Salvation

by Caryn Lix

  “Are you all right?” Mia demanded, managing to make her tone accusatory.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” said Priya. “Then do you want to explain what the hell just happened?”

  “I don’t …” The words lodged in my throat. Images surged against me, and I realized with some horror that part of my mind was still lost in a world of dark and mist.

  I struggled to describe my experience. Part of the aliens lingered in my brain, as if … “It wasn’t their system,” I managed at last.

  “What do you mean?” Rune whispered.

  “Or rather, the system wasn’t only a computer system. It was them.” I managed to straighten under my own power. I couldn’t have this conversation with everyone staring at me while Cage rocked me in his arms. With effort I leaned against the wall, Cage poised to catch me if I fell. “Remember on the alien ship?” I asked Rune. “How we never totally understood the system, even when you managed to bond with it?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is why. We weren’t the right … species.” I shook my head. “Their technology was based on the human tech in the world they came from. I recognized a lot of it. But they took it, adapted it, modified it. And I think my ability to understand them shifted my mind a bit. And of course our DNA’s been changing as we become more powerful. Whatever the reason, I was able to find my way inside, and it was …” My voice trailed off. I took in their stares, a mix of fear and confusion and hope, and I couldn’t find the words to explain.

  But then Rune sat cross-legged in front of me and took my hands in hers, blocking everyone else. She worked her thumbs gently into the edges of my wrist, and though the points she hit hurt, the pain was bearable and somehow purposeful. “It’s okay,” she said. “Relax. Focus on me. What happened?”

  I forced myself to meet her gaze, the gentle, compassionate, razor-sharp intelligence lurking there. “I went inside,” I told her, “and the aliens were there. They were everywhere. It was like a … a hive. Buzzing with individual thoughts and ideas somehow all merged into one central force. That’s their system. Their computer system isn’t something they created; it’s an extension of their minds. They took bits of themselves, the bits that could cross dimensions, and they integrated it with human technology to create … something new.”

  “Okay.” Rune released the pressure on my wrists and slid her fingers inward, pressing somewhere else. “So you were part of the hive?”

  “Sort of. Part of it, but still outside. It was painful.” I closed my eyes and visualized it: the alien presence battering me from all sides, attacking me like a computer virus. “I was intruding. They didn’t want me there, yet … somehow they did. They tried to draw me in. Swallow me. And they almost did. I didn’t want to stay, but there was this sense of, of …” I shook my head helplessly, opening my eyes to focus on Rune. “Completion? Identity? They’re never alone. They’re a single, functioning unit. And so much information. They’re not animals, not at all. They’re incredibly intelligent. And they are dedicated in their purpose.” I raised my eyes to the others. They were shaking their heads, frowning in trepidation, like they already knew what I’d say. “To expand. To devour.”

  “Where did they come from?” Priya asked.

  I almost laughed. “We created them.”

  “What?”

  “Not us,” I amended. “Or at least not here. They cross dimensions. They have that ability. I think it was their first ability, the one that was innate.” I shivered. “Mia was right. They absorb power. They absorb information. They ingest it and become it.” I swallowed hard and looked at Matt. “Remember back on the ship? Your companion, the man they killed?”

  “Finn,” said Hallam quietly.

  “Finn. Right. Sorry.” Should I even be telling them this? In my current state I had no sense of what was right and wrong, what was too much. “They took him. Remember? They wanted to see what made him work. His cybernetics. And I think they learned from that. They restructured themselves, grew stronger. I saw them do it to the man who designed them. Or cloned them. I think they are aliens, or at least that was their basis. The scientists found some long-extinct alien DNA and thought they were using it to make the ultimate weapon to win some war they were in. Instead they spawned … what Eden calls Karoch. The original. It created everything else.” I met their blank gazes and frustration surged inside me. “Am I making any sense?” I felt like I couldn’t keep track of my own words, like they were slipping away in a confused jumble.

  “Sense enough. Good God,” Hallam muttered.

  Matt crossed himself.

  Everyone else just gaped, dumbfounded.

  For a moment we sat there in dazed silence, and then Cage straightened up. “Okay,” he said, a line creasing between his eyebrows. “Okay. I know this all sounds bad, but let’s look on the positive side of things.”

  Jasper snorted. “What positive side?”

  “Kenzie said they cross dimensions.” He folded his arms and examined me—not with his usual gentle, loving expression, but like he was investigating a science experiment. “That means if we can get her close to one of them, she might be able to borrow its power.”

  I shook my head frantically. “It’s not like that. They aren’t powered, not individually. Their power stems from their core. Their center.”

  “You mean Karoch.”

  I stared at him, willing him to understand. “If I could borrow its power—and that’s a pretty big if—I would have to be standing right next to Karoch. It’s the original. The thing they all come from. They’re like its limbs rather than functioning individuals.”

  “So what would happen if we killed it?” asked Mia.

  I gaped at her in disbelief. “It can’t be killed, Mia. I can’t begin to describe the force of this thing. Picture every one of the creatures we’ve ever met linked together, their power joined.”

  “Anything can be killed,” she said quietly, swallowing. Then she pressed, her voice stronger. “Hypothetically, what would happen?”

  I shrugged, glancing to Cage, who had no help to offer. “I guess they’d die. It’s their central source, where they draw all their power and intellect. All of the creatures have pieces of Karoch inside them, and it has pieces of them. We …”

  “So all we have to do is kill Karoch, and we destroy every last one of those things for good?” Mia slapped her hands together. “I’m in.”

  “You’re not listening to me! We can’t kill it. It’s massive. It’s powerful. It has all of our abilities and more besides. It’s not blind. If we get anywhere near it, we’ll die.”

  “More importantly,” said Cage, “if we kill it, we won’t be able to use its power to jump home.”

  “Even if we could use Karoch’s powers to jump home,” Imani countered, “the zemdyut will follow us. We’ll lead even more of them right to Earth.”

  “Why are they using spaceships anyway?” mused Rune, inspecting her folded hands. “If they jump dimensions.”

  “They prefer space. The dark. The cold. They barely need to breathe.” Again I struggled for words. Some of this I’d seen clearly. The rest I’d absorbed in glimpses and glances, feelings, sensations. “They advance on one dimension’s Earth, destroy it completely, and settle there. Leave a skeleton crew to eradicate the remnants of humanity and scan the world for resources so they can grow and adapt. Then they send a force to take over the next dimension’s planet. And once they’ve taken over everywhere, who knows? Maybe they’ll find their original ancestors. Maybe they’ll just exist. I don’t think it matters to them.”

  “And it shouldn’t matter to us,” Hallam snapped. “The girl’s got a point. We can’t jump without those things following, so we have to kill them. Simple math.”

  “Simple, is it?” asked Reed wryly. “What are we going to do? Walk up, borrow Karoch’s power to jump dimensions, and shoot it on our way through? Sounds like a plan.”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Hallam replied. “We h
ave more than enough firepower.”

  I managed to struggle to my feet, slamming my fist against our makeshift wall impatiently. “No, we don’t. I keep trying to tell you. It would take a … a … nuclear blast to destroy Karoch.”

  “Okay,” said Mia.

  “ ‘Okay’ what?”

  “Okay, we’ll cause a nuclear blast.” She shrugged. “This planet seems big on the military, and their tech is comparable to ours, if not a bit more advanced. There’s got to be a nuke here somewhere.” She smiled, apparently pleased with herself, as if the idea of detonating a nuclear weapon was the only thing that compensated for the loss of Alexei.

  “We are not,” said Imani through gritted teeth, “detonating a nuclear bomb.”

  “Well, hang on,” Hallam mused.

  “No. This isn’t a question. Cage?”

  But it was Rune who spoke up, still staring at her hands. “Not a nuclear bomb,” she said, and in spite of the fact that she was using a soft voice, everyone stopped short. “Just a regular one.”

  “Meimei?” said Cage dubiously.

  At last Rune raised her head, and there was a steely resolve in her eyes I’d never seen before. “Eden mentioned it. Remember? There’s a missile storehouse around here somewhere.”

  “She said they couldn’t use it.”

  “Because they couldn’t move the weapons, couldn’t reach the aliens. But with Kenzie able to connect to the aliens, we might be able to lure them out. Lure Karoch out. Instead of bringing the missiles to them, we bring them to the missiles. We might have a chance to take them out once and for all.”

  “I can’t believe we’re actually discussing this,” Imani grumbled. “Rune, I can’t believe you’re actually discussing it. Kenzie barely survived her last encounter with those things.”

  Jasper shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind getting some payback. If we can do it without hurting Kenzie, I mean.”

  “Neither would I, but it’s impractical.” Priya spread her arms in frustration. “Even if we could connect Kenzie to the system without killing her, do any of you know where to find this warehouse?”

  “Eden does,” replied Rune.

  I went stock-still. Something tingled at the edge of my consciousness, as if the aliens were calling me back. I froze in terror, but it wasn’t that after all. Not the aliens. Or it was. But they weren’t calling to me.

  I was still, in some way, linked.

  As my shoulders went ramrod straight and my tongue thickened and blocked my mouth, the argument raged on around me. I closed my eyes, fencing it off. I wouldn’t be afraid of the alien presence. Not this time. Now that I was outside the system, I could control it, keep it from overwhelming me.

  Slowly, bit by bit, I opened my mind until I was barely touching the edge of the alien presence. I didn’t know how I was doing it. Maybe I was still connected to the system. Maybe I’d absorbed a touch of alien power myself. Whatever the case, this was real: I was on the fringes of the alien collective.

  My eyes shot open, my heart thudding a dull, sinking feeling into my stomach.

  “And what if Kenzie can’t reconnect to the aliens?” Reed was saying. “We march through the desert and hope we find another alien stronghold? Maybe jump around screaming, ‘Hey, aliens! Here we are! Come and get us’?”

  “I don’t think it will be a problem.” My own voice sounded strange to my ears, dry and raspy again, but also somehow higher, less secure.

  I hadn’t spoken loudly, but every eye cut to me. “What does that mean?” Mia demanded.

  I swallowed, searching for myself. “It means that because I connected to their network, the aliens are aware of us … and they’re on their way here.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I WASN’T SURE HOW WE would get the missile warehouse’s location from Eden. She wasn’t likely to volunteer the information, not when we weren’t sure the blast wouldn’t reach the city and destroy her and her people. There were still children there. An unwelcome and unbidden memory assailed me: Wendell, the little boy whose power Eden used to show us the past. His big eyes and the way he’d smiled when Eden promised him chocolate. I glanced at Rune and found her jaw set, her eyes resolute. But her hands were trembling. Was her mind traveling a similar route?

  “We’ll try to make sure we’re in an isolated area,” Cage soothed, reading my mind as he often seemed able to. “But remember, if we can actually kill those things, we’ll be helping the people on this planet as much as we’re helping ourselves. Kenzie, are you sure that destroying Karoch will get rid of all the creatures?”

  I shook my head crossly. “Of course I’m not sure. I’m trying to put concepts and ideas to words without any equivalent in English. In any human language. But I think there’s a good chance.”

  Cage flashed me a grin. “Well, that’s better than what we had a couple of hours ago. I’ll take it.”

  Of course, no one much relished trekking all the way back to the city. It was at least an hour’s walk in the scorching afternoon heat, and once we got there, we had no guarantee we’d be able to get a vehicle working, even with Rune’s help. But at least we’d be out of the sun, whatever happened.

  I caught myself glaring at everyone and closed my eyes, trying to ease the headache away. The tingling presence in my brain hadn’t faded, and I didn’t think having the aliens residing in my head was doing me much good. We were linked now—just barely, an uncomfortable itch I couldn’t scratch. They didn’t seem aware of the continued link, or if they were, they weren’t letting me know. I hoped that would work to our advantage. It was the only compensation I found for having these things in my head in the first place.

  Right now it was mostly a sense of direction and an occasional stir of anger or determination. It was weird, uncomfortable, but manageable.

  “Ready to go?” I asked Jasper and Imani, reluctantly shouldering my backpack. I didn’t dare leave anything behind. My weapons or armor weren’t likely to help if we ran into Karoch, but they might be useful against the other aliens.

  “Hey,” called Hallam from behind me. “Wanna hold up a second?”

  We pivoted to where Hallam was staring at the ground about twenty feet behind our makeshift warehouse, his lined face creased in a frown. “What’s up?” asked Priya, jogging to his side.

  Hallam said something I didn’t hear, and Priya dropped to her knees, pressing her hands to the ground. A second later Matt joined them and repeated her actions.

  Rune and I exchanged mystified glances. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. …”

  “There’s something down here,” Matt called.

  The rest of us gathered around him, even though my exhaustion urged me to ignore his statement and just keep going. I didn’t want to deal with anything else. “What kind of something?” I demanded.

  “A separate space,” said Hallam. “Just far enough off the main building to survive the explosion.” He caught my gaze and explained, “I can send a sonar signal through the ground and search for hollow spots. I don’t know what’s down there—if anything—but I got suspicious and wanted to check before we left. A place like this, you’d think they’d have vehicles, unless they’d all been stolen. But if they did still have them, they’d have to keep them in a garage.” He nodded at the sand. “If this is what I think, we might have a much better option than walking back to the city.”

  Priya nodded. “Let’s map out the area.”

  Legion spread out in three separate directions. They were methodical, crouching on the ground and resting their hands against it, closing their eyes, then straightening and moving ten steps in another direction before trying again. I noticed Hallam had removed the fingerless gloves he always wore. Maybe they needed their skin exposed to make the cybernetics work? It was appalling how little we knew about people who were supposed to be our allies, and I made a mental note to rectify that soon. Matt might trust me enough to share … and if he didn’t, well, he trusted Rune.


  I winced. That sounded more like Cage than me, using someone I cared about to get information. But at the same time, I wanted to survive. I wanted to escape this dimension. I wanted to go back to my own Earth, even without any family there waiting for me, even with Omnistellar probably poised to arrest me. And if possible, I wanted to do it without aliens in pursuit.

  “Hey!” called Matt suddenly. “Over here!”

  He was at least thirty feet away, and we all scrambled toward him over the shifting sand. “What did you find?” Priya shouted.

  “I hit what must be the border wall.”

  Priya and Hallam crouched on the ground, closing their eyes. Then, moving as one, they spread in opposite directions. “Border here,” Priya announced after a moment.

  Hallam took a few minutes longer before he said, “Same here.”

  Matt, meanwhile, was moving perpendicular to the two of them. He got quite a bit farther away and then said, “And here.”

  “So what’s down there?” I asked impatiently.

  “No way to know until we get in.” Matt glanced at Jasper. “What do you think?”

  “Worth a try.” Jasper cracked his knuckles. “Everyone stand back.”

  “Let me help you,” I said.

  Jasper hesitated a second, then nodded. “I could probably use it, to be honest.”

  I drew close to him and reached for his power, obsidian laced with shards of red. “What are we doing?”

  “Trying to pull something above ground. Carefully. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe it’s our nuke.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  Jasper made an X in the ground with his hand and retreated, taking me with him. “Aim there.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Damned if I know.” He flashed me a grin, one of the first times he’d smiled since we’d arrived in this godforsaken hellscape. “Let’s find out.”

  “Wait.” Priya stepped between us, holding her hand up and glaring at the X in the sand like it was going to come to life. “Matt?”