by Azalea Ellis
We pulled ourselves onto the rocks and collapsed. After a few moments of exhaustion, we pulled off our masks.
Jacky let out a small “whoop!” as she cracked a fresh glow-stick and tossed it to the ground between us.
I shrugged off my pack and retrieved the hairpin from where I’d stashed it safely inside. I held it up in the air like some sort of trophy, flopping back against the cold, wet pebbles that made up the beach. “We did it!” I crowed, elation pushing back against my fatigue.
“We,” Torliam announced, “are remarkable.”
Torliam increased the glow of his power. “We must find a way back to the surface of the island above.”
I trembled as a residual shiver slid through me. “I don’t have the strength left to tunnel all the way up through the ground. Not after the Trial, healing Chanelle, and making this.” I gestured to the small cave around us.
“We can’t swim out,” Adam said, his voice a tired murmur. “All our gear is still in the water, in the Other Place.”
“I could send Pinnochio back for it,” Kris said. “He’s not very strong in the water, since he doesn’t have any fins or flippers, but he could probably bring things to us out of the supply pallets, one at a time.”
Adam nodded, the motion slow. “I don’t have much energy left either, but it wouldn’t take too much to make a couple flippers in his size to help him swim.”
Chanelle leaned forward. “You’re out of ink, right? Use my blood, instead.” Adam frowned and was obviously about to deny her, so she continued quickly. “I’m the least useful out of any of us. I don’t have any Skills anymore, but all the Seeds you guys gave me are in Resilience and Life, so I’ll be fine, and Sam can heal me. I want to help.”
Soon, we’d gathered a small amount of Chanelle’s blood in one of Adam’s empty ink cartridges and re-opened the crack below us. Pinocchio slipped out into the mini cave in the Other Place. He dropped into the water with a little plop, crimson-flippered feet wriggling behind him. He had to make quite a few trips, but under Kris’ guidance, he retrieved our thermal wetsuits, the remaining oxygen tanks, and a few other useful supplies that we weren’t already carrying in our packs, like glow-sticks.
We left the rest of the supplies in the water, since we didn’t need them anymore, and our limited oxygen meant we needed to return to the surface as quickly as possible and couldn’t waste any time or energy dragging pallets through the water. We suited up awkwardly in the increasingly crowded space.
Gregor’s fingers were stiff and more swollen than normal, and Jacky had to help him maneuver into his suit. He kept clenching his jaw, and I knew the movement caused him pain, even if he was impressively stoic for a child.
Once we were all kitted out with the thermal wetsuits and oxygen supplies, with Birch once again in a sealed plastine bubble, Zed closed the rip to the Other Place, and the rest of the team pressed against the wall, out of my way.
I drilled downward with Chaos, the sound of breaking rock almost deafening in the small space. I kept going till we hit water, and then we waited for the rock to fall and float down. Then we jumped down, too, one by one, into the familiar cavern. With the wetsuits, and without the Other Place to suck at our strength, we were fine.
We swam out, moving as quickly as we could manage. Adam used a little more of his almost-expended power to give us all flippers, which helped a lot, though the drag of our packs in the water still slowed us down. Without the extra supplies and the caution we’d shown when coming the other direction, we made much faster time. We broke the surface of the ocean with barely any oxygen remaining, then swam toward shore.
We pulled ourselves onto the rocks and collapsed. After a few moments of exhaustion, we pulled off our masks.
Jacky let out a small “whoop!” as she cracked a fresh glow-stick and tossed it to the ground between us.
I shrugged off my pack and retrieved the hairpin from where I’d stashed it safely inside. I held it up in the air like some sort of trophy, flopping back against the cold, wet pebbles that made up the beach. “We did it!” I crowed, elation pushing back against my fatigue.
“We,” Torliam announced, “are remarkable.”
Chapter 32
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
— H.P. Lovecraft
After a few more minutes of flopping around like fish, we got up and huddled around Kris and Gregor. Despite our exhaustion, none of us wanted to put off the most important thing any longer than we had to. “We’ll heal you two now, and once we get back to the cabin, we’ll use the hairpin on everyone else to try and see if any of us need the cure, too.”
"Hairpin?" Sam said. "Oh. The metal thing. I was thinking of it more like a lance for infected wounds, myself."
I opened my mouth, then closed it. “That makes way more sense, actually,” I said belatedly. “I wanted to name it,” I muttered childishly under my breath.
Gregor rolled his eyes at me, but totally lacked the nonchalance of his normal attitude. “Yes, well I certainly hope you weren't intending to dawdle around about healing people." His cheeks were fever-bright, and he fidgeted as if he wanted to grab the lance out of my hands and jab himself with it.
I pretended not to notice his extreme impatience, but couldn’t help my expression of surprise when he nudged Kris and said, “Heal her first.”
She shook her head vehemently. “No. You’ve been getting really sick lately. I’m still feeling okay.” She turned to me, deadly serious. “Heal Gregor first.”
He scowled and moved away from me. “Kris has been biting herself when she sleeps,” he said, ignoring her look of betrayal. “The inside of her cheeks are all cut up. I’m not going first, and I’ll go Shadow if you try to make me. Let’s just save us all some time and heal her first.”
Jacky glared at the both of them. “Have you guys been keeping this a secret?”
Kris rubbed her foot against the ground, shuffling some pebbles. “There was nothing you could do. The whole team was already trying so hard. We didn’t want to worry you for nothing.”
Jacky scowled and gave Kris a feather-light smack on the side of her head. “Next time, tell me.”
Kris nodded, looking down.
I hoped there would never be a ‘next time.’ I knelt beside Kris and held her hand as she settled down next to me. I pushed my non-sensory awareness through the barrier of her skin, searching for any signs of the Sickness. I found faint traces, sections of her body where the connecting tissue was a little weaker than it should have been. They hadn't been there before, but I wasn't exactly sure it was the Sickness, and not simply damage that the God of Shaping and Molding's realm had done to her via prolonged exposure.
When I pricked her hand with the lance, it became clear. She lit up in my mind like a lightbulb was shining inside each and every one of her cells, and the paths of corruption were obvious, tar-like pollution seeping through her.
I frowned, and opened my eyes. "Sam, before I heal this, you should come take a look, too. It might help us figure out how this thing works."
He nodded and took Kris' other hand.
She swallowed. "You can fix it, right? Whatever it's doing to me?"
I smiled. "Yes, don't worry." I turned back to Sam. "Do you feel the damage around her lungs, and in the lining of her stomach?"
"Yes." He paused, and then frowned. "But I can't heal it. Something's blocking me from transferring the damage to myself."
Gregor had crept closer and closer, his eyes locked onto the point where the lance pierced his sister’s skin. He laid one tiny hand on her shoulder.
"That's the Sickness," I said. "Keep an eye on it while I set Kris back to normal." I then explained how the lance had worked so far, the sense of pristine blueprint and the corruption to the blueprint language that was the Sickness. I pushed my power through the warm metal under my hand, and it began to heal her.
The process was much easier than it had been with Chanelle, probably because the corruption was much less extensive. Still, by the time the lance had pulled enough power from me to untwist and re-write the language of Kris, my fingers trembled from exhaustion.
"I…feel way better," she said, her voice rising in excitement. "I didn't even realize how crappy I was feeling till it went away. Does this mean I'm cured?" She turned to me, her body fairly vibrating in a way that would have had her tail wagging frantically if she were a dog.
I nodded, smiling but too worn to talk for a while.
Gregor blinked away tears, and, in a rare display of open affection, hugged Kris around the neck.
“It’s your turn now,” she said to him, urging him down onto the cold beach beside me.
"Your strength is depleted," Torliam said, wrapping his hand around my own and gently removing the lance from my grasp. "Rest. I still have energy to feed through the healing artifact. If it will accept me, there is no need for the burden to rest upon you. Indeed, we should all attempt to use the lance.”
Adam grunted in what was probably agreement. “Did you get anything useful out of that, Sam?"
Sam looked up from Kris' much smaller hand, which he was still holding. "It is very strange." He didn't continue, until Adam urged him on with an exasperated roll of his hand. "It didn't feel quite like healing. It felt more like…transformation. Like a motion-capture video, in reverse. When I heal something, I take the wound onto myself, and my body knits together and rearranges or regrows something. This…felt different. It's hard to explain. Hard for me to quite understand, to be honest."
That didn’t lower anyone’s mood. Torliam clapped a hand on Sam’s shoulder like he was encouraging a child, or a pet. "That is to be expected, I suppose. If it were normal healing, it would have been accomplished by an Estreyan long ago. And if it were easy to understand, we would have been able to thwart the Sickness another way, by creating countermeasures against it. Continue to analyze. You might still learn something useful.” He pricked Gregor’s hand with the metal artifact. Torliam's eyes widened, and he looked to me. "This is quite astounding."
"Think about healing the places that feel wrong. It will pull on your power. Let it. Keep feeding it till everything is back to the way it should be."
Torliam turned his attention back to Gregor. A short time later, he drew away the lance piercing the boy's skin, and Gregor released a great sigh of relief, slumping forward till his forehead rested on his knees.
"The pain must have been great," Torliam said. "It is gone, now?"
Gregor nodded and sniffled with tears, though he kept his face hidden.
Torliam turned to me, grim-faced. "The Sickness had been concentrated around the nerves of his spine and in his joints, probably causing deterioration of his motor control, and an increasing amount of pain."
Jacky scowled. “You shoulda said something,” she repeated.
The boy swallowed, then took a deep, sniffling breath before answering. "What could you have done, anyway? We all knew I was sick. You didn't need to worry any more about it. Plus, if it got really bad, I just had Sam put a little of his numbing juice on my back. It was uncomfortable, but it helped a little."
Jacky turned her glare on Sam.
"He asked me not to say anything," Sam said quickly. "Black Sun was active the first time he came to me, and…his reasoning made sense. Stress is detrimental to performance. Adding more of it wouldn't have helped us find the god or the cure any sooner. Chanelle was enough motivation for all of us, don't you think?"
Chanelle flinched. "That's over now, though. We don't have to worry anymore. I'm normal again…and everything is going to be okay." Her words were forceful, as if they were as much for her as the rest of us, but she met my gaze with a small nod. Her eyes held a measure of loyalty heavy enough to make me uncomfortable, thick enough that it looked like adoration.
I straightened, reinforcing my spine with a bit of mental steel, and nodded back.
Chanelle's gaze grew vague, her posture loosening as she lost lucidity, staring into the air with a slack face.
"There was still some damage to her brain that the lance couldn't heal. I was hoping whatever’s wrong with her could be fixed, now that the Sickness isn’t there to stop us. Sam?" I turned to him, and he nodded.
He laid his hand on her forehead, then smiled. "Yes. I can…" he trailed off, paling. He was silent for a couple minutes as we stared at the both of them intently. Finally, he took a deep breath, then let out a sigh that shuddered as it left his lungs.
Chanelle’s gaze cleared, and when Sam told her she was healed completely now, she started crying again through her face-splitting smile.
Wearily, but in good spirits, we got up and began trudging toward the closest bit of civilization on the island. We'd stashed our snow pod not too far from the boat owner's house, and were hoping it would still be there waiting for us. None of us wanted to walk all the way back to the cabin in flippered wetsuits.
"I can't wait to get a fire going," I said. "And sleep with walls around me."
Zed leaned his head onto my shoulder as we walked side by side. "I can't wait to sleep without worrying that something is going to try to kill me."
Torliam snorted. "Humans. Where is your sense of adventure?"
We all turned to stare at him.
He scratched the back of his head. "Err, I can admit, the god's realm was not pleasant. Despite the necessity of our travel, I, too, am glad to be back on your planet."
"At least my Struggle Skill got plenty of workouts," Jacky said.
"And we've gained the means to save the world," I said.
She grinned. "Yeah, that too."
We found the snow pod right where we’d left it and unceremoniously piled in, only removing whatever pieces of our under-water gear was absolutely necessary for us to fit. Torliam, Jacky and Sam rode in the trailer with what was left of our equipment.
When we arrived at the cabin, we immediately started a fire in the wood-burning stove, then gathered in the main room, shoving the nonperishable food rations we'd left behind down our gullets.
Adam picked up his link, which he'd left behind to keep it from being damaged or broken by the passage to the god's realm, and laid it out flat on the table. Its surface flickered to life, and he frowned. "It's only been a week."
I raised my eyebrows. "Are you sure? Is it properly connecting to the data signal?"
Adam was indignant. "Of course I'm sure!”
After a second, I nodded. “Time passes differently on Estreyer than on Earth. I guess it's not so surprising to know that the god's realm was the same."
At first, we chattered happily to each other, but after a while, that petered off. In the quiet, Zed spoke up again. "So…what happened, at the end there? When he shoved us back here, into the water?”
We shared a grim look. When I spoke, my voice was halting, hesitant. “I saw something behind the sky, for half an instant. Whatever it was, it wasn’t…I feel like I would have gone insane if I looked at it for much longer.” It had been a break in the world, and it reminded me of Torliam’s explanation of what was in the emptiness between, what we risked when we used the arrays to traverse between his world and mine.
Torliam frowned. “If I am correct, that place was an enclosed realm made by the god. It was completely under his control, you might even say, a part of his body. For it to be damaged, either something was attacking him, or his own power has weakened to the point that he cannot even maintain the solidity of the realm."
Jacky pursed her lips. "Neither of those sound good."
I remembered the Remnants had said something about the world destabilizing if we succeeded. Was this what they meant? "What could have been attacking him?" I said.
"Another god is the only thing I can imagine, but that seems unlikely. I fear that he has simply grown weak, expending more energy against the Sickness than he is able to replenish. I believe we may have made this more difficult
, as we brought the Sickness behind his barriers. He mentioned that it had ridden with us, as if this was significant. Perhaps, his realm, being clean of it, gave him some sort of advantage in holding it back. Then, when he used his energy to create the tool…"
I looked down to the lance, tucked between the Oracle's armband and the skin of my left forearm. "You think giving us the lance made him weak enough that he couldn't even keep his pocket realm from crumbling apart?"
Torliam grimaced and gave a very human gesture that wasn't quite a nod and wasn't quite a shrug. “He may have also expended a significant amount of energy in the Trial. Nevertheless, I am only speculating.”
"I know that place was pretty big, but he went there to conserve his strength when it wasn't enough against the Sickness. If he can't even keep it stable, what exactly does that mean?"
Torliam shook his head. "I do not know. However, there are ancient stories of some of the lesser gods dying. It is not quite clear whether this is simply one of their manifestations being dispersed, or not. In any case, I fear for what it may mean, if he is weak enough for that manifestation to be dispersed. If he has been holding back the Sickness for so long, what might it do, free from his influence?"
We sat in grim silence for several long moments.
Adam leaned forward, his fingers twiddling restlessly. “On the off chance that this lance thing stops working when something happens to its creator, we really should check the rest of the team for the Sickness immediately. It spreads, if you haven’t noticed.”
Torliam gave him an unamused look but did as he suggested.
Sam volunteered to be checked first, followed by Birch, and then Jacky.
Jacky had traces of the Sickness.
