The boy points a finger in the air, moving it across the velvety green tops of the trees. I take a closer look and see that there is an elaborate system of raised and angled mirrors. The Daithi have created a labyrinth using the reflections of branches and leaves to keep a wanderer confused. We pass right through what looks like the trunk of a massive oak but is really a clear path, just part of the maze. Without a guide it would have taken us hours to navigate this terrain, even with the help of drones.
After a good fifteen minutes at a brisk clip, the boy disappears through a dense hemlock thicket, or, at least it looks like a thicket . . .
And then, the smell.
It’s so awful that bile races up my windpipe and I hold my hand up across my mouth to stop from retching and to block my nostrils. We keep moving until we emerge onto a large cleared field. I look to my right, down at the boy who points his finger forward, forcing my eyes to focus on the horrors before them.
I hear a gargled noise from Navaa that might be a scream or a word but is soon muffled by Arif’s chest as he pulls her close. This must have been the Rift site. There is no Rift here any longer, just a pit half the size of a football field and filled with hundreds, if not thousands of rotting Daithi bodies. All along the perimeter of this mass grave are posts. It’s the precision of it that I find just as disturbing as what they hold. Someone took the time, thought it out, planned and measured so they could get absolute symmetry. For the display.
There are wings, outstretched and nailed down. The scapulae are still attached to most of them, the bones picked clean by scavengers, but still discolored by blood and rot. Some of the feathers have been plucked and pulled by birds or trophy hunters, but it’s clear enough what they are. Faida. I venture forward with Levi at my side. I walk past the posts, and when I look at Levi, I can see that the wings are proportionate to his back. They could have raised them fifty feet in the air or kept them ankle length, but no, this was deliberate. A message. The Faida that were here, the scouting party, somehow they are being held responsible. Now, the wings stand guard over this grisly horror, the ghosts of their owners absent, murdered, but still made to keep watch.
I look down at the bodies, all in uniform, mouths agape and jawbones wide. What’s left of their faces is suspended in eternal surprise and pain. The smell is overpowering. It’s beyond awful. The stench has clawed its way into my every opening; even the pores and my own tissues are absorbing it like putrid water. I throw up. I retch without my stomach giving me the slightest warning. It’s as casual as a sneeze or a yawn. I don’t even bend over all that much. I just turn my head and empty myself out.
I think I know what happened here, but I have to make sure, so I do the one thing that I want to do least in this world. I jump down into the pit. From somewhere, Levi is calling my name, but I tune it out. This is not unlike fighting, the way I have to become more machine than girl, more soldier than person. I am knee-deep in corpses. The Daithi are so small that it makes this experience all the more disturbing. I know they are not children, but with all of them here rotting and lifeless, the distinction is more difficult to make.
I turn over a body and examine it, ignoring the maggots and blackened flesh. I look at another and another. I pull burgundy patches off uniforms. The same triad symbol as mine, only with different lettering. I’ll need some kind of proof later that this was actually real, that this actually happened and wasn’t just a nightmare. There are no slash marks or bullet wounds. There are no bruises or scrapes on what’s left of the flesh. I jump out of the pit and squat, wiping my hands in the dirt.
“At least they went quickly,” I manage to say to Levi, though the sound of my own voice feels wrong, off somehow, like someone else has borrowed my mouth.
“The Midnight Protocol?” he asks, but I don’t know why—he knows. We watched our own go down like this when I told everyone the truth about what ARC did to us.
“There are no active Rift sites here. No sign of Rift activity on this entire planet. They did this to them all,” I say out loud. To Levi. To no one in particular.
“We should burn them,” he tells me as he looks behind his shoulder at the pit. “No one should have to just rot away.”
I nod and take a deep breath as I make my way back to the others. They are all pale faced and somber eyed. There might be Faida bodies at the bottom of that pile, but I am done here. If the Faida feel they must retrieve their dead from that pit of atrocity, then of course they must. I don’t have it in me to help them. My shoulders are broad. I was built, born, and trained for bearing things, but not this. Never this . . . and I’m not ashamed. There is a universe of shame buried here, but none of it will ever belong to me. I assign it solely to the monsters who did this.
I clear my throat in attempt to find my voice, which I do, but it is tentative and halting. “Levi suggested that we—wait . . . where’s the boy?” We all look around us, but the boy has disappeared.
“He must have booked it,” Ezra says. “He held up his end of the bargain and this isn’t really a place for kids.”
“No, it isn’t, but he knew where it was.” I mentally switch gears in an instant as I put my hand on my gun. “And to leave the bodies like that, uncovered, exposed? And the wings . . . They knew someone would come along eventually.”
“We need to find that boy,” Levi says as he begins to jog through the maze. The Faida take to the sky. The three humans begin to run and, for once, Ezra doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t understand, but I—with an ever-increasing feeling of dread—think I do. From the air, Sidra has spotted the boy and with the help of Doe and the drones, we get closer to his position. As a Daithi, he is predisposed to disappear, but he is young and untrained. Doe’s voice calmly delivers orders into my earpiece. Left. Left. Right. Left. Right. We flee over the bracken and race past uncut grasses and webs made of dead vines.
The Faida are already there as we break through to a tiny clearing. The boy has dug up a QOINS device from the earth. This one is larger than most and has a large red button on the top of it. The boy, who must have stashed the food somewhere else, has both hands in the air. The Faida have their weapons drawn.
“We arrived just as he pulled it out of the earth,” Arif tells me in Faida. “He hasn’t yet activated it.”
I approach the Daithi slowly, holstering my weapon. “What is your name, boy?”
“Ruari,” he tells me with bravado, though his hands are shaking in the air.
“Why would you call them back here?”
“They told us that more would come and if we didn’t tell them right away, they would know.”
“Who?”
“The bald ones, with the rocky skin—they sent giants, covered in hair. I don’t know how they controlled them, but the giants obeyed them. They gathered us up, from five different villages, and showed us the bodies.”
“How would they know, Ruari?” Levi asks in a tone that is gentler than I’ve ever heard him use.
“Like we would ever ask such a thing!” he tells us excitedly. I’m just a few feet from him now. His bright blue eyes are starting to bolt all over the place. One slip of his finger and everything we’ve worked for will be for nothing. In one swift movement, I take the QOINS device from him between a breath. One moment it’s in his hand and the next it’s empty.
“No!” Ruari screams as he starts to lunge for me. I easily hold him off with a single hand. “You don’t understand. They will come back and they will burn our village to the ground and kill us all. The Citadels are gone. There is no one to protect us.”
“Ruari,” I tell him sternly, throwing the QOINS backward toward Levi, who catches it with ease. “They won’t find out. I promise. We disabled all the cameras. We can make it look like they just broke on their own. This place has been abandoned. They only told you that to scare you. They will never find out unless you tell them.”
Finally, Ruari goes still. His eyes narrow with contempt. “You don’t understand. How am I going to explain the
food? The moment my mother sees it she is going to know and I can’t not bring it home, we’re starving.” Ruari’s heart begins to race. His entire body stiffens as panic sets in.
“It doesn’t matter. You can tell your mother that we destroyed the QOINS.” After everything these people have seen, I can’t expect them to just believe that I’m telling the truth, not with these kinds of intimidation tactics at play.
Ruari shakes his head vigorously. “This isn’t the only black box buried in these woods, there are dozens of them. My mother will demand that we retrieve another and report your arrival.”
“Just lie, child,” Lujinn steps in and says smoothly. “These monsters, they have no honor. We are trying to stop them. They need to pay for what they did to your people, and we can make that happen, but we will be unable to keep up our ruse if they know that we know what was done here.”
Ruari considers Lujinn’s words for a moment and then clearly, in his mind, comes to his senses. He is resolute. “I could lie, perhaps, but not to my mother. She knows me too well and we would lose whatever peace we have found. Every branch bent the wrong way, any unfamiliar birdsong would make us jump out of our skins. Each day would be filled with fear and every night would be sleepless. You say they will not find out, but you will be gone and they are very powerful. No. I must do as they have ordered.”
Navaa and I steal a knowing glance at each other.
War makes monsters of us all in the end.
I bend down toward Ruari and place my hands regretfully on his cheeks. “I hope the next world treats you better than this one. I am sorry.” The Faida contingent moves out of the way, circling back so that they are behind Levi and me. Ezra follows suit, though it’s clear from the expression on his face he has no idea what’s going on. “Rift. Pandora,” I manage to whisper into my cuff.
A tiny green emerald dot spins into the inky onyx of the Multiverse, the doorway screaming into life. Ruari’s eyes are so wide with fear they take over his face. The Rift is moaning, demanding an offering. Ruari looks at it and then he knows, he knows what’s going on. “No!” He yells, “Please don’t, I won’t tell anyone. I promise. Please!” I pick him up from underneath his arms and pitch him into the Rift before he can plead anymore. The Rift swallows him whole and then spins away into nothingness. The forest around us becomes unnaturally quiet.
“Oh my God,” Ezra says in horror. “I cannot believe you just did that.”
I spin furiously to face him. “It was that or kill him. At least this way he has a chance. He could end up on an echo Earth, find a nice family, he’s young—he’ll adapt. He doesn’t even have the tattoos on his face yet. He could blend in.”
“Or he could end up on an Earth that has no air or the Walking Dead Earth. Or I don’t know, we could have taken him with us!”
“When am I going to stop having to defend myself to you?” I hiss in his face. “That was not easy for me.” I am so grateful that my gears shifted into drive after what we witnessed in the pit. I’m just moving on muscle memory and instinct. If I wasn’t, I’d have most certainly collapsed by now, into a weeping mess. “He may be dead, but death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Did you see the Faida’s wings out there? Did you see them all? Look at what we’re fighting. We don’t have the luxury of bringing home a traumatized boy who probably needs a lot of professional help that we don’t have the time or energy to give him. So enough about Ruari.”
“Ryn,” Levi says. I whip my head in his direction praying he won’t second-guess me on this, either. “We have his coordinates. When this is all over, we can go back and make sure he’s okay.” I sigh with relief at his suggestion.
Ezra has his arms folded. He looks forlorn. “He was just a kid,” he says quietly. He’s not speaking to me directly, but to the world, I guess. The world that he is, I think, just now realizing he’s a part of.
“So were we once,” I tell him as I check my gear and my weapons out of ingrained reflex. The shitty thing is, we can’t even risk going back to burn the bodies. We can’t do anything now, to suggest that we were here.
Levi comes up behind me. “It’s okay,” he whispers in my ear and in that moment, I do believe him. Ezra will never truly accept what I had to do today, but Levi, I know, would have done the very same.
But it doesn’t mean it’s okay.
Chapter 11
We spend the next week at the Faida base regrouping. That’s what we call it, but that’s not really what it is. We are recovering. Grieving. Even seasoned soldiers like the Faida who have been fighting for most of their adult lives seem only partially present. They are slow to answer questions and have taken to staring at walls. There are subtle changes in their body language, too. They will now occasionally bring a single wing around a shoulder, rubbing their jaws against the soft downy feathers.
Ezra, Levi, and I avoid one another whenever possible. We don’t want to talk. There is nothing to say and every conversation feels trivial. None of us will ever be the same after what we saw on the Daithi Earth. Each body in the pit has become the slice of a razor on our skin. They are hundreds of cuts that won’t clot, wounds that don’t know how to heal. Eventually they will fade—they’ll have to if we want to win this—but they won’t disappear. They will just dissolve into our skin and turn into a constellation of agonies that we will have to carry with us forever.
I don’t need any more reminders of that day, of what I saw and what I did to Ruari. Every time I look at Levi and Ezra, I see my own pain mirrored back to me in their eyes. I know they see the same so we keep our own solitary company. My thoughts are louder than they ever have been before, but I don’t have it in me to talk about that day. Every time I try, the words turn to ash in my mouth before I can even speak them.
Most of my time is spent with Navaa and the business of turning me into a full-fledged Kir-Abisat, which has become her obsession. I don’t blame her. It has given her something to do, so she isn’t spending all day thinking about what she’s seen. So hour upon hour she bends me this way and that, a constant stream of her urging, to separate the different frequencies I have sequestered in my brain. For these tones, I have built a memory palace. The room of this palace is my opa’s study where he keeps his collection of vinyl records. He calls this place the Lab and I call it that, too. Each sound is a record stored on a shelf that I can pick out and identify by attaching it to the cover of an album.
Ezra doesn’t need to stand behind me all day with his hand on my shoulder, thank God. I first need to learn to make my body buzz in just the right way to open a Rift completely. For now, the destination is not important.
It’s not just the humming. My whole being has to become the noise and that’s no small task. It’s uncomfortable and jarring. My molecules feel like they are being poured in a blender. Each time I close a partial Rift, the sensation doesn’t go away. My limbs go numb. I imagine it must be like sitting on top of an ancient washing machine set to spin (and not in the funny, sexy way that adults seem to find endlessly amusing, either). It rattles me. Literally.
However, after a week, we must all put the grief away. There is simply too much to do besides the Kir-Abisat or training or the gut-wrenching work of trying to hide from the truth of the Daithi Earth. So without much discussion, Levi and I set off for Battle Ground.
It’s good to have a mission. And once we meet up with our team, they are happy to report that Henry’s plan of gradual infiltration is working with impressive results. Revealing the truth one-on-one was the way to go. All the drugs were successfully swapped out with placebos, and each Citadel who’s been given the facts knows at least two others they trust implicitly. More than that, they seem to know who will most likely not be swayed. Each day hundreds of human Citadels are recruited to our side. For now, at least, the plan is working.
When I tell Beta Team what happened with the Daithi, I do so as a cautionary tale. We have all been trained in spycraft. We are vigilant when it comes to covering our tracks,
but I remind them all who taught us these tactics. The numbers may be growing exponentially in our favor, but I warn that our agents in the field cannot let their guards down. Now more than ever, we have to move forward under the assumption that while ARC might not know a thing, the altered Roones probably do. They have likely guessed we might be up to something; we just hope they don’t know what.
We have to keep it that way.
From there, Levi and I also travel to visit Iathan on the original Roone Earth. Navaa and Arif really wanted to come, but I thought it best to ask the president’s permission before bringing them along. I’m sure that Iathan will be more than interested in meeting with them, but it’s not like I can just call ahead and ask if it’s cool. These alliances are all tender, delicate things. Apart from the “Day of Pigs,” as Levi has started referring to the tussle we had after we first met the Faida, we have yet to really fight alongside these people and that is where real bonds are formed. On the battlefield.
We arrive on the Roone Earth and are taken immediately to the palace where Iathan resides. Whatever it may have been in its former glory, Iathan takes no chances. He lives beneath the building, deep underground in a bunker. The city above may be rebuilding from its own civil war, but he understands there is still war in the wind and will not emerge until the threat of the altered Roones is over.
I report everything that has happened since our last encounter. I regretfully have to recount what happened with the men he sent with us to the Spiradael Earth. Losing Vlock hits him particularly hard and he takes a few moments before he is able to continue.
He is bolstered, though, when I tell him about the Faida and even more excited when I tell him that not only have we formed a burgeoning alliance, but that they have cast out the enemy on their own Earth. The fact that he didn’t know this means the sound blockade works. He was aware, however, of the Daithi massacre, although he has only seen it via drone image. He presses for more information until he can tell that Levi and I aren’t ready to talk about it yet and, surprisingly, he respects that.
The Rift Coda Page 12
