by David Beers
David said nothing for a while but finally only said, “Do you want to go further down?”
“No,” she said and laughed. “I’m close enough to death, thanks.”
“We’re always close to death, Christine, but I think it’s life we actually fear.”
She didn’t hear him lift off from the platform. She didn’t even realize he’d left until she saw him moving beneath her. He was floating downward, his back facing the fire below, his eyes the Earth’s crust above. They were alight, the pupils and irises burning gray.
“I’m just a tool,” he said to her. She could hear him, even though his distance was increasing. He was speaking, at least partly, through her blood. His blood. The Blood of the Touched. “I don’t decide when the Unformed comes forth. It does.”
He continued his descent.
“The traitor doesn’t make me worry about being hurt. If they come for me, I can protect us and fend them off for a long time. Not forever. They’ll weaken me if it’s a prolonged siege. I’m worried about the traitor because if they come and the Unformed isn’t ready, then we will eventually lose. I can fight but not until the end of time. That’s what matters here, the timing. That’s why finding them is so important.”
Christine couldn’t speak back to him, not from this distance—not even with her blood. It was a power only he held, like so many others.
She watched as David floated down to the fire beneath … then gasped as he disappeared under it.
David felt the liquid fire pull him in, almost greedily—as if it were alive and hungry, not insentient elements of the periodic table.
David sunk deeper into its grip, his eyes open. He saw nothing but sloshing red and orange hues around him, looking angry that they couldn’t consume his flesh.
Why had he come here?
Why did he bring Christine? Why not Rhett? Why not Rebecca?
Much of what he did made little sense to him anymore. Stellan … David had thought it a necessary sacrifice, but looking back now, he realized how foolish he’d been. The traitor cared for nothing, probably seeing Stellan in the same light as they saw David. And so he’d killed an innocent man. He’d burned someone alive who held faith, who had loved both David and the Unformed.
Why am I here? he asked himself again.
David closed his eyes, forcing the lava from his vision.
His parents’ faces came to him from the darkness of his mind. Long dead, but somehow still with him. The heretics who left the Old World when it grew too dangerous for them. They’d brought their son, all three hiding in the submarine that took them to the True Faith.
Subversive to the core, David wondered what they had thought would happen. If they somehow made it to the True Faith, would it be easier to spread their message that God didn’t exist? Would they be safer?
They weren’t, he thought. In fact, they may have been less safe.
David had been five. His parents traveled through fringe atheist groups for a few years. They were angry, though, and not just at the state of the world. Not just with the Ministries. They’d been angry with the atheists too, feeling they weren’t doing enough to further the cause.
Radicals—even for the radicals.
And what would they think about what you’re doing now? Are you doing enough?
His sister had been born when David was six, their parents arranging for nanotech to be placed in her at birth. Rebecca had been different from the rest of her family—the only one born inside the True Faith, she possessed abilities none of them ever would.
What are you doing? he asked himself. Why are you going back to them again? What’s the point?
David didn’t know. He had come here to think, but not about the past. It was the present that mattered, the future. Yet his mind kept wanting to dwell on the past, his parents, their struggles.
David pushed thoughts of them away, though the effort took greater concentration than he wanted.
It was the Unformed he needed now. The Beyond.
The Beyond was always close, just a simple thought would take him to it. He was tired of going, though. Tired of searching to no avail.
I have to find It. I have to. I can’t see anything anymore, and I’m being encircled, which means Its being encircled. I have to find It.
Eyes closed, David left Earth. His body still floated beneath the liquid fire, jostling as the waves moved him to and fro, but his essence was no longer inside it.
The Beyond was only a term. A word used to describe a concept and a place—like every other word. It tried relating something that truly couldn’t be described, only experienced. When David spoke of it to those who could never see it, they often thought of it as a semi-mythical place. Something that might exist, or it might simply be a place inside David’s mind. A place he went to when he wanted to speak with the Unformed.
The Beyond was a physical place, though in a way, his followers were right. There was something conceptual to it, something a bit outside the physical realm.
Much of outer space is just that, space. For miles unfathomable there is nothing but blackness, with random rocks floating through from time to time. More, it’s continuously expanding, which was something that even the scientists of David’s day could not adequately account for. What is it expanding into? What is outside of it? What will eventually happen when the bodies inside our universe grow too far apart?
David didn’t concern himself with any of these questions, not now, nor when he had first arrived at the Beyond. Because once experienced, all of those questions fell away like scales fall from eyes. They were unimportant in the magnificence of what simply is.
The Beyond was just past the edge of space, the outer realm which pushes up against the unknown. Technically, David was on that edge, not able to move beyond the expanding universe.
It was there that he first met the Unformed.
It was there that he met It every time after.
He went to the Beyond again, hoping to find his savior.
Darkness was everywhere, a darkness so deep that even creatures floating at the bottom of Earth’s ocean couldn’t imagine it. Stars had not reached here. Nothing had. And still the universe continued its growth.
David had no body in this place, no physical presence at all. Yet, he was there, on the edge of the universe, and as always, he found beauty when looking outward.
Darkness waited behind, but forward was a spectacle that could barely be imagined even while looking at it.
Bright white light pushed against the universe’s border, in certain places even pressing into it, causing dents and ripples across the vast expanse in front of David. An infinite amount of dark lines came and went through the bright light, always vertical, and always ending when they collided with the universe’s border.
Whatever the dark dashes were, they exploded on contact, flashes of bright orange dancing across the invisible field. They weren’t coming toward the universe, but rather, the universe flying into them.
When David moved closer to the edge, it was incomprehensible. It was only as he stepped back, taking in the entirety of it, that he could actually make any sense of the beauty.
David pulled away from the expansion, drawing further back into the universe while still looking at the border. The Unformed was beyond our universe, beyond the edge where he now sat. David understood the fear the Ministries felt toward the Unformed. Their Gods were ephemeral, nonexistent things. His was real, and they knew it. They might call it an alien, or a creature outside of humanity’s reality, but it existed. David had seen It innumerable times.
The conceptual nature of this physical place came into play as David moved backward. The universe was expanding at far too great a pace for humans to move with it—a body would have simply disintegrated. Even moving as a purely sentient being, he shouldn’t have been able to focus on anything. The speed was simply too great.
Yet, he did, and this was only possible through his connection with the Unformed.
; That which rested in the Beyond.
Waiting.
To be let in.
Time had no meaning in this place, and David searched without regard to what was happening back on Earth. When he returned, everything would be as it had been, so he needn’t worry. Only finding the Unformed occupied his mind.
He stared at the white light, the exploding oranges, wanting some glimpse of the creature he served. Up and down wasn’t a concept that accurately applied, but for our purposes, they will have to do. He searched up and down, high and low, left and right.
Nothing.
And still he looked.
Until, finally, It arrived.
It moved slowly, or appeared to, though it had to be moving backwards at an incredible pace, or the rapidly expanding universe would have destroyed it.
Relief fell upon David like a heavy rain, covering every part of his consciousness. No eyes existed here for tears to form in, but he cried all the same. Tears of happiness, of immense relief.
Because all wasn’t lost.
The Unformed had not abandoned him.
David moved closer to the universe’s edge, trying to peer into the Beyond. Trying to see the creature behind more clearly—though he knew he wouldn’t fully grasp Its glory until It crossed over.
He could see the general shape, though, and It was massive in the way planets were. He stared at an orb of some kind, though not perfectly shaped. There were rough, craggy edges on It, resembling a moon more than a marble. It filled up the entirety of David’s vision, blocking out the white light and dark dashes.
It stopped in front of him, a deity-like eclipse.
David did nothing, just as he had the first time, and every time thereafter. He simply stared in awe at the God who called him, and now who had answered his own call. He hadn’t been abandoned. He hadn’t been forsaken.
The Unformed and David remained like that for some time, no communication, only existing in each other’s presence. What the Unformed thought, David could not tell, but for his part—he stared like a new lover, unable to pull his eyes from the being he’d grown infatuated with.
Eventually, though, the Unformed did communicate.
It had something to show David. Something he hadn’t seen before.
“Quickly now,” he said. “There isn’t much time.”
David heard the man’s words before he saw him. Darkness had fallen briefly, and then from nowhere, this man’s voice appeared.
Slowly, the person who spoke came into view.
He, his wife, and his two children.
The family was climbing out of an underground bunker. The man had already exited and was looking across the horizon, checking for what he knew was coming.
He glanced down at his youngest daughter.
Gray snow pulsed in her eyes, threatening to replace the natural brown there. She was being contacted. The man didn’t know if that was good or bad, especially right now.
David recognized the girl immediately and felt his heart soar.
Abby, he thought.
The wife and children hustled 30 feet to a vehicle. The man had procured a non-autonomous vehicle; he’d have to manually drive it. Getting an autonomous one would have surely meant death—the Ministry could’ve simply taken control of it.
Who was he kidding, though?
He was already too late. Autonomous or manual, he was going to die this afternoon. Maybe his daughter would live. That’s all he hoped for at this point. The rest of his family was lost.
He knew people that would help his daughter, if he could just get her to them. People that understood what she could do. People that recognized something greater awaited.
His family got into the vehicle as he closed the bunker door.
He looked one more time at the sky and finally saw it.
A transport flying a few miles away, just over the tree line. They’d seen him, of course, but they had already known where he was. Someone told, though he didn’t know who. He would never get the chance to know, either. He only wanted his daughter to escape.
And that opportunity was closing by the second.
He rushed across the field and hopped into the vehicle’s driver’s chamber. The four doors closed down around all of them.
“Seal yourselves off. We’re going to go fast.”
Transparent walls flickered into existence inside the vehicle, all four chambers now reinforced against any possible wreck.
The husband put his hands on the vehicle’s controls and it buzzed to life. He looked to the upper left of the windshield, the display showing the transport behind him. It was closer.
His left hand pushed forward on the accelerator and they roared forward, the wind turbines underneath the vehicle ripping up the field’s grass and sending dirt flying into the air. The man paid no notice, only kept his eyes forward, both watching the field rush by him and the transport rushing toward him.
His wife sat next to him, gripping her restraints and holding back tears. She said nothing.
The vehicle kept picking up speed, the grass underneath ripping from the earth and flying out behind it like a boat’s wake.
He glanced to the upper left panel.
Closer.
It was gaining.
He couldn’t outrun it.
He’d been too late. The notice had come too late.
He tried shoving the accelerator forward, but it was at full capacity—the vehicle at top speed.
Another five minutes passed in silence. He glanced back at his youngest daughter once. Gray falling snow filled her eyes. There was no trace of the brown she’d been born with.
If anything could save them, it was her.
He looked one last time in the panel. There was no sense in running anymore. The transport was nearly upon them. Their only chance was to let his daughter loose. To let her power do what it was meant to.
He decelerated quickly, turning the vehicle so that when the doors opened, his daughter would face the transport.
“Honey, are you ready?”
She wasn’t looking at him, but out the window. He couldn’t see her eyes though he didn’t need to. She was with It. What she called the Unformed. It was talking to her now, and if she spoke, It would speak through her.
The car came to a complete stop. The man looked to his wife and saw she was crying. The walls inside the vehicle flickered out of existence and he leaned over and kissed her. Neither said anything.
“Let’s go, honey,” he said to his daughter.
Both of their doors opened. They stepped from the vehicle and he walked around so that he stood next to her.
The transport had stopped moving and now hovered 500 yards above them. His daughter stared up at it.
The man followed her gaze.
The transport dropped, all at once, its thrusters pushing it toward the ground at a rapid speed. Wind tore at the two standing beneath as the transport’s descent forced it down.
The girl’s hair whipped back behind her, revealing her face fully. It held no fear. The gray static bouncing over her irises and pupils hid any other emotions.
The transport stopped a foot from the ground, but those inside didn’t wait for it to complete its landing. The transport’s doors opened and five armored troopers hopped out. They wore shields over their faces, hiding their gender, all of them masked horrors that the man was finally meeting. He’d run from them for years, since his daughter’s eyes first started changing colors, and now they were here.
Two on the right flew into the air without warning, thrown higher and higher, as if their arc would never reach its pinnacle. The two on the left moved without apparently noticing that their partners were no longer with them.
The girl turned on them. For a brief second, the man thought they would make it. He thought that It, the Unformed, would deliver them.
The soldier on the left pointed his hand at the man, squeezed his fist, and a hole the size of an apple opened up in the man’s chest.
He stood for a second, swaying on his feet as his chest emptied its contents onto the ground.
And then he collapsed face down on the grassy field.
Darkness again, but only briefly.
Another scene emerged out of it, and David didn’t consider the Beyond or the Unformed. It was Abby he cared about.
Abby was alone, the room around her all concrete and steel. She sat in a cold, metal chair, her eyes no longer shining gray.
Instead of that power, they held only tears.
She was just a little girl, regardless of what she might be capable of. The person in front of David was young and frightened.
Abandoned, David thought.
Except, no, that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been abandoned. She’d been loved, incredibly so, and people had come and killed those that loved her.
“WHAT ARE YOU?”
The words boomed into the tiny room, echoing off the walls. The little girl grimaced and whimpered at the same time.
Abby. Her name ran through David’s mind and he realized he loved her. Perhaps he always had, though he didn’t know it until this moment. He’d always respected her, perhaps idolized her in a way, but now he knew it went deeper than that.
“Please,” the little girl said. “Please let me go. I want to see my mommy.”
“WHAT ARE YOU?” the words repeated, the voice so distorted it sounded more robotic than human.
Tears fell from the girl’s eyes, her lips turning into a fearful frown.
David saw the wires then. They were attached to her arms and legs, a few on her back as well. They were thin and wound up her sleeves to her torso.
No, David thought, knowing whatever they were, they’d only bring pain. Also knowing that they’d be used soon.
David watched the little girl seize up. Her small muscles tightened and strained. Her jaw clamped down, David able to hear the clack of her teeth as they slammed together. White spit foamed at the corner of her lips, and her face twisted in gruesome agony.
Electrical shocks. They used electrical shocks on her.
