Jared blinked as the memory returned more fully. Yes. The day he’d met Kaitlin. “You’re that kid who wanted my nudie magazine.”
The teen snorted. “I only wanted to distract you, and set you on a different path. You had to meet Kaitlin that day. At least, in this reality. Oh, and by the way, that wasn’t your magazine, Jared. That was truth in all realities.”
“Tell me what you want with me.”
“While my Assembly keeps the dimensions separate by physical application, that separation is not enough. Events within dimensions should never flow in similar directions. We cannot afford intersections to occur. My work is done in quiet secrecy. I’m in everyone’s life. I’m the person you hardly recall, but never truly forget.”
“Didn’t you become an engineer after a car wreck… or something?”
“To some,” said the teen. “To others I’ve been ruling the Deeper Unseen.”
Slowly, Jared swallowed and his heart trembled. “You… you’re one of the Silent Kings, aren’t you?”
The teen nodded. “But I cannot remain silent at this stage, not with what you’ve just done. My intervention here must be loud.”
“Why now?”
His pale pink lips twisted. “You should have studied the corridor shadow routes better before you went dumping hazardous dimensional compounds down them. The banshee had a better grasp of the routes and what you’ve gained from her through the Divine Scream wasn’t enough to truly recognize all the potential paths. You’ve screwed up here, Jared. Royally.”
“That route went right into the fortress,” said Jared, his panic rising. “I saw it clearly! The inner chamber where the Grim Three live.”
“Do you know,” the Silent King said, stepping forward with a casual kick of his loafers, “that your chosen route branches off in three directions? And that the force of airflow is greater through one route than the other two.”
“So what? They all end up in the same place!”
“No!” the Silent King shouted and pushed a hard finger into Jared’s chest, making him stumble back. “One route goes straight through the inner chamber, with more force, and spills into the fissure where the Assembly performs their essential duties. It’s called a dimensional hinge and the greatest chemical reaction will spread from there, not in the inner chamber.”
Jared swallowed. He knew enough about the instability of the hinges to know this wasn’t going to be good. “What will happen?”
The Silent King’s blonde eyebrows lifted in amazement. “Such a fool… you’ve just instigated the largest disturbance paradigm ever known. And despite the banshee’s decelerating of time, the disturbance has already started to evolve and spread.”
“I—”
“Oh shut up, Jared Kare. You do know I have to spoil your playtime now? I must sever the remaining effects of the banshee’s Chronos Scream. The chances for the dimensions to survive this paradigm will greatly improve if I intervene in this way. The destruction suffered while time drags on would be far greater. It would end everything. I’ve only dropped in to tell you this so you stop messing with things of which you have no understanding!”
Jared lowered his head. It wasn’t fair. His plan should have worked. How could he have overlooked that corridor’s destination? Because your insight into Banch’s memories is limited. Yes, the Divine Scream hadn’t given him every significant detail, even though he thought it had.
“So the fortress… will it still catch fire?”
The Silent King folded his arms and shrugged. “The paradigm will shift everything around. Some places will catch fire, and some places will explode, but not just the fortress.” He pursed his lips in thought. “I’ve got my fingers crossed the Free Zone goes up in flames. That would be nice to see those jackasses scramble for a change.”
“No! It can’t! The Free Zone is too far. Isn’t it?”
“Not with what you’ve done, Jared. Everywhere and every soul will suffer for your actions.” With an agile turn of heel, the teenager started off. He lifted his hand and made a cutting motion in the air.
The next moment cars sped past, birds fired suddenly through the air like bullets, and people walked on unhindered. Time had resumed to its normal progression and the world became incredibly noisy all at once. The Chronos Scream’s effects were over.
Jared stood there, too numb to form a coherent thought. The ground trembled underfoot. It was building, like a massive train rocketed underground through the soil, set for exploding through the upper crust.
“How can I fix this?” he yelled. “Please, you have to tell me!”
The teen gave him a pinched, disgusted look that seethed with impatience. “The Disturbance Paradigm is ready to take hold. I cannot give advice, but my Assembly has awakened now as well. This normally means a whole lot of running the hell away, for most wise people.”
Jared broke off down the street, his feet flying beneath him.
The Silent King shouted through his hands, “See you in the fortress, my friend! Soon!”
Chapter 22
The Assembly
We had to push ourselves up. We had to reach our feet. Stand. That was foolish of us to risk the banshee’s touch. She was stronger than we could ever know. We had to remember she believed she had more to lose than we did—such false conviction make a soul’s fire burn higher and fiercer, and unexpected strength therein follows. But we’d known that! And should have remembered! We must have been blinded by the Gift being so close. It was impossible to help our elation sometimes—every hundred years seems to feel longer, each gift seems sweeter but less sustaining, and all the while, holding the dimensions apart becomes crueler, more painful and insane.
Writhing around in the alley, in the debris, we attempted to regain ourselves. Something strange had occurred, as though we’d held our breath for a long time and were now finally allowed to breathe.
Time has been played with.
For a few minutes we picked free metallic splinters from our bodies, but only those that pained us to move. The other shards would remain until we had more time to remove them. The Eighth had femoral bleeding from a collection under his thigh and the Second had a particularly nasty, lengthy shiv pushed through his jaw to the back of his ear. We all shuddered as he pulled it out.
A corridor shadow widened on the wall of a building. That would only occur if a being from the Deeper Unseen had the correct route, which was coveted by someone of great power. That knowledge made us shrink back. The shadow spread across the building, darkening a banner of obscene blue-white-orange graffiti painted along the bricks and then rippled across rusted iron bars covering an old dirty window. The auburn depths of the shadow cascaded to the ground and a rotting wooden palette that had rested against the wall fell momentarily inside the shadow before a loafer kicked it back out into the alley. A figure emerged.
“Yula’deem,” we greeted, as the light clarified his features. We hadn’t expected to see this Silent King. We hadn’t seen any of them outside the fortress in around four hundred years, but that was a short time considering the familiar fire in his young eyes.
“Enter,” he bade.
Some of us limped forward, while others braced against a dumpster for a moment before moving, but we obeyed.
We always did.
There wasn’t a choice.
He was a vital organ for us…
All the Kings were. And one didn’t argue with the demands of his liver or pancreas. You allowed them do their work and keep you alive. You trusted them with everything you had. That was how the Silent Kings were. We loved them, but knew, oh we completely understood to our marrow, what they were and what we meant to them. There was no shortage of true nothingness to define their indifference for us, and yet we hoped they’d love us anyway, just like our Gift had hoped his parents would love him. It was silly, but it was an unstoppable need.
We filed into the corridor and staggered out onto the fibrous, opalescent firmament. The fibers flexed underfoot, th
e artificial wind flowed on, and silver-gold-rust particles surged down the hall, which to an outsider might have been as alien as a god’s esophagus. Only halfway to a junction, the Silent King stopped us.
“We are distressed.”
“Why, our King?” we said, all of our heads bowing in shame.
“You’ve stocked too much interest into this Gift. He’s only one in so many.”
“One?” We gasped. “But he is ours.”
The Silent King nodded. “Indeed.”
“It’s time. We want our gift so much, our King.”
“You will have your gift—when have you not?” he nearly growled.
“You are a gracious, loving, cherishing, uplifting, beautiful, kind, tolerant, and worthy King.”
We meant it.
Every word.
Every.
Word.
The scent of sharp electrified steel bit into our nostrils. We stumbled back. Linen. Soap. White resolve. Blue crystal death. It went up in the air, everywhere. To the top of the ceiling, to the lowest crevice of the floor. The fire. The flesh. Then the rendering of fat.
“What has occurred here?” we asked.
“A massive undoing,” the King answered.
We already sensed that. The Silent Kings would not reveal themselves for a lesser cause. “How large is the Disturbance Paradigm, our King?”
“Four times the size of the unhinging of 1734,” he whispered.
“Four times?” Our voices flared in the sliding darkness and dust.
“You will need to see to the hinges and help the effort to restore the separation.”
“At once,” we replied, and followed out of the corridor into another. We walked on, heads buzzing with the same question: what did this mean for our gift? Would we lose him? That couldn’t happen. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. “Was this the banshee’s doing again? How did this paradigm conceive?”
“Ignorance and haste,” said the King. He took us through the last sweeping corridor into an inverted room. Bricks bled into each other and super-heated inside like cores of magma burned within. It took us several moments to realize we’d come to one of the inner chambers of the fortress. The Disturbance Paradigm had reconfigured the shape of the room and made all the stone brick unstable, volatile. Our mouths dropped open in shock.
“It wasn’t the banshee who caused this,” said the King. “It was your beloved gift. He did this while you were sleeping off your failure.” All the remaining slivers of the Lung Spike embedded in our skins stung deeper at that moment. The King beckoned us on. “I will lead you to the hinges so you can begin your work.”
Hollowness expanded through us like a soul-devouring disease. After an anxious rush down several more warped passageways, the Silent King, not breaking stride, spoke again: “Before you enter the Space, I want you to consider something. I will make an exception this time and your third grant can be a new gift. This Jared Kare and the rebel banshee have caused more disruption than they are worth. Once the Paradigm is handled, I can send you another gift—male, female, young, old, or in-between. That will suffice your needs, I’m certain.”
We bowed our heads in thanks. We would not risk going the next hundred years empty handed. This was a generous offer from our King.
We continued toward the space when a voice hailed from a hall filled with pulsing orange-red rubble.
“Fathers,” the voice said.
One of our children. Amaen. Flesh a ghostly white, he was so bloodied and disfigured we might not have recognized him but for his voice. Dirt and crumbles of mortar caked his wounds. A large one in his neck coursed with fresh scarlet spillage. We rushed to his side, the ten of us surrounding him in a protective circle.
“There is no time for this!” the Silent King hissed.
Amaen choked on some blood. “My brother and sister are dead, Fathers. The walls folded and chopped them into…” His voice broke at the word. “Pieces.”
Our bodies trembled. We didn’t know what to say, what to do.
“Before it got very bad, I had time to check the prisoners and oldest Gifts. They are frightened with the size and scope of this disturbance, but they are alive. Some are trapped behind walls, but they are alive and still serviceable… we didn’t fail you Fathers… we didn’t fail.”
With a violent twitch, Amaen clutched the Fourth and the Seventh’s wrists and his body twisted for a breathless second before the last of his life poured from his neck, and then he went still. We could say nothing. We could feel everything. It had taken several miracles to bare children in the Deeper Unseen. Now all three were gone.
“Stand and continue,” ordered the Silent King. Tears bloomed in our swollen eyes and the King noted this with an impatient sigh. “You may have other children. Take another woman as a gift this time. I will let you choose anyone. I will even alter the schedule once more so that can happen. But you must obey now. Tend to the hinges and take your new gift after this resolves.”
Quietly, we resumed our trip to the Space.
When one dies in the Deeper Unseen, banshees from another territory lead their souls onward. Had this not been the case and we could see the one who came for our Amaen, we would have ripped her throat out on the spot. We could do nothing, however, except brood and cry and feel sick at the stomach from the faint sweet smell of the unseen banshee’s breath on the air.
“I know you’ve suffered here.” The Silent King’s voice softened. “But I don’t wish to create a new Assembly and waste more time… so hurry your steps.”
We all looked back to our fallen child. The death of our other children had not yet hit us. We weren’t choosing to let it have access to our minds. Many assumed we were grooming our three offspring to join us someday. Even perhaps the children believed that. And yet, such a notion couldn’t have been farther from the truth. We wanted them to have real lives. The Assembly would never lack members. If all ten of us fell, another ten would soon rise up. As we traveled these bending halls and corrupted rooms, the job ahead of us already penetrated our minds with a complete and absolute dread.
First would be the pressure. All of the hundreds of thousands of times we stepped into the Space, there was no becoming accustomed to the sensation that an organism must endure there. The skin becomes a brittle paper stretched over miles. The muscle, organs, and bones become water and the blood becomes a noble gas—inside our veins would be a highway of emptiness that provides no relief for the crushing forces above, beneath, front, around, back, and inside. When a physical life form forces itself between the hinges, only the nerves have tangibility.
And they are all boiling in acid.
They are all on fire.
They are all frayed.
Cut.
Ripped.
Shredded.
Raw.
Second would be the madness. What holding the hinges open does to our minds, if one can imagine, is really a sense of ultimate love lost. It is beyond even the loss of Amaen, Raithy, and Dureen, our young ones. There can be no explanation of the heartbreak experienced in the Space; one had nothing to direct the feelings to, but it was there and it was very real. Love attained by the void and love lost simultaneously within it. We’ve long called this “falling for the ghost,” because it seems like something real—it made our hearts warm, it made us quiver with desire and hope to nestle it within our arms like a superb lover. But we couldn’t. It didn’t exist. It has NEVER existed. The whole sensation of adoration and the need for utter devotion was a farce. In the Space, holding the hinges apart, keeping the dimensions from colliding, this and this most of all, wore on us; that feeling of perfect happiness, of being content, once and for all, was so elusive, it was enough to make us sob in the abyss and hope for more. Always more.
Third, and lastly, would be the soul. Our job imparted another pain on us, beyond the physical and the emotional. The next ruthlessness was something few could understand because in many dimensions few believed such a thing existed… but t
he soul can suffer the worst. Some might mistake this as a projection of emotion, but they would be wrong. The soul was something more meaningful on a cosmic scale and its relationship to the universe was at stake and what caused suffering. The way ones might appreciate their “grain of sand” status in the universe, but have no idea the millions of nuances beyond that, no idea how large they really are compared to nothing. Physical matter can be cut in halves forever and a soul can go forth into the light and become energy, which is useful, purposeful, and necessary. But to be reduced to nothing? Zero? Nil? Less than dust? Holding the hinges apart brought one closer to realizing that bleak concept. One became the void. You aren’t a particle. An atom. An election. Proton, neutron, lepton.
You were the emptiness.
All that mattered was the tangible, what was left behind. Like fingerprints in setting concrete, these would be indicators of your fight, your life.
Children were like this. A reminder of your once upon a time.
As we approached the opened area of the fortress, which was so different from how we remembered it, this truth sunk in and vengeance clawed to the surface.
We wheeled around on the King, surprising him. “No!” we all said in a unified roar.
His irritation with us found a new pitch. “What?”
“We wish for direct corridor access to the beach, where we will collect our gift, Jared Kare. That will be our third grant.”
He anxiously waved his hand to move along. “So be it, but you cannot be certain you’ll reach him in time, Assembly. You might end up with nothing.”
“You are right in that, our King, but the risk is worth the prize. He’s the only one we want. The only one we can have. Nobody else will do. He is the Gift we will have.”
The Space between the dimensions opened.
The Silent King watched us rush into the vacuum. “This calamity is partially your fault. So I ask that you keep the amount of lives lost unexpectedly to a minimum. I principally don’t wish to change the schedule for millions of people. If you succeed, your grant will be given on your return.”
Divine_Scream Page 17
