With a look of horror on her face, the woman pointed with a trembling finger past the hatch and down the hall. “What is it?”
Running toward them was a skeleton of polished chrome, filled with glowing tubes, wires and tiny flashing lights. The yellow globes of its eyes brightened as its gaze settled on them. It slowed to a trot, heading directly toward them, its arms swinging tiredly at its sides, like a marathoner just crossing the finish line.
Ginger squealed at the sight of it and cowered behind Diana’s legs.
“I don’t know what the hell it is,” Sam said. “Throw one of those vapor orbs at it before it gets us.”
The acolyte held out her palm—a cloudy orb appeared and grew above it. She reared back to pitch it when Ping grabbed Sam’s arm and yelled, “No, stop her!”
“Why?” Sam asked, placing a restraining hand on the shoulder of the acolyte. “Look at that thing. It looks like a friggin’ cyborg assassin sent back from the future by Skynet.”
“Look what it’s carrying in its right hand,” Ping said.
Sam’s eyes narrowed as he focused on the copper medallion in the skeleton’s hand. It was the Chronicle. “Mara?” he said as the creature approached.
“Who are you calling a cyborg?” Mara said.
Sam simply stared, his gaze locked on the up-and-down motions of his sister’s chrome jaw as she talked. Definitely her voice came out of it.
“What the hell happened to you? We just talked to you a few minutes ago, and you still had a face. You still had your skin—well, most of it.”
“I got hit by one of those sand-blaster orbs, and I think it scoured away my skin,” she said.
“And your clothes,” Sam said. “Technically you are completely naked. Way naked.”
“Thanks for the observation,” Mara said. She handed the Chronicle to Ping. “Can you keep this? I don’t seem to have any pockets at the moment.”
Diana touched the side of Mara’s face. “Oh, sweetie, are you in pain?”
“The experience wasn’t much fun, but I’m okay now,” she said. Turning to the other Mara, she added, “I see they got you out.” She paused for a moment and examined her counterpart’s features. “At least people won’t have any trouble telling us apart.”
The other Mara smiled. “They will—once I grow you a new body. What do you say we get out of here?”
“Excellent idea,” Ping said. “Sam, why don’t you ask our acolyte friend here to guard the ladder while we climb to the roof?”
* * *
Being the last to emerge from the hatch at the end of the ladder, Sam rolled his eyes at cyborg Mara when he stepped out onto the rounded roof of the Arboretum. As he straightened after slamming the hatch closed, he was taken aback by his surroundings. A stiff cool breeze blew relentlessly, whipped up by the massive rounded roof upon which they stood. And it was dark. He had forgotten they had entered the building at night. However, the bands of blue and magenta highlights on the horizon indicated dawn was imminent.
“What was that look about?” Mara asked.
“Nothing,” he said, scanning the distance to see if there was any obvious way to get down to the ground.
“No, tell me. Why did you roll your eyes?”
His gaze shifted back to her. “You clanked all the way up here, that’s all.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pointed to the chrome bones of her feet that glinted in the muted light. “Your big metal clodhoppers sounded like a chain gang working on the railroad with each rung you stepped on.”
“Look who’s talking. The guy with the glowing green eyes and the creepy echoing voice.”
Sam laughed. “True, but you really do look like the robot from The Terminator.”
“A chobodon was climbing the ladder just a few feet ahead of you, and the most interesting thing you had to obsess about was me?”
“You kids will need to trade barbs later,” Diana said. She pointed ahead, where something emerged from beyond the curvature of the roof. It looked like the silhouette of an invading horde cresting over a distant hill.
“More acolytes?” the other Mara asked.
Ping shook his head as he peered into the dim morning light. “No robes. Very skinny appendages. My guess would be bowraiths.”
Mara glanced around and assessed the terrain. “Given the slope of the roof, how are they able to climb like that?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think we should hang around to find out,” Sam said.
“What do you suggest?” Mara asked.
The horde was getting closer, and they were definitely bowraiths, ascending the sides of the Arboretum effortlessly and silently, more like mindless zombies than an army of soldiers. There were no war cries, no yelps, virtually no sound at all. There were hundreds of them. As they drew closer, a dry scraping sound filled the air, like two sheets of paper rubbed together.
“Run!” Sam yelled.
They spun around and ran toward the closed hatch, but, after several steps, Sam, who led the group in retreat, stumbled, fell to his knees and then forward onto his hands. As each of the group caught up to him, they too stopped suddenly and tumbled forward.
Sam pulled at his feet and found he could not lift them. “I’m stuck,” he said.
Mara felt the surface of the roof beneath her soften and ooze between her skeletal fingers and toes. “Something gooey is on the surface of the roof. I’m not sure what it is.”
“It’s flypaper,” Ping said.
“What?” Mara asked.
“The outside of the Arboretum is coated with an adhesive that is preventing us from escaping. It may also be why the bowraiths can walk, despite the pitch of the roof,” Ping said.
“Tran said the whole building was designed as a trap,” Sam said. “Remember?”
“So she spread goop all over the building on the off chance that we might come up here?” Mara asked.
“Do you people always talk this much when you get into trouble?” the other Mara asked.
“Yes, they do,” Diana said. She yanked her hand free of the stickiness that held it, but the recoil caused her to fall to her side. Now, with her torso and hair stuck to the roof, she glared at Mara. “I would suggest more action, less talk at this point.”
Ginger, who was stuck nearby on her belly, squealed as if in agreement.
“I’m thinking,” Mara said. She looked up. More bowraiths closed in from the direction to which they were escaping. They were surrounded. In frustration, she looked past the soulless plant-things looming just a few yards away, into the brightening horizon beyond. It was still dark enough to see stars, thousands of them of shimmering and shifting, bobbing and weaving in the distant sky. The rising sun gave them an orange glint she had never seen before.
She froze.
How could the rising sun turn stars orange?
“That’s it!” Mara yelled. “Attack! Attack!”
Sam cocked his head sideways and strained to look over his shoulder. “Have you fried some kind of circuit? Attack what?”
“Look!” the other Mara said.
Sam turned toward her. She looked wild-eyed into the distance, and he followed her gaze. Orange sparks shifted in unison, forming a wave, like a flock of birds diving out of the air, striking the army of bowraiths, kamikaze-style.
“Cinderflies,” Ping said.
Dozens of the bowraiths burst into flame, sending them gyrating and writhing in all directions to extinguish the fire. As more cinderflies attacked and more bowraiths slammed into each other, the fire spread from creature to creature.
Several attackers fell to the roof and rolled down its curved flanks, like logs escaping a poorly built campfire, leaving a trail of tiny flames that fed on the sticky substance coating the Arboretum. Flames licked up from the roof while the silhouettes of burning bowraiths sprinted in panic, looking like a mad forest fire in which the trees tried to escape, only to spread the conflagration more.
The roof beneat
h them shuddered.
“We’ve got a problem,” Mara said.
“Yeah, one of those burning bowraiths will roll right over us if we don’t get out of here soon,” Sam said.
“And the Arboretum is on fire. It’ll collapse any minute,” she said.
As if on cue, a loud ripping sound cut through the air, and a wall of flame burst into the sky from somewhere beyond the crest of the roof. The surface onto which they were stuck shifted several feet to the left and undulated like a flag flapping in a stiff breeze. Wind and smoke whistled over them, bringing water to Mara’s eyes as she turned to Ping.
“Got any bright ideas?” she asked Ping while trying to free her hands from the adhesive keeping her bound to the burning building.
“When was the last time you used your abilities?” he asked.
“On the drawbridge, before we went inside the Arboretum.”
“That doesn’t strike me as something that would tire you out so much that your abilities would become inoperable,” he said. “Besides, it’s been a while since then. You should have recovered.”
“That’s not it. I think Tran did something to snuff them out.”
Ping shook his head and raised his voice over the howling thermals whipping around them. “Impossible.”
“I’m telling you that, from the moment we entered this building, I haven’t been able to do a single thing, metaphysically speaking.”
“Technically,” he said, “we’re no longer in the building, so that shouldn’t be a factor, even if Tran could do something to your abilities.”
The surface below them plunged more than twenty feet, turning Mara’s stomach and she felt sure everyone else’s. “What?” Mara yelled over the wind and the sounds of crashes.
“We’re no longer in the building!” Ping screamed.
Mara’s eyes widened with realization, and she yelled, “That’s right!”
In a burst of blue light, they disappeared.
CHAPTER 42
When the light receded, it took a moment to adjust to the sudden silence and the nearly dark shade of the swamp’s trees. Mara blinked and allowed her eyes a moment to adjust before she attempted to stand. When she did, she grabbed the bumper of Diana’s SUV to steady herself. Straightening, Mara worked her chrome fingers back and forth, trying to get relief from the tackiness left on them by the adhesive from the exterior of the Arboretum.
The vehicle was where they had left it—on the side of the trail leading into the dense swamp, down the road a b it from the cinder-block pumping station, the silhouette of which she could just make out in the limited light.
“What happened? Where are we?” the other Mara asked, standing on the far side of the Ford Edge SUV.
Diana’s head popped up next to her. “At the entrance to the swamp. We parked here before hiking in to find you.”
Sam and Ping stepped out of the shadows together. “What do we do now?” Sam asked in his echoing voice.
“We got what we came for,” Mara said, pointing to the other Mara. “Let’s go home.”
Diana opened the driver’s door, and Mara walked over to the front passenger door. The others began piling into the back seats. As soon as Mara took her seat, Diana turned to her with an odd look on her face.
“What is it?” Mara asked.
“It might be better if one of the others sits up front,” Diana said. “It’ll be light out soon, and, if we have to stop on the way home, you’ll draw a lot of attention.”
“What do you mean?”
Diana swiveled the rearview mirror toward her. Mara glanced up to see a shiny silver skull with glowing eyes looking back at her. “Oh, jeez! I had no idea!”
“Yeah, quite a sight to behold,” said Sam from the back seat. “But look at the bright side. You save on hair products, and you can use Turtle Wax instead of makeup.”
“Shut up,” both Maras said simultaneously.
Mara opened the door and glanced at her counterpart. “She’s right. Why don’t you come up here and sit with Mom. It’ll give you two a chance to catch up.”
Both slipped out of the car and passed each other next to the open doors, Mara giving her counterpart a wide berth, which caused the other Mara to pause.
“What’s wrong?” the other Mara asked.
“We can’t touch, or I’ll be pushed back into my own realm. Whatever you do, remember that.”
“Will do,” she said as she slipped into the car.
Mara got into the back seat next to Ping. He eyed her but didn’t say anything as Diana navigated the vehicle through a U-turn, passed the pumping station building and got back onto the main road.
“What’s on your mind?” Mara asked.
“It’s unlikely Tran will simply let the matter drop,” Ping said. “How do you think we should prepare ourselves for that eventuality?”
“The Arboretum looked like it was about to collapse in on itself, so I think she has her hands full at the moment—assuming she survives the fire. We’ll have to take it one step at a time. My biggest concern isn’t that she’ll come after us immediately but that she was able to block my abilities. If you want to prepare, figure out how she did that and come up with a way to prevent it from happening again.”
“I’m having trouble believing she actually nullified your abilities. It’s just not possible given the laws of metaphysics. It’s much more likely you were fatigued. After all, last night, you created the cinderflies, generated the fog that surrounded the Arboretum and used your abilities in other ways. Surely that is what caused your … outage.”
Mara shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t feel tired at all. I’m telling you that she did it—somehow, some way. Could she have cast a spell on the Arboretum that nullified my abilities?”
“No. Tran has demonstrated the abilities of a powerful pretender. As such, she can only cast spells using the elements of Perception. She could animate the bowraiths out of dirt, but she could not alter Reality and strip you of your powers.”
“We’ve seen pretenders exceed their metaphysical limits before,” Mara said.
“When?” Ping asked.
“Sam’s version of Mom crossed from her realm to mine, and you said that couldn’t be done, that pretenders couldn’t cross realms. The Aphotis did it as well. You never explained how that happened.”
“That’s true. But this is different. A progenitor is intrinsically and metaphysically linked with Reality. The shape of Reality is defined by the progenitor. Saying that your abilities were somehow blocked is like calling a finished painting a masterpiece while saying the artist’s talent for creating it doesn’t exist. One cannot be without the other. Reality cannot exist without the progenitor’s abilities. It’s that simple.”
Mara sputtered for a moment, trying to absorb what he said. “You’ve never said that before—that I’m responsible for Reality. How can that be?”
“Unfortunately we haven’t had a lot of time to study deeper metaphysical principles, apart from your abilities. But it is true. Reality flows from the progenitor, meaning you.”
“The progenitor. You’ve always said I am a progenitor—like there are others.”
“There are others,” Ping said. He pointed to the front passenger seat, to the other Mara. “In other realms.”
Mara rubbed her forehead. Her brain hurt. “You’re saying that, to be a progenitor, someone has to be me in one realm or another. No one else can be.”
“Correct.”
“So explain to me how Reality flows from me.”
“Remember our first lessons when we discussed the substance from which Reality is made?” he asked.
She nodded. “Consciousness. Everything in Reality is made of Consciousness.”
“From whose Consciousness do you think Reality was made?”
She stared at him.
“Yours. The progenitor’s.”
“And you are just telling me this now?”
“It was difficult enough convincing you
that you had the metaphysical ability to alter Reality. How likely would you have embraced the notion that Reality flows from your Consciousness and that’s why you can change it at will?”
“Not very likely,” Sam said.
Mara bent forward and glared past Ping at her brother. “You knew this all along?”
“Yeah, I guess. It only makes sense. Consciousness has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew,” he said. Raising his hands and making air quotes, he added, “Progenitor? Meaning, the source, or the one who generates. What did you think that meant?”
She leaned back. “I don’t know what I thought.”
Ping interjected, “Anyway, the point being that Tran could not have stopped you from using your abilities, not in this Reality.”
“What if she were a progenitor? Could she then?” Mara asked.
“She could not be. She’s not you. This realm can only have one progenitor, and she’s sitting in the front seat,” Ping said.
“Humor me. Let’s just say for a minute that it was possible. What would one progenitor have to do to shut down another progenitor’s power?”
As Ping pondered the question, the soothing drone of the tires on the road lulled them into a tired silence. A few minutes later, he made a sound as if he were about to speak but stopped himself.
“What?” Mara asked.
“It’s far-fetched, and I’m not sure it’s applicable to our situation.”
“Far-fetched has not been a barrier so far. Spill it.”
“The only way I can conceive of a progenitor blocking the abilities of a second progenitor would be to create a new Reality—one specifically designed to omit the second’s abilities.”
“Is that possible? To create a whole new Reality?” Mara asked.
“Your counterpart created the dream realm we visited. It had distinct characteristics from Reality,” he said. “So, yes, it’s possible.”
Diana cleared her throat and glanced into the rearview mirror to those in the back seat. “Ah, I think we may have a problem up here.”
“What it is?” Mara asked.
Broken Spells Page 25
