by Amber Stuart
We also couldn’t return to Vilandt.
So yeah, once we walked into Razmun’s gate shift, my last chance of seeing Earth would probably be gone forever. From what Nik told me, coordinates to a particular place varied from dimension to dimension... even gate to gate. While there was no guarantee Nik could have found Earth from the third gate on Vilandt, there was significantly less chance he would be able to find it from another dimension entirely.
It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Or, more accurately, it would be like finding a particular grain of sand in a beach three times the size of the sun.
I’d never see Earth again.
All of this ran through my mind in the handful of seconds it took me and Nik to be shoved towards the gate's high opening behind Razmun and the others.
Once we stood directly under it, I found myself looking around, even as my breathing started to get stuck in my chest, coming out harder with each forced exhale. I’d never been the type to have anxiety issues, but right then, I felt on the verge of a panic attack.
Glancing at Nik, I wondered if he felt it on me, too... and then, looking at him closer, I wondered if he might be the source of it.
Seeing how pale his skin looked under the hood he wore, and how taut his expression, I found myself getting nervous for a whole different set of reasons. Nihkil looked like he was gearing up for a fight... a real one. I’d never seen him look like that before, like he might jump out of his own skin any minute.
I wondered if being unlocked was affecting him again, if he was itching to change forms now that they’d finally removed the artificial restraint. No one came out and said it to me, but I’d definitely gotten the sense that morph got some kind of kick out of shifting.
Maybe closer to exercise and endorphins than actual sex, but with some component of their more primal desires woven into the mix, for sure.
I’d have to ask Nik about that.
Assuming we survived this, of course.
Either way, I had a pretty strong feeling that something was about to happen. The longer I stared at Nik, the more sure I was, until I could practically feel the adrenaline running through his blood between the link we shared.
He must have felt me staring at him. Giving me a bare glance, he asked me in no uncertain terms with his eyes to cut it out.
I did as he asked without hesitation.
Averting my gaze, I fought to focus my eyes through the partially-fogged goggles, looking around at other morph without really seeing them. I felt my fingers clench at my sides, and that tension in my own chest worsened.
Still, a few bits of information got through.
Forcing my eyes around in another arc, I realized in a kind of panic that even more of them stood in the small canyon than I’d originally counted. By the way they all milled and hovered in the clearing directly in front of the gate, I had to assume they were all coming with us.
I tried to make out faces as that fact sank in, and it managed to distract me somewhat from whatever Nik was up to. Seeing the rows of different but similarly-symmetrical faces shining in the illuminated circle thrown off by those odd, blue torches, I tried to count them again, to at least get a ballpark figure of just how many stood there.
Just then, Razmun paused at the opening of the gate, glancing back at the rest of us.
We stood near him again, I realized.
The guards who’d been pushing and prodding at our backs and sides apparently had instructions to keep us within Razmun’s reach. I guess he was still worried about Nik running off, or maybe he’d seen the same thing in Nik’s face that I had.
Either way, he clearly wanted us well-surrounded.
His hands hanging open at his sides, Razmun glanced at me, then at Nik.
"Are you ready, old friend?" he said.
Nik gave him a dismissive look.
I might have even bought it, if I hadn’t felt the adrenaline thrumming through his blood like a hot fever. As it was, I kept expecting one or both of them to crack their knuckles, or make some other posturing move, like two guys in a pissing match might have done on Earth.
Nik gave me a bare glance, but I didn’t see anything in it that time.
Nothing I could identify, anyway.
Razmun glanced at another morph then, one standing by the gate.
“Start the timer,” he said.
I swallowed a little.
I knew he had to be talking about the bomb, or whatever they’d done to get the gate stabilizers to self-destruct after we left.
That whole thing where I might be trapped forever on some alternate dimension was suddenly feeling very real. I couldn’t help wondering if Razmun had been lying about keeping me alive, even in the short term. For all I knew, this place could still kill me upon arrival.
Murdering me might just be another way to screw with Nik’s head, or force him to bond to someone in Razmun’s group.
I’d also noticed Razmun was more than a little jealous of Nik, whatever he pretended.
Thinking about that, I found myself glancing at Nik again, almost without meaning to. Intercepting a second warning stare from him, I looked away just as quickly, but not before I saw that his eyes had gone obsidian black.
I swallowed again, trying to shove the worry from my mind.
Something nagged at me though, pulling at me to pay attention, to think.
Razmun was jealous of Nik.
Why would Razmun be jealous of Nik? Clearly, from when they were kids, Razmun had always been the dominant one, particularly in terms of social interactions. Nik wasn’t the type to bother trying to gain power over people, not unless he had a specific reason. From what I knew of him, he’d never try to manipulate anyone to do his bidding on a regular basis, just to see if he could. The very idea would be abhorrent to him.
Razmun certainly wasn’t jealous of Nik and me, given how much open scorn he’d piled on both of us for being together.
Still, Razmun was jealous. I was sure of it.
Glancing at Nik, I caught him staring at me again, that warning back in his eyes.
I looked away from his face, just in time to see Razmun rip off his goggles, holding them up along with his free hand, presumably to gain all of our attention. I watched his eyes scan the crowd of morph, his irises a bright, pale gold and strangely mesmerizing.
“My friends!” he said, his voice caught on the wind and rain. “My friends, hear me! Now, everything changes! Now, we take the first steps to true freedom!”
I jumped a little when the crowd erupted around me.
Stomping their feet, whistling and cheering, many raised gloved hands to the sky, making a symbol with their fingers and palms that I recognized from the historical recordings.
I had no idea what it meant.
I saw young morph among the adults, even children, noticing them for the first time as they waved their hands, beaming in Razmun’s direction. Older morph stood there, too, possibly relatives of the others, but the majority I saw looked to fall roughly between the ages of twenty and forty-five years old, at least in their human bodies.
It struck me that everyone around us had been poised for that exact moment, watching Razmun with held breaths as he approached the gate.
They were scared, nervous, probably out of their minds with misgivings and doubts. They were leaving the dreaded human slave-owners behind, sure, but they were doing it by going somewhere that might mean all of their deaths. At the very least, they were doing it by leaving everything and everyone they’d ever known behind.
Many of them had likely never been on a gate-shift before, since a good percentage of morph were born without the ability.
As the thought struck me, another one did, too.
I glanced at Nik, and suddenly, I knew exactly why Razmun was jealous of him.
Averting my eyes before the thought could gain much traction, I watched the morph around me begin to chant Razmun’
s rebel name of Zarwin. The rebel leader watched them do it, a faint smile on his face, a glimmer of relief in his eyes... along with an overt, possibly even put-on, expression of affection and pride.
Whatever it was, the other morph seemed to buy it.
I watched as the crowd smiled with him, gazing up at where he stood with a kind of fevered hope in their postures and expressions. Some even appeared to be crying, although it was hard to tell in the rain and with most of us still wearing goggles.
I got it, too.
Even if they hadn’t experienced those things personally, most of the morph in this crowd knew morph in Muganu jail, or morph slaves working for the Malek or the Pharei, or morph who worked as bodyguards, mercenaries or entertainers to individual humans or human cartels.
From the cards, a lot of them probably had hybrid children, too, and somehow I doubted all of them would be as callous as Razmun about abandoning them.
Looking around at the catharsis I could see on different faces, I found myself thinking that morph weren’t all that different from humans, after all.
Clearly, given all of their conflicted feelings around this “escape to freedom” thing, they needed someone to tell them everything would be all right. They needed someone larger than life, some kind of savior-type, even if, somewhere in the back of their minds, they didn’t fully believe it. Razmun twisted that emotional need, just like I’d seen skilled manipulators do with people on Earth.
Knowing Razmun, he’d probably culled his followers from the same desperate and traumatized segment of the population as the worst scam artists, political charlatans and cult leaders did back on Earth.
Even so, gazing around at the shouting morph and their taut but hopeful faces, I could feel a tangible release of their fears as they cheered.
Of course, I knew Razmun had done it for that very reason.
Nik alone seemed unmoved.
He continued to stand there, surrounded by guards, his hands at his sides, his expression unreadable. Remembering I wasn’t supposed to be staring at him, my eyes searched once more for Razmun, instead.
He stood directly before the gate now.
The guards behind me and Nik pushed us forward, so that we were right behind Razmun and his immediate entourage, which also included Oslep, I noticed. The large morph grinned at me under his goggles, the second my eyes fixed on his bulkier form.
He seemed genuinely happy about what was happening.
Before I could smile back, Razmun was already walking into the gate.
The last few strides he took without hesitation, a hard, triumphant look on his face.
Nik followed only two morph behind him, his expression holding something I still couldn’t quite interpret. I had time to think that he looked almost at home in those few seconds, as if the gates really were a part of him somehow, when Razmun disappeared through the stone archway altogether, Oslep close on his heels.
White light rose in a blinding shower.
Like that first time, it was so dense, it felt almost physically tangible.
Within a matter of seconds, I couldn’t see my feet anymore, or any of the faces around me, not even Nik’s. I had a bare second to think: this might be it, I might be dead at the end of this... when the light blotted out the last remnants of my mind, leaving me with a sensation of utter free-fall.
I don’t know how long that lasted.
I only know that, at one point, it changed.
I went from falling to flying.
I went from being pulled to doing the pulling.
I felt Nik in that. I felt him helping me.
A struggle lived in that crossover, too... somewhere at the periphery of my awareness.
Whatever it was, it didn’t really feel like it had anything much to do with me, though... and thankfully, it was over soon.
Nihkil’s presence grew stronger soon after that.
I felt affection on him, what might have been relief. More than that, I felt joy on him, a kind of triumphant happiness.
Whatever its cause, the feeling was infectious.
Rather than being frightened, like I’d more than half-expected while waiting for this thing to start, I felt... liberated. For the first time, maybe in my whole life, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to do.
I was born to do this, to fly.
All of us were, I found myself thinking.
Whether through dreams or fantasies... or simply a fascination with birds and planes... flying was something all people knew, deep in their hearts, that they were born to do.
The idea made me laugh out loud, even though I could no longer see where I was. Even though I no longer knew if I existed at all.
I was meant to fly. I was meant to be flown.
So I flew.
31
AN UNEXPECTED LANDING
... TIME PASSED.
I have no idea how much.
All I knew was, I found myself standing in shocking daylight, once again... and gasping, once again.
I couldn’t catch my breath, but this time, it was because some part of me wanted to breathe too much. I could actually feel my lungs sucking oxygen molecules out of the air around me. Other things drifted into my awareness as I watched my lungs and breath work. I felt off-balance. I felt heavy, but it wasn’t only that. I felt like something inside me had been left somewhere, far behind, and had yet to catch up.
Everything around me appeared to be awash in greens and blues.
The sun hung too bright in a blue sky, but God, it was so familiar...
I took a step forward, and fell.
Grabbing hold of the person next to me, I fought to use them to keep my balance, but nearly pulled them down with me, instead.
Whoever they were, they staggered, too, gasping in a beached fish kind of way.
I heard them let out a frightened moan.
Shapes grew indistinct around me, moving forms and shadows in the blinding light. I realized I was on my knees in soft-feeling ground, that my hands were clutching something growing in that soil.
Staring down at it, I breathed a familiar smell...
I don't know how long I knelt there precisely.
After a few more minutes, where my heart rate slowed back down to non-heart-attack speeds and I could breathe again without choking, it occurred to me that I still wore the infrared goggles. Realizing that the goggles were likely why my eyes still hurt, I ripped them off my head, clutching them in my fingers over that soft ground.
I waited a few seconds more before opening my eyes, rubbing them with a gloved hand and blinking painfully up at the sky. Pretty quickly, though, my eyes felt better, and a lot less like they were going to be burned permanently out of my head.
When my vision finally cleared, my heart started pounding for a different reason.
In my non-goggle-holding hand, I found myself gripping something I knew so well that I cried out in shock.
My fingers wrapped around green grass sprinkled with little brown pine needles and what looked like three-leaf clovers. Dandelions wove into that tapestry, along with what I distinctly recognized as a honey bee, and a little black ant.
My mind balked, fighting not to accept what I was seeing.
Maybe I was afraid to feel it, only to be proved wrong.
I looked up, and found myself staring at a row of triangular-shaped trees surrounded by sharp green grass. Pine trees. At the base of one of them lay a plastic bottle. I found myself laughing aloud, recognizing the Pepsi logo that stared back at me like something from a dream... or maybe a nightmare.
A moan erupted from the grass next to me.
My gaze swiveled, taking in the rest of my surroundings.
I saw morph everywhere, I realized.
Most of them gasped from their knees, or sat on the close-cropped grass. I looked around the section of lawn... and realized I recognized that, too.
The golf course.
We were on the same section of golf course we’d visited that night all those weeks ago. The same one where I’d done my first gate-shift... not long after Nik drove me on the Enfield after we'd nearly been killed by those Malek morph.
Nik had brought me back to Seattle.
The thought barely made sense to my mind.
I looked in the direction of the nearest golf cart track, half-expecting to see my bike still parked on the asphalt, as if everything that happened since had only been some kind of Alice in Wonderland dream.
The Enfield wasn’t there, of course.
When I looked back at the lawn, I saw some kind of scuffle happening.
In the same set of seconds, I got a better snapshot of where I was... in relation to everyone and everything else, that is. Rather than being on the main green of the golf course itself, I knelt at the tree-lined edge on a patch of semi-shaded lawn. About twenty feet away from where the fight erupted... I was another thirty or forty yards from the nearest actual road.
Looking around, I realized morph covered the grass in a circle over fifty meters wide.
I could see more in groups and clusters among the trees rimming the golf course, too, including not far from where I crouched.
It crossed my mind to just run, to bolt out of there and run like hell before someone tried to gate-shift with me again.
A part of me thought I should go now, while everyone was distracted.
I had visions of showing up at Irene’s door, pounding on it, the look of shock on her face as she saw me standing there, wearing these weird-ass clothes with a wild look in my eyes, babbling about being chased by aliens.
My mind continued along with the fantasy, imagining her inviting me in, her making me... shit... coffee.
I hovered on that vision of me sitting at her crappy linoleum dining table, watching her smoke and tap her fingers nervously as I drank a real cup of Irene’s psychotically-strong coffee and tried to explain to her where I’d been.
In my mind, I saw her smoking nervously as I told her the whole, crazy story, and explained to her about Nik, about that mark in the alley...
