by K. Gorman
She reached Pranav, who was still on the floor. He flinched as she came to him, and her light caught the rawness of his eyes and the streaks of tears that had made a mess of his face. Seeing the way his hands and jaw still shook, and realizing that he hadn’t said a word for the past thirty seconds, she bent down to help him recover.
Dr. Lamond paused, glanced down at the two of them, and then back up at the hallway. After a moment, he took a breath and squared his shoulders, much as she had a few minutes ago, and began making his own way through the Shadows.
They parted for him, just as they’d done for her.
“Anya, can you tell me about this place? Any of the tools work?” he called up.
“Come on up, and I’ll show you.”
Karin watched his form retreat down the hallway, leaving them behind, and a small part of the back of her mind tried to decide if it was a brave thing, or a cowardly thing, to do so.
Maybe it was both.
She turned her attention back to Pranav, touching a finger to his shoulder but pausing as he flinched. When he gave no other reaction, she squatted down beside him, put her arms around his shoulders, and held him close. With a thought, she made the light flare inside her and poured a little of it into him.
She doubted it would do anything, but this place was very dark, and they were still surrounded by Shadows.
He stiffened a little as her light flowed into him. Then, after a moment, he relaxed. He blew out a slow, ragged breath and bowed his head forward. She heard him gasp again, and his shoulders began to shake.
She held him for the next few minutes, not saying a word. Dr. Lamond and his friend Anya spoke at the top of the stairs, but their voices were little more than a backdrop, too low and vague for her to hear. The Shadows remained, watching her.
After a while, the shaking in his shoulders slowed, then stopped. When he stirred beneath her, she relaxed her hug and slid her arms off his shoulders.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just—”
“Dude, we just got pulled into an alternate shadow dimension and are surrounded. This is freakin’ nightmare fuel. I get it.”
She thought that might earn her a chuckle, at least. But he wasn’t Marc, nor was he any of her teammates, and they’d only been quasi-friends for a day and a half. Instead, she felt his shoulders tremble again.
He breathed another ragged breath. “You’re not crying.”
“I’ve actually seen more Shadows than this. Ones that were attacking.” And worse nightmares, but she decided not to voice that last part.
His breath rose again, presumably to argue his patheticness again. She cut him off by standing up. Her light went up with her. She let it slip over her fingers, ignoring his gasp of shock, and looked around. The Shadows still watched her. She held some of their gazes for a few seconds, then turned her attention to the rest of the hall.
As she stepped away, clothing rustled behind her as he stood. “Where are you going?”
“Exploring. Didn’t get much of a chance to do that before I got shunted into a chair and used as a sentient light bulb.”
There was a pause. Then, “Can I come?”
Her fear had started to dissipate a few minutes ago, and although the adrenaline and anxiety still shivered through her—the constant presence of the Shadows ensured that—a small part of her realized just how absurd his question had been.
“That all depends,” she said, keeping her face straight. “What’s your favorite color?”
He’d begun to follow her before she asked, but her question made his footsteps stop and his breath hitch in surprise. “What?”
She rolled her eyes at the uncertainty in his voice, the action easing some of her fear. “Never mind. Just follow.”
Still uncertain, he waited a few beats before he started walking again. And she felt a little bad for asking in the first place. Clearly, he was not in the frame of mind to notice a joke was a joke.
They continued down the hall together, Shadows backing out of their way and then folding in behind them again. A few photographs and bulletin boards appeared on the walls, along with the workstations she’d seen lining the hall before—they were heading east, she guessed. Two holoscreens flickered at one of them, one a login screen and the other a series of blank data windows. She paused at a few tables, rummaging through the contents, but gave up after a few tries. There wasn’t anything interesting here, at least not for her.
She wandered on.
The next hallway proved to be about the same as the last, though she noted the location of the washrooms, but the third had a window at its end. She made a beeline for it, some part of her pushing her on with more urgency than before. As she moved, a light, tingling feeling slipped into the skin of her arms.
When she arrived at the window, the sense of urgency directed her in a different direction.
Up, it seemed to say.
She didn’t question it. Nomiki had similar inklings. In fact, she was pretty certain that her sister experienced them on a near-daily basis, being so fine-tuned to her environment as she was. The way she’d explained it was that they were messages from the subconscious part of the brain, which gathered and processed information in a much more detailed and cumulative way than the conscious mind did. The urge she felt was just how her subconscious conveyed the result of that information.
She followed a staircase that appeared on her right, her shoes making small tap, tap sounds against the resin surfaces. Pranav paused at the bottom. She heard him take a breath and thought for a moment that he was going to question her actions, but he kept quiet. The sound of his steps soon joined hers.
She went up one floor, then a second and a third. She passed the fourth floor landing, too, ignoring the pain in her overworked knees and muscles from all the running she’d been doing.
At the eighth, she stopped. There was a window there, too. She strode into the hallway and up to its base. As her fingers rose up and touched its sill, a little zing of energy snapped through her. She had a sudden image of her sitting in the chair downstairs, both eyes closed and her hands still strapped down, light flowing through her.
Out the window, the skyline of Pomona’s eighth level stretched out between the upper and lower discs. Lights sparkled in most of the buildings, but there was a sense of stillness to them, as if they weren’t really there. No cars moved on the streets. When she looked down, only Shadows were visible. They moved in pairs and groups, some standing still and others wandering. She spotted more of them below, visible on the university’s garden path.
On the horizon, seen through a corridor between two of the inter-disc block structures, their forms zig-zagging in cube forms to the upper disc, the orange-gold glow of the sun lay behind the low mountains of Pomona’s port-side horizon. It seemed to be waiting.
A second thrill of energy zinged through her. For a moment, it felt like she was in two places at once—both here in Tylanus’ Shadow world and still strapped to the chair on the real Nova. Her frown went down to her wrist. Tight pressure snagged around her skin, a slow pain growing on the upper part of the bone. As she watched, a straight red mark appeared in the exact position the strap had been.
She flexed her fingers, examining it, then rubbed at the spot with her other hand.
I’m not really here, am I? Or, if I am, I’m not just here. I’m in both worlds.
Maybe that’s why Tylanus had been so pissy and insistent she leave the planet. She had no idea she could do this.
Whatever this was.
“Karin? Are you okay?” Pranav entered her peripheral vision, joining her at the window.
“Yes. I think so. Having weird thoughts.”
His head tilted toward the window. She watched him lean forward and look down, no doubt noticing the Shadows on the paths and in the streets. They were still around them, forming a small half-circle at their back, but their number had dwindled as they’d climbed the stairs, and only three happened to be staring at her right now. She lifted
her gaze to the one on her left and studied him.
The light from the window cut across part of its—his?—face. Though the dark, fog-like substance the Shadow was made from had trouble reflecting light back, there was a noticeable difference between that spot, which seemed a more light-brown color, and the rest of it, which was as depthless and indistinguishable as the deepest, darkest water.
“What kind of weird thoughts?” Pranav asked, his attention also going to the Shadow.
She pulled her gaze back to the window, her eyes narrowing on the corridor-sized piece of the horizon she could see. The sun was not rising. Her gut instinct told her it was waiting. Her fingers itched, and she squared her shoulders to it, trying to put the puzzle together.
Project Eos. The dawn goddess. The power seemed to pull at her, to call her name.
Eos was never meant to be a mere flashlight.
She looked at her hand, to the sun, and back again. The light inside her felt like it was collecting in her fingers, the closest point between her and the sun, lining up on the inside of her skin like iron filings attracted to a magnet.
“Karin?” Pranav prompted again. They were watching her, both him and the Shadow. Waiting.
“Thoughts like maybe that sun over there isn’t just for show,” she said. “Like maybe I can do something about it.”
She splayed it against the windowpane, watching how the light inside grew to outline her palm. Far away, she felt the connection with the sun—two suns, with Lokabrenna the trickster with its blue-tinged light below—ready and waiting.
With a thought, she locked onto the connection. Power flooded through her, then settled. The Shadow beside her lifted its head, but didn’t move. Beside her, Pranav took a sharp inhale of breath.
She ignored him, focusing. Her own breath rattled in her lungs and hissed across her throat, still ragged from her run and the fear that had coursed through her. But the power she felt erased all that. She kept the connection, burning bright against her hand, and, after a quick count in her head and a small prayer to whatever god would listen, she pulled.
Light burst at the horizon. Her head snapped up, watching it come. She stumbled back with a quick breath, a tidal wave of energy smashing toward her, and threw her arms up in front of her.
The entire scene went white.
She sucked in a breath and tried to scream—but no noise sounded. Everything was in a blind hush. She could still feel the floor, and the light, and she had a sense that Pranav was still near her, but everything else had gone away, dissolved by the light.
Then, she was falling.
She awoke—and jerked hard in the chair. Straps held her hands in place. Hands held her down as she struggled against them, eyes widening as the room came back to her all at once. Beeps and tones screamed around her, and there was yelling. Lights were everywhere, both in and out of her head.
When she finally calmed down enough to realize that she was back in the chair, back in the room with the scientists and not wandering the halls with Pranav, she stopped her struggle. The person who’d been speaking in her ear left her side for a moment, returning a moment later. The straps lifted from her wrists.
And then, Marc was there, filling her vision.
The rest of her panic stopped. She focused on him. “Marc?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
The rest of the room seemed to be running in a hive around them. She glanced around, seeing scientists and soldiers racing around and shouting to each other, others frowning down at the stations they worked at, their holoscreens, most of which had been dead and dark in the otherworld, springing to life with data streams, machines screaming and beeping as even more data came in.
Beside her, the metal box had gone dormant, and no energy pulsed through the lenses at the ends of her chair arms. “Is it over?”
“It seems that way.”
“Good.” She leaned back against the chair and closed her eyes against the noise. “Because I’m tired, and I’m not sure I care about the little stuff anymore. If you don’t mind, can you find out if there’s a place I can sleep in? If not, I’m just going to curl up in the corner over there.”
It had looked empty, so she didn’t think anyone was using it, but with every other square inch of the room seemingly occupied, one could never be sure.
“Sure.” His lips met her forehead, giving her a soft kiss. “I’ll be right back.”
Good, she thought. I’ll be right here.
But she didn’t voice the words, instead letting them roll and linger in her head. Though parts of her aching body had protested against the chair’s stiffness when she’d woken up, it had begun to feel comfortable. Just before she drifted off to sleep, she thought she heard voices coming closer, Marc’s among them.
Then the world disappeared again, this time in a normal fashion.
Chapter Thirty-One
The sun rose over the hill, limning the ruins and casting the field around them in a burnt, pink-gold hue. The trees were still, and the grasses had come back from the dead in little green and brown clumps, some rising higher than the rest. The remains of an old gate stood down the slope, little more than two sagging and broken posts standing upright in the wildgrowth, the fence they once guarded long gone. Karin let out a breath, and the fog rose up in front of her face, catching the light before it disappeared.
She watched it go, then switched her attention back to the field, the trees, and the light that covered them. It wasn’t a solstice or anything. The sun wasn’t doing anything so visually exciting as line up with the stones in a certain way, but there was something off about it. And, as she watched it for a few minutes, the realization clicked into place.
It was too still. Everything was too still.
The sun wasn’t moving.
Now that she knew, it became much more obvious to her. The light looked more like it came from a studio lamp than a system star, with a monodirectional shine that seemed lacking, though her senses told her than the only thing it lacked was movement. The whole meadow had the feeling of a photograph—a three-dimensional snapshot frozen in time.
And, like before, she got the sense that it was waiting for something.
A familiar tingling started in her fingertips.
She frowned down at them and lifted her hand. A secondary connection opened in the back of her mind, this one similar to what she’d felt when she’d pushed her light into the lenses at Hawkings-Navarro and rode their energy down into the nodes. Her frown faltered as she turned her attention to it, looking inward.
Golden light fluttered at the edge of it, looking like flames. Though silent, she could ‘hear’ the call it made. The light inside her pooled together, strumming into her center until her core hummed like the strings of a mandolin.
Er. Okay, then. She hesitated, eyebrows rising, then gave the connection a mental tap.
Light flooded inside her—but not in a bad way. It was silent, and it felt warm, and it poured inside less like a waterfall than a slow, deep-moving creek. She closed her eyes, watching the shift of white and gold, and she caught snippets of other things, as well. Sounds, images, snatches of conversation. The smell of dust in a summer field. The feeling of sun on her hand, and dew brushing against bare ankles.
When it finished, slowing down to a quiet, unobtrusive trickle, and she opened her eyes again, she was still in the field. And the sun was still not moving.
But, this time, she could feel it—not the fiery celestial ball, but the idea it represented, the light and warmth of the dawn, the turning back of the darkness, but not the burn of day. She wasn’t Helios, who moved the sun, but Eos, who gave permission for it to rise.
Thinking this, and following the warmth of her connection with the sun, she reached out and gave it a little nudge.
As if someone flipped a very quiet switch, it began to move.
She let out a breath as a near-imperceptible change took over the hil
lside and relaxed her shoulders back. The fog rose in the air, then vanished. Overtop of the forest, a rust-colored hawk wheeled into view. It turned with a gentle angle of its wings and glided toward the left.
Just what is this power? Was I always supposed to have it? She directed her gaze down to her hand, where light seemed to collect and pool at its edges. Is this what I missed out when I didn’t go through the tertiary and quaternary stages of treatment?
“You remember now, don’t you?”
Karin didn’t jump at the voice. She’d half-expected it. More than half-expected it. Layla was a common fixture in her dreams these days.
When she glanced back, the girl was stepping out from the shadow of one of the stones as if she’d been there all along. Layla’s gaze fixed on her with a preternatural focus.
“Nope,” Karin told her. “Not at all.”
That put a frown on Layla’s face—and halted her steps.
“What? But…” Her features pinched as she thought, wiping the unnaturalness right off it, and she turned her focus to the air slightly left of Karin for a few seconds before returning it to Karin’s face. “Ah. I see. You’re getting better.”
“Thanks.” Karin gave her a critical look. “Are you back to being you?”
“Er… I think so?”
“No threatening, aggressive body language?”
Layla’s frown deepened. “No. I don’t see why I would do that to you.”
“Good. I’ll just assume the last time was weird because of Tylanus. Now, why are you here? Are you going to tell me anything useful?”
“What?”
“Anything that is going to help me out in the foreseeable future? Preferably in a way that isn’t vague, in code, or assuming that I know what is going on?”
