Our-World
Al Vincente waited for the mother of two to finish scolding the obnoxious six-year-old who refused to make room for him on his way to the window seat of the northbound red-eye. She literally had her hands full with the sobbing baby clutched to her chest. Vincente glanced at the narrow seat he would be forced to occupy in close quarters with the spirited family for the flight up the eastern seaboard and felt the tension headache begin to form behind his eyes.
The mother hissed something at the boy in the seat while Vincente waited to reach his assigned seat. The boy responded by hurling a tablet device with seemingly practiced skill. The mother swiftly turned in response to the attack, and Ingersoll heard what he believed was the sound of the device’s corner striking flesh and bone at high speed. The bulge of the mother’s eyes and her quick scowl was followed by a moment where she appeared to count briefly to herself.
Vincente was massaging the corners of his eyes when he felt a hand settle gently on his shoulder.
“Sir?” a woman called from behind him. Turning around, Vincente was met with the flight attendant’s polite smile. She cast a quick glance at the mother struggling with her pair of children a few feet in front of him and then motioned over her shoulder. “We have an opening over here,” she said quietly. “Maybe you would be more comfortable?”
Vincente smiled as he followed the woman to the unoccupied row of three seats. The tension was already easing behind his eyes, and a sense of claustrophobia he hadn’t acknowledged was dissipating. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said dryly. “You may have just saved my sanity.”
The flight attendant smiled knowingly. “Happy to help. The aisle seat is reserved, but you’re welcome to choose the middle or window seat,” she clarified. “Either option should make for a much more comfortable trip.”
Vincente slipped into the window seat and took a deep breath. Reaching up, he adjusted the vent on the ceiling and felt the draft wash over the perspiration on his face. The Tampa humidity was overwhelming, even at this late hour. The air coming from the vent wasn’t cool, but at least it was circulating. Glancing at his watch, he verified the time. If the plane left on schedule, they would be taxiing in just a few minutes. Then, the cabin would cool down. The temperature up north would be better. He despised the heat.
Loosening his tie, Vincente contemplated the wisdom of this latest trip. Was he giving up on Tampa before exploring all possible leads? Probably. Grady Ledger had been spotted here just two days earlier. Video evidence showed he had been at Tampa International and had spent the night at the Hilton, although he had checked in under an alias, and the hotel registry did not list him. Surveillance footage captured him entering the hotel and a room, but the hotel had no record of his booking. That was a clever trick Vincente had seen the kid use before, and he still didn’t know how he had pulled it off. Presumably, it involved some kind of computer hack to remotely reserve the room.
Interviews were conducted with most of the hotel staff, and none of them recalled seeing Ledger. The only evidence of his presence was the video surveillance records. No one had met Ledger, and the external cameras provided no hint regarding his method of transportation. Since he had stayed at a hotel near the airport, Vincente suspected he took another flight out the following day. However, if that were the case, why hadn’t the airport surveillance footage shown him departing at any time after?
Tampa served as an international hub. From there, he could fly to almost anywhere in the world. The only other reason Ledger would be in Tampa is if ATG had a facility nearby. According to the FBI’s findings, ATG had no offices, labs, or affiliates anywhere in Florida.
It wasn’t the first time Vincente felt as though he was chasing a ghost. This likely explained why he had been so quick to deem this effort a failure in favor of a potentially more lucrative lead to the north. The bulletin had hit his phone less than an hour earlier—a preliminary report regarding an attack on a lab at Alison Springs University. The name of the small graduate school initially rang a bell in the agent’s memory. That bell quickly transformed into a chorus too loud to ignore when he remembered a report detailing several off-campus locations where Breslin Global Technologies had funded research projects. One of those projects was running at ASU.
The aircraft jolted, and Vincente’s attention was drawn to the dimly illuminated view of the muddy ground surrounding the taxiway. The jet turned as it prepared for takeoff. With the movement of the aircraft, a wave of refreshingly cool air finally made its way through the ventilation system, and the agent felt more of his tension ease. For the first time in months, he might have a promising lead on the location of Grady Ledger. And with Chris Ingersoll exploring another aspect of the investigation in the UK, he sensed new opportunities opening up for him. This brought a touch of hope he hadn’t experienced since being assigned this case more than a year earlier.
Pike walked me around the property and introduced me to the rest of his team. Billy Unger and Kyle Seger were the other operatives I had disabled while advancing on Pemberton’s position. It would be an understatement if I said my presence wasn’t welcome. Still, while the pair didn’t understand why Pike was suddenly on friendly terms with me, the remaining team members were professional enough to keep their animosity in check, at least for the moment. Everyone knew they had a job to do, and if I wasn’t a threat to their principal, they needed to maintain a defense against the real danger.
I followed Pike into the dark interior of the largest barn. He silently slid a door shut on what seemed to be freshly oiled tracked rollers. A moment later, he flipped a switch and activated a series of lanterns that glowed with soft red bulbs. They were designed to provide nearby illumination without hindering our night vision. Stacked around us were crates filled with provisions, ordnance, and gear.
“…I thought you were joking when you said it was just you,” Pike was saying. “No support team at all?”
I tapped my right ear. “I have logistics support on comms.”
Esker let out a bemused sniff. This was yet another new affectation from him. “Logistics? I guess that’s better than calling me a sidekick.”
I fought a grin and wondered how and where the AI had developed a sense of humor. The amusement must have shown on my face because a questioning expression registered on Pike. I shook my head to dismiss the question before he could ask it.
“That doesn’t reflect well on my team in that case,” Pike said, his tone sullen.
“I have a few unfair advantages,” I admitted before steering the conversation in a different direction. “When did Pemberton contract your team?”
“Four days ago. We arrived yesterday.”
“How did he know your contact protocol? It’s somewhat unusual for an academic to hire people like you. I assume you vetted him?”
Pike nodded. “That’s why it took a couple of days for the team to arrive on site. I performed a bit of extra due diligence. It’s highly unusual. I needed to be sure he was trustworthy.”
“And?”
“As far as I can tell, he’s exactly who he claims to be. Just an academic who took funding from someone he probably shouldn’t have. He’s in over his head and afraid for his life.” Pike paused to think for a moment, then said, “It seems he has family. A great uncle who’s an ex-congressman. He understood the contact protocol and relayed the information. I also looked into the funds he’s using to pay us. Family money. It appears to be the last of a trust he inherited from his grandfather.”
Esker’s voice resonated in my ear. “Impressive due diligence.”
I agreed. Pike might have been disappointed with his team’s performance so far, but I couldn’t fault his preparation when researching a prospective client.
When Alley Lauer radioed from the main outbuilding, it came over the team channel Esker had added me to, so I received the transmission. “Pike,” she said. “The client’s not looking good. I need you back here, ASAP.”
Pike shot a stony glance before killing the lights and cracking the sliding door just wide enough for us to shoulder through.
Pemberton’s skin looked sallow and cadaverous, even in Laura’s penlight’s focused, stark white glow. She flicked the beam back and forth before the man’s eyes while she held each open with an extended thumb. The ocular response was nonexistent. Each time the beam of her light glanced off the skin of his face, I could see the putty-like consistency of his skin. He didn’t look like a corpse. He looked worse than a corpse.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Alley Lauer said, waving a hand at the flatscreen mounted on a stand behind Pemberton. A series of technical readouts filled the display. Though three horizontal lines dominated the top third, they meant nothing to me. Their prominence suggested significance. The fact that the scrolling lines were completely flat and lacked the telltale blips and bumps usually found in medical images was not encouraging.
“These are the brainwaves,” she continued. “According to the telemetry, Pemberton is completely brain dead.”
Pike and I looked at the screen and then at each other. Neither of us knew what to say. I felt dizzy and struggled to determine my next course of action. I was aware there were risks associated with the experiment, but the possibility of something catastrophic like this occurring hadn’t really crossed my mind. At worst, I assumed the subject might have a few nightmares and fail to cross the barrier.
But brain death?
I heard Pike asking questions and Lauer saying something, but it all felt like white noise in the back of my mind until I heard Lauer say, “The equipment is working fine, but what it’s showing doesn’t make sense.” I looked up to see frustration twisting her pale face. “If he really was brain dead, it doesn’t explain why his heart is beating.”
Pike’s jaw went slack as he slumped onto a stool at the foot of the bed, staring at the man who had hired his team to protect him. I couldn’t guess what he was thinking, but it was clear that he was rattled. He was a professional soldier who had certainly seen men injured and even killed. But this? There was something deeply unsettling about the look and feel of the situation. While looking at Pemberton, I sensed something was uniquely wrong with his current condition.
I heard Esker in my ear. “This condition is not unheard of. It’s possible to be brain dead and still have cardiovascular activity.” But even as he spoke, I could sense a lack of conviction in his tone. He was seeing what I was seeing.
“This diagnostic hardware has network connectivity,” Esker continued. “Have Miss Lauer connect it. I would like to conduct some more exhaustive analysis.”
“Really?” I said aloud. My seemingly self-directed comment drew the attention of both Pike and Lauer. I shrugged and relayed Esker’s instructions to Lauer. She appeared unfazed but complied with my request.
Lauer continued to speak as she worked, connecting various technical hardware to network switching equipment. “Having the heart continue after neural activity ceases isn’t unheard of,” she explained. “It’s the readings that I don’t understand. Pemberton’s heart rate should have slowed to a resting rhythm given his condition. His blood pressure is elevated, and his heart is racing as if he’s running, fighting, or terrified. If I didn’t know better, I would say he’s in the middle of a nightmare. But that’s not possible,” she paused. “Because there is absolutely no brain activity at all.”
She had finished networking the last of what must have been four of five different devices connected to Pemberton. Wires were attached to disparate points on his chest, head, inner arms, and legs. Some of them had been connected when I first entered the building and were part of the experimental gear I was familiar with. Lauer must have attached other gear as part of her efforts to diagnose and treat the professor.
More than a minute passed without a word from anyone. We simply stared at Pemberton, lying motionless on the table, his medical gown gaping open at the chest, with over two dozen thin spaghetti-like wires snaking from his torso and limbs to the carts and equipment clustered around his bed.
Then Esker came back in my ear, his tone urgent and authoritative in a way I had never experienced. “Pemberton is in distress,” he said. “There is a high probability he is nearing the point of embolism. Miss Lauer, you must induce a coma immediately. If you do not, Professor Pemberton will most certainly be dead within the next eight minutes.”
The way Esker phrased the statement, along with the expressions on the faces around the room, instantly made me realize that he had used the team comms channel. He was directly addressing Alley Lauer, clearly trying to save time.
Lauer looked at me, obviously confused.
I waved a hand at Pemberton, urging her to move. “Yes,” I said. “That was my logistics guy. Do you have what you need to induce a coma?”
Lauer’s eyes were wide. She looked at her kit bag and then at her commander. “I can’t,” she said. “He’s already brain–dead. That would be…” She seemed unsure how even to explain what might happen. I don’t think she knew.
I looked at Pike, who was glancing back and forth between me and Lauer as if he were watching the world’s most confusing tennis match.
“Don’t think,” I snapped. “Just do it. The guys already messed up. Can it get any worse? E can explain everything after you’re done!”
“E?” Pike said, but then he seemed to reconsider. He gave Lauer a glance and simply nodded.
Lauer looked like she might vomit, but she grabbed her kit bag and started sorting through a series of short glass ampules. Ten seconds later, she took a steadying breath and injected something into Pemberton’s arm using an absurdly large syringe.
When Esker spoke again, I knew it was only to me. “You realize I won’t be able to explain this to anyone’s satisfaction, right?”
I turned away from everyone in the room and walked slowly as far as I could in the cluttered space. “Why?” I subvocalized.
“I believe Professor Pemberton has crossed the Brane, just as he intended. The problem is that he didn’t take his body with.”
The uniquely sallow look of the man’s complexion suddenly made sense to me as I understood the unique sense I’d had upon first seeing him in that state. I felt as if I were looking at an empty shell of a human being. It was like everything that made the man who he was had vanished, leaving behind a body that was still alive but devoid of essence. Although it was a unique experience, it felt strangely familiar because it resembled what I sensed when I was near one of Elend.
I felt a headache growing behind my eyes, troubled by the question I was about to ask. “E? If Fulbright crossed without his body, what happens to him on the other side?”
“Unknowable,” Esker said, pausing slightly. “You’re the first person we know of to cross, ever. We understand that your body crosses with you, but we’re not sure if that’s the only way the phenomenon works.”
“So, is it possible he might still be alive?”
Esker remained silent for a few moments. “As you’ve often said… there’s only one way to find out.”
Wild-Side
The ragged tear split the earth. From the air, it appeared as a wide seam dividing the otherwise pristine wilderness of towering conifers, redwoods, and elms. Though only thirty feet in average height, the excavation extended over a quarter mile in width. Dirt and stone were split, churned, and extracted in just under a month since the site had been identified. The powerfully built, wide-backed, eight-legged creatures responsible for the quarrying remained unseen by the people of Wild-Side… at least by any survivors. The average creature stood between twelve and fifteen feet tall, was one and a half times as wide in the body, and walked on six legs. While the front two legs were functional for locomotion, they were more often used for digging. These insect-like limbs were multi-jointed and articulated for a wide range of movement. Although they resembled steel beams in appearance, they were as thick as telephone poles and twice as long as a man was tall, just like the rest of the legs on the creature. The primary difference with the front legs was the spade-like shape at the end of each limb, as large as a manhole cover and shaped like a digging shovel if the shovel had razor-honed edges and an unyielding sharp point capable of splitting any stone.
While the Diggers churned dirt and gravel with drone-like efficiency, striving to widen the borders of the excavation that had been dug nearly a hundred yards deep into the earth, a small group of Elend gathered at the perimeter of upturned marker stones. The henge measured exactly thirty-five feet in diameter and consisted of twenty-one upraised obsidian flagstones. Each stone was uniquely jagged and misshapen, resembling a savagely broken tooth. The smallest was half as tall as a man, while the largest was half again larger than the smallest.
Breslin walked slowly around the perimeter of the stone henge, using a long, blazing torch to ignite the five surrounding fire pits, bringing the depths to life with pale, dancing shadows. He was in human form, with tattered black material hanging from his hips. It had once been clothing of some kind, but it had endured too many transformations as he shifted from human to his Elend form. He wore knee-length, leathery black rags, referencing his host figure’s shattered past. His chest was bare and smeared with a black grease, a mix of past vanquished Elend and Seeley alike.
Dozens of Elend jostled shoulder to shoulder in the shadows beyond the perimeter of the firelight. Breslin paid no attention to the masses as he completed his circuit of the henge, his fingertips gliding slowly across the rough surface of the upright stones. Finally, as if performing a ritual of his own, his eyes rested on a jagged spire placed at the center of the circle. The stone was wide at the bottom but appeared to swirl as it narrowed to a jagged tip three feet from its base. The surface was rippled and imperfect, as if the material had been liquid when shaped, then windblown as it cooled into the striking, flawed spire.
Though it appeared to be made of a mineral similar to that of the henge, it was completely transparent. It seemed as if all of the onyx, oily blackness of the henge stones had been drawn out from the spire. Breslin’s gaze remained fixed on the object as he stepped through the gap between the stones of the henge to enter the circle. He advanced within four paces of the spire, then paused to lower his head.
After several seconds of silence, Breslin raised a hand and waved to the darkness. “Bring me the first five,” he said, his voice booming with command.
The ripples of movement beyond the shadow’s perimeter shifted, and a Crawler emerged. It was followed by five emaciated, bedraggled Seeley—three men and two women. Each looked exhausted to the point of collapse. They were bound at the wrists and linked to the person before them. The Crawler at the front of the procession moved slowly across the dry, packed dirt, between the stones of the henge, and toward the spire at the center. A Jay brought up the rear of the line, there to keep the group moving, though showing little concern for escape. The bored glower was evident on the expression of the lizard-like Jay. This task had been carried out with repetition and little, if any, variation.
The Crawler moved the first figure in the line, positioning the man’s feet beside an iron eyelet driven deep into the earth three feet from the spire’s base. The Jay moved forward and hooked the man’s rope to the eyelet, then used the blade edge of his longest talon to split the thumb-thick line linking the man to the woman behind him in the procession. The woman was lashed to a similar iron anchor before Jay moved to the following figure in the line. Within minutes, the five captives had been positioned equidistant around the perimeter of the spire, bound at the wrists to the iron at their feet, and positioned so they had no choice but to face the glassy surface of the strange stone object.
Without prompting from Breslin, the Jay and the Crawler withdrew from the henge and disappeared back into the shadows. The figures gathered beyond the perimeter of the firelight now jostled against each other with heightened anticipation. The shadowy mass appeared to writhe and swell as Breslin positioned himself just a yard away from the circle of Seeley, arranged around the spire.
Breslin’s hands were folded at what would have been belt level, and his head was bowed. His face was enveloped in shadow, with the only light glinting off the top of his sweaty, bald head. Embers popped and hissed at the bottom of the fire pits; this was the sole sound. Then, the gentle breeze through the cavern intensified, aligning with the slow, steady crescendo of murmured words slipping from Breslin’s lips. The phrases he used—the incantation—would not be understood by the Elend or the Seeley present, but everyone grasped that the wind blowing through the space was intensifying in preparation for the timbre and volume of his words.
When Breslin’s words reached the level of spoken conversation, the wind through the cavern began to whistle. The leathery fringe hanging from his hips started to flutter, as did the sticky, perspiration-laden hair of the figures bound to the iron surrounding the spire. All five figures had fallen to their knees. Fallen there or pulled there by an unseen force, no one would ever know, as an orange light began to shine from deep within the base of the spire. It pulsed slowly at first, as if some kind of force were awakening. The intermittent pulses became slower until the gaps between light and dark diminished. Finally, there was nothing but solid, iridescent, penetrating light.
Breslin’s words never wavered. His voice steadily grew louder and more rhythmic until he was nearly bellowing the words at a speed that began to merge each of the strange, unintelligible phrases into the next. Finally, the orange light surged, a long pulse that spread to fill the entirety of the cavern. The pulse flowed like a consuming shockwave. It passed over and through the five figures secured around the spire, over Breslin, and paused almost imperceptibly as it reached the perimeter of the henge, then flowed outward to pass through the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Elend gathered in what had been darkness just seconds before.
As quickly as the wave had ignited, it vanished. The spire turned dark, and the cavern became silent. Even the surrounding fire pits were extinguished with the passing of the orange wave.
Seconds seemed to stretch into minutes; then the five fire pits ignited of their own accord. With this, the shadowy group beyond the perimeter began to reanimate with sluggish anticipation. All eyes turned toward the henge, the spire at its center, and the five figures secured there.
Where the five Seeley had been now stood five different large lizard-like creatures, each still shifting and taking shape. The remains of excess skin and bone sloshed off as if they had just molted inside a human shell. Wet splatters emerged as human remains slid from broad, leathery shoulders, while scales developed and exoskeletons began to take their final shape. Two crawlers, a Drake, a Digger, and a Hunter, were positioned at the points of the sacrificial circle where the Seeley had been just moments before.
Liquid pulses of translucent spectral light surged in a barrage from every direction. Where there had once been five senses, now there was a blend of something…different. Where there should have been sound, instead there was a grinding rattle that plunged the world into a topsy-turvy morass of confusion. An acidic burn assaulted from every angle, permeating every pore and capturing all of Pemberton’s attention. This pain was unlike anything he’d ever imagined. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see the flesh flayed from his upraised arms.
However, there were no arms.
There was nothing to see—only light and pain. Savage, all-consuming agony. A torment without form or figure. He could see, but he had no body.
Yet, an awareness of his physical form lingered. He was being shredded at a molecular level. An apocalyptic burn engulfed him, and through it all, there was a sense that every part of him was being separated from every other part of him.
This is what it feels like to die.
