by A. L. Knorr
I couldn't make out the expressions of any of the people, hidden as they were behind full-face protection. But there was an uncomfortable shifting from a few of them. My guess was that none of them had a clue what I was talking about, but now they'd be curious.
"Come on, then." I made a beckoning motion with my fingers. "If you want to stop me, now is your chance."
I took the sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on my face. I couldn't stop my grin.
With a cry of, "Fire!" from someone, the world around my bubble exploded.
A multitude of frequencies lit through my core. Even with the sunglasses on, I had to squint against the bright lights of the assault. Starbursts and sparks went off everywhere, the blue ripples of my force-field adding to the visual chaos. It was like an over-the-top firework display happening mere feet from my face.
The light was simply too much for my poor retinas, the sunglasses were not enough protection. I crouched and hid my face in my arms, waiting.
When the assault finally ceased, I lifted my head and opened my eyes, blinking as the firing squad came into view. The acrid smell of hot metal and smoke lingered in the air. The world went still as they realized I was still here, whole and untouched.
"Are you finished?" I stood up.
A few long seconds passed before two of them parted. Hiroki was shoved through the line to the forefront. A soldier held him by the collar, pressing the barrel of a handgun to Hiroki's temple. Hiroki was pale and sweaty, looking fit to have a heart attack.
I flicked my fingers.
The gun flew out of the soldier’s hand, did an arc in the air, and landed behind enemy lines. There was a murmur as they witnessed this.
I flicked my fingers again, and did what I could have done earlier.
The weapons were wrenched out of their hands to hover in the air. With a batting gesture, I send the guns into orbit, rotating like a macabre carousel high over their heads.
My eyes on Hiroki, I walked forward, anger simmering. I ignored those now gaping up at the weapons swinging in their grim merry-go-round.
"How much did you know? Did you know about Libya?"
"Petra, I'm so sorry," Hiroki stuttered.
I spoke through a tight jaw, trying to keep my teeth from clenching. "Did you work with my father?"
Hiroki wilted under my gaze. "I tried to tell them—"
I cut him off. "Did you know they killed my father? Did you know they've been watching me since birth? Did you know the whole dig in Libya was a fake? That it was all an elaborate scheme to get me on your roster?" I turned and said this to everyone present. "Do you know that people die every time TNC executes a project? Do you know who you're working for? What you're working for?"
No one answered me. I looked at the faces, covered in dark glass.
"Why? Can any of you tell me why?" I paused, giving time for someone to step up with a response. No one did. "Why does TNC seem to exist to hurt people?"
I couldn't see their faces to tell how they were feeling, what they might be thinking.
I narrowed in on one of them and lifted the gates between our minds, probing for answers. Nothing. There was wolfram here. I wouldn't doubt that it was lining their combat gear. I closed the gate and took a weary breath.
Someone was speaking. I turned to Hiroki, rubbing the back of my head as the pain passed.
He was stuttering. "I-I asked them not to hire you." Sweat poured down the sides of his face in streams. "I told them not to–"
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" My lip curled in a snarl. "It doesn't even matter if you're telling the truth. I can't believe a word you say."
"He did," said a muffled but familiar voice. "He warned us not to hire you."
Miss Marks pulled off her helmet and put it under her arm. Her perfect face was ashen in the dim light. The carousel of weapons circling overhead sent shadows over her features.
She continued, "But do you know what his recommendation was?"
"Jody, don't," Hiroki said.
"He said we should terminate you instead."
Somehow this admission, which was meant to shock me, did not surprise me at all.
I stepped through the line and headed for Hiroki's lab. "You should have."
19
Petra
I tore the guts out of it.
Destruction became almost mindless as I fried electronics and blasted computer hardware and complex tools that did goodness knew what. I shattered millions of dollars’ worth of lab equipment, cracked open the hologram machines in all of the theatres, busted up the consoles and left them smoking and sparking. I even broke their coffee and vending machines. I ruptured pipes and let the water run. I sparked fires to life and let them burn.
The sun was breaching the horizon by the time I finished with TNC's offices and labs.
I stood on the road leading to the prototype, listening. If there was anyone around, they were quiet. I wondered where Mr. Nakesh was, and what the team was doing now. They couldn't stop me with any show of might, they knew that now. But were they re-strategizing? Coming up with some way that didn't involve firepower to bring a halt to the destruction I would rain down upon them?
I put the rubble of FS11 at my back and made the journey to the dome the Elemental girls and I had built the day before.
It was truly beautiful to look at, like a protected park. The curves of the dome pressed the leaves of vegetation growing next to its inner walls into a gentle curve that made it look like the plants were reaching for the sky. The small sun and moon were slowly orbiting, throwing shadows as they moved peacefully around the dome like a lazy top.
I turned the force-field around it off and the vegetation sprang outward.
A pleasant smell and the feeling of fresh and humid air rich with the scent of damp earth swept over me.
The moon Georjie had assembled drifted slowly by. I untethered it and it dropped out of the sky and crashed into the jungle below. A cloud of gray-white dust drifted up from its wreck.
With a powerful mental shove, I sent the small sun, which had lost much of its brightness, flying toward the Atlantic. It became a shooting star as it arched across the sky, trailing smoke and flaming debris. Shadows moved under its path and then vanished as it splashed with a loud hiss into the waves beyond, extinguished forever.
Unsure of what to do about the vegetation, I made a mental note to ask Georjayna about it. She had mentioned that many of the species were not native to the area, but this issue was out of my jurisdiction. If she thought it was going to be a problem, she could deal with it.
The sound of footsteps and panicked breathing made me turn.
"I wondered when you'd show," I said, crossing my arms and facing Mr. Nakesh as he came running through the trees, huffing and puffing.
His blue eyes were wide and blazing, his brow and hair pasted with sweat. His clothing was torn and muddy. He was wheezing hard but when he saw me, he still had breath enough to let out an agonized wail. He bent over at the waist and put his hands on his knees, his back heaving.
"What…have…you…" he wheezed, panting and looking the color of curdled milk, "done?"
His eyes traced the edges where the tell-tale curve of plants should have been. Then he looked up for the orbiting fake-sun and fake-moon, which were no longer there. His face seemed to cave in on itself. He shook his head and dropped his face again, moaning.
"What have you done, Mr. Nakesh?" I asked in a flat voice. "You were hoping that I would never find out what you did to my parents? Worse than even the personal offense, I know about the sinister side that TNC projects always have. I'd ask you to tell me why people die whenever you and your company come near them, but I don't think you're capable of saying anything that isn't a lie."
"You don't understand," he said, standing and scrubbing at his pale face with his hands. His sweaty hair gleamed in the morning sun and stuck up in all directions. "There has always been more good done than bad. It's the way it has to work
."
"What are you talking about, 'more good,'" I snapped, then held up a hand. "You know what. I don't care to listen. Actions speak louder than words, and your company is about to see a whole lot of action from me."
I walked past him, fighting the urge to send him flying into the nearest tree.
He reached out for me but his hand bumped hard against my force-field and there was a crunch of knuckles.
"You don't get it,” he said. “I’m due to pay up. Now is the time. It has been too long since it fed."
My skin prickled and I paused, wondering what kind of new insanity this was. I turned slowly. "It?"
His face was terrible to behold—terror, fear, desperation.
"Please," he whispered. "This is your only moment to fix this, to stop what’s going to happen. Put it back. Please, put it back." His voice became conspiratorial. "Let’s let it think the plan is going forward, if only to buy us a little time."
"Us?" I almost laughed. "There is no us, Devin.” I enunciated his name.
He trembled and opened his mouth to argue. I shook my head.
“I don't know what you're talking about, but I do know this." My voice was calm in the face of his apparent mania. "I will never, ever, do anything you ask of me."
"Then I am a dead man, and others will die. People you love. You may be indestructible, but they are not."
My lip curled. "That already happened, in case you forgot. It's in the name of those people that I'll destroy everything you own, everything you have ever touched."
"Jesse is alive," he said, shaking his head. "Put the prototype back, or he dies."
For a moment I had no words, and scanned Devin’s face for a lie.
"What did you say?" I asked, my voice low.
"We have him. We picked him up as you were blowing apart all of our hard work, all of my assets."
I narrowed my eyes. "Where did you pick him up from?"
"In Saltford. We knew when we lost track of him in Berlin that he was going to find you." He put out a hand. "Please, put the prototype back before it wakes up."
I didn't believe anything that came from his lips. The 'it' thing was just another lie, something he'd made up to get me to cave. The 'it' thing was not my problem. Jesse was. Could I afford to assume he was also lying about Jesse?
I lifted the gates between our minds and got the result I expected. Nothing. There was wolfram on his person somewhere. My eyes ran over him, looking for sign of the metal.
"I need proof that you have him," I said.
He let out a sharp exhale. "Petra, we don't have time for this. We have him. I'm not lying."
"How do you even know that your people found him? I fried all of your electronics. You'd have no way of hearing from anyone outside of shouting distance." My eyes traced his collar, looking for a necklace, his fingers, looking for rings. Nothing.
Then I spotted his watch. Its band was made from alternating gold and wolfram.
"We have ways, Petra." His tone was patronizing and it made my skin crawl.
"That's a nice watch, Devin."
He paled. "Wh–what?"
"Take it off."
He began to shake his head.
"You want me to believe you have Jesse? Take off the watch." I crossed my arms. "You have three seconds."
He laughed that creepy high-pitched giggle, rubbing at the back of his head frantically, like there was a serious itch there.
The wolfram was dead to me, but the gold’s frequency sang out loud and clear. I gave the watch a mental yank and his arm shot out toward me.
He gave a cry of surprise and tried to pull his hand back. I held it there as he squirmed against it. Keeping my eyes on his, I flicked open the watch's gold clasp and it came shooting off his wrist. It arched over my head and landed somewhere in the trees behind me.
Lifting the gate to his mind was like opening Pandora's box. Strange scared gibberish and images flashed across the screen of my mind. A demonic face tipped with horns flew out of the refuse filling his head and I choked off a scream. I yelled out Jesse's name to help focus Devin’s thinking and Jesse's face and form flashed in front of me, along with the truth.
The did not have him. They knew he was in Saltford and they were looking for him, but they did not have him.
I slammed the gates down and fought back a moan against the pain.
Devin stood before me, his eyes still wild. His hands came together and I believed he was about to resort to begging. I shuddered and swallowed the urge to throw up. I desperately wanted to take a shower, and never, ever would I fish around in his mind again.
"Goodbye." I turned and walked away.
"Wait! You don't understand!" His voice was a croak behind me.
I was several meters away when there came a sharp and heavy boom which vibrated through the ground. It was too deep a sound to be from a gun. The sound was somehow familiar. My eyes dropped, looking for this new threat. Then I realized why the sound was familiar. It had been the sound of terrain straining under Georjayna's power as she moved earth.
A deep crack had opened in the ground between Devin’s shoes.
20
Petra
We both staggered back, me with surprise, and Devin screaming out for help.
His already white face turned a shade of dirty gray and his eyes widened and rolled with fear. He looked up at me, his expression a grimace of mortal terror.
"It's too late," he rasped. "It's awake."
He staggered backward as the crack in the earth widened and spread with a sound like a series of breaking bones. He fell and scrambled onto his stomach in a desperate army crawl to get away.
A black tentacle made of smoke whipped out of the crack in the earth and wrapped itself around his ankle, dragging him clawing and screaming toward the crack.
He disappeared into the earth with no other sound, along with the tentacle. The crack in the earth slammed shut with a thud. A puff of dirt drifted up and a sapling swayed back and forth before deciding to cant heavily toward the sea. Then, all went ghostly quiet.
It was as though Devin had never been there, the tentacle had never been real, and the only evidence that the earth had been disrupted was the crooked young tree.
I stood frozen in soundless shock. I wanted to scream, but my throat felt too tight. Only the sound of my labored breathing and the whisper of the wind in the pines could be heard. Every hair on my body stood at attention and for the first time, the cold hands of terror slipped around my heart.
"What just happened?" I croaked at the woods.
I lost track of time as I stood there trying to process. I had just met 'it,' or part of it. It had also decided that today was Devin’s day to die.
My heart thudded dryly, as though all the blood had gone out of it, while I replayed his awful demise in my head. It might have been fitting, but that didn’t make me feel any better about watching him die. A wave of nausea swept over me and I closed my eyes against it, swallowing hard.
The wind picked up and the sound of a distant siren made me jump. Some alarm finally decided to react to something.
"A little late," I muttered, but the sound opened my eyes and jolted me back into action.
I began to run through the trees in the direction of the front gates of FS11, back to where I had parked my car. I paced myself, but it wasn’t easy. I kept glancing over my shoulder, wondering if that thing might appear again. My heart was galloping, and not just from the exertion. My hands were ice-cold while my face felt flushed with heat.
Skirting the field station buildings, I ran on, looking back every once in a while and watching the earth, half expecting more cracks to open up and a tentacle to come out and grab me. Fear was an exquisite motivator and it spurned me on, even when my breath grew ragged.
What was that thing? What did it belong to? What, exactly, had woken up as a result of the project falling apart? I didn't know the answers to these questions, other than TNC was dealing with a supernatural force that w
as very unhappy.
I kept my force-field intact and passed by the now useless laboratory where Hiroki had first started testing me.
After nearly twenty minutes of running and no sign of ‘it,’ I slowed enough so my heart could find something of its regular pace. I allowed a small but bitter smile to lift the corners of my lips as I passed the shattered gate and abandoned security booth.
It was over for this field station.
With Jesse's help, I would find the other stations and I'd destroy those, too. I didn't care if it meant I couldn't ever live a normal life again. I wasn't normal, so a normal life was not something I could expect anyway. I had a new purpose now—destroy TNC and any corporations like it. The arrogance, the pure evil of these kinds of conglomerates couldn't be fought by normal civilians. But I was not a normal civilian. I had the power and the kind of defenses necessary.
My thoughts were broken by the sound of a great groan vibrating deep beneath my feet. I froze in a half-crouch, ready to spring or run if a crack broke open.
The groan ceased. I waited, but all remained quiet. I resumed jogging. Whatever owned the tentacle that had pulled Devin into the earth, it had sounded like it had rolled over.
A minute later, the groan was back, louder this time. The earth shook and I felt the shudder go up my legs.
A long rattling hiss followed the groan and the early morning light dimmed. I looked up and watched as part of the sky went from pink to gray. My skin grew cool and my hands and face felt wet. I rubbed my fingers together, looking at them and expecting to see them dripping. But the damp I felt was invisible, and whatever was between my fingers felt more slimy than wet.
"Ugh!" I flicked my fingers, trying to get rid of the feeling. I felt my face, and it too felt coated with slime. I wiped at my skin but the feeling didn't go away. My fingers showed no visible mucous, nothing could be scraped off and examined, yet the feeling remained.
The groan became a growl.
I whirled, raking the trees for whatever made the sound.
