Ms. Jance took a cellphone, an iPad, a handgun, and a tube of lipstick out of her purse, laying them on the faux-marble counter.
“You want a receipt for those?” He winked at her.
“As well as Dr. Black’s items, if you please.”
“Of course. I’ll have someone bring them right up.”
“Thank you.”
Ms. Jance passed through the gate and took the back of Julie’s wheelchair, steering her toward a double bank of elevators, nice public ones with faux-marble tile along the bottom half of the walls and clean, new carpeting inside. Ms. Jance turned the wheelchair to face the doors and pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator glided smoothly upward.
Ms. Jance smoothed the sleeves of her jacket, tugged on her cuffs just a little too conspicuously. Like a magician hiding something. “What do you know about the astral plane, Dr. Black?”
Of all the things to ask. She rolled her eyes. “I know that Pax has been whipping up the scientific community with astral bullshit since he was ten.”
“Ah,” Ms. Jance said.
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see.”
Terkun’shuks’pai, holding the form of a large, gray-winged gull, caught a thermal and floated high over the next island. This one was larger, not something to be consumed in one swallow—at least, not yet.
Under him, thickly forested volcanic peaks rose off a sharp, black coastline and cast their hollow shadows against the stars. Jagged waves crashed irregularly against precipitous, cavern-riddled cliffs. Low, wide houses surrounded with broad porches overlooked the water, open to the night air. Many of the inhabitants were awake, enjoying the pre-dawn freshness. Tree frogs sang and bats sliced through the shadows, hunting bugs or fruit, as the nature of their species dictated. The air was heavy with the scent of a thousand kinds of flowers. Some humans considered this a paradise because they could spend a week or two not working, not shivering in the northern winter, not having to cook their own dinners, not fixing their own drinks. It was touching, sometimes, how little it took to make them happy.
Farther along the coast, a river of light flowed down the side of a dead volcano to a protected bay. The water was a glowing maze of orange-lit docks and quays. The coastline was white sand, littered with sated pre-dawn lovers walking hand-in-hand or sleeping under palm-tree canopies. One solitary woman was jogging.
He briefly considered whether to lead his creation toward the bay or toward the cliffs and then bowed in the direction of chance.
He was not unpleased when his creation, following a trail of runoff, turned toward the more heavily populated bay.
The frigid coast stretched endlessly, a thin powder of snow over the loose rubble of the beach. Even more than the top of the mountain where her temple had been, this northern island was barren, leftover crushed rock from other, worthier projects. Thick dust streamed off the bluffs and drifted out onto the ocean. Only a few lichens grew here. Greenland, the humans called it.
Akllana’chikni’pai wondered if it was a joke.
The ice off the shore was cracked but still thick, thick enough for wolves to cross, if any were brave enough to venture this far north—although it was not a question of bravery so much as it was one of practicality. Wolves went where their prey led them.
She liked wolves. If the bees didn’t survive, wolves would make a good replacement for humanity. No cities, no cars. Their civilization would be a bloody yet practical one.
Akllana’chikni’pai landed next to the radar station, two enormous octagon plates whose range covered the Mediterranean to the Bering Strait. She had followed its signals to the isolated, rocky bluff, damping her skin so she did not reflect the signal back to its origin. She was still visible to the naked human eye as a kind of dim shimmer in the air, an absence of heat—but who would be looking for her?
The wind hissed across the landscape, ripping at a tin sign that was already losing its color from the burnishing dust.
She entered through a door in the base, short-circuiting the lock and alarm and letting it bang open in the wind. She slipped inside the second door a few feet away in the dust-clogged entry corridor. A lone human with jaggedly cut white hair pulled on a blue jacket, cursing to herself. Akllana’chikni’pai walked toward her with a warrior’s balanced gait, her feet making little sound on the dusty, rubber-backed rug.
The woman stopped within arm’s reach of Akllana’chikni’pai, sniffed, and looked up, pinching her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Akllana’chikni’pai stilled herself, chilling the air slightly. The woman sniffed again, pulled a large red cloth out of her pants pocket, and blew her nose into it.
She scrubbed the cloth over her nose, which was rapidly becoming redder.
“Smoke,” she said. “I smell smoke.” She tucked the cloth into a pocket in the jacket and walked back to the desk, behind which was a small monitor screen, a computer, and a telephone.
The woman, her coat distending her overlarge belly, edged past her chair, her back scraping a calendar decorated with a tropical island off the wall and onto the floor. Straining to reach over some computer equipment, she grasped for a red alarm handle on the wall.
Akllana’chikni’pai drew the swords from her thighs, leapt on top of the counter, and swung twice. The woman fell, hitting her head against the desk and crumpling underneath it. The chair rolled across the tile floor and stopped with a jerk when it hit the line of rugs.
Akllana’chikni’pai stepped down onto the desk and onto the floor next to the woman, returning the swords to her thighs and lifting the woman upright by the lapels of her jacket. A few moments later, the woman was sleeping soundly at the chair, slumped over some papers on the desk. She would wake normally, remembering nothing, with a few insignificant bruises.
Akllana’chikni’pai found a button under the top of the desk that unlocked the glass door leading farther into the building, braced the woman’s knee against it, pulled open the door, and walked through.
Scarlett sat weightlessly on a little shelf of drifted snow with her knees up against her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. Though they weren’t really her legs. She was just an apparition now, not solid at all. Half the time she could see through her knees.
Below her, energy swirled with what almost looked like messages to her in glowing green and gold and purple. It felt as if she were being read: the story of her life, her emotions, dreams, everything. Whatever was reading her wasn’t judgy, either. Outraged at all the right parts. Curious. Friendly. It was trying to make her feel good about herself. After she’d killed her entire school.
In her mind came the image of the school, burning around her. With it came a wave of sympathy, emanating out of the black lake.
She snapped out of the dreamy haze with a little jump that put a tiny ripple over the top of the lake. The ripple faded quickly, as if it were passing through heavy sewer sludge.
The northern lights had faded and the sun had risen, throwing cold sparkles over the icebergs surrounding the lake. The lake itself hadn’t changed—it still reflected slowly shimmering northern lights, like some kind of screen saver.
This was the same negative energy that had helped her destroy her school.
I’d have to be fucking stupid to trust it.
Scarlett stood. Somewhere back along the ice, Pax and Lana were probably done fucking. They’d probably discovered Scarlett’s captured “spirit” was nothing but a mass of tangled negative energy. Which meant they’d probably be coming for her soon, if they weren’t already. She had to get out of here.
She shoved her fingers into a long, thin crack in the ice and scrabbled around until she found a toehold, pushed herself upward, and felt around for someplace else to put her hands.
Wait.
She hung on the side of iceberg
in the middle of the freaking Arctic and waited while the lake full of all the worst humanity had to offer came up with some dumbass way to get her to do what it wanted.
Need help.
Sure, it needed help. Spreading its shittiness throughout the galaxy all the way up to the astral plane probably.
Need help fighting enemy.
“Do you?” she said sarcastically. “Well, I’m not looking for more work at the moment, thanks. I’ve screwed enough things up already.” She ran her hands across the ice, found a splinter that fit nicely into her hand, and gave it a yank.
Instead of holding her up, it ripped off. Fuck. She swung backward, willing her fingers on her other hand to stay jammed in their crack and her toes on their little outcropping. Good thing she wasn’t freezing while she was doing this.
The shard of ice bounced off the snow shelf and landed in the lake with a glup. After a few seconds it bobbed to the surface.
Scarlett. Enemy coming. Need you.
“Whatever,” she said.
Come inside me. Show you.
“No. Fucking. Way. Ever.” No way was she going to dive into that pool of negative energy. No way was she going to turn her back on the last part of anything good inside her.
Another image slipped into her mind, this one far clearer than the last.
Lana was standing in a chamber full of tentacles. As Scarlett watched, Lana began to burn, brighter and brighter until the tentacles burned away from her body. The flames spread wider, farther, spreading beyond the chamber, disintegrating everything in their path. Scarlett watched herself standing on the desk, staring in fear at the mass of tentacles that surrounded her. Then flames burst from her body, exploding in all directions and engulfing the school in a huge conflagration that turned the tentacles into dust even as it ripped holes in the walls and blew students and teachers into bloody, burnt pieces.
And as Scarlett watched, she realized she had not fallen unconscious during the explosion. She had been driven into unconsciousness, trapped in the bubble of negative energy and forced away from her body as Lana, knowing exactly what she was doing, burned away the tentacles around her without the slightest care for the people in the building.
Chapter 13
The hallway’s carpet was made of threadbare, rubber-backed squares. Akllana’chikni’pai felt the thrum of electricity underfoot, carrying both power and information. The current gave her a sense of excitement and nausea, which was appropriate: she was putting the tools in place to destroy a species.
Akllana’chikni’pai passed several flimsy wood doorways that framed storage rooms, a stale kitchen, mildewed tile, and toilets. The humble working conditions of the primary species.
She withdrew her swords from her thighs but kept them dampened and invisible. Unlike the others, the door at the end of the hallway was made of steel. Her sword slid easily into the heavy steel covering the alarm panel, shorting out the wiring with a hiss. The small hallway filled with the smell of burning paint and plastic. She melted the bolts with her other blade, using steady pressure and taking care that the now-burning tip did not emerge from the other side of the door frame. If she had let her swords burn, she could have done it with a single sweep, but discretion was called for.
She pulled on the handle.
A few large, flat monitors hung on the white walls, flickering with news or showing operational statuses via lists and graphics. Rows of old, chipped, gray plastic desks lined the rest of the room, facing the larger screens. Each had several monitors of its own. The desks were arranged in two arcs with an aisle down the center, following the downhill slope in the floor as though the room were a theater—or a temple.
Only three people were in the room, dressed in nearly identical pressed, white, cotton uniform shirts and dark pants. A printer at the end of the row nearest her extruded sheet after sheet of paper. To her right was another secured door made of steel, which led to a room full of hot, buzzing computer hardware.
Two of the humans were standing up, leaving a young female with short blond hair bending over her keyboard, typing intently. All three of their pulses were racing. The female murmured into a headset that wrapped across her head and protruded in a stalk in front of her face.
The two who were standing were staring at the video feed from the front room, where the fat woman now sat, slumped over her computer.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?” the softer looking of the two males said.
“I don’t know, sir, but I’ll go look,” said the other. Underneath his uniform, he had a fighter’s physique, broad through the shoulders and narrow at the hips. He grabbed a chair and shoved it out of his way, knocking it loudly against the desk, and strode into the narrow aisle between the desks toward the door.
As he approached, Akllana’chikni’pai’s sword flickered, a thin wisp of bent light that passed through the man’s stubble-haired skull without cutting it, although he would bear a nasty bruise for some time afterward. The fighter’s green eyes bulged and rolled upward, turning into thin, waning crescent moons. His momentum carried him forward, and she stepped to the side, giving him a kick on the shoulder to shove him sideways and prevent him from hitting a desk. He tumbled into the aisle, head downward.
“Mickelson!” The softer male’s voice went high as his head swiveled on its neck, desperately searching for the attacker. A moment later he barked, “Mendez! Report!”
“No answer from Cadigan, sir,” she said, still bending over her keyboard and typing furiously at her keys. “The base is mobilizing. Two trucks are on their way with backup.”
The soft male looked around the room with rounded, wet, fearful eyes. “Tell them to shut us down. Shut the power down.”
“Sir? Won’t that keep us from seeing if any missiles approach?”
“This isn’t the Koreans or the Pakis, Mendez. Shut us down!”
“Yes, sir.” The woman’s hands darted over the keys on her keyboard.
Akllana’chikni’pai threw her sword at the woman. Just as her slim fingers touched the keys, the sword passed through the woman’s chest. Her mouth opened in shock, almost as if she had been able to see the sword, and she slumped over, falling out of her wheeled chair and onto the carpet.
The man’s eyes seemed to fix on Akllana’chikni’pai, and she paused briefly to reassure herself that she was not visible. She recalled her sword with a wave. From under the desk, the woman panted and coughed but did not get up.
The soft man said, “I know you’re there. Whoever you are.” His voice was thready and frail.
Akllana’chikni’pai walked down the aisle toward him. The woman on the floor was in her way, retching a rancid mixture of coffee and some kind of partially digested orange starch onto the carpet, so she stepped onto the surface of the desk to avoid the filth.
The man’s eyes followed her. His hands hung limply at his sides, shaking against his urine-soaked pants.
“We will stop you. I promise you. You might have come here from another world. You might have powers beyond our imagination. But we will stop you.”
She stepped over the woman’s keyboard, careful not to jostle the keys or the small control unit beside it.
“Brave words for a man who’s pissed himself,” she said and flicked the tip of her sword through his head. He fell backward over his chair and came to rest tangled around the chair and the legs of his desk.
She viewed the tableau with satisfaction, walked back along the desk, hopped down into the aisle, and sat at one of the desks, away from the smell of piss. If she had been Terkun’shuks’pai, she could have done this from anywhere in the world. She could have walked through the walls; she could have felled everyone in the room with a thought.
She put one of the swords away, changed the other into a long needle, and plunged it into the monitor. She spent a few moments
ensuring the systems in the building could send data as well as receive it and released the seeds of life into its local programming.
She withdrew the needle, tucked it away by her thigh, and stood.
Her seeds had infiltrated the secure network easily, bypassing fragile human security methods and jumping from wire to wire using electromagnetic radiation.
It was done.
Now to find out what Terkun’shuks’pai is really doing here.
Ron ambled along the blindingly white beach, barefoot. The white sand burned the soles of his feet, but it could have been worse. He’d grown up dancing over asphalt just to get a chance at a fire hydrant. His feet still remembered what it felt like trying to scrub that shit off his soles with big blisters underneath. This smooth white sand was nothing.
A long line of palm-leaf shade shelters stretched down the beach like a trail leading him back toward the bars under the trees, up next to the hotel. Pretty girls roasted in the sun on lounge chairs and little kids played in the waves with parents lounging nearby, stunned into drowsy apathy by the heat and the sun and the shining waves.
He’d lost his dress shoes at one of the tiki-hut bars and left his last good Hawaiian shirt caressing the shoulders of a sunburnt Japanese bathing beauty at the far end of the beach. St. Lucia was packed with bathing beauties, as was his cruise ship, Jewel of the Caribbean. But bathing beauties were cheap.
What Ron was looking for right now was a jam session with someone who could really play. His axes were back at the ship, but it wouldn’t take him more than an hour in the rental car to get at them. He’d had this image of jamming on the beach, wandering up to a bunch of guys in dreadlocks smoking ganja and playing ukuleles. But it wasn’t happening. All he was doing was turning alcohol into a full bladder and staring out at bronzed skin and shimmering waves. Either of which he could stare out at from any deck over the next six weeks until his contract with the cruise ship band ran out.