by James Maxey
"Just how much more powerful can she get?" asked Shay.
"You wouldn't ask that if you'd fought the goddess the first time. However, your idea is worthy. We'll go to the Free City."
"The Free City? Why?"
"That's where I buried Jandra's genie. The Free City has been abandoned in the aftermath of the atrocities that took place there. No human or dragon would want to call that cursed place home. I'd planned to keep the genie there until I could locate some force powerful enough to destroy it."
"After we get the genie, how can we find Jandra?" Shay asked.
Hex sat down. His legs were still weak. The dancing lights before his eyes were fading, at least. "We should find Bitterwood. He killed Jazz last time. She may seek revenge. More importantly, Bitterwood is now the guardian of Zeeky, a girl who possessed a power that the goddess greatly desired."
"What power?"
"I'll tell you what I understand, though when Jandra explained it to me I failed to grasp much of it. You witnessed the rainbow Jazz escaped through?"
"Yes. I've never seen anything like it."
"Beneath our own reality, there's a larger reality known as underspace. The rainbow gates let you slip through underspace to travel instantly to any other part of our own world. Apparently it's possible to become trapped in underspace. If you linger outside our reality, you gain the ability to see all points of space and time. You become omniscient."
"What does that have to do with Zeeky? She's smart for her age, but hardly omniscient."
"Jazz trapped Zeeky's family inside underspace, sealed inside a crystal ball. The goddess can't communicate with them, but, somehow, Zeeky can. From what Jandra told me, Jazz wanted to study Zeeky to discover what quirk of her brain gave her this ability."
Shay stood up. He walked over and picked up the flaming sword. "It sounds as if we have a plan. Recover the genie. Find Bitterwood. Guard Zeeky and hope the goddess still wants her."
He held up the sword, looking mournfully at the dancing flames. "This blade cut her. If I'd been a better fighter, she might not have escaped."
"Let me carry the sword. I trained extensively in my youth. When we find Bitterwood, we'll let him carry the blade."
Shay frowned. "How do I know you won't just fly off and bury this?"
Hex sighed. "I've done nothing to earn your trust. Keep the blade. Let us hope your mistrust doesn't doom Jandra."
"Let's hope your mistrust of Jandra, which led you to take her genie, doesn't doom us all," said Shay.
"We can argue later. We should leave. We have a long journey from this place back to the surface."
"Maybe not," said Shay. "We found a map at the barracks. It showed a shorter route out of here. We should stop and get it. There were other supplies that also would be useful."
"Lead on," said Hex.
Shay walked toward the fallen earth-dragon. The coat Jandra had discarded lay nearby. He knelt and wrapped the small body within it.
"I… I didn't like Lizard," he said. He shook his head slowly. "I thought Jandra was taking a risk in adopting him." He cradled the bundle to his chest as he stood. "When we make it back to the surface, I hope you don't mind if I pause for a while to bury him. He deserves better than to rot away down here in this sunless kingdom. I'd like to find a tranquil valley, or a sun-drenched mountain top. Some place… some place that…"
"Of course," said Hex. He wanted to ask more about Jandra's adoption of a dragon, but held his tongue. In truth, he wasn't surprised. Jandra had befriended Hex almost from the moment they'd met. She'd been, perhaps, the most trusting, open-minded individual he'd ever known. The burden of betraying her still weighed heavily on his soul.
Could all of this have been avoided if he'd extended her the same faith and trust she'd shown him?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
STRUGGLE AGAINST MONSTERS
JAZZ FELL FROM nowhere, face-down onto the white sands of a sun-washed beach. She rolled to her side, squinting as she looked around; the beach sparkled like powdered diamonds. She closed her eyes, letting the bright sunlight sink into her silver shell. The tiny machines that coated her hummed with pleasure as they ate up the free energy. All around her, the air buzzed with nanites not guided by her genie. She exhaled a thin swarm of machines, commanding them to acts of piracy. Given time, she could manufacture more nanites; right now, here in Atlantis, it was simply more expedient to steal them.
The ghost of Jandra's personality shouted somewhere in the back of her mind, but as the power levels of her genie increased, the faint remnant grew quieter. Jazz sat up, wincing from her wounds. The dragon had given her quite the workout. She ran her silvery fingers along the three-inch gash he'd torn in her belly, knitting the wound shut. She turned her attention to her shoulder. The heat of the sword had carbonized much of the tissue. It wasn't going to be as easy a fix. She set her nanites to work on it, then flowed the silver shell of her genie back over the wound to prevent contamination.
Satisfied that her new body was no longer in peril, she paused to look around. She was on the western shore of Atlantis. The sun hung over the waves. In another hour or two it would be night. The ocean lapping the shore was breathtaking, a bright shade of blue that would have looked perfect on the wings of a tropical butterfly. When all this was over, she'd have to whip up a batch of butterflies. She'd design them as flesh eaters the size of small eagles, but they'd still be beautiful. The required DNA chains uncoiled in her mind's eye.
Jazz stood up, wiping the sand from her silvery butt. She craned her neck to see as much of her new body as she could. She looked good in chrome, better than she would have imagined. Despite her high-tech talents, Jazz had always possessed simple, down-to-earth tastes in fashion-blue jeans, cotton blouses, hemp sandals. Her vegetarianism had extended to eschewing leather, but she had to admit that Jandra's calf-high black boots looked good against the mirror-smoothness of her legs. The fact that they were scuffed and worn provided a pleasing contrast to the machined perfection of the rest of her. The rationale for her longstanding vegetarian ethics rested on shaky ground, anyway. She was honest enough to admit she'd long ago lost the moral high ground when it came to killing the creatures who shared the planet with her. Jandra had eaten meat her whole life. Her brain brimmed with cells programmed to enjoy the taste of fish. Perhaps it was time to try sushi.
Jazz looked up and down the beach. Not a sushi vendor in sight. In fact, the beach was empty. Six billion people lived in Atlantis, and not one could be bothered to come down to the beach on this perfect day. Of course, this beach was perfect every day. That had always been the fatal flaw of the city. After a thousand years of paradise, even the most innocent souls grew bored.
She looked up at the towers behind her. The tallest spires stretched into the blue sky, vanishing in haze, their peaks somewhere beyond the edges of the atmosphere. She saw a shadow of movement race along the shell-pink surface of one of the towers, miles up. She had the nanites in her retinas reprocess the photons striking them and the image sharpened. It was a man, falling, flapping his arms like they were wings. He looked as if he was laughing. Quickly, Jazz spotted another man, then a woman, all falling on parallel paths. Now that she was aware of them, she quickly spotted a hundred more. Some were laughing like the first man she spotted, but others were weeping, and still others looked as if they were screaming in terror. One by one the bodies vanished behind the screen of the lower towers surrounding the spires. If anyone was walking below, Jazz hoped they were carrying heavy-duty umbrellas.
"If your friends jumped off a building, would you?" she asked out loud, remembering the question her father had put to her over ten centuries earlier. She shook her head in disgust. It was time to get to work. She said, "Find Cassie."
Her genie responded instantly, hacking the datastream that flowed along the beach like an invisible river. In Atlantis, every cubic centimeter of air was permeated with nanites, waiting to serve the inhabitants. Her eyes zoomed back up the tallest towe
r, the Bethlehem Spire. A bright green circle of light flashed around a window too far away to be anything more than a speck, even with the fine tuning of the nanites. Still, she had the coordinates, which was all she really needed.
She waited a while longer, stealing more of the microscopic machines, turning in the ever-dimming sun to charge them to their fullest. Soon, her ribs felt better, with no evidence at all that she'd been a sun-dragon's chew toy. Jazz flexed the fingers of her left hand. They were fully under her control now that she'd fortified the nanites clinging to Jandra's nervous system. Her shoulder tingled as the nanites busily worked on cutting away the charred tissue they found there. On the whole, she felt back in control, not only of Jandra's body, but of everything.
She knew what she had to do to make sure she'd never lose control again.
Humming "Somewhere over the Rainbow," she opened an underspace gate before her.
A YOUNG WOMAN with golden skin looked up as Jazz stepped from the rainbow. The woman had glossy black hair that seemed to bubble up from her scalp like a fountain and flow down her neck and back in liquid smoothness. The woman frowned.
Jazz smiled, until she felt movement beneath her feet. She looked down. The white sand from the beach falling from Jazz's boots were causing tiny mouths to open in the onyx floor, swallowing the grains, leaving the smooth black tile immaculate.
The entire room possessed the same sterile cleanliness. It was as big as a museum gallery, yet barely furnished-its walls were clear panes of glass, free of any curtains or blinds. The golden woman sat at a black table, or at least table top. The perfectly square polished wood hovered, unsupported by legs. A pearl-white cup and saucer sat before the golden woman, full of fluid as dark as the woman's hair. Jazz wondered why the woman was drinking ink. A memory stirred within her.
"Is that… is that… coffee?" Jazz spoke the last word with in a reverential tone.
The woman's golden eyebrows scrunched together above diamond eyes. Her lips parted to reveal pearl teeth.
"Do I know you?" she asked.
Jazz walked across the floor, trying not to be distracted by the mouths gobbling up sand that fell with each step. The golden woman held her ground as Jazz approached until they were practically touching. Jazz grabbed the cup and sniffed it. The toasted, nutty odor of coffee filled her nostrils.
"Sweet merciful Jesus, I haven't drunk coffee in seven hundred years," she said.
She took a sip. Her lips puckered at the bitterness. The receptors in Jandra's tongue weren't mapped to the parts off her brain that would find the taste pleasant. She set her nanites to work fixing that. For now, there was a mildly pleasant surge of endorphins as the hot liquid scalded her tongue.
"Jazz?" the golden woman asked.
"How'd you guess?"
"One of your identifying traits is taking things that belong to me."
"Ah, Cassie," said Jazz. "Do we really have to launch straight into the old arguments?"
Cassie crossed her arms. Her chair drifted backwards, putting some space between her and her sister. A trickle of the liquid hair ran down the crease in her forehead, over her eyebrow, and down the edges of her nose. She blew it away and the liquid responded as if it was normal hair, falling to the outer edge of her cheek. She said, "I thought you died in that explosion on Mars."
"That's what I wanted you to think," said Jazz. She put the cup down and walked toward the window. Her chrome-plated skin was faintly reflected in the glass. She smiled as she realized how youthful her body looked. Her old body had been more or less frozen in development around the age of forty. Unlike the Atlanteans, she'd never had any particular fetish for looking as if she were barely out of puberty. She'd been comfortable with her body, with its stray hairs and generous curves and the familiar sags and wrinkles. It had looked, and felt, lived in. Still, there was something about this fresh, clean body that made her spirit shiver. It was the same artistic rush she felt when she picked up a sheet of fresh white paper.
Outside the window, the distant horizon curved in a perfect arc. They were on the threshold of space. The blue-gray ocean stretched out beneath them. At the edge of the horizon, the color changed as the ocean met land. She was looking at the eastern seaboard of what had once been the United States. These shores had once been studded with cities; now, it was a wild place, the abode of dragons. It was the crowning achievement of a long life.
Jazz leapt backwards as a man flashed past the window. He was naked, with bright red skin crisscrossed with black zebra stripes. He looked as if he was giggling as he plummeted toward the earth, many miles below.
"Jesus," said Jazz. "He scared the shit out of me. Is there a rash of suicides in Atlantis?"
"Don't be absurd," said Cassie, rising to stand beside Jazz at the window. Cassie was wearing a simple slip of sheer black lace that clung to her almost flat chest and barely noticeable hips. Save for Cassie's unnatural height-she was easily a foot taller than Jazz now-she looked no older than twelve. "The city won't let anyone die. The bodies of the jumpers will be destroyed when they hit the ground, but they'll awaken instantly in a backup copy. The essential part of a person is nothing but information, and information is immortal."
"Ah, yes," said Jazz. "You Atlanteans change bodies more frequently than I change my hairstyle. Speaking of which, the last four times I've seen you, you've been female. You get that boy phase out of your system?"
Cassie shrugged. "The female body has… aesthetic advantages. It supports a broader palette of colors. The male body has never looked right to me in the brighter shades."
As if to prove her point, as second man fell past the window. He was dressed like a rodeo cowboy in a fringed leather vest and chaps, but had neon pink skin that looked dumb on him. A few seconds after he flashed by, his hat dropped past.
"It's like bungee jumping without the bungee," said Jazz, tracking the hat down as far as she could.
"They say it's the ultimate adrenaline rush. If you've gotten tired of a body and don't intend to use it again, why not dispose of it in style? It's less boring than going to sleep and waking up new."
Jazz shook her head. "This is what's so wrong about Atlantis. You've let the city remove all pain and fear and worry. You've devolved into beings so jaded you have to throw yourselves off buildings to get ten minutes of feeling alive. You've been given the gift of immortality, and except for the moderately ambitious folks who went off to new worlds, you've all turned into bored teenagers looking for the next distraction."
Cassie shrugged. Her hair flowed into a new trickle along her neck. "What great goals are left? There's no hunger. There's no death. There's no fear, or want, or sorrow. Every great challenge of mankind has been solved. How are we supposed to spend our days? There are no more battles to fight."
A leopard-skinned woman in a bathing suit darted past the window, her arms pointed before her in an arrow, her feet held in perfect balance. If they still held the Olympics, this would be a 10. But, of course, any dive-all dives-could be a ten. The muscle memory for doing anything perfectly could simply be borrowed from the Atlantean datastream. Atlanteans could know everything while literally learning nothing.
Cassie pressed her forehead to the window as she looked at the world far below. She sighed. "After the struggle's over, all that's left is entertainment."
Jazz nodded. She felt a flickering pulse of sympathy for Cassie. She thought of the empty beach below. Her sister was fated to eternity in paradise with the promise-or curse-of a billion years more of the same. The rebellious, fire-bombing ecoterrorist who'd once followed in Jazz's footsteps was long gone. How do you rebel against heaven?
As quickly as the sympathy welled up, it ebbed back. Jazz remembered the real reason for her visit.
"If you thought I was dead, why did you send people to kill me?"
Cassie raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"
"Don't act innocent. I'm wearing the body of a girl named Jandra. She had an Atlantean genie and a body full of nanite enha
ncements. She got them from a sky-dragon named Vendevorex. I don't think Vendevorex invented the technology on his own."
Cassie smiled. "Oh! Vendevorex. Wow. I haven't thought about him in years. How is he?"
"Jandra remembers him dying," said Jazz. "Of course, we both know that could be a false memory. Jandra doesn't have any memories of meeting you, but that could have been edited as well."
Cassie shook her head as she looked out toward the darkness of space that hung over the horizon. "I don't have a clue who Jandra is."
"But you know Vendevorex. How did he get the genie?"
"I gave it to him. I'm part of a debate committee to decide whether or not the dragon species should be regarded as hazardous bio-engineering waste and removed from the ecosystem."
"Atlanteans shouldn't care about that," said Jazz. "You shouldn't be able to care about that, because the city can't care about it."
"I know," said Cassie. "You hacked the city to keep Atlantean technology from spreading. You made the most powerful, benevolent force ever seen on this world turn a blind eye on the continents so they could go feral. But, while the Atlantean master intelligence doesn't care about what goes on beyond these shores, I still do, and so do some others. You didn't hack our memories, Jazz. Some of the people here were involved in creating the dragons. They're concerned about their spread. They were created as novelties. No one anticipated they'd become the dominant sentient species on the North American mainland."
Jazz leaned against the glass wall. "Unintended consequences are what make life interesting. But what does this have to do with Vendevorex?"
"Vendevorex was one of a handful of dragons the committee captured for study. Usually we keep them in laboratory settings, but Vendevorex was clever enough to escape. He eluded capture for three days, this on an island where even the air is sentient. I finally tracked him down. He was frightened, but also defiant. His fighting spirit stirred something inside me. He reminded me of the person I once was."
