Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  “But… everything we have worked so hard to build…”

  “Has already been undone. The corrupted one has spread his tendrils far and wide. He understands the darkest aspects of human nature as few others do. The fear. The greed. The lust. The vanity. More and more of the Kkadie and Sagain are coming to Manderlas every day, Oren. They are drawn by the promise of divine revelation, by the false hope that the chosen few will be granted the same knowledge and powers of the greatest magi. He is manipulating those impulses, drawing them here to feed his own insatiable hungers.

  “They receive a revelation of sorts, but it is a nihilistic one, distorted through a warped looking glass. Even if they wanted to turn back, the hooks are in. It is only a matter of time until they are all used up.

  “It has to end.”

  “And we are the only ones left to end it,” I said.

  Reacher nodded.

  “But won’t the Fellowship come? Can’t we get word?”

  “No one is coming, Oren. Since almost the beginning, the data packets we have sent back to the Dromedar starhub have been manipulated. The corrupted one has altered all of it, telling the Fellowship that this planet was not what we hoped. That it will require extensive terraforming. It has told them we are looking for any signs of the first crew, and that once our search is complete, we will abandon the planet and return to Forsara.”

  A shiver ran through me. “What are we going to do? How can we possibly stand against this thing?”

  “We cannot. Not for long anyway. But he does not yet know all of our secrets. There may still be hope.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Truthfully? I am not sure, Oren. It may be too late for them. Each one is trapped in the perverted reality, a seemingly ideal realization of all of your goals on this planet. As the reality gets abused to suit the hungers of the shipheart, they do not even notice. The utopia degrades into a sick parody, and that parody becomes the truth.”

  “But you were able to get through to me!”

  “You are the most resilient. You were made that way. Your body filters the chemicals that are being used to keep you dull and docile faster than anyone else. I had a window of opportunity, and I took it.”

  “Wait. What about Neka and Cordar? They were not in that altar room you showed me, with Adjet and the twins. And… and Siddart.”

  “Oren, I am sorry, but Cordar is dead. He was killed in one of the first explosions.”

  My chest tightened. My vision blurred. “Neka?” I choked out her name.

  “She too is imprisoned within this madness.”

  I closed my eyes and touched my hand to my face, my thumb on my cheek and my fingers on my forehead. I sighed. I was sick and sad and angry. “I am so sorry, Reacher.”

  “I know, Oren.” His rippling fingers grazed my hand, pulling it away from my face. “But it’s not your fault.”

  “No? I’m the one who brought this corruption into our lives.” I turned my head away. I could not look at him.

  “Oren. Listen to me. We are past blame. You are remarkable, yes, but in the final reckoning, still only human. You do not deserve to carry the weight of this failure alone.”

  When I did not respond, he touched his hand to my chest, and a shock passed through my whole body. I jumped back, wide eyed with surprise, rubbing my hand over the spot where he touched me.

  “Enough. We do not have time for you to wallow. Whatever your feelings, now is the time to act. To make it right. Do you hear me?”

  I grimaced at him. “I hear you. So what do we do now?”

  “The corrupted one controls almost all of the island’s network. He has severely limited my computational access, and I am incapable of excising him. As long as the network is running, he has control.”

  “But that means… we shut down the network? But… but how could we even do that?”

  “As I said, he controls almost all of the network. But there is one place left that is protected. One place where we might still fight back.”

  The image of our ship came again to my mind, and I realized what Reach had been trying to show me from the start. “Of course!” I exclaimed. “Our ship!”

  He did not respond to me. His head tilted up, as if listening for something.

  “Reach?”

  He lifted one of his many fingers to his amber lips and touched his ear with his other hand. That’s when I heard the voices. Whispers and utterances, distant and unintelligible.

  “He’s coming,” he said.

  The blankness around us tore open, a deep gash of absence. The invisible ground supporting me shuddered and convulsed. The rip opened wider and swallowed us up.

  * * *

  Noises filled the darkness, scraping and grating like a rake through rough soil. Reacher’s eyes began to glow, brighter and brighter, illuminating the space.

  We were surrounded.

  A legion of ravaged, emaciated humans encircled us, eyes ghost white, skin pocked and charred, sagging against bone and joint. They weaved in a rough, slow loop, hemming us in, growling and sniffing the air. Some of them crawled on all fours, their bodies bent and disfigured. Others walked, feet dragging.

  “Eledar’s breath,” I whispered.

  The one closest to me moved with shocking speed, lunging towards the sound of my voice. I lurched backwards. Its blind eyes swiveled and circled in its eye sockets as it pressed its face and clawed hands up against some invisible barrier. It tilted its head back and sniffed the air.

  “What in the blazes!” I cried.

  The others were moving faster now, barking and coughing, stirred up by the one who lunged at me.

  “My persecutors,” Reacher said. “A script written to hunt and purge. They have hounded me to every corner of the network. I thought that they could not find me here. I should not have brought you.”

  They were raging now, climbing over each other, pressing up against an invisible barrier. The barrier formed a sphere around us. I could tell by the way the monsters leaned and pressed against it, legs and arms bending and tangling as they probed for weakness.

  There were so many, and they cared nothing for each other. The ones at the bottom of the heap served as stepping-stones for the next wave. Soon the whole sphere was covered by the writhing mass. The invisible dome started to warp and bow beneath their weight.

  “I cannot hold them much longer,” Reacher said. His voice sounded strained. “You must get out of here. We may yet have one or two allies who can still help us. I have sent word to one. He will be waiting.”

  “What about you?”

  “I have one place left to hide.”

  “Wait! What am I supposed to do without you?”

  Reacher reached out and touched my forehead. The barking and growling rose to a roar, almost drowning out his words. “Wake up.”

  31 Go Back In

  Warm air flowed in through my nostrils, acrid and salty, and the fetor of excrement filled my lungs, making me cough and retch. My whole body ached, and the coughing sent stabs of pain through my chest. When the fit passed and the pain abated, I opened my eyes, rubbing my hands across my face, then rolled forward to my hands and knees. My forearms were cut and bruised, and even though the air was warm, a chill slithered in my bones. I lifted my head, readying to stand, and that’s when I saw where I was.

  A massive room. Hundreds of human bodies lay prone on the floor, withered and emaciated. Some were dead. Others were clearly dying.

  The closest to me had rivulets of blood trickling from open sores all over his naked body, forming tiny pools on the ground beneath him. He started twitching, and vomit filled his mouth. It was laced with streaks of crimson, bubbling over his lips. I watched, paralyzed, until his lungs emptied out his final breath.

  The room wavered like a heat mirage. Pain throbbed at the back of my skull, radiating down my spine. I reached up to touch the spot, and felt a hard, metallic ridge protuding from my neck.

  A transmitter was embedded in my
field port.

  Panic rose in my gut. The transmitter was sealed in tight. I either had to find a way to unlatch it, or I’d have to tear it out. Breathe, Oren, I thought to myself. Breathe. You’ll find a way to remove it, but right now, you must try to do what Reacher needs you to, while you still have the will to act.

  I stood up. The room was spinning now. I took another deep breath, steadying myself, and began to walk towards a faint light on the far end of the room, weaving my way through the bodies.

  I pictured Siddart, writhing under Adjet’s knife. I prayed for Neka, prayed that she was somewhere safe. But I did not see any of my close friends. The people around me were all Kkadie and Sagain. Whatever cultural differences that might have once distinguished them had been eradicated. They had been stripped down and gouged out.

  I stopped walking and shut my eyes. Grief threatened me. I thought of Saiara, saw us again on the edge of the central reservoir on Transcendence, careless of all we stood to lose in the years to come. If only she was here, I thought, she would find a way to fix this.

  But it was left to me.

  I opened my eyes and started walking again. I knew that when I reached the doorway, a person would be there, waiting for me. My ally. Reacher had somehow imbued me with this premonitory knowledge.

  He wore a long cloak, and he was crouched over the naked body of young woman, his back to me. Her eyes were shut, and her ribs protruded up through the meager flesh of her torso, but there was no rise and fall of breath. He touched her forehead, then her lips, speaking a blessing for peace in the realms beyond.

  The sound of his voice filled me so with joy and relief that I couldn’t even speak his name. Then he turned at the sound of my approach, and the smile forming on my lips fell into shock.

  “Socha?” I whispered.

  His face was a scarred wreck. The flesh below his blind left eye looked like melted wax, layered with folds and ridges, and his beard and scalp looked as if someone had been tearing the hair out in clumps, leaving patches of bare skin across his head.

  He smiled at the sight of me. It was a gruesome sight. His gums were blackened and he was missing several teeth.

  “Orenpausha,” he said in a quiet voice as he stood up. He took a step towards me, but then he stumbled. I caught his arm before he could fall, and pulled him close to me, wrapping him in my arms. He felt impossibly light and thin beneath his cloak as he leaned against me. I stroked the hair still left on his ravaged scalp.

  “Socha,” I said in a choked voice. “What have they done to you?”

  He made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob, his face buried in my chest.

  “Oh, Socha. I am so sorry.”

  We stood there, leaning on each other, and I wished with everything I had that I could turn back to the moment I met this man, my faithful friend, and stop him from pledging himself to our ill-fated dream. But it was a futile wish, and we had to keep moving.

  “Socha,” I said, stepping back from him, “we are in grave danger. We need to get out of here. Do you know the way?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he crouched down and picked up another cloak from the ground. “Here,” he said, “I found this for you. You must be cold. Take it.”

  I put the cloak on. It was tight around my chest and shoulders, and only hung down to my thighs, but I felt better to have it on.

  He nodded, satisfied. “The god Reacher woke me from my wicked slumber and told me everything. Ne-uru-gal knows we are free, and he will come for us, but there is a path that remains hidden from him.

  “Come.” He grabbed me by the arm and led us away from that chamber of the lost.

  * * *

  The sun hit my eyes. After all my days in darkness, the pain was intense. We held in the doorway at the edge of the threshold, where the light was quieter.

  I squinted, and the scene began to reveal itself. A beautiful courtyard, with a copse of cedar trees in the center. Wild apple trees were dotted beneath the cedars, branches heavy with yellow fruit. The open space around the copse was ringed with columns imprinted with cuneiform runes. The ground was tiled with sandstone bricks, eggshell blue and white.

  When my eyes adapted, I tapped Socha on the arm, then made my index and middle finger move like two legs walking. We headed into the open courtyard and found ourselves surrounded on all sides by towering walls, punctuated with tall, arched windows. There was no sign of movement up in those shadowed arches, but it was easy to imagine some malign force lurking in the darkness, watching us from above. As we approached the trees, a clutch of larks took flight, emerging from the leaves with a chorus of titters and the staccato rattle of feathered wings. My senses thrummed with surprise.

  But my fear began to fade once we were beneath the canopy of cedars. The light was scattered and muted, motes of dust floating through the thin, luminous pillars spilling down through gaps in the shade. The ground was littered with seed pods and dried shoots. I caught a pod with my toe, sending it caroming off the nearest tree trunk with a hollow thunk.

  The sensory experience enveloped me, filling me with an intense, hypnotic pleasure. Despite the heat, a shiver passed through my body, prickling the hairs on my arm. As we moved deeper into the trees, the brush thickened. We were forced to slow our pace. It was as if we were traveling backwards through time, to a world before human intervention, a wild and untamed forest, not the manicured growth of a courtyard.

  Then we came to the border of a sunlit clearing in the trees. A placid pool, filled with silver water smooth as a mirror rested in the center of the clearing. The pool was edged with tiles, shaping the water into a perfect circle.

  A shock ran through me as I came to the edge of the pool. The man who stared back at me from the water was unrecognizable, skin pale and sallow, eyes sunken in shadow. I opened my cloak, turning my torso. In the mirror reflection of the pool, my back was covered with small sores and lacerations, and my ribs were pressed up against my skin.

  A handsome child stepped up next to my reflection. His eyes were a bright grey, almost silver. I turned to look, but there was no boy standing next to me. When I looked back at the water, he was gone.

  I took a few deep breaths, steadying myself, then knelt down, breaking the surface with my fingers. The water was cool and reassuring. Circles rippled out across its surface.

  Socha crouched down to my left, and we watched each other, our reflections wavering as the ripples settled. I turned to look at him in profile. His face looked noble and whole from this angle, his seeing eye staring down at the water, his scars hidden from view.

  Then he turned to me, giving me full view of his old wounds. “This is where we part ways, pausha,” he said.

  “What?” I stood up.

  “I’ve taken you as far as I can,” he said. “I would not survive the journey you now must take.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He pointed at the water. Then he smiled and brought his hands close to his chest and thrust his arms out in wide arcs around each side of his body.

  “You want me to swim?”

  He nodded.

  I looked back at the pool of water. “How deep does it go?”

  “Too deep for me to follow.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “The dark god Ne-uru-gal has my wife and child, pausha. If they are still alive, I will find them.”

  “Socha…” I said, hesitating. I didn’t know how to tell him what I’d seen and done, the darkness that Adjet had become, the lust we’d shared for each other, and the violence she had inflicted on our companions.

  He stood and touched my arm. “I know what you mean to say, pausha, but you need not say it. If you and I can come back from this terrible darkness, than there is still hope for her and for our child. I must at least try.

  “Now go. Time is running short, and Ne-uru-gal is angry.”

  “Thank you, Socha,” I said, grasping his shoulder. “Go and find your family. And may the spirits of
the Scions travel with you.”

  Then I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with air, and dove beneath the water.

  * * *

  The shaft of the well went straight down, and when I glanced back, the surface was already a distant circle of light. Panic taunted me. I’ve held my breath for over twenty minutes, but I had no idea how deep the well went, and I was tired and weak.

  But I could not afford to waste energy with fear. I turned my back on the surface and focused my whole mind toward the act of swimming, propelling myself deeper and deeper with steady kicks and strokes, building a rhythm. The light from the surface faded, and in the growing darkness, I caught sight of a diffuse blue glow below me. I swam towards it, and soon came to an opening in the side of the well shaft.

  A long conduit of water stretched away from me, filled with the same scattered blue light, brighter at the far end. It was hard to be sure, but as I swam into the conduit, I had the impression that I was climbing up again, at a much slighter incline.

  I fell into a rhythmic lull, my mind going quiet with the monotony of the effort. Then, suddenly, my diaphragm spasmed. My brain was hungry for oxygen, and the urge to open wide and inhale threatened to drown me. I repressed the urge, letting the involuntary spasms rise and fall in waves, slowing myself with gentle strokes until the worst of the impulse passed.

  When I looked up again, the narrow shaft ahead of me had opened up to a wide pool of gleaming azure light. The surface! I raced towards it. My head and arms broke through, and I gasped, pulling in gulps of air.

  As my breathing leveled, I took in my surroundings. I was inside a cavernous grotto. Light filtered in from cloudy glass portholes dotting the ceiling in a honeycomb pattern. I couldn’t tell if the light was natural or artificial, but it reflected off the water, casting the whole room in muted blue.

  I swam towards the edge of the pool. The reflected light undulated on the walls, luminous dancing particles responding to my movement. I climbed out, dripping wet. The air was cool, and I started shivering, my teeth chattering. I had no way to dry off, so I did a little standing jig, trying to warm my bones while I scanned the room for some idea of what to do next.