The Yanti

by Christopher Pike

  It all got a little confusing in Ali’s head. The reason was the queer nature of the mountain’s interior. It not only possessed doorways into other dimensions; the tunnels somehow folded space over the surface of the Earth. That meant a straight line was not necessarily the shortest distance between two points. Somehow, the tunnels superseded that basic law of physics.

  Ali could never forget the shock she had felt—when she had raced down one of the tunnels to escape the dark fairies—and she had ended up in Tanzania! And just a minute before she’d been in Breakwater . . .

  Ali cautioned herself to focus on the problem at hand.

  She could not let her sister detonate the bomb.

  “Looks like you’ve been busy,” Ali called. The truth was, with their supernatural hearing, neither of them needed to shout. It was old human habit, Ali supposed.

  Sheri wore a fine red gown, as befit a fairy princess, and her sword-belt was studded with rubies. The latter matched the ruby necklace she wore around her neck.

  Unfortunately, Ali could stare at neither her sister’s gown nor her jewels without seeing Sheri’s scars. The veil of beauty was simply too transparent for her now that she had been to the Isle of Greesh and back. Not all the “gifts” the Entity had bestowed on her sister were potent.

  Sheri studied Ali’s own scars.

  “The violet ray proved too much for you?” she asked.

  Ali nodded. “You tricked me. Clever.”

  “I heard my trick saved your life. Old Kashar couldn’t swallow the Yanti.”

  “True. But he tried.”

  Sheri shook her head. “Stupid old dragon.”

  “His was not an easy death.”

  “Burning is no fun. You must know that by now. But I’m confused, why the scars? Was Queen Geea stingy when it came to her healing touch?”

  Ali drew her long red hair back from the right side of her face.

  “I kept a few out of respect for you,” she said.

  Sheri snorted. “Please! You break my heart!”

  “Your heart doesn’t break so easily. But like you said, at least now I know what it feels like to burn.”

  “Ha! You didn’t like me calling you a fool at the police station.”

  “Trust me, that was not my motivation,” Ali said.

  “Then explain yourself. We have time. Not a lot, but some.”

  Ali took a step forward. “Why not stop the clock on the bomb? Then we can talk as long as we want.”

  “Sorry, sister. You never were my favorite company.”

  Ali took another step forward. Sheri interrupted her in midstride.

  “Stop! You’re keen-eyed, and you’re not stupid. You must have noticed the holes in the walls. You must have guessed what’s inside them.”

  Ali nodded. “Explosives.”

  “Very good. So stand back. There’s no reason for you to lose your head, is there, little sister?”

  Ali stopped. “I visited the Isle of Greesh. Had a chat with the Entity.”

  Sheri studied her forehead, and Ali knew she searched for a purple crystal that she would not find. “You lie,” she said.

  “You can hear what is true and what is a lie. While trying to inspire me to sign up for its unholy cause, the Entity showed me a short film of you and Tulas. I saw how the Entity manipulated you into accepting the implant. It helped me understand why you kept going to Hector, to see him, even after Lucy Pillar was supposed to be dead.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Tulas or Hector!”

  “Why not?”

  “Neither of them means a thing to me now.”

  “Doren . . .”

  “And don’t call me by that name!”

  Ali nodded. “Should we add Nira to your list of unmentionables? When I was with the Entity, Father came and helped. He saved me from their grip, and at the same time provided me with the key to unlock those you’ve marked. Nira speaks now. You should hear her. The first words out of her mouth were orders. You would have loved it. She contradicted everything I’d told the others!”

  Sheri showed interest. “I’m happy to hear she’s not your stooge.”

  “She’s no one’s stooge. Certainly not the Entity’s.” Ali paused. “I gave her the Yanti. She knows how to use it in ways neither of us imagined possible. With it, she could remove that implant in your forehead.”

  Sheri sneered. “That was placed inside Doren, not Lucy!”

  “Don’t lie to me. It’s in both of you. Even from here, I can see it.” Ali paused. “What was the name of the man who came to visit you at the hospital?”

  Sheri chewed on that one. Did not answer.

  “Your mother told me about him,” Ali offered.

  “I suppose she talks now, too?”

  “In a sense, she talks less.”

  Sheri was amused. “Mom never knew when to shut up.”

  “She showed me your paintings. You’re quite the artist.”

  “General Kabrosh showed me his arm. You would have made a lousy doctor.”

  “How is the good general?”

  Sheri shrugged. “I hated to see him suffer.”

  “So he’s dead. And Tulas . . .”

  She raised the sword angrily. “I told you to leave him out of this!”

  “You cannot pretend you were not manipulated! You cannot act like this is what you wanted! You’ve become a thrall, nothing more. When you were young, and still had dreams, was this one of them? I don’t think so! Admit it, it’s all become a nightmare.”

  Sheri stood away from the bomb. “You surprise me, Geea. With everything you’ve seen and experienced the last few days, you still act the fool. You say you’ve spoken with the Entity. It must have explained to you why it’s here. Without help, this planet is doomed.”

  “With their kind of help, humanity would be better off dead!”

  “So you just decide that for everyone on Earth? Sorry, but I think if it was put to a vote, the vast majority would choose life rather than extinction.”

  “You are not talking about life. You are talking about slavery.”

  “Slavery is better than death!”

  “Humanity abhors slavery!” Ali snapped. “They’ll fight to the last one of them to get out from beneath it.”

  “That’s just your opinion. To me, most human beings are cowards.”

  “You just don’t get it, Doren. You’ve decided the very destiny of the human race without asking another soul their opinion.”

  Sheri threw up her arms. “Who was there to ask? Tulas was gone. Father was gone.”

  “No. Father was there, inside the purple cubes . . .”

  “Then why didn’t he help me?” Sheri interrupted, and there was more anguish in her tone than hatred.

  “You didn’t reach out to him the way I did,” Ali said in a gentle tone. “That’s how I survived my encounter with the Entity. Not because I’m smarter than you. But because I asked for help, Doren, and help came.”

  “I told you not to call me that!”

  “You’re my sister. I can call you by your real name. And there’s no reason we can’t talk about Nira and Tulas and Hector. These are people you still love.”

  “Didn’t the Entity give you its lecture on the uselessness of love?”

  “I chose not to listen to it. Why don’t you stop listening to them?”

  “No.”

  “You have the choice. It still exists. Doren . . .”

  “No!” Sheri shouted, shaking her sword in the air, causing waves of purple light to convulse the air. Or did they come from her head? Ali could not be sure, only that it felt as if something evil had suddenly entered the cave. Dizziness swept over Ali, as her sister ranted on.

  “The time to choose has passed. It passed for Doren when Tulas caught fire. It passed for Lucy when she caught fire. After that kind of pain, nothing matters. There’s survival and that’s it. In the coming days, the world’s going to learn that lesson.” Sheri paused to catch her breath. “Now go, Geea, just
leave. Or I’ll kill you where you stand. I swear it.”

  Ali took a step forward. “I cannot allow you to detonate that bomb.”

  Her sister caught her eye. “You cannot stop me.”

  Sheri pressed a switch on a black instrument attached to her sword-belt. There was a deafening noise. Behind Sheri and the bomb, Ali saw a rapid sequence of bright explosions. The fireballs erupted on both sides of the cave wall—simultaneously—and tore apart the tunnel. A geyser of dust blasted Ali’s face. It must have been harder on Sheri, since she was closer to the blasts. Yet her sister stood firm—in the center of the cave—as well as in the depths of her madness.

  The cave had been blocked from the south side. And if Sheri pushed the next button, Ali realized, it would be blocked from the north side. Then Sheri would be all alone with her bomb, and no one would be able to stop her.

  Energizing her field, Ali tried to fly forward.

  Sheri countered with a slice of her sword.

  The shiny weapon never left her hand. It touched only dust-choked air. But it sent forth an invisible blade of pure pain. Ali caught the phantom blow in her abdomen. It felt exactly as if she had been stabbed there. The agony was immense. Her sweatshirt was torn and a line of liquid red appeared. It was blood—she was bleeding from a wound inflicted by a weapon that had not touched her!

  Only then did Ali recognize the fairy sword. It had belonged to her father.

  Sheri reached for the next button on the black instrument. Reversing her field, Ali tried desperately to fly backward, away from her sister. Before she could move ten feet, the second sequence of bombs went off. The noise was deafening, the debris choking. It was only the magic left in her depleted field that kept her from being crushed beneath the stones. It humbled Ali to realize that just one swipe of Sheri’s sword had been enough to drain her entire reserve of power.

  For a while, holding onto her bloody shirt, and the torn flesh beneath it, Ali let herself drift on autopilot. It was not long before she saw the light of the sun shining outside.

  Finally, free of the confines of the cave, she was able to stop and rest on a rock that stood beside a pile of snow. The latter reddened as the blood from her cut flowed over the white ice. Physically exhausted, mentally devastated, Ali doubted she had the strength to heal herself.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Once more, Geea and Ra rode Drash back into battle, but this time, with less hope. Geea had been right about the new element of attack. In the sands south of Mt. Tutor, the tiny scabs emerging from the desert were somehow fusing together—first in pairs, then in quadruplets, and so on, until they formed one gigantic monster—that was made up of thousands of the brain-sucking creatures. How they were able to do this, no one knew, but Geea said it must have been part of Sheri’s long-term strategy.

  “I told you she would never trust the dragons to remain loyal.”

  “How can we stop them?” Ra asked.

  Geea shrugged. “There must be a way.”

  Presently, they were flying high above the woods south of Karolee, where the bulk of the dragons were meeting the onslaught of the new threat. What was remarkable to Ra was that even though the new scabs were a thousand times larger than the old ones, they behaved the same way as the originals.

  To get airborne, they had to inflate themselves with air, and then whirl a mass of hanging tentacles to give themselves both direction and speed. Yet the spinning tentacles acted as their main weapons, too—along with being the central part of their propulsion system.

  Periodically, a tentacle would stop spinning and reach out a sticky claw—from beneath an inflated gelatin bulb—and grab whatever was in the vicinity. These tentacles were fast and hungry. From his vantage point in the sky, Ra watched in horror as fleeing fairies and elves and dwarves had their heads torn right off the top of their bodies.

  The scabs had changed in one respect. They were no longer trying to create scaliis. They just wanted to feed, and besides gobbling down elemental heads, they went after the dragons with a vengeance, possibly because they offered the most meat. Or more likely, Geea had said, because they’d been programmed by the Shaktra to take them down.

  “Doren knows she cannot strike Uleestar with the dragons protecting it,” Geea told Ra. “Even if she forces a million marked thralls or scaliis onto our capital, they’ll be beaten back. But these new scabs—let’s call them drones—could change all that.”

  Even as they spoke, two drones began to rush toward Drash. Geea commanded the dragon to turn about, fly back to Uleestar. But the drones—once they had locked in on them—dropped their tentacles and set them spinning. Their speed was amazing. One minute the drones were a mile below, the next they shot past Drash at over two hundred kilometers an hour.

  That was their goal, Ra saw, to get above them. Because once they had the superior altitude, they could drop down their tentacles and use them as weapons. Ra could not help but panic as twin drones closed in over their heads.

  But Geea remained unconcerned. Rubbing her hands fiercely together, she let loose six powerful vooms. One drone ruptured like a blimp that had been struck by a cruise missile. But the other showed no signs of damage.

  A two-foot-wide tentacle swung by their heads.

  “Duck!” Geea ordered. Ra did not need the order. He practically glued himself onto the dragon’s back, as Drash dove toward the ground. The drone proved stubborn. Again, it positioned itself directly above them, but this time it went into simple free-fall—aimed directly at Drash’s back!

  Geea took out her sword and stabbed up at the creature. The blade, of course, was no longer than a yard, but it did not seem to matter. A slice of blue light shot off the tip of it. In an instant the drone was sliced in two. What a noise! What a stink! The foul gases—as they left the drone behind—were nearly poisonous. Ra choked on them as he complained to Geea.

  “You could have told me your sword could do that!” he said.

  “I like to show off,” Geea said, patting Drash on the back. “Let’s get some more of these monsters. Before they get to your friends.”

  Drash was fearless. He flew directly into the smoky fray.

  Cindy and her traveling companions were resting in the seemingly endless cave when she felt rather than heard a roar. It came in two waves. Mr. Warner noticed it as well. “What was that?” he asked.

  Mr. Havor sat up with a start, almost lost his dark glasses, quickly replaced them on the tip of his nose. “Could it have been an earthquake?”

  “It sounded more like explosions,” Cindy said. “Could Sheri Smith’s bomb have already gone off?”

  Mr. Warner and Mr. Havor looked sadly amused.

  “If a nuclear bomb went off anywhere in this mountain,” Ali’s father explained, “We would definitely know about it.”

  “Or rather, we wouldn’t know anything at all,” Mr. Havor said.

  Cindy grimaced. “We’d just be dead?”

  Mr. Warner nodded. “But it takes expertise to detonate such devices. She’s a genius at software development, but she’s not a physicist. It’s not going to be that easy for her to set it off.”

  Mr. Havor was less encouraging. “She wouldn’t have bought it if she didn’t know how to set it off. Trust me, she’s a master at everything she touches.”

  “How did you get involved with her?” Mr. Warner asked.

  Mr. Havor shrugged. “I had ideas for computer games and she had money. She understood my vision. Or at least I thought she did.”

  “You were just wanting to play end of the world,” Cindy said. “She wanted the real thing?”

  “Exactly,” he replied with a sigh.

  Cindy had a bottle of water in her hand that was almost empty. But Terry hadn’t brought anything to drink. She couldn’t stand to see him hiking all this time uphill without taking a sip. She offered him her bottle. “Please take a little,” she said.

  He stared at her with unblinking eyes. In the harsh shadows cast by their flashlights
, they seemed to have lost their color. For the first time she noticed what looked like a birthmark on his forehead—a dark smudge between his eyebrows.

  Terry did not answer Cindy.

  Mr. Havor spoke up. “He can’t talk. It’s not his fault.”

  “But he can hear, can’t he? He has to eat. He has to drink,” Cindy said.

  “I’ve seen him go days without doing either,” Mr. Havor said.

  Of course, the blind man was speaking figuratively when he spoke of “seeing.” Cindy understood that much. But what she didn’t understand—and it filled her with dread—was that she’d finally figured out where she’d seen Terry before.

  The first day they visited Toule, Ali had left her and Steve to check out Omega Overtures on her own. The two of them were resting in the park with Rose and Nira, when a blond teenage boy was suddenly struck by an SUV—not twenty yards from where they were sitting. At the time Rose said the guy’s name was Freddy Degear, and got all upset. Leaving Nira in their custody, she rushed off to tell Freddy’s mother what had happened to her son.

  Only later they learned it was all a lie. There was no Rose—it was Sheri Smith in disguise. Plus there was no Freddy Degear, either, or at least, no one in town had heard of the name. Yet someone had died that afternoon, and had subsequently been taken to the local hospital. Indeed, Ali had gone to the morgue to check on the guy’s body, and even she had said he was beyond hope.

  Yet here he was, sitting two feet away from Cindy.

  “How long have you known Terry?” she asked Mr. Havor, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Just a couple of weeks. I know he acts kind of strange but . . .”

  “How did you meet him?” Cindy interrupted.

  Mr. Havor hesitated. “Sheri Smith introduced me to him. As a favor, she said, to help me get around. Why do you ask?”

  Cindy waved the flashlight over the guy’s face.

  No blinking. No pupil response. No nothing.

  “Just wondering,” she whispered.

  Somehow, after resting near the cold mountain peak for an hour, Ali managed to gather enough strength to expand her field so that she was able to fly home. Once inside, she showered and then collapsed on her bed. For a long time she just lay there with her palms placed over her wound. The bleeding had stopped but the pain remained. Just as bad, her blood loss had drained away much of her magical powers.