by K. Gorman
“What—”
An explosion thumped into the door at his back, the lock and hinges rattling. Outside, someone screamed.
Karin reached over with her bad arm, shoved his hand onto her arm, and pulled on the electric crackle of power within her.
The world snapped and spun. Their surroundings reeled. Light blurred out like paint streaks, slowly fading into tones of dark gray. Its touch faded from her senses like air from a tank.
The cool quiet of the Shadow world folded over her hair and skin like a veil.
Baik jerked back with a yell. “What in the ten hells was that?”
Soo-jin smacked his arm on her way out the door. “We’re shifting dimensions. Don’t have much time to explain. Just hold onto Karin. I—” She halted as she came to the door, spine and shoulders stiffening. “Oh, holy shit. Karin?”
There were more Shadows in the hall. A lot more. Karin’s breath hitched as she tried to guess a count. Twenty? Give or take? Their forms staggered throughout the hall, as if they had arrived in ones or twos—not all at once. Which was odd, since there had only been one in the hallway when they’d left it a minute ago.
They all looked up when she came into sight. Her Shadow was there, too, staring at her from less than a meter away. She met its gaze, feeling that tremble of recognition crumble through her gut.
She let out a slow breath, holding its stare. Then, slowly, she made for the next door.
“I have no idea what’s happening, but we have to keep going.” She swallowed hard. “Don’t attack them.”
The last, she directed to Baik, whose pale expression had gone stone serious, his earlier shock wiped clean off. The dark trail of blood down the front right of his fatigues made him look like a ghost from a particularly bloody horror movie.
Eyes on the Shadows, they retreated to the next door. Karin hesitated, one hand lifted to its wood to close it, but a quick look at the splintered lock told her that wasn’t going to happen.
A tremor went through her as the light shifted outside. She didn’t need to look to know the Shadows were moving in. She could feel them—as if they were tiptoeing on her spine.
She shut the door anyway, ignoring the line of light it made when it swung partially back on its broken lock, and turned inside.
Even in the dimness, Baik and Soo-jin’s stares were obvious. She met them.
“Maybe they’re attracted to me,” she said, letting out a breath and inwardly cringing at the slight high pitched warble of her words.
A small silence followed.
“I want to come up with a joke for that,” Soo-jin admitted. “But I think I’m too scared to try.” She shivered. “Can we warp now, please?”
She held out her hand, pale fingers splayed.
Karin looked over to Baik. “You good?”
He didn’t appear ‘good’—his earlier stoicism had worn down to doubt at the edges—but he nodded.
She held out her arm. Soo-jin grabbed it first, quick and firm, Baik a little more hesitant, but stronger.
She closed her eyes, let her head drop forward, and focused on her power.
It came crackling out of her center like a maelstrom of lightning. The world crashed away in a whoosh, sounds distorting. Dark and light bled together. Something gentle brushed through her shoulder, like a whisper.
Then, they were through, and she was blinking her eyes against the light.
Smoke scratched at her face and dragged small nails down her throat as she breathed. She coughed and ducked, squinting against it.
The room was a haze. Blasters and pulse weapons cracked and reverberated outside, and her heart jumped in her chest, head snapping around.
Cookie sat in the corner, his posture stiff and eyes wide. They grew wider when he registered their presence.
He squawked as Baik hauled him up, gaze snapping to the stain of blood that ran down his front, then to Karin. “Holy shi—”
She didn’t wait for him to finish. She grabbed him with her bad arm, ignored the twinge in her wrist, and pulled them into the warp. The sounds from the hallway disappeared, the walls and colors blurring like a slow camera.
Then, they were through.
Cookie snapped his hand back as if he’d been bitten. “Holy fucking child—agh!”
She didn’t think his eyes could have gone wider, but they did. Then, as she registered their surroundings, she realized why.
They were absolutely surrounded by Shadows.
She froze, sucking in a breath. Her spine contracted, the smooth, sliding twinge of familiarity running through her shoulders in a wave. There was a smell in the air, warm and languid, similar to what she’d smelled in the tank but without the background of chemicals in it—like smelling a rose as opposed to smelling chemically scented rose perfume.
“Don’t move,” she said, her words coming in a breathless burst. She shuddered again. Every single muscle in her back was taut, and she couldn’t help the hiss that escaped her when that smooth sensation rippled through her again—as if every Shadow in the room was sliding its fingers through the skin of her back.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Cookie gibbered, then moved onto something else, his voice growing even tighter.
Baik and Soo-jin looked little better. He had already gone for the empty spot on his thigh where his holster normally hung. She was staring dead ahead, eyes wide, jaw locked tight. The Shadows blocked the light from outside the door, casting her face half in shadow, but Karin saw her throat move in a swallow. Time seemed to flow like mud.
Several seconds ticked by, everyone holding their breath.
Nothing happened.
Soo-jin unlocked her jaw. “They’re not attacking.”
Cookie let out an unintelligible noise and jumped when the one beside him moved. Karin held still, watching it.
Another few seconds ticked by. When it didn’t make to move again, her attention shifted to others. It should have been hard to pick out individual heads amid the sea dark, amorphous bodies—they surrounded them at least two deep—but she had no trouble locking on each one. They weren’t attacking, but the accuracy of their position was suspect. None of them had been inside the warp area.
They must have known precisely where we were arriving.
Not a great thought, but, frankly, she was just happy that they weren’t attacking.
Yet.
“Oookay,” she said, her voice sounding not nearly as confident as she wanted it to. “Let’s try for the door, shall we? I—”
“Eos.”
The word tripped through her brain like a flash of lightning. Everyone else flinched, too.
“—still need to get Marc,” she finished.
Even in her stiffened panic, Soo-jin managed to raise her eyebrows at her.
Yep. Just going to pretend that never happened.
Eyes wide, back stiff, right fist clenching at the smooth, eerie ripple of energy that flowed through her skin, she turned to the door. The Shadows parted for her like plants bowing away from the wind—an image made all the more disturbing by the disjointed, malleable nature of their bodies. She brushed by several, their hands and arms sliding both onto and into her skin in a touch that felt like tingly silk.
More Shadows waited for her outside. Karin sidestepped around a larger-than-average one, feeling the thing’s gaze follow her up the hall.
“Uh, Karin, you have a—watch out!”
A silky-smooth touch clasped around her forearm, then held fast. She jerked as an image of the ruins up the hill came into her mind, stars twinkling above. A line of light waited on the horizon, as if the sun had just set or wanted to rise.
Three strangled shouts sounded from back down the hall. She flung a hand out at them, fingers splayed.
“No, no! It’s okay. I’m okay. I think she just wants to talk.”
She looked up into the Shadow’s face, and a little part of her stomach dropped straight from under her as her brain registered the odd, depthless quality of
the Shadow’s darkness. The blackness seemed to churn, similar to the way the worlds shifted around her in the warp. She swallowed hard and dropped her gaze to the ragged black fingers on her forearm. With the Shadow’s half-realized corporeality, their fingers slid inside her skin a little ways. Not as much as this one had on the ship, but enough for her to feel the tingle.
“Eos.”
The voice hit her mind like a warm ripple. She shivered.
“What do you want?”
Time ticked between them. She was aware of her breath, slow and shallow. Of eyes watching her. Soo-jin, Baik, and Cookie stood in the background, tense and rooted. Around her, every Shadow in the hallway had its attention turned toward her.
After a few seconds, the Shadow’s grip loosened. Its hand slid down, the action slow and deliberate—as if it either floated or was controlled.
She swallowed and turned away. But, before she’d taken more than a step, the Shadow’s weird mental voice slid up her spine like an electric current.
“And I don’t care what your so-called mother says—they are real, living people. You will wipe them out in one fell fucking swoop.”
Hearing her voice come out of the Shadow—hearing it wipe across her mind in that way they had, every stress and cadence ruthlessly imitated—felt so wrong. Tension rippled through her. She held herself stiffly, barely daring to breathe, her eyes locked on the Shadow.
She’d said that to Tylanus. Recently. But how could it possibly know that?
Is it reading my memories?
“Is it reading my memories?” the Shadow copied. Then, she felt a silky twist inside the back of her neck, as if the Shadow were touching her there, too, and it corrected itself. “It is reading my memories?”
The cadence it used, the way the words went up at the end, turned the sentence into a question, but she had a feeling that it had just answered her. In its own, eerie way.
Well, at least we have a way of communication, now.
“Well,” the Shadow started. “At least we have—”
“Shut up.” She jerked arm away from it, and the tingling connection she’d felt dropped immediately. It seemed to ripple, draw taller. She stepped around its arm and back toward the door.
“I have to go do something,” she ground out, trying to catch the others’ eyes as she walked away. “We’ll be back. Stop touching me.”
Cookie and Soo-jin were gaping at her. Baik had his usual stone-serious face on, but she could tell by the way his eyes darted between her and the Shadows that the whole thing set him off.
They all gave the Shadow a healthy clearance as they veered toward the next door. Two other Shadows slid out of the way when she let herself in.
She ignored them.
If they attacked, then they attacked. She just added that to the list of things she had to worry about.
Soo-jin, Cookie, and Baik filed in after her. She held her hand out, aware of the Shadows coming in after them. Three sets of hands grabbed onto her forearm.
Without preamble, she pulled on her power.
Energy shuddered through her, rushing down her chest, thrumming against her heartbeat. The world quivered around them. She sucked in a breath, muscles tensing as a wave of power rode through her.
Come on, come on, come on, go!
Reality around them cracked with a sound of thick ice under truck tires. It felt like someone had plucked her heartstrings. Her hand burned, traces of light flipping to the surface of her skin like white, glowing sparks.
With the feeling of pulling water through sand, she forced the warp through.
Sound returned. The air re-settled around her, warmer and muggier than it had been. Cloying, close, and tinged with the heavy scent of—
Blood.
She forced her eyes to open. She didn’t remember closing them. The smell of blood and sweat overpowered her. It was like she could feel it, the smell, touching her skin. Soo-jin made a small noise in her throat. When Karin turned, following her gaze to the hunched figure lying on the bed, a small whimper crawled through her own throat.
Marc’s face was a mess. If the Centauri had bothered to treat anyone for their injuries, they’d clearly skipped him. Even Soo-jin, with half her face puffed up so much that her left eye was little more than a slit, made a better first impression than the lopsided, raw swelling that bloated his eyes, cheeks, and jaw. The bruising was more severe, too. Where Soo-jin’s formed a distinct trail from her eye to her jaw, Marc’s face was dark in multiple areas and with multiple colors. She remembered the way the side of his right eye had caved in. Remembered the wet sound the soldier’s fists had made as he’d kept punching him.
Part of it looked misshapen.
Nausea clotted her throat. Her worry spilled over. The next thing she knew, she was gibbering at his side, her hands trailing hesitantly over his arm, noticing the dried and tacky blood that marred the skin. Heat radiated from his body.
Soo-jin pushed her aside and opened the medkit. A crash sounded outside the door.
“Shit.” Soo-jin cast a glance back. Blaster cracks and pulses could be heard in the hall, coming closer. “Karin, can you move him without… moving him?”
Move him to the Shadow world, she meant.
“Yes,” she choked out, thrusting her right arm up for the rest to grab onto. Her left hand found an unbroken spot on Marc’s arm—Gods, he wasn’t even awake. If he weren’t so warm, she’d have assumed he was dead. Her bad wrist gave a twinge of protest as she pushed her thumb underneath.
Soo-jin lifted a hand to clasp her shoulder. “Don’t forget the medkit.”
Karin nodded and pulled. The world warped. Light shut off, as if someone had drawn a curtain, and everything settled.
When she opened her eyes, Shadows had surrounded them. Again. Two of them wavered within her reach, their darkness crawling on her senses.
Too close.
Power rushed through her. She raged upward, light burning through her skin, thrust a pointing finger to the door, and screamed. “Out! Get out!”
To her surprise, they did.
The ten Shadows in the room rushed through the door like a herd of black ghosts, the whispery whooshing sound they made sending a douse of cold up her spine. They scattered to different spots of the hallway, stopped, and spun. Their attention snapped to her like a magnet.
Her jaw dropped open.
What the fuck?
Slowly, she dropped her arm. A halo of white-gold light shone around her skin, illuminating the room in a warm glow that contradicted the diffuse, gray lighting of the Shadow world. She glanced to the side, her wide-eyed expression finding similar looks on Baik and Cookie’s faces.
“Oookay.” Soo-jin closed her mouth. With visible effort, she turned her back on the door and faced Marc, one hand pulling a medscan out of the bag. “Uh, keep them there, please?”
Sure thing. Karin breathed a shallow breath, her stare going back to the door. The Shadows stared back at her.
Suns, what the fuck?
She examined the nearest one. It was shorter than the others, but she recognized it as one of the two that had been next to Marc. It stood to the left side of the door, rooted to the floor as if it had been stuck there. Its body seemed to burn with blackness. The closer she looked, the more it appeared to roil. At the edges, reality appeared to dip in, like the bend of a mirror.
Another Shadow stepped in from the right. Even before she saw the entire thing, she knew which it would be.
It didn’t speak this time, but its stare pierced her with an accuracy that the others didn’t have—as if it went straight into the center of her chest rather than a few inches into her skin.
The medkit rustled behind her. Soo-jin shifted, the movement nudging her leg. A beep sounded.
“How is he?” Karin asked, her voice high.
“Unconscious,” Soo-jin replied. “Give me a second.”
The hiss of a nano-injector sounded, and Karin fought the urge to turn around. Both Baik and Cook
ie had slid their gazes down to a spot behind her. She tried not to watch the way their shadows appeared to shift on the wall behind them.
After a few seconds, Baik knelt down, joining Soo-jin with a rustle of clothes. “I can carry him. Does he have any spinal injuries?”
Gods, Marc. She forced her gaze to stay forward, flexing her fingers, feeling the light flow inside her. It felt like part of her was stretching, on the verge of breaking.
But Soo-jin was already zipping her kit up. “No. He’s good to be moved.”
She let out a loud breath and turned. The smell of blood came to her again, smaller but more distinct this time. As Cookie and Soo-jin helped maneuver Marc into a fireman carry over Baik’s shoulders, she led them out of the room. The Shadow stepped out of her way.
She ignored the way its proximity seemed to call at the power under her skin.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Blasters cracked outside the door when they warped, so close, it felt like thunder ripping through her skin. She ducked when she heard them, saw Cookie do the same, then noticed the empty room.
Neither doctor was there.
“Shit,” Soo-jin exclaimed, turning around in a small circle—as if one of the doctors might be hiding on the dresser, or in the corner next to the door. “Shit, shit, shit!” She spun, jerking her head to the wall. “The next room, maybe? Or across the hall?”
Karin just shook her head. The world spun around her, as if all her warping had never really stopped—like she was constantly running the fine line between being here and being not here. The smell of blood still cloyed her nose. She couldn’t get rid of it. Couldn’t get rid of the picture of Marc slumped over Baik’s shoulders, for all intents and purposes looking dead. Things were screaming outside, shooting, blowing up. Smoke hazed the air and stung at her eyes. She had to get him back to the ship. Had to get him to safety.
“I don’t know,” she heard herself say. “I…”
She shook her head again, almost stumbling. Soo-jin moved again in her vision, this time to the left. Her fall of dreads made a thick, black blob in her sight, the colors within making it seem to shift and seethe, like a Shadow. Her breaths came short and sharp. Shallow. Too fast. Limbs shaking, she worked to slow them. To ground herself.
