by Mark Russo
He scoffed and approached me; he wore a mechanic suit I had never seen before on him. “I was there”—he pointed at a working desk behind us—“trying to fix a vision globe, you know, for the Marcovians. Things are going slightly better with them.”
I nodded while the tip of my right foot tapped the vault’s stone floor.
“Then when I finished, I went by the case and noticed the spectacle was missing. But that was not the weirdest thing about it.”
“What do you mean?” I doubt I could have frowned more.
“Come have a look.” His new suit had a specific way of walking; he was not lifting his feet enough, so the soles of his shoes would rub on the stone every time.
I tried to focus on something else. “So, what’s wrong with the case?”
“Nothing. That’s the weird part. It looks like they did not even touch it.”
I took a closer look. The glass and the cabinet’s lock hadn’t been forced or damaged. The frame was shinier than I ever remembered. “What you are saying is the spectacle is just gone?” I peered at him above my glasses.
“That is why I called you here. That thing was here, and the next time I looked, it was not.”
I scoffed, but fortunately, I could do something. “Follow me to that rack over there. I may have found a way to prove how much you are lying.”
He grumbled a few words, which I couldn’t decipher. He followed me and stopped talking as well.
I localized the lamp I needed and turned it on without further ado. “Luckily, we do not tidy up this place much. Dust will help us.” I pointed the light toward the floor to reveal many lines of footprints, but those all belonged to Vagras and me. When we returned to the case, things looked different.
“See? I told you. Someone was here,” that gangly man beside me said with a grunt. “And these footprints move from here to there.”
The trail ended abruptly against a wall a few steps from us. We followed the tiny feet marks.
“And this person, whoever he or she was, left the vault through this wall,” I suggested.
Vagras nodded while lifting his eyelids.
“Can you Path of Mind marchers move through walls?”
He shook his head as if I had asked him whether he could breathe underwater. “Nor can Path of Time or Matter ones. We do not know what we are dealing with. That’s progress.”
I made him stifle laughter.
The large bricks on the wall would not reveal any peculiar detail; they appeared to be the same size, shape, and color as all the hundreds of others there. Things looked quite different when I laid my hand on those bricks. A portion of the wall crumbled and fell, revealing a hole big enough to fit a person, especially one with feet as tiny as those we had followed all the way here.
“Is this happening?” Vagras peeked inside the blackness of the small tunnel.
“I’m as surprised as you are. I assume we go in there now.” I extended my right leg into the wall, crouching slightly to fit in the compact space, then I switched on the light. “It seems they dug a tunnel through the wall. It leads outside.” The dim light of the day shone a few steps from me.
Vagras joined me, and in a few seconds, we were outside.
“This plane merger thing is a real bummer. Now people can attack the vault, just like that,” Vagras said with a moan.
“Do you have any idea what part of the human’s world we are in?”
“This is Russia, Valu. Don’t ask where exactly; I can’t pronounce these names correctly.”
We were in the middle of an arid taiga with a small asphalt road opening before us and leading deeper into no man’s land.
“It will take forever to find whoever stole from us here. They could be anywhere now,” Vagras lamented.
“I’m happy to prove you wrong then. I have waited lots of Plane R years to do this.”
His face appeared puzzled as I ventured back into the vault.
I returned shortly after, holding a remote control. “Follow me,” I told the vault keeper.
We walked a slight distance around the building. When we were at the right spot, I pressed the red button on the remote, and a secret door opened.
“Okay, I thought you said I already knew all the secrets about this place. And yet, this proves you have lied to me.”
“Don’t take it personally, Vagras. I almost forgot I had a car. But now that we needed one, it came back to my mind.”
He grunted. “Do you even know how to drive it?”
“This is a self-driving electric car. It does the thing on her own. We sit and enjoy the drive,” I answered, way more eager than I had planned.
“Let’s see how enjoyable the Russian taiga is,” the former giant serpent commented.
“Bonny, get out of the garage.” I enunciated the words while talking very close to the remote control.
The car whirred as its wheels rolled the scant distance I had ordered her to cover.
“Sure, humans have been creative in developing their technologies,” Vagras said. When the gullwing doors opened, Vagras nodded and showed me his right thumb.
We took place side by side. The vehicle’s interior appeared much cleaner than expected, and those fake leather seats surprised me positively as well.
“Bonny, drive straight in front of us. We don’t have a precise destination.”
“Sure, Valu. Fasten your seatbelts, please.” The car’s engine started in a low key, and we left the Red Vault at moderate speed.
The fading light of the day shined on an empty landscape. Pines and larks lay scattered here and there without a specific pattern. We passed a small group of wooden sheds devoid of people. The road extended straight in front of us for kilometers.
“I wish I could say I was enjoying the landscape.” Vagras pointed to the surrounding nothingness.
“This is not a weekend trip. Let’s keep our eyes open. Maybe we’ll spot something worth investigating from a closer distance.”
He pursed his lips and stepped backward, peeking out the thick windows.
We drove some more, and the surroundings did not change much. The car stopped near an intersection.
By pure chance, I saw a group of houses in the distance. “Bonny, turn left. There’s a village maybe a kilometer from here. Let’s see what’s there.”
“Of course, Valu.”
“Do you have firearms here? I’m not sure what we are poking our noses in,” my travelling companion asked.
“I carry nothing of the sort, but, as you know, I always have a few gadgets. Those will do the trick.”
He spied the pockets in my jacket, as if he could spot any of them.
This part of the route was much bumpier than it had been, so the car slowed quite a lot. At this speed, I could appreciate the details of the first houses of the tiny village ahead of us. Most exhibited heavy structural damage, like almost everywhere else on this planet. More houses and some larger-sized buildings appeared as we moved forward, so I asked the car to stop.
We exited without talking, but Vagras was more than explicit when he would not stop looking around. He hesitated, so I went past him to explore the area. He eventually followed me. “Everywhere is the same …”
“How do you mean?” I turned to face him.
“The destruction. It is like this in all parts of the world we’ve been.”
“Since when did you become such a romantic? I preferred the scared version of you.”
He chuckled. “Do we even know what we’re looking for?”
A sudden gust of wind reminded me I could get cold in this body. “Someone with tiny feet. A human, I suppose.”
Footfalls from the side of a decrepit house cut our conversation short.
We ran toward the pile of debris and turned the corner, my hand already reaching into my pocket. “This thing is fast,” I told the vault keeper.
Once we reached the other corner of what once was someone’s home, many trees surprised us.
“How come I alw
ays end up running in the woods?” Vagras joked.
We quickened our pace. My feet cried inside my leather shoes after accelerating.
“I saw something!” my sprint companion yelled as he overtook me. His arms and legs moved like a demonic spirit had possessed him.
The grass grew taller around us, and the soil was wet. I also spotted something scampering from us in the corner of my eye. When we reached the first trees, we stopped.
“Where did it go?” he asked, panting.
“Wait a second.” I removed the box from my right pocket.
“What is that?”
“I was thinking we would use this completely differently, but it might as well serve the purpose.”
The spider popped out of the box on its eight metallic legs. I pressed the button on its back, and it ran away.
“What is that?” he asked again.
“Just the thing that will help us catch our thief.”
“How? We lost sight of that too. It’s just too fast.”
“That was the whole point.”
His face was way beyond furrowed.
“The spider will track the human and immobilize him or her.”
“How do you know it’s a human being?”
“I saw someone running before us.”
“That very same body figure could have been a Marcovian.”
I looked straight in his eyes. “We will find out soon.”
“Will the spider call you once he has something?”
“Not exactly, but you’ll see.”
We entered the woods, and the wind followed us. If that person was still running, he or she was quite far from us, since I could not hear a sound coming from the expanse of trees. Not a twig creaked; not a branch rustled. I wish I had listened to Vagras’s suggestion and carried more weapons with us.
2
Emma
We were all standing around a coffee table, and all I could think about was that it was crooked. It would wobble just staring at it.
Vain entered last, fidgeting with a paper chart as he burst through the door.
“We are all here. We can start our meeting,” I announced.
They looked at me, assuming I’d continue speaking.
“Our first topic is Maria’s disappearance, of course. Akko and I already decided he will cover for her with the students.”
He looked up at me. “Isn’t there another way to do this?”
“The schedule for this first week is not that tight. We will dodge all the questions for now. Unless you guys have any idea on how to tackle this differently …?”
They shook their heads.
Vain kept writing, as if he hadn’t heard a word I said.
“What do we tell them when they ask questions?” James asked.
“She’s taking some time off,” Laura answered. Her dress looked amazing on her.
“Yes, I’d go with that too. We can say we’ll share updates on her as soon as we have something.”
They all seemed pleased with that version of the facts.
“Okay, good that we are all on the same page for this,” I commented.
“We’ll start looking for her,” Vaim interjected, stopping what had been distracting him.
“Yes, thanks for helping, Vaim.” I turned to the others. “Laura and he volunteered to lead the searches for our missing colleague. They will sweep the inside of the building for clues. Please share with them all information you might have about her.”
Akko looked even weirder than normal.
“Anything you would like to add, Akko?”
He made a few guttural noises. “I do not think she left willingly. Someone must have taken her.”
We shared agreement looks.
“Akko is right. She would never do that,” James spoke for us all.
“It looks like we all agree on that. Vaim, Laura, thanks for doing this. Just one thing: be as discreet as possible. We do not want to raise flags just yet.”
They acknowledged me.
“Let’s have some coffee. I don’t want this to be only about work,” I added.
The guys became loud and chatted like they hadn’t seen each other in years. That brought a smile to my face. Akko and Vaim discussed the data occupying our cyborg’s mind the entire time, and the Grand Master on the Path of Time’s eyes looked interested for the first time that day. James teased Laura about her dress; I didn’t get if that was him trying to flirt with her.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and went by the window. That place reminded me of EIBM, but just remotely; trees surrounded the building but not as dense as they were in Langren. We had worked for years to clear all the rubble, to paint those walls, renovating hallways and mowing grass. Now that we were finished, it looked great.
Vaim pulled me from my thoughts. “The intranet is almost ready. Soon, we will be online again.”
If I didn’t know he was an automaton, I would swear his words were warmer than usual.
“Too bad all social networks are down for years,” I goaded.
“We will find other ways to entertain ourselves during the evenings,” he joked.
“That came out terrible, Vaim.”
“I already prepared a schedule for the interviews. We’ll talk to all the people who saw her on her last day here.”
We moved to the coffee table, as I wanted to have one of those delicious cookies. “That is good. We want to solve this as soon as possible.”
“Yes. It’s weird not having her loud voice around anymore.”
“Well, Vaim, I couldn’t agree more.”
It was time to cover the last topic of our meeting, so I asked for everyone’s attention once more. “Guys, I have something else to share with you.”
James tilted his head, as a curious dog would.
“During the opening ceremony, Laura noticed something that rattled me a little.” I paused to clear my throat. “In one of our boiler rooms, we found a dying fox. It must have crawled in there to find a peaceful place to pass away. While this would not be weird on its own, the general condition of the animal is.”
Laura asked if she could continue, and I was more than happy to let her take over the details. “Bruises and blisters covered the poor beast, like it had caught an infectious disease.”
“It was not a disease,” Akko murmured.
“What do you mean?” Laura asked before I could do the same.
“It’s the planes’ merger. It affects everything around us. Didn’t you notice you are all struggling with your sleep?”
“Because in Plane K, we did not need to sleep at all,” I whispered.
James nodded, his face petrified.
“What we did in Paris will only slow things down. We need Valu’s device to work if we want to revert all this. Otherwise …”
“Let’s hope we do not get there, Akko. I trust him,” Vaim added.
“Is there anything else we can do?” I asked Akko.
Him shaking his head was a very eloquent answer.
*****
When the meeting finished, I escorted the others to the door and said goodbye. I still felt peckish, so I had another cookie from the coffee table. I’d really had enough of those vegetables from our greenhouses; it was a bummer supermarkets did not exist anymore after the planes’ merger. I returned to the window and saw a few students walking outside, trying to work on their skills.
One of them conjured a double, but it disappeared almost immediately. The others laughed at him, but he was as well; they were having fun.
Then, within a second, I was somewhere else. The office and furniture had disappeared, and I stood on the cold rock of a mountain. The sunny cliff did not seem familiar, no matter what direction I looked. I walked a few steps, and it all seemed realistic—the gravel beneath the soles of my shoes, the scattered blades of grass, even the giant shiny ball in the sky—but it wasn’t. I waited for a sign that proved this was an illusion.
I kept walking. Birds sprawled above me, spreadi
ng their high-pitched singing. The path climbed gently to the mountainside. I followed it, never turning back. I knew I couldn’t do that.
It was sunny, but it was cold, and my clothes were not helping much. I followed the path left, and as soon as I moved to the other side of the mountain, I saw a woman standing on the edge of a cliff.
Her back was to me, and she was staring into the ravine before her.
I wanted to stop—or for this vision to interrupt, but it didn’t.
The woman was closer, and I had a feeling I knew her, but I could not remember her name. She turned to me, and I looked straight at her face; it was Maria. Her eyes were completely white and as empty as two holes in the ground. When it all ended, I was still in the office, and the students were no longer in front of the building.
I sat for a moment to gather my thoughts. That image had to mean something. I left the office and went downstairs, walked to the main doors and left.
When I had left the trees behind me, I found myself in front of the pond where I knew I would find Akko. “Do you still have your students jump on that rock?”
“What fun would I have if I didn’t have them do that?”
“I guess that is a legitimate point.”
“I imagine you’re not here for discussing a training-related matter.”
I stepped closer to him; his expressionless face looked at me. “I see what Maria always told me is true. You do not waste any time.”
“Yes. What can I help you with?”
“I had a vision.”
He exhaled.
“I saw Maria in it. It looked like her, but it was not her.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I’m wondering if Vihkan might have something to do with all this.”
He sighed while twisting his prod in his tiny hand. “I can’t exclude that possibility. We have to talk to her.”
We both took a moment to let that sink in.
“She guaranteed she would never leave Plane K—or better, what remains of it,” he added.
“It’s been years since we’ve heard from her. I’ll be more than glad to pay her a visit.”
He nodded at me.
A student ran up from behind us. I heard him stomping like a bunch of bulls were chasing him. “Emma …” He took a break to catch his breath. “Stuart is not feeling well. We have to do something.”
