The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  She’d stuffed the cracked Quartz in the pocket of her hospital robe, put a hand protectively around it as she watched Natti, unsure what she could possibly do or say. It had dawned on her suddenly that this was the last Calamity Stone left in the world, and Phae kept thinking, Maybe if I squeeze it hard enough, maybe if I push and push, I’ll feel what I did when I came out of the Glen . . .

  Back then she’d felt the Matriarch, Fia, resonating inside her. She’d felt beyond death. She’d felt that she was only made of Spirit, and that it was enough, and it was good.

  She had emerged as not a woman, but a song, and it had been sung back to her by the sister stones. Phae had felt so much, too much, and it had been more than beautiful, more than healing. She had felt what Spirit truly meant, the last unabashed hope of a god who didn’t believe in it.

  Now that hope was as cracked as the lump of glass in her pocket.

  “No one can go anywhere right now,” Phae said to Natti, shutting the hospital door and lowering her voice. “Barton’s been speaking with his unit. The whole Coalition. We’re all playing this day by day now. The world’s militaries are on high alert for anything remotely pointing to Denizen activity. The last elders are all going underground, because we expect a United Nations tribunal any day now. We all can’t go around like we used to. We have to plan this carefully, and —”

  “Exactly,” Natti replied, holding a pair of jeans against her hip-to-toe cast. She threw them away, and instead reached for a long, flowing hippie skirt from a stockpile under the bed. “Of course I’m going to be careful. There’s too much at stake. I have to go back to my mom. To my Family. I’m needed with the Seals now. And it’s best to do it when everyone’s got their heads up their asses. They won’t be able to stop me even if they try.”

  Phae couldn’t help but suddenly feel petulant. “But we need you. Barton, me, Aivik. We’re all connected to Roan. To Eli. It’s our responsibility to —”

  “Responsibility to what?” Natti shouted, moving far quicker than she should with that broken leg. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug, but it’d wear off soon. “Don’t you talk to me about Roan.” Natti’s finger was in Phae’s face, backing her into a food tray. “This is all her fault. She killed Aunty. She’s the one who fucked up everything. She was on Seela’s side this whole time.”

  Phae took Natti’s hand, but she ripped it away. “It wasn’t like that, and you know it. Her stone was corrupted. She did manage to fight it off —”

  “Too late,” Natti was muttering, “we were all too late.”

  It was like she was in a panicked fever. Phae tried to call up the power, her fingertips sparking blue, but it was harder than it ever had been. With the stones gone, would Denizen power wane? Would she lose what precious grace she’d taken for granted? Natti turned her back on Phae, squared her shoulders, and shivered.

  “I need to be with my true Family,” Natti said at last, her voice hard as an ice floe. “The one I chose is broken. That’s on me.” When she turned back, her face, though slightly ashen, was utterly calm. “You weren’t there, Phae. You didn’t see it. I thought it was going to be the end. I sort of wish it had been. How screwed up is that? We all survived, and look at the world we have ahead of us. They’re going to hunt us down, all the Mundanes who will blame us. And they’d be right for it. We risked everything, and we lost.” She licked her dry lips. “Best not to meddle any more than we already have.”

  The door opened behind them. Barton had arrived, and Phae and Natti both glared at him.

  “Natti,” Barton said, passing Phae with a perfunctory squeeze to her arm. “I’ve talked to Commander Zhao. There’s a transport ship we can put you and Aivik on to take you to the North. It leaves in a few hours, though.”

  Phae felt twenty protests seizing her jaw. “Barton, no —”

  Natti snatched her crutches and was basically bounding out of the room. “Fine,” she said roughly, “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

  Phae gave Barton a look to melt steel before she rushed after her, down the hall. “Natti, please wait!”

  “I’m done waiting,” she snarled. Aivik came around the corner, nearly knocking Natti over, and Phae caught up.

  “I may not have been there,” she fumed, voice growing as feverish as Natti’s, “but I was in another realm. One your god sent me to. You don’t know what it took to convince Fia to give me the Quartz, to even get back here alive! We’ve all done things, taken the risks, but we did it together. We have to stay together.”

  Natti would not turn around, not this time. “Maybe you should’ve stayed in the Glen,” she said. “At least we both got to see our gods before we killed them.”

  A woman with a shaved head and wearing green Coalition linen had come down the hall and looked questioningly from Barton to Natti and Aivik. She seemed to survey the gathering with too much grave understanding.

  “This is them, Kita,” Barton said. “They’re ready.”

  “I hope so,” she said to Natti and Aivik. “This way. We have a ground vehicle waiting in the back. Hurry, if you can.”

  “With pleasure,” Natti uttered, face even whiter now, and she took one last look at Barton, at Phae, and at the little girl clinging to Barton’s leg. The one who had found Phae washed up on the seashore, who had convinced Natti to come out of the hole beneath Seela’s compound and survive another day.

  Natti looked at them all with mean, disappointed eyes and left. She didn’t dare say goodbye.

  Red Song

  Saskia remained cautiously hopeful after falling into a sickly sort of routine. At least now she had a plan.

  After the first week she still hadn’t discovered quite what she was working with the ETG for, or what good she could do there. One week and Ella was still missing. One week and the Moth Queen hadn’t bothered to show up again, even when Saskia begged her to.

  One week, and she still couldn’t get that old computer in her room to turn on.

  While the lab was separate from the recruit intake, or even the classroom training barracks, the place seemed to swell with activity every day. In that first week, Saskia hadn’t seen nor heard from the chancellor, and she was grateful for it. “Every day brings a new urgent matter,” Mi-ja had said after those first couple of days, beaming her plastic smile. Saskia didn’t buy it. Every day she steeled herself when taking sharp corners down sterile white corridors, expecting the chancellor’s sick, sharp-faced smirk on the other side. She was absolutely convinced he was just waiting for her to slip up.

  Not much room to slip up when you’re doing nothing, Saskia had sulked. She asked herself over and over if her infiltration had just been a pointless risk.

  She saw Cam now and then. Combat training was not done on site, though, so these instances weren’t predictable. Trainees billeted outside of the city, in a community of co-opted farms in nearby Steinbach, which had virtually become its own military town. New recruits still had to come in for classes, however, since they were underage and the ETG had its own propaganda-filled “education” program. Saskia had mercifully skipped that part.

  Saskia’s work was more important than socializing, anyway. That’s what Mi-ja had told her during the daily debriefings with Saskia and the rest of the engineering team — meetings that just seemed to reinforce how “important” their work was without actually making them do anything.

  The rest of the team were all much older than Saskia, and intolerably suspicious of her. While they were all new hires like her, anytime Mi-ja left the room they became a hive of nervous bees. They complained about the impossibility of working under such conditions, since they were given only breadcrumbs: papers on theoretical physics, folding dimensions, the transmission of frequencies from deep space . . . and a firm encouragement to re-read the chancellor’s memoirs about the White Militia. What did all these things have in common?

  Some guessed this mystery gauntlet was
a test of loyalty and threw themselves into playing along. Others were terrified, looking for someone to blame. Then they’d look at Saskia disapprovingly. She was young and no one knew her story, but they all seemed to know the chancellor had hitched his star to her. She was nervous, too, but she was willing to wait. The others didn’t know a thing about waiting.

  It came down to this: her team was tasked with building something that would be implemented into the ETG’s greatest asset, one that had a lot of time and money and brilliant minds sunk into it already, but was giving them . . . trouble. Word from on high was they were waiting for clearance on a new development that would make their jobs much clearer. “Read the papers you’re given about Project Crossover,” they were told. “Prepare yourself.”

  Project Crossover itself was not revealed to them in anything but vague promises: this will change the tide of our current circumstances. And Project Crossover will allow humans to take back their broken authority over this world. These documents, with official Canadian government letterhead, were rife with black marker streaks: REDACTED. RESTRICTED. FEDERAL CLEARANCE ONLY.

  On her second day, Saskia was given a tour of the asset in question. The rest of the team had been working with it before she got there, had already developed a hands-on approach to it. But still, none of them could see what Saskia did the second she walked up the concrete ramp and to the steel railing that stopped her from disappearing into the Earth’s core.

  Yet for all the holes in their instructions, the pieces of everything slid neatly together when Saskia looked down into that oblivion machine. The Task Guard called the machine “The Apex.” Saskia had another name for it.

  A Bloodgate.

  “It worked once, god knows how,” one of the engineering team members had said offhandedly when they thought Saskia was out of earshot. They were as bad as her classmates, these grown astrophysicists, most of them doctors six times over. “I hear they got a Rabbit neutralizer in to do it. Except now they have no idea how to make it work without him, or what he did to wreck it.”

  Saskia knew. Because she knew what type of person Barton was, if that’s who they meant. He’d go along with what the ETG wanted — seeing that their machine could work. But he’d do whatever it took to make sure they couldn’t do it again.

  When she first saw the machine, Saskia thought of the Large Hadron Collider, a marvel, a true invention engineered into being to explore the frontiers of possibility. This thing that the Task Guard had built . . . all Saskia could see was a loaded gun.

  It descended miles into the ground, a tube of steel panels, electricity arcing off it. Somewhere, there would have been a reactor to turn it on, which meant there was an enormous turbine, coils of wire the circumference of her body, and on and on. This had been a huge undertaking, something the Task Guard would have had to hide for years. Saskia drowned in questions — they had been testing the machine, but for what purpose? Who had built it? What had they tested it on?

  Or who?

  When it came down to it, it was just a dark hole. But how had they managed to dig such a hole in the first place? There were some questions Saskia could answer for herself, the longer she stared at this thing, tuning the chatter, the grinding, the general noise out. She remembered what Rabbits could do. They could dig and dig and dig. But they could also open doors that no one else could see.

  In the scant two years Saskia had become close to Barton, relying on him to occupy the space of father and brother at the same time, she had sat at his prosthetic legs, begging to know everything. Whatever slip of magic he could spare. He was generous with that knowledge. People liked that about him. He told a story, and it made you feel like it was yours.

  Bloodgates, he’d said, were tricky things. Just like Owls had the augmented skill of telepathic manipulation besides their wind-harnessing, Rabbits could part dimensional space — That’s how I understand it, anyway, he’d say, pushing his glasses up his nose. They could feel for a crease, and open a way to the Bloodlands, because, as the roundabout story went, Heen was the one who dug the Darkling Hold to put away the three beings of destruction, and her descendants inherited this ability to feel the way there.

  Bloodgates were easier to open in certain locations. Once closed, they could not be opened a second time. Bloodgates could not be created, either. When it came down to it, not all Rabbits were able to open or shut these doors, and no one had really discovered a pattern in determining who could. What was the purpose of knowing how to do this dire thing, anyway? The Bloodlands weren’t necessarily the promised land. If anything, it was Denizen Hell. Going down there was a last resort. But it was a good place to put things you didn’t want to see again.

  They called the Rabbits who could perform this feat neutralizers. Someone who managed a balance between creation and destruction, if only rarely and for a moment. There was some overall Denizen suspicion towards neutralizers, too, because they were, in this minor way, connected to the dark. And they could use this connection to enact a ritual that could remove a Rabbit’s power, given to them by the god Heen.

  Owls could take away powers, too — anyone’s powers. Maybe they resented that they weren’t in total control.

  Barton had had to become a neutralizer himself, after being mutilated by one in order to save his life. He wasn’t bitter about the fact he had been severed. If he carried any ill feelings about it all, he’d long ago learned to let it go. Doesn’t get you anywhere, he’d say to Saskia, when she was experiencing her own bad taste of the world. After he disappeared, Saskia often wondered what sort of things he may have grown capable of doing, if the world had allowed him.

  Now she knew.

  The engineering team were the only ones allowed in for the daily tests run through the machine. But then the first week had ended and, surprising everyone, Chancellor Grant showed up himself to provide the marching orders. As much as Saskia had dreaded his appearance, his presence made her hope that her luck was about to improve.

  “I know it’s been difficult working on this project with little to go on. You, with all your . . . many gifts.” He’d been addressing the whole team, but his glance lingered over Saskia, and she met it. “It took some time to secure the highest government clearance on this, so know that if any of you were to speak of this, to anyone, including your deaf cat, there would be consequences.”

  Saskia rolled her eyes to overcome the anxiety growing in her.

  “There’s something you will now listen to. It’ll be your first time hearing it, but soon you’ll have every tonal shift memorized. Your task will be to build a receiver that can not only fill in the missing gaps of this transmission but lock on to its location.”

  The room had been silent. Somewhere, someone flicked a switch, and Saskia’s guts twisted so hard, she collapsed.

  She came to seconds later, with one of the team members, Beth, holding her up.

  “Keep it together or you’ll be out of here,” she growled. Saskia snapped her head up, finding her feet, head throbbing. Beth shoved her aside, giving her a look that said Don’t screw this up for the rest of us. Luckily the chancellor wasn’t looking at Saskia anymore.

  The recording stretched on. Saskia was already ten steps ahead; it was the same warped, sonic sound that seemed stuck inside the winding canals of her ear and brain. The sound she heard when Barton — or a good trickster — had sent her a message. It was the cracked music box of an evil carousel, and she couldn’t get off.

  “We are calling this the signal,” the chancellor said over the noise, which was making most of the team wince. Some held their ears but kept their faces blank. Which, Saskia thought, seemed the best response to most of what went on in this place. “It came through this very machine, recently. So here is your task: you will interpret it. You will locate it. And once that location is determined, in this dimension or another, I believe we can direct what we’ve already worked so hard for, and op
en the door at the time we need it most. You will be the ones to carry Project Crossover over the finish line, and end any notion of war consuming this planet.”

  Open the gate. Win the war. Now get to work.

  “He’s batshit insane,” another tech, Jonathan, had said, in a quiet lab at the end of a hall where Saskia was scanning through the first 0.23 seconds of the signal’s readout, to the part where there seemed to be a gap of silence, part of the chain of code deleted. The team had been divided into little clusters like this, to dig through wavelengths till their eyes and ears and brains hurt. They had to apply the science they already knew to an illogical plane.

  Saskia was game. Because that missing piece was inside her head.

  But she darted Jonathan a skittish glance from her screen. “Maybe keep comments like that to yourself.” Unless he’s just trying to bait me so I say what I’m really thinking and get kicked out . . .

  He groaned in his seat, cracking his back. “Grant knows exactly what he is. It’s how he gets results. But please. A signal that’ll lead us to . . . another dimension? We have a real theatre of war here, not in la-la land. This isn’t what my Ph.D. is for.”

  Saskia put her headphones back on. “If you’re living in a world where people with powers are the living breathing bogeymen, and you can’t cope with the possibility of another dimension, you should throw your degree in the trash.”

  She turned the recording up to drown out Jonathan’s answer, and despite how painful it was, she listened hard. Listened to see if anyone was talking back.

  Saskia felt, finally, like she was in control. It was only a matter of time before she did exactly what she was told . . . and got through to the other side first.

  * * *

  Now, at the close of the second week in those labs deep underground, Saskia finally felt like she’d made actual progress.