Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3)

by Dan Rix

  She reached for the tiny vial hanging from her neck and rolled it between her fingers, lost in thought.

  “A naked singularity . . .” The vial distracted me and I trailed off. “What’s in that thing?”

  She dropped it, startled. “Nothing.” She tucked it out of view. “Yeah, so according to string theory calculations, a naked singularity—if it was ever found to exist—would have fluid-like properties, it would transmit light instantly from one side to the other, rendering anything in between invisible, and it would form the mouth of a wormhole to another location in space.”

  “You mean like dark matter?” I said.

  “Exactly like dark matter. Whenever we put on dark matter, Leona, we were literally stepping inside a naked singularity. We were stepping right into a wormhole . . . and if we stayed in it long enough, it took us here.” Again, she cracked the blinds and stared up at the stars, and the furrow in her brows deepened.

  “What’s up there?” I said. “Why do you keep looking up there?”

  Gaze fixed on the night sky, she clenched her jaw and swallowed. “Leona, can I ask you a favor?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Can I borrow your telescope?”

  Chapter 14

  “Well, there’s the star Deneb . . .” Sarah muttered, squinting into the telescope which she had erected at the floor to ceiling window in the dim master bedroom. “That’s something familiar, at least. But where’s the rest of the constellation?”

  “Can I see? Can I see?” I said, bouncing on my toes.

  “Where the hell is the rest of Cygnus?” she said, ignoring me. “Or the other constellations? I’m not finding anything.”

  “I can find the Big Dipper for you,” I offered.

  “Shh,” she said.

  “Is there a moon here?” I asked. “How come I haven’t seen the moon once?”

  “What the hell is this?” she whispered, distracted.

  “Come on, just let me look. You’ve been hogging it.”

  “No, wait, wait . . . there’s Gamma Cygni! Gotcha. Now where’s Albireo? Nowhere.” She backed away, scratching her head. “Where are we?”

  I pounced on the telescope.

  She had it focused on a hazy dusting of stars, dominated by a bright yellow one at its center. I strained to make it out. “Is that a UFO?”

  “That’s Gamma Cygni, the second-brightest star in the constellation Cygnus.”

  “Where’s the Big Dipper?”

  “It’s called Ursa Major,” said Sarah, “and it’s not up there. Orion’s not up there, Canis Major’s not up there, Gemini’s not up there. None of the constellations are up there.”

  “So . . . where are they?”

  “The real question is where are we?” Under the lantern, she consulted the short list of celestial objects she had found. “So we’ve got the Large Magellenic Cloud, we’ve got the Andromeda Galaxy, we’ve got Deneb, which is supposed to be in the constellation Cygnus, but I’ve got no idea where Epsilon Cygni, Albireo, or the others are.” She studied her notes. “The good news is we’re still in the Milky Way, still in our galaxy. Where in our galaxy, I have no idea. Maybe somewhere out on the Perseus Arm, but that’s just a guess. I don’t recognize anything nearby.”

  “Wait.” I blinked. “You mean we’re actually somewhere real? This isn’t just a weird, parallel version of Earth that’s in an alternate reality or something? We’re actually just way out in space?”

  “Well, we have to be somewhere in the known universe, don’t we?”

  “How far are we from Earth?” I asked, feeling hopeful. “From the real Earth?” If it was just distance that separated us from home, then suddenly it didn’t seem so bad. A distance, we could cross. Earth might even send help. Or we could build a spaceship—

  “Maybe ten thousand light years,” she said. “Again, that’s just a guess.”

  Her words finally registered. “Ten thousand light years?”

  “It’s just a guess.”

  “But that’s . . . that’s . . .”

  “Far,” she finished for me. “Incomprehensibly far. So far that we might as well be in a different universe. So far it doesn’t even matter.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “So the good news in we’re at least in the same galaxy as Earth. But the bad news is it’s really far away.”

  “I haven’t given you the bad news yet.”

  I cringed. “Please don’t say that.”

  “You want to hear the bad news or not?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe.”

  “The bad news is that patch of sky right there.” She pulled back the blinds and pointed, and I squeezed in next to her to look. Her finger ended low on the horizon, near a strange swirl of stars. “I noticed that patch a while ago. It was only just now I realized what it was, when we were outside talking about this stuff.”

  It was that smudge I’d noticed the first night.

  “Here, I’ll bring it up on the telescope again.” She withdrew to adjust the tripod, aiming the device at the swirl. “Now look at it through the eyepiece.”

  I peeled my eyes off the anomaly, pulled my hair back, and looked into the telescope. The smudge swam into view, magnified a hundred times.

  At first, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at.

  “When you realize what that is, everything makes a lot more sense,” Sarah said grimly.

  Suddenly, the stars snapped into focus.

  In that one spot, the pricks of light smeared together into a spiral, as if a giant fist had taken the night sky and scrunched it together, dragging everything along with it.

  “That’s an effect known as gravitational lensing,” said Sarah. “It happens when something massive and invisible passes between you and a distant source of light, bending it like a lens. That we can see the effect with the naked eye means it is both very heavy, and very close. That’s the bad news.”

  I pulled away from the telescope and found her face in the darkness. “Why is that bad news? What does that mean?”

  “It means,” she said, “that this planet is orbiting around a black hole.”

  Chapter 15

  “Shh!” Sarah pressed her fingers to her lips and waved her hand for me to quit dismantling the tripod.

  I froze, and the ruckus of clinks went silent.

  Her gaze darted around the room.

  “What?” I whispered.

  She shook her head, hushing me again. I listened too, straining to hear past the silence. I’d only just begun to process what it meant to be in orbit around a black hole. Would we fall in and be crushed by the gravity? I shuddered at the thought.

  Slowly, Sarah lowered her finger. “Never mind. I just . . . I thought I heard something.”

  “What? Where?”

  “It was nothing. Let’s just get down to the shelter.”

  “Okay.” I finished packing up the telescope, quieter this time.

  Together, we tiptoed to the door and slunk down the stairs to the first floor, the stairs squeaking under our feet. The lantern flung our shadows across the ceiling.

  Sarah threw out an arm, halting me at the bottom step. The tripod legs clanged into the wall.

  “Shh,” she hissed, clicking off the lantern.

  “What is it?”

  She threw back a glare and jabbed her finger to her lips.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered.

  She leaned back and whispered in my ear, “I think . . . there’s something . . . in the house.”

  A terrified tremor shot through my heart. “What do we do?” I mouthed.

  “Follow me,” she said. “To the shelter. Quickly.” She spun and darted into the foyer, leaving me choking on fear. Wait! I ran after
her, adrenaline buzzing in my ears.

  We cut through the dining room into the kitchen, swimming in near pitch black, then slunk down the stairs to the subterranean level. Groping along walls, we crept down the corridor. A dim rectangle loomed ahead of us, the shelter—

  A small, humanoid figure stood in the rectangle.

  My heart clawed into my throat. “Sarah!” I squeaked, grabbing her arm. She hadn’t seen it. “Sarah,” I wheezed, too terrified to speak, “look . . .”

  She froze, limbs tensed.

  Sarah fumbled with the lantern and clicked it on again. Blinding light filled the corridor, but if anything, the tiny humanoid figure became harder to see, its limbs scarcely blurs, its torso only vague lumps.

  Its fuzzy head held no features, yet I got the sense it was staring at us.

  Watching us.

  A petrifying chill crawled down my spine. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

  Beyond the open blast door glinted the food pallets, the jugs of water, the propane tank. All our supplies. Our beds.

  The creature floated through the blast door into our shelter.

  “No . . . NO!” Sarah screamed, lunging forward. “Don’t let it go in there!”

  Her yells startled me into action, and I ran after her, pulled ahead, somehow knowing I had to beat the creature inside—

  The blast door slammed shut in my face, and my body crunched into the steel, Sarah smashed into my back.

  Beyond thinking, I wrestled the door open again and darted inside—only to trip on the bottom riser of a concrete staircase, scraping my palms. A rectangle of starry sky floated at the top, which I already knew led to the backyard.

  This was the rear exit out of the bomb shelter.

  I turned and looked behind me, pulse drumming in my ears. Sarah stood in the entrance, face ashen.

  Where was the shelter?

  The entrance led straight to the exit, no shelter in between.

  I looked around again. “Where’d it go?”

  “It’s gone,” Sarah said softly.

  “What do you mean, gone?” I repeated.

  “That was everything,” she said. “All our food, all our water. That was everything we had.”

  “No, it can’t just be gone,” I said, an ache forming deep in my throat. “It can’t just be gone. There was a whole room here, all our stuff, my cell phone . . . her diary—” I choked on the words. “It can’t just be gone.”

  But it was gone.

  Five seconds ago, the first blast door had opened into a cavernous chamber filled with a year’s worth of supplies. The second blast door, at the back of the chamber, had led out into the backyard.

  Now the first blast door and the second blast door had become the same door. The entire room in between—along with all our food and water—was gone.

  At the top of the stairs, the blurry humanoid shape shifted against the stars and moved out of view.

  “It’s still here,” I whispered, needles pricking my back. “It’s right there, I can just see it. It’s leaving . . .”

  “Get back inside,” said Sarah.

  “We could follow it,” I said, my heart thudding at the prospect. “We could see where it goes . . . try to get our stuff back.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “It can’t just erase our food like that,” I growled.

  “Leona, get back inside before it erases you too,” she said.

  “No, I’m following it,” I announced, and before I could change my mind, I charged up the stairs into starlight.

  It had vanished.

  Nothing moved in the backyard but the shadow of a tree branch swaying gently in the wind. Except there was no wind.

  As I strained to make sense of the movement, something clicked in my brain and the creepy human shape materialized against the backdrop of grass, slithering away from me.

  It drifted around the edge of the building, heading toward the street.

  “Leona!” Sarah hissed behind me.

  I ignored her, darted to the side of the house and crouched behind a bush, then darted out to the next in line, keeping out of sight.

  My lungs bristled with electric adrenaline. The creature slipped out of view, and I sprinted around the corner in hot pursuit and flattened myself against the wood paneling.

  Against the pale street, its smoky silhouette stood out more clearly, and I edged along the side yard after it.

  It began walking down the road, limbs blurring in and out of focus. Where was it going?

  Skirting along the neighbor’s hedge, I kept it in my sights, my pulse getting louder and louder. As I watched, the creature drifted toward the opposite curb and slithered into a storm drain.

  I blinked at the empty street.

  It goes into the sewers.

  “No, you’re not following it down there,” Sarah breathed in my ear, nearly making me jump out of my skin. She’d appeared right next to me. “We need to get back inside. Next time, you need to listen to me.”

  “What is that thing?” I asked, peeling my eyes off the storm drain and letting out a shiver.

  “It’s been following me since I got here,” she said, turning back to Major Connor’s house. “It’s been trying to eat my soul so it can take over my body on Earth.”

  “All I know is it’s some kind of life form.” Hands shaking, Sarah sealed the remaining blast door behind us—fat lot of good it had done us last time—and leaned her forehead against it. “Meaning it’s alive . . . at least, I think it’s alive. I have no idea what that thing is.”

  “Is that . . . was that the voice?” I said quietly, chilled by her words. “The thing that talks to us in our heads . . . was that it? That little shadow person, that was dark matter?”

  “It goes by the name of Dark.”

  “What?”

  “The voice . . . the being that brought us here . . . it calls itself Dark. And that shadow thing we just saw, it’s more like a part of it, like a limb, or a puppet. Or a pet. I don’t really know. When you have a naked singularity—dark matter—it’s nonlocal, it doesn’t exist in a single place. It’s everywhere at once and nowhere at once. It’s weird.”

  “Wait, so there’s Dark—the voice—and then there’s dark matter—the invisible stuff. And they’re the same thing, right? I mean, any time you have dark matter, you have the voice too, right?”

  Gently, Sarah banged her head against the blast door. “If my understanding is correct, dark matter should be nothing more than a naturally occurring naked singularity—a substance of infinite density that bends the laws of physics a little. In and of itself, there’s nothing inherently conscious or living about it, just like there’s nothing inherently conscious or living about the organic molecules that make up our brains. Yet, we are conscious. Likewise, dark matter is just a medium. It’s not living. But there’s something living in it.”

  “And it wants to eat our souls,” I breathed.

  She nodded, banging the door again. “It brought us here to feed. It’s like a spider. Once it snares its prey, it wraps us in silk and digests us from the inside out.”

  “That’s why it targeted me and Ashley first,” I said, piecing together what I already knew. “Because we were the ones it could manipulate, our souls were the most vulnerable.”

  “I think it’s weak right now,” said Sarah. “But as it feeds, it’s getting stronger. It’s been wearing me down, trying to get to me. It can’t yet, but . . . the water. It’s turning the water. Oh God.” She rubbed her temple. “ The food, the water, everything here, I get it now, it’s all digestive enzymes . . . meant to digest us, make us easier to eat. This whole planet is a giant digestive system.”

  I stared at her. “So let’s get out of here. Let’s go. Let’s just leave.�
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  “We’re trying, Leona. We’re trying.”

  “No, now. Right now. We have to leave right now.”

  She glanced up at me, eyes red. “Where are we going to go, huh? There’s nothing else out there. Just darkness, just fake food, just that thing.”

  “Wait—dark matter, you said it’s not conscious itself, it’s just a medium, like it’s the ocean, and whatever’s living in it is just a fish, right?” I snapped my fingers, suddenly breathless. “Which means we could use it too, right? We could be another fish . . . we could make our own wormhole!”

  “I do not possess the technology to harness a naked singularity,” she said.

  “You don’t need technology,” I said. “You just put it on, and you end up right back on Earth.”

  She shook her head. “I tried that, Leona. I told you. It just spits you right back out here. You need an opening on the other end.”

  “So how do we make an opening on the other end?”

  “You need a volume of dark matter large enough for a person to fit through, otherwise it’s a dead end and it spits you right back here. But that’s the brilliance of it. On Earth when you put the stuff on, it literally molded to your skin and created a hole in spacetime sized perfectly for your body. You fell through that hole and ended up here, and then what happened? That dark matter you were wearing shriveled back into a little ball, resealing the hole. It’s like a monkey trap. We only ever used a drop of it. You had it in a contact lens case. Ashley had it in a nail polish bottle. I had it in a tiny vial. There was never enough for a return trip. From this side, it’s like trying to squeeze yourself through a pinhole.”