Agnosis – Ch. 20
The bore fell still. The stabbing blat of the alarms cut off abruptly. The fading echo rolled across the concrete landscape and then disappeared altogether. Dorian started guiltily at the keen silence, the memory of sound still reverberating in his ears. The sudden emptiness was deafening.
Everyone froze, stunned and wary. All labor ceased as the crew collectively paused in their gagglesome knots of activity, and directed their gaze at the dome’s apex, as though expecting a hammer blow to fall from heaven.
No sound. No movement. They did not even dare to breathe.
Dorian stood on one side of an open packing crate, opposite Ghast, his face turned to the blast doors. He held a crumpled hard copy of the shopping list Stine had printed off for them from her intrusion into the ICS. They had been arguing about the jacking advantages of the bland signatured Tolix BitBlast-80 portaprox versus the more stable, but access-sig-spike prone Parkman Icenet Personal External Array. In that instant of sharp-edged silence, his own voice bounced back to him off the smooth curve of the dome, as loud and startling as a detonation in his ears. He felt uniquely exposed, as if a searchlight had been fixed on him.
Dorian hunched his shoulders involuntarily.
The next moment, a magnalift turned the corner, exited off the warehouse’s main artery and careened up to the makeshift unloading dock that had been established at the foot of the stairs to the control booth. Its electrical engine yowled; its sure-grip tracks skittered across the slab. The driver–Dorian couldn’t see who it was from his vantage point–squeezed the brakes too hard, wheeled too sharply, and the uppermost crate toppled onto the concrete floor with a thunderous crash. Someone shouted a curse. A few handfuls of packing foam were tossed at the magnalift’s cab. A steady buzz of chatter and nervous laughter returned to fill the void. The spell was broken.
Work resumed. Dorian heaved a sigh.
“I like the Parkman,” Ghast continued in a conversational tone. “It’s familiar and reliable.”
“The admin sysop obviously does, too,” Dorian said, holding out the sweat smeared hard copy as evidence. “They’ve stockpiled almost a hundred units plus enough replacement parts to build thirty more from scratch. There’s only one case of the BitBlast-80’s, so either it’s a test product that the sysop is experimenting with or they were specially fabricated as part of the deal for the Strat Marines. In either case, the sysop isn’t going to be nearly as familiar with their key sig as he is with a product he obviously prefers. That’s all I’m saying.”
Ghast shook his head. “And I don’t like the Firefox 0.7 build of the Genesix OS. Point-six was quicker, less user-friendly at the cost of flexibility and still has the stock Genesix Icecrack utility suite. The Tolix has been pre-loaded with point-seven, which is an absolute pain to back out and even worse to reverse patch. Plus, the Parkman comes in silver, which I like.”
“The adjustable earpieces are nice,” Dorian admitted. “Doesn’t squeeze so much around the temples and at the base of the skull.”
“And you have a narrow head, whereas mine’s fat and lumpy. If I’m going to be wearing a rig for the conceivable future, comfort is a factor. I’ve got enough trouble with eczema in a fresh corpse without adding a friction rash to the mix.”
Dorian picked up one of each unit and weighed them in his hands one last time. The Parkman was lighter, less bulky and the retinal screen wouldn’t obscure as much of the jack’s peripheral vision. He tossed the Tolix back into the open crate. “You win. Let’s move on to the next item on the list.”
Amara appeared beside him without a sound as he studied the printout. She tugged at his forearm with her small hands, her eyes bright with impatience. Dorian glanced up at her impatiently.
He noticed at once that she had a sprinkle of new freckles across the bridge of her nose. They were all filling out, filling up, or otherwise dynamically altering the zap template to their particular DNA or package tweak mappings. He had begun to accumulate a soft growth of stubble along his jawline, and he’d watched the ridges and whorls of his fingerprints gradually emerge over the last few minutes. But he liked the freckles, and he liked the tightly coiled, shivering energy that she emitted. The native Amara was almost heart-stoppingly, unbearably girlish. As precocious as a child.
“What’s up?” he asked, striking the mild irritation from his voice.
“They’re coming,” Amara said, as flat and steady as a statement of fact. Her expression betrayed only the subtlest hint of anxiety. “Do you have what you need?”
Ghast blanched and reached for his rifle, which he had leaned against the side of the crate next to his leg. “Now?”
“A probing force. There are only thirty of them, but they’re well armed, and they have been given permission to use non-lethal neural inhibiting bioweapons. I think we should gather the others. Quickly.”
Dorian spared a look at the blast doors. The fallen silence seemed suddenly more ominous, more pregnant with peril. “How soon until they’re inside?”
“We should gather the others,” she repeated, and he found that his newly formed guts lurched almost exactly the same way his old ones did.
“Get Ray down here,” Dorian said to Ghast.
“He’s in the control booth studying the station schematics Stine obtained from the core before she was locked out of the system,” Amara said. “He hopes to find another way out of the warehouse.”
“Is there another way?”
“No.”
“We don’t have the firepower to contend with thirty Marines,” Dorian said, though it was not to anyone in particular. “Whatever deal Raville made with Strat, it didn’t involve replicating black market weapons. Or if it did, he had the foresight to remove them before he allowed us to be decanted.”
“More guns are not the answer,” Amara said simply.
“I agree. You have something else in mind?”
“Yes. But we all need to be together when they come for us. Preferably in a place where we’ve been afforded some cover.”
“I’m going,” Ghast snapped. “We have most of the essential items. Tell Yartz to assemble the crew near the stairs. There are enough of the crates there to provide some meager protection in the short term, and we have the body armor Yartz has been passing out. It will be of limited utility in a heavy firefight–none of it is graded for plasma or energy weapons–but it’s better than nothing.”
“It will suffice,” Amara said, nodding. “Go.”
Ghast turned and sprinted for the stairs. A few of the Misfit Toys watched him go, sensing that something was up, then returned to their tasks with redoubled effort. They cast uneasy glances at Amara, and then at the doors.
“We need to get you into body armor, too,” Dorian said quietly after he was gone.
“Raville won’t harm me.”
“I don’t think he would on purpose, no. But Raville won’t be the one firing projectiles at us, either, and even if he was, bullets tend to have a mind of their own when they start caroming around in a confined space. When the shooting starts, I want you beside me, and I want you as protected as possible.” He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You may not value your human parts much, Ms. Proto-Exousiain, but until you decide to cast them off, I still do.”
Amara smiled a little, just a weak curl of affection, and pressed her face into his touch. “I won’t allow them to hurt you, John.”
“Hey, I’m the brave and gallant protector here. You’re the helpless protectee, remember? That means I worry about you, and you do what I say and keep your head down. No heroics from you, do you hear me? Remember which one of us is expendable where saving the universe is concerned.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m neurochemically required by a billion years of lizard brain evolution and testicular impulse to talk like that. It’s part of my gender encoding.” She frowned at his attempt at humor, and he pulled her against his body in a comforting embrace. “Look, I promise that when the bullets start flying, I’ll be right there hugging the floor next to you. Probably screaming like a girl, too.”
She showed him a small, pale smile, and he hugged her against him one last time, then drew her across the open floor into the shadow of the control booth where the low defensive wall that had been assembled. He left her for a few breathless moments as he found Yartz, obtained an armload of padded quintalloy chest plates and directed him to begin gathering the other Misfit Toys and their equipment. The armor was almost ludicrously oversized for Amara’s small frame even with the flowgel padding fully inflated, and rather than try to strap her into it, Dorian stacked a few of the chest plates against the inner wall of the crate that sheltered her and piled the rest on top of her like a patchwork quilt.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the bioweapons Amara had mentioned. He would have given his right arm for a military issue ENV suit, but he suspected he would never have been able to talk her into it anyway. She tolerated his quintalloy nest without comment, but also without confidence, plainly humoring him more because the effort made him feel better than because she believed it was actually necessary.
Content to be humored, Dorian sat down beside her to wait.
Ray and Ghast came down from the booth a few moments later, followed by Stine and Thomas. Yartz herded the remainder of the crew together and spread them out along the line of defense. A startlingly thin and pasty young man, Chambers, maybe, or Yelkins–Dorian couldn’t tell them apart yet–unpackaged Parkman EA’s, tested their p-source generators and helped shipmates don the cumbersome earpiece-skullcap-transparent monocle arrays. Body armor straps were tightened, mag-locks snapped. Clips of ammunition passed from hand to hand and were stockpiled in individual caches or jammed into the pockets of fatigues. Rifles clattered, locked and loaded. Safeties snicked off. A pair of insta-therm coffee brewpots made the round, but there were no cigarettes, apparently. Dorian thought he would have liked a cigarette.
At last, the only sound in the vast expanse of the warehouse came from the air circulation system and their own uneven, anticipatory breaths.
Ray hunkered low at Dorian’s back, and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Did you examine your weapon?”
Dorian clutched the rifle in his lap so tightly that his knuckles popped. “I haven’t used one of these in years. But I checked it, yeah.”
“You’ll be amazed at how clearly your training comes back to you, if it comes to that. You always were a good soldier. One of the best.”
Dorian cocked his head at Ray. “If it comes to what?”
“If I see you lift your head above that crate at any time, unless I have specifically given you the order otherwise, Mr. Ghast will introduce the base of your skull to the butt of his rifle.” There was steel in Ray’s unwavering grey glare. The point was beyond argument. “Each member of the Misfit Toys has been trained extensively as a part of this fighting unit. Any assistance you might think to offer would be disruptive at the least, and possibly downright counter-effective. You have one task, which I see you have already begun to execute: keep her safe.” Ray jabbed a finger at Amara. “At all costs, Mr. Dorian, keep her safe.”
Dorian could only nod his acceptance.
Amara lifted her head and shoulders above armor piled about her. “You know what you have to do, Captain?”
Ray softened slightly, but his face remained rigid with purpose. “Aye, my dear. We’ll get our part done. You need only worry about what it is that you must do.”
“We’ll see one another again,” she said.
But he shrugged as though he didn’t believe it. “I wouldn’t count on it. Someone has to stay behind and pick up the pieces when all the socio-elitist technocrat dorks flash off into super-quantum divinity. It’s going to leave behind a considerable mess, and those who don’t answer the call will either be the poor and the disenfranchised or those greedy and unethical sorts who would be all too happy to fill the void left behind by the economy of power and control. The innocent are going to need a shepherd more than ever.”
“Be safe, captain,” Amara said. Her eyes welled with silent tears. “I suspect you haven’t exhausted your usefulness just yet. Just keep your ears open. Life is about to become interesting for all of us.”
The sonic bore erupted into life once more. This time, it was not the low, nauseating rumble they had grown accustomed to over the last hour, but a piercing, ear-splitting whine whose aural force felt as weighty as a hammer against the skull and vicious as an assault. Dorian clapped his hands over his ears instinctively, but the screech was penetrating. It rumbled about inside his brainpan like an avalanche rendered in slow motion with stereo sound. It coursed through his joints, tingled along nerve endings, seared his senses with fire.
He screamed, but the sound of his voice was lost in the reverberating roar that surrounded him.
To his left, a young woman dropped her rifle and fell onto her side, writhing. Blood ran from her ears in narrow, scarlet streams. Tears ran down her cheeks, and the tears were dark red drops of ruby. She too screamed soundlessly, voicelessly. There was no escape. Sonic concussion pressed them down, compacted sinew and bone into a dense, simmering core of pain.
The massive blast doors took the brunt of the force directed against them and trembled as though the ground beneath the warehouse had begun to quake. In seconds, the light tremor along their surface became a wave of concentric circles. The waves rolled to the edges, then caromed off in random directions that seemed to increase in amplitude as they propagated. Within the space of a few breaths the entire frame began to heave itself violently against its moorings until finally, the meter-thick titanium alloy doors wrenched against themselves in a last, mighty spasm and buckled inward.
The nano-carbon exopanels, whiskered alloy encasements and forge-hardened whipcord struts of the blast doors did not simply rend. They did not crumple as though struck by the stone fist of a giant. They shuddered and contracted and blew.
The bore’s sonic ram punched the doors out of the frame and flung them aside like a child’s toy. Grey clouds of instantaneously pulverized blastcrete plumed out like smoke from the ragged hole where the doors had been. Explosive tensile decompression shotgunned titanium shards as keen and lethal as knives across the breadth of the staging area and embedded them, quivering, into the nearest stacks of poly-carbon crates. The floor near the doors split along cobwebbed fault lines, new cracks streaking across the flagstoned joints in chaotic, Sanskrit scribbles.
The bore ceased. The clouds of blastcrete streamed in, hung on the air in thick and strangling banks that obscured the glow of the overhead lights, leaving only pale islands where the lamps had been.
Dorian groaned. His head pulsed. A deafening emptiness howled against his ears. Grey soot from the aerosol blastcrete coated his skin, filled his nostrils and lined his tongue, blinded him. He couldn’t even think. The hideous clangor of the bore, the smoke and dust, the sickening pitch of fear, it all overwhelmed him. For a few moments, he could do nothing more than cower in a twilight world of disoriented pain.
When he at last emerged, he found himself lying on his side, his legs folded up against his chest, his forehead pressed against his knees. He didn’t remember having fallen. Didn’t remember anything but the pain, in fact. He forced himself to move. Up onto his knees at first where he could lean over, bent at the waist with his hands braced on his thighs.
Raville won’t hurt me. Right.
Dorian remained where he was, blinking his eyes until they cleared a little. Enough for him to see that he couldn’t see anything but the dust cloud. He hawked and spat, and his spittle was the color of ash. He thought about vomiting, but somehow managed to avoid it.
His rifle was gone, lost somewhere. The defensive line was gone, for that matter. Everything had been obliterated by the roiling cloud of smoke and dust. The dust covered the floor, hung in the air, engulfed him in a barren landscape of smoke and shade and looming destruction. Little anthill mounds had already formed here and there, saharan dunes carved by unsensed currents of scorched air. Miniature dust devils skirled around obstacles that were only vague shadows and hints of objects.
He had no idea where he was in relation to their defenses. In relation to Amara.
And he knew that the Marines were coming, even if he couldn’t see them.
He couldn’t hear them either.
Dorian peered into the darkness doing his best to pick out the useful features of his surroundings, something that would help orient him to his location. Here was a leg: unnaturally twisted, smeared with blackening grime, already stiffened. The torso to which it was attached was broken, punctured by at least a score of titanium razors despite the chest plate. Eyes wide and staring, caked with grey powder; jaws stretched, chin collapsed as though in frozen in a terrible, rictus howl.
It was Yartz.
More: part of the left flank of their unsturdy wall had simply blown away, the cases and crates swept aside by a lash from the sonic bore. Strips of packing material and broken electronics littered the floor about his feet where their cases had broken and split. The circulation system fans kicked on, creating undulations in the layers of dust, and for a brief moment, the lowering clouds thinned, and he could see the ruins of more than one storage section that had collapsed where the bore had touched it before shutting down. The curtain closed then, dumping him back into the choking and impenetrable fog.
But he had seen enough to know that their situation was a disaster.
The Marines would be coming, moving under the cover of the dust cloud, wearing bug-eyed filter lenses or infrared goggles. Their weapons would be locked and ready, their deployments quick and precise. Close in, clamp down, contain the targets while they are shaken and disorganized.
Assuming, of course, that they didn’t just decide to lob in several canisters of a Class I neural agent and call it good.
He had to find Amara.
He paused near Yartz’s body, fighting off the urge to panic. Where had Yartz been? Dorian remembered seeing him midway down the line seconds before the bore had been activated, helping one of the others with his sidestraps. But he had been moving. Was it to or fro?
Amara!
He spied a splash of color out of the corner of his eye: the tight beam of a laser targeting sight cutting through the dancing motes and gloom. Dorian threw himself to the floor and scrambled away from it to his right. He struck the hard, straight edge of a packing crate with his shoulder, then scampered around the far side to get the crate between himself and the advancing soldier.
Another body here, still warm, but too soft and yielding where he touched it. Sticky. Dorian jerked his hand back and skittered away again on all fours. Something struck his knee, hard and metallic, and he stopped. Even in a state approaching panic, he recognized the familiar outline lying in the dust. He grabbed the rifle and kept going, groping blindly ahead, until he found the corner of another crate.
His breathing was ragged. He coughed often, loudly, churning up wads of thick phlegm.
He couldn’t hear himself, but he knew that the Marines would.
Amara!
The tiniest of sounds. A flash of pale yellow light off to his left once more. Poppoppop
Dorian lifted his eyes above the top edge of the crate, kept his profile as low as possible. There were more laser sights now, slicing a dozen frenetic angles through the fog of dust, in rapid, sweeping arcs. They were moving fast, double time, thrusting in for the kill.
A beam shifted suddenly, and Dorian was blinded by its glare. He ducked just as a bullet spanged off the topmost edge of his crate.
Ray was right. He remembered.
Extend the rifle up. Don’t try to aim. Three shot burst and roll.
Get your back against something solid. One quick look. Duck.
Three shot burst and roll.
Repeat until you find a position you can actually defend.
Once or twice, he thought he heard again the tinny poppoppop of another weapon, but he couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t take the time to watch or listen, because with each duck and look, the laser sights were nearer, more concentrated, more focused and cautious.
He was being hunted.
And he had lost Amara.
He kept moving to the right. At some point, he had to come up against the wall of the dome or the staircase to the control booth. Either one would work as a fixed landmark to work from, as he recalled the layout of their position in his mind. The idea of the stairs was tempting. It would get him above the dust where he could see better, take his bearings, but he dismissed it. Positioning himself on the stairs would just as easily point him out as a target of opportunity.
The targeting beams were constant now, passing directly over his head in increasingly tight and organized patterns. He heard, or imagined he heard, more gunfire back the way he had come–a weak spatter of the three round bursts he had noticed before, followed by a throaty barrage of tok-tok-toks that seemed to come from every direction at once.
He heard at last the distinctive foomp, followed by the tink and clatter of gas canisters being deployed. He imagined the hiss of neuronal toxins released into the air, spreading in a fine, invisible mist. Everyone in its path would be instantly immobilized as their cortical systems spasmed, ground to a halt, and ultimately failed.
He waited, straining at the thunder in his ears, and when the light volley, which he could only assume was what remained of the Misfit Toys, started up again, he dove for a reasonable looking patch of darkness. Marines being Marines, he trusted that those hunting him would want to be part of any firefight going on in their vicinity, enough to glance away for just an instant, at least.
But the darkness was just bare strip of floor, and he landed hard on his shoulder. His right arm went numb from his elbow to his fingertips. He curled himself into a crouch and sprang backwards, trying only to be an unpredictable target. Something caught his foot, and he pinwheeled, lost his balance and came up hard against a solid object.
His vision swam sickeningly. His heart thudded in his chest, but all he registered was a white glare of pain shooting up his back and into his head where he had impacted the side of the crate.
He couldn’t feel his right arm; he couldn’t even tell if he still had his rifle, but it was shelter, however fleeting its safety might prove.
Groaning, Dorian flopped onto his side. It was all he had left.
His head struck something softer than the bare blastcrete he expected, a concave sheath lined on the inside with gelpad. An empty chest plate.
He had tripped, caught his foot on. . .
Dorian forced himself to move. Clutching his useless arm to his chest, he clawed at the pile of discarded body armor, dragged himself up and over its low protective ridge. It was here! Amara was here!
He hissed her name, but heard nothing. He burrowed into the nest with his head and shoulders, cast the plates aside the best he could, but found only emptiness and a fleeting warmth where she should have been.
Amara was gone.
He had lost his rifle. Again.
He had lost his friends and allies and was being hunted in a night he could not penetrate on a small moon halfway across the mapped universe from his home.
But most of all, Amara was gone. While he had been playing soldier, pretending at keeping her safe, they had taken her right out from under him. Or worse, she had been injured in the spray of titanium shards just like Yartz and unable to find him, had scattered into the dark to hide or die or both. Or maybe the Exousiai had finally decided to throw their divine weight around and just take her to get her out of all this silly human interspecies bloodshed nonsense.
It didn’t really matter one way or the other. Amara was gone.
The distant patter of gunfire echoed in his ears, the sound small and pitiful. It wasn’t even a proper last stand. The Marines were picking them off one at a time, two at a time, destroying the Misfit Toys with the steady and efficient aplomb of professional soldiers.
Dorian lay his head down, closed his eyes and waited for the gas to reach him or for a soldier to find him, whichever came first. He waited to die.
It was over. They’d never had a chance.
He becomes aware of wind on his face. Soft at first, as though the fans have kicked on again in their stubborn, but hitherto largely unsuccessful attempt to wrestle the overwhelming blastcrete cloud into submission. It steadily stiffens into a regular breeze that is thick with dust and airborne grit. He tries to inhale, chokes. Sneezes. Dust and mucous cake his upper lip.
Within moments, the breeze has become a sturdy blow. Small particles sting the skin on his face and arms. This would ordinarily be good news: he can feel both of his arms again. But it is not an ordinary sort of day.
He can hear the wind rustling through the warehouse, moaning around the stacks. Somewhere nearby, one of the empty crates actually creaks as it slides a few centimeters across the floor.
The darkness behind his eyes flickers, stabbed with streaks of yellow light crosshatched by the forest of veins in his eyelids. The cloud is lifting, which he welcomes. It will make him easier to find, and thus bring a sooner end to his misery. The wind ruffles his hair gently, cool and soothing like his mother’s hand in the aftermath of a fever.
But the pleasant sensation does not last. The wind increases sharply, notching itself up to a regular gale. The grit carried along on its phantom jetstreams doesn’t just sting anymore, it outright smarts. Must be a full environmental purge. The system boards have finally recognized that they’re fighting a losing battle against the fouled air and performed the binary equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Screw it. Just wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch. Dorian can sympathize with this sort of surrender to inevitable defeat.
A series of shouts reach him, hard voices, cursing and surprised. The cries seem distant, half a world away, but he can’t tell if it’s only the roar of wind that makes it appear so, or if the Strat Marines really have forgotten about him. He would hate to have to drag himself to his feet and go in search of someone to shoot him. It would be the final insult.
Sighing, Dorian forces an eye open.
He has grown jaded over the last few weeks to eruptions of the supernatural into the temporal plane, but what he sees surprises even him.
A revolving tower of dust and wind has appeared toward the center of the warehouse. It is a a massive vortex, a score of meters across at the base, thinning to a twisting, dancing tongue near the apex of the dome, streaked with curls of yellow, coruscating flame that wind and climb the shaft of the tower like undulating millipedes. The pillar doesn’t move except to rotate in place, a whirling, grumbling violent storm, impossibly contained.
The air has indeed cleared. The sharpening wind tugs at his clothing with disincarnate fingers, drawing him forward. Toward the storm’s outer edges, the overhead lamps suspended from the ceiling lean into it, vibrating on their long chains, aligning themselves like iron filings to an electromagnetic field, casting strange shadows in their whinging, clattering dance. Light tubes begin first to flutter, then flicker and dangle and finally burst in a rain of glass Cases on the periphery tumble forward, become caught up and vanish behind the outer wall of dust, only to be sucked to the top and catapulted out across the length of the warehouse. The sound of their impact is like summer thunder.
Between Dorian and the storm are soldiers clad in black matte combat armor. Their weapons hang at their sides; their filter goggles and rebreathers have been pushed up on top of their heads. They stand with their backs to him, their faces toward the gyre, while a red faced sergeant races about amongst them trying to get their attention. He screams at them, shoves them, knocks them down. They treat him as though he doesn’t exist. The way they hunch their shoulders and ignore the knot of Misfit Toys in their midst says that they are capable of recognizing the utterly inexplicable, even if he is not.
They are soldiers for hire; they still have the capacity to be amazed. And frightened.
The Misfit Toys, on the other hand, are not, or if they are, they don’t show it. They’ve compacted themselves into a dense circle of bristling rifle barrels and grim determination, caught out in the open between the battered wall of their defensive position and the looming aisles of storage crates. The Marines have fanned themselves out on three sides, caught in the act of closing in by the pillar of fire and cloud, and the ruddy sergeant excluded, demonstrate no aggressive desire to close the loop that will place them perilously close to the storm. Dorian recognizes Ray amongst the survivors, crowned by his silver ex-array, surrounded by a circle of defenders, weapons at the shoulder. Ghast crouches on his right. Stine is there, Thomas, others.
They were going to hold a last stand after all. He’d just missed the memo, apparently.
He sits up, still careful with his arm, though there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it now. He hesitates for a moment atop the pile of discarded body armor, flexing his elbow and rolling his wrist. He sniffs tentatively at the air, aware even as he does so that if any pockets of the neural toxin linger, he won’t sense them until it is too late. No one notices except Ray, who offers a cheery wave. Dorian returns the gesture uncertainly.
Lamps continue to shatter themselves until fully half of the warehouse would have been in darkness but for the pulsating orange glow cast by the pillar of shadow and light. Dorian creeps forward until he stands less than a meter behind the nearest Marine. Ray beckons to him, but he doesn’t move. Like the soldiers, he watches, catching his breath as a gash of brilliance appears at the base of the storm like the parting of a heavy curtain. The man in front of him sucks at the air and begins to tremble.
At first, there is only the light, but it extrudes itself in a sticky, cohesive ball that reminds Dorian of the superheated glass fresh from the blast furnace he once saw in a public demonstration at a glassblower’s booth at a street fair in Sonali Southrange. It flows like a living organism, forming random and swirling striations of red and gold and blistering white into arcane patterns as though the glass itself is a thin layer of tissue drawn over varicolored strata of blood and muscle and bone. And finally, it emerges as a translucent orb that plumps like a bubble and hovers several centimeters above the floor, drifting away from the vortex as if blown upon a cooling breeze.
Watching it come is like peering into the milky and multi-faceted depths of a crystal ball.
Inside is a creature of fire, flesh like molten iron, hair of flame, eyes like whorls of liquid mercury.
He feels its incredible heat against his skin, dry and scorching, even from twenty meters away. The creature raises its arm, extends a single, shimmering finger and inches it in his direction.
Come to me, John.
There is no hesitation now. Dorian stumbles forward, shouldering past the soldiers in his way. They make no move to stop him. He crosses the narrow space between the Marines and the Misfit Toys, but does not stop. Ghast nods to him soberly, then leans back into his rifle. The pillar rumbles, whipping impossible meteorological forces about its central core, but the wind only tugs at his limbs, hurrying him he thinks, but not threatening. He dashes across the last remaining paces and scuds to a halt before the orb. The intense heat bakes his skin, singes his hair. His flash-baked eyes fill with tears.
But it is Amara inside, just as it was her voice that called to him. Even as a creature forged from elemental fire, he recognizes her, and when she waves for him to come to her, he doesn’t wonder, doesn’t think about the incinerating flames, though he hears her soft, comforting, mildly sardonic voice in his head.
Do you still believe, John? Are you a True Believer?
Yes!
He plunges ahead, pushing through the porous outer wall of the orb with his arms extended in front of him like a man fighting his way through cheesecloth. Little tongues of fire light the hairs on his forearms. His skin blisters, blackens and peels back from the red muscle beneath. He draws a final breath, and he feels the lining of his lungs whither and ignite.
He is destroyed, and still he rushes in to drown himself in her lake of fire.
I believe. I believe. I BELIEVE!
And then he is inside the orb. He is whole: unscarred, unscorched, unhurt. He blinks once, twice, staring at his hands, his arms and pink, healthy skin.
Amara winks one glassy eye at him, then braces her legs, raises her arms and points her hands, palms out, at the halted Marine advance. She becomes an imminent goddess of pain. The orb pulses with an excruciating light, and to a man, the soldiers take a step back, cowering, anticipating oblivion.
There is a sound, brief and sharp, like the fizz of a blown circuit board.
The Marines fall to their knees.
Then silence and absolute darkness.
Long seconds pass. Dorian hears himself breathing, swift and shallow. A cool hand finds his and grips his fingers tightly. It is small and delicate. A child’s hand, almost.
They wait.
One of the soldiers locates a flashlight among his gear. The beam is fat and bright and wavers uncontrollably in his hand. A scuffle of feet. A few groans, then curses, as awareness returns and resolve is gathered. The sergeant begins to rail as sergeants have done for time immemorial.
The first thing they discover is that the pillar of fire and smoke is gone.
The second, that the Misfit Toys have vanished with it.
Gone. Poof.
Eventually, the beam alights on Dorian and Amara standing together atop a low berm of fallen crates. More shouts, more efficient military scrambling, the noose is reformed, redirected, retightened. Amara makes no move to resist, and he is content to follow her lead.
When they have been completely surrounded, Amara lifts her chin toward the ranking officer amongst them, a hollow-cheeked lieutenant who looks pale and shaken and too young for the responsibilities that have been thrust upon him.
Amara favors him with an encouraging smile.
“Take me to your leader,” she says. “Please.”
