Aether (The Shadowmark Series Book 2)

by T. M. Catron

  “I thought I was hiding until they showed up.”

  “And you thought you’d follow them around dark corners? First chance I get to check on you, and you’re trailing rogues . . .” he said, his voice closer to his usual tone. “Do they know you know?”

  “No. Why should they?” So they were rogues, then. Mina remembered the way the one had watched her at the window. And Iverson’s comment about her being different. And her pack was missing.

  “We can’t talk about this here.”

  “Then let’s go somewhere we can talk about it,” she said, some of her annoyance returning.

  Doyle hesitated there in the darkness, his hands still on her arms. “I only have a few hours,” he said finally. “You’ll have to go with me. Travel light—leave everything but your gun.” Doyle found his own pack and rifle a few feet away, slinging them over his shoulder while Mina waited. She already carried her gun. It was all she had left, but she didn’t need to tell him that just yet. Then he took her hand and led her through the dark forest behind the hotel.

  They hiked in the dark for several hours, their pace leaving little room for conversation. Doyle grasped Mina’s hand as she stumbled along. Of course he wouldn’t use the road, she thought. The initial shock of seeing Doyle had worn off, and now Mina was beyond tired.

  Occasionally, he asked her a question or two about the last few weeks, and she filled him in on the important points. She left out the massacre in the woods until a time when she could question him about it. But she told him about everything else—Solomon, Evan, and Emily, Lincoln’s team. When she mentioned her brother, Doyle stopped walking.

  “He was here the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh,” was all he said.

  “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but look at this.” He stooped to pick up something in the dark.

  Mina might as well have been looking with her eyes closed. “What?”

  “Your pack. It’s empty.”

  “Oh.”

  “When did you lose it?”

  Mina filled him in on her failed search for Lincoln.

  “What was in it?” Doyle faced her now, a note of impatience in his voice.

  “Everything,” Mina said.

  “The hybrid food, too?”

  “Yes, everything!”

  Doyle was quiet a moment, and then said, “Can anyone connect you to this backpack?”

  “I’m sure lots of people saw me with it at the lodge. But I don’t think one of them would have stolen it.”

  “You are hopelessly optimistic, but a human didn’t steal this. It reeks of hybrid filth.”

  Mina struggled with the way he characterized them. “The rogues? I don’t think they would know it was mine unless someone told them. They could connect Emily though.” Emily. What would they do to her?

  “She should be okay,” Doyle said, guessing her thoughts. “They already had a chance to hurt her.”

  “But had they opened it yet?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. She’s obviously not a hybrid. If they’d spent any time at all watching you, they would know that.”

  Mina shuddered at the thought of the rogues watching her and Emily in the forest. “How bad is this, really?” she asked.

  Doyle sighed. “If they connect it with you, they’ll either think you are a hybrid or that you know one.”

  “They would be right.”

  Doyle dropped the bag on the ground. “I don’t think they opened it until later, or they would have come after you right away. Good thing too. You can’t use this one anymore, obviously. Don’t tell anyone else you lost it.”

  Following along behind Doyle was impossible. When Mina ran straight into a sapling, she had almost been expecting it. Its branches grasped at her hair, pulling painfully.

  “Stop.” She let go of his hand, and he turned around to help.

  “I’ve got it.” He untangled the branches from her thick curls.

  When he finished, Mina massaged her scalp. “How much farther?”

  “A little. We’re going back to that bunker, except it’s not a bunker.”

  “So you’ve seen it?”

  “Briefly. The day of the attack.”

  “The day you tossed me out of the Nomad.”

  “You’re not going to let that go.”

  “No. How did I survive, anyway?”

  Doyle guided her away from the sapling to sit under a tree a few feet away. Mina leaned against the trunk and stretched out her tired legs. Everything around them smelled damp. Doyle sat close, leaning against the same tree, his leg touching hers. “It’s Condarri technology,” he said. “I’m learning to use it better than any other hybrid.”

  “So I was a guinea pig? That’s reassuring.”

  Doyle scoffed. “I didn’t experiment on you.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What if you’d made a mistake?”

  “But I didn’t.”

  Mina didn’t have the energy to argue. “So what is it?”

  “The closest English word is aether, but it’s actually what cosmologists would call dark energy . . . and dark matter, interestingly.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “There isn’t one. Humans believe there is—they think they are two hidden substances that push and pull the universe apart. But dark energy and dark matter are the same to the Condarri. The aether is an almost sentient phenomenon that gives the universe its order. It can change its form, expanding and contracting depending on how it's needed. It rings this galaxy, holding it together, and it flows throughout the universe, expanding and twisting it. The Condarri know how to manipulate the aether. They bend it using their adarria.”

  “So you can control it, too?”

  “Partly.” Doyle picked up her hand and massaged her palm. “Right after I killed the Condarri I realized I had more control over it.”

  Mina tried to focus on her questions. “How?”

  “Through my adarre. It turns out that if I can visualize it happening, it will. I don’t know exactly how, but it has something to do with my connection to the adarria.”

  “Will you show me?”

  “Not now. Too dangerous.”

  “Why can’t the other hybrids do this?”

  “Because they’ve only been allowed to learn part of it, mainly for use in limited tasks. Never for gaining any kind of control.”

  Once again, Mina wasn’t sure what to think of Doyle. He looked human and most of the time acted like one, but his knowledge went far beyond anything she’d ever experienced. She didn’t understand half of what he’d just said, about dark matter and dark energy. The terms had barely existed in her world before now. And yet she couldn’t ask him to explain, not right now. If he explained, he would tip from being a human who knew about aliens to an alien who looked like a human. And she wasn’t ready for that shift just yet.

  “You’re quiet,” he remarked. “What are you thinking?” He still held her hand.

  Mina smiled. “I don’t think you’ve ever asked me that before.”

  “Is that a rebuke? Because you’ve never had any trouble voicing your opinion. I don’t usually need to ask.”

  Mina playfully slapped his hand away. “I had to voice it somehow, didn’t I? Otherwise you’d just run all over me most of the time.” She tried to stifle a yawn.

  “You better get some sleep.”

  “Quit ordering me around.” But Mina leaned her head on Doyle’s shoulder, and he put his arm around her. She relaxed into him. She really was very angry. And very tired. “What are you going to do?” she asked through the fog.

  “Keep watch.”

  “How long can you go without sleep?”

  “About two weeks without problems, but I try to sleep whenever possible. Never know when I’ll get the next opportunity.”

  “I thought you were going to tell me you didn’t need sleep at all,” she mumbled into
his shirt. “Sorry I’m slowing you down.”

  Doyle tightened his grip on her. “It has advantages.”

  ***

  Overnight, Calla examined and re-examined every body. All the hybrids had died violently. None of them gave a clue about the attacker. Five hybrids had been killed with a knife. Three had died of multiple gunshot wounds. And one had fallen to the side, his neck crushed.

  An abundance of weapons lay strewn about the site. Many of the magazines had been emptied. Whoever had attacked them could not have escaped unscathed. The remains of a small fire pit had been trampled. Calla thought a moment. If the attackers had been injured, perhaps they had succumbed to their injuries nearby.

  She walked around the bluff, then climbed up to the top to look over. Dense branches hung over the edge. Calla moved them aside, searching all along the top. At a site directly above the bodies, lower branches had been lopped off with an axe, then woven into the branches above—a make-shift shelter. Someone had camped here. And no one would have camped on the edge of the bluff with those bodies decaying below. So the camp had been rigged before the hybrids’ deaths. Maybe their attackers had watched the hybrids from above before springing on them unaware. But Calla could not find a scent or other evidence of who might have slept there. The trail had gone cold.

  ***

  “Hey—wake up.”

  At first, Mina thought she was traveling with Doyle, who used to shake her roughly out of sleep, ready to run from whatever danger he’d detected that day. Then she woke more fully. Doyle was shaking her. He wasn’t being too gentle now, either.

  “It’s still dark,” she said.

  “Not for long. We’re almost there. We took a shortcut last night.”

  “I bet we did.” She felt every mile of it in her body. Mina lay on her side, a light blanket folded around her like a sleeping bag. Her eyes still heavy with sleep, she opened her eyes to see Doyle’s outline above her. The sky through the trees was slightly gray instead of black. She sat up, stretching, and Doyle handed her a bottle of water. Mina slowly turned the cap.

  “Quit stalling,” he said. “Let’s go.” Whether he wanted to annoy her or not, he was doing a good job of it. She sighed and rose, thankful she didn’t have a bag to carry. Doyle rolled the blanket and stuffed it in his pack.

  Despite what he said about being almost there, the hike to the bunker took all morning. “The entrance is up there,” he said at the foot of another mountain. Clouds had drifted in, and the air smelled of rain. The slope ahead of them was steep, its dark leafy branches creating a cool shade in the summer heat.

  “Why’d we have to hike in?” asked Mina as they made their way up. “Why couldn’t you have picked me up in the Nomad?”

  “I’m not a valet service.”

  “No, seriously.”

  Doyle frowned. “Because Calla would know a human had been on the ship.”

  “Calla? How?”

  “She’d smell you.”

  Mina sniffed her own shirt and winked at him. “I just bathed last week.”

  “The day of the attack, Calla was on board the Nomad within hours of you leaving it, and I had to do some quick damage control.”

  “I guess you take all your women up for a ride in the spaceship.”

  Catching her tone, Doyle glanced at Mina and smiled. “Just the important ones.”

  “What have you been doing? And why is Calla on the Nomad?”

  Doyle led her to a stand of young pines growing closely together, blocking the daylight. But Mina wasn’t just looking into shade. A dark doorway opened into the mountain. She walked through the trees and peered inside where little light reached in. “This doesn’t look like the other bunker you took me to.”

  “No. It’s completely different. No door. No lights.”

  “And stairs.” Metal glimmered dully from the floor of the tunnel. Doyle entered first with Mina following closely behind. Her boots clanged loudly on the staircase, contrasting with Doyle’s silent footfalls.

  “Shh,” he said. She tried to soften her steps, but the noise seemed very loud in the unnatural quiet of the tunnel. They rounded a turn and plunged into complete darkness.

  “I can’t see.”

  “Hold onto my shoulder.”

  The air was cooler and drier than it had been outside. Mina’s breath echoed off the walls. And still they descended. She envied Doyle’s extraordinary night vision. Then the metal stairs ended, and they stood on stone.

  “I can’t see anything. How’s this going to work?” asked Mina. She stood still, afraid of what was—or wasn’t—around her.

  “Hang on a minute.” She heard Doyle fiddling with his pack and then a click. A brilliant white light blinded her.

  “A flashlight? Why didn’t you use it last night?”

  “Because nothing screams come and get me like a flashlight shining through the trees.”

  “I would have thought a great hybrid such as yourself would’ve had more sophisticated technology than a mere flashlight.”

  Doyle flicked the beam into her eyes. “I’m lucky I found this one on the Nomad. The Condarri don’t need light like humans. Neither do hybrids.” He handed the light to her; she was the one who needed it after all.

  “So you planned on bringing me here.”

  “I would’ve come back sooner.”

  “I’m still angry.”

  “Yes.”

  Mina shone the light around, getting her bearings. They stood in some sort of small chamber with the stairs to their left. Then Mina saw the adarria cut into the stone. She walked over to get a closer look. When she put her finger into them, she braced herself for the rush of images that came when she touched Doyle. When nothing happened, she looked at him. “These are just like the ones on the Glyphs, aren’t they?”

  Doyle ran his own hand over the markings, touching them. Caressing them, Mina thought. When he moved his hand, they changed. Mina gasped softly as the adarria responded to him and the stone shifted before her eyes. A flash of yellow light burst out and then disappeared. Mina took a step back and trained the light on Doyle.

  “Ready to see more?” he asked.

  A huge archway cut into the wall led to an empty blackness beyond. A cool breeze swept across Mina’s face as she and Doyle stepped through the doorway. Doyle pivoted beside her, looking around. The flashlight revealed massive stone walls curving off to the left and the right. The far side of the room was barely visible, but it looked like stone as well. Then Mina looked up.

  “That’s strange,” she whispered. “The light won’t show the ceiling.”

  Doyle stopped turning and said, “Turn off the light.” His voice was strange, almost strangled. He took Mina's hand and led her farther into the room. When they stopped, he placed her hand on his chest.

  At first, Mina only saw him. Then she switched off the light, and the vision appeared, clearer than ever before. The first thing that struck her was the room had become shades of deep blue and purple instead of black, and she could see the curved wall all the way around to the far side. The room was enormous.

  Doyle looked up. Where the ceiling should have been, millions of stars swirled in space. Mina dropped the flashlight. It clanged down on the stone floor, forgotten. She broke contact and backed away from Doyle, looking up into the darkness with her own eyes.

  “Did you know this was here?” she asked, still trying to imagine what was above.

  “Not until now. I tried getting in here a few days ago, but Calla followed me, so I slipped out.”

  Anxious to see it again, Mina closed the distance between them and put both hands on Doyle’s chest to make contact with his adarre. This time, instead of seeing the galaxy above, Mina saw herself—Doyle was looking at her. She shifted, and he put his hands on her waist and refocused.

  Then they were floating in space with their feet glued to the ground. The center of the galaxy was bright white, blinding. Tendrils of stars reached out across the darkness, not flat like a pict
ure, but stretched down inside the silo. Uncountable stars. Almost close enough to touch.

  Mina reached one hand above her head. “How?” she whispered. “How can this be real? Is it real? What is it?” Despite her rush of questions, Mina stood completely still, wishing to gaze up at the stars forever. Also, she didn’t mind that Doyle held her close. For a moment, she imagined boarding the Nomad with him and leaving Earth to travel through the stars. He’d said something like that the first night she’d spent on the Nomad. Mentioned flying across the galaxy. She hadn’t taken him seriously. But now . . . “Doyle?”

  “It’s Condar.”

  “Condar is a galaxy?”

  “No, it’s a constellation, a system of stars in this galaxy. Look.” Doyle concentrated harder. She scanned the spinning mass and saw it residing in the lower right quadrant. The constellation looked like a crooked V—seven stars sliding off to the right like slender tree branches waving in a galactic wind.

  Doyle let go and darkness enveloped Mina. “Wait a minute,” he said. He looked for something in his pack. Then a rough strike, a flare lit, and red light blotted out everything else around them.

  “What?”

  “An experiment.” Doyle walked farther into the silo until the only thing Mina could see was the sputtering flare. It sailed into the air, cast by uncanny strength toward the ceiling. The glowing flame scattered sparks as it hit something and fell apart, the pieces arcing back to the floor to die out.

  “That answers your questions,” he said. “It’s not real. Or at least, it’s sealed off.”

  “What, like a door?” Mina shivered.

  Doyle walked back to her. “I don’t know yet. This isn’t Condarri technology. This is something else.” He kept his voice low, but Mina detected a note of concern in it.

  “But the symbols. Those are Condarri, right?”

  “Yes, but there are no adarria here in the chamber.”

  “Can you read them?”

  “They aren’t for reading specifically. They’re for communicating.”

  “What do they say?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Doyle found her flashlight and put it in her hand.

  Mina didn’t want to turn it on just yet; the image of the constellation still burned in her mind. “Then how does it work?”