by Amber Stuart
Light reflected from his dark blue irises. Dark brown hair contrasted his oddly-symmetrical face, the dark grey eyes I could see... or were they brown? Now green... they seemed to change every few seconds as his face contorted in some intense emotion over me.
I heard words, but it took me more seconds to recognize them as coming from him.
It took a few beats longer to make sense of them.
"Why are you here?” he shouted. He clutched my arm, his fingers frantic, filling me with fear. “Why? You should not be here! You are in the wrong place... !"
Here, the sun was shining.
The air smelled like...
Flowers. But also smoke.
I fought to breathe, lost in a sudden grip of emotion, more than I could stand. Even in the midst of my mind essentially cracking, the more logical threads ran in an undercurrent below, strangely calm, and asking some of the more relevant questions.
Was this shock? Was I in shock right now?
Was I dying? Was the air here killing me as I breathed it?
Or had I died earlier... when I first stepped inside that ring of white stones?
He said the process would kill me. Was it killing me? Would I die?
But I didn’t die. Somehow, realizing that slowed my breathing, but not enough to dim the emotions that still warred in my chest. I calmed, but not enough to relax that suffocating need to survive that lit a hotter flame in my belly. The latter made me ready to sprint into the trees or get in a fist fight. Or maybe do both at the same time.
I could hear other voices now.
Meaning, I could hear voices apart from the voice of the man in the strange black clothes, the man whose eyes continued to change colors while I watched. I remembered him now, more or less. He’d taken me on that crazed motorcycle ride on the Enfield, evading aliens with blue-white laser cannons... not long after he'd tried to rescue me from that homicidal mark in that alley near Pioneer Square.
Pioneer Square, which was in Seattle.
Seattle, which was in the state of Washington.
Washington, which was part of the United States of America.
... In the general vicinity of Earth.
My mind tried to process all of that, too.
More specifically, it tried to avoid the thought that I no longer resided anywhere near any one of those places.
The survival thing remained the loudest, though.
It jangled nerves and adrenaline through my very bones. Those other, different voices, worried me. Truthfully, they worried me a lot more than this guy did, no matter how tense or upset he seemed.
I fought to breathe, gripping the man's shirt, maybe for balance.
He held me equally tightly in his hands and arms, but I saw that worry intensify in his eyes, growing into an overt fear as he looked around where we crouched like a feral animal. He looked like he expected us to be attacked. Normally, that wouldn’t have bothered me so much, mainly because he clearly had a twitchy demeanor in general.
But here, given everything, his fear was too much for mine.
My survival instincts tried to identify the danger he clearly sensed, to incorporate it into my new reality. That part of me looked for solutions, countermoves, strategies.
It didn’t find any.
I struggled to my feet, and he helped me... but it was already too late.
A line of forms appeared at the edge of the largest ring of white stones, just in front of that tall, shimmering archway.
They held sticks in their hands, or what looked like sticks... or maybe poles.
Really, they were long, straight, possibly-metal, rod-type things, unlike anything I had ever seen before. They didn't look like guns, or like the fighting staffs I’d used in martial arts classes. The people standing there clearly held them like some kind of weapon, however.
The man holding me tightened his grip.
His hair looked black now, but I saw streaks of blond in the front, what might have been the beginnings of a fiery, coppery-red on one side. His fingers remained firm around mine and I clutched him back, feeling suddenly as if I'd known him for a lot longer than I had. I sensed his confusion, as well as a near protectiveness towards me that didn’t do a lot to reassure me that we weren’t both about to get our asses kicked.
He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly, as if using them to think. His irises had turned a light, smoky color now, mirrored chunks of glass that reflected the sky’s depths.
Above, I felt that sky pressing down on the two of us.
I felt the stone arch looming over us, too.
I didn't feel safe. Even without that crowd of armed people staring at us, I didn’t feel safe here at all.
"This is a bad place," I muttered, holding him tighter.
He didn't disagree with me.
"What do we do?" I said, maybe just wanting him to talk.
After all, what could we do? We were surrounded. I could barely breathe here, and those cliffs looked too steep to climb, at least in any kind of hurry. Still, it wasn’t really like me to defer that particular question to someone else.
Asking him seemed to make the most sense, though.
He glanced at me, as if reluctant to give me a truthful answer. His eyes looked resigned, even below that worry.
"We wait," he said.
For the first time, probably because I’d only been around him in the dark before now, I realized his words didn't quite match the movement of his lips.
“...We wait," he repeated. "They will come for us. Until then, we wait." He looked at my face, studying my eyes. "It could be bad before then.” His voice grew careful, but that regret grew more audible. "I am sorry,” he said, still watching me. “I am sorry, Dakota."
I only looked at him. It occurred to me that I’d never told him my name.
Compared to the expression on his face, however, that struck me as a detail.
He looked afraid. The fear didn’t bother me too much... because, yeah, a bunch of people with weapons were walking towards us. He’d have to be a little thick not to be nervous about that. The emotion I could see beyond that fear bothered me a lot more.
Behind the fear, my new friend looked resigned.
He looked as though he’d already lost... or, at least, that he completely accepted our inevitable defeat. He looked at me like he saw our powerlessness as immutable fact. He also looked resigned to endure whatever he seemed to think would come next.
That resignation scared me.
I found myself remembering something Gantry said to me once, too.
You cannot argue with gravity.
My new friend looked like he’d discovered that truth the hard way... and more times than he could probably count.
If he felt like that here, after what I’d seen him do... I was definitely screwed.
My friend’s gaze swiveled as I thought it, aiming at the line of people approaching us with those weapon-like sticks. My eyes followed his, and for the first time, I realized the people standing there all wore the same dark-gray uniforms. Those uniforms looked similar to what the man next to me wore, but the complexions of the faces above the high-necked collars looked darker, and somehow wilder. Their hair all shone the same light color, nearly white, differentiating them from any ethnicity I’d ever encountered in the States. It also made their coloring look artificial... but the uniformity across all of them made me think it probably wasn’t, no matter how it looked to me.
That weird, albino hair––with the faintest tinge of reddish-orange and most of it the consistency of dry straw––stuck out at different lengths all over their heads. Their reddish-brown skin contrasted their hair color strangely, even as it also seemed to go with it. The same was true of the black irises they all seemed to have been born with, which stared out from apparently lash-less and eyebrow-less eyes. Either way, not a lot of variation among this group.
Well, unless I simply wasn’t looking at the right thin
gs.
While they didn't look like any people I’d ever seen, they did look like people.
Somehow, that made it more weird, not less.
When my friend turned back towards me, the hardness had returned to his eyes. He looked openly hunted now, and some of that seemed aimed at me.
He reached down, using his fingers to press my eyelids closed.
"Do not open them," he told me. "Not for any reason."
"Wait!" I said, opening them again, my voice close to frantic. "What is your name?"
He gave me a surprised look. Then his expression softened. He looked down at me as if my question touched him somehow.
"Nihkil," he said. "It is Nihkil." He touched my face again, softer, near to my eyes. "Close them," he said. "Please."
That time, for reasons I couldn't understand, I did.
Right after that, a sharp pain hit my neck, hard enough to make me gasp.
... after that, I felt nothing at all.
6
SUPERNATURAL BADNESS
IT SEEMED LIKE hours later when something jostled me awake.
My arms hurt. My neck hurt more, like an ice pick lay embedded somewhere deep between my shoulder blades.
It took me a second longer to realize I was being dragged.
My feet bumped and jostled along a hard, uneven surface.
Shadows confused me, cutting up the sharper glints of light. I couldn’t see the sky. Only a water-like shimmer passed liquidly in front of my eyes.
I tried to remember where I was.
I remembered my friend. That part felt real. Nihkil.
But I could hardly remember him, either, what with the pounding behind my eyes.
I fought with things I understood.
Things from my own world.
Irene would be looking for me. She’d be frantic by now. Or... maybe not enough time had passed for that. Maybe she was still wondering why I was late getting back, what went wrong with the job.
If that were true, she'd probably be back at the office, cursing me out for taking my sweet time, or worrying I sat in a drunk tank somewhere. She might be trying to decide if she should risk calling around to check. She’d probably assume I’d gotten picked up by the cops or maybe, if her imagination was really working overtime... she might worry the mark got to me, and hurt bad enough to end up in the hospital.
She'd be worried, yeah. Even if she didn’t know I’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Even if they hadn’t found the Enfield in that golf course yet.
It would probably come out later as one of Irene's confusing and nonlinear lectures, the ones that didn't seem to have a lot to do directly with whatever had actually happened. She'd give me a hard time about how I drove my motorcycle, for example... or demand to know why I wore that particular purse to the job, when I knew damned well it might throw me off balance while I ran in those boots. Irene, queen of the non-sequitur.
She meant well, of course.
When I first met her, I rarely knew what the hell she was driving at until she’d been talking for a few minutes. I’d developed an odd sort of fondness for the way her concern tended to manifest itself, though... even if it could be maddening sometimes, too.
"Just don't do it in front of the clients," I muttered under my breath, watching that light and dark liquid shimmer in front of my eyes.
I’d said it to her about a million times.
Like it did any good.
Irene was Irene. She didn’t really have different settings for different social situations. When she tried to act normal, generally it only made things worse.
My smile faded when my shoulder struck a small boulder, hard enough for me to grunt in pain. It snapped me out of my fugue state a little, though.
I looked up and back, craning my head.
Men carried me. Not just one. Three of them.
They carried me facedown, which was why I hadn’t seen the sky.
When I looked up now, hard, angular faces shone in small circles cut in gray, skin-like cloth. Pale, white hair with orange metallic highlights ruffled at different lengths in the breeze. Remembering faces like these from the nightmare I'd just left, I cried out in fear, fighting to writhe free of their hold. They’d bound my hands, though. Two different guys each held one of my ankles.
I struggled harder.
When I did, the pain in my neck screamed.
My body felt strangely light, my limbs stiff, difficult to manage.
Without warning, they let me go.
I landed painfully on my knees, seemingly on nothing but sharp edges.
Gasping against that fire blooming in my knees, I looked around. I found myself in what appeared to be a dry creek bed, filled with chunks of glass-like rock. Above me, a near waterfall of the same, glass-like, smoky rocks littered a steeper slope. I didn't see any water, though. I guessed the water I’d thought I saw was nothing but the glass rocks themselves, glinting in sunlight and shadow.
I watched in a kind of numb shock as the two men walked away.
Their postures remained casual, openly indifferent, as if they'd just left a bag of dirty clothes at Goodwill. In any case, they didn't seem overly worried about me trying to escape.
I fought to stand.
I got hit, hard, by a wave of dizziness once I got a booted foot on the ground. Struggling to stay upright, I was forced to stop, panting. I managed to catch myself before I face-planted into those glass-like rocks... barely. Waiting until the next wave of sickening spins passed, I tried to think, to assess my options.
They must have drugged me.
That, or the air was all wrong for me here, just not wrong enough to kill me.
Either way, the last thing I needed was to pass out.
I needed my hands free.
When my head and vision more or less cleared, I brought my bound wrists to my mouth, trying my teeth on the rope. The consistency was all wrong, though... it was more like skin than fibers, and my incisors only managed to mush it around.
After a few more minutes of that, I realized it was futile.
I looked around for weapons, next.
Remembering those glass-like shards of rock, I fumbled around in the pile where I lay. Finding one with a sharp, knife-like edge, I wedged it between two others on the ground in front of me. Then I tried sawing at the alien rope again, using my knees to hold the rock still.
All it did was create line-like indentations in the blue-gray material. The material felt like rubber, only rubber with the tensile strength of steel. No matter how sharp the stones, the material only slid around under the glass-like edges, evading any attempt puncture or tear it.
I stopped long enough to rest, looking up at the cliffs.
Fern trees waved from sheer lines of marbled rock, along with flowers that looked bigger than my head, now that I was closer. I wondered briefly at the make-up of the insect population here, then shoved that from my mind, too.
My mind grew paralyzed by the view of that deep-blue, purple-tinted sky.
No way I could convince myself that sky belonged to Earth.
No way I could convince myself that I’d just passed out, that night magically turned to day, that I was in South America or some other part of Earth, not even if I’d been knocked out for a few weeks, or drugged, or if my mind had suddenly snapped. Any one of those things might still be true, of course, but I struggled more and more to convince myself that some combination of those factors could explain everything I was seeing.
The high, dome-like sky simply looked too real.
The air smelled too hot, too rancid with plant-like decay, too filled with foreign sweat and fragrances and hints of water. Blue-green clouds morphed too perfectly in wind, even as the cries of some kind of animal reached me through the breeze from a distance.
Then I heard something else. Something a lot more familiar-sounding.
A thick gasp, followed by a scattering
of laughter.
I looked down the slope, towards the trees.
I saw buildings there, and blinked at them in surprise. They stood in the trees about a hundred feet away, all the same gray-blue color. The colors and shapes of those buildings both contrasted strangely with the lushness of the jungle and helped them to blend into the dirt and rocks below. Half-buried in the trees, they looked to be made of some kind of metal. Blue-gray in color, it reminded me somehow of the glass rocks, and the uniforms those men wore.
The laughter grew louder.
Loud enough to convince me it was real.
My eyes swiveled, finding the source.
More men in those same, gray scuba suits were dragging something, some kind of animal that appeared to be wounded. I recognized the form then, and let out a startled gasp.
It was him. Nihkil... my odd stranger with the different-colored eyes and the super-strength. The same guy I’d been dumb enough to follow to this place, even after he specifically told me not to.
I watched as four men threw Nihkil to the ground, a lot less gently than they had me. They slammed him against a boulder made of that sharp, glass-like rock, so that his back hit flat against one side.
Panting, Nihkil held up a hand in a kind of supplication.
It only made those jerks with the weird hair and the gray scuba suits laugh harder.
I felt my jaw clench, but only watched, silent.
Unlike with me, they didn't leave Nihkil alone.
A circle of maybe eight people stood over him instead, pacing like jackals in front of a wounded antelope. They looked as if they were trying to decide how long they should play with him before they ate him. They’d already bound Nihkil’s arms at awkward angles behind his back. His feet appeared to be bound, too, with the same strong but stretchy material that encased my wrists. Something that looked like a shard of glass, covered in blood, stuck out of his shoulder. One of his ears bled, and blood trickled down from under his hairline.
I was still staring, fighting the reality of what I saw, while at the same time trying to decide if there was anything I could do... when the soldier closest to Nihkil kicked him in the thigh. He did it hard enough to make me jump.
