He was distracted by all of it when Burns the Flame approached. He turned to see she was moving toward him quickly. She looked—pleased.
He’d confided a great deal of the truth in her, but surrounded by his lieutenants and other tribal Alphas, she understood the part she was to play in public. As such she fell to one knee, planted a fist in the dirt, and chose her words with care.
“I understand this might not be the moment, as the prophet deals with this unexpected obstacle in our path to the Promised Land.”
“Unfortunate,” Malkier corrected. “Surely, not unexpected. You must understand the nature of these abominations. Even when their end is predetermined by the gods, they will stubbornly refuse to accept their fate.”
“Yes, I see, those who refuse the will of the gods, fight destiny itself,” she said. “I am pleased—proud—to be a Ferox on this day. Our people will make believers of them.”
She said the words with passion so genuine that Malkier himself was not sure if her convictions had not aligned with his.
“What brings you before me?” Malkier asked.
She offered her free hand up toward him. “I seek the prophet’s wisdom. I believe the gods have sent another sign.”
Burns the Flame looked up into the prophet’s eyes, a toothy grin forming. “I wish very much to be the one to show you.”
Malkier had taken her hand. This drew looks from those nearby who still toiled to remove wreckage from the pit. They were just as quick to look away. It was not their fault—the prophet seldom touched any of those amongst them. Yet, the way he took the hand of Burns the Flame betrayed—an intimacy.
From a human perspective, it would be like watching the President of the United States volunteer to change a stranger’s diaper.
Yet he enjoyed the pleasure she took in leading him by the hand as those clearing the pit parted to make them a path.
By the time he thought it might be best to put an end to it, he realized where it was that she led. Within the pit, there were seven gateway fields, each one a part of the larger circle that held the conduit open. There had been no surprise when it seemed that all the gateways had become active as the humans prepared for a war they knew to be coming.
All—but one.
There was no mystery to Malkier why that had been the case.
“The mated one, you spoke of,” Burns the Flame said. “Is her way active?”
The prophet’s eyes closed, and for a moment he looked enraptured, as though he truly heard the voice of the gods.
“Bring me the six,” Malkier said.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
AS DAWN BEGAN to shed light on the city, Bodhi sat beside Leah. They were on the balcony of a building overlooking the destruction around the conduit.
“Hardly begun, and it’s already hard to watch,” Leah said.
Below her, their army sifted through the wreckage of The Columbia Center. There had been a few more isolated cases of Ferox who survived the skyscraper. Isolated and injured, tracking them down had been easy—as there was always at least one soldier in their army who could sense their location via their connection to the portal stone.
While those few had been hunted down, the enemy combatants buried beneath the wreckage had been recovered and put down. For those severely injured by the collapsing building this was a mercy. For those that crawled out and still had fight in them it meant being dealt with quickly.
The Never Army had a few scrapes and bruises, but so far zero losses. All the stones on their side of the conduit were accounted for. For the uninitiated soldiers, those who had never seen a Ferox outside the projection chamber, those like Leah herself, this was their first time accounting for portal stones. She’d forced herself to be a part of the retrieval teams, only retreating to this balcony when she was no longer of real use.
Whenever she opened the shield of her helmet, she could still smell the toxic Feroxian blood sticking to her gloves and remembered the heat of reaching into bodies to tear the stone free of their veiny appendages.
Jonathan hadn’t ordered her to take part. But she felt that taking the device and being part of this army meant carrying her fair share of the load. And from what she could tell, those who saw her doing so respected it. She’d only taken leave of the wreckage when the numbers needed to finish were small and more people trying to be of use was getting in the way.
Jonathan had the stones the soldiers recovered placed into airtight steel crates. The insides of these crates were like large padded egg cartons stacked on top of one another with layers of protective foam. The crates were then moved to a secure location. Leah knew there to be more than one tactical reason for this, but the reason Jonathan gave the soldiers was still just as true. He was keeping their senses sharp as long as possible. Unlike Jonathan, many of the soldiers would feel the sensation of multiple signals in their mind for the first time.
Every soldier, Leah included, could feel that strange alien compass pointing toward the conduit itself. But roughly a hundred had now felt both the portal stone of a Ferox in The Never as well as whatever lay on the other side.
What they sensed from the conduit itself was every Ferox on the other side with a stone tied to their gateway. While that could account for ten or a hundred stones on the other side, until one crossed the conduit’s threshold into The Never, it simply felt like one single point in their mind.
By keeping the recovered stones in a specific location, the individual soldier’s ability to tell live Ferox threats from enemy combatants that had already been dealt with remained clear before the next wave. Still, Jonathan had said that eventually the numbers coming through would be too many. The fog this would cause in their minds would render their alien instincts near useless.
Leah understood the necessity of retrieving the stones, but what she watched below her now only left her feeling sick to her stomach.
Jonathan had ordered the Ferox corpses taken to another point in the city to be piled.
None had refused the order, but Leah wasn’t the only one amongst the uninitiated to feel something grotesque in the act. Seemed to reflect a sort of madness. Yet, none of those who had fought the Ferox before, saw it this way. This was not to say they went about piling the dead with a skip in their step—sure there were a few, but most weren’t so morbid. Rather, those familiar with the Ferox nodded knowingly and got to work.
Bodhi must have sensed her revulsion. She hadn’t been standing on that balcony long before he gleamed gracefully up the side of the building to take a place beside her.
“Nice spot you got picked out here,” he said, retracting the shield visor of his helmet.
A strange thing, over the last few days, since the moment the army saw a device glowing in her chest, she was no longer scorned. Just as Rivers had been accepted, she simply became one of them in an instant. They all shared the same fate, and some even called her sister at times. It had all changed so quickly—she was still caught a bit by surprise when someone just spoke to her.
“My old place had a balcony,” Leah said. “Used to go there to clear my head.”
Bodhi took a seat, dangling his legs over the edge in a manner that would have been alarming under normal circumstances, but what was dangerous on a normal day hardly seemed a consideration now.
“It isn’t what you think,” Bodhi said.
Leah retracted her shield. “I don’t know what to think.”
Bodhi looked at her but not for long. She kept forgetting how hard the others found it to hold eye contact with her and Jonathan while their eyes blazed with the bond’s power. Bodhi didn’t dwell on his awkwardness, rather he got a faraway look in his eyes as he stared down at the conduit.
“Every time one of us was pulled into The Never,” Bodhi said, “the Ferox would kill as many civilians as they could. They made mounds of the dead—stacked them like trophies.”
“So . . . this is some sort of vengeance?” Leah asked.
Bodhi shrugged.
; “If humans deserve to live—shouldn’t we be the better ones?”
He shrugged again, but this time he did so in a manner that conceded she had a point.
“For months, I saw mounds of dead human beings every time I closed my eyes. I don’t know if making a Ferox see the same thing done to their own people will get under their skin—kind of doubt it actually.”
“So, why bother?” Leah asked.
“I don’t think it’s meant for the Ferox,” Bodhi said.
She had to consider that for a moment. “Malkier?”
Bodhi nodded.
With a sigh Leah asked, “Do I want to know?”
“I . . . I think we all want Malkier to feel some of what he’s put us through . . . I think Jonathan knows it.”
He trailed off for a moment, eyes lost in the memories. “I hear it in my head, can’t help it whenever I remember seeing the piles . . . This is your fault, Bodhi, these people were slaughtered and you weren’t there to stop it. It’s your job to stop it Bodhi.”
“You feel all that, even though they’re shadows?” Leah asked.
“Some of the soldiers can see it that way,” Bodhi said. “They talk about the shadows like they’re just NPCs in a video game. Others, just can’t.”
“Others like you?”
Bodhi smirked. “If I’m being a hundred percent honest, I actually feel pretty bad when I fail NPCs in video games.”
She smiled for a moment, but then felt a profound sadness for the kid. She wouldn’t want anyone to feel so much responsibility—whether they were justified in feeling it or not. Yet his words were a mirror—dredging a memory from her. No—not a memory. It was more of a symbol, and not even her own. She’d only glimpsed it inside Jonathan’s head when their minds had been bridged.
A little girl in a pink hoodie, her body standing out like a beacon in a pile of death. Jess—Jonathan had learned her name somehow. But that little girl had triggered something in him—uncaged something. That was the day Jonathan Tibbs had gotten so angry he’d stopped being afraid and picked a fight he fully expected to lose.
What had been Jonathan’s memory had a way of mutating once it became part of her mind.
Leah recoiled away from the balcony’s railing when an unwanted image took shape in her head. Her brothers, Peter and Jack, taking Jess’s place in that pile.
“I wish you had gotten to be a kid longer, Bodhi,” Leah said.
He smiled sadly. “Thanks, I guess. But I wouldn’t change anything.”
This sentiment was one she heard often from their soldiers—the veterans at least. But Bodhi was their youngest—she’d thought he might feel differently. He’d been robbed of more than the others. He wasn’t even old enough to vote. He’d been living with his parents until he’d been retrieved to help with Jonathan’s escape. His mother probably didn’t even know where he was.
“I wouldn’t think less of you if you did.”
Bodhi shook his head. “I have a brother, Steven, he’s five.”
Leah closed her eyes and nodded.
“It’s funny, I used to tell myself I hated that kid—he annoyed me every day. The usual sibling bickering, coming into my room uninvited, borrowing my stuff without asking, blah blah. Then . . . Heyer . . . all this.”
He gestured vaguely at the conduit.
“Now, I . . . I’d see all the awfulness there is, if it means I can keep it from ever touching him.”
Leah nodded, looking to Bodhi’s chest where his device would be alive beneath, and remembering how desperately Peter tried to get her to stay away.
“I had an older brother. Peter, he . . . he and you have . . . would have had a lot in common.”
She stopped herself. Knew what she was doing and cut off the urge to say more. She wasn’t going to tell him about Peter just because there was a lull in a storm. She didn’t want it on his mind in the hours to come.
Bodhi looked up, as though he’d just gotten a message on the comms.
“That’s a weird request. But okay,” Bodhi said. He listened for another moment, then spoke again. “Confirmed, on my way.”
He turned to Leah once more. “Maybe you can tell me about Peter sometime.”
Leah forced a smile. “I’d like that.”
Then he dropped off the balcony, gleaming his way down toward ground zero.
“You’ve destroyed the point where you entered The Never?” Jonathan asked.
Bodhi nodded. “Yeah and most of the roof around it.”
“Good,” Jonathan said and held out a portal stone. “Break it.”
Bodhi had known it was there, not just because he could feel it in his mind but because Jonathan had asked for it when he pulled it from the dead Ferox that had been tied to him.
“What?”
“I need to confirm what happens when we break a stone,” Jonathan said. “I’m fairly certain of the outcome, but until someone tests it, we won’t know.”
“But, if you’re wrong, I . . . I don’t want to abandon everyone,” Bodhi said.
Jonathan placed an arm on his shoulder. “No one will think that. This isn’t a request; I’m giving you an order.”
Bodhi swallowed. He was struggling with this and didn’t want to make a scene—didn’t want to sound how he knew he would when he said the words. “It’s because I’m the youngest.”
Jonathan took his hand and put the stone in it. “It is.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It isn’t,” Jonathan said. “But someone needs to do it. If we’re wrong about the outcome, we need to adapt. I need you to confirm your memory is still intact, that you’ll return to your original point of entry.”
A moment played out between them; Bodhi looking into his commander’s blazing eyes and knowing full well that Jonathan didn’t want anyone to see their youngest soldier die in what was to come. Sure, he may need to confirm these things, but he also wanted Bodhi out first if there was any chance it was possible.
The thing was, he wasn’t pretending it was anything else, so Bodhi didn’t know what to argue.
“Yes, sir,” Bodhi said.
He stepped away, removed his glove, and broke the stone.
Jonathan watched, and much like in single combat, a portal appeared around Bodhi. However, the process played out much faster than normal. Bodhi had barely begun to show signs of distress from the pain that accompanied a stone’s destruction before he was encapsulated in a red globe and disappeared in a flash of white light.
Jonathan watched the small dot that represented Bodhi in his HUD map disappear. The AI that ran the equipment flashing a location unknown sign in the place where Bodhi’s dot had been a moment ago. A clock began to run, as the map zoomed out to the scope of the entire city instead of just the streets nearest the conduit looking for Bodhi’s signal.
“Bodhi,” Jonathan said over the comm. “Can you read me? Have you reentered?”
Jonathan was starting to worry as a full thirteen and half minutes went by before Bodhi’s dot reappeared in his HUD. “Bodhi, do you read me?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Bodhi said. “Apparently I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
“What’s your status?” Jonathan asked.
“I remember everything. I’m about twenty feet from where I entered, on the roof of the old Seafirst Plaza.”
“Good,” Jonathan said.
“How long was I gone?” Bodhi asked.
Jonathan sighed. “Longer than I would have liked.”
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
PERTH WAS A few stories up from the apex of the conduit. He stood behind a minigun mounted in the window of one of the nearby buildings. He tensed when the rubble in front of the conduit began to tremble.
“Easy,” Jonathan’s voice said over the comms. He was talking to all of them, not just Perth.
They watched as small clumps of concrete began to loosen and roll down. As the minutes ticked by the size of those clumps grew, the Ferox on the other side were dislodging the wr
eckage. Somewhat like having pulled the plug on a bathtub, the top of the rubble sank into the conduit.
“Hold.”
The hole began with one Feroxian hand, frantically pulling at the debris, yanking it through to the other side. Slowly, the top of what remained began to disappear. Then more hands appeared, and the process began to accelerate. Soon, there was enough space that one of the Ferox could have forced its way though.
Yet, they restrained themselves and kept digging until finally the pile fell in, dislodging enough debris that an opening half a dozen Ferox wide was cleared.
“Steady.”
Activity seemed to stop, and the seconds ticked by in painfully slow increments. Then a minute had passed, then two.
“Not liking this,” Perth whispered.
“Ain’ nuthin’ gonna come through dat conduit ya ever gonna like,” Beo said.
“Thanks for the hot—”
He shut up when something came through. Not a Ferox, but a rather oily gelatinous mass the size of a barrel rolled its way across the threshold.
“What the hell is that?” Perth said. “Looks like—”
A second blob rolled through and came to a stop behind the last. Almost as though the Ferox were rolling casks of sludge through the portal.
“Change in plans,” Jonathan’s voice was suddenly less calm. “Aim into the conduit, go high do not hit the sacs. Open fire now!”
In near unison, the windows on the face of the three buildings closest to the portal erupted. Glass rained down on the wreckage below as the deafening roar of hundreds of alien steel bullets streaming into the conduit rang through the city.
“Hold your fire.”
They stopped, smoke wafting up from the windows all around as they waited. Another minute crawled, and then a third blob rolled in.
Finally, a black ball came through. It was about the size of a volleyball and looked as though it were made of the same obsidian-like rock found on the Feroxian Plane. It rolled to a stop beside the three gelatinous sacs.
A moment later, two more followed.
“We all know what this could be, switch to thermal optics,” Jonathan said. “Don’t wait for a command, if something with arms and legs comes through, open fire.”
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