Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  The sound seemed to turn back on, somewhere after that initial moment of heart-pounding terror. Screams mixed with the sound of falling debris.

  The groan of metal overhead made me look up in panic, but the trellis directly over us seemed mostly intact, if covered with a fine, reddish-white powder from the stone floor and probably the damage to the high ceiling.

  It occurred to me that, despite the man’s stares, we’d been far enough away to avoid the worst of the blast, especially with the trellis protecting us overhead.

  Smoke and dust made me cough.

  A table-sized slab of rock dropped down from the ceiling, landing smack in the middle of a cluster of kiosks on the sloped main floor. It fell not far from the crater left by the suicide bomber himself. I couldn’t hear, tried to see through the smoke and dust but could only make out vague shapes, stumbling and mewling in the dim light.

  For a few long seconds, all I felt was him.

  He was hurt. I could feel it now, so urgently that his pain wanted me to block out all the rest.

  Somewhere in that, he sat up.

  I slid awkwardly to the floor, still deafened by the rushing and ringing in my ears.

  Nihkil leaned against the edge of the table, panting. I pulled myself up beside him, grabbing the bindings on his wrists. I yanked on them, but they didn’t budge.

  “Get them off! Now, Nihkil!” I said, nearly shouting. Realizing I was half-deaf from the blast, I fought to lower my voice. "Nik... change yourself! Get out of them!"

  “I can’t,” he said, looking up at me. “It doesn’t work that way, Dakota. You have to open the lock for real. Open it... please...” Seeing the blank look on my face, he seemed to give up, pushing at me with his shoulder. “Go! Find Mai’... she'll get you out of here.”

  “No! I’m not leaving you here, Nik... they just tried to kill you!”

  “Go, Dakota! Please go! He warned us... you saw him do it. They’re not after me––”

  “You can change!” I stared at him, sure of it suddenly. “You can, Nik! I know you can. Make yourself change! Open the lock!”

  Frustration reached his eyes.

  He turned then, his eyes scanning the dais around them.

  “The guard!” He pointed with his head. “They’ll have a key. It’s small, it’ll look like...”

  He fumbled for words in English, but I already had a picture in my head from watching the guards lock him to the table.

  Half-running to the other end of the table, I crawled over the felled guards once I got there, fumbling with their clothes, rifling through pockets.

  A few seconds later I had it, ripping it out of the sleeve pocket of one of the human guards who’d been killed. He’d been impaled by part of a kiosk that got driven through the middle of his chest, probably in the initial blast. The man’s arm felt like jelly, as if his bones had been crushed to powder beneath the skin.

  Grimacing, I removed the thin tool, holding it up to show Nihkil.

  “That’s it,” he said, relieved. “Bring it here!”

  I crawled, climbed and stepped over bodies, then ran again to return to his side, using the table for balance.

  When I reached him, Nik tried to take the key from my fingers, but I jerked it back, leaning over his cuffed wrists. My hand shook as I inserted the device into the lock. There was a moment before I positioned it just right, then the three sets of rings opened on each of his arms. They revealed pale wrists colored by swollen bands of purple and black.

  Tearing my eyes off the welts and bruises, I tried immediately to pull him to his feet, but Nik staggered, grabbing hold of the table. When I tugged on him again, he let out a low sound, gripping the black metal until his knuckles whitened.

  Watching him pant, I looked around us again, trying to get my bearings.

  I was conscious of time again.

  It occurred to me we might not have a lot of time left.

  Glass covered the floor; it had already sliced open the blue socks I wore, cutting my feet. I tried not to look at the blank faces staring out from under debris, lost in that cloying confusion that came from not being able to hear very well, or see through the chalky powder from the walls.

  Bare minutes had passed since that initial blast.

  I saw shapes moving erratically in the smoke, more of them now, covered in reddish powder and choking as they fought their way over larger pieces of debris. Black marks and burns covered most of their clothes and parts of their bare skin. The air smelled like singed hair, smoke and burning synthetics... kind of like the smell of burning plastic back home. Much more disturbingly, I caught a denser, more cloying whiff of cooked flesh.

  Blood got clotted and muted on clothes and skin by lighter stone dust, but I saw fresh streaks of that on faces and trickles from open wounds, as well.

  One or two of the guards in the corner were moving feebly now, too.

  I looked down at myself and saw blood running down both of my legs. I’d cut my knees looking for the key and hadn’t felt a thing. My dress was black with smoke, coated in dust; I looked like I'd been lit on fire and put out all over my body at the same time.

  I bent over Nihkil and that time, he let me help him up.

  He straightened slowly. As he did, I finally saw it with my eyes.

  Burns littered his back, singeing off part of his hair. A piece of metal stuck out of one shoulder and another, smaller piece, stuck out of his right arm. An open cut, covered in red dust, also stretched across his back, charred black at the edges of his jacket and shirt.

  Wrapping an arm around my shoulder, he leaned on me, but not with all of his weight.

  "I didn't see any more of them," he said via the link, probably as much to compensate for the noise as a desire for privacy. "Do you see anything, Dakota?"

  I looked around, trying to pick out any glimpse of intention in the people remaining, anyone moving with purpose, or even just heading in our general direction.

  I tried to clue into the whole spidey-sense, too. Meaning, I tried to decide if I still got that feeling of being hunted, or even watched.

  Of course, I was pretty wigged out, shaking with adrenaline, in shock...

  But I saw no one who fit any of those descriptions.

  I didn’t feel anything, either.

  Well, other than the obvious things.

  Everyone alive I saw seemed to be panicking, either screaming in pain and terror, or going into full-blown shock. For the most part, I saw a lot of dead people, though. The living ones moved in a half-alive daze, as if the blast had somehow blown them far away from the reality of their bodies.

  "No," I told him, still looking around. "Do you think there are likely to be more?"

  Nihkil didn’t answer.

  I continued scanning faces, but now I was also trying to find us an exit, fighting to remember the layout through the smoke-filled obstacle course I now faced. The landscape had turned unrecognizable. Everything appeared to be broken, punctuated by holes in the sloped floor and cracks up the steep, cliff-like walls. A segment of the domed skylight had shattered, despite its great height, raining glass down on that part of the room. Fires burned in a half-dozen places, mostly on what remained of the kiosks and the entertainment stages.

  I heard people call for help, mostly in Pharize. I heard a few other languages, as well. I saw one of those giant lizard creatures half-crushed under a piece of ceiling. It looked dead to me, and wasn't moving at all.

  I still couldn’t see more than a dozen yards in any direction.

  Nihkil tugged on my arm.

  I glanced at him, and realized he still leaned most of his weight on the table, holding on to me even as he rested his palm there, his face contorted in pain.

  "We have to go, Dakota. We have to go now."

  "What about all of these people?" I said.

  "Someone will be along to help them... it can't be us."

  I felt his fear. Looking at his face a
nd feeling what I felt through the lock, I realized he was downplaying the danger, not the reverse. I watched people stumble through the smoke. Hesitating another beat, I found myself nodding.

  "Okay," I said, looking at him. "All right, Nik. Where do we go?"

  I saw his eyes change, a flicker of uncertainty.

  Then that uncertainty disappeared.

  Holding me tighter, he pulled his weight roughly off the table. It felt like it took a lot of his strength to do it, and I saw his face contort in more pain.

  Before I could speak, another sound cut me off.

  It reminded me of old air-raid sirens, like they sometimes set off for drills in Seattle. The alarm began to wail from an outside corridor first, jerking both of our gazes towards the higher part of the slanted floor.

  Quickly, that alarm started getting louder.

  Without waiting, Nihkil began to walk.

  He led me to the edge of the platform, still half-leaning on my shoulder, then we descended the stairs together, making our way down from the raised dais with Nihkil moving one step at a time and wincing at each shift in his weight.

  He still hadn’t made a sound though, I realized.

  When we reached the main floor, a hissing sound erupted, just before a pale, sticky chemical began falling down around us in sheets. The chemical covered every inch of the floor under the dome, dousing flames, splattering on scorched rock, steaming as it hit hot metal and stone. It plastered my braids to my head, sliming down over my skin, making it harder to see.

  Feeling like a cat who'd fallen into an oil pan, I glanced up and back at Nihkil.

  The slimy chemical had plastered his hair to his head, too.

  His eyes looked different, even beyond the deep-black color they now held. They looked inhuman now, completely alien. He scanned the face of every person who came near us, as if seeing each and every one of them as a probable threat.

  He held me tighter now, too... so tightly that I had to struggle to draw a full breath, even apart from the chemicals and the smoke and whatever else floated in the air.

  We had been forgotten in the chaos, though, I realized.

  No one seemed to care about us at all.

  The fact that pretty soon no one would be able to identify our faces––or anyone else’s, for that matter––due to the sticky fire retardant, didn’t hurt.

  Either way, by the time the military entered from the other end of the corridor, shouting out commands to the survivors, I saw no one looking at us at all.

  20

  AFTERMATHS AND INJURIES

  "THAT ONE," HE said, panting. "Dakota. Check it."

  Leaning Nik carefully against the wall, I studied the nearest doorway, trying to locate active surveillance, although I wasn't positive I would recognize it even if I saw it.

  The whole security network seemed to be off-line, or shorting out maybe. Sections of the corridor would light up and die down, as if fighting some unseen force.

  By then, I was thinking that maybe Nihkil had been right, that this was some kind of precursor to a Malek attack. He hadn't wanted us to return to our assigned quarters, for the same reason that he didn’t want to be anywhere that someone who breached the system might find. Of course, the Malek could still track us by our implants, in theory at least, but Nik told me that the Republic’s implant tracking should shut the Malek out in the event of an attack. It was one way to prevent mass killings by targeting concentrations of implant signals.

  It also prevented them from targeting the leadership specifically, Nik noted.

  Anyway, he was pretty confident about the implants.

  He was less sure about regular directory functions tied to registration databases.

  So we didn’t go back to our room. Instead, we were in the abandoned corridor of a much older residential area, one that appeared to be in disuse.

  So far, most of the doors had been locked.

  I glanced at the ancient access panel embedded in the wall next to the oval door, and realized at once why Nihkil had chosen it. There might be some chance of breaking the outdated lock enough that it would get us inside. Also, it appeared to have power, which meant the lights might still work, among other things.

  "They’ll know if we use any of the equipment," I reminded him. "If we activate any of the machines, it'll track to the main grid... even the door. Right?"

  He nodded. "Yes. You are correct. But people break into these all the time, Dakota. They won't have time to chase down every malfunctioning door, not with a breach alarm going off. Not when they are on high-alert status for a possible attack."

  "They have my implant frequency," I reminded him dubiously. "And yours." Seeing him about to repeat what he’d told me before, I added, “The Pharei, I mean, Nik. Not the Malek. They can still track us, right? The Pharei? Implant to implant?”

  “Yes. In theory.”

  “Yeah... so? Isn’t this risky?”

  Nik shrugged. "Anything is risky, Dakota. If the Pharei are looking for us, and still have access to our implant codes, then it won't matter where we are.”

  Seeing how pale he was, I didn’t argue.

  Laying my hand over the access panel, I held my breath for the few seconds it took for the signal to deactivate the lock on the door.

  When the mechanism gave a low groan, right before the door began disappearing into the wall, I exhaled in relief.

  I didn’t just walk right through, though.

  My old training still lived in me, somewhere. So I made sure Nik remained out of view of the opening, then slid my head over slightly to peer inside. Luckily, the light from the corridor easily illuminated the four corners of the small room.

  After making sure it was empty, I touched the panel just inside the door to activate the internal sensors.

  Whatever my fears, the room behaved like any Pharei room, just slower.

  Lights came on in flickers and starts, starting with the floor runners and working their way up to a dull glow around the rim of the ceiling. A square bed stood in the far corner, covered in rectangular cushions, each about a foot or more thick and dark brown in color. Otherwise the room looked mostly bare, as if it had been looted of all other furniture.

  I saw the door to the washing cubicle, though, and sighed in relief.

  A few minutes later, I had Nik inside that same cubicle.

  Getting him there had been a little tricky. Nik wasn’t exactly a small guy, and the round opening hung a good three feet above the floor of the bedroom. Even so, we’d managed it with some helping pulls and pushes from me.

  Now Nik sat on the tile floor, struggling to pull off his jacket, which was littered with burns and powder, and not a small amount of blood. Watching him try to do it on his own for another few seconds, I exhaled in exasperation when he didn’t ask for help, and knelt down to help him anyway. Pushing his hands aside, I moved around behind him, assessing the damage, as well as the places where the fabric was punctured by shrapnel.

  I noted one piece of metal embedded in his arm that looked sharp.

  Assuming Nik really did turn human when he wore that form, it wasn’t near any major arteries. Making a snap decision, I knelt down next to him and grabbed hold of the sharp piece, wrapping my fingers around it and yanking it out with a sharp jerk.

  Ignoring his gasp of surprise and pain, I proceeded to use the same piece of metal to cut the fabric of the jacket off him, at least around the larger piece of metal sticking out of his shoulder. I managed to cut it most of the way off his hurt side a few minutes later. Then, moving carefully still, I began rolling the thick fabric off his remaining arm.

  He winced when I started, and looked at me even, but didn't argue as I finished.

  Instead he braced himself, as if in pain and trying to stay silent. He remained that way until I tugged the last of the jacket off his wrists. When I reached for his shirt, getting ready to cut that off him, too, he caught my hand.

  "Dak
ota, I’m okay."

  I stared at him. "No, Nik... you’re not. Give it a rest, okay?”

  He looked down, watching his own blood run down the drain.

  “Just let me help you,” I said, exhaling in frustration. “Jesus, what’s the big deal? You’re going to let yourself die, just because you don’t want my help?”

  "I won't die."

  "You know that for sure?"

  He made a noncommittal gesture.

  Looking down at himself, he seemed to make up his mind a few seconds later. Nodding reluctantly, he placed his hands on the tile floor.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Biting back a sarcastic comment, I slid closer to him again and started unfastening his shirt.

  That time, he let me.

  Sliding around behind him on the wet tile, I cut the fabric around the piece of shrapnel, then peeled the remainder of the sodden fabric off his back. I still had to pull it carefully off the long cut and burn I could see, as well as easing it off the main shrapnel wound that now showed through as a thick metal spike in his back, surrounded by burnt flesh.

  When I got a good look at his skin, I sucked in a breath.

  “Will it kill me?” Nik asked calmly. “When I pull it out?”

  I stared at his back, fighting to control my reaction, or at least to keep it out of my voice.

  Forcing my eyes to the most recent injuries littering his back, shoulder and arms, I returned my gaze to the main piece of shrapnel, which I knew was the object he meant.

  I struggled to answer his question, biting back a kind of fury as I looked at the rest of him.

  "No. I don't think so," I said after a too-long pause. "There's one burn that looks pretty deep, but it's not bleeding much so I think the wound is cauterized. And it shouldn’t kill you, to get out the piece in your shoulder. It’s going to hurt like hell, though... and you’ll probably be sleeping on your stomach for a few weeks."

  I frowned, looking at the other injuries on his back.

  From what I could tell, Nik had been sleeping on his stomach for a few weeks already.

  My anger worsened briefly, but I shoved it aside. I didn’t have time to be pissed off about that now. I’d have to be pissed off about it later. Forcing my mind off the Pharei guards and what they’d done to him, I focused on the problem at hand, instead.