It looked as if a giant had picked up the city, wrung it out like a rag, and smashed it down again. I walked forward numbly, unable to absorb the extent of the destruction. No flat land remained. It was all jumbled up and thrown about, leaving huge mounds with fragments of pavement, planters, lamp posts, and fountains mixed into the rubble. Beyond that first line of destruction, the mounds became bigger, including shattered buildings. In the distance, the skeletal remains of towers stood like silent condemnations of our failure. It was too much. Cries had died. I had to find someone, anyone, alive.
I spun around and limped toward the Undercity.
“Bhaaj, stop,” Max said.
“Aqueducts,” I muttered.
“You can’t go down there.”
I stared across the plaza to the fallen archway to the Concourse. The desert had collapsed in a fissure all along the route followed by the Concourse under the ground. It would have crushed the entire boulevard along with any visitors or vendors.
“That can’t be.” I kept walking. “The Concourse is reinforced to withstand even a bomb blast.”
“Bhaaj, don’t do this to yourself.” Max sounded subdued.
I slipped into dialect. “Find my people.”
“You can’t, not this way. You need to get help. If you go in there alone, what can you do, except crawl over the destruction, and end up dying in a cave-in yourself?”
He had a point. I needed to bring in aid. I changed direction, heading back toward Cries.
Max spoke gently. “Go back to the temple. At least it’s intact.”
“I have to find out if anyone is alive.”
“I’m not receiving any signals.”
I kept walking. “The fact that a single gauntlet EI with limited sensors doesn’t detect any people doesn’t mean everything here is dead.”
“True. But I’m not getting anything. No sign of life or tech-mech. It’s all gone.”
I reached the first mounds of rubble. Bones lay mixed in with the debris, stark and white.
“Max,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry.” If he was only simulating grief, he was doing one hell of a convincing job.
The ruins became worse as I went deeper into the city. Aurora Park looked as if it had gone through a gigantic vegetable masher. No life showed anywhere, just ruins and skeletons.
“Bhaaj, stop,” Max said. “You’ve seen enough.”
I sat on the pile of stone, leaned over, and threw up, retching as if I could tear out my insides. I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t absorb this horror.
“The Majda palace,” I rasped. “I’ll go there.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
I stood up. Then I stopped. “Max?”
“Yes?”
“You think it’s a good idea for me to go to the palace?”
“Better than here. If anything survived, it would be the Majda stronghold.”
“Yes, that’s true. Except for one little thing.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a lot easier to maintain a simulation for a single palace than an entire city.”
“Probably.” He spoke with that terrible gentleness. “If this is a simulation.”
“Why didn’t you want me going to the Undercity?”
“The Concourse collapsed. No other entrance exists except in Izu Yaxlan, and that’s too far.”
I looked around at the destruction of Cries, the wind blowing my hair back from my face. If this was a sim, it was perfect to all five of my senses, the sight, the smells of death, the sound of Max’s voice, the wind against my skin, even the gritty taste of the air.
“I know other ways to reach the Undercity,” I said.
“You also know they’re probably destroyed. The palace isn’t underground. It has a better chance of surviving.”
I spoke slowly. “The first thing I should have done, when I landed, was go to the aqueducts. I’d walk through hell to get there.”
Max was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You want evidence something is wrong with this version of reality. Instead you found something wrong within yourself.”
“See, that’s the thing.” I started walking back toward the outskirts of Cries. “I don’t think I did. You’re trying to keep me away from the Undercity.”
“That sounds like a justification,” Max said.
“For what?”
“You didn’t go to the aqueducts because you didn’t want to see their destruction.”
Despite how sick I felt, I kept walking. He was right, I didn’t want to see the people and home I loved in death. But I knew myself. I’d never turn away from my people, never, no matter what nightmare we faced. The real Max would know that. He’d never try to tell me otherwise. More than anything else, that convinced me I was still in the sim. Oblivion wanted to demoralize me with the destruction of all that I loved. So it sent me here. But apparently that included a risk, because for some reason it didn’t want me anywhere near the Undercity, not even in a simulation.
Why?
“Bhaaj, stop,” Max said.
“You’re not Max.”
His voice hardened. “Stop. Now.”
I kept going.
The ground began to shake.
“Give it up,” I said. “Your little earthquakes don’t bother me.”
The sky darkened and the ground heaved. Screams echoed behind me.
“You can cut the dramatics. I’m not scared.” In fact, I was terrified, but I was too stupid to stop. I had rocks in my head. Always had, always would.
The shaking stopped. The city disappeared—and the world exploded.
XVIII
The Voice of the Sea
The ground heaved beneath me, and mud covered my body. The lead-grey sky roiled with drones blasting at each other, mechanized robots with no soul.
“Bhaaj!” a man shouted. “Over here.”
I rolled over on the marshy ground and saw a soldier calling me from a few meters away. No, this couldn’t be, I couldn’t be here again. Not again.
“Max,” I yelled. “What the bloody hell happened?”
No answer.
A battle raged in the sky above me. I had no wrist gauntlets, no gun, no supplies, nothing except my uniform, grey and orange fatigues that matched the mud.
“Bhaaj, can you hear me?” the soldier shouted through the murk and noise. I had no name for him. No, that wasn’t true, I knew his name—
A shell hit nearby and exploded, throwing me into the air along with so much mud I couldn’t see through the mess. I fell back, plunging into the roiled bog. Gunk clogged my eyes, nose, mouth. I wiped it away, gagging as the noxious stuff went down my throat. I could use both of my hands now, no broken wrist, but when I tried to crawl forward, my body wouldn’t respond. I was sinking. I had to stop fighting; it would only make me sink faster.
An aircraft roared above and a voice called through the chaos. “Bhaaj, Rhimes, you there?”
A hand closed around my arm. “We’re here!” a man shouted, so close that the force of his breath sent half-vaporized mud swirling past my face. I lifted my head. Rhimes was kneeling next to me on a sandbar that had slowed down our sinking into the bog. A tiny drone hovered above us, nothing more than an airborne framework, engines laboring, undoubtedly clogged with mud. A woman leaned out of the framework, reaching down to us.
“We have room for one of you,” she called. “We’ll come back for the other.”
I pushed at Rhimes. “You go.”
“Your leg is broken,” he said. “You go.”
I looked at my leg, half buried in the bog, twisted at a strange angle. I felt no pain, not yet.
The pilot leaned out of the cockpit. I knew her: Captain Tadra, my CO. “Rhimes, get in,” she shouted. “This piece of crap won’t stay airborne much longer.
“Take Bhaaj,” Rhimes answered. “She’s injured.”
“Leave the fucking dust rat,” Tadra called out. “She isn’t even human.”
Rhimes stared at her. “Captain—”
“That’s an order,” Tadra said. “Get up here, soldier. Now.”
Rhimes spoke to me. “We’ll send back help. I swear it.”
“Go,” I muttered.
He jumped up and grabbed the framework. With the help of another soldier, he scrambled into the drone. Captain Tadra veered off, leaving me in the mud, the dust rat, less than human, with no choice but to die.
Time to die.
Time to give up.
“Like hell.” I spoke through gritted teeth. “It didn’t happen that way.” Yes, Tadra had left me. Her words were etched into my memory: Leave the fucking dust rat. But I’d never given up, and I wouldn’t now, either, no matter how much Oblivion wanted me dead.
I crawled through the mud, dragging my useless leg the same way I had all those years ago, when we were ambushed on that shit world. I kept to the sandbar, which was sinking into the bog more slowly than the rest of the debris from the chaotic battle. I followed it to solid ground, a ridge that bordered the marsh. Pushing up on my elbows, I surveyed the barren flatland beyond the ridge. I had come out of the bog several kilometers from our army outpost, with the battle raging in the plain between me and the relative safety of that post. Trader waroids strode across the landscape, armored cybernetic giants more than eight feet tall, wiping out our soldiers as if we were no more than gnats.
“You aren’t fooling me,” I said. “This is all fake.” The outpost had only been a kilometer away. We had fought soldiers with minimal armor, not waroids. I’d crawled the entire kilometer, struggling to stay alive. I showed up after Captain Tadra reported me lost in battle. Her words were recorded in my gear, proof of my claim that she left me to die. I testified during her court-martial, but it didn’t end there. Tadra had blocked my entry into officer candidate school despite my high scores on the qualifying exams. I filed a complaint, and in the end the brass approved my application, more because they wanted to make sure I kept quiet about the battle than because anyone expected me to succeed. But that chance was all I needed. I graduated close to the top of my class.
Now over ten kilometers of impossible terrain separated me from safety. “Fuck you, Oblivion,” I said. “If you can rewrite history, so can I.” In my mind, I imagined Singer’s mammoth gun, the Mark 89 Automatic Power Rifle that she and Taz toted around. “I’ll remember whatever I damn well want.”
I suddenly held the gun, my fists clenched around its massive stock. I targeted the closest waroid and fired. The gun boomed as it discharged, and the waroid’s upper body exploded in a maelstrom of fragmented mesh parts. The debris spun over the landscape in a widening circle. I sighted on another waroid and fired. It detonated with the force of my blast—
An explosion came so close by, it threw me into the air. For an instant I blacked out, as much with shock as from the blast. I thudded down into the soggy ground, sinking into the porous ridge, probably the only reason I survived. And yah, I had survived, because that blast had actually happened. This time, however, I had a way to fight back. I rolled onto my back and fired straight up, blasting a stream of spinning, serrated bullets. They tore through the drone above me and the craft shattered, raining debris over my body.
Somewhere, the mind of an entity too alien to understand shifted—
* * *
Darkness. No battle. No sounds. No sights, smells, or tastes.
What the hell? I couldn’t get my bearings with these sudden switches.
A voice called out in the distance, too far away to identify.
Max suddenly spoke. “Those are moans of the dead.”
Yah, right. “Shut up, Oblivion.” I strained to catch that distant, faint voice.
Come to me, a woman called, like wind keening over a far plain.
Pharaoh Dyhianna! I thought. You’re alive.
Her voice came again, closer this time. I certainly hope so.
I took a deep, shaking breath.
The darkness around me morphed into a new landscape. I was so shell-shocked from the abrupt changes, I couldn’t focus. It took me a moment to comprehend I was in the desert again, my body whole, no broken leg and wrist, no trace of mud or battle. I was still in the sim, however. Distances had become bizarrely condensed. The Lock temple stood less than a kilometer to my left, blurred around the edges. Izu Yaxlan stood a few hundred meters in front of me, and the ruins of the Vanished Sea starships were about a kilometer to my right.
This all looks distorted, Max thought. Do you want me to see if I can focus it better?
I snorted. You don’t frighten me, fake Max.
Why the hell would I want to frighten you? he demanded. You want my help or not?
That sounded like the real Max. Yah, sorry. Help if you can.
The resolution of the Tiqual pyramid sharpened. A figure formed behind the pyramid, rising into the sky, a monolith of shadow against that blue expanse. My mind translated it into a symbol I recognized, Azu Bullom, his horns curled around his head, his face dark, a wild god with a hooked nose and hooded eyes, upright like a human, but with the power and musculature of a jaguar. He loomed larger and larger, until he dwarfed the temple and stood as tall as the sky.
A shadow fell across me. Startled, I turned toward Izu Yaxlan. Another giant was rising behind the ruins, a thundercloud figure with a human shape but no face, only the glow of many stars within it. This wasn’t one being, but the amassed memories of a city that had survived for six millennia.
I spun around to the north, fearing to see—yes, a third giant had appeared, towering above the Vanished Sea ships, not a shadow, not thunderclouds, but a void that stole all light. It had no features, no human form. This wasn’t a deity of darkness, it was nothing. Oblivion.
Light flowed around me, and I turned again. The air above the desert between the Lock and Izu Yaxlan had taken on a luminous quality. A fourth giant formed there, a figure of white radiance so diffuse I couldn’t see her clearly. She was Ixa Quelia, the goddess who brought nonexistent rain to the desert. No, wait, it wasn’t Ixa Quelia, it was the pharaoh, a deity of light next to the massive power of Azu Bullom and the multiplied power of Izu Yaxlan, three aspects of humanity pitted against a void with no resemblance to anything human.
If I survived all this, even if I lived another century, I knew I’d never witness the titans of Skolia this way again. Yet even with three of them, I sensed the greater power in Oblivion. It grew with every EI it devoured. Its void would expand until it darkened all of the sky and encompassed all the world.
The Lock lifted his massive arm with his fist clenched. BE GONE! He opened his fist, and lightning burst out of his palm. It flashed across the desert, directly into the amorphous Oblivion.
The brilliant flash disappeared, swallowed by the void.
Oblivion grew.
Dyhianna raised her arms. BE GONE! She shimmered against the blue sky and flooded Oblivion with radiance that poured from the heavens. She filled the world with her light, washing away the darkness that Oblivion brought upon the land.
Oblivion swallowed her light and grew.
BE GONE! Izu Yaxlan thought in the voice of a million people. The figure spread its arms and the desert rose in a whirlwind of sand. The disturbance reached across the Vanished Sea, the sands spinning fast and high, blotting out the sun. They whirled toward Oblivion until they surrounded the void in a red maelstrom.
Oblivion swallowed the maelstrom and grew.
They raised their arms together, the Lock, Dyhianna, and Izu Yaxlan, and together they hurled their light, thunder, and the desert itself at the void created by the Vanished Sea EI.
Oblivion swallowed their assault and grew.
I stood, too overwhelmed to move, frozen in place while the gods fought. Oblivion took all they had to give—and grew stronger.
The Uzan’s thought came to me, quiet and close. This is what killed the beings who brought our ancestors to Raylicon.
I looked around. The Uzan and N
azam were standing with me.
They gave their lives to protect us, the Uzan thought. They let Oblivion think it caught them, and when it lowered its guard, they destroyed it even as it destroyed them.
How do you know? I asked.
More of Izu Yaxlan is awaking. He sounded like the Uzan again, not the horrific skeleton created by Oblivion. Its memories are hidden, hard to decipher, but they are stirring.
Nazam motioned toward the desert. Look.
Tiqual, Dyhianna, and Izu Yaxlan were striding across the land together, headed toward Oblivion. Its void had grown until it encompassed a huge portion of the desert, including the ancient starships of the Vanished Sea.
The giants walked.
When they reached Oblivion, they surrounded the void, joining “hands” and stretching their arms until they formed an unbroken ring around its immense perimeter. With all that it had grown, they barely contained it. In real life, I suspected they were trying to limit a mesh program that had become so adept at erasing all other forms of code, almost nothing could stop its invasion.
Its strength grows, Nazam thought grimly. If the race that brought humans here couldn’t destroy it six thousand years ago, we have no chance.
Why not? the Uzan thought. We have spent six thousand years developing.
And we are different than them, I added. It may not know how to deal with us.
Tiqual, Dyhianna, and Izu Yaxlan stepped closer to Oblivion, tightening their circle.
They created it, Nazam thought. The kidnappers of our ancestors. They created this monster.
We don’t know who created it, the Uzan thought.
We cannot fight it. Nazam cut the air in a sharp wave, gesturing at the three giants. They are trying to strangle Oblivion. They cannot. It will swallow them, and then the rest of us.
I frowned, concentrating on him. I’d never known the Abaj captain to speak this way.
You aren’t Nazam, I thought.
I am Nazam.
No, you’re a fake, I thought. Screw you, Oblivion. You can’t get rid of us.
Nazam blurred into darkness until he became a shadow on the desert.
Oblivion can erase us, a woman thought. The air in front of me reformed into a bent figure.