by Sandi Gamble
I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t got through to him. This was not the Jace that I had known all my life. “Jace, Jace,” I cried, kissing him full on the lips. I could not think of anything else to do.
He still did not respond. Desperation was taking over my thoughts and my actions as I shouted his name as loud as I could while, at the same time, drawing back my fist and then bringing it crashing against his cheek. His head snapped back. His eyes widened as he repositioned his head. Instead of the frozen mask of terror on his face, his expression shifted to one of amazement.
“Ari,” he said.
“Oh, Jace…” I stared at him. “Jace,” I whispered, reaching out to grasp his arm, “what’s happening?”
In all the years I’d known him, I’d never before known him to be as confused or worried as he seemed to be just then. “I don’t know,” he confessed, his eyes wide and his body tense.
We stopped, unsure of where to go next. Nothing seemed like it was only a few moments earlier. What had begun as a hint in the air, as gentle and soft as a summer breeze rustling through the smallest of leaves, had begun to whip those same leaves and branches now, causing them to dance madly above our heads. The air itself, only a short while ago so still, now seemed electric with uncertainty.
“What’s that?” I asked, unable to keep the jittery tremble from my voice.
“What?” Jace asked, turning too late to see the brief slice of light that cut through the still darkened sky.
“I thought it was a firefly…”
“A Firefly? In the morning?”
Of course, he was right. But I couldn’t imagine what else the small bursts of light could be.
“There!” I cried when another appeared. I poked my finger toward the burst of light and, although the light was gone as quickly as it appeared, I felt a curious buzz, like an electric jolt, on my finger.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, pulling my hand back.
Jace watched me but remained quiet and thoughtful.
“Did you see?”
Even though he did not answer, I knew he had. I could tell by the confused expression on his face. He was trying to understand what it could be. But, like me, it didn’t make any sense to him. “It’s as though infinitesimal pockets of gas are being ignited…” he said, almost to himself. I will say one thing, his tone was one of fascination, not alarm. But even his objective observation was unsettling. I could feel the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What could be causing these “pockets of gas”? Even as we considered this unusual phenomenon, it seemed to increase in frequency and severity. Soon, even as the breeze picked up, the air became more electric and constant microbursts of light and energy filled the air above and around us. We twirled around and around, trying to determine if there was a single source of energy.
“Finally,” Jace stated with some fascination, “I remember reading about Ion storms in the library. Although I’ve never seen one, this comes pretty close to how I’d imagine it to be.”
When I stopped, I shook my head. “I don’t like this at all,” I said, giving voice to the fear that was gathering in my thoughts. “Not one bit.”
He drew a deep breath. I could tell that, although he was brave, much braver than I could ever be, he too was unnerved by everything that was happening. It was as if nature herself was trying to warn us about something. But what?
Just then, a distant rumble moved across the sky.
“Did you hear that?”
My question made him smile. “Of course, I heard it. Whatever else is happening, I have not gone deaf.”
“Very funny,” I said, sneering at him.
The noise faded, only to have another rumbling noise move across the sky. And then another. Soon, as it became louder, it also became more familiar. It was the rolling of distant thunder, growing louder and more ominous as it neared. Over and over, again and again, until the noise no longer came in rumbling waves but was a constant din. Crack! Crack! The next crack of thunder shook me so hard I almost lost my footing. That last crack of thunder was followed by a bolt of lightning that, despite the early dawn light, lit up the world around us, creating shadows in every tree and shrub.
Then another.
And another.
We found ourselves unconsciously ducking down as if to dodge any possibility of being struck by lightning. Hiding from the lightning and even from the anticipation of the lightning. The noise and the light were enough to make anyone cower. Only Jace’s renewed courage and determination allowed him to continue to keep his eyes open and observe what was happening all around us.
“Fascinating,” he managed to say, in between the crashes of thunder.
“What?” I cried out, barely able to make out his words over the thunder and crackle of lightning splitting the sky.
“I said, it is fascinating,” he shouted raising his voice as loud as he could, leaving me still straining to hear.
“It’s horrible,” I shouted back, not at all fascinated by these strange events.
“But look,” he said, pointing into the lightning shower. No longer just chromatic darkness and light, the lightning produced the colors of the rainbow.
I grasped his arm tighter. Perhaps under normal circumstances, I would find the color shower interesting, even beautiful, but the truth was that it had me completely unnerved. The hair on my arms was standing up. My flesh was goose-pimply. I was shivering. I felt cold and hot at the same time. I could not stop my heart from racing. It took all my concentration simply to keep my eyes open and to not collapse into a quivering ball. Which I probably would have done if not for Jace. I would be too ashamed for him to see me completely fall apart. After all, I was a strong woman and had spent many years ensuring that he knew that.
“It’s because of the pollution,” he shouted after a moment.
“What is?”
“The colors. The dust and pollution are acting like a prism and bending the lightning into all these colors.”
“What pollution?” I quipped back at him… he knew the pollution levels of the earth were now nearly nonexistent.
“But what about the lightning itself?” I wanted to know. “This is like no storm I’ve ever experienced.” I could feel hot tears rolling down my cheeks, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. “What is happening?”
He nodded his head. He combed his strong fingers through his thick hair. “Can’t say I don’t agree,” he said.
“Oh, my!” I screamed out when the rumbling grew even louder, becoming so pronounced that it actually knocked me off my footing, causing me to let go of Jace’s arm and to stumble. I barely managed to keep my balance and catch myself before I fell. The thunder – if indeed it was thunder – reverberated through the sky. The earth itself quaked in distress.
As Jace reached out to help me steady myself, a crackling sound like a whip being cracked filled the sky, only louder. It was as if the heavens were being torn apart. No, not the heavens, the earth.
“Oh no…”
The growing crackling sped faster and faster. Until it hit the curtain at the speed of sound only to rip through, causing a noise that was beyond deafening. I screamed, but I could not hear my own scream above the noise, a noise that came from no place and every place, from deep within the earth and from the reaches of the heavens above us, a noise that was so loud, so penetrating, and so massive that it had an indescribable physical character.
We looked to our left and then to our right. Before us and behind us. But there was no sanctuary and no escape. No place to hide. The noise was everywhere. On and on and on, ever louder, ever more frightening, as if it were proclaiming absolute dominion over the earth and the sky.
I felt lost in the noise. I could no longer stand. I was tumbling and rolling. I was descending into what seemed to be a pit filled with noise. Louder! Louder! Louder!
And then it was gone. Completely, utterly unavoidably gone.
Its absence was the more stunning and disturbing for how absolut
ely it had been there. If possible, I would have to say that the silence was even more frightening and overwhelming than the noise had been. The noise had pushed me out, but the silence drew me in, into an awareness that everything around me, everything that I had ever known and ever loved had been taken from me; drew me into an awareness of how everything I had once embraced had changed.
I was terrified. Lost. Even the things I could see and recognize seemed new, different. Alien and unfamiliar. A shiver went through me, one that seemed to come from someplace deep in my soul. I wanted to hide. To curl up in a ball and make whatever was happening simply go away. Nothing I had ever learned had prepared me for whatever was happening around me.
I wanted it to be a dream, even a very bad dream.
I longed for a time of better dreams when my dreams told of a world yet to be realized, not a world stolen away. I longed for the dreams I’d enjoyed when I was a small girl, when, each night my father would tuck my covers around me, and before he would kiss my forehead and wish me sweet dreams, he would tell me stories.
“The one about the forest?” I might ask. Or, maybe one of the great wars from long, long before. Or even some other event or great person, heroic or otherwise. But he never repeated a story, not once. Each night was a new story and a new lesson; a new story of how the world had been, before the change. Then my dreams that night would magically take me to that once existing world so that, as I grew to be a young woman, it seemed I had inhabited both the world that was and the world that once was long before, both at the same time.
But neither the world that was, or that once was resembled the world that presented itself to me now. No story my father had told me, nor lesson he had taught in any way prepared me. No place I had visited in my dreams, nor thought I’d ever had, nor wish I’d ever wished, prepared me for this horror before me.
No pearl of wisdom passed along from generation to generation over the course of time; passed along unchanged and unchanging, filled with wisdom and truth, visions and precepts, could give meaning to these events that were happening around me.
I was lost.
The memory of my father’s voice and his image did not serve me at all. Did not comfort me. Did not guide me. The sound of his voice, once so real in my memory, trembled and vanished. The words of my teachers, so dear when I committed them to memory, could not help me. My studies mocked me.
All that I had striven to learn; all the hours I had devoted to the books of wisdom, the late nights, straining my eyes as I committed the words and lessons to memory; all that now proved futile.
Where once there had been pure white sand, crystal blue water, and exotic fish swimming amongst beautiful multi-colored corals, darting playfully through the strange shapes, now there was only a barren landscape on the ocean floor. Or what is left of it anyway?
There were no fish and no colorful corals. No crystalline blue water. Just rust-colored pools of water, grit black sand and … and not much else. It was all gone. Everything.
Where had it all gone? What had happened? That I could not fathom; could not imagine…
The sky was leaden, dark grey. Heavy, it weighed on me and my thoughts. And still, there was silence, deep and unrelenting. Even my own heart, still pounding in my chest, was silent.
No bird chirped. No leaves sang in the breeze. No animal made its presence known. No cry, no moan, no breath.
The world that had witnessed my most innocent moments was gone.
I had the sense of familiarity if not familiarity. A vague déjà vu sense of having been in this place, but there was nothing about it that felt safe.
“Jace?”
I was surprised at the sound of my voice. It was my voice. It felt so odd, speaking. It sounded like something spoken in a vacuum, which is to say, it sounded as if it had no sound at all.
“Jace?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t wait for me to say another word. He grabbed my hand and pulled me towards his transport. I don’t know what his thinking was, but I was thinking only of leaving, getting back to the safety of my home and the care of my parents. Whatever excitement that had accompanied our journey that morning was long gone. Now all that remained was a hollowness I’d never known before.
Once we were safely strapped in, Jace started the engine. It too seemed to hesitate, as if the events occurring around us affected even its performance. But then it sprang to life, and we lifted off and sped away in the direction we once knew to be home.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ACADEMY
Never Bow Down
That was the Academy’s motto and a lesson to us all; never bow down; not to anything or anyone. One was to always be the master of one’s self.
As we flew home, I tried to focus on those words, whispering them to myself over and over again.
Every day at the Academy, regardless of core lessons, the same message was drilled into our minds and our hearts… Never. Bow. Down.
From the time I was a child, I had known that the Academy was one of the elite institutions of our society. However, it was only when I began to study there that I would come to learn just how elite. Our Academy, Pandec, was one of a handful of Military Academies that were strategically positioned across Pulchra.
The name Pulchra is derived from the ancient root meaning, “pristine” and in the case of our moderately-sized island-continent, it was an apt name. Located in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean with Australia, the USA, and Chile – or, at least, what was left of them – as our closest neighbors.
The formation of Pulchra was the result of the same seismic activity that resulted in those massive land formations being nearly decimated. As it was, by 2025, climate change had already driven the majority of humankind into habitable bunkers deep in the ground and safe from the unrelenting heat and solar rays that had turned the Earth’s surface into a roiling desert of heat and dangerous gases.
The long process of creating and perfecting the bunkers began decades earlier, near the turn of the century. By then, human disregard for how their actions impacted global climate patterns reached a tipping point. The polar caps and other ice sheets melted in an ever more rapid process; sea levels rose significantly and, with no prospect of a refreezing of the ice caps, it never reduced.
Life on the surface became more challenging. Not only were vast population centers inundated with flooding seawater but more and more severe weather patterns lashed out against the interior plains of the continents. Tornadoes once thought unimaginable became the norm. Sleet the size of large stones damaged every structure. Violent thunderstorms brought about regular power outages. Crops were threatened as were supplies of potable water.
As was the way it had always been, the wealthy and elite managed to hang on longer than most. They were able to purchase or take land that remained relatively safe and to build homes that were protective against the ravaging changes. Meanwhile, the poor and the workers were moved to the crude spaces being carved out underground. Ultimately, as more and more activity was conducted from safe bunkers hundreds of feet below the surface, they took on the feel of true living spaces. The wealthy began to migrate from the surface to the bunkers as they continued to grow in complexity and luxury. Soon, the bunkers became vast networked communities and cities.
With ever-quickening certainty, reality made the decision for the final hold-outs above the surface. Life had become a subterranean reality as the majority of the Earth’s elite inhabitants finally went underground.
Then, in 2080, seismic monitors within the bunkers picked up new, unusually violent activity. Seth Forester, a senior seismologist, working for the governing council, was one of the first to chart the activity.
As he moved through the rows of earnest young researchers, diligently studying their holographic monitors, several of the researchers hit their alarm buttons at once, calling attention to “something of note” appearing on their monitors.
Seth moved quickly toward the scientists.
He d
id not need their interpretations to understand that they had picked up something of concern. Still, he was too senior a researcher – and too experienced – to feel particular alarm.
“Let’s monitor this closely,” he said, looking over the shoulders of a number of associates who were watching their three-dimensional monitors. “Right now, it might simply speak to an anomaly. But if you note increased activity, please inform me immediately.”
And so, those first researchers stayed glued to their monitors, reading and interpreting the data as it streamed in. Soon, other researchers began to pick up similar disruptions. In those first hours, the seismic activity seemed to dance around the globe, showing up in disparate places, making it difficult to discern a pattern to the activity. After all, living so deep in the ground, seismic activity was a way of life. No one in the bunkers was immune to the regular tremors that accompanied life below ground on the ever-more challenged planet.
“Dr. Forester!” one of the technocrats shouted out suddenly, real alarm in her voice.
He lifted his attention from another monitor and looked in the direction of the young technocrat. The urgency in her voice had him moving quickly toward her monitor. He was soon standing behind the slight girl with long, straight black hair. Her almond-shaped eyes were wide as she moved her hand toward the three-dimensional, holographic display. “Here, sir,” she said, indicating a shelf deep under the sea. “The activity is following a pattern that is not dissimilar to what I’d seen when I studied the great earthquake.”
He leaned forward, peering intently at the display. He could not help but feel pride in her ability to recognize a pattern in the disparate seismic activity. Even so, he shared her alarm. “Yes, you are right,” he said after a moment. He drew a deep breath to make sure his voice was under control. Then he touched the communication device at his shoulder. “Please inform the President that there is significant – and dangerous – seismic activity.” He waited a moment before continuing. “This is not a test. I repeat. This is not a test.”
