by K. Gorman
“I should probably eat,” she agreed. Her stomach didn’t do anything so obvious as grumble, but she felt a thinness to her that didn’t jive well, and when she moved, the room was starting to move, too. Probably low blood sugar or something. “Fruit, maybe something with electrolytes or something in it.” She glanced up. “You guys have any of that Sparkstar stuff? That worked well when I was doing this on Chamak.”
“I can find something similar,” he said.
She didn’t realize he’d meant it literally, but when he gave her a short nod and walked away, she realized that he was going to find her some food on his own.
Hells, I’ve got my own butler-soldier.
Maybe it was just his way of showing appreciation. She didn’t have to be working so hard at healing people, but she was. And healing the Lost was an emotional subject. Everyone knew someone who was Lost.
She didn’t have time to think too much about it. Baik arrived after a few moments, followed by David who stayed behind him. He glanced after the departing soldier with a confused frown, then directed it to her. “You’ve been busy.”
“It’s what I do.” She shrugged. “You guys finish that beacon thing?”
“Yes, we finished the Exis Termina Spectra Extender. Have you had dinner yet?”
She nodded in the soldier’s direction. “He’s finding me some sports drink. Don’t know if he’s going for food, too. Maybe. Probably.”
Baik’s eyebrows twitched upward again, his glance going back to Warren just as the soldier vanished past a doorway. “Huh.”
“Are you really a prince?” she asked.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“One of the men. Didn’t catch his name.” Plus, she didn’t want him to get in trouble. Baik hadn’t looked back down at her, and he had kept his tone light, but she caught a sharpness to it. “So—are you?”
“Technically, yes. I’m the heir to the management of my family’s estate, including its titles.”
“So then…” She made a gesture to his uniform. He’d changed it, replacing the blood-soaked mess of the old one with a new pristine white jacket. “How did you become a commander?”
He gave her a sidelong look. This time, there was no mistaking the sharpness in his tone, nor the dryness that laced his words. “I joined the military. Just like everyone else.”
Yeah, but not everyone in the Alliance military has the ability to have a quicksave installed. But his prickly tone suggested he’d done some form of work to get to his position. Plus, none of the soldiers around them had been rolling their eyes at him. So far as she’d seen, they all respected him.
As he tipped his head to the left, indicating the door, and stepped away, she decided to end that line of questioning and switch topics. Once Nomiki got there, she could gossip with her sister to get an assessment. Until then, this was the guy who decided if she got to eat or if Marc got a blaster round to the head. She should probably play nice.
But then, she should probably also play nice to Dr. Ma. Eighteen million people were missing from Nova. That might be only a few drops in the bucket compared to the amount the Shadows had taken over the course of their attack—some eleven billion people, at last estimate—but it was happening fast, and it was happening hard. And, according to Baik, they’d almost figured out how to use her light to stop it.
The walk was a short one. Unlike before, where they’d had to do some complicated, inbound turns to get to the elevator—she guessed she’d been in a basement or sub-basement for one part of her travels here, perhaps the transporter?—it was a simple straight shot to the end of the wing, then a left to the elevator.
She caught sight of Warren again, reappearing from another doorway, empty-handed and still on his quest for the Sparkstar knock-off that she’d requested. As he glanced up and their eyes met, something about his black hair, the deep tone of his skin, and the way the brim of his hat put his eyes in a distinct shadow conjured images of Tylanus from the latest dream. In her mind, the image of his ink-dark, Lost eyes bored into hers from the dream last night, and her fist tightened as she repressed a shiver.
He was a figment of her imagination, just like the others, but she was having a difficult time shaking him. And the memory of his voice didn’t help. The way it had morphed at the end to sound like her sister…
It made her skin bump and shiver every time she thought of it.
Baik noticed. He lifted an eyebrow as they stepped out of the elevator and gave her a quick glance-over, not unlike the one Warren had given her a minute ago. “Are you okay? Do you need to rest?”
She shook her head and made a placating gesture, rolling her shoulders and forcing her fingers to unball from her fist. “No. Just bad dreams. Nothing you need concern yourself with.”
She sidestepped past him and followed the hallway up to the small stairwell at the end where the metal stairs rang under her feet, dodging a few soldiers and workers on the way up.
But, when she went up the stairs and arrived at the open door to the roof, her stride faltered, then stopped.
“Actually, you know what? I think I’ll be having new nightmares today.”
Chapter Eighteen
The beacon had been both uncovered and lit, likely testing its display and energy readings along with set-up, and it cast a solid, stark, gold-white glow across the entire roof and would have blinded everyone up there if they hadn’t put a set of temporary shades around it. By the looks of them, simple gray fabric stretched taut across a pipe-metal frame, they’d dug them out of the building’s ancient past, either an old hospital room or someone’s horrible idea of a room separator.
That’s not what had made her stop. She’d expected the light.
What she hadn’t expected were the twenty to thirty Lost sitting around it, bound to the same types of mismatched chairs she’d seen in the gymnasium downstairs, their shadows like bold, expanding strips of black compared to the light from the roof, stretching out behind them in thick bands that reminded her of the ones she’d seen in the sky before. Only the roof’s other light sources, the flood and troublelights that still occupied various points beyond the blazing inner circle, offset their lines into subtle scatterings of overlapping light and shadow. Each face stared at the light, unblinking. Utterly focused.
She took a step onto the roof.
A ripple went through the crowd of Lost. Every single face turned her way.
This time, she couldn’t quite suppress the shudder that ran through her shoulders.
Baik joined her side, studying the scene. “Any idea why they’re attracted to you like that?”
“They didn’t use to be.” She swallowed hard, her breath returning in a ragged waver. “This is new. And they didn’t do that downstairs.”
It was more than unsettling—it hit at something soft and vulnerable inside her chest. Their liquid-dark stare slipped into her skin like a poison, freezing all it touched. Her breath caught for another moment as the feeling reached her lungs. She forced them to work again and tried not to make the resultant gasp too obvious.
By the prolonged look Baik was giving her, she hadn’t been successful.
“So,” she said, giving another swallow to calm her nerves. “What’s the plan?”
“Dr. Lang has modified one of the light traps from the lab to work with the Extender—” Apparently, that was the shortened version of Exis Termina Spectra Extender. “—which you will use as normal. The device should take that and direct it into the secondary bulbs at the side via a fiber-optic channel in the device’s arms.” He paused. “When an event occurs, we’ll know if the doctor’s theory is correct or not.”
“And how, exactly, is my lighting up a single spot on the globe going to prevent the event from happening?”
“It won’t prevent it from happening, but it will prevent it from taking hold. Something to do with weakening it long enough to trip the cycle of strength it has been building. So I’m told.” He looked at her. “I’m not actually an expert in parallel univers
e theory.”
And neither was she. Dr. Lang, she assumed, had a better idea of it than either of them. Hopefully, anyway. “Maybe you should have gotten me to heal that person.”
“Didn’t need to. She’s working at Hawking-Navarro lab over at headquarters in Unity.”
“Oh. And she has okayed this plan?”
“She is working on about seven different projects, all testing theories to combat the shift that’s occurring. Dr. Lang is here to test one of them due to his specialty in energy work.”
Baik’s eyebrows drew together, and she followed with her gaze to where the doctor had appeared around the other side of the machine, his white lab coat sporting a large streak of black grease on its side, and a glass-backed netlink full of data held in his hand.
“From what I gathered, it’s not so much that you’re opposing the shift itself, but opposing the energy causing it. Similar to how you can push out Shadows and how you killed that monster early this morning.”
Uh huh. Well, her light had worked well enough against that.
He started walking, and she followed, trailing a few steps after him as they wove around an industrial spool of cable and toward the beacon. The intensity of the light faded gradually as they drew closer to the shades, and she avoided the large swath of brightness that glowed against the upper part of her vision, instead putting her focus on the ground.
A three-inch gap at the base of each shade cast a similar brightness across the ground, which made stark shadows of all the dips and chips in the roof’s concrete. Her shoes, newly-bought but scratched and worn after a week’s worth of events and her brief-but-intense escape attempt last night, lit up in detail under it. A variety of other shoes went by on either side of her, attached to legs that had been bound by what looked like several lengths of packing strips, each as mismatched as the chairs the Lost were sitting in. She felt more than saw each face turn to track her up the path and over to where Dr. Lang was making some final adjustments on the machine, some of them more improvised than most. Was that tape? And tightly-wound twine?
Probably not above-board, but this wasn’t a bomb they were combusting. Her light power would not result in the instant death of everyone around her should something mess up. And they were on a tight deadline.
Eighteen million people. Hells. And if the monster this morning was any indication of what was to come…
She lifted her head and straightened, refocusing her eyes on the part of the light trap Dr. Lang was fussing over as her mouth took on a grim set.
It didn’t matter that these people had abducted her. This needed to be stopped.
A second shade, this one made of metal rather than fabric, slanted out over the front of the light trap like the lens hood on a camera. Dr. Lang adjusted it as Karin ducked under it, raising the upper part higher to accommodate Baik’s height, as well—although Dr. Lang was around the same height as she, Baik had another three inches on them.
A small orange status light blinked out overtop the lens on the machine’s cream-colored surface and, as she drew even with it, she caught a brief, bright flash from the lens itself, more happenstance than anything else—like finding the right angle to a microscope and catching the circle of light within.
She glanced up. “So… are we doing a test run, or are we waiting?”
“Test run,” Dr. Lang said, perhaps a little quickly. “Definitely a test run.”
Baik’s eyebrows twitched, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he shifted to angle his body out from the shade and lifted his hand.
As he made a signal to one of the soldiers on the site—the first female soldier she’d noticed there—David came up the walkway between the chairs and pressed something cold and wet into her hand. “Corporal Warren sends his compliments.”
She smiled at the sports drink in her hand. Not a Sparkstar, but it had the same red color. She imagined Warren running into David in the hall and wondered what Baik thought of it all. It probably wouldn’t do to have his soldiers running errands and getting food for her—not unless he’d ordered it.
“Thanks,” she said, accepting the apple David also offered. Warren must have either found it, or passed on her request for fruit.
“A more proper, balanced meal will be provided in a few minutes,” David said with a quick bow that managed to encompass both herself and Baik within it. “Warren has seen to it.”
“You must have made an impression on him,” Baik commented to her. “He doesn’t usually go out of his way for people.”
“I spoke about three sentences to him after ignoring him for four hours,” she said.
“Commander,” Dr. Lang interrupted, coming up from where he had been in an awkward, squinting stoop around the back of the shade. “The event time range prediction starts in five minutes. We should test this now.”
“Yes. Dinner will have to wait.” Baik made a gesture to Dr. Lang, then took a pair of dark-colored goggles that David handed him. Dr. Lang handed a pair to her, as well.
“For the brightness,” he explained.
No shit. The pair had an old feel to them, the rubber worn and flaking as she ran her thumb over its back, and the strap had frayed a bit—no doubt another result of them scrounging for local supplies, similar to the improvised methods with which the Lost had been bound to the chairs. She fastened them over her head, tightening the strap after it slid over her hair the first time. Around them, the workers and soldiers were donning similar glasses and goggles. Two welders had simply put on their masks, looking like a half-naked version of the clunky old Border Wars fighting armor she’d seen in the system’s museums.
The Lost had no protection.
“What about them?” she asked, making a gesture to the closest one without quite looking at him, avoiding the way that every one of them was still staring at her.
“They can close their eyes,” said Baik.
“They may not have the mental capacity to do that,” she said. “I’ve heard of them burning themselves on stoves and electrocuting themselves on live wires.”
“We’ve tested them. They flinch at light.”
They don’t flinch at my light.
But she didn’t argue further. Dr. Lang was checking his netlink clock again, the countdown displayed in numbering large and bold enough for her to see. Three minutes until the predicted range of the next shift event. They didn’t have time to get everyone glasses.
“Fine. If they go blind, you’re paying for the corrective treatment.” She turned to the lens and activated her light with a quiet thought. After six hours of healing, it bubbled up through her skin and jacket with little effort, seeping into the air like glowing milk through a brown cheesecloth. “Anytime?”
“Anytime,” Dr. Lang confirmed, checking his netlink. “We’re ready for you on this side.”
By the way he spoke, it was clear that this was his project, not Baik’s, which made her feel better about it for some reason. Her light flared at a thought, burning brighter in the air around her and producing a kind of mid-air shimmer between her and the device. She collected it with a thought and pulled at the pool of light that had remained inside her, almost immediately feeling a wave of dizziness overcome her as she took about triple the amount she normally did. Her breath caught, and she stumbled, legs shaking, but stayed upright, focused on her task.
As she slipped it out of her skin and directed it into the lens, it felt akin to giving blood. Little twinges echoed around her body, the flow of the energy draining from her… She used to think that this stuff was magic—and that it was infinite—but the truth was that, before the Shadow attack, she’d never pushed the limits of her powers. It wasn’t magic. It was very real science, created by the Eurynome scientists using a bunch of things she did not have the context or bio-neuro-medical background to understand. A duplicable effect, if her younger clone was any evidence of that.
She couldn’t see past the shade, but as her power poured into the lens, the change of light was noticeable. The
glow beyond grew larger, forming a bright haze that turned the edges of the shade into blurred lines, hard to look at even with the goggles. Her mind split as she focused, one part her normal, human side, and the other tracking the flow of her energy through the trap, along the tiny fiber-optics network of the device, and then as it mingled and took over the existing light. A tingle spread through her skin, along with a hum that seemed to rise through her bones. She felt warm, as if someone had dipped her hands into bathwater, or put them under the sun. She closed her eyes, focusing, letting the light spread.
To her right, someone shouted. Then screamed.
Her eyes shot open. Was something wrong? Had her light done something? Overloaded it somehow? She took a step back, holding the light steady, aware of people running in the backdrop, and more shouts.
A second wave of dizziness slammed into her. This time, when her skin tingled, nausea coursed through her system. She doubled over with a hiss. Hands caught her as she staggered. Her skin crawled, as if there were a layer between it and her that was threatening to separate. The same sensation hit her inside, then crawled up her spine and shoulders to slide into her brain. The tell-tale sound of distant rain came to her.
Her eyes widened. It’s starting.
As the rain rushed toward her, she ripped her goggles down and forced herself to look up. The sky had darkened, the disc of an eclipse blotting out the sun. Two bands threaded into existence across the sky, curving with the atmosphere. The tingling intensified as the black screamed across the sky like blots and swirls of ink, creating itself. The stars twinkled beyond. For a second, she watched them, caught between one moment and the next, unable to breathe.
Then the world blinked out in a rush of static.
She yelled, fighting against the sensation, struggling to find herself as she seemed to fall—then it was gone, and the world was back.
Screams and shouts rang around her, along with the sound of pounding feet. Blasters cracked, accompanied by the strobe-flash of their shots. The device was dead, dark, the only light left being smeared remains of her power floating in the air like strange, disoriented streaks.
