by Rachel Bach
Stay away.
The words exploded into my head so suddenly I would have jumped twice my height if my feet had had anything to press down on. They didn’t, though, so I just kicked, craning my neck out of a frantic, instinctive need to see where the threat was. Frantic and futile, because I couldn’t see anything except the phantom. It didn’t matter, though; I knew that voice. Or, rather, voices. But just when I was sure I was wasting my time, I spotted something moving out in the dark beyond the phantom’s light.
I’d felt the lelgis when I’d first arrived, before the phantom had distracted me. I’d known they were out there, watching. Now, though, I could feel their hate and fear like bugs crawling over my skin. We warned you, death bringer, they whispered in the dark. We told you, never return.
The words hit me like slaps, but I barely noticed. I was too focused on the great, black, mountain of a shape rearing up out at the light’s edge. I’d seen the lelgis queens before, in the vision they’d showed me of Caldswell bringing them Maat, but that had been just a glimpse, an impression of something enormous and alien. I still couldn’t see them clearly because they stayed in the shadows, keeping away from the phantom’s glow, but I could make out the glassy reflections of millions of eyes set in bodies even larger than the phantom before me coupled with slick flashes of long, sharp barbs the size of battleships creeping in the dark, waiting for their chance to strike.
You will not undo our work, they hissed, their voices like cutting claws in my mind. Be gone.
Like before, the word was accompanied by a blow meant to knock me out of the oneness. This time, though, I didn’t go anywhere. Right before the hit had landed, the phantom had wrapped its dying tentacle around my waist, holding me in place as it turned on the monsters in the dark and roared. Not the plaintive whale song it had sung for me, but a true bellow of fury. And as the sound filled the emptiness, the lelgis screamed in reply, their voices shrill and terrified as they skittered back into the shadows.
Once the lelgis had retreated, the phantom turned back to me, dropping the tentacle it had used to catch me, which was now completely black. I expected it to cradle its dying limb, or at least show some sign of pain. Instead, the phantom used the second of the two tentacles it had reached toward me, the one that was still moon bright and uninjured, to form the rectangle again. Once the shape was made, it placed the tentacle I’d infected, the one that was now crumbling into black dust, in front of the pantomime door. “Home,” it said again, its whale song voice filled with longing. “Home.”
As the last of the phantom’s plea rumbled through me, I couldn’t help thinking that I should have guessed the truth a long time ago. Maat had told me herself that the phantoms were prisoners and she was their jailer. She’d told me, too, that the phantoms were the ones who told her to find me. Small voices, she’d said.
I smiled at the enormous emperor. Apparently, I got the big one. But then, I needed it. They’d been trying to get my attention ever since I’d left Reaper’s ship, but I hadn’t spared them a thought other than annoyance. Now, though, I heard them at last, and I understood. Maat was the door, the force that kept them in, and as she’d always told me, my virus was the only thing that could kill her. The only way I could set the phantoms free. Before I did, though, there were a few things I had to be sure of.
“Will you all go home?” I asked, gazing up at the phantom shining like the moon above me, tilting my head back to stare into the bluest of its eyes like I could make it understand my question through sheer will. “If I open that door, will you and all your kind leave us in peace?”
The phantom made a deep keening sound, and then, slowly, it reached with its remaining clean tentacle, the one my virus hadn’t destroyed, and pressed the tip gently into my chest.
I hadn’t felt its other touches in the oneness, not when it had taken my virus the first time or when it had steadied me against the lelgis, but I felt this one loud and clear. Just like when it had gone into my chest in the real world, its flesh was unbearably cold. Cold enough to knock my breath out, like I’d jumped naked into an icy lake, and in the moment when my body seized up, the vision filled me.
It wasn’t like the lelgis’ many layered images or Rupert’s memories with their intense feelings. It wasn’t even like the daughter’s hand in my mind. I’d been on a ship with aliens and visited the farthest reaches of known space. I’d fought lelgis and felt an entire xith’cal tribe die one by one, but I’d never felt anything as alien as the phantom’s touch in my mind. I didn’t even think I had all the senses I needed to process the confusing torrent of experiences it was pouring into me, but below all the stuff I was sure I could never understand was a basic need that I got completely: hunger. Horrible, crippling, overwhelming hunger.
For one terrible moment, I saw our universe as the phantoms must: a great, barren waste without food or shelter. They’d come as explorers, but when Maat had closed the door, they’d gotten trapped in a land of death and hunger and darkness, and they couldn’t go home.
The vision vanished in a flash as air exploded back into my body. I floated panting in the nothing as my brain tried to recover, but I wasn’t sure there was a recovery from this. Even now that I was alone in my head again, I could feel the alien echo of the phantom in my brain, and when I looked down at my own body, at the faint glimmer of plasmex I could now see shining under my skin below the black film of the virus, part of me saw it as food. Thin, terrible, insufficient food.
“You eat plasmex,” I said dumbly, more to myself than to the phantom. Dr. Starchild had said as much, but I’d never really understood. Never known. “You’re starving,” I said, my head shooting up. “That’s why you want to go—”
The word died on my lips. When the phantom’s cold had left my body, I’d assumed it was because it had removed its tentacle. Now I saw I was wrong. The tentacle was still pressed against my chest, but it was black as the void around us. All of it.
When the phantom had taken the virus into itself before to make a point, the darkness had crept slowly, eating the phantom’s light in little bites. But if that had been a drop, then whatever the phantom had done to pour the knowledge of its home into my head must have been a mainline, because in the few seconds I’d been out, my sickness had overwhelmed the emperor phantom completely.
The beautiful snake’s nest of tentacles was now a blackened knot, and where the virus hadn’t yet reached, it was spreading in waves. I could actually see the light vanishing before my eyes, but I didn’t understand why. It had formed itself out of smaller phantoms, hadn’t it? Why didn’t it break apart again? Cut off the sickness and go back to how it was?
But the phantom did no such thing. It just hung there, its blue eyes watching me even as they succumbed to the dark, and I couldn’t do a damn thing but watch back as the phantom died.
“Home.” Its booming voice was thin and brittle now, but the word was clearer than ever as its last glowing tentacle, the last light of its entire body, reached up to point at my face.
I met it on instinct, grabbing the offered tentacle with both my hands. I didn’t even have a name for the emotion tearing through me. No word seemed big enough. I hadn’t understood before, but I knew now on a deep, primal level that this phantom had given up its life so that I would believe. It had sought me, found me, grabbed me knowing that I was death so that it could show me the truth. Even now, I could feel its longing, the phantom’s—maybe all phantoms’—desperate need to go back, and as the last of its light faded, I swore.
“I’ll take you home,” I whispered. “On my honor, by my king, I swear it. I will open the door. I will end this. All of it.”
I don’t know if the phantom heard me. I don’t know if it understood. But as the final light snuffed out, the tip of the enormous, snakelike tentacle curled very slightly around my hand, brushing my fingers like a promise, and it was enough. And as the darkness fell again and I felt the lelgis returning, I was not afraid. I didn’t fight or answer or acknow
ledge the wordless rush of rage and fear that threatened to stomp my mind to nothing. I just closed my eyes and let go, falling out of the dark and back into my freezing body.
When I opened my eyes again, the lights were back on and Caldswell was in my face.
“Morris!” he yelled, his voice hoarse, like he’d been yelling for a while. I also caught a hint of panic, though that part might have been my imagination. “Morris!”
I rolled away from him with a groan, curling into a ball on my side. God and king I was cold. Cold and achy, like I’d just woken up from death itself. But when I reached up to rub my eyes, my hand felt funny, almost like it was asleep.
My eyes popped fully open and I sat up with a gasp, holding my hands in front of me. Sure enough, they were black as the void outside, but the mark was already fading, slipping away down my arms. Usually that would have made me feel better, but now all I felt was tired. Tired and empty and flat, like I should lie down and never move again. But I couldn’t, because as the pins and needles faded, I could still feel the slick residue of the dead phantom on my fingers, reminding me of what I had to do.
I took a deep breath and looked around to check where I was. Still in the fighter bay was the answer, though it took me a moment to recognize the place with the lights on. They must not have moved me at all, because I was lying right below the window where the phantom had lifted me up. I could hear alarms blaring from other decks of the battleship, but other than Caldswell, I was alone in the huge hangar. That struck me as odd for a second before I saw the blast doors over the exits were in lockdown position. Of course. Caldswell had quarantined the area.
“Morris,” he said again, leaning closer. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh, wiping my now virus-free hands on my baggy scrubs only to realize that my pants were also covered in the phantom’s slick slime. “I think so.”
“Good,” Caldswell snapped, reaching down to grab my arm and haul me to my feet. “Because I need you to tell me what just happened. The emperor’s field isn’t jamming us anymore and it released you. Why? Did it go back into hyperspace?”
I blinked, caught off guard. I opened my mouth to tell him the emperor hadn’t come out of hyperspace at all, that it had formed itself out of the millions of tiny phantoms, but one look at his face told me I should skip the particulars and get right to the point. “It’s not gone,” I said, finding it surprisingly difficult to get the words out. “It’s dead. I killed it.”
Caldswell’s eyes widened, and then his face fell into a relieved smile, but before he could congratulate me, I held up my hand. “That’s not a good thing,” I said. “Listen, I’m not sure how to explain this, so I’m just going to lay it out. That phantom didn’t come randomly. It came to talk to me.”
The captain’s eyebrows shot up, and I took another deep breath. Oh boy, where to begin?
“They want me to set them free,” I said at last. “The door Maat holds closed isn’t just keeping new phantoms out. It’s also keeping the old ones in. They don’t want to be here. They want to go home but they can’t because Maat’s in the way. The phantom came to explain that to me.”
Caldswell’s face, which had been growing more and more skeptical as I spoke, was now set in a firm scowl. “It told you, did it?” he said. “The phantom just popped in to talk to you?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “Sort of. That’s not the point.” I leaned closer, dropping my voice even though there was no one to hear. “Look, Caldswell, I think this is the solution we’ve been looking for. The phantoms don’t want to fight. They never did. They eat plasmex. That’s why they’re drawn to inhabited planets. The fact that they destroy things in the process is pure accident. They’re not our enemies. They don’t want to kill us or wipe us out. They just want to go home where there’s food, but Maat’s in their way. All we have to do is take down the barrier she puts up and, bam, we fix the phantom problem.”
Like saying the words out loud made them real, my whole body started to shake with excitement. “Don’t you see?” I asked, grinning. “We don’t have to use the daughters or the virus to kill them. We don’t have to kill them at all. All we have to do is clear the way and they’ll leave on their own!”
By the time I’d finished, hope had filled me to bursting. After days of fighting, even resigning myself to death on the mere hope for a compromise, I felt like I’d just been given another chance at everything. Thanks to the phantom, I’d solved the unsolvable problem, and now everyone could live, maybe even me. Just the idea made me want to jump around and sing for joy, and in my happiness, I didn’t see the deadly frown stealing over Caldswell’s face until it was too late.
“The phantom told you this?”
“Yes,” I said, my smile fading. “But—”
“And you believed it?”
“Yes,” I said again, staring at him. “Caldswell, it died to tell me. Of course I believe it.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” he said, his voice rising. “I thought you were smarter than this, Morris. If you close off the path of attack for an invasion force, do you go open it again because the surrounded soldiers caught on the inside tell you to?”
“It’s not like that!” I cried. “They’re not soldiers and this isn’t an invasion. They just want—”
“You don’t know that,” Caldswell said, crossing his arms. “Intent doesn’t change the crime. Even if they meant no harm, phantoms destroy everything. They disrupt the flow of space and time just by their presence. What’s to say if we open that door we won’t just be trading out new phantoms for the old?”
“That won’t happen,” I said. “They know there’s no food for them here now. Compared to what they’re used to, our universe is a desert. If you’d just open the door for a moment you’d see.”
Caldswell’s face went from angry to incredulous. “You honestly expect me to open the floodgates for the phantoms and possibly undo seven decades of work because you saw something in a dream? Are you completely out of your skull?”
I glowered, grinding my teeth in frustration. It was hard to be really mad at Caldswell, though. Had our positions been reversed, I would have been a lot less kind. But I knew I was right. I just didn’t know how to make him believe. I was still trying to think of something when Caldswell held up his hand.
“I can see your wheels turning,” he said. “But you’re wasting your time. Even if I did buy your story as told, I can’t open the door. The setup the lelgis created with Maat is a combination of machinery and plasmex mumbo jumbo even I don’t understand, but I know it’s not something you can just turn on and off. Whatever the lelgis did to her that lets Maat hold the universe closed, it’s forever. It doesn’t matter if she’s completely nuts or drugged catatonic, her barrier never goes down. The only way to open the door is if Maat dies, and that’s completely off the table.”
“But Maat wants to die,” I said, pleading. “You know how much she wants to die, Caldswell. This is our chance to break this endless cycle, to set us all free. Dr. Starchild said Maat could possibly remove my virus, and that if she did, she would die with it. But that could also mean the virus dies with her. Maat would finally be able to rest, and if the threat of the virus was gone, the lelgis would leave us alone. Don’t you see? We all win. Maat, the phantoms, all the daughters, the Eyes, even me, we’d all be free.”
I poured my confidence into the words as I spoke them, trying to make Caldswell understand, even if he wasn’t really listening. I’d never pleaded so hard for something in my life, but I’d only get one shot at this; I had to make it count. And for a moment, I thought it did. When I finished, I could almost see my hope reflected in Caldswell’s eyes, but then the captain sighed, dropping his head to rub his temples with his fingers, and for the first time ever, I saw how old and tired Caldswell really was.
“I want to believe you, Devi,” he said quietly. “It’s like I said before, your heart’s in the right place, but you’re asking the impossible. Only
fools gamble what they can’t afford to lose, and I was done being a fool a long time ago.” He lifted his head, and the flash of weakness was gone, replaced by the captain I knew too well. “Your request is denied. The plan does not change. Hyrek’s already preparing your new quarantine chamber. As soon as it’s ready, you’ll be going back under sedation until the ship arrives to take you into hyperspace for study. I’m really sorry, but this is for the best. For everyone.”
My fists clenched so tight my hands ached. “Don’t do this, Caldswell,” I said. “Don’t—”
The piercing shriek of an alarm cut me off, making me jump. Caldswell jumped, too, though not in surprise. He’d jumped to his feet to go to the bay’s window, yanking out his com as he did. But there was no need to call to ask what this new emergency was. Even from my spot on the floor, I could see the bright flashes outside as ships came out of hyperspace. And came. And came.
I swore and pulled myself to my feet, crawling up the heavy bay door until I was finally standing beside Caldswell. Something funny was going on, I told myself. There couldn’t possibly be as many ships out there as the flashes suggested. But I was wrong. There were more.
“King protect us,” I whispered, eyes going wide.
Out past the battleship flying in formation with ours, in space where the emperor phantom had been, lelgis cruisers were popping in one after another. Already, they filled the sky as far as I could see through the small window, more ships than I could ever count, and still they were coming, surrounding us in a wall of beautiful, deadly force.
I swallowed, turning to Caldswell because, for once, he was less frightening. “How long was I out?”
“Not five minutes.”
“How did they get here so fast?”
“Lelgis move through hyperspace instantly when they know where they’re going,” the captain explained, leaning into the little window like he was trying to get a count. “The queens are much better at navigating than our jump gates.”
