by CK Dawn
Lucienne could hear her heart stuttering. Her body heated, responding to Ashburn’s desires. She warned herself to move away from this dangerously beautiful boy, but her body rebelled and stayed.
“You don’t understand,” Ashburn said, his eyes locking on hers. “I am programmed for evil. I felt its menace when I activated the Eye of Time, so I broke free before it could upload all of its data into me. Seraphen said it’d happened before, and it caused the flood that almost wiped out all humankind. Now it has started again, with us—you and me. If we go with the TimeDust, we’ll cause the apocalypse. It would be worse than the flood. Seraphen isn’t the bad guy here. He is doing whatever it takes to preserve the human race. I can’t undo what the Eye of Time did to me, but I can resist the TimeDust in me, so the world will be safe from us.”
“Knowledge is never evil.” Lucienne reached out and laid her hand on Ashburn’s. “Our hearts decide the course. We can build a new world, with ancient knowledge at our disposal. Seraphen is wrong. Even he admitted parts of his memories were damaged. How do we know they weren’t twisted or altered? You saw how crazy he was when he tried to kill me, and he still wants to murder me, though I’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
Ashburn looked at Lucienne’s hand curving around his. “It isn’t just Seraphen. When the Eye of Time transmitted the data to me, a subprogram that was secretly built inside the mainframe and hidden from the Eye also reached me. The subprogram opposes the TimeDust, and it’s been trying to get in touch with me to unveil the truth. It also warned me to stay away from you, but I’m not doing too well listening to that counsel.”
“Ash,” Lucienne whispered, “I’m on your side. It isn’t our fault we’re connected, and it doesn’t mean we have to serve that dreadful purpose. We can fight it, together.”
“We can’t fight it. It wants us to be together, but if we are, we’ll lose the battle. We wouldn’t succeed in building a new world; we’d destroy it. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve sensed a terrible fate lurking ahead.” Ashburn extracted his hand from under Lucienne’s and put his head in his hands. “It’s already begun, Lucienne. I can no longer fight whatever it is that draws me to you. It hurts so much!”
“Listen, Ash.” Lucienne caught his cool hands, pressing them between her warm ones. “I’m a warrior. I promise you we’ll not go down—”
“You still don’t understand what lies ahead.” Ashburn pulled his hands out again and pressed them firmly against Lucienne’s cheeks.
“Ashburn, what are we doing?” Lucienne tried to pull away. Her soft voice and light touch were meant to persuade him to go along with her plan, not to lead him on.
Just then a bolt of black lightning exploded in her mind. Lucienne cried out in shock, but the dark lightning didn’t burn her. It opened a channel, a tapestry of images flowing like an electrical current in front of her. Lucienne was experiencing what Ashburn had gone through—
Ashburn entered the terrain of Hell Gate on his wheelchair. Thick fog and howling winds traveled over the wilderness. Ashburn switched on a light bar, but its light couldn’t penetrate the mist. An eerie noise clicked on and off around him.
Lucienne felt unmistakable viciousness from the place.
“Who’s there?” Ashburn’s voice quavered. “Don’t get any closer! I have weapons.”
Something that sounded like sharp metal closed in on him, then the fog lifted. A silvery gate materialized, rising high into the sky. A hollow, metallic noise echoed from the gate. Strange symbols, numbers, and alien characters flashed on it—the same symbols Lucienne had seen in the Eye of Time.
Ashburn veered his chair around the gate, reading the streaming numbers and symbols in amazement. After a while, he seemed to awaken from a trance. His face sank. “Violet!” he shouted, veering his wheelchair away from the gate.
“Wait!” a voice called. Lucienne recognized the voice of the Eye of Time.
An intense light blinded Ashburn, and Lucienne blinked.
A metallic eye blazed on the gate at Ashburn’s eye level. “I am the Eye of Time. I am Xρόνος. I am beyond time and space,” it said. “I am a species of the highest intelligence. I am the first and the last.”
“If you say so,” Ashburn said with a shrug.
Nothing impresses this kid, Lucienne thought.
“Where are you from?” Ashburn asked politely.
A chart of an unknown star system twirled inside the dark mirror of the Eye. Ashburn leaned forward to study the chart, but jerked back as a wave of light surged toward him. The expanding band of light transformed into a holographic chart of stars.
Lucienne widened her eyes. The star chart consisted of part of what she saw on the forehead of the image on the Rabbit Hole’s pillar.
“So you’re from far away.” Ashburn sounded a little stupid.
The holofield vanished. “I have been waiting for you for millions of years,” the Eye of Time said.
“But I’m only seventeen,” said Ashburn.
“I searched generation after generation to find you. I tested you when you were still in your mother’s womb,” said the Eye.
“Now I understand why everyone is afraid of this place,” murmured Ashburn. “But on second thought, if you’re so smart, do you know who built the Ghost House and Nirvana? And where’s the path to the outside world?”
“They are your playground. They were built for you millions of years ago, to prepare you,” the Eye said.
“To prepare me for what?” Ashburn asked sharply. “I’m not just some little pig you prepare for a fine meal!”
“For a great purpose. Activate me,” the Eye urged, “and the knowledge of the universe will open to you.”
“So I’ll know everything?” Ashburn sounded more motivated.
“Yesss.” the Eye let out a shrill cry. “Free me now. I will wait no longer.”
Ashburn was taken aback by its desperation. “I’ll have to think about this. I don’t like to rush into decisions,” he said, steering his wheelchair away from the gate. But an unseen force drew his chair back. Ashburn punched the button on the arm of his chair, but his chair kept moving toward the Eye. Ashburn grabbed a wand from his wheelchair and fired at the Eye, but nothing shot out of the weapon.
“No weapon can harm me,” said the Eye.
Ashburn tried again to steer his chair away, but it was glued to the ground. “No matter what you do, crazy Eye, I will not free you.” Ashburn’s face reddened with anger and humiliation.
The Eye exhaled sinisterly. “I need your free will to begin. It is one of the rules I have to follow.”
“Believe me, you’re not getting it. Now let me go!”
“You came for a human girl, even though you knew it was a trap,” the Eye of Time said. “I know where she is.” Violet’s image and her agonized cry appeared on a hologram before Ashburn.
“Where is she?” Ashburn’s voice cracked, his fists clenched. “Is she safe?”
“If you want to save the girl, you must activate me.” The Eye paused for a compelling effect. “You are running out of time, Ashburn Fury.”
Lucienne instantly knew that was the Eye’s manipulation. Ashburn, however, took the bait. “How do I activate you?” he asked.
“I need the code.”
“What code? I don’t have it.”
“You’re the code. It’s in your DNA.”
“What? What is it?”
“Touch me. My data will recognize the code encrypted in your DNA.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“After you touch me, you will know. You will have infinite knowledge. Do it now. We do not have a minute to lose,” the Eye pressed. “The girl is in mortal danger. Prince Felix will murder her to get you.”
Staring into the Eye’s hypnotic depths, Ashburn flinched, sensing great evil again. But Violet’s safety outweighed any danger to himself and the whole world. Despite a wave of terror washing over him, Ashburn stretched his hand and touched the Eye of Time.
Lucienne gasped as a firestorm appeared, a vortex encircling Ashburn and the Eye, guarding the being and imprisoning the human boy. A skeletal bolt of lightning erupted from the Eye and pierced Ashburn.
Lucienne felt the burning sensation sear through her veins just as Ashburn must have felt it. With a cry, Ashburn struggled to yank away, but he was bound to the force. Ancient, alien music, a mix of inhuman whispers and mechanical noises, blasted inside Ashburn’s head. While he tried to exorcize the horrible sounds with shouts and punches in the air, millions of human voices speaking in different languages joined the invasion, forcing their way into the front of his skull. The cacophony echoed relentlessly in his ears.
Ashburn cursed the Eye and begged it to turn off the sounds.
As the excruciating noise marched inside Ashburn’s head, millions of images, graphic and grotesque, squeezed into his head like an army of African cannibal ants. “I’m burning.” Ashburn screamed. “You’re killing me!”
“It is data-overloading, Destined One. You will survive. Your brain is superior,” the Eye of Time said dispassionately. “Five more minutes and it will be done . . . immortal in flesh . . . You’ll end the era . . . end the time . . . as designed . . .”
Ashburn’s free hand grabbed the wand from his wheelchair and hacked at his finger held captive by the Eye, ready to cut off his own flesh to break free. Before the weapon smashed his finger, a black lightning formed in his fingertips and fired at the Eye.
“Nooo!” the Eye of Time cried.
Ashburn jerked back, breaking free, but the impact threw him from his wheelchair. He crashed to the ground. With labored breathing, Ashburn crawled toward his chair, but it was outside the range of the flame that still confined him. Before he reached the perimeter of the fire, the Eye’s power pulled him backward again, like wild wind sweeping a thin trash bag.
Ashburn roared in fury. Power and energy poured out of him, more forceful than a hurricane. Trembling, Lucienne smothered her ears with her hands, bent over with a cry, trying to shield herself from Ashburn’s rage.
An ocean of liquid light gushed out of the silvery gate like a mighty waterfall.
“Take me away,” Ashburn commanded. “Far away.”
The torrent of light scooped Ashburn up like he was a tealeaf and lifted him high into the sky. He looked down as Nirvana zoomed out, then the continents and the oceans shrank away, and then the Earth rolled back at the speed of light and became a speck.
Whisking away into space, Ashburn roared again in horror, but it was too late . . . .
The images and the scream faded in Lucienne’s mind and she was back in Ashburn’s bedroom. Complete silence devoured her while waves of vertigo assaulted her.
Ashburn’s hands slid along the arches of her burning cheekbones before they left her face. “That’s how the Eye of Time implanted its terrible purpose inside of me,” he said.
Though she had walked through pain, fire, and lightning, as Ashburn had, Lucienne felt only privileged. As her dizziness faded, she looked up at Ashburn, her whole face brightening like the first sunshine. Ashburn gazed at her, lost in her beauty. Despite the horror he had just relived, he reached to trace her cheek with his knuckles. When she didn’t pull away, he gently outlined her long, thick lashes. Lucienne half closed her eyes with parted lips, amazed at how a touch could be so lush and dreamy.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Ashburn sighed.
“If you go to the outside world, you’ll see plenty of girls like me,” she said. “I’m just a small fish in the ocean.”
“I possess almost everyone’s memories. Lucienne, you’re anything but a small fish.”
As Ashburn’s hand moved to the curve of her lips, Lucienne’s heart hesitated. She remembered Vladimir and pulled away. “Who are you really, Ash?” she asked in a quiet breath, concealing the rapid rhythm of her heartbeat.
“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes shifting to steel gray.
“I know Clement and Peder aren’t your biological parents,” she said, watching him, “and you know that, too.”
“I’ve searched my databank,” Ashburn said, “and I can’t find any records.”
“You broke free before the full upload. Do you think the secret of your heritage is still with the Eye of Time?”
“Maybe.”
“When Peder found you as a baby crying in a basket in the inner garden, Clement had just given birth to a stillborn. They buried the secret of your birth with the dead baby.”
Ashburn narrowed his eyes. “You read her mind.”
“I want to know more about you. I need to know who you are.”
“Any conclusions?”
“There was a card with notes in the basket, but your parents repressed the memory.”
“The notes forbade them to tell anyone about my arrival,” Ashburn said. “It threatened their lives if they didn’t obey. My parents were very fearful of me in the beginning. They didn’t know what I was. No one else had ever entered Nirvana until you came. At some point, they suspected that I was a demon child.”
“You’re actually the first outsider in Nirvana,” Lucienne said. “Do you have records of the first settlers?” She had read The Book, which Prince Felix had smuggled out of the temple for her. The Book was all about the king’s ancestors’, their great deeds, and the law of Nirvana. Nothing useful. “The Book says the gods summoned the first settlers from all the continents to this land to be their chosen people, but I believe there is a hidden agenda behind whatever power called them here.”
“Seraphen mentioned Nirvana is a failed breeding field. The Eye of Time rounded up the potential humans with specific DNA requirements to breed the Destined One, but no matter how it manipulated the genes of the people in Nirvana, The One never came.”
“Until it found you outside Nirvana. How?”
“I don’t know. I told you I have only partial data, and the Eye was very powerful before it completed transferring the TimeDust to me.”
“I believe the answers—along with your inheritance—are still inside the Eye of Time.”
“I don’t want to be anywhere near it,” Ashburn said. “I think I was responsible for my mother’s stillborn. Its power made sure my parents would take care of me. Only me. It made a monster right from the beginning, but I don’t want to be one.”
“You’re no more a monster than I am, Ash. You’re a force for good, and you’re unselfish,” Lucienne whispered. “Even with the TimeDust in you, you can still choose your own path. I’ll help you. We’ll work things out, together.”
“What about your Russian mother?” Ashburn asked abruptly.
Lucienne blinked. All the warmth left her. “That’s none of your business.”
“Then how come my lot is your business?” Ashburn’s tone was steely sharp.
“You’re the Chosen One, and I’m not. All the Sirens were deceived. We aren’t privileged. We aren’t special,” Lucienne said with a touch of bitterness. “If you’re the Destined One, then all the secrets lie in your genetic code. If we decipher your code, we can have all the answers we’ve been seeking. We can even neutralize the evil program you believe is in you.”
“How do you know you’re not chosen in some way? Do you know why your father never came to visit you? Do you know why your mother went off the grid after she gave birth to you?”
“Why should I care about them? They abandoned me, just like your biological parents forsook you.”
“You don’t know the whole truth. And you should have cared. Have you ever wondered why there’s finally a female Siren after a million years? The Siren’s line couldn’t produce a girl, and yet you popped out. You say you seek truth and knowledge above all else, but when it comes to yourself, you’re too afraid to know the truth.”
“Tell me then,” Lucienne said, her heart pounding. “Tell me about my mother. My grandfather and others tried to locate her, but never succeeded. So please enlighten me if she indeed stood out amid the millions in
the gene pool.”
Ashburn gazed at Lucienne, who stared back in defiance. His expression turned sheepish, and he dropped his gaze, his long lashes veiling his eyes. “Sorry, that is also not in my databank.”
Lucienne was so annoyed that she wanted to hit him. Her eyes burned darkly. “Then why did you bring it up?”
Ashburn raised his eyes to face Lucienne’s scowl. “If I was meant to happen, then you were, too. Whatever force didn’t just create one freak; it created a pair. It’s all the more reason we must get as far away from each other as possible, so its nasty plan that needs both of us will not succeed. Think of how you found me. Of all the worlds, you had to come to mine. It wasn’t a coincidence. Some force drives us together.”
“What a cosmic conspiracy,” Lucienne said with a laugh of irony, “just to set you and me up.”
“Laugh all you want, but I won’t let the TimeDust lead me down the path of destruction.”
Paranoid, Lucienne thought. “I wasn’t laughing at you, Ash. Think of it this way,” she said. “If the TimeDust means for us to be tools, we can take advantage of that and use it. If we know what it’s up to, we’ll be able to beat the mastermind behind it.” Her rich, silver voice was laced with passion. “We choose our own destiny.”
“How are we going to outwit it and the mastermind behind it?”
“We need to figure out your genetic code first.” An encouraging smile curled at the corner of Lucienne’s mouth and her eyes sparkled. “I have the best scientists and the most advanced labs waiting in Sphinxes.”
“Don’t even think about it.” Ashburn’s voice turned cold. “I’m not your guinea pig. And using me is all you care about.”
The smile faded from Lucienne’s face. “Why did you say that?”
“I overheard what you told Vladimir. You said I was only your asset and nothing else.”
Right, she thought. He saw and heard that when he crashed her date with Vladimir that night. “I want to believe I felt that way, but I don’t.” Lucienne exhaled slowly. “You mean more to me than I expected. More than I want to admit.”
