There was a flash of light, and the room-temperature pattern of the bunker receiving platform replaced the barn’s cold version. Wes stood at the control terminal facing the platform, while Lacy quickly took on her traditional role by fetching a thick, wool-like blanket. It remained unclear whether this gesture was meant as an accommodation for my naked arrival or as a sign of respect for my exposure to this world and its elements before reaching the teleportation platform. Regardless, while I appreciated the consideration, it wasn’t necessary. I had long since given up any anxiety over appearing naked in front of these people or anyone else, and thanks to the nanotech, I was impervious to all but the most extreme temperatures.
I noticed Lacy averting her eyes as she approached with the blanket and, this time, noted what might have been a coloring of her cheeks. That had never happened before. It was unusual because the people of Wild-Side had, at least until recently, no experience with sexuality and, as a result, no apprehension about this kind of male-female interaction.
Noticing how Lacy gave me a furtive glance before quickly exiting the room, I decided something had changed. I would either need to ask her about it… or perhaps bring up the subject with Doc Cormac would be better. Chances were, this had something to do with my social experiment. If that were the case, Cormac would be the better choice.
I noticed the smirk on Wes’s face and shot him a questioning glance. He’d seen Lacy’s response and found it unusual too. “It’s not just me, right?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She’s given you the same blanket at least a hundred times. I don’t know what’s different about today.”
Tossing the wrap over the console, I grabbed the jeans from the stack of folded clothes waiting in their usual spot. I slipped them on while keeping my eyes on the door Lacy had used for her hasty retreat. I pulled a black t-shirt over my head and stood on one leg as I slipped a sock onto my left foot. I’d gone through this process so many times that I could get fully dressed in under thirty seconds, all while standing.
“The Doc’s running late,” Wes said. “A meeting with Columbus was running long. Said he’d meet you in the Commons.”
I grinned at how he referred to Doctor Cormac simply as the Doc. When I first came here, everyone was stiff and formal. People were called by their given names, and slang was nonexistent. At the beginning, I was treated like an outcast. No one knew what to make of me. I wasn’t just a foreigner to them; I was like an alien. Now, I’ve done more than influence them. I’ve begun to impact their culture in significant ways.
This was done out of necessity. These people didn’t know how to defend themselves against a threat as hostile as the Elend. Breslin and his kind were preying on the people of Wild-Side, a group that, until my arrival, had been entirely unprepared to protect themselves.
I found Doc Cormac studying a tablet cradled in one arm. He sat on the amphitheater’s stair step, with the setting sun backlighting him. Maybe a dozen city residents shared the space, gathered in small groups or paired off as couples. Everyone noticed me as I entered from the back of the bowl-like area. Each of them shied away from my gaze. Some did so with awkward discomfort, while others with an unblemished loss of alacrity. Everyone knew who I was by now, even if they hadn’t met me. Most directly associated my arrival with the Elend threat, even if they didn’t grasp the dynamics and couldn’t connect one event to another beyond vague timing. In my mind, this only proved that the people of Wild-Side had much more in common with the people of Our-World than not. They might be intelligent and wise beyond our years, but they still filled the silence with their worst fears, suspicions, and doubts. I wasn’t one of them, so I must have more in common with the Scourge, as some had begun to call the Elend.
“Doc,” I said and dropped onto the bench beside him. “Wes said you needed to see me first thing?”
Cormac met my gaze with tired eyes, and I immediately saw that he hadn’t been sleeping again. His gaze swept across the room, absorbing the disapproval of those sharing the space. Everyone seemed to inch further away, as if what I had might be contagious. He shook his head, frowning with a mix of disapproval and frustration, but that was nothing new. Instead, he gestured to his tablet, swiping something away from the screen before putting it to sleep and tucking it under his arm. I could tell by the distant look in his eyes that he was checking his heads-up display. “Thirteen days?” he commented, referring to how long it had been since my last visit. “How long was it on your side this time?”
The Doc’s support team was completely in my corner, and I knew that without question. The rest of Seeley wouldn’t put me out if they saw I was on fire. Even those who were open-minded enough to understand I was their best chance at resisting the Elend didn’t appreciate my efforts to arm and armor the cities in defense against their Scourge.
I had accepted that my list of allies was short. The Seeley opposition came in different forms. While I couldn’t counter that hostility using the same combat tactics I employed against the Elend, it didn’t mean I had to fight fairly. I had long abandoned the idea of a fair fight. I hadn’t come to Wild-Side willingly, and if I didn’t have control over where I went or when, then survival was my top priority. This meant keeping the Seeley safe, whether they appreciated my methods or not.
“Only two days this time,” I observed his scowl. This frustrated him. There was no connection between the passage of time on Wild-Side and Our-World, and the disparity of it grated on him with every crossing.
“Much has happened since your last visit,” he said, motioning for me to follow as he led me to the top of the stairs, where a railing topped a short wall at the back of the amphitheater seating. This wall marked the city’s outer perimeter. It overlooked about seventy-five yards of nearly flat, open ground that separated the city from the dense forest beyond. What was typically flat, featureless dirt had been disrupted. The earth had been churned up in a way that wasn’t immediately clear from my vantage point atop the forty-foot wall.
I slowly blinked to allow my enhanced optics to zoom in on the disturbed earth beyond the base of the wall, and I instantly felt my mouth go dry. When I spoke, my voice was parched and cold. “How long ago did this happen?”
The Doc leaned over the rail to get a better look. For the first time, it occurred to me that he might not have the same optical augmentation as I did, which led me to reconsider the other tactical upgrades available to me. During my many visits here, I had been outfitted with upgrades and gear that, until recent events, people from his place had never even dreamed of.
“Three nights ago,” Cormac said, his tone a tremulous quaver. “More than we’ve ever seen—more than we even knew existed.”
I studied the churned earth, pulverized by the aggressive footfalls of who knows how many Elend. I took a breath and felt the alloy rail curve start bending under my iron grip. “Any sightings since?”
He shook his head.
“How many were there?”
Meeting my eye, he shrugged. “Unclear. As you know, many of them look very similar. So much so that even our automated systems couldn’t generate a count, I’m afraid.” He sighed and rubbed the tension from the back of his pale neck with an unsteady hand for a few seconds before continuing. “There were a lot. To have that many, we must have lost one of the colonies. It’s the only explanation.”
I was already on my way down the stairs, but at this, I stopped to look back at the older man. “Fresno?”
Cormac’s lips were drawn into a tight line. “They’ve been out of contact for weeks. It seems likely.”
Fresno was a city similar to Portland—where I was now–but smaller and situated so far on the fringes of the Seeley territory that reaching it had become nearly impossible since the Elend incursion. Vast expanses of dead zones separated Fresno from the other four cities. The growth of these dead zones had caused Fresno to become isolated even from communication over the last two months, prompting me to consider ways to travel to the city. If ever a wellness check was warranted, the hundreds of inhabitants cut off from the rest of their society needed to know they hadn’t been forgotten.
Just like the names of people on Wild-Side, the cities did not have names that corresponded with those in Our-World. At first, I found their names hard to pronounce, so I relied on my real-time translator to link each city to a name from back home.
There had been discussions about potentially rigging up enough repeaters to enable the teleportation platforms to function between Fresno and the nearest city, Oakland. I had been waiting for this technology to come together before making the journey. Now, it seemed it might be too late.
I exited the amphitheater and moved through a corridor to a chamber with wide, windowless double doors. I activated my HUD, which superimposed a camera view of the no man’s land beyond the doors. The device was positioned directly over the doors. The perimeter was clear to the tree line. I glanced left, and the camera, seamlessly integrated into the wall’s surface, pivoted to follow my gaze. The path was clear to both the left and right.
“You’re not going out there.” Doc Cormac protested.
“Wait here,” I said simply as I tapped the unlock code into the virtual keypad that was projected into the air before me.
There was a hiss of compression as the airtight seals surrounding the doors released and swung wide before me. I quickly walked out into the fading evening light, knowing that allowing the doors to close behind me was essential. I wouldn’t be responsible for a breach of the perimeter in the unlikely event that something rushed me from the tree line.
I heard the hiss of the doors sealing behind me and was already studying the churned soil surrounding me in every direction. No footprints were visible. It appeared as if the ground had been pulverized by the clawed feet of hundreds of Elend.
A gasp came from behind me, and I spun around. My blade slid from the sheath on the back of my belt as I felt the tech in my veins supercharge my pulmonary and cardiovascular systems. It was a false alarm, however. Doc Cormac was completely unaware that he had put my entire body on red alert. He had his back to me while he stared at the surface of the wall surrounding the city. The surface was usually polished to a porcelain-like finish that was impervious to the scarring from the elements. So far, occasional attacks by the Elend had failed to mar the pale shine of that finish.
Doc Cormac ran his fingers over the gauged and dimpled finish that scarred the wall as far as we could see in every direction. Furrows a quarter inch deep and a foot long extended up to nearly twelve feet high. The Doc’s eyes were pinched, and his mouth hung open. I couldn’t blame him; the wall was the only lasting defense keeping his people safe from the Elend.
Pressing my palm against the wall, I felt the cool surface, solid and reassuring despite its pockmarked appearance. “I thought you said they couldn’t do this,” I said quietly. I kept my words hushed, understanding that the vast wilderness was less than a football field behind me and anything could lurk in the dense foliage. It was best to assume we weren’t alone out here, even though the city tech had suggested we were the only bipeds within five hundred yards.
Cormac continued to stare at the wall. He shook his head. “They must be getting stronger.”
If Fresno had fallen as we suspected, perhaps this was a hint at how it occurred. I paced along the wall for several hundred yards, following its curve as it surrounded the city. Every inch of the once-pristine surface was marred and defaced up to a height of twelve or thirteen feet. The ground at the base of the wall was thoroughly churned, as if by the hooves of hundreds of horses, everywhere between the wall and the tree line.
“You heard this happen?” I said.
Cormac looked me in the eye, his eyes watery. His voice trembled. “I’ve never seen so many terrified faces,” he said, referring to the city’s denizens.
I led the way back to the doors leading into the city. “We’ll expand the capacity of the emergency bunkers.” I infused my voice with confidence, knowing that whatever assurance I provided to Cormac would circulate among his subordinates. The people of this world were not equipped to face a threat like this, but they were learning to cope. It was a slow, painful process.
I just wished they didn’t need to.
“Next time, move everyone to the bunkers if more than one of those creatures is spotted in the clearing,” I said over my shoulder. Then I suddenly stopped to give the older man a hard look. “Are the new drones finished?”
He nodded but appeared confused. “Twenty-four with the modified sensor package, according to the Mark-7 specification we discussed.”
I glanced at the churned soil beneath my boot and then at the expanse of cleared land that functioned as a kind of demilitarized zone beyond the city’s wall. “Can we fabricate a hundred more at half the size with a Mark-5 sensor package within the next couple of days?”
Tucking the tablet under his arm, Cormac shoved his balled fists into his jacket pockets. I knew he was trying to hide the shaking of his hands. I could see the telltale pinching of his brows that indicated the complex calculations happening in his sharp mind. He said, “Printing will take just under two days—once I provide the specs to the team, of course.”
Nodding, I gestured toward the doors. I knew the Doc wasn’t clear on my intentions for the drones. “If this happens again, or something similar, send everyone to the shelters and launch the new drones. We need to track where this new horde goes once they leave here.” Something was changing in how the Elend organized, likely linked to their recently expanded population. Some drones would be destroyed, regardless of how small and stealthy they were. But if enough got through, we had an opportunity to learn. It was highly likely the drones would follow the Elend into a dead zone. When that happened, the only way to pursue would be for the drones to fan out and search the perimeter of the Waste until they reacquired the target.
It wasn’t an ideal scenario, so we would compensate for what we lacked in capability with sheer numbers. That would have to be sufficient.
I was just finishing an impressive interpretation of what I assumed was grilled chicken breast coated in chipotle sauce. It was garnished with something that looked vaguely like cilantro, and there was a tang of lime to whatever had been sprinkled over the entire plate before it was served. The meal was terrific and a vivid reminder of home. This was no small accomplishment, considering this world had no chicken and did not condone the slaughter of animals for human consumption, even if it did. Whatever had been grilled looked and tasted like chicken, and whoever prepared the meal had gone out of their way to emulate one of the many recipes I’d brought from my world. I could only hope everyone enjoyed the meal as much as I did.
There was no one to ask at that moment. I was eating alone, which was my preference when I could get away with it. Even though I’d been coming to Wild-Side for a year, the people of this world continued to see me through different lenses. The Elend plague, now referred to as such, began not long after my arrival, and some couldn’t help but correlate my presence with theirs. To be honest, I still wasn’t sure if there was any connection at this point, and right or wrong, I wouldn’t have disputed their concern.
One thing was certain: the people of Wild-Side were completely unprepared to fight the Elend and would have succumbed to them long ago if not for me. Some appreciated this fact, while others resented it. Refer to my earlier point for insight into the mindset.
If I’m honest with myself, I believe the main reason some didn’t know what to make of me was my tendency to ask questions about their world and people, constantly striving to understand the social components they had long considered sacrosanct. In my view, some of the most significant questions were simply unknown to a race considered the most intelligent and technologically advanced to ever walk upright, yet they wouldn’t question their own origin. They lacked the motivation to improve themselves beyond the established limits of their current existence.
The longest-standing question for the people of Our-World has been about who we are as a people and where we come from.
Everyone on Wild-Side was literally the same age, and there were no children. The world’s population resided on one of the cities located on one of three major continents. Everyone here was hundreds of years old—all of them, exactly the same age. However, not everyone appeared to be the same age. The majority looked to be in their mid to late twenties, while many seemed to be in their thirties. Some, like Doc Cormac, appeared closer to sixty or perhaps in his early sixties.
You can imagine how this was a problem for me. How could I not bristle at their inability to question day-to-day life?
How could they not want an answer to the mystery?
Then there’s the other thing. I’m pretty sure I’ve alluded to it before. The people of Wild-Side are intelligent beyond anything I could begin to measure—the slowest among them, if IQ were tested, would rank as one of the sharpest minds of those on Our-World. Somehow, the entire society lacked any form of art. They had no music, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, dance, theater, or photography.
They were incredibly intelligent, yet all the qualities that make you and me human were strikingly absent.
Many aspects of Wild-Side didn’t make sense, but it was, for all intents and purposes, an alien world, after all. I needed to keep that in mind. The people here looked like those from Our-World, but they were not the same. The geography of this place was entirely different, as was its history. I had researched the Many Worlds theory interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it didn’t begin to explain Wild-Side. This place wasn’t just a few shades removed from Our-World; it was more different than similar. From what I understand about the theory, this undermined most of the interpretation.
The people here were good and decent, albeit narrow-minded. They were frigidly lacking in personality as well. Most were so rigid they seemed almost robotic. Someone could have convinced me this was a race of androids if I hadn’t seen evidence to the contrary. The absence of music and art was difficult for me to grasp, but that was nothing compared to coming to terms with the fact that they didn’t engage in intercourse. While they had the equipment—I should say, the people of Wild-Side were genetically equipped for human sex in the same way as men and women of Our-World—they simply had no concept of the act. They didn’t understand intimacy or some of the emotions common in Our-World. This isn’t to say they lacked emotions altogether. They weren’t Vulcans from Star Trek. If anything, they could be described as emotionally stunted—people hundreds of years old who possessed the tools but lacked the experience to use them.
One didn’t need a degree in psychology to wonder if all of that had something to do with them never developing music, art, dance, or literature. They never experienced the passion needed to pursue art. Maybe that’s why science was revered as God in this world.
Since nothing was sacrosanct to me, it wasn’t long before I made my mark on Wild-Side. I couldn’t bring anything physical across the Brane barrier. However, Doc Cormac’s technology, specifically the nanotech, quickly enabled me to transfer information from Our-World. Art and music was easily converted to digital form and stored within my biology. Thus, they successfully crossed the barrier, allowing me to share them with the people of Wild-Side. The people here couldn’t get enough of these new experiences. Art was consumed with enthusiasm. It encompassed everything from digitized versions of classics that hang in renowned art museums worldwide to some of the latest graphic novels. In many instances—perhaps most—the people here had no idea how to interpret what they saw. Nevertheless, most were fascinated.
Music and literature were exceedingly popular. With each trip to Wild-Side, I shared more of the culture from Our-World. I introduced classics from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, alongside some of the latest works from the twenty-first. If there was an issue with my approach—well, to be honest, there were multiple issues with my approach, but more on that later—it was that I wasn’t equipped to help the people of Wild-Side understand the material. I didn’t have a clue when it came to anything outside of modern material or pop culture. I couldn’t assist the big brains of this world in grasping or interpreting the motivations behind the creation of classic works, nor could I help them understand the history of Our-World. I could only present them with the raw material so they could draw their own conclusions.
If I had had more time to prepare and had taken a more controlled approach to add context to the material, I believe the entire effort could have been more constructive. Still, everything I brought was consumed with the voracious abandon of intellectuals starved for stimulation. I didn’t have time to prepare or even consider my approach. I was more focused on protecting the people of Wild-Side from the Elend. Shortly after I first appeared here, a locust-like plague began sweeping the land. The coincidental timing didn’t escape the attention of the intelligent, analytical people.
Understandably, many of the people I interacted with didn’t know what to make of me. Despite my cultural offerings and efforts to protect them from the Elend, most tended to avoid me. Consequently, the majority of those I encountered in the street, so to speak, were hesitant to engage. I might have looked like them, but everything about me screamed outsider, and I was aware of it.
“What do you think of the chicken?” Wes asked as he slid onto the bench across from me. Lacy smiled at me as she took a seat beside him.
“Chicken? I was pretty sure. I just didn’t see how,” I replied. Although most of the people of Wild-Side preferred to keep me at arm’s length, almost no one was openly hostile. The members of Doc Cormac’s research team were perhaps the most glaring exception, given that we worked together constantly. Every team member had been exceedingly accepting of me since day one.
Light sparkled in Lacy’s eyes. “It took some trial and error with the sequencer,” she said with a smile. “Many of the formulas you downloaded during your first few trips were chicken-based. I began to think it was a favorite, so I started experimenting.”
“Recipes,” Wes corrected. “Not formulas.”
Lacy nodded her head. “I still don’t understand the difference. It’s a formula for the meal.”
I shrugged. It was a good question. That’s when I realized they were both speaking in English. The nanotech in my blood had long functioned as a means of on-the-fly translation, allowing me to converse with the people of Wild-Side and even read their language. It was why I could seamlessly interact with their technology. A couple of hours after the tech became operational, my mind no longer differentiated between their native language and mine. It felt like having their language digitally downloaded directly into my mind. I saw their words in English and heard them speak the same way. It was a trick of the mind, a way that part of my brain rationalized what was happening—at least, that’s how it was explained to me. That’s why it took me a minute to realize they were both speaking English when they sat at the table.
“You learned my language?” I said with wide eyes.
Wes nodded. “A couple of them,” he explained. “We think it might help us to understand the nuances of your nineteenth-century literature better.”
“Some of the late twentieth–century work is proving more challenging,” Lacy went on.
I grinned. “I get that. The twentieth century is fine for me, for obvious reasons. It’s the sixteenth and seventeenth-century stuff that never worked for me. I couldn’t read Shakespeare if my life depended on it. Might as well be written in Klingon.”
“Klingon?” Wes said from under a furrowed brow.
Lacy nodded enthusiastically. Her eyes shifted to the side as she gazed into the middle distance, and her fingers poked at something invisible in the air before her. I knew she was interacting with an AR display only she could see. “Episodic fiction from the late twentieth century,” she said with a grin that revealed dazzling white teeth. No one here had poor dental work. Did I mention that? “I just sent a tag to your inbox. You’re going to love it!”
I shook my head and shoveled the last of the chicken onto my fork. “Anyway, dinner is fanatic. My compliments to whoever replicated it.”
Lacy swiped the AR display away and suddenly looked bashful. “That was me and Corey,” she explained. “I’ll let him know. We have a shift together in an hour.”
Wes cleared his throat. “Anyway, we tracked you down because Doc wanted to tell you in person but got pulled into something. He said this couldn’t wait.” He looked left and right, seemingly to ensure no one was within earshot. “We just received an update from Oakland. They said Mara came out of her coma about twenty-five minutes ago. She can’t talk yet, but her scans are encouraging. They believe she will regain that ability within the next couple of hours.”
I pushed my plate away. “And transport to Oakland?”
“It’s been reliable for the last couple of days,” Lacy said. “There’s an ion storm to the northwest, but we don’t think it will be an issue for at least eight hours.”
I checked the countdown time in my HUD. It displayed the time left before I was slingshotted back to Our-World. For once, I had plenty of time. “Tell the administrator to expect me. I want to be there when she’s ready to speak.”
Lacy nodded. “Already done. The Doc said you’d want to be there. He wants to go with you.”
I knew I was scowling at the comment. I didn’t like the idea of Cormac leaving Columbus. None of the other cities were as well-fortified as what I considered their capital city. It was the most well equipped with bunkers and therefore prepared for an attack. That said, I still didn’t know if any other cities had been attacked in the same way as Columbus. Maybe the others hadn’t experienced perimeter wall assaults similarly.
“As long as he’s back here before the storm arrives,” I said, my mouth dry.
An alarm blared as I stepped off the transport platform, and the overhead lights flickered. At first, I thought the city was under attack. But when Doc Cormac materialized on the single-person transport platform three feet to my right, the look in his eye told me he was already receiving a status update via his heads-up display. Whatever information he was presented with, I could tell it was complicated because he more or less stumbled from the platform, his eyes distant as if he were consumed by something only he could perceive.
“Well,” I said, my tone more impatient than I intended.
“Sorry,” Cormac said, waving his hand in the air. The gesture made the information on his display accessible to my HUD as well. Knowing Cormac was spending far too much time absorbing the details of whatever he was seeing, I blinked into the gist—the auto-generated summary—cluing me into the key points of the info dump bogging down the Doc’s big brain.
I was glad I did because none of my worst-case scenarios had come true. The tremendous crash that rocked the room and sounded like an explosion was nothing more than a thunderclap. A violent storm had settled over Oakland, catching the city’s residents off guard and sending everyone running for cover. According to the report displayed on my screen, the storm had developed in minutes and was the second most violent in the last seventy-five years.
This was a relief because a storm, although violent and dangerous, indicated the city wasn’t under attack by the Elend. After witnessing the damage inflicted on the wall protecting Columbus, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of destruction a sufficient number of the creatures could cause if they focused their efforts on a coordinated attack.
Concerns also arose about the ion storm approaching Oakland. Although it was said to be eight hours away, the storms were unpredictable. These phenomena had only appeared recently, having never been documented until two years ago. Now, they were sweeping across the landscape with increasing frequency. While they didn’t impact human life or vegetation, they wreaked havoc on Wild-Side’s technology, exerting an almost vampiric effect on any powered devices. It resembled a mobile version of the dead zones that sporadically dotted the continent.
The walls of the room shook around me, thunder crashed, and the lights flickered out for a few seconds. When the overhead fixtures illuminated once more, Cormac had crouched low, as if the ceiling might collapse at any moment. He glanced at me with a sheepish grin. “I think that one hit somewhere in the city.”
I nodded. The storms on Wild-Side were more elemental, reminding me why I initially called this place Wild-Side. The wilderness felt more primal and untamed, the air cleaner and less polluted, and the weather systems shifted and swung unpredictably. It all felt like a fresh, pristine, less worn version of Our-World—a place that could evolve into Our-World if given time and if the right—and maybe wrong—choices were made. If it weren’t for the presence of the technologically advanced people and the geography that bore no resemblance to Our-World, I sometimes felt as though this could have been an early prototype for Our-World.
Then again, I suppose that’s what Brane theory was all about: worlds upon worlds, upon worlds. But that made me wonder more about the overall premise. If Our-World touched Wild-Side on one side of its Brane—didn’t that mean Other-World touched Wild-Side on its other surface? If Brane theory stated that each reality is layered one on top of the next, it implies that each reality is technically exposed to the reality above and below it. So, assuming Our-World is on top of Wild-Side, what is below it? Presumably, that’s where the Elend originated. But if that’s true, what reality is located above Our-World?
These are the thoughts that occupy my mind while I’m running stairs, specifically the wide, sweeping spiral staircase surrounding the atrium of the city’s governance complex. Imagine the Guggenheim, but without any artwork. In this instance, I was ascending from the second sub-level to the fifth floor because it led to a sky bridge that would allow me to bypass the numerous crisscrossing pathways that made up the streets of Oakland.
I reached the top of the stairs and turned onto the open-air walking bridge at a dead sprint. I had left Doc Cormac in my dust. He didn’t have my stamina; he didn’t have my nano-infused blood, which was super oxygenated and pushing my body at one hundred and fifty percent of standard capacity without breaking a sweat. I did sweat when the gusting air socked me in the side and threatened to send me over the railing. My hip hit the balustrade, and my pace slowed as I took in a concrete-like street four stories below. A gale-force wind slapped me, and I felt my already sodden clothes chilling from the wind assault.
Grinding my teeth, I pressed on. I pushed off the rail and sprinted across the bridge. As I ran, I opened a channel to Cormac. “I’m checking the perimeter,” I said. “Meet me at the medical building. Stay off the sky bridges.” I cursed under my breath. “They’re dangerous.”
An update stating that the border observation system had just gone offline due to a near-field lightning strike was part of the alert I received after stepping off the transport platform. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. The system was self-healing. It would take at most an hour before the array of cameras atop the perimeter wall would be back online. Still, my first thought was about the strange damage done to the base of the wall at Columbus. It wasn’t anything impactful. If anything, the marking struck me as…exploratory.
Oakland was hundreds of miles away from Columbus, so it didn’t seem likely that the attack on Columbus was connected to a storm here. Still, the burning in the pit of my gut signaled that my conscious mind was missing something that my lizard brain was picking up on.
Survival in this place meant never ignoring my lizard brain, so seconds later, I sprinted the length of the sky bridge. The perimeter wall was about fifty yards away when another flash of lightning struck so close that I felt the thunder’s reverberating impact like a hammer blow to my chest. It was like an explosion, ringing in my ears with an intensity that brought tears to my eyes. In the back of my mind, I envisioned a shaft of liquid energy lancing into my body at my collarbone, spiking through all my organs before it puddled and swirled with the gravitational force of a black hole near my testicles.
Beneath me, every light in the city went dark.
I don’t remember stopping my charge toward the wall, but suddenly I found myself standing motionless on rubbery legs. My first few steps were awkward, as if my brain needed to relearn the length of my legs before permitting me to walk, jog, and eventually run. I pressed on with every sense scrambled. The pounding rain around me was muffled, sounding as if my head were wrapped in layers of thick gauze.
A long blink finally restored my night vision. The pain settled into my ears as the muffled sensation was replaced by something sharper. I focused on the path ahead and my clumsiness as I struggled to run. My awkwardness made me wonder why I was limping, so I looked down and saw that my right shoe was missing. Well, not entirely missing. The remnants of the boot were still strapped to my knee just above the ankle. Something stringy and shoelace-like trailed behind me in the rushing water, and it took me a stumbling stride or two to realize it was, indeed, the remains of a bootlace. I stopped and yanked away the meager remnants of my footwear before looking in confusion at my left foot. That boot was still intact, more or less. The heel had been mashed into a flat pulp, and a crack had split the entire instep, exposing my wet sock.
I’ll admit to staring at my feet for seconds longer than it should have taken to process the experience, but in my defense, my mind was wandering. It was almost impossible to focus with the piercing ringing in my ears, the almost strobe-like blueing of my vision, and the absurdity of my boots spontaneously disintegrating.
Seconds passed as I tried to make sense of everything. I stood in the driving rain on a bridge in a black void when suddenly, movement in the abyss beyond the wall ten yards ahead caught my attention. The world began to make sense again. I was looking at the open space of no man’s land—the hundred or so yards surrounding the base of the wall and separating the city from the encroaching wilderness. Every city on Wild Side had a wall and a similar DMZ, except for Tampa. Tampa was on a peninsula, so the sea protected part of its perimeter.
Christ.
I blinked slowly and realized my mind was a mess. I tipped my head—and felt more than heard—the Doppler shift of the ringing adjust with the movement. Rain streaked down my face, and I smiled. I tipped my head in the other direction. Sure enough, the whomp, whomp, whomp of the ringing sounded like a boomerang whirling around my head at high speed.
“That’s kinda cool,” I mumbled.
Then, I heard a splash in the mud not far beyond the base of the wall. It was only audible due to my heightened senses, but the fact that I heard it at all was unusual. My senses had never been this acute. I turned toward the sound but only saw the streak of a large shadow as something reached the distant tree line. Another splash echoed in the mud as another shadow moved somewhere far to my right.
I took a deep breath and leaned against the rail, focusing my attention beyond the ringing in my ears to what I was starting to recognize as the sound of blood running through them. A flicker across my AR lens indicated my HUD was coming back online, and I wondered—unfortunately for the first time—what had caused it to glitch. Glancing at my bare right foot and wiggling my toes in the accumulating puddle, a suspicion began to form. Then I heard a skittering, scraping, rasping sound in the distance. I noted a subtle shift in the shadows at the tree line on the far side of the DMZ just before my HUD began to pulse with contact designations. Small targeting reticules dotted my field of view as my heads-up display instantly switched to combat mode after rebooting. It identified threats beyond the tree line, which, though still not visible to me, had been recognized by my tech’s targeting system. I looked slowly one way, then the other.
Nine contacts.
They were spread out roughly sixty yards from left to right, concealed just beyond the forest’s edge. There could have been more deeper in the trees, but I didn’t think so. If they were massing in larger numbers, I figured they would choose to circle the city rather than stack in columns. They were predators—ambush hunters—not strategizing, hive-minded thinkers. Still, if more than a couple attacked the same wall section, they might inadvertently help one another over the top. I’d been campaigning for gun emplacements every fifty feet around each city wall. Columbus was almost finished placing the guns. Portland had only recently accepted the plan and had just begun fabricating the weapons. They were more than a week away from implementation.
“Doc, can you hear me?” I said quietly into my coms.
“Not really,” Cormac’s voice replied. “You’re distorted and breaking up. Can you speak louder?”
“Negative,” I said calmly. “Sound a city–wide alert, now. Everyone to the shelters immediately. The Elend are about to attack in force.”
“Gray, you’re breaking up,” Cormac said. “I thought you said—”
I cut him off but still didn’t raise my voice. I just eyed the distant tree line. Blood was already beginning to hyper-oxygenate in my veins and arteries. “I did. I count nine incoming hostiles, but more may be coming from other directions. Get everyone to the shelters, now.”
With nine contacts moving in, even the clumsy coordination that characterized the Elend’s teamwork made it likely that at least two would get over the wall. I’d warned Cormac about this day. Even if there were only nine of the beasts beyond the wall, it would turn into a bloodbath.
Emergency lights flickered to life below the bridge where I stood. The corridors and boulevards of Oakland were shrouded by the storm’s torrential downpour, but the occasional flash of distant lightning brought fleeting moments of clarity. I was tearing off what remained of my left boot when I noticed movement in the street below. Initially, I thought it was one of the city’s residents scrambling for cover, but in the brief snapshot my mind captured amid a flash of light, I realized the silhouette I saw was too tall, hunched, and moving too quickly to be Seeley.
I discarded what remained of my last boot and jumped barefoot from the bridge. I wrapped an arm around what might have been a flagpole or an aerial antenna and rode it down to street level while reengaging my comms. “The perimeter has been breached,” I informed Doc Cormac. Others may be monitoring the channel by now, but Doc would be spearheading the effort to get the inhabitants of Oakland to the shelters. As for mounting a defense, I knew I was it. While I’d made efforts to organize a semi-effective militia to combat the Elend, that was only established in Portland. Gaining compliance from the Seeley was a slow and laborious process.
“How many?” Doc responded.
How the hell should I know? I kept this thought to myself. “When will sensors be back online?” I said instead.
I could swear I heard the Doc curse. He never swore. I couldn’t help but grin; the Doc’s big brain was picking up my bad habits. “Five—maybe six minutes. I think there was a lightning strike near the main tower. The primary sensor sent a feedback pulse into all of the tertiary arrays. Everything is coming back—” Then there was a massive electrical spark, followed by what I can only assume was profanity from the Doc in another language. “I’m performing a manual reset on each system one at a time. It must have been one hell of a lightning strike.”
I looked down at my feet and wiggled my toes again. I was standing in a water stream as it sheeted across the pavement. The toenails on my right foot were stained black. “You’re telling me,” I muttered.
“I’ve got everyone within the outer ring,” Doc confirmed. “But we never expected that to withstand a concerted attack. I estimate it will be thirteen minutes before everyone has pulled to the core.”
The inner barrier was the ultimate goal in this situation, particularly given the absence of perimeter guns. If they had chosen to implement the guns along with the sensors I had been recommending for the past three months, the likelihood of the Elend breaching the wall would have been nonexistent. At the very least, the guns would have provided crucial time for everyone to reach the shelters beyond the inner barrier.
I was listening and watching, but amidst the flashes of lightning and the white noise of the relentless, ever-present pounding of rain striking every surface around me, it was far more likely that any Elend in the city would find me before I could find them. I could wait at the nearest access point to the outer barrier, but doing so might unintentionally lead the enemy to the Seeley. There was no sense in making the attack any easier than necessary. If the Elend breached the wall, it would only happen if one managed to climb atop another, and then another atop that. Since the creatures didn’t engage in team-building exercises—at least in my limited experience with them—for a beast to breach the wall would occur more or less by accident. The mad scramble when the nine attacked the wall at once would result in a pileup.
If I was right, it meant that at most only two or three could get over the wall—and that would only happen through sheer misfortune. If I was lucky, none would get through. Yet I was almost certain I had seen one of the creatures already stalking the streets.
Or my mind had been playing tricks on me.
A guttural screech pierced the white noise of the rain, and I spun just in time to be struck by a crushing tackle. Gaping, razor-toothed jaws snapped shut repeatedly, just inches from my face. I twisted at the hip as I was thrown backward. I felt my head hit the pavement, and I saw stars. My forearm intercepted the creature’s biting lunge at my face, bracing just below my jaw to prevent contact. The thumb of my free right hand immediately went for its eye. The snapping at my face paused, but I was already delivering three right hooks to its head.
Time seemed to slow. The creature howled and rolled off me. I knew its claws would be part of the next strike. With one eye gone, it would be in pain, triggering a hardwired, primitive response to lash out as it tried to assess the damage to its face. Sure enough, a massive taloned hand swung at me from my right. I saw it coming as if in slow motion. Three razor-sharp claws, hooked and lethal-looking, were primed to take my head off.
A heartbeat later, the creature stood motionless. I watched its massive chest heaving as it inhaled and exhaled. The beast seemed to shudder as if in pain. I looked to my left to see that it had swung a taloned claw at me while I’d been focused on the attack from my right. To my own shock and amazement, I’d caught the center-most talon, the largest of the three, and simply grappled it in the palm of my left hand. The swing had never come within a foot and a half of hitting me… though I’d never consciously recognized the swing.
Even more surprising, when I searched for the attack I had seen coming from my right, the centermost talon from that paw had been torn from the beast. It was in the palm of my right hand, pointed down like an eighteen-inch curved ice pick, though now it protruded from the creature’s remaining eye socket.
Since the thumb to the eye didn’t kill the monster, I knew the talon had to go deeper.
I heard a squish and a pop, so I quickly pushed the teetering corpse away and watched it splash into a collecting puddle of rainwater runoff. I held both palms up to the pale emergency lighting that had flickered to life in the alley only moments ago. The rain pounded my hands and quickly washed away what I could only assume was my blood mixed with the foul odor of the Elend. A deep rent marked the palm of each hand, a trade-off for grappling with talons that were themselves razor-sharp. But then, before my eyes, I saw the wide lacerations on my hands seal themselves.
The technology in my blood contributed to faster healing and a boosted immune system, but I had never seen it do anything like this before.
I was still staring at my hands when the Doc’s voice came over the com channel. “Gray, do you read? Three Seeley have breached the wall—ahh, um—but one just disappeared from the grid, so maybe that information isn’t as accurate as I thought…” His voice trailed off into what I could only assume was a man much smarter than me now talking to himself. Undoubtedly, my bad habits were rubbing off on the people of Wild-Side.
I looked at the serrated talon still in the palm of my right hand and blinked the falling rain from my eyes. I observed the four hundred-pound corpse at my feet and took a calming breath. I eyed my surroundings and opened the channel. “The bogey you lost—was it near Secure Two?”
When the Doc came back, it was with an uncharacteristic “…duh—how did you know?”
I grinned and shoved the claw into the cargo pocket on the leg of my pants, where it was less likely to do harm. Even there, I worried it might flay my leg. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d vanquished the Elend, and the recent blank spots in my memory were deeply concerning. I eyed my bare feet, now ankle-deep in the still accumulating rainwater, and then glanced at the palms of my empty hands. The pair of lacerations was seconds away from disappearing entirely, the talon in my pocket the only evidence that my experience had been anything more than imagined.
“Forget about that one,” I said after a hard swallow. I was already looking forward to the stiff drink that would be waiting when—if—I survived the night. I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to the Doc. “Vector me to the next contact and let me know when everyone is secure.”
The Doc stammered. “Gray, maybe you didn’t receive my last message. Everyone has reached the inner marker. It’s safe to fall back now. If you can reach one of the portals, we’re standing by to bring you through. You’ve bought enough time. You’re the last to arrive.”
I blinked and took inventory of my body. My internal clock must have been scrambled because, at least as far as I could tell, only seconds had passed since the Doc’s last update.
“Roger,” I said. “The nearest hostile?”
“Almost four blocks to the north,” the Doc replied without hesitation. “The fastest route to the barrier is on your HUD now.”
The corner of my heads-up display lit with an overlay of the surrounding city blocks. Two red dots indicated the locations of the Elend that had breached the wall, each hundreds of yards from my current location and moving without any discernible purpose. They were hunting for targets of opportunity that were no longer available. A dotted line appeared on the display, indicating the path I needed to follow to reach the first bulkhead separating me from the outer barrier.
Hours had passed, and I lay on an inclined table in a dimly lit room. The residents of Oakland had been teleported from the bunkers beneath the city to those under Portland. Although this wasn’t ideal for the inhabitants of Oakland, once Doc Cormac had a chance to explain that the perimeter walls had been breached, people became much more understanding of the last-minute migration. Sponsors in Portland acted as hosts for those besieged and made accommodations for the newcomers. From what I’d heard, everyone was making the most of the situation. According to the Doc, the people of Oakland were suddenly overwhelmingly supportive of my proposal to place gun turrets atop the perimeter wall. This topic had been debated since its inception and was only now being seen as a wise precautionary measure.
I laughed. “Like they could argue the point now?” I said to the Doc.
He shrugged. “You knew our people were different from yours. Yours have guns in every home across the land. It was always going to be an uphill battle.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s not quite how it is back home,” I admitted. “But when faced with a hostile force that wants to eviscerate their bodies, I think the people of my Brane will gather a little faster than the folks on Wild-Side. They don’t need to see the fangs and talons of the creatures up close before they’re ready to go to guns.”
The Doc shook his head. “We still don’t know exactly what happens to those who have disappeared. At least you finally have support for your position.” He tapped the glass display, and the AR screen on the wall sprang to life, revealing the perimeter wall around a city. The name Portland floated in a tag above the city. “The guns will be in place before morning,” he said. “And while we’ve lost, Oakland, at least for the moment, the armament will be assembled on site here and put atop the perimeter wall as soon as you’ve cleared the city.
I took a deep breath and tried not to react. I’d warned the people of Oakland that the attack was coming, but they wouldn’t listen. Now that it had arrived, they still looked to me for confirmation that it was safe to return to the city. They had technology for this, of course, but now they were finally willing to take me at my word.
“Fine,” I said. The concert of better late than never came to mind when it came to their support. “At least tell me they’re willing to communicate this point of view to the remaining cities?”
Cormac grinned. “Already done. As you say, I ensured they had no wiggle room on that point. They can’t expect you to touch their asses after this mess, after all.”
My eyes were already rolling. “It’s wipe their asses, but close enough.” I was laughing. The euphemisms of Our-World continued to elude the Doc.
“Back to my test results,” I said to the Doc. “Any idea what happened?”
Doc Cormac nodded. “Absolutely,” he replied. He tapped the panel before him, and the AR display projected on the wall switched to a cutaway view of a human skull. “This is your brain,” he said. With another tap, the view appeared to zoom in, revealing a cellular perspective. The tissue was blue, magnified to the point where individual cells became visible. Tiny gray blips crossed the image, some moving slowly and deliberately while others darted quickly from one side of the frame to vanish on the other.
“The silver particles are nanites,” Doc continued. “This is a random sample of your brain tissue, but any section we capture will appear the same based on my observations over the past twenty minutes.”
I watched but didn’t understand. The slowest of the gray, or silver, nanites moved too quickly for me to discern their shape, let alone what they were doing. As for the fastest? I’m not sure I perceived them as anything more than a vague blur in the image.
“Can you slow this down?” I said. “I don’t understand what I’m seeing.”
Doc Cormac appeared uneasy. “I’ve slowed the footage down,” he stated. “I’m recalibrating the equipment for the next test, but your tech is operating at an unprecedented speed. To be blunt, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
I don’t often find myself at a loss for words, but as I watched the footage on the screen, I was speechless. It wasn’t so much the speed at which everything was moving; it was the fact that the leading expert in the technology was astonished and troubled by what he observed.
By that point, I had learned how to draw answers from the man. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him struggle with the unexplained. “Supposition?” I asked. “Forget what’s possible. What’s your first guess based on what you see?”
Cormac seemed to chew on that for a few long seconds, at least mentally. This was significant because his mind operated at speeds exponentially faster than mine. I knew this wasn’t the first time he’d creatively considered this question. After working with me for over a year, thinking outside the box had become a standard operating procedure. It was necessary for survival at this point.
“If I had to speculate,” Cormac said, “I would say something supercharged the nano-lattice matrix in your blood and brain. Both would be necessary to prevent your body from losing phase and slipping into shock.” He shook his head slowly as he contemplated the conjecture. “But I don’t see how that could be possible. We’re discussing a degree of overclocking that would require years of research and development. I doubt human biology could survive such an experience.”
“Assume I’d been struck by lightning,” I said slowly. “What does that do to your hypothetical model?”
Cormac looked confused for a beat, then stared at me with a slack-jawed expression. He examined me from head to toe while sitting on the edge of the gurney, my feet dangling a foot and a half above the cold composite floor. He pulled the glasses from his face but continued to stare. His gaze shifted to my bare feet. The toes on my right foot were no longer black as they had been, but he had seen them before they returned to normal.
Perhaps twenty seconds passed before his gaze shifted to the glass control console he’d used to manage the AR display on the wall. He looked at me, then at the console, and then back at me. “The strike that took out Oakland’s grid…” he said in a quiet, distant voice. “It didn’t hit the tower…” He approached the console and began tapping on the glass. Whatever he was doing was visible only in his AR display. Finally, he looked up at me. “The strike didn’t hit the grounding tower,” he stated. “That’s why it took out the grid. The focal point of the blast was two-thirds of the way along the sky bridge. It hit you directly—I have footage of the strike…
I rolled my head on my shoulders, producing an audible series of pops. Thankfully, this provided a degree of relief. A headache was building at the base of my skull.
The Doc glanced back at the shared AR display, where silver-gray blurs darted across the screen. “I don’t know how you survived a strike that disabled the city grid,” he muttered.
I grinned and slipped a hand into the pocket at my left knee. I dropped the eighteen-inch-long talon onto the semi-inclined glass console in front of Cormac. “You’re not the only one.”
