by F P Adriani
Kostas said fast from on our left, “I can’t get a local transporter stream to coalesce!”
“We’ve gotta go!” Gary said as he grabbed me by my left arm, his eyes on the opening between the rocks on our right, where that familiar length of green light moved in the distance.
I was on my feet an instant later, and as I began running, following both Gary and Kostas, I finally realized something else: the sky had lightened. It wasn’t “daylight” out; more like a twilight, with only certain parts of the sky lighter than others. But at least I could see where the fuck I was going now…or maybe that was a bad thing. Did I want to see the cavernous area we now had to run across and then climb through? Fuck no!
“Where did the ground go!” I shouted at Kostas’ back as I crawled up a hill. Gary was behind me, and the hill wasn’t that steep, but it was still high and far too sandy to walk up. We had to use all of our limbs now to grip into the hill’s earth—the going up was so damn slow.
One good thing though: the sandiness had somehow prevented the crazy exclamation point from continuing to follow us; it was rolling around at the base of the hill, as if it was waiting for us to return—or for us to fucking fall down the hill.
My fingers gripped at the scratchy-sandy soil; sweat slid down my face and into the neck of my worksuit. I thought of the baggies full of water, which Kostas had lost “last night” when we were running. “We need more water!” I said now.
“Once we get up the hill,” Kostas panted, “I’ll run a scan.”
“Has it…powered up more?”
“Yes, a little…. Almost there to the top,” she said, strain in her voice now as her red-covered back and arms struggled to pull her tall body up and then over the top of the hill.
“Can you see anything good?” Gary called to her when she was finally standing.
“I think I’ve found some water,” she said. “It doesn’t look like much, but we’ll go that way and drink what we can.”
She turned around and helped me up the last of the rise; then I turned around and pulled at Gary as he slid up over the sand.
The three of us finally stood together on the plateau of the hill. The land laid out before us was the flattest it had ever looked in this dimension. I could no longer see very far away; the omni-curvature was totally gone now. If we had to run, we wouldn’t be able to so easily see where we were running to.
I couldn’t help sighing; it seemed that nothing in this erroneous place would ever go right.
*
Though we were apparently safe now from the exclamation point, I did not like the look of the land here as we continued moving over it toward where the water was. There were random inclusions beneath the brown ground now—hot inclusions, molten and angry. Their heat filled the air, though the liquid didn’t quite break through the clear, crystal-like, round plates over the red fiery fluid. But every step I, Gary and Kostas now took between the plates made my heart jump.
“I’m thinking that maybe we were better off being around the exclamation point,” I finally said.
Gary shook his head from side to side, but his eyes remained on the dangerous-looking ground. “We don’t even know what happened to the thing that was fighting with it.”
“The water should be less than 500-feet away,” Kostas suddenly said.
“I’m more concerned with what’s under us,” I said. “Are we walking on volcanic land?”
Kostas’ dark head shook now. “I don’t believe so. But whatever this land is, I have good news: it’s charging up my device faster, and probably our suits too. The land may be a type of electrical system—which brings me to the bad news: the flow below is somehow ionizing the air here. If that continues to this degree, the air will become a conductor. With all the energy coming into this dimension and the shifting magnetic and other fields, there may be high voltages induced too. This place could become a layer of lightning.”
“Shit!” I said, a string of nervous spit flying out of my mouth. “I hope you still have that protective field around us.”
Kostas glanced my way. “The field can only do so much. At the moment, though, I’m more worried about whether there is enough water and where it actually is….”
When we reached the coordinates of the spot her device had indicated, she was right to be worried: if there was “water” here, it must have been inside of or beneath one of the many burning, electrified flows in the ground.
“Well,” Kostas said, throwing a frown at both me and Gary, “we’ve found water before in this dimension; we’ll probably find it again. In the meantime, we can adjust our suits to mitigate some of our dehydration.”
“Actually, right now, I’ve really got to piss,” I said.
And Gary nodded fast—in agreement.
Kostas glanced around us, then pointed to her left. “We need to get to a less volatile spot where there’s no ground-flow. According to my scanner’s data, there’s greenery over there. Let’s go.”
Gary and I followed her lead again—gingerly over the angry earth, and we eventually found some bushes to both “safely” rest and pee near.
When I was done emptying my bladder behind the bush we’d designated as our toilet area, I sat between Kostas and Gary. They had their food stashes on their laps now; I pulled out mine, then stared at my two companions as I chewed. They both looked pale, tired and dirty, all of which was probably exactly how I looked.
One of Kostas’ hands was sticking a dried piece of blue bread in her mouth; her other hand was working away at her device. “I’ve been running an analysis on those yellow, lemon-looking berries we keep seeing in the greenery here; fortunately, they are edible. They exist in other dimensions. The Keepers call them eoni.”
I swallowed the bit of emergency food in my mouth and closed my belt on the pieces I had left, which weren’t much. They might get me through another three days—tops—without my feeling too many effects from starvation. I asked Kostas now, “Have you eaten the eoni before?”
Kostas shook her head “no.” “The Keepers have.”
I frowned. “But we’re not Keepers,” I reminded her. Sometimes it seemed like she would forget that so easily.
“If we’re here long enough that we need to try the berries, we’ll have no choice,” Kostas said. “The amount of food we have won’t last much longer.”
I thought back to the Lamren dimension—to when I was stuck there and had to take a chance on the fruit there. That worked out fine for me, but that didn’t mean the same would happen here….
Or maybe the three of us wouldn’t even reach the point of needing more food because we’d be dead by then: something was growing now behind Kostas, growing across the land—a white-hot shock of electricity suddenly jerked across the ground and crashed into a huge dark rock, shattering it into small pieces.
“Shit—” I said, jumping up “—the lightning!”
While we were eating, Kostas had laid her device on the ground, and Gary, his gun; but now both Kostas and Gary scrambled to pick up their stuff; then the three of us rushed out of the bushes.
The lightning was coming from the right, so we ran to the left, across a quite empty plain—there would be no protection from the electricity—
We ran and ran and ran now, the electricity making crashing sounds behind us. I didn’t dare look over our shoulders. Through my boots, I felt the earth absorb the shock of some of the electrical blasts; tears of fear pricked my eyes.
Then the sounds of the storm lessened, and so did our pounding feet. We finally braved turning back around—and immediately saw that the land looked far more barren than before. Where there had been greenery and the occasional boulder, there was now a powdery film. It looked as if the place had been hit with a nuclear blast.
But at least the lightning was gone.
I was both out of breath and breathing a sigh of relief that the three of us were still intact when a wheezy high-pitched sound from the sky pulled my eyes upward: a silver ship soared t
here—but it was headed toward the ground, not far from where the three of us were standing.
Kostas’ eyes widened at the ship as she yelled, “Move out of the way—run again!”
So we did run again—we sprinted away from where it seemed the ship would land.
A moment later my legs felt the massive vibration of the crash, and I almost stumbled as I kept moving.
Kostas suddenly turned around to look at the wreck, which made me and Gary stop.
Gary’s eyes were on Kostas, and his voice was severely out of breath when he spoke: “Kostas—what—is it?”
“My ship. That’s my old ship,” she said.
Now my eyes opened as wide as possible, both at the crumble of shining metal in the distance and at Kostas’ shocked face. “The one you came to Rintu in?” I finally asked.
Kostas’ nod was rapid. “But what does it mean? It doesn’t make sense. We converted my ship’s parts into energy—was that a mistake? Was my staying and working with the Keepers actually a mistake?”
“Kostas,” I said, my eyes wide in astonishment now, “what the hell are you doing? Don’t try to analyze this insane place!”
She opened her mouth again, but before she could respond, we all felt something: the earth moving, again. There was a vibration or an electric feeling—something that wasn’t right.
Our eyes whipped down to the ground now, mine looking to see if more of those hot flow areas had popped up, but I didn’t see any nearby. And I couldn’t tell where the vibrating was coming from. Kostas whipped out her device and punched at it, but her eyes twitched as she stared at her screen. Then she said fast, “We can’t stay here—we need to move!”
“Where!” I cried, my head whipping around.
Kostas sped away from me, and Gary and I rushed after her—and that was when I really felt the ground move and heard a loud CRAAAAACK. When I looked on my right into the distance, lines of molten red inclusion were spreading over the earth.
“Holy shit!” I screamed as we all began running in the opposite direction to the angry earth. It kept bursting and roiling, and then a piece of the earth split off and up and tossed Kostas away from me and Gary.
“Kostas!” Gary and I shouted at the same time.
The earth seemed to suddenly stop moving, and we immediately ran to Kostas: she was lying on her back on the ground, with blood coming off the back of her head. Her chest heaved jaggedly beneath the red material of her worksuit. I never thought I would ever see her like this—so limp, so broken, so powerless. For an instant, I stood staring in shock.
Gary dropped down to her first, and that pulled me to reality.
“We need to work her medical controls!” I told him.
“It is too late…” Kostas said in a weak voice as she glanced down herself at her arm, to where her readout was blinking in and out now. “The suit—not strong enough to save me in time. My injury…too severe. Listen to me,” she said, trying to sit up, but failing, partly because I had grabbed onto her to hold her still, so she wouldn’t injure herself further. “If—if Keepers don’t ever come…” she said now “…there might be a way for you to get out of here. This is the last resort—now that I am on the cusp of my life, now that I am leaving….”
“Don’t leave!” I said, wanting to shake her to keep her with us, but her bleeding wasn’t slowing—
Her dark eyes widened at me, and she tried to grab my hand. I quickly grabbed hers. “Listen, Lydia…Gary…not enough energy before for this, and there’s a risk your energy won’t be enough now and you’ll drop out to somewhere even worse…but if you coordinate your suits, your energy will be higher. It might give you momentum out of here. Your controls….” Her pale face seemed to convulse in pain, and I felt tears drop from my eyes onto her. Then her eyes slid right to mine. “Tell Babs—tell her thank you. Thank you for being so caring…I know it was brief, but it meant more to me. I’m so sorry, I…work your controls, the second ridge…” she said finally. Then she jerked upward for an instant, and then she was gone.
“No!” I cried, both for her and for us, because Gary and I were next. We needed her guidance; all along, we had relied on her and her device and experience telling us what to do—and not just here, but everywhere we had interacted with her. In all things the Omniverse, Gary and I were like dependent children still. We especially couldn’t survive here in The Error Universe alone.
I said that to him now in a frantic voice, and he grabbed me and shook me the way I had wanted to shake Kostas to urge her to stay alive. “We’ve got to think, Lydia—of the stuff we learned from her and the others!”
“But she never finished explaining. The second ridge—the one on the suits isn’t how to do the emergency suit-coordinating, though she only explained how to do it that one time—I don’t know if I even remember that right!”
“But,” Gary said, “her brain was shutting down. Maybe things got muddled and she wasn’t talking about our suits just now.”
I thought a moment. Then my eyes whipped to his. “You’re right!” I’d completely forgotten about the side-ridges on Kostas’ full-worker device. It had fallen onto the ground when she’d fallen—please, let it still be working….
I found it, grabbed it, held it right-side up and examined the side ridges. I pressed the second one on the left side, but nothing seemed to happen. I pressed the second ridge on the right side—again, nothing happened.
Then I told Gary to press his controls to coordinate our suits while my right hand would press one of the second ridges on Kostas’ device, and my left would press my suit controls to coordinate with Gary and start my transporter.
“I feel like this is probably what she meant,” I said, breathing heavily, staring down at her lifeless body and feeling sadness tighten my throat. I hated to leave her lying here, but I didn’t know if it was safe to include her dead body in the transporting….
“This set-up seems right to me,” Gary said now. “All right, let’s coordinate on the count of three.”
“One, two, three….”
We pressed what we needed to press, and once again, nothing happened.
“Shit!” I screamed, and I almost flung Kostas’ device away from me.
Gary grabbed my right arm and deftly slid the device from my grasp there.
But as I watched him move the silver box, something came to me….
I was still breathing too hard as I said, “Wait—maybe just pressing the device’s ridge isn’t enough…. Maybe there’s something—some instruction on the screen for how to maximize the device’s energy. Kostas was trying to do this all along, and then the changes in the ground increased. Maybe they’ve given the device an extra jolt of energy.”
Gary stared over my shoulder now while I fiddled around with the device’s buttons and my eyes rushed through the writings that came up on the screen—most of which weren’t in English.
I finally noticed one of the circular Keeper danger symbols, and it said below in English, “Device Overload.”
My fingertip jabbed at the screen. “That’s it—that’s what we need to do.”
Out of the corner of my left eye, I could see Gary’s throat nervously moving as he swallowed. “And if it doesn’t work?”
“Then I guess we’re stuck here forever at best, dead at worst.”
Our eyes locked onto each other. My mouth turned down as I looked at Gary’s jumpy eyes and sunken cheeks.
“There’s no choice, Gary,” I said, suddenly feeling immensely sad.
Gary closed his eyes and softly nodded at me.
“I’ll activate the overload first; then we’ll follow the same procedure as before.”
My fingers shook on Kostas’ device and on my suit controls, but as soon as Gary and I went through this new sequence of actions, the area around us shifted into a deep black, and then we were suddenly floating in it….
“Yes!” I said in a happy voice, looking down at the bright readout screen on my left arm. “We’re out.”
>
“Yeah, but where are we?” Gary asked.
“I—I don’t know. There are no numbers. My readout just says we’re in a stream.” I was still holding Kostas’ device, and when I looked down at it in my right hand, the front screen of the box now looked like a charred wreck. Apparently, when the device had said “overload,” it really meant it. I was lucky the thing hadn’t burned my hand, but then, knowing the Keepers and the workers, the device had a safety feature.
“Lydia, are you sure about where we are? I can’t get much data to show up on my readout either,” Gary said in a more desperate voice now, his right arm extended in front of him, his left holding his gray device. “I also can’t get a location on my damn device. Not for a dimension or a dimensional stream—not for anywhere.”
I tried using my suit readout to do the same things as he had, and now I got the same result as he had. Suddenly my readout was barely working, no matter what I tried doing to it.
Feeling quite woozy as we floated and zoomed through wherever we were, I said,
“I guess we just have to hope the Keepers can see us now and bring us back from wherever the fuck we escaped to, if we’ve indeed escaped.”
*
Time and space had no meaning in the black. I only knew where I ended and Gary began.
We continued floating in this existence; my stomach swam and began making me gag. Just when I thought I was going to upchuck into this black neverwhere, a reddish, golden light materialized beyond me and Gary, and grew into an elongated, humanoid shape….
“Thura!” Gary and I both shouted in relief. She was robe-less and flickering wildly, but she was still such a welcome sight.
“It has been very difficult to locate you, but I am very pleased to finally see you,” she said out loud now. Her voice seemed to bounce around me and Gary, enveloping us. “Where is Kostas?”
“Dead!” I said, and I immediately began crying.
Thura’s golden chin seemed to be moving more than normal. “Do not operate your suits or any other devices. You must remain in this stream to reach the Monument. And I must go back for Kostas’ body.”
