Freya lay for what felt like hours, painfully conscious. Then, suddenly, her damaged body became deadened with senselessness and her mind emptied for a single blissful second; the agony had unanimously emptied from her broken posterior. ‘I’ve died.’
Fear began to surge from deep within her but she could still feel. She knew she still existed. She could feel the cold floor pleasantly cooling the skin on the back of her arms and heels. She could feel the slight breeze lightly touching the left side of her body, slipping under her t-shirt. Taking in some of the air, she immediately noticed its incomparable freshness for the first time. She dared to separate her eyelids. The beauty, crispness and clarity of colour above her poured through her pupils. ‘The sky?’ Another breath of the perfect air caused her to quietly gasp, but this time with pleasure.
On further inspection of the space above her head, she spied three tiny golden spheres. Not quite a gold Freya was used to; this gold had white and silver mixed into its making. Slightly smaller than three small marbles, the spheres were spinning around one another in tiny complex orbits.
Before she could study them further, she suddenly remembered her back; it was broken. ‘Was’ being the operative word. ‘What’s happening?’ She half-heatedly questioned, not really caring about what the answer could be at this moment.
Freya decided her back was no longer broken, or perhaps the lack of pain was tricking her into sealing her fate. Either way she sat upright. No distress this far. ‘I… healed?’
For the first time in her life she felt normal. Like she was all there, body spirit and mind. Like everything was real. She had not realized it before now but she had never felt this inexplicably existent. It was something Freya could not possibly, as yet, come to terms with. For the first time in her memory all the pieces of her very existence were as one. For the first time in her full 47 years of living she was actually feeling alive, as if her life the whole time this far had been moving beside her or nearby, rather than within her. ‘My soul…?’
An uncontrollable smirk appeared on her face. ‘There is a heaven?’ In truth the landscape Freya now took in as quickly as she could muster was not the afterlife as she knew it. Besides the concrete-like material she sat on, a red-sanded desert stretched out in all directions. The horizon, as she was used to, did not curve away out of sight with the curvature of the planet. It curved upwards filling her vision until a kind of fog disallowed her from viewing further. Strangely, as far as she could tell, she now found herself within a bowl shaped… planet? Maybe it was an entire sphere? The fog ensured it was impossible to tell. Still, she stared, transfixed at the bizarre view surrounding her.
Freya sat there enchanted for quite some time. Eventually a thought crept to the front of her mind. ‘He said escape.’ The man on the phone had asked, almost begged her to break away from something. Perhaps this was what he meant and she had succeeded? She had escaped from… ‘From what exactly have I escaped?’ She pondered this for a while. ‘Is this heaven?’ She returned to her previous question. ‘No, Freya.’ She chastised herself, ‘You lived your whole life a scientist. This is not heaven, there must be another explanation.’
If this was in fact heaven, there were very few bright colours, only the sky directly above her had a distinctive lightness about it. There was an absence of angels and the welcome from God himself was severely lacking.
She began to wonder why it was that nobody seemed to be within view in any direction she looked. Freya estimated it was at least a hundred miles before her vision was obscured by the fog.
The desert was stereotypical. There were sand dunes, an absence of life and water and a shimmer of heat radiating from the tops of the dunes. The only exception was the colour of the sand; deepest of reds. Freya leaned to the right taking a handful of the sand and allowing it to run through her fingers. Immediately she noticed the lack of heat against her skin. It was cold, almost ice cold. The sand was absorbing an extraordinary amount of heat energy from her hand and apparently reflecting very little. This led her to think about the heat source of the planet. ‘Same as the light source?’ She looked up at the violet sky. ‘And where is the light source?’ She felt warm enough; the cool breeze seemed exactly accurate to keep her body temperature feeling perfect. But she did not feel her face warming as she would have from the rays of the sun she was used to; if, of course, there was a sun. Right now it seemed unlikely. The heat bizarrely gave the impression it was somehow being generated in the air itself and yet the fresh breeze told her otherwise.
‘OK.’ Freya had finally given up avoiding the question further. ‘Where is this?’ “Where am I?” She spoke aloud as if somebody nearby would answer. Nobody did. The only sound was the wind whistling and that was only scarcely audible.
A fleeting glimmer of light snapped Freya’s attention to her left. She could just make out a tiny object in the distance. There was no way of telling at this point what it was or even its shape, but Freya was quickly losing the blissful feeling of before and replacing it with an uneasy sensation, as the object was coming closer. Still not knowing whether it was friend or foe, she maneuvered her rebuilt body into a flat, chest-down position on the cool sand, concealing herself as much as possible. Her head lay on her right cheek, enabling her to see the object as it moved closer.
A few minutes passed and she could make out the thing’s shape. It was not dissimilar to the spheres orbiting several meters above her head. As it came closer still however, she observed it was much larger than any of the three tiny spheres; it was at least twice the size of a football. Hovering less than two meters from the ground, its pristine surface shone, reflecting the violet light of the sky magnificently.
Freya lay motionless. She strained her eyes, attempting to view any details of the sphere. The surface appeared at first to be flawlessly smooth, but as the thing came within a few meters of Freya, she could make out explicit incisions; curved lines bending in innumerable directions, but never crossing one another and never straight.
The globe was upon her, directly above her neck. It strafed to the left filling more of Freya’s view, allowing her to finally get a detailed look at the mysterious incisions on its glistening surface. The strange design somehow reminded her of something in her past, what it was or where she had seen it she could not remember.
Suddenly and swiftly the design shifted into a new combination. The sphere separated into two halves, still connected however by one central, cylindrical beam extending into the interior. Apart from the cylinder connecting the two halves, the sphere seemed void of everything.
Before Freya had time to notice the incisions within the globe, a tiny convex circle fell from the central beam to the sand beside Freya, less than a centimetre in diameter. She forced herself not to flinch as its collision with the sand sent a tiny spray of the grains into her eyes. The first circular disk was followed by a second. Then the two halves of the sphere combined into their original form and began a prompt return to wherever it had come from. Freya pondered for a second where this was and for the first time since her arrival, had at least a little hope that others dwelled on this planet.
Then, prior to her smiling at the thought of speaking with another soul, the convex disks began to move. They pushed through the sand to one another, leaving tiny imprinted trails until they were together. The two then oriented themselves until they created a full sphere; a miniature version of their parent in every aspect.
The thing lay peacefully, dormant for a second, then it changed. It became as red as the sand and, causing Freya to let out a brief shriek of horror, it began to screech abysmally. She instantly recognized the sound as that which had burst her eardrum earlier. She slammed her palms against her ears. The noise was awful, unlike anything she had heard. It was terrifyingly high-pitched and painfully loud, even through her hands.
Not wanting to touch the horrific thing, she levered herself up using her elbows, her right hand left her ear for a second as she did, causing her to cry in agony. If she stayed her
e she was sure, if it were possible, that she would die from this torture.
Her legs burst into life, albeit weakly, and she launched her fleeing attempt. It was to no avail, as every step she ran caused the sphere to smoothly move in closer to her thigh where it now hovered. She pushed her palms harder into her skull, so much so the pain from her crushing hands alone was immense. The previously deposited salt on her eyelashes was re-dissolved in a fresh set of tears.
She decided to touch the thing, to see if she could simply throw it to a safe distance. Common sense told her there would almost definitely be a failsafe mechanism enabled to stop such a crude defense, but anything was worth a try at this point, as blood spread slowly down each of her cheeks.
Her hand came away from her right ear and she cried out with fresh pain from the ear-splitting noise. But she strenuously continued her plan, reaching tentatively for the tiny horror. Her hand came close, within three centimetres, and the sphere screamed even more ear-piercingly every millimetre closer that her fingers approached, as if the volume and the frequency were working together to make the most efficient agony possible.
Suddenly, her right ear could hear nothing; she was now deaf on one side. Not wanting to risk further damage she moved her hand away from the sphere; the noise lessened, but only enough to stop her becoming deaf in her remaining ear. The agony was unwilling to end.
Freya fell to her now frail knees, prepared to give up the battle, but she unexpectedly had an absurd idea.
With renewed energy she rose to her bare feet and sprinted back in the direction of the concrete-like slab from where she came. She launched herself towards the only thing she knew of within her surroundings with which she could use as a weapon. Although it was still a massive long-shot, Freya had no other option but to try something using the three tiny spheres which remained in their orbits above the slab. Her fingers closed around one of the cold metallic objects. She felt the force generated, perhaps by the orbits, and then the link of force between the one in her hand and the others broke violently, throwing Freya back towards the sand. The remaining two spheres followed shortly after landing in the sand beside her.
The terrifying screech still continued. Under different circumstances, Freya would be intrigued as to how this piece of machinery worked, and what powered the thing. Now, with her ears bleeding and her head throbbing with the continuous torment, the thought had not occurred to her.
She held the tiny glistening sphere in her right hand, gathered the remaining two from the sand with her left, wincing at the harsh pain in her left ear as her hand moved away, and threw one full force at the screaming sphere, one meter from her feet. Surprisingly, it hit, but the sphere retaliated, sending a high voltage electric shock up Freya’s leg. She convulsed violently, screamed at the pain and her left hand released her remaining ammunition.
Then the pain stopped.
The sound stopped.
It was now eerily silent.
She fell forwards to her knees, feeling the sand take the heat from her skin through a hole in her now frayed jeans.
CHAPTER 4
Dosus Yin and Dia Thorpe