by JM Guillen
“In what way?” My tongue felt heavy.
This experience will be exactly as if you were collating engrams through a neural lacuna. He smiled. They’re just memories, 108. Try and remember that.
Sable midnight fell around my head.
***
“What’s the play, Alpha?” I turned to Gideon and gestured. “Cadavas could be anywhere.”
“The trail leads here.” He glanced over the rise and then spat. “But there’s no town on the map.”
Many Yucatec settlements are not charted, Katarina linked.
“Seems deserted.” Gideon sighed. “Or abandoned. But if so, I think it’s been recent. Those are thatched roofs. There’s no holes in them anywhere.”
“You think the cult moved, though?”
“No,” Maxwell Barnes, Asset 330, said in his throaty French accent. “Here. Those assholes are here.”
“I agree with Max.” Gideon gave the dusky-skinned man a nod. “They’re here.”
“Want me to toggle the Wraith?” I raised an eyebrow at my Alpha. “I can slip down there and take a look at—”
***
—intricate copper masks. They’re covered with some kind of glyphs. I bent closer and tried to get a good image on my phaneric memory. There’s a dozen corpses here, all nude except for these masks.
Can you patch a visual, Mike? Elle linked, her words light and airy in my mind.
Yes, I can, I smiled, knowing the waifish Gatekeeper would feel it through her Crown. Just for you.
In less than a minute, I’d sent several images to my cadre.
These people may all be Yucatec Maya, Katarina observed. If you remove the masks, you might see slightly flattened heads or wide noses.
Huh. I reached for one of the eyeless masks, found the edge, and tried to pry it upward.
Um. The mask wouldn’t move. I tried to slip a fingernail between the mask and the person’s face…
But no. No space existed.
“Oh!” I jerked my hand back as I realized the truth. In that same instant, I felt my gorge rise.
I understood exactly why the masks remained stuck.
Alpha, they won’t come off. The more I studied the situation, the more I understood. They’ve been seared onto these people’s faces. The flesh is melted against them.
What? I felt Max’s disgust over the link, could almost see his wrinkled nose. You mean after they died?
I dunno, man. I shook my head and gazed at the array of bodies. But knowing the guys we’re chasing, I somehow don’t think—
***
“—these people were alive when impaled.” I stared up at the young man in front of me.
Naked and bloody, the body had been eviscerated. The cuts were meticulous, exacting in a way that made me ill just to consider.
We hadn’t made it ten minutes out of town before we found the first corpse. The pole had been forced through the body, then erected on the side of the road. A copper mask, eyeless and covered with glyphs, had been seared against the face.
Lines of bodies bordered the path on both sides and guided us deeper into the jungle.
The markings upon the body emanate slight amounts of Irrationality, Katarina informed us as her fingers twitched.
“There must be a hundred of them.” Max shook his head. “How does a cult this small slaughter so many people?”
“The Darkened Road has dozens of followers that aren’t Irrats,” Gideon growled. “Calls them Zealators. Usually they’re just goons with guns, but sometimes they have an Irrational trick or two.”
“Right.” I nodded. “Like that guy with Amir in Mexico City. Did you—”
***
“—hear that?” I stared into the midnight darkness of the jungle. In the distance, we heard all manner of wildlife, jaguars and howler monkeys, mostly.
But this sound, this was something else entirely. Somewhere in the jungle, someone wept, wailed.
“What, Bishop?” Max canted his head. “Just jungle, man.”
“No.” I glanced at him in irritation. “Listen.”
We both fell silent.
Immediately, the sound came again. It drifted through the jungle, lamented, lost. It sounded like a child, like a ghost in the darkness.
“Oh shit,” Max gasped. “What is that?”
“Closer.” I drew my disruptor and spun around. “It’s getting closer.”
Fear came with it, elemental and sharp. It flowed outward from the jungle, like tendrils of mist.
Rationality dipping in your vicinity, Katarina’s pronounced Russian accent came through our Crowns.
“Fuck.” Max stared into the jungle, his eyes wild with fear. “I’m engaging the Juggernaut, Bishop.”
“Okay,” I hissed. My breathing came tight, ragged. “Keep your eyes open. I think it—”
***
“—just shouldn’t be here.” Elle peered down into the chasm. “But the Gatekeeper says it drops beneath sea level.”
They’re called cenotes, Katarina informed us. Limestone sinkholes, commonly encountered within vast series of caverns.
“I don’t like the idea of vast caverns.” Gideon glanced at Elle. “We need to leave quarrels out here, just in case we get lost.”
“There’s no question that we’re going in, is there?” I stared again at the blood scrawled across the large stone, the letters painted in wide strokes.
COME THEN. HE LIVES YET.
Below the words, Maxwell’s severed hand lay staked to the ground.
“No question.” Gideon met my gaze and gave me a slow nod.
“Fine, Alpha.” I quirked up the side of my mouth. “Let’s go. I’d follow you straight into hell.”
“This might get messy.” He rubbed at his chin. “But we have to—”
***
—engage. System message incoming, Katarina linked, and I felt the weariness within it. Most of the blood had dried on the side of her face, but I feared she’d have a scar.
She might lose the eye altogether.
It’s about tim— Gideon stopped mid-link.
I glanced toward him, expecting to see him distracted by something.
But no, he seemed confused.
My Crown whirred then, an odd sensation I’d never enjoyed. I associated it with being out of control, system updates, and other things that the Designates decided might be required.
I started to say something but noticed I couldn’t move. I still breathed, my heart still beat, but every muscle I had wouldn’t so much as twitch.
After a few seconds, warmth flowed through my body. It felt like warm caramel trickling through my veins.
My muscles warmed with it, and I could move again.
“What was that?” I turned toward Gideon. “Alpha, what was that?”
Sovereign prerogative gamma-twenty engaged. The system prompt sounded heavy in my mind, much like the secondary comm. Initiating now.
“What?” Elle turned to me, her eyes wide as the moon. “That can’t be right.”
DuMarque, Gideon. Alpha on Site. Engaged.
Yakovlev, Katarina. Preceptor third tier. Engaged.
Bishop, Michael. Asset on Site. Engaged
Quirke, Elle, Gatekeeper. Engaged
Barnes, Maxwell. ASSET PRESUMED LOST.
“Those prerogatives only engage if a Variance in Rationality is encountered.” Elle turned to Katarina. “Is that it? Do you show a Variance down here?”
I believe so. Kat seemed a bit uncertain, which surprised me. Typically, she seemed so sure. It is difficult to say, this deep beneath the ground. We do not have enough Telemetry relays in the area.
“If it’s truly a Variance in Rationality, we’re absolutely fucked,” Gideon snarled. “I’ll call up the Designate. One way or the other he’ll—”
***
—offer immediate, onsite Designate support, the Designate linked. This Variance is unexpected and incredibly dangerous. However, this is not impossible to overcome. Asset Quirke will imme
diately create an aperture at the provided coordinates, and a Designate will immediately—
***
“—getting slaughtered like a sheep!” Gideon roared and turned his pistol against the Zealator. He fired once, then twice.
The man fell, missing most of his face.
Yet more came. Deep within the darkness of those awful caverns, they lurched toward us.
“Max was just bait!” Elle stared at me, her pixyish face overwrought. “They took him just to get to us!”
It must be most of that village, I replied, as I turned toward an oncoming woman who screamed shrilly in a tongue I didn’t know. The ones that didn’t get slaughtered.
The situation was an unknown, the fair-haired Designate linked, his chiseled face a snarl. He fired his own pistol—one of the large Mavericks—into to stomach of another crazed, bald madman.
“No shit!” I turned and fired.
Coarse language is not required, Michael Bishop, the Designate linked.
“[The Harvester shall come!]” The Zealator fell and snarled, “[You have not yet begun to learn the secret name of agony, the equations of suffering!]”
“Maybe not, fucko.” I shot him in the chest, my kinetic burst like a bowling ball fired by a trebuchet. “But I think the equation—”
***
“—is not complete!” Amir cackled wildly and his eyes burned with the fury of the damned. “Oh, Michael! You haven’t even begun to see!”
And with that, the masked cultist slid a wicked blade through the side of the Designate’s neck.
I heard the visceral tear of his flesh, saw the dark fluid splatter across his face and into his blond hair. It ran down the Designate’s chest.
The man just stared at me and trembled.
Amir ripped the blade outward, and a spray of warmth scattered across me and the stone floor.
Gaping, the Designate sank to the floor.
System shock pro-pro-protocols initiated. He twitched twice and then fell to the ground.
“You don’t grasp the truth, Michael.” Amir walked toward me, his voice muffled by that awful iron mask. “Yet I shall show you. I swear by my power that I shall slaughter you while you scream and beg. I shall gift your warmth to those you cannot comprehend.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it,” I snarled. “Where exactly—”
***
“—have you been?” Elle cried with panic. She ran forward, practically sobbing, but then stopped, stunned. Her hands flew to her mouth.
“Max? What have they done to you?”
Asset 330 shambled forward, his gait broken. When he emerged from the shadows of the passageway, I saw what had horrified Elle. Part of the left side of his head had been completely removed.
“They know what we are, Elle.” He stepped closer, and a patch of light fell directly upon him.
They had removed his hands, I suspected, simply to taunt us. Now they’d sliced into the side of his head as well. Blood flowed down and sinuously slipped around one eye socket. They’d found his Solomon’s Crown and ripped part of it away from the groove within his skull. Wrecked pieces of his Crown hung loosely, dangling from his horrific wound. The glint of metallic vanadium dioxide shone in the dim light.
I saw an orange substance crusted on his dark skin, and a tiny readout light blinked behind his left ear.
“I couldn’t hear you, Elle,” he sobbed and sank to his knees. “Any of you. Everything was empty…”
“Max.” I glanced at the hallway behind us. “We’ve lost track of Gideon and Kat. We brought in a Designate, and they slaughtered him.”
“No…” Max shook his head. “It’s Nothing, Michael. That’s what they are. And this time, it’s only the seventh.”
“What?” I turned back toward him.
“They move in cycles. This one is the Faceless Harvester. But two more cycles, and it will be the Ninth, Michael.” He grasped at me. “They’ve done this elsewhere.”
“The Ninth?” I feared I’d lost him to wild, irrational rambles.
“Nothing is what I thought you are,” he whispered.
We gotta move, I linked to Elle. Get all back together. Do you think you can—”
***
“—find them again?” Gideon spat, his fury laced with terror. “How did you get split up?”
“No idea, Alpha.” I slunk with him through a narrow passageway, on point as always. I peered ahead with narrowed eyes, though I saw nothing I didn’t expect. “There’s something about these caves; they seem to turn about on themselves.”
“Katarina said the same thing. She also thought there might be some property within the stone that stops us from linking.”
“That would make sense.” I nodded in the darkness. “Do you—”
***
“—believe you understand?” the Irrat woman, Isabella Juarez, cackled knowingly. “Look then. See the wonders the Harvester brings to bear upon the world!”
Below us, a man screamed in agony the likes of which I’d never imagined.
Unable to help myself, I stepped to the edge of the precipice and gazed down on the room below.
Horror oozed through the shadowed darkness.
Shafts of light shone in from above, shining through crevices impossibly far overhead. The light speared down into the midnight void, beacons of luminescence. As a result, I could only see portions of the gelatinous creature.
I shifted my optics, and the shapeless amoeba-abomination came into focus.
Bishop! Gideon’s link startled me, and I turned. “Where did she go?” He spun and stared at the place the darkly enticing, ragged woman had just been.
There was only darkness now.
The scream came again, the voice hoarse. It broke and began to fail.
I glanced back.
A portion of the formless organism lay across Max. He struggled weakly.
A long streak of crimson marred the rock below him, marked where the protoplasm touched him.
Digested him.
I shuddered.
“Fuck! Oh, fuck me,” he wailed and tried to crawl forward, dragging himself with arms that held no hands.
To no avail. The large creature sluiced down over him, and he screeched in wordless agony.
“Oh God,” Gideon whispered. “We need to—”
***
“—get out of here!” I screamed at Elle, who had stepped back into the shadows. “If you have an active quarrel, let’s move!”
It ate her, Mike, she linked.
I felt the chaos, the pieces of her sundered mind. A series of images came with the link, a broken patch that said what no words ever could.
Oh.
Katarina had also fallen to the formless amoeba Amir had beckoned.
Elle had watched, helpless, as the ichor-laden thing digested the Preceptor’s face and arms, as it caught and devoured her alive.
That patch held scatters of screams, of weeping, wailing horror. In the end, Kat had howled, had cried. She’d lapsed into Russian and begged for her mother.
Katarina died hard.
“Elle, listen to me.” I glanced over my shoulder, terrified that the formless corporeality might come up behind me. “We’ve got to have an extraction. We—”
***
“—are falling victim to arrogant foolishness,” Amir said, that sickening smile upon his face. “A new Aeon dawns, Asset. It begins here.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we just hand you your ass and leave.”
“No, Michael.” Amir’s satin tone came from behind me, from the darkness. “You will never leave here alive.”
He took three more steps, not realizing how close we stood. After a pause, he took two more and peered into the shadows.
Unbeknownst to Amir, I stood under the Wraith, less than two meters from him.
The moment he came close enough, I struck him squarely in the teeth with my disruptor pistol, punching with all the strength and speed the Adept could grant me.
Th
e cultist screamed and blood blossomed from his mouth.
I rushed forward and used my momentum to shove the pistol deeper into his throat.
He gagged, his hands going around my arms, futile as they pushed against me.
I bore him to the ground and landed on top of him. “One of us won’t leave here alive, motherfucker,” I seethed, as I pressed my weapon deeper. “And maybe both of us are arrogant and foolish.”
I pulled the trigger and screamed as I fired again and again.
The back of his skull shattered, leaving a patina of brain, blood, and bone upon the cold rock.
“Bishop!” Gideon yelled from behind me. “How—”
***
“—could I have not understood?” I whispered as I stared into it.
The Variance had been a child, a Mexican Irrat boy of perhaps ten. However, just as the Facility feared with all Irrats, this boy had unfurled into…
Something more.
Now, he represented the single greatest danger that walked the face of the planet. He radiated madness and broken imaginings. Horrific things that dwelt beyond our world had taken note of him and granted him power unlike any that other Irrats wielded.
Incomprehensible color swirled around the Variance, hues that seemed to drink at memory and sanity. They burned, those colors, and consumed everything I was, everything that made me whole, that made me human.
The shadows cast by that light held more reality than anything I’d ever dreamed possible.
The Variance spoke.
I shattered—
***
“—reality itself,” I gasped. “Crimson that burns.”
I saw them now, the eighty-one. Each a mask, each a shadow. I floated in the space between, stretched thin. I—
