The forest was quiet here. The birds and animals had fled; a few remaining humans roared away from the area in speeding vehicles along winding, precipitous roads running along the tops of the volcanic ridges. The leaves on the nearby trees hissed as a thick, gummy acid ate into them, dripping onto the forest floor and disintegrating the thick layer of dead leaves under the trees. The acid burned through the ground below as well, digging down into the tree roots. A nearby tree cracked and toppled.
Akllana’chikni’pai investigated the crack in the side of the volcano. It had been packed shut with rock, cement slabs, roofing tiles, wire, greenish acid, and what looked like matted ferns or feathers.
Akllana’chikni’pai drew her sword and sliced through the mass, pulling the rubble out of the hole with her burning hands and tossing it into the dying forest. Small fires began to burn where the hot rubble landed, but she had no time to put them out.
Slowly she cleared a pathway deep into the mountain, following the crack to a large, hollow cavern. A great pile of junk filled the center of it. Twisted, rusting iron plates, scraped almost to a shine at one end, lay near the entrance. Beyond them, cars, broken glass, children’s toys, trash cans, boxes, pipes, bed frames, cement blocks, large gears, computer monitors, desks, more than a few bicycles, and bloody, half-melted bones rose in piles. The cavern smelled of seaweed and blood and sewage, along with a sweet smell, a kind of fermenting smell—yeasty and sour.
It took Akllana’chikni’pai a moment to realize the piles of trash had been formed into towers and domes, archways and deep windows with darkness behind them. Akllana’chikni’pai felt like the monster within the trash was watching her with a thousand eyes. Windows, pipes, the ends of two large, cement drainage tunnels—it all seemed to stare at her. As she approached, the monster’s feathery arms emerged from cracks and crevices in its fortress and waved at her, trying to protect something precious within.
Akllana’chikni’pai drew her swords and cut through the arms. She pulled down the castle made of rubble, chopping and burning it, throwing it to the side to find out what was inside, what was so worth protecting.
Under the outer layer was a thick, veiny membrane that reminded her of a leathery, bulging snake’s egg.
She sliced it open.
From the egg, a million feathery spores burst out at her, wriggling and buzzing like insects, rushing out of the tunnel and into the forest.
She sent fire at the tunnel, blasting it so rock collapsed, sealing it closed. The air around her swirled with spores, which she burnt out of the air until the volcano seemed as though it were about to erupt once more.
It wasn’t enough. Akllana’chikni’pai knew it in her heart, and she cursed Terkun’shuks’pai with every blast of flame she fired.
Akllana’chikni’pai destroyed everything inside the volcano, from the monster and its detritus to the bats roosting within the upper confines of the cavern. She broke through the upper face of the volcano, where an old crater leaked rainwater down below, burning a few drifting spores that had escaped her first onslaught.
Outside, the spores had quickly spread and grown. Nothing on Earth had ever moved so quickly. In the minutes since their escape, the spores had torn down every bit of greenery along the sides of the mountain. They had stripped away human constructs, from houses to power lines. They had eaten asphalt roads and ripped out pipes, wires, drains—everything.
A wave of scuttling movement spread across the valley toward the other volcano and the southern boundaries of the island. The spores had been no larger than snowflakes when they had escaped. Now they were creatures, twisted things that marched across the jungle, dissolving trees and undergrowth, carrying mounds of branches on their backs. They grew to the size of jaguars, then tables, and they kept growing.
She flew to the nearest one and cut it down, making its branches burst into flame. She sliced the next one cleanly in two, the halves rolling apart onto the slimy rock beneath. In the center was a dull, greenish mass of slime that leaked out through a shell made of twigs and bits of reddish brick.
A rustling behind her made her turn.
The youngling she had cut down just moments before had doused its flames and was crawling toward its brother, its mouth snapping at the broken flesh.
She pointed a sword at one of the pair, shooting a ball of fire at it. The branches on its back wavered in the heat and burst into flame. The monster’s feathers curled up in the fire, throwing off tiny sparks, and it collapsed onto a mat of dead leaves, black smoke billowing out of its shell of tree branches. The smell was incredibly foul and thick, like burning tar.
She pointed the sword at the other one, but the monster had fled—up the tree, under the leaves. She’d been a fool, allowing it to escape while she burned its twin.
I can’t do this alone, Akllana’chikni’pai realized. I need help. I need…
Julie stared down at the body of her son, her mind racing in circles.
If this was Pax, who was the boy she’d seen? Who’d visited her in the hospital? Because this was her son.
“Where did you find them?” she asked. Her voice came out hoarse. Faint.
“I am holding a chair directly behind you.” Ms. Jance’s voice came from behind Julie, dripping with unwanted sympathy.
The door of the clean room opened above them. Ms. Grace called, “What does she say? Is it him?”
Julie didn’t hear the answer. Her eyes were on her son’s skin, on the tiny silver dots that shone across it. The same stuff had left a smear on his upper lip and trails under his ears, down the sides of his face. No one had wiped him clean like they had the girl. This isn’t real. She remembered him having a heart attack. She remembered rushing into the room and seeing the girl looking guilty. She remembered…
The trails of silver pouring out of him. The staff trying to perform CPR when it seemed like the paddles weren’t working. His body already stiff as a board.
She put out a gloved hand, rubbing it delicately along his skin.
“That him or that the copy? Don’t be shy now.” Heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs; the door at the bottom of the theater opened. “That’s all we really need to know. That him, or is the other one him?”
“The other one?” The dots on his skin tugged on her glove, like non-skid socks.
His pale blond hair. His blue eyes—cold, emotionless, slightly sunken. It looked as though the life had just left his body moments before. His skin was uniformly pale—the blood hadn’t yet begun to pool at the back of his neck and along the undersides of his shoulders.
He looked like her. He’d always looked too much like her. He should have looked like his father. Then she might have been able to love him.
The boy who’d visited her in the hospital. It hadn’t been her son.
“Which one, damn it? Which one?” Ms. Grace carried a Styrofoam cup of bad coffee and wore her street clothes, shoes and hair uncovered. She slurped the coffee and stared down at the body of Julie’s son.
Julie glanced behind her. Ms. Jance’s eyes were shining but steady. She was holding the chair right behind Julie’s knees. She sank into it gratefully.
“Go to hell,” she croaked. “I need some coffee.”
“We don’t have time to waste on your horseshit,” Ms. Grace said.
“Don’t be cruel,” Ms. Jance said. “It’s the real one.”
“Where?” Julie said. “Where did you find them?”
“On a small island just off the coast of St. Lucia. In the Caribbean.”
“How?”
“We have someone who looks in on it from time to time. Other bodies have been found there—not human bodies, but shapes made completely out of that same silvery material.”
“The material… what is it?”
Ms. Jance rested a hand on Julie’s sho
ulder. Her fingers felt impossibly long, almost spiderlike. “You won’t believe me. Not yet. But it’s not natural.”
“Not natural. Some kind of plastic?”
“Less natural than that. It comes from another plane—the astral plane. Your son, Dr. Black, was right about the ‘astral bullshit,’ as you called it. As far as we can tell, he was right about everything.”
Something blue flashed overhead, a bubble that caught the light, arced gracefully over the lake, and bounced off the icebergs on the far side. Pax. The lake didn’t reflect him at all. He’d found her.
Hide you, the deep, motionless lake of pure evil told her.
“Thanks,” she said, and she pushed off the cliff, kicking off so she cleared the snow.
Pax! You must come to me. Terkun’shuks’pai has gone mad. He has created a monster that will destroy all life on the planet.
But—Scarlett—
You must abandon your search for her. She is hiding, which will keep her from doing damage for now. The monster is reproducing. We have little time before it spreads to other islands.
Why do you care? he asked her. You want to see all human life dead so you can “reset” the planet.
It is a mindless creature that consumes all life. From the smallest bacterium to the most graceful whale. You condemn more than humanity if you hesitate now.
Pax stared into the mirrored surface of the pool, which still showed the northern lights rather than his reflection. Scarlett was down there; he knew it. He could feel her watching him from under the surface, her eyes big and dark and full of self-pity because the made-up fantasy world in her head wasn’t anything like reality.
He was wasting time. She was hiding under that swirling, oily surface, and it wouldn’t do any good to try to drag her out. She wanted him to find her, to come rescue her.
With the self-righteousness only an emotionally confused teenager could feel, Pax decided he didn’t have time for her shit.
Scarlett watched a series of long slow ripples cross the lake surface above her, the concentric circles like a big target showing where she had just fallen through.
“Scarlett?” called Pax.
At first the pool of negative energy was dark, too dark to see.
It surrounded her in a loose, rippling nest. It wasn’t like water at all under here—more like a collection of threads that felt like they were connected to everything.
She felt weightless. The threads had linked to her spine, thick cables that probed her skin and bit in with a sharp pain that quickly faded. Slowly the darkness became dimness, then vision: she was looking up from inside the pool.
Scarlett watched Pax, silver and naked and broad-shouldered and tall and confident and, at the moment, hatefully smug-looking, bend over the edge of one of the icebergs near the pool. He stared down at her almost as though he could see her.
Scarlett’s loneliness burned like cold fire in her chest. He was sneering. He called her name a few times and looked up at the sky.
He doesn’t really want to find me.
“Fuck it,” he said. He had a good voice, deeper now. An action-hero voice. “I don’t have time for this.”
He crouched down a little and jumped away.
Pax leaped up in a graceful arc above the ice. Lana was somewhere to the south. Far to the south. He had to find a faster way to get there than jumping around in his shield bubble. His top speed might have been a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, if that.
Scarlett could fly. She’d hovered on a nest of negative energy above the burning, blasted school. Lana could fly. She used blasts of heat, like a jetpack. Terry, that fucker, could teleport.
What could Pax do?
He had a bubble. A hamster ball. A shield. He could heal the shit out of anybody still alive—but he couldn’t travel faster than a car.
Fucking hamster ball.
Pax shoved the shield in annoyance—and found himself flung upward as the shield slammed into the ice below him. The ice directly under him crushed into powder, with cracks radiating outward in bigger and bigger chunks. The snow sparkled darkly where water burst up through the cracks.
Pax arced through the air and bounced. The shield had spread into a huge, thin blue-tinted ball. The shield came down again, crushing the snow underneath it in a wobbly pattern. His astral hamster ball rolled to a stop against a long blue ridge where two icebergs had smashed together.
Pax pushed his shield farther away, this time with a steadier hand and mind. He was a hundred meters in the air now, two hundred. It wasn’t flying. But it was close. He stretched the shield even farther, until it was more of a loose mesh. He tried extending his arms forward and flying like a superhero—but all he did was float in midair. A great pose, but useless.
Pax sighed, stood up, and started running. The hamster ball rolled under him. The higher he pushed himself, the faster he rolled.
In a few minutes he hit the edge of an iceberg and ramped off into the sparkling, dark ocean. A polar bear shook itself awake at the splash and started lumbering down the iceberg. Pax rolled across the water. The waves flattened underneath him, and floating chunks of ice skidded out from under the shield, dipping their edges into the water.
He pushed farther away from the surface. Arctic birds dipped their wings, as they flew through the invisible edge of the shield, the boundary nothing more than a ripple in the wind. A few of the lower clouds heaved as he passed under them.
He spent the time trying to calculate his speed. At his best estimate, he was running at almost a thousand kilometers per hour. Not bad for someone dying in a hospital bed five days ago.
Akllana’chikni’pai rose in the air, searching around her. The piles of branches and rubble had all collapsed, motionless, on the forest floor. The greenery around her shivered, as though a thousand monsters were crawling among the leaves. She searched, but she couldn’t actually see any of them. They seemed to know when she was turned toward them and froze before she could do more than glimpse movement out of the corner of her eye.
Using her swords and drawing heat from the bright sun overhead, she formed a huge ball of fire and rolled it into the forest. If she couldn’t find the monsters, she would burn everything. Her fireball blasted trees and burned down huts hidden in the branches. Electrical lines collapsed, birds shrieked in terror, a propane tank exploded. The fire fed itself, as surely as any monster.
A shadow flickered across her eyes as she formed another ball of fire and threw it into the trees. When she looked up, a bird circled overhead, a hawk.
The bird circled in tighter and tighter spirals and dove toward her.
At the last moment it changed, and Terkun’shuks’pai stepped gracefully onto the burning ground.
He still wore the clothes of a warrior. He carried an odd, alien, pink bud in his hand, more like the new shoot of a fern than a thing with petals.
“What do you think of my new creature?” he asked, walking across the hot rocks, still barefoot. “Is it not clever?”
“How could you do this?” Akllana’chikni’pai spat. “This thing will kill everything on the planet!”
He smiled gently, rubbing his empty hand across his bald head. “All life on a world is bound together, you know that. If you kill off humanity without changing what my progenitor did to all of life here, its replacement will be as brutal and arrogant and destructive as the race it replaced. Unless you change the ecosystem, the species will fill the same roles, over and over again. Humanity is unbalanced between competition and cooperation, but so is all earthly life. They have a saying—”
“There was no need for you to have done this, Terkun’shuks’pai. Especially if you knew what I was sent here to do.”
He hummed in the back of his throat, possibly with satisfaction. “Have your seeds of second-level intelligenc
e already been released, then? How they will wreak havoc, destroying the humanity that supposedly wronged them.” He smiled. “We are fortunate, are we not, that living creatures so rarely discover our existence? How angry they would become if they knew of our manipulation. Which reminds me. Have you told the boy about my creature yet? Is he on his way to help you destroy it? Surely, it must be a monstrosity, worthy of death.”
“Stop this, Terkun’shuks’pai. Or…”
He waited for her, that infuriating smile still lightly curving his wide lips.
She couldn’t finish it. She could do nothing, take no effective action, make no threat, no plea that would provide a lever with which to move his plan.
“He is coming,” she admitted. “He does not know—I thought I was the traitor here. I am an amateur, it seems.”
His smiled broadened. He sniffed the flower in his hand, and it unfurled, spreading out delicate pink feathers and scattering miniscule spores into the wind.
“Who are you?” she demanded. His ancestor had been cruel, cold, hawklike, manipulative. “Are you Terrun’shusta’pai? What have you done to—”
He shook his head. “I am the same one you have known, and my progenitor still resides within the Council’s prison. But I have traveled farther than you. I have lived a hundred times your lifespan, wandering strange worlds while you were imprisoned here on Earth. I have seen more, learned secrets that grieve me. I have split into thousands and reabsorbed them to acquire the knowledge I needed.”
“That’s monstrous! Those we generate must be allowed to live in freedom, not be… swallowed.”
“A dark time is coming, Akllana’chikni’pai. A very dark time. Outside the worlds we know is another world, a kind of twist in time and space, an ancient universe that has almost completely consumed itself. It has found a weak spot here, near the Earth, and is even now preparing to begin consuming us.”