The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  Though they had recovered their desert gear from the bottom of the gorge, the journey was almost as miserable as the one they had endured before. Adan soon grew exhausted. By the time they stopped to take a rest in a crevice between two large, exposed pieces of machinery, he was so weary he fell asleep the moment he shut his eyes.

  But rest did little for him. His dreams were filled with the screams and chaos of the battle in the Basin, only this time he was in the middle of it, fighting for his life. He awoke with a start, just as he was about to be thrown off the edge of one of the platforms.

  “Are you okay?” Will asked.

  Adan nodded. “It was just a dream,” he said, as much to reassure himself as to answer Will’s question. “Just a dream.”

  “Here try this,” Will offered.

  Opening one of the pouches he had taken from the Basin, he pulled out a peculiar substance rolled up in a strip. He ripped off two small squares of the reddish, resin-like material and gave one to Adan. Then Will unfastened the top of his garrick and pressed the swatch into his chest. The rubbery square dissolved a moment later, absorbing into his skin.

  “A patch that size is enough to keep you for a full day,” Will said, nodding for Adan to apply his own.

  Adan did so, but felt no better after the patch had dissolved. His arm got a little warm at the spot, that was all. He and Will fastened back up their garricks and set out once more.

  Because of the winds, they spoke little during the journey. Adan’s thoughts kept returning to the horrors he had witnessed in the Basin. He could not get the images out of his mind; it was like a waking nightmare.

  He slogged on, persevering through the wind and the flashbacks until at last they found themselves in sight of the compound. It was growing dark by then and the lentes had all but given out. Adan was drained as well. By the time they finally passed through the doorway, neither he nor the lentes had anything left.

  They shed their desert gear and Adan collapsed onto the canvas sacks. Will handed him another piece of viand.

  “I thought you said it would last a whole day,” Adan said, taking it. “I’m not actually that hungry, to be honest, just exhausted.”

  “Trust me, with all you’ve been through, you could use the extra nutrients to help you recover.”

  “Okay,” Adan said, pressing it into his forearm and watching it dissolve. “What did you call the people you got this from again?”

  “Somatarchs. And they’re not really people,” Will said.

  “But they looked like people.”

  “I know. They’re created from human vacants—generic bodies the Developers grow inside the Institute. The vacants can be imprinted with memories and knowledge, making them seem very human, but they have no will of their own. They lack what the Welkin might call a ‘soul’.”

  Will began removing the sand-covered tarps from the barrels as he went on talking.

  “The somatarchs have a special bioseine that allows the Developers to control them remotely,” he explained.

  “So, the Developers sent them?” Adan asked, alarmed. “Do they know where we are now?”

  “I doubt it. They were too far from Oasis. Probably they were just harvesting. That’s what they call it when they send out somatarchs to bring subjects back to the Institute for remapping. But when they go missing, the Devs are sure to investigate.”

  “Are you sure they were somatarchs? They were dressed in desert gear and you said that’s what the Waymen wear.”

  “They dress that way so they can travel the Vast without being noticed. The Developers don’t want any of the Werin to know what they’re doing.”

  “Are they afraid of them? Because it didn’t seem like the Welkin stood much chance against them.”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense, but they must have some reason for it.”

  “Why did they turn on each other like that, though? That didn’t make any sense either. They were winning.” Scenes from the battle flashed through Adan’s mind once again. He hated reliving them, but he had wondered about this ever since the first traitor appeared.

  “I used their bioseines against them,” Will said. “When we first headed out onto the plank-work to face them I thought they were just Waymen too. But when the Welkin threw their light-taps and the Waymen didn’t go down, I started to suspect they might be something else.”

  “Light-taps? You mean those explosions? That was the Welkin?”

  “Yes, it’s a mixture of sopor, neophosphorous, and deton that they use to stun their enemies. The deton is what causes it to explode, spraying sopor and neophosphorous everywhere, covering the area and the victim in streaks of light so they can be spotted in the dark. The sopor is supposed to knock them out. It’s very strong and usually will take a man down more than long enough for the Welkin to capture him. But it only dazed the somatarchs.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why they turned on each other,” Adan said.

  “Once your bioseine has been initialized, you can sense the presence of it in others within a certain distance. Once I got close enough, I could tell what they really were. I used the Developer channels to control them, taking them over one at a time, switching targets whenever the one I was controlling got killed.”

  “So you controlled those men—those somatarchs. But I thought only Developers could do that.”

  “The reason most of the Collective can’t control other people is because they don’t have access to the right channels. They don’t even know about them. That’s how the Developers maintain control, by denying them access.” Will finished rolling up the tarp and headed towards the shelter.

  “But how did you ever learn to use those channels if only the Developers are supposed to have access to them?” Adan asked, following after.

  “The man who got me out of the Institute showed me how to use them. He was a Developer as well.”

  As Will entered the shelter, a dark thought flashed into Adan’s mind. He did not like where it seemed to be leading, but now that it was there, he had to pursue it.

  “You said the Developers can control anyone in the Collective?” he asked when Will appeared again in the doorway.

  “That’s right,” Will answered.

  “Anyone connected to the esolace? Anyone with a bioseine? Even if they haven’t been initialized?”

  “Yes.” Will said, looking away as if he knew what Adan was about to ask.

  “So…You can control me as well, then?” Adan asked softly.

  Will hesitated, but Adan already knew what the answer would be.

  Eighteen

  Things Remembered and Forgotten

  Will’s face wore a look of resignation, as if he would have preferred to lie, but could not bring himself to.

  “Yes, I can control you,” he said.

  Adan stared at his hands. He wished he could find whatever it was the scientists had put inside his body and rip it out. As long as it was there he would never feel completely safe or completely human.

  “How would I know if you were controlling me?” It was the only thing Adan could think to ask. If he couldn’t keep people out of his mind, he at least wanted to know when they were in there.

  “You wouldn’t,” Will admitted. “Not unless I let you know—but I did, remember? In the Institute I had to take control of you, but I kept you conscious at first. But it was too limiting so I had to take full control.”

  Memories of the Institute came rushing back: the shaking, the paralysis, the feeling of floating, disembodied, down the hall—that terrifying journey which had ended with his fall in front of the door.

  “It was the only way I could get you out. I had to take you off their system,” Will said, “I did it to save your life.”

  Adan tried to see things from Will’s perspective, but he was missing too many details. “How long were you in my head?”

  “I controlled you just long enough to get you outside the Institute and onto the lev.”

  “Onto the
what?” Adan’s mind wandered somewhere between his last moments in the Institute and what Will had just said.

  “The lev. That’s what I used to get you back here. It’s out behind the compound.”

  Finally something tangible Adan’s mind could latch on to. “I want to see it,” he said. “Show it to me.”

  Will gave him a questioning look, but turned and headed for the door.

  The sand swirled around them outside the compound. Around the back, measuring about half the length of the wall, lay something covered under a tarp.

  It took Will a few moments to remove the pins holding the tarp down. Then he slid off the long sheet, revealing a metal platform with shiny railings running along either side, and a bench in the middle.

  “What does it do?” It looked to Adan like it might have been just another one of those machines he had seen half-buried in the desert.

  “It’s a transport vehicle. It hovers just above the ground,” Will said. “It’s not really designed for long trips—the charge doesn’t hold very long—but this is what I brought you back in, swapping out bismine cores so we could make it all the way.”

  “How does it work? Can you turn it on?”

  “I’d rather not. I want it to be fully charged for when we go back to Oasis.”

  “Go back? No. I already told you, I’m not going back to that place.” Adan crossed his arms stiffly. After what he had seen in the Basin, he was more convinced than ever that a return to Oasis was far too dangerous.

  “But we have to. We’re the only ones who can stop the Developers,” Will said, gripping the railing like he meant to mount and take off after all.

  “Maybe you can. But I saw what those things in the Basin were capable of. They’ll kill me if I go back there.”

  “We can deal with somatarchs. They’ll be the least of our problems.”

  Adan struggled to push the fight at the Basin to the back of his mind, but it refused to leave: the chasm, the lights, the shafts tearing through the bodies of the Welkin—it all played through his mind over and over again.

  “I can’t,” Adan said. “I can’t help you.”

  “Yes you can.” Will’s eyes flashed. “They’re killing us. Don’t you get that? They’re killing the Welkin. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. How can you just stay here and do nothing about it?”

  The cavern loomed in Adan’s mind, glimmering and beautiful and full of death. The screams of the dying men would not stop echoing inside of it.

  Looking into Will’s eyes, Adan saw the same look he had seen when Will reached out his hand, beckoning him to step into the rickety cart. But this new journey would be far more dangerous. The chasm which stretched out in his mind was much deeper than even the one in the Basin.

  Will stared at him in silence. His hair whipped across his face in a sudden burst of wind. “Let’s go back inside, so we don’t choke on all this sand.”

  They worked together to fasten the tarp back down, fighting the winds so they could cover the lev.

  Back inside, they sat down on top of two barrels, facing each other.

  “Will you at least hear me out?” Will asked.

  Adan gave him a reluctant nod.

  “I can’t promise that this will all make sense,” Will said. “Because honestly, I’m running half-blind in the dark on some of this myself, but here’s what I know. I found a vulnerability in the esolace, something that can stop the Developers. But it’s something they can’t find out about. If they do, they’ll eliminate it and we’ll have no chance of taking Oasis. So I had to erase it from my memory.”

  “What?” Adan said, his fears momentarily blunted by his confusion.

  “If I get captured, they’ll scan my mind and find the flaw in their system,” Will explained.

  “If you get captured, what difference does it make? You won’t be able to stop them anyway.”

  “But someone else could.” He looked pointedly at Adan.

  “How? If you’ve erased it from your memory, how could anyone find out about it? For that matter, how are you going to find out about it again?”

  “I transferred the knowledge into a vial of remin fluid before I erased it. It’s another way of storing information.”

  Adan shook his head in disbelief. “The more you explain this, the less sense it makes.”

  “I’m not completely insane.” Will cracked a smile. “I can get the information back. And there’s more to the plan than just the flaw in the esolace. It won’t cripple Oasis completely. That’s where the Waymen come in.”

  “Oh no,” Adan said under his breath. This plan was getting worse by the moment. “You’re bringing them into this? Those are the Welkin’s enemies. How can they—”

  “At first I didn’t want to have anything to do with them either. But we need them to help slow down the somatarchs. They don’t have to actually defeat them, just keep them occupied long enough to distract the Collective security forces while someone gets into the Developer facilities and brings down the esolace.”

  After seeing what only a dozen of them had done to the Welkin, Will was going to need an awful lot of Waymen, unless they were much better fighters.

  “But how did you even get them to agree to help you in the first place? From what Senya said they’re savages.”

  “She’s right. I tried to get the Welkin to fight, but they wouldn’t. And then they exiled me to the surface. I almost gave up on attacking Oasis completely.”

  Adan shifted his weight on top of the barrel and ended up pinching the skin under his thigh. He hopped off abruptly and started massaging where it hurt. He was tired of sitting anyway.

  “But then you went and found the Waymen.” He wondered just how far Will was willing to go to see this plan through. Hadn’t Malloc’s son, Uron, died already? Were there others? Was Adan just another in a long line of his recruits?

  “I didn’t go looking for the Waymen. They found me.”

  That certainly wasn’t what Adan had been expecting. He walked over to the outer door.

  “They came here? Do they know about this place?” Adan asked, peaking through the crack. No one was out there at the moment.

  Will nodded. “I knew when I came out here it would only be a matter of time before they found me. I set up motion sensors around the perimeter because the Waymen are superstitious about technology. The sensors set off lights and sounds to scare them away and it worked for a while.

  “But one day they sent one of their throngs. There must have been fifty of them. I thought they were going to kill me. But instead, they forced me to come to one of their camps. They told me they had heard that some seer with magical powers lived in my part of the desert. They seemed to think that I might be a famous seer from one of their legends. Of course it was all nonsense, but I wasn’t in any position to contradict them.”

  Fifty Waymen? Adan glanced around at the eroding walls and piles of junk. He doubted he would ever feel safe here again.

  “If you knew it wasn’t true, weren’t you worried they would find out?” Adan asked.

  “I didn’t have a choice. If they didn’t think I was the seer, they would have just killed me. Anyway, I showed them things like the cutter and the shifter and that was enough to convince them that I was the one they were looking for. They’re gathering out in the desert as we speak for the assault on Oasis. I’m supposed to meet them once everything is ready.”

  Adan tried to imagine a settlement like Aldea out on the sand. How did they survive up here? He wasn’t really sure he wanted to find out. The idea of fighting with Waymen sounded even worse than fighting with the Welkin.

  “So if you have the Waymen and this flaw or whatever it is, what do you need me for?” He could overlook the foolishness of the rest—this was Will’s plan after all, not his, but, this…this was what really mattered.

  “That is a very good question.” Will rubbed his chin. “Unfortunately that part is still locked up in the remin fluid. All I know is that I had to find som
eone to help bring down the esolace and that it had to be someone whose bioseine had not yet been initialized.”

  Adan shook his head ruefully. Why was it that he always seemed to be the one in the dark?

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But you can get the answer back, right? It’s somewhere out there, isn’t it?”

  “In the remin fluid.”

  “Right, the fluid.” Was Will just making all of this up? No, it made too little sense to be something anyone would make up. “And where is that?”

  “The Waymen have it.”

  “Of course.”

  “I figured that would be the safest place if I got captured. They’re nomads. They move around. It would be hard for the Developers to find the specific thrall that has it. But we’ll be able to find it when the time comes. Then I’ll get the remin. After that, everything will be in place for us to return to Oasis.”

  “You say ‘us’ like I’ve already made up my mind.”

  Will slid off the barrel and onto his feet. Darkness was falling quickly over the compound.

  “I won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to,” he said. “But remember what they did to you. They have the same plans, or worse, for the rest of the people out here. Remember Senya and the children. Remember what they did in the Basin. And then decide for yourself what’s the best thing to do.”

  Adan expected one of Will’s fixed stares. But he turned and headed into the shelter, leaving Adan with his emotions swirling fiercer than the winds outside the compound. He was more confused than ever about Will’s plan. And what about his own plans? Was he ever going to get his memories back? Was he ever going to find out who he really was?

  One thing he did know: he couldn’t just stay where he was and do nothing. If it were up to him, he’d run as far away from Oasis as possible. But after what he had seen in the Basin, he wondered if any place was truly safe.