something not very dense, like paper.
“Janitor’s closet,” Marek surmises as I walk to the next.
“This one’s the janitor’s closet,” I report. “It’s full of brooms.”
“Next,” Marek orders.
My hand settles on the door. “Stacked metal frames. Shelving, maybe.”
When we get to the seventh door, its contents surprises me.
Marek picks up on my reaction. “What we got, superhero?”
I glance at him. “Nothing.”
“As in another empty room?”
“No. Nothing as in no reflection at all. Like a void. Just emptiness.” I shake my head. “It’s…eerie.”
Marek nods, looking thoughtful. “Try the next one.”
“Sheets of plastic or rubber. Matting, maybe. Hard to tell.” I try one more door. Same deal. A six-foot space with a few boxes.
“Back to Number Seven,” Marek says. “Do it again, just to be sure.”
I get back exactly what I did before. “Nothing. Nada. Nil.”
“So, if Cadi went into a place that absorbs sound waves, possibly all waves, that would explain why your connection to her got cut off.”
He’s brilliant.
“Yeah. What do you think’s on the other side?”
Marek opens his mouth, then closes it again. “It’s crazy. Maybe too crazy to say.”
I tilt my head. “Try me.”
He scratches his scalp. “There’s not much that sucks in waves like that. Sounds a lot like a black hole. But if we were that close to a black hole, we’d be dead. So it ain’t that.”
A twinge of impatience needles me because I can tell he’s got more to say, but he’s holding back. “So what else?”
“The only thing I can think of is a tear in the space-time continuum.”
I roll my eyes. “In English, please.”
“Jeez, Id. Did you never watch Thor? I’m talking about a wormhole.”
Now I understand why he was so hesitant to spell it out. Even if Einstein did calculate their existence with a lot of scribbles on several chalkboards, wormholes are science fiction from where I’m standing. But theorizing what’s behind that door suddenly seems less important than getting through the damn thing and finding out for a fact.
I toss a thumb toward the door and look at Marek square on. “I need to get in there, and you’re going to tell me how.” Because I haven’t a clue.
42
Cadi
The silence is killing me. From my hiding place behind a giant rock cone, all I can hear is my own breathing and the heartbeat throbbing in my temples. My fingers cling to the stone barrier behind me as I strain to hear the general’s approach.
He’s going to turn the corner and shoot me with his mega blaster any second now.
A shadow shifts across the brown sand at my feet as its source blocks the light from the massive floating energy ball. “It’s all right, Cadalonea. You’re safe now.”
/> I look up as the general appears, still in lizard form, his weapon aimed at the floor. My lips part, chest heaving. Clearly I’ve missed something. The general is supposed to be on the commander’s side, not on mine.
“Come,” he waves me toward him.
Creeping along the edge of the stalagmite, I peer into the cavern center. There’s no sign of Evil Bitch or John.
I blink, confused. “W-What happened to the others?”
“They’re dead.” The general watches me. His eyes remind me so much of Idris it’s uncanny.
“Y-You killed them?”
“I’m afraid so.” He indicates two piles of silvery dust. “You see…I’m not General Loguïti.”
My body turns weak and rubbery. “Then who are you?”
He smiles and puts his massive weapon down on a truncated stalagmite, a kind of table that holds some sort of holographic screen and control panel.
He glances back at the piles of dust on the cavern floor, then looks at me. “I’m Valdar. The Gatekeeper. The last of the Livran Elders.”
My mouth drops open, cartoon style. He’s one of my people. “So…what happened to the general?”
Valdar points to another pile of ash behind the sawed-off stalagmite and his lips quirk. “I got him first.” His voice is deep and a little bit husky. It reminds me of Idris, which makes sense, since they’re the same species. Unlike those life-sucking Evatenon beings.
A relieved breath whistles out of me. I feel giddy.
Valdar approaches and offers his hands; their scales are thick and dark green. I take them. My crystal quivers with pleasure and contentment. We belong in this strange place and this man is known to us.
“How you’ve grown.” He shakes his head and his eyes light up. “How is Dre?”
He knows Dre. “Um…fine. I mean, mostly fine. I only found him a few days ago, but I think he’s had a good life.”
Valdar’s body stiffens. “You were separated?”
So he knows about Idris and me — I mean Dre — and our connection. That we’re related somehow. “Yes, when we were three.” I study his face, watching for his reaction.
