by A. L. Knorr
"I'll tell them. I should let you call RJ now, yeah?"
"Okay, honey." She made a kissing sound. "I love you. Oh, and make sure to stay away from gas mains, water lines, and power lines. They can rupture and cause fires in the blink of an eye."
I almost said, better if I'm nearby if a fire starts than someone else, but it wasn't the right thing to say to my mom. She knew what I was but it didn't mean she had to like it and for her, the tactic that worked best was to ignore my fire as much as possible…even if I was going to Arcturus as soon as my visa came through.
"Sure, Mum," I said instead. "Talk to you later."
I hung up just as a text came through from Jack.
Jack: All good here. You?
I sent him a thumbs up.
I had just tucked my phone back into my bag when a heavy rumble filled the air and shook the ground. It reverberated through my soles and up my shins. My head snapped up, catching the look of shock on Georjie’s and Targa's faces. It definitely had not been my imagination. Looking around the park and the lot, people were either still with their heads cocked and listening, or interrupting their friends to get them to shut up and listen.
"Now, that was the weirdest thunder I've ever heard," Georjie said, getting off the picnic table. "I don't know whether to look up to the sky or down at the ground."
"Uh"—Targa pointed toward the north, where the city met the sky—"I think up."
22
Akiko
Visiting the community library was a bit like going back in time. They had only offered a digital catalogue of their books in the last couple of years. I was thankful that at least they had 'the interweb,' as the librarian liked to call it.
I looked up as someone got up from a squeaky chair. Then I went back to my research, scanning articles about The Nakesh Corporation and its doings since its inception.
So far, the public-accessible articles I had found were glowing, heralding many of TNC's projects as altruistic and its founder, Devin Nakesh, as beneficent. I tapped my fingernail against the tabletop, frowning and wondering how I could find anything that wasn't propaganda. There was nothing to be found anywhere about Project Expansion, but of course there wouldn't be. TNC was determined the project would remain a secret until they decided to unveil it.
The whole experience had left a bad taste in my mouth but I didn't know why.
"Shhhh," one of the librarians said from the front desk.
I mouthed an apology at him and stopped tapping my finger. I closed the browser and got up from the slippery wooden chair which had probably served this community library for a half-century or longer.
A series of creaking and groaning noises filled my ears as the floor shook beneath my feet. I paused, unsure if I had imagined it or not. No, the floor was shifting.
The sound of the windows rattling drew my eyes up to the old warped panes. I met the librarian's gaze, both of us parodies of surprise.
There was a groaning sound from the floor and an old crack in the wood split further. Faintly, a couple of vehicle alarms could be heard from outside. A library patron rushed out, one hand rooting deeply in her pocket for her keys.
When the earthquake seemed to be over, I walked to the front desk.
"You okay?" I asked the librarian, a petite balding man in a neat wool vest of blue and green argyle.
"I do believe we just had a little quake," he said with an off-putting, high-pitched voice. He whipped a red paisley kerchief from his back pocket and dabbed it against his brow. More sweat oozed from his forehead. He took his glasses off, held them out, and peered through them as though able to predict that the next quake would not happen until both of us were long dead. He put them back on his face with trembling fingers. "Don't let it concern you."
"I won't." I smiled. "Thanks. Might want to check the pipes, though."
He lost his smile and paled as though it was not only a capital idea to check the pipes, but that they had most certainly ruptured and even now water was pouring over the boxes and boxes of books and magazines he had left to rot in the basement. He bustled away.
I headed for the front door. I had told the girls I'd meet them for lunch. I took out my phone and texted Targa to let her know I was on my way and asking if they were okay. I received a thumbs up reply. She texted that she was with Georjie and Saxony and that Saxony was on the phone with her mother being schooled on earthquake safety. I smiled at this and tucked my phone away.
I headed in the direction of the school on foot. Passing an empty playground, I was struck by how the swings were still swaying, the rusty chains expressing a moody symphony of squeaks.
The earth heaved under my feet again and a deep rumbling sound accompanied it. All of the hair on my body swept to attention at the sound. That thunder was unnatural.
I staggered and fought to right myself as the terrain tipped and swayed like the deck of a ship in a bad storm. Car alarms went off all around me in a dissonant cacophony of wails and blats.
The light changed and I thought the sun must have skated behind a cloud, but when I looked up, there were no clouds. The horizon to the north of Saltford was a pallid shade of gray. As I watched, eyes narrowing and heart pounding, the gray moved, leaching the blue out of the sky as it went. The gray was darkening, and increasing in size. Oddly, it seemed to be traveling low, almost through the city, rather than over it.
Glancing around, I noticed several people on the street, but no one in my immediate vicinity. As the ground rolled underneath me, I tore off my jacket and sweater, then staggered toward a small copse of trees to stash my things. I kicked off my shoes and left my jeans in a puddle on a pile of dry leaves. Phasing literally on the fly, I climbed into the air above Saltford on a falcon's wings.
As I wheeled north toward the gray, my Hanta vision narrowed on the mass of boiling shadow moving into Saltford. I strained against the wind to get closer. The storm was moving fast and erasing color as it came. The heat of my hunter's killer instinct ignited as I closed the gap, scanning the ground for someone, scanning the sky for the dark left-spinning double-helix that screamed demon.
A dark shape, with two sharp jutting columns suggestive of horns, moved toward the northeastern suburb of Saltford. It was blurry, like I was seeing it through frosted glass.
The caustic scent of evil burned my nose, endorsing the supernatural nature of the approaching creature, but the tell-tale spinning column was missing. There was nothing connecting this shadow-creature to the Æther.
I had not been an active Hanta for long, but I had never seen any intelligent animate being without a connection to the Æther; even silkworms had a thin glimmer of silk reaching up into the mysterious beyond.
What was this? It almost looked like a storm cloud moving across the landscape. If I didn't know better, I would think that was exactly it—a freak storm.
Far below, the wails of sirens, the screams of humans, and the creaks and groans of buildings were distant but increasing in both urgency and strength. Whatever this thing was, it was bringing destruction with it.
I dove and phased from a flesh falcon to a spirit bird, picking up speed as I passed from one realm to the other. But a strange thing occurred as I phased—the optics of the thing sharpened and then fuzzed out again.
What I saw mid-phase and between the realms lit my battle-rage. My whole Hanta being shuddered and blazed. It had been like peeking through the crack in a fence while walking by and catching a glimpse of the dog on the other side with its gleaming teeth bared and snapping.
I had a momentary glimpse of a thing with nuclear eyes and a bulging muscular frame tipped with horns. What was thunder momentarily became a slow, resonant laughter that filled me with horror.
But the view of this beast, once I completed the phase, went fuzzy and confused again, looking more storm than creature. Once again it sounded more like thunder than laughter.
I phased back into a flesh-and-blood falcon, looking through the crack between realms again.
Again, I lost the view as I completed my phase. Frustrated, I released a scream of fury. Trying to stop in the middle of a phase was like trying to run on marbles. I slipped from one realm to the other, unable to grasp anything and hold myself in the middle.
A trail of gray spread from the thing like a plague and a huge crack shot through the earth, opening the ground under an entire neighborhood. I watched in horror as the yawning mouth in the earth opened wide. Houses splintered and shifted, basements caved in. Street lights swayed, tilted, and fell, crushing parked cars. People ran screaming through the street, trying to escape the destruction.
Phasing again, I saw something in between that made my blood run cold. It flashed by in an instant but I saw enough to understand that the creature was feeding. The spinning columns connecting the people to the Æther were blurring toward it. Not only their helixes, but their very forms were blurring as well.
I could not wait. In spirit form I bolted for the dark mass, which already appeared to have doubled in size.
Hot righteous anger erupted as I reached, talons outstretched, to rip this demon from its place and drag it to the center of the Earth.
When I struck, a total and complete black closed over me. The air vacuumed from my lungs and from around my body. Pressing in on all sides was a substance like muck or soft clay. It felt as though I'd been swallowed by a bag of slime.
I tried to breathe and the muck went down my throat. I thrashed, hardly able to move in the heavy, cold, wet body of the beast. A muffled laughter filled my ears and vibrated around me. Fingers of panic fluttered around my heart, clutching at my mind until they closed fast. I was suffocating, blind, and deeply revolted by the feeling of being swallowed alive. The slime more than coated my feathers and filled my nostrils, it seeped into my pores and smothered me completely.
Desperately I thrashed and toiled, directionless and confounded. At the feeling of the slime pulling away from the tip of a wing, I strove in that direction. I sludged my way through this trap as my whole being screamed for air.
I burst from the muck, my mind woolly and body aching. The ooze crawled across my body and wrung itself from my feathers reluctantly, as though it could only stray so far from its owner.
I shuddered as I finally came free of it. Bewildered, I spiraled around the creature, staying clear of every part of it, as it rained destruction on the world below me.
Saltford was under supernatural attack. Something had to be done, and who else was to do something about this but me? But what could I do? I'd already proven that I couldn't take this thing down the way I had the Oni in Japan. It was something different.
I needed help. I needed Yuudai.
Pointing my beak to the sky, I phased into a crane and headed for the white.
23
Saxony
The sky to the north grew black with a strangely shaped thundercloud. Dark and angry as a bruise, it loomed over the city and blocked out the sun. The air grew cold and I pulled my jacket closed.
It seemed that suddenly, Saltford was skating on ice as it swayed under our feet and the earth moaned. The three of us staggered, eyes wide and focused on the dark cloud approaching, hands thrust out for balance. People began to scream and run as panic set in. Someone yelled something about the end of the world. Others dove under picnic tables or ran for their cars. A bunch of kids pelted for the school.
A series of heavy thudding sounds came from nearby as bricks and chunks of cement fell from the building and hit the ground near the school's foundation. Cracks appeared at its base, shooting up through the mortar. The whole building swayed, giving me vertigo. I squeezed my eyes shut to try and settle my stomach.
"Move!" Georjie screamed at a group of girls who were sitting and leaning up against the school, frozen with fear at the sudden chaos.
One of them got to her feet and yanked on her friend’s arm. Several bricks hit the ground next to them and the girls screamed, scrambling to get out of the way.
Georjie toed off her sneakers and thrust her hands out, her eyes illuminated with a bright light. Targa leapt out of her path and into me. The two of us got out of the way as we realized what Georjie was doing. We got behind her as wind picked up her blond hair and whipped it back.
I felt Targa grasp my hand hard as we watched a sapling shoot from the soil near the base of the school and become a full-grown tree in moments, while students scrambled off the grass in efforts to get away from falling debris. Bricks and stonework tumbled into the dense canopy, their fall arrested briefly. The debris trickled through the branches to land on the ground with heavy thuds.
"Georjie," I tried to say, but I was so astounded at what she'd just done and what was happening that it came out as a rasp.
She’d just exposed herself. Big time. But she'd saved several students from being flattened. I noticed at least one person standing off to the side, gaping at the tree which had appeared out of the school's foundations, holding their phone up and taking photos or videos.
"Oh, this is bad," I groaned, watching as another student joined the first, this one definitely filming both the tree and the approaching storm.
"Get out of here!" I yelled at them.
Cracks shot through the mortar of the school walls like the building was made of glass. Dust crumbled and drifted over the tree and the grass, turning the green to gray. Or was it the dust doing that? I squinted at the base of the school, watching the color leach out of everything. It wasn't the dust turning everything to gray…
A stampede of people came running through the parking lot, looking over their shoulders and screaming. Behind them, a fuming gray fog that was almost smoke, or smoke that was almost fog, swept across the city, swallowing buildings and cars and turning people into silhouettes stumbling through the haze.
I heard sounds of disgust and screams of terror, people yelling out names in panic, looking for one another. The strangest thing about this smoke was that it had edges. There were stark borders between the fog and the clear air around it.
A terrific crack filled the air and the sound of grinding rock and crumbling concrete drew my attention back to the school. The cracks were huge now, and wove through the side of the high school where Georjie's tree reached up from the earth and along the brick wall like a hand hoping to catch something.
"The whole building is coming down." Georjie's tone was not panicked, her voice not even loud. Maybe something about the wraith she'd fought in Ireland had taken the edge off strange events like this, but my heart was pounding like war-drums.
"Georjie, let's go!" My voice was husky and an awful crawling feeling was all over my face and arms, making my clothing feel heavy and caked in swamp guck.
The grinding noise increased and my eyes flew up to the second story of the high school. A section of the storm, moving independently from the main body, swung toward the school like a huge fist. Blue daylight flashed at me through gaps in the fog-smoke. I blinked and tried to refocus my eyes, unsure of what I was seeing.
"It's a thing," Targa whispered beside me, her hand gripping my shoulder. "It looks like a freak storm but it's something else, right? A…creature? Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
I nodded and felt my inner fire bellow to life. What was this force? If it was a natural phenomenon, it was the strangest one I had ever seen. But strange things had happened before. I'd read about them in the news, like how spiders rained from the sky in Australia, or the sky turned bright red in Wales after a tropical storm blew metallic dust across the ocean.
I squinted, watching with disbelief, as a disembodied part of the storm crashed through the school. At first there seemed to be no effect. The 'fist' passed through the bricks and windows like a ghost. But moments later the school's walls swayed, leaned dangerously, and groaned like the buildin
g had a soul and it knew it was dying. More fat cracks threaded their way through the brickwork.
"Saxony." Targa tugged on my arm. With monumental effort, I tore my eyes from the ghostly fist and followed Targa's gaze.
Georjie had become the Wise. She looked the way she had in the photograph I had thought was photoshopped. The face was hers, the form was hers, but Georjie's expression was alight with a terrible and beautiful wrath.
Goosebumps swept up the back of my neck. I barely recognized my friend. Her eyes were white lights, her arms lifted and fingers flexed. Dirt covered her feet and disappeared up her pant legs.
The walls of the school gave way.
"There are students still inside!" I made to dart forward but Targa kept me back. "Let me help," I rasped.
"Wait!" Targa's hand squeezed, almost painfully. "What are you going to do? Light the whole thing on fire? She has a plan!"
I glanced at Georjie and her body seemed to surge with tension.
Trees and vines and surfeit of plants wound their way through the walls of the school, wrapping tendrils and green muscular arms around chunks of brick wall and crumbling cement. Huge vines as thick as tree trunks snaked around and through the building as kids crawled from the first-floor windows and ran from the doorways, dragging one another, helping each other escape. Like the tentacles of some subterranean kraken, the plants whipped and unfurled to thread themselves through the building, holding it up.
Georjie couldn't stop the school from crumbling, but she was slowing it enough to give the people inside a chance to escape.
My jaw sagged at the sight before us. A fractured building woven through with rich green plant-life—and Georjie's plant-life did not lose its color; if anything it seemed to pulse with an ethereal green light. Amazement held me still and my heart surged with pride.
Targa made a sound almost like laughter. "Now she's just showing off!"
