Wild-Side
It took me four days to move Pemberton’s body to a location I believed would be safe for an extended period. Part of the effort required a cross-country drive. And since the first time I drifted off to sleep, I would likely end up in Wild-Side; I couldn’t risk even a brief nap. My otherworldly excursion would jeopardize Pemberton, and compromising his comatose body could also provide Breslin with the information he might use for a successful Crossing. I didn’t know if Pemberton fried his brain or Crossed, but until I knew for sure, keeping his body safe was the only prudent course of action.
Fortunately, I had now enlisted the support of Pike’s team. They were technically on the payroll. More importantly, they were personally invested in the effort. With their firsthand insight into what Breslin was trying to accomplish, I had skilled operators to help protect Pemberton while I returned to Wild-Side.
It was a long, exhausting four days. While I could control the nanotechnology in my body, overclocking myself to run nonstop for that duration was beyond my capability. Thankfully, Esker was there to help. Even the AI was reluctant to make the adjustments. Setting technology aside, the human body wasn’t designed to run continuously without rest, he warned. This was why I couldn’t adjust the tech on my own.
The Crossing to Wild-Side wasn’t usual. Fatigue made me feel a bit like a struck match, and dark skies laden with low-hanging, angry-looking clouds poured sheets of rain that didn’t make me smile. It was dusk, as close as I could tell. I gave my HUD a minute to come online, but when it didn’t, I confidently concluded I was in one of the numerous dead zones. Not the end of the world…but I was tired. More tired than I could ever remember being. Usually, I was fatigued when I fell asleep back on My-World, but when I Crossed, something about the transition left me energized, though temporarily sickened and a little worse for the wear. Yet, the effects were slowly improving with time. It was as if my body was building a tolerance for the negative repercussions of the Crossing. But this time?
Not good. Not good at all. I felt as if every ache and pain I experienced back home was amplified on this side.
I knelt in the mud as a cool, light rain fell on my shoulders.
Super.
I climbed to my feet and braced my flimsy knees against the cold wind. I found myself at the edge of a small clearing surrounded by towering conifers. They would at least provide a respite from the wind, so I quickly slipped behind the boughs of the nearest shelter. As soon as I did, the whistle of the wind became hushed, and the woods fell silent. Not just silent from the wind, but devoid of the rustle of natural habitation.
Something is wrong.
I held my breath and listened intently. At first, all I could hear was the rasp of my own ragged breathing and the rush of blood behind my ears. I fought against the chattering of my teeth. The cold and the loss of my heightened hearing were feelings I acutely experienced at that moment as I strained to sense the danger I knew was nearby. The forest fell silent in response to that danger. It was a primal, natural reaction—wildlife responding to a predator in the area.
A tree limb snapped in the distance, the sound coming from somewhere behind me to my right. Then, I heard a whoosh of something moving quickly through the brush near my left. I froze, sensing two different threats. Sinking slowly, I focused my ears on what my eyes couldn’t identify in the darkness and dense tree cover.
More movement. This was a third figure, and it, too, was moving swiftly. All three figures passed by me to the north, by my estimation. The abundance of moss on an exposed boulder a few feet away made it easy to discern north. Three Elend hurried along, all heading in the same direction. They were becoming more organized, but for so many to be near me without catching my scent, something had them distracted.
As much as I wanted to find shelter, or better yet, a platform that could take me directly to one of the cities, I was suddenly more intrigued by whatever had the Elend so motivated. My fatigue and hypothermia quickly took a back seat to my curiosity, so I waited to ensure that more of the creatures weren’t following the ones that had just passed me by, and then I swiftly followed the pack.
I stalked the creatures for about six miles. One good thing came from following them that far—we cleared the edge of the dead zone, if only just barely. As I expected, my tech was nearly useless. The reserves of nanotech were stretched well beyond their capacity and were at least as exhausted as me. I was, however, able to identify my geographic position. It wasn’t good news. I was hundreds of miles from the nearest city—and almost sixty miles from the nearest farm with a teleportation system. That system hadn’t pinged in more than a year, so its state of operation was questionable at best. At least I had one thing going for me—the Elend were moving without regard for stealth, though it was a good thing I was. Before we reached the churned-up burrow in the forest that was their destination, the two Drakes and the Crawler I was following were met by another Crawler and a pair of Jays. While all seemed to be approaching from different directions, every creature was vectoring toward the same destination with a similar sense of haste.
The clearing before me was likely just over a hundred yards deep and at least three times as wide. The forest had been aggressively cleared of trees, with the wreckage of intact oaks, redwoods, and pines haphazardly piled along the edge of a massive, crude cleft in the earth that resembled a glancing hatchet Airbike in the ground. The cleft was at least a football field in width and forty feet high at its center. Clearly, it was the result of immense labor by the Elend, though the reason for their efforts wasn’t immediately obvious. They worked like monstrous, oversized mud wasps, digging and burrowing into the earth. Furrows of discarded dirt and stone beyond the mouth of the cavern extended into the surrounding forest, piled in heaps among the trees, revealing the scale of the excavation.
I hunkered down, climbing between the stacked piles of tree trunks, gravel, and discarded dirt. It was easy to stick to the shadows since dozens of small, oily bonfires dotted the pulverized gravel trail leading into the chasm. The cavern resembled a massive roach motel. I watched as dozens of Elend entered—Jays, Drakes, and more Crawlers than I could count. I saw some forms I’d never encountered before—creatures I hadn’t met yet. It made me wonder how many of the Elend were now on Wild-Side, where they were coming from, and how many forms the creatures actually took. Those I’d faced so far had been formidable. If there were a version that was even harder to kill, I didn’t want to see it.
That led to the next question of concern.
What the hell are they doing here?
At most, I’d faced the creatures in small groups. They were not—at least in my experience so far—socially organized creatures. What I was seeing was something new. And if they were organizing, it wouldn’t be good for the people of Wild-Side.
This is a game–changer.
I’m not sure how long I watched and waited. I saw dozens of Elend enter the cave. I stopped counting after one hundred twenty. There was no way to know how many entered before I arrived. The rain continued to fall, though I had some shelter in the lee of the massive felled timber. Still, my impatience eventually got the better of me.
I need to learn more.
Entering the cavern would have been the foolish effort of a desperate man. Even if I were functioning at one hundred percent and armed, it would have been a one-way ticket. At that point, I was running on empty. Hell, I didn’t even have clothes. All the tech the Seeley had for me to leverage, and when I needed it, I had nothing.
Did I mention it was raining?
Since I couldn’t enter through the front door, I hoped for a back entrance. Following the remnants of the monster mining project, I made my way around the edge of the cavern and climbed the rocky, muddy slope beyond the mouth’s right side. By that point, the rain was falling strong and steady, which was both good and bad. On the positive side, the white noise it generated masked any sounds I made. It softened the ground and prevented my movements from dislodging the loose rocks and stones I was hitting in patches as I made my clumsy ascent. On the downside, it was muddy and extremely slippery. I slipped, fell, and bruised just about every unprotected part of my body—and when you’re completely naked, that’s a lot of body parts.
At least the effort paid off. I was about to close in on what I thought was the apex of the cavern’s arch when the acoustics of the rain patter changed. My first instinct was that I wasn’t alone, so I dropped to my belly. The change in the timbre of the rainfall, at least to my lizard brain, suggested someone or something was up here with me. What I heard sounded like the rainfall striking another figure as they moved. But as I lay there, I realized that while the change in the rainfall pattern I had heard had shifted, it didn’t continue to change. The more I thought about it, I noticed that it wasn’t the small shift I would have noted if there was a man—or monster—sized figure up here with me. This was something different. This was a bigger disturbance.
Climbing to all fours and shifting my head, my eyes saw nothing but the dim sifting of moonlight on rough rock and earth. Instead, I focused on my hearing. The enhanced sense of sound I once enjoyed because of nanotechnology was long gone; that tech had atrophied and depleted to a point where I was lucky to rely on my primal, primitive senses.
Once I was back on my feet, I took a deep breath and regained confidence in my instincts. Three steps later, I realized they had been accurate, and I understood what had triggered my sense that something had altered the rain’s fall. Twenty feet away, the ground had caved in. An oblong sinkhole had opened up, likely due to hydrologic forces. And as luck would have it, I saw a dancing flash of light coming from somewhere beneath the gap.
I thought I had found the backdoor I was looking for, but I didn’t want to get too close if the earth had fallen in once already. I could become part of the next collapse. Still, I needed to see if this was a way into the cavern. If not, there might be others. Lowering myself onto my belly, I slipped slowly closer to the opening. Treating it like a hole in thin ice, I tried to distribute my body weight across the rocky, muddy ground. I moved slowly and paid close attention to the surface beneath me.
Hearing a commotion in the cavern beneath me, I froze. There were growls and a voice that sounded human, so I waited. I sensed there were many figures below me, but they felt distant. That made sense. If this portal was positioned where I suspected, as I visualized it in my mind’s eye, it was just off-center from the apex of the cavern. While I had no idea how deep the burrow extended into the earth, I guessed I was at least fifty feet above their heads based on the voices I heard.
I shimmied away from the hole and examined my desolate surroundings. After a quick search, I found a shattered tree limb. It was nearly twenty feet long and about as thick as my forearm on average. Each end had a jagged break, making me wonder how large the tree was that it had come from and what that Elend looked like who had brought down the tree.
I stripped the small sprouting branches and turned the limb into a structural support, a beam.
Laying the limb down beside the hole, I took a deep breath and rolled it across the opening. If watching the Elend as they gathered and entered the cavern was a gamble, this felt like playing Russian roulette with half the chambers loaded. My trick could cause a larger collapse, or worse yet, one of the Elend below only needed to look up at the wrong moment to catch me.
Holding my breath didn’t seem like a reasonable mitigating factor, but what harm could it do? I didn’t breathe again until the massive green tree limb was rolled into place, spanning the narrow section of the oblong expanse. Then, I belly crawled to the edge of the hole once more, keeping the limb beneath the center of my body to better distribute my weight. Slimy, cold clay coated the belly and legs—and believe me, you haven’t truly lived until you’ve smeared that nasty stuff all over your junk. At least it distracted from the rain pouring down on my back and bare skin, since both were pointing skyward.
I stopped crawling when my eyes breached the edge of the hole and the cavern below came into view.
At first, I couldn’t see anything. I was staring into a pit of inky blackness. Frustration sent a series of silent expletives from my lips. The wasted time and effort were made worse by the fact that my internal reserves were running on empty. Time mattered less than that my vision was starting to blur and a strange tingling deep in my jaw made my molars ache. The pain at the base of my skull felt like someone was trying to itch my brain with an icepick and…
The mental image of the icepick was familiar. If I had felt more like myself, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to grasp what was happening and why. Finally, everything clicked into place.
I took a deep breath and pressed my cheek against the side of my makeshift beam. With my eyes closed, I focused on calming myself and soothing my senses. The sound of the rain pounding the mud, stone, and clay around me became a hypnotic white noise. The relentless pulse of the torrent against my back turned into a soothing, albeit chilly, massage. The thunderous rush of my heartbeat in my ears merged with my blood flow, settling into a meager, steady rhythm.
What remained were the ache in my jaw and the icepick stabbing at the base of my skull. Neither had changed in intensity, which confirmed my slowly recognized suspicion. I looked back into the yawning void and focused on maintaining my breathing. While I could hear nothing new, my gaze gradually shifted as my eyes adjusted to the piercing darkness.
The floor of the cavern lay at least a hundred feet below. Tiny figures moved, indistinct in the murk from that distance. Still, even from that height, I could tell the figures were not human. Dozens upon dozens of Elend had gathered—likely hundreds of these creatures since what I could see from my vantage surely didn’t capture the full extent of the gathering beneath me. The creatures were assembled in a loose formation around a central point, their assembly spanning the breadth and depth of my view.
At that point, I realized two things for the first time. First, the Elend population was far more invasive than even our worst-case expectations. Second, while they had shown no signs of large-scale social organization thus far, that had either recently changed—or worse, it had been intentional misdirection.
I was cut off and on my own. There was no way I could inform Doc Cormac about what I was seeing. Considering my health and nano reserves, there was little chance I’d reach a communication or teleportation station before one of these creatures stumbled across me. I was too far behind enemy lines, and there were too many of the creatures for me to have any realistic expectation of making it far in my condition.
With that in mind, I decided to learn what I could. My next step was to find a way to leave a message for the Doc. For now, concentrating on one thing at a time was sufficient.
Still looking into the cavern, I concentrated on my breathing. The idea was to block the stabbing pain from the back of my skull. If anything, it was growing more acute with time. Since I now knew this was due to my geographic location, the pain made sense. Though I’d been slow to recognize the symptoms, I now knew what they indicated about this place. I was suspended over one of the places where the barriers between Branes were thin. For whatever reason, back home, I knew at least one similar site located several stories underground.
So how do the Elend know that?
I stared, trying to make out the distant figures in the darkness. The congregation had gathered around some kind of oval-shaped apparatus or configuration of smaller components at what appeared to be the center of the excavated cavern. At least a dozen small fires burned randomly on the floor, sending wispy tendrils of oily smoke to the space’s roof. Little of the smoke bothered my nose or eyes, suggesting that there was either a second entrance to the cavern or additional openings similar to mine through which the foul air was freely escaping.
Concentrating as I was, I was surprised when the darkness below suddenly brightened into better focus. I would have thought the cavern was flooded with light if not for the fact that my view shifted to zoom in on the ovoid shape at the center of the gathering at the same moment, making me acutely aware that the tech in my eyes had come to life with one final burst of effort. I didn’t know how this happened, but I was grateful.
The oval configuration at the center of the Elend mass wasn’t a device I encountered. Instead, it was a pattern of six cylindrical holes bored into the stone floor of the cavern, arranged as one column of three stacked beside another column of three. While I couldn’t determine the depth of the depressions, I estimated them to be around three feet in diameter. Beyond the depressions was something that defied explanation. It appeared that someone had removed an old door from a house—frame included—and positioned it a few feet in front of the recesses. It was as if someone were expected to walk through the door before confronting three pairs of evenly spaced recesses just a few feet ahead.
As much as this didn’t make sense, it somehow struck me as familiar. I was still pondering this and eyeing the short post at the opposite end of the configuration when the gathered mass quieted and seemed to shift as one. The group parted, creating an open avenue from my three o’clock position. Without pause, a small procession advanced along the newly vacated path and moved swiftly toward the strange configuration at the cavern’s center.
The Elend figure at the front of the procession was unmistakable. While each creature was unique in color or slightly distinctive in shape even within its class, this creature stood out among every Jay, Drake, Crawler, and even the new Harvesters. This Elend was broad-shouldered, its carapace matte black from end to end. Its primary abdomen was wide and horizontal, resembling the body of a crab, held aloft on four taloned and pincered claws. At the front of the abdomen, the torso shifted upright and tapered to something vaguely human-like, with broad shoulders and a pair of massive chitin-plated arms ending in hands with three thick talons for fingers. Short barb-like protrusions rang the shoulders and collar beneath the head. The face was reptilian and demonic, featuring wide yellow eyes with thick vertical slits, a bony slit where the nose should have been, and a gaping maw too large to be human but somehow reminiscent of humanity, revealing thumb-sized triangular razor-edged teeth with shifting, scaly lips.
Without question, I knew I was looking at Breslin. This was the leader of the Elend.
Behind him, six Drakes trailed, each manhandling a beleaguered and hunched-looking Seeley. Four men and two women, none of them restrained. Judging by the appearance of the prisoners, shackles were unnecessary. All six of the Seeley moved mechanically at the command of their captors. Each stared unblinkingly from drawn, haggard faces that had long since lost the will to live. The Seeley, unfortunately, didn’t know how to fight in the first place. They were all too easy to capture or kill.
An Elend stood behind each of the Seeley, ensuring their compliance.
Seeing these six like this, I wondered—not for the first time—how many had been taken instead of being killed outright. A roiling sensation deep in my gut feared I was about to receive an answer to my long-held question. I watched as the six prisoners were led to the depressions in the cave floor, one prisoner placed into each.
Having finished their work, the contingent of Drakes took positions at the perimeter of the small clearing. The bustle of the gathered horde grew suddenly silent. Completely, eerily quiet.
Breslin’s hulking form moved to the end of the oblong configuration at the center of the clearing, just a few feet beyond the post I had just noticed. He spun slowly, his gaze seeming to take in the extent of those gathered. Then, without a word, he lowered his head as if observing a moment of reverent silence. At this, the entire gathered mass shifted. As one, I heard the rustling of scales and chitinous panels sweep across the cavern.
I realized with a choked gasp that the group was bowing in submission.
Something was happening to Breslin, and I noticed it too late. My attention returned to him instantly, knowing I had missed something important. His body was undergoing some unexplainable transformation. The final seconds of his shift occurred so quickly that my rational mind couldn’t comprehend the sight. The hulking Elend figure had shifted and was replaced by a six-foot-tall form of a normal thirty-something man.
He was completely naked, and as far as I could tell, he was entirely human. This was the Breslin I knew from Our-World.
I was speechless.
“Rise,” he bellowed to the crowd of Elend. They obeyed.
With a wave of his hand, Breslin signaled to a pair of Crawlers at the edge of the clearing. They had been among the small group that followed him upon his grand entrance. The first stopped a few paces away and presented an old, worm-eaten wooden chest about the size of a breadbox. The second Crawler flipped open the lid before stepping aside.
This, it seemed, was some sort of ceremony. I eyed the six Seeley in the hip–deep holes, and the bile reappeared in my gut.
Breslin approached the wooden chest and took something from it. I couldn’t see inside the box from my position, and as Breslin selected his item, his stance blocked my view even more. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Breslin turned and walked directly to the hip-high post near the setup’s end, placing his choice atop the post. It was a glass orb about twice the size of a fist. Without hesitation, Breslin extended his flattened hands on either side of the orb and began speaking in words too quiet for me to hear. His eyes were closed, and I could see his lips moving. His hands remained still, palms raised and held about four inches away from the sphere’s sides. From his position, his line of sight faced across the sphere, bisecting the six holes and the six standing Seeley they held, and directly toward the surface of the door-like plane at the far end of the configuration.
When Breslin’s lips stopped moving, his eyes opened and the sphere ignited with a blinding inner light. Breslin’s hands moved, closing around the sphere’s sides at the same instant. As they did, the incandescent light shifted into a focused beam that projected across the six recessed pits and struck the vertical surface on the other end. The light lasted for perhaps three heartbeats, then some kind of feedback pulsed back from the door, across the pits, and hammered into the sphere. The light went dark.
I blinked away the stabbing pain in my eyes, unable to rub them for fear of losing my precariously braced position on the limb. At some point, I’d shimmied halfway out onto the tree, likely for a better view. Now, my hips and legs were the only parts of me in contact with the muddy earth at the hole’s edge.
Casting a glance over my shoulder, I scanned the darkness. Visibility stretched only a dozen feet beyond the edge of the hole, and the feeling that I wasn’t alone was so strong that I almost expected to look up and see one of the creatures lunging at me. I wanted to dismiss it as paranoia, but hundreds of creatures were just a few dozen yards below me. One of the predators only needed to glance up, and my paranoia would become a reality.
Taking a slow, calming breath, I realized this wasn’t how I was meant to die, not after everything I’d witnessed and accomplished. I was meant to go down fighting. Falling to the hoard of these creatures while I was naked, fever-ridden, and hypothermic? That was no way for my story to end.
Then I heard something move in the distant sky. It was quick and far too large to be wildlife. Beyond that, I couldn’t be certain what it was. The darkness and torrential rain obscured it. The sound had been subtle, but whatever it was, I was instantly confident that the brief noise was more than just my irrational imagination.
I closed my eyes and focused my senses, but it was no use. Whatever brief surge of nano-augmented ability had granted me visibility into the cave, that ability didn’t extend to my hearing. The sound was gone.
Looking back at the scene below, I noticed that Breslin was already putting the sphere back into the wooden case. I wasn’t sure what this accomplished.
Then I noticed movement in several of the six holes at the center of the configuration. A sizeable scaly limb emerged from the smoke, filling the three-foot-wide space. Another thick arm followed immediately. They clawed at the earth for leverage and were used to pull a bulky Elend form from the space that had held a Seeley only moments before.
Movement in the other five holes confirmed my suspicion as Elend forms instantly emerged. By my tally, there are two Jays, a Crawler, and three newly discovered Harvesters.
I took a breath and fought back the bile rising in my throat. The world around me spun as my mind grappled with the reality of what was truly happening to all the missing Seeley.
For the Elend to surge in numbers like this…I finally knew what had become of the population of Fresno.
It was time to go. With no idea how I would reach the nearest teleportation platform—only that I needed to more than ever—I placed both hands on the rail beneath me and pushed myself back toward the edge of the hole. Instead of moving across the beam, the beam shifted under me, spinning and sliding in the mud between my ankles.
Sensing the shift of the rail and fearing how much it might continue, I dug my toes into the mud. That’s when I realized just how far I had extended myself over the mouth of the cavity. Between my toes, I noticed the end of the beam sinking deeper into the mud at the edge of the gap. Since my shin was hanging over open air, even in my beleaguered state, I was instantly aware that the beam was quickly shifting closer to the edge of the pit and that I was about to plummet into the Elend-filled space below.
I may not have been at my best just then, but it turned out I could still move with the speed, if not the agility, of a monkey. My hands skittered, fingernails digging deeply into soggy bark as I pushed my raised torso backward along the length of the rail with adrenaline-fueled velocity. As I did, two things were captured like freeze-framed photos in my mind. The first was the hundreds of upraised faces of the Elend below, staring at the disturbance I created. The second was the broken, jagged end of the limb I was traversing as it spun from beneath me. Water droplets unfurled from its length as its near end—as thick as my right leg—launched globs of thick clay and mud. I watched as the last fingers of my left hand pushed the descending limb one way and my body spun in the opposite direction.
A half breath later, my face was buried in the mud and clay just inches beyond the mouth of the pit. I was rolling, maybe sliding? Likely both. The only thing I know for sure is that the moment I got my feet beneath me, I was hauling ass. I spotted the backside of the mound and headed toward it. There were three possible exfiltration paths I’d roughly eyeballed earlier. One was preferable to the others simply because it consisted more of earth and clay than rock and stone, so I headed for it.
I made it halfway down the backside of the excavation on my ass—the other half was on my face. The great escape, it was not. But I didn’t break anything, and one could argue that I actually descended faster than I would have if I’d been running. If that sounds unlikely…I might have hit my head more than once along the way. Still, it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Beyond the base of the excavation lay a mass of felled timber. Entire trees, including their roots, trunks, and canopies, were uprooted from the earth. Hundreds of trees—thousands! Conifers, elms, oaks, and pines all jumbled together, tangled like a careless child had discarded them. I plunged into the field of upended timber at full speed, attempting to lose myself in the chaos. Climbing and ducking among the mess of trunks—some as wide as motorcycles or sedans, while others no thicker than the legs on a bar stool.
Even as I ran, I felt the ground beneath me rumble as the horde of Elend converged on my position from three directions. They had speed and certainly outnumbered me. I knew that the smallest of them weighed more than twice as much as I did. In the field of fallen timber, their size slowed their pursuit, albeit only slightly. Judging by the savage sounds of thrashing and the outright rending of wood, their numbers and fierce intent more than countered this disadvantage.
There was no way I’d make it to a farming facility, so even as I ducked through branches and climbed higher into a tangled pile of horizontally stacked hardwoods, I was starting to question the futility of my efforts. The mud–coating chest, arms, and legs had been washed away by the driving rain, only to be replaced by blood that seemed to flow freely from countless cuts, gashes, and lacerations. Still, I never looked back. Knowing hundreds of the creatures were closing on my position and seeing them remained two separate experiences in my mind, and while I knew the vicious creatures were there, I wasn’t willing to stare them down until the very last second.
I was still climbing higher in the stacked timber when a shrieking wail echoed overhead from my right and vanished to my left. The sound emerged from nowhere and disappeared so quickly that I nearly lost my grip and fell backward into the tree clutter. I shook off the strangeness of the noise and forged on with whatever little energy reserves I could muster. The sound seemed to echo in my mind, odd not only for how fast it had appeared, but also because it didn’t remind me of any Elend I had experienced before. There was something artificial about the sound—mechanical.
I froze, one arm hooked over the soggy horizontal trunk of a pine tree, and listened. It was there again, somewhere in the distance. It was hard to hear over the driving rain hitting the surface of the tree litter surrounding me. I turned slowly, shifting my head left and then right.
A smile spread across my face for the first time in what felt like a million years. I knew that noise. I had no idea how it could be here now, but I understood what it meant. My gaze shifted to the tangle of bushy limbs I’d relied on to conceal my location from the horde. I could hear the bulk of the assault less than fifty yards below me, and I could see the sky about twenty-five yards directly ahead through a cloudy tangle of green and brown dead branches. The sound was somewhere beyond the tangle, shifting left and right as well as higher and lower than me. It was likely using the position of the horde to estimate my location.
Stopping my vertical ascent for the first time in… forever, I began to move laterally through the tangle of discarded timber. This was slower going than the ascent at first. Then I found the trunk of a massive elm. It lay like a sidewalk through the ruins of its kindred and led me directly to the surface of the tangle of brush.
When I stepped onto the surface, fresh air hit my face, and the torrent of rain rocked me to my core. It wasn’t until I took a deep breath of fresh air that I realized how dank and pungently foul the air was within the briar. It wasn’t a place where anyone could survive long. Breathing in the rot couldn’t be healthy. Then the tangle of limbs trembled beneath my feet, and I heard the scream of the Elend. I had been spotted.
Time’s up.
I heard the shrieking buzzing sound more clearly now that I was out in the open, but I still couldn’t locate its source. Several dozen yards below me, I could see a tangle of Elend forms flowing across the surface of the bramble. Dozens, maybe a hundred or more, flowed vertically like a prone army directly for me.
A howl of propellers suddenly erupted from directly overhead. It startled me so much that I nearly lost my grip on the thick limbs I had used for support. I glanced up and then over just in time to see the quad Airbike descend like a falling stone, then shift into a hover about ten feet beyond the tree cover directly in front of me. A slender female figure was at the controls, clad from head to toe in form-fitting armor and a black helmet. That lithe and shapely silhouette could only belong to one person.
The Airbike spun on its axis, presenting the back of the bike. It also lowered a couple of feet as it glided within jumping distance of where I stood. “Move your ass!” Piper yelled.
I didn’t need to be told twice. Clearing the gap, I landed hard. My wet feet slipped on the snowmobile-like foot trays, and I mashed my man-bits between me and the seat. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes filled with tears. I still managed to clamp my hands on Piper’s hips. It’s a good thing, too. She shoved the handlebars forward and dove us away from the tangle of trees. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see at least three indistinct Elend forms disappearing in the space been us and the briar, screeching and pinwheeling limbs as they plummeted.
Piper goosed the throttle, and our dive transformed into a gliding, rollercoaster-like incline that grew sharper and sharper as we ascended. After ten or fifteen seconds, she leveled us off, banked around into what seemed to be a very specific direction, and engaged the cruise control. This must have been a new feature, as it wasn’t something I had when the machine was first built. I’d suggested it to Tripp after my first long flight, but he hadn’t gotten around to modifying the last time we talked about it.
Swiping the control on her sleeve, Piper disengaged her helmet. The nanomaterial instantly disintegrated, with the particulate matter vanishing into the collar around her neck. I shifted back in my seat to make room for her and relieve my aching body. She twisted in her seat but couldn’t do much more since there was no space to move on the tiny craft. While it could accommodate two people, it wasn’t designed to seat them comfortably.
“My God, Gray,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with shock. “You look awful!”
I fought a shiver, likely caused by the chilly air at our altitude, and tried to offer a look that said, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
She rolled her eyes and passed me a series of interleaved rings. One ring was about as thick as my thumb and had a diameter slightly larger than a dinner plate. Inside was a ring of a slightly smaller diameter, which contained another smaller ring, and so on. I selected the smallest ring from the center and snapped it around my right ankle. The next ring encircled my left ankle. Another wrapped around each knee, while the largest expanded to fit around my waist. One went around each wrist, elbow, shoulder, and the last went around my neck.
Once the rings were in place, I carefully stood on the foot trays of the Airbike and activated the body armor. The nanomaterial swept across my body, forming a snug fit just like Piper’s in the blink of an eye. I quickly sat back down and swiped my wrist to disable my helmet. When I looked at Piper, she was clearly focused on something in AR, evident by the distracted gaze characteristic of someone seeing something beyond my view.
Piper’s stare quickly shifted back to me. “Your biomarkers are fucked!” she cursed. “Do you know how bad your readings are?”
I shrugged.
She stared at me, slack-jawed, for a couple of seconds. “Your tech isn’t supposed to function at these levels,” she seemed to struggle to find the words. Maybe she was having a hard time coming up with words longer than four letters. Observing the creases in her face, it might have been a combination of both. “You ran your tech so low that it’s actually been drawing power from your body instead of supplementing it.” Her jaw waggled as if she were stammering silently. “Gray… that’s not supposed to be possible!”
I nodded slowly, taking a few long seconds to absorb her words, appreciate the closest brush with death I’d experienced in a very long time, and recognize that the suit was quickly bringing warmth to parts of my body that hurt in savagely unique ways.
“Do you have anything to say?” She asked after what must have been an interminable silence.
I leaned forward and very close to her. Her eyes were wide and completely filled my vision. I saw them clouded with confusion, concern, and unfortunately, pain. “You saved my life,” I said, kissing her softly and gently on the lips. I had a lot more to say. I wanted to ask how she knew the things she did. For example, when had she become an expert on Seeley nanotech? What happened to her fear of flying? How did she find me? And why was my HUD rebooting when I knew for a fact we were currently flying over a dead zone?
Rather than asking all these questions, I concentrated on the kiss. The long-overdue kiss.
Piper eased away from Gray’s embrace. Clumsy as it was while half-twisted in her seat on the Hover-Airbike, she didn’t want to let go. She wiped the driving rain from her eyes and became aware of the smirk stretching across both their faces.
Thank God for the autopilot.
“No more fear of heights?” Gray shouted, his voice rising above the pounding wind and rain that battered them and the vehicle.
Her teeth began to grind, and her knees tightened involuntarily against the sides of the seat. “Priorities,” was all she could say. Her gaze shifted to the sky behind Gray and about thirty degrees below them. The already rapid thunder of Piper’s pulse in her ears ratcheted to a furious crescendo. “Looks like they’re not giving up without a fight,” she said, turning back to the controls.
A half-dozen of the largest Elend she had ever seen were moving in from the back, gaining altitude and closing the gap with alarming speed. The second her helmet materialized back into place around her head, Piper double-checked both their airspeed and elevation. Sixty miles per hour had seemed too aggressive given the conditions, so she throttled back to fifty. It reduced the painful impact of the rain to something tolerable and was a good trade, at least until Gray had a chance to suit up.
Four thousand feet had been a calculated risk. If they had ascended any higher, Gray would have been at an increased risk of hypothermia. She had been anxious about him from the moment Doctor Cormac confirmed they had possibly located his position. The flight time to retrieve him had been extremely distracting, her mind a whirlwind of worst-case scenarios, picturing what she might discover upon her arrival. As it turned out, none of them were even close to what she witnessed. Gray appeared beaten and disheveled in a way she could never have imagined. He looked profoundly ill.
“Any time now,” Gray said, his voice coming over the helmet-to-helmet comm channel, confirming that he was ready for both speed and altitude.
Piper kicked at a narrow, rectangular compartment recessed into the airframe about six inches from her left boot. The latch popped open, and the lid retracted. “Grab that,” she said.
Gray leaned forward and down, returning with a pair of short-barreled rifles. “That’s my girl,” he laughed. “Let’s turn around, then punch it.”
She glanced over her shoulder in time to see him sling the spare rifle over his back before spinning a hundred and eighty degrees around on his seat to face rearward. The moment his ass landed back on the seat, her eyes were moving across the HUD and through the menus on the virtual screen. She heard Gray laugh as the restraint system lashed his belt to the bike seat. “Here we go,” she bellowed.
Goosing the throttle and pulling back ten degrees on the handlebars, Piper accelerated and launched the flying machine higher into the sky. A moment later, Gray unleashed a three-round burst from the rifle. Even through the wind and rain, Piper felt the report of the gun like a tapping against her back. More shots erupted behind her, then even more.
When Piper sensed movement that she interpreted as Gray swapping the magazine of the first rifle for that of the second, she couldn’t help but wonder how many of the flying Elend were pursuing them. Meanwhile, a glowing dot in her HUD indicated the heading to their eventual destination. A distance counter in the corner of her display showed how many miles remained before they arrived. Although it was counting down quickly, she was starting to worry about what would happen if they reached the destination with their persuaders close at heel. “Are you losing your touch back there? Did you forget how to aim?” She chided.
Gray chuckled with sincere, albeit grim amusement, and then fired a single shot. He’d switched to single shot mode as soon as he reached the second magazine. “Not to worry you, but faster would be good,” he said.
Swallowing hard, Piper tried to assess just how bad things could be. Concentrating to keep her arms braced and, therefore, the machine steady, she shot a look over her shoulder. The wind buffeted her as she adjusted her aerodynamic profile. The whole Airbike shifted slightly, but since they were flying at just over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, the minor movement felt like hitting a speed bump in the road at a comparable speed.
She saw two things immediately before she regained control of the craft. First, the rifle rocked and fell from Gray’s grip, caught by the fierce wind and vanishing without a trace. Second, in the blink of an eye after the rifle was gone, she noticed the indistinct mass of moving bodies perhaps a hundred and fifty yards behind them—an indistinct tangle of approaching heads, bodies, talons, and wings.
Piper stared straight ahead, focusing on the marker in her HUD. She locked her elbows and leaned into the wind. “We have less than six miles to create some distance between us and them,” she said through gritted teeth. “Hold on tight.”
When Gray said, “do it,” she could swear she heard the smile in his voice.
I don’t know when she learned to fly the Airbike or what it took to overcome her fear of heights, but it proved something I have never questioned—Piper is a force of nature. Once she spotted the Jays on our tail, she dropped the hammer. Pitching the nose forward, she accelerated to just over one hundred eighty. At that speed and in those conditions, I can’t imagine what kind of tech she used to see, but the rainfall was blinding. I had my back to the approaching downpour and was mostly shielded by the slipstream created by her petite frame. Even then, the back of my helmet and shoulders were taking a pounding.
The compartment with the rifles was new. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Tripp would likely add on his own, but once he did, he would be thinking like an engineer. On a machine like the Airbike, that would mean he was looking for balance. With that in mind, I looked for a similar compartment on the opposite side. Sure enough, I found it. It was slightly different—a pair of smaller square shapes rather than a single long rectangle. So, shouldering into the oncoming wind, I leaned over and popped the top on the rearmost cover.
“Hell, yes!” I couldn’t help but laugh as I grabbed three loaded magazines and quickly settled back into the center of my seat.
At this point, we were flying like a bat out of hell. The closest of our pursuers was now three hundred and twenty-seven yards behind us. The biggest Jay I’d ever seen was leading the pack, while another was about forty yards behind and off to its side. The rest of the group had fallen back, trailing at nearly three-quarters of a mile. I figured they were getting tired, and I knew Piper was determined to keep our machine at full speed.
I brought the rifle to my shoulder and focused on the nearest Jay through the optics. The wind and rain buffeting Airbike caused my scope to drift across the face of the Jay in unpredictable ways. Still, I took my time. My breathing slowed, and my vision sharpened. Long seconds passed. There was no way I could make this shot without my tech. It was impossible. I could spray and pray, but what would that get me? I was never a gambler. And if we landed, it would be better to conserve ammo for close-up confrontations. That’s when I’d need it more anyway.
For some reason, I wasn’t able to let it go. I kept the rifle raised. The face of the massive Jay drifted quickly and wildly across my lens. Nothing short of an eye shot would harm the creature. It was a kill shot or nothing. Beyond long odds at this range when unenhanced. Given my conditions and iffy health, it was impossibly long-range.
Just as I was about to give up, my vision blurred. I blinked quickly to clear the haze. When I did, it felt like the Jay had moved within arm’s reach. I immediately understood what had happened, even though I couldn’t explain how. My nanotech was back online. I adjusted the rifle sights, and all drift and wobble had disappeared. Only the slightest adjustment of the crosshairs remained as I focused on the reptilian vertical slit of the creature and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle bucked, and I adjusted windage and targeted the lead creature. Perhaps two seconds after the first shot, I fired a second time. When I lowered the rifle, the pair of monsters had simply disappeared.
“You just scared the shit out of me,” Piper said in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t exaggerating. “Where did you find more ammo?”
“I started thinking like Tripp. Our lead is almost a mile ahead. Where the hell are we?” From what I could see on the map, we were nowhere near any cities. We weren’t even heading toward one.
“It should be just enough time,” she said. There was no relief in her voice. Piper sounded suddenly exhausted. Clearly, flying under these conditions was taking a toll on her.
When Piper spoke again a few seconds later, I knew she wasn’t talking to me. She’d placed me on a shared channel so I could react more quickly when the time came. Whatever was about to happen, she wouldn’t have time to explain things before they took place.
“We’re coming in fast,” Piper said. “And with a lot of unfriendlies in tow. This needs to happen really quickly.”
“From what I see, you’re taking lessons in understatement from Gray,” came Tripp’s voice over the channel. His next words cracked, unable to hide his concern. “That’s a lot of Elend, and they’re moving faster than we thought possible.”
“Too fast?” Piper said.
There was a lengthy pause on the line. “Well, it depends on how close you can land. Landing isn’t your strongest skill.”
I’ll admit to feeling a bit of concern when I heard that. I released the seat restraints and spun around to face forward before strapping back down. I put my hands on Piper’s hips and was glad to return to a more conventional riding position. “Having trouble with the landings?” I said in my best calming tone.
Piper leaned forward, her shoulder hunched against the relentless wind. “Any landing you can walk away from, right?” she said humorlessly.
Without slowing down, she put the craft into a near dive. We lost a couple of thousand feet in mere seconds. When my brain and insides adjusted to the change, we traveled about eighty miles an hour, just thirty feet above a saturated, dappled green forest canopy. We were moving like a bullet and approaching a vast clearing that was just starting to become visible in the gloom.
“Better open the doors,” Piper said.
“Not until you land,” a new voice said. It was Lacy.
“Do it now,” Piper said confidently. “We’re not landing outside.”
The statement confused hushed conversations on the open channel, followed by some quiet cursing and banging around. The cursing was new. I couldn’t recall hearing Tripp or Lacy use those colorful expletives. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t part of the plan. Something urgent and improvised was taking place.
As we swept over the clearing, several agricultural outbuildings came into view. More than half a dozen small structures were positioned haphazardly around the customary transport building closest to the center of the clearing. The two-story steel and glass structure featured wide sliding barn doors across the front and a roof made of semi-transparent panels. Tripp pushed the left door wide open while Lacy pushed the right.
What in the hell are they doing in the field?
Piper throttled back, slowing our forward speed and dropping us vertically as we rapidly closed the distance to the wide open doors at the front of the barn-like building. Both Lacy and Trip wore masks of concern as we approached with far more speed than they considered safe. Still, Piper wasn’t deterred. She arrested our hover, halting just two feet above the ground without cutting our forward momentum. However, she drastically reduced our forward speed when we were about two hundred feet away from the entrance to the barn, slowing from twenty-some-odd miles an hour to a walking pace in the time it took for our friends to cringe and gasp.
Piper swept the Airbike into the barn, smoothly hovered us up the pair of steps onto the platform, and gently set us down before shutting off the propellers. When she did, the caustic shrieks in the distance became immediately audible. Tripp and Lacy stood in the open door, staring frozen, their heads pointed in the direction we had come from. Piper and I darted past them and began closing the barn doors.
This snapped Tripp and Lacy from their trances. They helped us secure the doors. Moments later, the four of us were on the platform with the Airbike, and the sequence was engaged. The room flashed with a pulse of white light and was replaced by a larger room with walls made of a white, glossy, plastic-like material I’d never seen before.
I walked to the platform’s edge and looked at the massive, empty room. It was pristine and appeared unused. The walls, floors, and even the ceiling thirty feet overhead looked as if they were coated in some type of plastic-like lacquer or resin.
“Where the hell are we?” was all I could say.
Piper leaned over the semi-inclined bed and watched the slow rise and fall of Gray’s chest beneath the blanket. She’d never seen him so peaceful or helpless. As her eyes shifted to the eleven diagnostic displays suspended in augmented space just behind the far side of the bed, she knew he was receiving better treatment than anyone in human history. The displays showed diagnostic information about his blood, respiration, and endocrine system, including data points entirely unknown to her people. In the sixty-eight days Gray had been gone, she’d taken the opportunity to learn all she could about Wild-Side, its people, and their technology. Now, she was glad she had explicitly focused on the minor biological differences between the Seeley and the people from her Brane.
Lacy walked quickly into the room and presented an open palm that held a small, roughly cylindrical device. “Doc Cormac agrees,” she said without preamble. “He’s upset.” Pain was evident in her expression. “We all are. The Doc just can’t be here right now.”
Piper took the device and removed the protective cap from the end. “No one could have anticipated this. We still don’t know what’s changed. You’ll see—Gray isn’t going to be upset. We just need to get him back on his feet.”
Even as she spoke the words, Piper hoped she wasn’t speaking too soon. Gray had collapsed immediately after making it back through the city walls. He’d been dehydrated and hypothermic. His condition would have been critical under normal circumstances, and without the tech in his blood, he likely wouldn’t have survived as long as he had. Still, the tech should never have allowed him to become as sick as he was, so Cormac and his team did the only thing they could under the circumstances and put him into a coma-like state until they could better understand his medical condition.
Piper placed the injector against the side of Gray’s neck and her finger against the smooth surface of the trigger button. Only the slightest pop could be heard, followed by a low hiss. Both ends of the device pulsed green and were removed from the surface of his skin. “That’s it?” she said with a glance to Lacy.
Lacy nodded. “You just triggered his nanite payload. This batch also contains the code updates you requested.”
There was movement beneath Gray’s eyelids. Piper saw it and felt her pulse quicken. When the movement paused, her breath caught in her throat, and she waited to hear the warning alarms from the numerous wireless systems monitoring his vitals. A dozen worst-case scenarios suddenly played out in her mind’s eye, all of this in the span of three heartbeats.
Then Gray’s lips parted for a slow intake of breath. Piper felt as if the world had suddenly begun to spin again. Her hands clutched around his, though she didn’t recall grabbing him. Gray’s eyes shifted beneath closed lids once more, and then the lids opened. She watched his irises struggle to focus and held her breath again until his head gently turned, and his gaze landed on her. When a smile creased his face, she realized tears were already streaming from the corners of her own eyes.
When Gray spoke, his voice was dry and raspy. “What’s all that about?” He didn’t seem to notice the sound of his own voice, so intent was his attention on her at that moment.
Piper laughed, an abrupt snort that seemed to say, seriously, where do I start? She leaned over him and threw her arms around his neck. “You,” she said, trying halfheartedly not to strangle him. “You were gone so long. I thought they’d gotten you.”
“Wait.” Gray pulled Piper from around his neck and looked at her. She could see the confusion in his eyes and the crease of his expression. He looked down at his own body lying on the bed. “What happened? How long have I been out?”
Lacy appeared at the foot of the bed. “We should go back a bit to explain that,” she said. “A lot has happened. First, you’ve only been here in this bed for—” her eyes drifted up and to the side, as she checked a display only she could see—“twenty-two hours and change.”
Piper smiled at the euphemism from back home and thought once more of all the ways Gray had impacted the people of Wild-Side. If she was correct, he was the only one who could save them from what was yet to come.
Continuing, Lacy said pointedly to Piper, “Our assumptions about your disappearance were completely mistaken.” She waved her hand in the air, and a large display appeared at the foot of the bed. She shifted to stand shoulder to shoulder with Piper as complicated analytics scrolled across the bottom half of the display far too quickly to read. The top half was divided to showcase a pair of graphs.
“I suggest ignoring the raw data for now,” Lacy said. With a flick of her fingers on an upraised hand, the scrolling wall of text was minimized, and the pair of graphs dominated the majority of the display. “You can review the information at your leisure. What’s important is this.” The left graph was labeled Other-World, and the right was labeled Wild-Side. Piper realized she hadn’t actually considered what the Seeley would refer to as Our-World. They certainly couldn’t call it Our-World; that really didn’t make sense from their perspective.
“Are you familiar with this information?” Lacy said, glancing at Gray. Both graphs displayed exactly the same wavy line; only the numbers on the X and Y axes differed between them. The contours of the line were identical.
Gray rubbed at his fatigued eyes, though Piper could already see more of the man she knew returning to his expression. He looked at Piper when he spoke. “There’s a temporal offset between the Branes,” he explained. “It’s inconsistent, but we think we might be able to predict it if we gather enough historical evidence. There are two variables we believe have an impact on the offset. One is how long Breslin and I are on either Brane.”
“If you’re on one longer than he, then he Crosses, it has an impact,” Piper added. “If you’re on either Brane when he arrives, he alters the calculus. In either case, it’s like you told me a long time ago—there’s a balance between the two worlds. When one of you Crosses, it impacts that balance. The Offset,” she motioned to the screen, “illustrates that through the temporal inconsistency. It’s also why we have the unusual storm fronts on Our-World.”
Gray glanced between Piper and Lacy. “You’ve covered a lot of this in a very short time.”
Piper shook her head. “Not really. This last time?” She paused and met Gray’s gaze, ensuring he could see the pain and worry in her eyes. “You were gone for sixty-eight days.”
Lacy waved her hand, and the graph on the right side of the screen shifted to reveal a wide, serpentine curve that in no way resembled the shape on the left. “Something has changed,” she said. “And we have no idea what.”
Whatever I had been injected with was working. Everything that had happened since crossing to Wild-Side felt like a blur, but the injection—or whatever it was—seemed like a nitro shot of espresso for both my mind and body. It was as if half-dormant parts of my body and brain were rebooting and returning to full functionality. Then again, considering the amount of technology pulsing through my blood by that point, it might have been more than just an apt analogy.
“Fulbright,” I said, sensing the bewildered gaze of both women as they focused on me with renewed intensity. “He experimented with the formula on himself and ended up in a coma.”
Piper’s shoulders sagged. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words emerged.
Lacy spoke instead. “When? I mean, when did this happen in your…time?”
My time… The offset between Our-World and this place seemed to be more inconsistent…
My memory suddenly became fuzzy, and my head hurt. The room turned blurry, and a sharp pain pierced my skull.
Everything went dark.
